Blue Ground Beetle (Carabus intricatus) 1 of 5
What is it that makes one species rarer than other apparently very similar ones? That was the question that came into my head when my son Tom and I found a single female blue ground beetle (Carabus intricatus), one of the rarest ground beetles in the UK found only in a few ancient woodlands in Devon, Cornwall and one site in south Wales. It’s restricted to a rare habitat, but there are dozens of such places where the beetle is absent. It feeds mainly on a few species of slug associated with these woodlands, but again the prey species are to be found far more widely in the UK. To make matters more complicated, the same species of beetle is much commoner throughout continental Europe including dry habitats and gardens, so it can’t be that it needs the humidity of temperate rainforests. It also appears to need a ground layer of moss and leaf litter, and can’t cope with bramble for example, so it was disappointing to find that despite recommendations from Buglife among others that this nature reserve has become overgrown on the forest floor with bramble, presumably the reason why we could only find one individual, and suggesting that this particular population may well go extinct soon.
Blue Ground Beetle (Carabus intricatus) 1 of 5
What is it that makes one species rarer than other apparently very similar ones? That was the question that came into my head when my son Tom and I found a single female blue ground beetle (Carabus intricatus), one of the rarest ground beetles in the UK found only in a few ancient woodlands in Devon, Cornwall and one site in south Wales. It’s restricted to a rare habitat, but there are dozens of such places where the beetle is absent. It feeds mainly on a few species of slug associated with these woodlands, but again the prey species are to be found far more widely in the UK. To make matters more complicated, the same species of beetle is much commoner throughout continental Europe including dry habitats and gardens, so it can’t be that it needs the humidity of temperate rainforests. It also appears to need a ground layer of moss and leaf litter, and can’t cope with bramble for example, so it was disappointing to find that despite recommendations from Buglife among others that this nature reserve has become overgrown on the forest floor with bramble, presumably the reason why we could only find one individual, and suggesting that this particular population may well go extinct soon.