Click Beetles

(click beetle image found at wikimedia commons and under cc)

     Remember when you were a kid and you played outdoors with insects with your older brother or sister? Your favorites were usually grasshoppers, crickets and katydids. I remember playing with click beetles when I was a young one.

   My brother and I used to see them and try to catch them. Patrick was afraid of them when we were younger children, but a few years later, he was chasing me with them.

     Click beetles are in the same family as the Cosmopolitan Beetle. These "Cosmos" beetles usually all have a click mechanism that protects them from predators. It's clicked when the prosturnium is shifted with the mesosternium. It's usally done to avoid the predator from eating them.

     Alabama's beetles usually eat the nasty leaves and plants that are ruining. If you see a beetle such as the click beetle, they are cleaning up the vegitation and getting their bellie's worth. Keep them out of  the garden though because they will ruin your strawberries, corn and wheat.

      Their larvae the "wireworm" is the beginning of destruction. They are highly tolerate to pesticides that make them. The click beetles have their homes in burrows and lay beds of larvae. The wireworm can travel underneath the ground destroying one plant after the other from underneath the surface of the earth.

     Some animals that love a great snack of these clickers are  owls and crows.