Beetles ring-ins from Argentina | Coffs Coast News | Local News in Coffs Coast

The beetles are new to Coffs.

AFTER I fished the second one out of my stir fry (they were a bit too crunchy), I began to wonder why the Christmas beetles were so small and so early this year.

Perhaps, as a colleague said, they were only tinsel beetles and not the real deal?

My friends tell me they are all over Bellingen, in Toormina, they are in Upper Orara and here in Coffs Harbour in their tens of thousands.

They have been clinging to the insect screens and the washing on the line, zooming around the bedside lamp and committing suicide in the washing up water.

And they were down my shirt with their scratchy little claws.

Enough is enough.

Just who are these pesky little invaders and why are they upside down on every horizontal surface along the Coffs Coast?

“It’s an entomologists dream to have heat and rain,” said the technical officer with the school of environmental science at Southern Cross University, Maxine Dawes.

“Those are perfect conditions for a lot of insects and that is when you get an outbreak.

“You had lots of winter rain, ideal for egg laying and the thing that helps them emerge in plague proportions is heavy rain in spring.”

It turns out Christmas is not to blame at all – the Coffs Coast is experiencing an outbreak of Argentinean scarabs.

Related to the larger native Australian Christmas beetles with their iridescent brown shells but from a different sub-family of the scarabaeidae, these little fellas were accidentally introduced from South America some time in the 1950s, said the senior curator of the CSIRO’s Australian National Insect Collection, Tom Weir, who identified the beetles yesterday.

Mr Weir said the beetles were known to be in Sydney and Canberra, but this was the first time he had heard of them on the Coffs Coast.

“They are obviously spreading,” Mr Weir said.

“We have no records of them in your area.”

The CSIRO entomologist, a beetle and waterbug specialist, said the Argentinean scarab larvae lived in soil, chewed on lawn and pasture roots, flew readily to lights and came inside through cracks and when doors and windows were opened and closed.

He said good pasture growth encouraged larval development and it was the right time of year for the beetles to emerge, but they would probably disappear in a few weeks.

Mr Weir said there seemed to be a decline in the number of native Christmas beetles, which might be related to droughts.

NSW insect inquiries officer with I&I NSW, Merydyn Davison, said the Argentinean scarabs were considered a pasture pest further south, in the southern tablelands, and to some extent in the central tablelands.