Insect Tenants.

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 661, 14 January 1933, Page 8

Insect Tenants .

Nature Notes.

By

James Drummond, F.L.S., F.Z.S.

(CONTRASTING with the big hu-hu beetle, New Zealand has several species belonging to a family that contains the smallest beetles known. The largest species of the group is hardly two millimetres long; the smallest is one-fifth of a millimetre. The habits of New Zealand’s members of these Lilliputians have not been studied. Like their relatives in Australia, they probably are inquilines, beetles which, although not parasites, live as guests or tenants of ants and termites, sometimes called whiteants. Ants’ nests are tenanted by many species of small beetles, which, according to Dr G. H. Carpenter, of Manchester, return the kindness by doing scavengering work for the ants, or provide them with luxuries in the form of sweet secretions. Australia is rich in ants and termites, and hosts of beetles live with them on that arrangement. Dr R. J. Tillyard states that these Australian inquiline beetles range from species only occasionally associated with ants and termites up to highly-specialised forms of beetles that evidently depend on their hosts for their living. Some seem to pass unnoticed, or to be merely tolerated. Others are cared for by the hosts, probably for the sake of a secretion the hosts value. This is the law of the inquilines, but other species of beetles that live in ants’ nests may be robbers, whose practices are unknown to their hosts.