Weevils Are Beetles

Weevils Are Beetles, oh yes they are, and the next blog post will cover more about their taxonomy.

Weevils are incredibly diverse, comprising one of the largest groups of beetles with around 60,000 known species worldwide. hmmmm hold on...... wikipedia says 97,000 weevil species; The Field Museum estimates around 60,000 weevil species, while ScienceDirect.com mentions a total of 83,000 described species. there are a lot anyway, and in Britain, there are over 600 species of weevils recorded. Or maybe more.....hoho. think of it this way....the number of weevil species is comparable to the total number of vertebrate species on Earth, which is about 60,000. 

Here is one I found in my garden in Surrey, England.

I can only get this to the Genus Curculio....and it is probably either a nut or an acorn weevil.

Lets assume its an acorn weevil, as I have quite a few oaks in the garden.....and this adult chappy is less than 1cm long.

Adult females lay their eggs inside developing nuts on the trees during mid-summer.  The egg hatches into a creamy white, grub-like larva that feeds inside the nut until autumn time. When the acorns have fallen to the ground , the larva chews a perfectly round tiny hole in the nut and emerges to say hello to the world.  The larvae then tunnel into the soil, where they will stay for one to two years before emerging as a new adult weevil to repeat the process.

Weevils are normally very small, can be recognised by their elongated, almost comical beaks, look kinda cute, and are really just a type of beetle.

Here a Broad-nosed weevil turns to look at me.

The superfamily Curculionoidea includes the snout beetles and various types of weevils. Here some gold dust weevils

With their long nose you might assume they feed by piercing and sucking their meal, much like the true bugs, but actuallyweevils belong to the order Coleoptera, and just like other beetles weevils have mandibulate mouthparts made for chewing.

You can see them if you look closely at the photo, they are tiny and are found just at the tip of that long nose. Many weevils cause significant damage to their plant hosts, and for this reason, we consider them pests. Looking at the one above and below, which would you say is the lesser of two weevils? (groan).