365 Urban Species. #077: Sap Bucket Beetle

Urban species #077: Sap bucket beetle Ellychnia corrusca

Whether floating in a maple sap bucket, sleepily clinging to the siding of your house, or crawling into the open window of your car, this insect is often encountered around human activities. It gets its unfortunate common name for its frequent untimely demise as it searches for plant juices and gets more than it bargains for. Maple sugaring takes place in late winter, just as this beetle is starting to stir from its overwintering spots deep in the furrows of tree bark. The overlapping siding of a house or other building can stand in for tree bark if need be. The sap-bucket beetle is a slow-moving, weak-flying, and soft-bodied insect, rarely considered a pest beyond those times when it must be strained from the sap to be evaporated into syrup. After spring becomes summer the sap-bucket beetle feeds on the juices of weeds such as goldenrod.

The sap-bucket beetle has another common name: the diurnal firefly. It's ancestors are night-flying bioluminescent beetles, the kind still caught and put into mayonnaise jars in darker suburbs to this day. Light pollution makes fireflies more rare than ever, but Ellychnia has adapted to breed in daylight, and has forsaken the flashing-light semaphore courtship of its progenitors. Diurnal fireflies can therefore live closer to cities than their nocturnal counterparts.

( In broad daylight )