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ON VALGUS CANALICULATUS AND SQUAMIGER: ELLESCHUS BIPUNCTATUS, XYLORYCTES SATYRUS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 May 2012
Extract
Valgus canaliculatus Fab. and V. squamiger Beauv., have, so far as I am aware, escaped the notice of American writers on Coleeptera, except that it is mentioned in the U. S. Agricultural Report for 1868, p. 90, that V. squamiger was found in great numbers in January, in Maryland, under the bark and in the rotten wood of a pine stump; and that Fitch gave some account of it, under the name seticollis, in his report for 1857, p. 695, which I have not seen.
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* Fitch's description is as follows:—
“Bristly-Necked Valgus, Valgus seticollis Beauv.—Beneath the bark around the crown of the roots of ant-eaten pine stumps, feeding upon the wood, fleshy, white, thick cylindrical grubs, resembling small larvæ of the May beetle, having three pairs of legs anteriorly and the body curved into an arch, its hind part being bent more or less inward under the breast, divided by impressed transverse sutures into twelve rings; the pupæ and perfect insects also occurring in the same situations; the latter short thick beetles about 0.28 long, the males chestnut brown, beneath black, the females dull black, both sexes with chestnut colored feet, and covered more or less with little ash gray scales, flattened upon their backs, their wing covers much shorter than the abdomen and marked with rather obscure impressed lines, a broad shallow groove along the middle of their thorax, which groove is more deep anteriorly, and their anterior shanks with a row of about five little uneven teeth along their outer edge.
“In the month of April last, I met with sixteen of these beetles beneath the bark of a pine stump, slightly above the surface of the ground. The stump had been much eaten, by white ants apparently, the sap wood being all consumed and the cavity thus formed being stuffed with sand and dirt which had been carried up from the soil beneath, in which these insects were lying, torpid in their winter quarters, most of them crowded together in a heap in a single cavity in this dirt, the others scattered about in it singly, their larvæ having no doubt subsisted upon the decaying wood.”—[Ed. .C. E.]