Colorful and Threatened necrophiliac
Female American Burying Beetle.
Excerpted and edited from an ecoRI News article by Frank Carini.
Series note: The region’s collection of native species is under threat on several fronts, most notably from humanity’s shortsightedness. Humans aren’t giving the natural world the space it needs and deserves. We’re crowding out non-human life, which, in turn, makes nature less productive and us less healthy. Wild New England examines the animals and insects most at risk.
The American Burying Beetle, thanks to the efforts a decade ago by third-graders at St. Michael’s Country Day School in Newport, is Rhode Island’s state insect. The students’ effort helped raise awareness about this orange-spotted insect with an interesting occupation.
After sniffing out a freshly dead animal from up to 2 miles away, the rare beetle, whose continued existence is listed as threatened, joins a mate in burying the carcass, stripping it of fur or feathers, rolling it into a ball, and covering it in oral and anal fluids to preserve it as a shelter and food source for the pair’s litter of larvae.
Nicrophorus americanus, the largest carrion beetle in North America, is native to at least 35 states and the southern borders of three eastern Canadian provinces.