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Wikipedia / Melyridae

Melyridae (common name: soft-winged flower beetles) are a family of beetles of the superfamily Cleroidea.

Description

Most are elongate-oval, soft-bodied beetles 10mm long or less. Many are brightly patterned in black and brown, yellow, or red. Some melyrids (Malachiinae) have peculiar orange structures along the sides of the abdomen, which may be everted and saclike or withdrawn into the body and inconspicuous. Some melyrids have the two basal antennomeres greatly enlarged. Most adults and larvae are predaceous, but many are common on flowers. The most common North American species belong to the genus Collops (Malachiinae); C. quadrimaculatus is reddish, with two bluish black spots on each elytron.

Four New Guinean species of Choresine (the more abundant C. pulchra, the less abundant C. semiopaca and the two infrequent C. rugiceps and C. sp. A, the latter as yet unnamed) have been found to contain batrachotoxins, which may account for the toxicity of some birds such as the blue-capped ifrit and hooded pitohui which eat them. The hypothesis that Phyllobates frogs in South America obtain batrachotoxins from related genera of the Melyridae (Choresine does not occur there) has not been tested due to the difficulty of field-work in Colombia.

Evolutionary history

The oldest fossil of the family are Sinomelyris and Juraniscus from the late Middle Jurassic (Callovian) Daohugou bed in Inner Mongolia, China. The oldest member of Dasytinae is Protodasytes from the early Late Cretaceous (Cenomanian) aged Charentese amber of France.

Distribution

The family Melyridae contains over 100 genera worldwide, with ~520 species in 48 genera in North America, and 16 genera in Europe; the largest diversity is in dry temperate regions.

Subfamilies

Various authorities have, at times, treated each of the presently-recognized subfamilies as families, and a few tribes have been accorded family status, as well (e.g., "Attalomimidae"). The family Mauroniscidae was removed from Melyridae in 1995, and Rhadalidae in 2019.

Selected genera

Notes