Sometimes called “Sweet Clover Weevils”, although they don’t seem to be all that picky about which clover they eat.

Every spring, and on through the first part of the summer, we get these little brown beetles all over the place. They tend to hang out on the sides of buildings, and of course get into the house a lot. When touched, they tuck in their legs and antennae and play dead, obviously depending on their very stiff wing covers and heavy exoskeleton to protect them.

The one above was photographed at the end of May of 2008, this next one was from almost a year earlier, July of 2007:

They are some of the Entiminae, the Broad-Nosed Weevils (as opposed to the weevils with the elongated snouts). Based on the color (brown), the hairs on the wing covers (longer than the spacing between them), and the first segment of the antennae reaching all the way to the not-terribly-protruding eyes, I’d say they are Clover Weevils, Sitona hispidulus

Given that I’ve already said that they are very common, is it any surprise that they are an invasive species? No, I thought not. They are from Europe and Asia originally, and the larvae eat the roots of (complete lack of suspense here . . .) clover! And alfalfa, too, but that’s pretty close to being a clover. The adults eat the leaves of the same plants. They are reported to overwinter as adults, and lay eggs in the spring. The larvae then mature in the late summer, and almost immediately go into estivation (kind of like hibernation, only done to avoid the heat and dryness of summer instead of the cold and lack of food of winter), with a brief emergence after the first frost to get a little food into themselves for the winter. They are something of a pest of clover crops, which is no surprise seeing as how plants generally don’t do so well when some bug eats their roots.

While we’ve got this little guy here, I just wanted to mention something about beetle anatomy. When you read about the fundamental traits of insects, one of the things that is mentioned is that they have three distinct body segments – head, thorax, and abdomen. The head is obvious, the thorax is the segment that has the wings and legs on it, and the abdomen is the segment where most of the digestive tract and other vital organs are located. In most insects, there are clear constrictions between each of these segments, particularly in things like wasps and ants.

Beetles are a bit different, though: if you look at the underside of this fellow, we can see that the legs do not look like the are all together on one segment. We have the head, then a segment with two legs on it, then after the constriction there is a much larger segment that has the other four legs on it that runs all the way to the end of the body.

That last segment is not all abdomen. The part of it that has the legs on it is the last 2/3 of the thorax, which blends smoothly into the abdomen, and the whole thing is tightly packaged under the wing covers. What has happened with beetles is this: like most other insects, beetles had four wings. The front pair of insect wings are on the middle third of the thorax, and the hind pair of wings are on the last third of the thorax. When beetles developed their hard, armored forewings, they then started compacting their abdomen together with their thorax so that everything would fit under the armor. Ultimately, the abdomen and thorax practically merged together into one segment. But, since the front third of the thorax was ahead of the first pair of wings, it was never under the armor. So, that front third of the thorax developed its own armor plate (the pronotum), and basically turned into a separate segment so that the beetle could retain a little bit of flexibility. As a result, we ended up with beetles looking like they have a thorax with just two legs.

Why do I bring this up? Well, some years ago I was goofing around trying to draw beetles from memory[1], and they kept coming out all wrong, because I was assuming that all the legs went onto that middle segment. It wasn’t until I looked at a beetle closely to figure out why it was all coming out wrong that I realized that they’d seriously messed with the whole “head, thorax, abdomen” body plan. So, I thought I’d point it out just in case somebody else was having the same problem.

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[1] See, there is this short-short science fiction story that I currently don’t remember the title of, or the name of the author,[2] “The Figure”, by Edward Grendon, and the plot has stuck in my mind. In the story, this small team of researchers has developed a time machine that can reach into the future, and pull back objects. So they operate it, and bring back something that causes them to lose all hope for the future. It is a statue, a piece of fine art, reaching upward in an aspiring manner, and obviously intended to be inspirational. The only problem is, it is a statue of a beetle! Anyway, I thought it would be amusing to actually sketch out what this statue might look like, possibly with the aim of using my metal-casting kit to cast it in pewter. Unfortunately, all my sketches came out all wrong because I didn’t understand about beetle segmentation and how the legs were really attached. Ultimately, I ended up making pewter castings of the asteroid Eros instead.

[2] Found it! It’s in Fifty Short Science Fiction Tales, edited by Groff Conklin and Isaac Asimov. And yes, I remembered correctly. The statue is, in fact, of a beetle (not a cockroach, although roaches are mentioned in the story).