New for Skye Beetle

I went out looking for Yellow-browed Warblers today (there have been at least five found on Skye the past few days, quite an unprecedented influx!) and instead found a weird plant that has the BSBI Recorder puzzled and a beetle that is new to Skye and of a family entirely new to myself. I failed on the YBW front, but I'm off work tomorrow too. 

I was wandering the woods near Cuillin Hills Hotel down in Portree, pishing away like a loon, when I spotted a dead birch trunk with maybe twenty Birch Polypore fungi ranked down its length. If ever there's a manky, half-rotten polypore within reach I tend to pull it free of the trunk and rip it apart in search of fungus beetles. Usually all I find are tiny midge larvae and the odd aleoch, one of which I found and carded today. Happily, I also found a distinctive looking beetle which rocked in at a whacking 5mm in length. Here it is, slightly dazed I imagine after being knocked to the ground from about eight feet up

I didn't have a clue what this was when I saw it. Which meant it was probably a tenebrionid. Back indoors I checked the options - ok, so it's not a tenebrionid. Happily it keyed through very easily to Tetratomidae, a whole new family for me and colloquially known as the polypore beetles! Haha, how bloody perfect is that?  I jumped online and discovered that there are only a handful of British species so it was easy to name this as Tetratoma fungorum. I still went ahead and ran through all the relevant identification features, obviously. Happily everything fits, though mine seems to be about a third of a millimetre too long (I blame my tape measure, it's the six metre one I use for work which I suspect may be less accurate than a graticule). Next I jumped on the NBN Atlas in order to check its distribution. Oh...

I'm glad there's a dot way up in the north of Scotland, gives me hope that I haven't completely mangled my identification! Next I turned to my trusty copy of Richard Moore's Beetles of Raasay which confirmed that Tetratoma is unknown on Skye. But there is a record from Rum, which is somewhat less than a million miles from Skye. The only other member of Tetratomidae to occur up here is Hallomenus binotatus, thanks to two specimens found on Rasaay in 2005 and a Rum record (I don't know the date for that). There are no other records at all of any tetratomid beetle for the Inner Hebrides and none whatsoever for the Outer Hebrides, as far as I can see. 

As you may have noticed, I had a slight mishap extracting the left antenna from beneath its head....

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I'm really quite keen to pull apart more Birch Polypores now! They aren't anywhere near as commonplace up here as they are down south, but they aren't so scarce that I'd feel terribly guilty destroying a few fruit bodies. Not if it helps add more Tetratoma dots to the maps. I don't need to collect any more specimens, they're distinctive enough that even I should be able to recognise one again, I'll just take a piccie instead. 

Regards the 2020 Challenge that is ongoing between The Ghost and myself, I'm absolutely whupping his arse in both the beetle and the fly totals. However, I simply cannot afford to become complacent, he has many specimens in his storebox and, between bouts of haunting folks, has been slotting in some serious microscopy time. He is slowly closing the gap between our totals. 

But if he beats my beetle tally I'll eat my best woolly hat.