The other day my sister found this little beetle crawling around on our hotel floor, which I instantly recognized as a rove beetle in the tribe Xantholinini, a species I'd kept before but never identified. In addition to deciding to try and keep this species again, I got some pictures and submitted them to Bugguide, where V Belov tentatively identified them as a Xantholinus sp. (of which there are three adventive species found in the US).
I have mine set up in a 2 oz container with a moist substrate mix of spent Panesthia substrate and coconut fiber, about a CM deep. On top of that I have little bark pieces, chunks of rotten wood and some pieces of long-fibered sphagnum moss on top. I'll be offering chick feed, pre-killed Compsodes, live Nocticola nymphs and springtails as food.
I kept this species several years ago, that time I had two adults and kept them communally. I think they did OK for months, but didn't seem to breed at all, and I actually forget what I fed them, (I assume I used pre-killed mealworms). Would be nice if this time I had a gravid female, and could rear the larvae somehow!
Here are some pics of her:
I really like the long, slender build of this genus, a lot of roves are more bulky, but these ones are super slender, even their heads are a thin oval shaped! Hopefully I can get offspring from this one if it's female, but at the very least it will make an interesting captive. It's too bad they are so small (7-8 mm), because they are really really neat looking IMO. 😄
Anyways, that's gonna do it for this post, thanks for reading, hope you all enjoyed, stay safe, and I'll see you all next time! 😉
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