Carabidae  

Most species in this family mature in one year, and can live for 2-3.

After mating, female beetles lay eggs in the soil. They place them one by one, not in groups. They can lay many dozens of eggs over the summer.

Breeding season: Summer.

Key Reproductive Features: iteroparous ; seasonal breeding ; sexual ; fertilization (Internal ); oviparous

Males do not care for young. Females in some species place eggs in mud cells attached to plants or stones, others just hide the egg in the soil. Once the egg is laid (and possibly enclosed in the cell), the female leaves it alone.

Parental Investment: no parental involvement

View Carabidae Tree

While carabid phylogeny has been extensively studied, the convergences and reversals present in morphological traits has lead to a great deal of controversy about many groups. Two of these groups, the tiger beetles (Cicindelitae) and wrinkled bark beetles (Rhysodini) are often considered outside the carabid clade. The phylogeny shown of carabid tribes on this and other pages is a conservative consensus view, in which a large number of "basal" groups give rise to a middle and upper grade of carabids. Within this latter group is a large, relatively uniform clade, the Harpalinae, which includes many of the larger, more common carabids.

Included below the tree are a number of especially enigmatic groups, including Gehringiini and Rhysodini, which may be older lineages, related to groups in this page, or they may instead be related to groups within the Carabidae Conjunctae. Their placement, along with the resolution of other aspects of carabid phylogeny, awaits numerical analysis of available morphological and molecular data.

Body surfaces reflect light to create colors: jewel beetles
 

The body surfaces of jewel beetles and other beetles create colors by reflecting lights at different wavelengths.

 
  "The Buprestid beetles…as well as many ground-beetles (Carabidae), are different again in that the body surface producing the colour is hardened and quite permanent and sculptured into subtly varying shapes that reflect light at different wavelengths - blue, purple, green, bronze, silver and gold. The purple flush on the elytra of the ground-beetle, Carabus violaceus, is due to this cause, as are the metallic marks on various butterfly pupae." (Wootton 1984:140)
  Learn more about this functional adaptation.