Eastern Ontario Garden Insects

Scientific Name: Silphidae

 

Carrion beetles are a common garden insect that are beneficial to your garden!

 

How to identify:

• Carrion beetles come in various colours and shapes. However, they are generally large and hold a typical beetle shape.

• They have well defined forewings.

• Their most distinctive feature is their clubbed antennae, which means at the end of their antennae there is a thicker area.

 

Benefits:

• Carrion beetles play an important role in your garden as they are they consume decaying matter.

• This includes dead vertebrates, dung, rotting fruit, and decaying plant matter.

• This is important into renewing dead matter back into organic nutrients that will be incorparted in the soil. Better soils will attract more beneficial insects and increase the growth and numbers of plants in your garden.

 

How to keep your garden carrion beetle friendly:

• If you see decaying, or dead matter in your garden, do not disturb it as this is the food of carrion beetles. They will naturally come to eat it.

• When you see decaying plant matter in your garden, do not be so quick to throw it away, it contains beneficial nutrients which carrion beetles will incorporate back into the soil!

 

How this relates to conservation:

• Carrion beetles play a major role in transforming organic matter.

• They play the important role of taking decaying matter and digesting it in order to turn it back into nutrients that are beneficial to the soil.

• Without these beetles, the nutrient level of our soils would be significantly lower and would not be able to support a high abundance of plants.

• Ultimately this would result in large scale ecosystem losses, reducation in usable agriculture lands, and a reduction in carbon dioxide uptake by plants which clean the air.