News Section | Wildlife
Diet reversal: Small Epomis beetles prey upon big live amphibians!
A new study has found that the predator-prey interactions between ground Epomis beetles and amphibians are much more complicated than one may have thought.
It in fact suggests that adult Epomis beetles can prey upon live amphibians.
“Amphibians are typical insect predators and their diet may include adult beetles, ground beetles in particular. The recently filmed successful attacks of the beetles on toads and frogs brought new insights on the amphibian-insect interactions, and documented the uncommon phenomenon of invertebrates preying on vertebrate animals,” said Gil Wizen, the senior author of the research from Tel-Aviv University.
According to the study, the genus Epomis is represented in Israel by two species: E. dejeani and E. circumscriptus. The researchers recorded Epomis sharing shelter with amphibians during the day, but preying on them during the night.
In the laboratory, the researchers observed predation behaviour of the adult beetles on five amphibian species.
These observations showed that the diet of the two Epomis species overlaps only partially, with only one of the species (E. dejeani) preying on the Banded Newt, a species of salamander.
The results of this study serve as additional evidence that both larvae and adult Epomis beetles are specialized predators of amphibians.
The study was published in the open access journal ‘Zoo Keys’.
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