Hello.
Could you tell me about the diet of Dendarus coarcticollis and Bioplanes meridionalis ?
It’s a good question, there’s little info about particular diets of tenebrionidae species as adults, I found this reference, so checking those papers could potentionally help you with this, but probably there were no work on these species and they likely also eat plant matter and/or carrion.
Tenebrionids usually feed on plant parts, including decaying plant litter, dead wood,
pollen, fungi and algae. Some of them are scavengers, myrmecophiles, predators
and cannibalistic. Some tenebrionid species are associated with stored grain and
considered as common pests of crops (Brendell, 1975; Borror et al., 1989; Booth et
al., 1990; Daly et al., 1998; Fattorini, 2000; Lillig et al., 2012; Thakare et al., 2012)
I found a piece on another Dendarus species:
Among the Tenebrionidae species collected from Mount Davraz, Blaps tibialis, B.
jeannei, Dendarus tenellus and Dailognatha quadricollis were found under Astragalus
microcephalus, a small shrub, especially during the autumn season at 1500 m.
These species were also collected under leaves of Verbascum spp. Shrubs provide
both protection from insolation, predators (Ayal and Merkl, 1994) and cold weather
conditions, as well as detritus that accumulate under the shrub canopies which
constitute the main food supply for beetles (Krasnov and Shenbrot, 1997)
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Dendarus coarcticollis (memim.com)
Bioplanes meridionalis Mulsant, 1854 | Fauna Europaea (fauna-eu.org) - no info on food sources, but contacts and resources.
Thank you for the links but on that of Dendarus coarcticollis, I didn’t find the information about feed.
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http://old.romanatura.roma.it/wp2/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Fattorini-S.-2011.pdf
I do not believe anyone alive actually knows what coarcticollis and meridionalis eat; I’ve searched the internet quite thoroughly.
With that being said, it should be safe to conclude that they both feed on normal tenebrionid fare (decaying and sometimes live plant matter) as both adults and larvae. They both appear morphologically non-anomalous for a tenebrionid and their closest relatives for which life history is known all feed quite normally for the family.
From the research papers above, we can also conclude several things:
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Since coarcticollis is arboreal it probably consumes floral parts more often than the average tenebrionid (which is not very arboreal and thus has difficulty reaching flowers). This is supported by the paper on Linum, which mentions Dendarus messenius eating petals and buds that were still attached to the living plant.
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meridionalis benefits from seagull activity but does not consume guano and is not an obligate gull associate. Thus it likely engages in a higher proportion of gull-trash scavenging (thus being dietarily analogous to pest cockroaches) than most tenebrionids, which are not associated with vertebrate nests and feed less on nutrient-eutrophicated refuse (and are thus more dietarily analogous to isopods, millipedes, and nonpest cockroaches).
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OK, that’s what I told myself but I still wanted to have other opinions.
thank you for the information.
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