Home Introduction of longhorned beetles In Asia the cerambycid beetles consist of three families, Disteniidae, Vesperidae and Cerambycidae. Among them, the family Cerambycidae constitutes one of the largest groups of wood-boring insects. Named for their elongate antennae, Cerambycids are phytophagous: the larvae usually burrow in the tissues of woody plants in conditions ranging from alive to moribund to dead and decomposing, but some species feed within the stems of living herbaceous plants. It is probably this ability of beetles to feed endophagously in wood and other plant tissues that makes them so successful, with an estimated 35,000 species in 4,000 genera, with perhaps one-third more to be described from tropical areas. What is known of adult cerambycids suggests that species vary in natural history and reproductive behavior. To some extent, variation in reproductive behavior among cerambycid species can be attributed to taxonomic affiliation. An example is the lamiines, all of which seem to require maturation feeding and usually feed on the same host species as do their larvae. After copulation, males of many species remain with females as they search for and prepare oviposition sites, repeating copulation and fending off rival males. A number of species mimic ants, bees, and wasps, though a majority of species are cryptically colored. How many cerambycid species are there in Singapore? Here, as in much of other tropical regions, the number of existing insect species cannot be estimated with any degree of certainty. Alfred Wallace recorded a total of 132 Cerambycids in Singapore (some of the original 135 species are merged, because they are merely sexes of one species). This, together with other historical records, such as by Gahan, brings the total to 140. Out of Wallace's list of 132, 48 have been sighted recently and 84 species have not been sighted in the past 30 years. In addition, 94 "new" species have been recorded recently (note that these "new" records are hardly surprising given that Wallace only collected at one site). Of more significance is the 84 missing species, which could be an indication of species becoming extinct due to habitat loss or insufficient sampling (especially for the nocturnal species), further compounded by the natural rarity of many of these species. Wallace himself provided a commentary on the localities where the specimens had been taken: "My chief collecting ground was at Bukit-Timah, a Roman Catholic Mission Station in the centre of the island. Here were several patches of forest on the tops of low hills, and on one of these, about a square mile in extent, I obtained nine-tenths of my Singapore collections." Interestingly, he said "...in a little more than two months I was able to collect about 700 species of Coleoptera (of which 135 were Longicorns) in a very limited area." The fact that Wallace recorded so many species just within a short period of two months and at one location alone strongly suggests that the forest of Singapore then had an immensely rich and abundant Cerambycid fauna. Such tremendous biodiversity probably no longer exists and greatly decimated. A more concrete example can be found in the genus Glenea, tribe Saperdini and subfamily Lamiinae. Many members of the Glenea group are very eye-catching and diurnal, so it is unlikely that so many of them would have been missed by the author if present (one can also reach similar conclusion by comparing the frequency of Glenea encounter in lowland Malaysian forests). Of the 26 Glenea species recorded historically in Singapore, less than 1/4 have been recorded recently (other than a few new species). It is safe to deduce that since Wallace's time, there appears to be a severe decrease or even steady extinction of the beetles in the Glenea group. The exact reasons are yet to be uncovered, but reasons such as fragmentary habitat, loss of host plants etc. are likely. The gallery on this website primarily shows the Cerambycid species recorded by Wallace and those recently encountered by the author in the field. Even such an online list is not an official way of publication, and clearly this list is by no means complete or even half-complete (and thus subjected to frequent updating), it has been decided to put all the data gathered during these years online. This solution allows a faster and wider diffusion of knowledge. Facilitating access to this knowledge would hopefully in turn encourage more people to embark on studying long horned beetles and fill our knowledge gap through more field observations. Home