Wildlife Watching Wednesday: The Wood-Boring Pine Sawyer Beetle
By: Tom Berg
Most people don’t like beetles. And it’s understandable, since most beetles fall into the “creepy-crawly” category. But some beetles are very interesting. Take longhorn beetles, for example. Longhorn beetles are wood-boring insects with very long antennae. Their antennae can actually be longer than their body, and those long appendages look a bit like horns. Thus the classification “longhorn beetle”.
One of those longhorn beetle species is the Pine Sawyer Beetle. This beetle is native to much of the United States, at least where there are plenty of pine trees which act as their host plant. Pine sawyer beetles are just one of more than 1,000 species of longhorn beetles in living in the forests of the USA and Canada.
Pine sawyer beetles are dark in color, usually dark brown or even black. They have six legs like all insects, and their antennae are extremely long (longer than their bodies). They are very cool to see. They are sometimes called white-spotted sawyer beetles because they have a conspicuous white spot behind their head, right where the wings meet on their back.
The word “sawyer” means woodcutter, so it makes sense that pine sawyers are beetles that are “pine woodcutters”. They are attracted to pine trees which are dying or have been recently injured, such as trees that were damaged in wind storms or tornadoes. The adult beetles lay their eggs in the damaged wood and the pine sawyer larvae that hatch bore into the wood as they consume it.
Pine sawyer beetles are sometimes mistaken for the invasive Asian longhorn beetle, but the Asian longhorn beetle is much larger than the pine sawyer. Also, the Asian longhorn beetles differ in the fact that they are very smooth and shiny and have many white spots on their wing covers.
Since pine sawyer beetles are a native species, they are actually beneficial to the environment. The wood-boring larvae help break down dead conifer trees as they rot and return them to the forest soil as they decompose. It’s all a part of the circle of life!
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