Castiarina xystra

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Crikey! I can hear the rustling of Allen's car keys already!

Hi Miranda,
Can you please either deliver it or send it to Living Li, Australian National Insect Collection, Black Mountain.
Many thanks, Mark

As with the specimen of C. xystra found 2 years ago there is some conjecture as to whether C. xystra is a good species or whether or not it is a synonym of C. militaris which is found in SE Australia and is also very rare in collections.
It would be good for this specimen to be deposited into the Australian National Insect Collection at CSIRO, Black Mountain as they don’t have any specimens.

Thanks Mark! I have just emailed Living and can drop it over there tomorrow if that works for him 😊

Miranda was it under the remnant Blakley's Red Gums or other planted eucalypts?

There is profuse flowering in eucs about 200m away, I think they are E. elata ? Same as the ones they removed from Northbourne for the tram ..

Hi Michael, there are about 1500 species of jewel beetles in Australia of which probably less than 100 have common names (of which probably less than 20 are widely used). I’m not sure how useful they are however I guess for a citizen science project like NatureMapr it might be a little more appropriate.
Naming something after a location can be a little fraught given it’s a possibility that next year someone might find 20 specimens in Braidwood (for example) so the Red Hill Beetle probably won’t work. Having said that this specimen (the second collected for science) and the other records show that it seems to have a very limited distribution around Canberra. I thought that the Latin derivation of xystra might help but it means scraper so that doesn’t really seem very useful or appropriate. Maybe the younger generation might like the X-Beetle (which has echoes of X-Men ?). Over to you.

@MichaelMulvaney, I was photographing street plantings of ornamental pears(!) when I found it. There were no native trees in the immediate area.

Re a common name, would there be any value in running a competition or something for a bit of awareness raising about the value of citizen science and even Naturemapr specifically? It would never have occurred to me that this could be something significant without the knowledge I've gained through this community.

Great pickup Miranda!

Whoooooot!!! Go you!!! <3

(The person who took photos 2 years ago)

Not true that the Australian National Insect Collection (ANIC) has no specimens. The holotype (the designated reference specimen for the species) is held by the ANIC.

Thanks Kimberi. Yes Living sent me a picture of the HT. I thought it was in the SAM.

The specimen is now safely at ANIC. Living was kind enough to show me the type specimen and also a specimen of C. militaris, which was a lot smaller than the two xystra so it'll be interesting to see how that comparison turns out.

@KorinneM thank you for your posting of the original rediscovery! It was so exciting and I've been vaguely keeping an eye out since you saw it but never imagined I would find one - especially in urban Woden.

Hi all, I am having some thoughts about exactly what species this is, as well as last year's specimen, which I at least thought to both be Castiarina xystra. Assuming that Castiarina xystra is not a junior synonym of Castiarina militaris (their male genitalia are sufficiently different and the elytral apices are different - see Dr Shelley Barker's illustrations of such on page 16 in his 1993 paper describing various species including Castiarina xystra), I think this specimen, now thankfully lodged in ANIC, needs to be compared with specimens of Castiarina militaris, as there is a chance it is Castiarina militaris. I am not sure if ANIC has any specimens of Castiarina militaris, though ANIC does have the unique holotype (HT) of Castiarina xystra, recorded from Black Mountain. I'd be very interested to know of the results of such determination. From my various visits to the ANIC I don't recall seeing any Castiarina militaris there, but the HT of Castiarina militaris is held in the Museums Victoria collection (photos are online). Note that the ACT is within the expected or likely geospatial range of Castiarina militaris, which has been photographed alive in the Bunya Mountains in QLD, and others have been photographed alive in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, thus its occurrence in the ACT is quite possible - though it is a bit strange that two near-identical species, Castiarina militaris and Castiarina xystra, to occur together in the ACT. Of course, the possibility still exists that the aforementioned differences in the male genitalia and elytra of these remarkably similar species are due to individual variations, therefore that possibility also needs to be investigated. The paucity of specimens of both sexes in public and private collections is an impediment so all effort needs to please be made, especially right now before the weather heats up, to not just photograph live specimens (which I would love to do myself if I had the chance) but to collect them to better enable such investigations to occur. Good luck all, Allen M. Sundholm OAM.

Given that the ornamental pears were probably in flower and that they have white flowers and the specimen on the edge of Red Hill was found under planted flowering white box Eucalyptus albens - with white flowers, are we perhaps more likely to find the beetle on or under white flowering tree/shrubs?

Hi Michael, agreed, but particularly those of Eucalyptus spp. and Leptospermum spp.

Thanks Allen