A distinctively marked beetle with straw-yellow and dark brown colouration and sculpted pronotum; nothing else in SA resembles it.
This is a south-eastern Australian species which in SA is confined to the higher rainfall areas.
Legend | records | count of breeding adults, pupae and larvae |
sites | count of major sites (unique 10 km grid cells +/- some distinct approximate localities) |
* | indicates alien (non-native) plant occurrences, either wild or planted (the species may be alien in SA, or native in parts of its SA range) |
adult | live = extracted alive; dead = extracted dead as intact or fragmentary remains; ex billet = reared and emerged from stored sections of host; ex pupa = reared from sampled pupa |
pupa | extracted pupa; pupa ex larva = reared pupa from larva |
larva | extracted larva (any stage including prepupa) |
gall (only) | hatched or unhatched gall identified by form and position rather than contents |
Adults are often found on the trunks of Eucalypts with rough bark, including Stringybarks as well as species where the rough bark is mainly basal. One SA Museum specimen was collected from a planted Tuart, Eucalyptus gomphocephala, in the Adelaide Hills. It is more commonly found there on Messmate Stringybarks (E. obliqua).
Tepper 1887 reported the Stringybarks E. obliqua and E. baxteri (as E. capitellata) to be larval hosts, noting that 'the larva lives in the dry corky bark'. Another SA Eucalypt species, E. goniocalyx (Long-leaved Box) was identified as a larval host in NSW by Turner & Hawkeswood 1995a who found dead beetles in dry bark and larval and pupal chambers in bark and sapwood.
Pupae and larvae illustrated here were found in a small stand of planted Flooded Gum Eucalyptus grandis that appeared to be under stress. Pupal chambers were shallow, forming dish-like impressions in living wood immediately beneath the bark layer, and the pupae faced outwards. Frass-filled tunnels leading to the chambers had widely spaced darker bands. Somewhat similar frass traces but more strongly and tightly banded dark and light were prolific under the bark of several trees, but could not be linked to N. vetusta with certainty.
¹ Legend | regions | SA State Herbarium regions (map)
EA: Eastern, EP: Eyre Peninsula, FR: Flinders Ranges, GT: Gairdner-Torrens, KI: Kangaroo Island, LE: Lake Eyre, MU: Murray, NL: Northern Lofty, NU: Nullarbor, NW: North-Western, SE: South-Eastern, SL: Southern Lofty, YP: Yorke Peninsula |
| size | The ellipse is the correct size when printed, indicative on a desktop screen, and likely to be wrong on a mobile device. |