So I have been going through my freezer looking for any stray sample tubes. Ones that have beetles in and especially ones that I have yet to put a name to. I found one such tube this evening and on first examination let out a fairly audible gasp and a small but firm expletive when I looked at the contents.
For a split second I thought I might have rediscovered a lost UK species but once I looked at the data label scrunched up in the tube, I remembered finding this beetle on a moss covered boulder, on the edge of a glacial meltwater river in northern Spain way back in 2017.
The staph is in the genus Paederidus which has 44 species worldwide, two of which have specimens apparently from the UK but neither of which have been seen since 1833.
So which species was this? There are 13 that are known from the Palaearctic and four of these occur in Europe. P. punctiventris occurs in south-west Russia, around the Black Sea (so it's not that one) P. algiricus occurs in Spain and north-west Africa but not from the north coast of Spain so I can rule this out too. That leaves me with P. rubrothoracicus and P. ruficollis both widespread and the two ones supposedly once found in the UK in the dim and distant past.
The species are very similar but differ a little on size (always a difficult measurement with staphs) and in the direction of hairs on the tergites (upper sections of the abdomen).
P. rubrothoracicus should have the hairs directed uniformly diagonally inwards where as P. ruficollis should have them directed untidily inwards almost horizontally.
Pretty sure this is the latter, P. ruficollis. A species that occurs right up to the channel coast so could conceivably occur again over here.
The post title comes from the closing track of Fleetwood Mac's album, Rumours. Still a great listen.
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