Critically Endangered
Cromwell chafer beetle
Prodontria lewisi
Cromwell chafer beetle is a beetle in the family Scarabaeidae (order Coleoptera) — Prodontria lewisi, recorded as Critically Endangered and tied to New Zealand.
Appearance
This large beetle has pale reddish-brown elytra that are strongly convex and with deep groves passing along their length.
The Cromwell chafer beetle (Cromwell chafer beetlei) is a flightless beetle in the family Scarabaeidae.
Range and habitat
This beetle usually lives in an area of low sand dunes on the Cromwell river terrace, known as the "Cromwell shallow sand". The dunes are formed by loess originally deposited by the Clutha River. As P. Lewisii seems to be adapted to burrowing in these inland dunes, its entire natural range was probably never more than 500 hectares.
It is found in just one spot in Central Otago, New Zealand, that is now a nature reserve. In 1979, an 81 ha area was fenced off to protect the population, and in 1983 it was gazetted as the Cromwell Chafer Beetle Nature Reserve: at the time, the only reserve in the world created solely for an invertebrate.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Life history
Life history follows the order: complete metamorphosis in moths and beetles, nymphs in grasshoppers and bugs. This page does not invent a host plant that no source named.
In crisis
Some of the beetles were found north of the town in 1968, next to a nine-hole golf course, but that population was destroyed when the course was expanded to 18 holes. The remaining surviving population of the Cromwell chafer was a 95 hectare triangular area of undeveloped land immediately south-west of Cromwell. In 1996, after years of being classed as Vulnerable, the Cromwell chafer was declared Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List.
It currently has the Department of Conservation status Nationally Endangered. The main threats to the Cromwell chafer were formerly habitat destruction, but now are introduced predators.
Cromwell chafer beetle is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Cromwell chafer beetle, Wikidata item Q142468. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
