Monkeypod Round-Headed Borer

bugman

August 27th, 2009 at 8:27 am

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What’s this bug?
August 27, 2009
This was found in early August in the Ka’u district of Hawaii island (south side of the island), outside the hospital crawling on the sidewalk. The orange cap is from a urine cup it was brought to me in, the bug is probably about an inch and a half long.
Alan Laird
Hawaii

Monkeypod Round-Headed Borer

Hi Alan,
We often have trouble identifying Hawaiian insects for two reasons. One is that there doesn’t tend to be much available, easily accessible information online. The second reason is that so many introduced species are found on the islands. We quickly identified this Monkeypod Round-Headed Borer, Xystrocera globosa, on a Insects of Hawaii website. There wasn’t much information, but it was indicated that it was non-native. We then searched the scientific name and found an article on Five New Invasive Species of Longhorn Beetles in Israel. There we learned that “X. globosa originatesfrom southeast Asia and is widely distributed inthe Oriental Region (East Pakistan, India [includ-ing Andaman Islands], Indonesia [Java, Suma-tra, Celebes], Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand,Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Seychelles), Ocea-nia (Australia [Northern Territory], New Guinea)(1,15), Hawaiian Islands (1,6)), Madagascan Re-gion (Madagascar, Rodriguez, Mauritius) (1),Caribbean (Puerto Rico) (1,6), and subtropicalareas of the Palaearctic Region (Arabia, Egypt(1), Japan (1,18), Korea, Taiwan (1)).”

Thanks! I had searched for hours on a couple of large insect ID sites, but never thought to look locally…
Makes sense, too, because there are lots of monkeypod trees surrounding Ka’u hospital.
Mahalo!