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Photo#732871
Meloid? - Cortodera falsa - female

Meloid? - Cortodera falsa - Female
Near Boyden Cave, Kings Canyon National Park, Fresno County, California, USA
June 5, 2010
Found here walking along the maturing fruit of a Calochortus flower (petals had fallen...like here). The fruit and beetle were oriented vertically...I rotated the image to make it easier to view.

I don't think this is Cantharidae (no sharp edges on pronotum) or Oedemeridae (pronotum is not wider anteriorly) so I'm guessing it's Meloidae. Best match I could find is Gnathium francilloni...but my beetle seems to lack the long beak of a nemognathine.

Images of this individual: tag all
Meloid? - Cortodera falsa - female Meloid? - Cortodera falsa - female Meloid? - Cortodera falsa - female

so cool... will seek confirmation
Moved from Beetles.

 
Cortodera falsa
This species is common in the chapparal of Tulare and Fresno Counties.

 
Thank you both, for the ID and the distribution info
Regarding the latter, out of curiosity I searched the CAS online database and it yielded 14 US records for C. falsa: 13 from CA and 1 from Ohio(!). The northernmost CA records were from "Sequoia Natl Park" and Tulare Co. to the east, and San Benito Co. to the west.

So this BG post and the one from near Monterey seemed to push online data points for the species a bit further north.

But then I noticed there are also single CAS records from each of Baja California Norte and British Columbia (gotta be careful with the abbreviation "BC" here). So seems it may occur in a large swath of the Pacific coast region (all the way from BC to BC :-)...with far off cousins in Ohio?

Postscript: Just checked Monne & Bezerk(1) and they give range of Cortodera falsa as: swUSA (CA), Mexico (BCN).

 
thanks much again, Dennis

check in Cerambycidae

 
Thanks, Brad
Cerambycidae is a good suggestion...that would explain the lack of a beak :-) Don't know why I resisted that possibility earlier!

I quickly found something promising there, namely Cortodera falsa. It's a very good visual match, particularly in the bulky scape and longer segments of antennae; shape of hind corners of head; long red clypeal area; etc. Compare with the image below:



I'm thinking mine is a female, as the relative length is shorter (width wider) than most the other BG posts, closest to Harsi's post below (note =v='s comments there):



Compare also images from the CDFA Cerambycid site. Further images of the same (type) specimen are here. Up to discoloration (that specimen is 152 years old!) those images also look good.

Some CA distribution records can be found at this page from the California Beetle Database. The closest (and furthest north) records there are from "Sand Flat", a few miles west of Lake Isabella in Kern County, and about 120 miles south of my location. Both that locale and mine are in mixed oak woodland/chaparral habitat of the western Sierra Nevada at ~2400' and 3400', respectively.

Just for reference, I've noticed the density of Calif. Beetle Database records are often more concentrated in southern California (the database is operated out of Santa Barbara). There's a BugGuide post of C. falsa from east of Monterey, CA which is equally as far north as my specimen from the bulk of the 35 southern CA records on the CBD. In other words, the CBD seems to sometimes have better coverage of southern CA records.

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