I was doing a spot of gardening and after a couple of hours I got distracted by the compost heap and so went and got my sieves and tray and started going through the various patches of vegetation in varying states of decay.
There were quite a few beetles in there including 3 species of aleoch and at least 2 species of ptilid. I'll leave those for another day!
The first one to catch my eye was this 1.2mm tiny thing. It looks a bit like a cross between a ladybird and a miniature tortoise beetle. It is in fact one of the Corylophidae.
I couldn't initially find a key and so I went and got some help from the UK Beetles Facebook page. Turns out this is a species of Sericoderus. There are are only 2 possible UK species: S. lateralis and S. brevicornis. There is a key available on Mark Telfer's website to this pair. However, unless you have a male brevicornis then things become trickier. This turned out to be a female so it could be either and I'll need to dissect out the spermatheca but I'm predicting that I'll be left none the wiser after doing so as the differences are slight.
The second new beetle family was the Endomychidae. This rather hairy 1.6mm beetle is Mycetaea subterranea, aka the Hairy Cellar beetle. The pubescence and the pronotal margins make it a doddle to identify unlike the previous beetle.
I also had another new species of rove beetle. Despite getting the right group I struggled to key this one out. It turns out that it's Tachyporus nitidulus, and has distinctive maxillary palps where the last segments are tiny and cone-shaped. This was also a tiny beetle but bigger than the other two at 2.4mm.
Not bad for 30 minutes of sieving. If I can ID the ptilds and aleochs there will be some more new species too.
Can't stop listening to this song at the moment. Have had it on repeat in the car on the daily work drive recently. The stand out song on the latest Nick Cave and Bad Seeds album. I'm of to see them again in May and can't bloody well wait to hear this live. Powerful stuff.
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