A new record for McFarlanes Hill Regional Park! This week, a Botany Bay diamond weevil (Chrysolopus spectabilis) was found along the Granite Walking Trail which is in the McFarlanes Hill Regional Park, West Wodonga. No records of this creature at this location have been added to publicly available databases such as iNaturalist or NatureMapr until now. However, there are a handful of other records in the Albury Wodonga region over the last few years, so it’s certainly about and most commonly seen in the warmer months in the more southerly parts of its range. It is endemic to Australian and can be found along the eastern coast from around Adelaide in SA to Harvey Bay in QLD.

This insect is not only spectacular-looking (it was named appropriately!), but it was among the first five insects to be collected on James Cook’s first voyage exploring the Australian east coast in 1770! The type specimen collected by Joseph Banks is still in good condition in the Natural History Museum in London.

The diamond weevil feeds on the sap of 28 out of the 1000 acacia species found in Australia. It also uses this plant to lay its eggs by boring a series of holes in the stem, close to the soil level, and depositing a single egg into each one. After hatching, the larvae will burrow further into the main roots of the plant where they find nourishment and then bore their way out again to emerge as adults. Their long snout and powerful mouthparts make easy work of this. Preferred species include Cootamundra wattle, silver wattle, Australian blackwood, and golden wattle. The weevils can become a pest of acacia plants by limiting their water uptake and damaging the bark and shoots of young plants.

Despite the bright colours, these weevils are not poisonous. If startled, they may fall to the ground and play dead or freeze and hold fast to the plant. So why is it blue? No one really knows, but blue is such a rare occurrence in nature and is produced not from a pigment as other colours such as green, red, and orange are, but by the magic of physics and how light is reflected.

Although this specimen was deceased when found, it’s still exciting to add a new record to a citizen science platform especially in areas we want to preserve into the future, so that the community as well as scientists can see where animals, plants, and fungi have been observed. All credit must go to Josephine McPherson, 13, who spotted the wonderful weevil on the ground when she stopped to examine a ball of sap, funnily enough coming out of an acacia!

If you’d like to give recording our local species a go, why not check out this helpful guide by Wodonga Urban Landcare Network about the benefits of citizen science and the different apps you can use.

And if you’d like some in-person guidance, Wodonga Urban Landcare Network run events in partnership with Parklands during the Great Southern BioBlitz (which is in October this year) including walks through local reserves as well as training sessions on how to use the apps. You can read all about these events and some of the interesting things we spotted last year in this article.

You can follow Wodonga Urban Landcare on Facebook and Humanitix to stay up-to-date with all the events happening locally!