This is a breeding report for Oxythyrea pantherina. Like many of my favourite Cetonidae, this species is small, as a result does need only little space and is easy to keep and reproduce.
Oxythyrea pantherina is a North African species, from Tunisia, Morocco and Libya. Oxythyrea are normally easy to identify to a genus level, and then it gets a bit tougher. The European species is Oxythyrea funerea, and depending on time and location, they are locally very abundant. In Germany, there are only a few known locations, and it is speculated that here they develop on cow dung. I have been on a meadow at Lake Como in Northern Italy in the beginning of May, and they were common. Within an hour or so, on a normal walk I must have seen at least 100 imagines feeding on flowers. Within a single Magnolia flower, I found 16 beetles.
I have witnessed similar number with Oxythyrea abigail and Oxythyrea noemi in Israel several years back. That time their preferred flower seemed to be Thistles.
Back to Oxythyrea pantherina. I received four pairs in September 2018, which had just come out of the cocoon. They were already an F5 generation, from a population around Hammamet in Tunisia from 2014. The imagines I had were always in the substrate and the breeder who had given them to me mentioned that they need a diapause. I hence decided to put them into the refrigerator. I had put them into a small box, filled with substrate, together with the Protaetia cretica that I have written about a few days back.
They stayed in the fridge at 4-5 degree Celsius until March, when I took them out and set them up for breeding. Here is the super nice part about small species – I set them up in a 5-litre plastic terrarium, which I placed on a South facing window. Within a day, they became active, started feeding – the preferred food was banana – and mating. I did get eggs almost immediately, and the tiny larvae hatched very quickly as well. The imagines lived for about 3 months, during which they continued to lay eggs. They egg laying material and larval food was mainly wood based, a mix of flake soil and white rotten wood sawdust.
The development of this species is super-fast and they started pupating in already in July. I did check on them in the beginning of September, and managed to collect many fresh imagines. Which, to no surprise were inactive again and hid in the substrate. I too all imagines, the few remaining larvae and a few pupae, and placed them again in a small box with humid substrate. This box went into the fridge and will stay there until March again.
Apart from the diapause, this is a very easy species to breed and reproduce in captivity. As they are small, it is nice to have many of them, as this creates a nice effect, black and white and countless spots, especially nice on macro photographs. The larvae are very peaceful and I did not witness any issues with cannibalization or disturbances while pupating. If you have not yet tried it, and get the opportunity, I would suggest Oxythyrea as a perfect starter pet beetle.
Leave a Reply