Family MORDELLIDAE Latreille, 1802

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• Mordellonae Latreille, 1802.

  Type genus:

   Mordella Linnaeus, 1758.

Introduction

The family Mordellidae (tumbling flower, or pintail, beetles) is medium sized, with an estimated 150 species in Australia (Lawrence & Slipinski 2013), compared with 2300 described species worldwide (Liu, Erwin & Yang 2018). Adults may be conspicuously abundant on flowers in woodland and forest and therefore significant pollinators. Their tumbling motion when disturbed is the result of a high degree of rotation at the base of the enlarged hind legs, a feature also present in the morphologically similar and related families Melandryidae and Scraptiidae (Reuter 1995). The larvae are associated with sap flows, living soft plant tissue, dead wood or hard bracket fungi and a few species are predatory (Liu et al. 2018). However the biology of Australian species is virtually unknown. The family has an extensive fossil record going back to the mid Cretaceous (Bao et al. 2019, particularly in Baltic Amber, which includes extant genera (Bao et al. 2018).
The Australian fauna is poorly known taxonomically. Only one of two subfamilies, Mordellinae, and two of five tribes occur, Mordellini and Mordellistenini. Most australian mordellid species are placed in three cosmopolitan genera: Hoshihananomia, Mordella and Mordellistena. However 11 additional genera are recorded from Australia (Lawrence & Slipinski 2013). There is no key to all Australian genera, although many are included in an out of date world key (Ermisch 1950) and seven are included in a revision of the South Australian genera (Matthews 1987). The last comprehensive revision of the species was in 1917, when only three genera were recognised (Lea 1917). The last taxonomic treatment of Australian species was a byproduct of a study of the related New Zealand fauna (Lu 2009).

General References

Bao, T., Walczynska, K.S., Bojarski, B., Jarzembowski, E., Wang, B. & Rust, J. 2019. A new species of tumbling flower beetle (Coleoptera: Mordellidae) from Baltic amber. Paläontologische Zeitschrift 93(1): 31-36

Bao, T., Walczynska, K.S., Moody, S.,Wang, B. & Rust, J. 2019. The first true Mordellidae (Coleoptera: Tenebrionoidea) from lower Cenomanian amber of Myanmar. Cretaceous Research 93: 60-65

Ermisch, K. 1950. Die Gattungen der Mordelliden der Welt (16. Beitrag zur Kenntnis der Mordelliden). Entomologische Blätter 45-46: 34–92

Lawrence, J.F. & Ślipiński, A. 2013. Australian Beetles. Volume 1 : morphology, classification and key. Collingwood : CSIRO Publishing 561 pp.

Lea, A.M. 1917. Notes on some miscellaneous Coleoptera, with descriptions of new species. Part III. Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia 41: 121-322 pls XII-XV

Liu, Y., Erwin, T. & Yang, X. 2018. Mordellidae (Coleoptera) Research: A Review Based on the Zoological Record from 1864 through 2013. Insects 9(3): 1-20

Lu, W. 2009. Tumbling flower beetles from New Zealand (Coleoptera: Mordellidae) with new synonymies for some Australian species. New Zealand Entomologist 32: 23-40

Matthews, E. 1987. A guide to the genera of beetles of South Australia. Polyphaga: Tenebrionoidea. Special educational bulletin series No. 8 Adelaide : South Australian Museum Part 5 pp.67.

Reuter, M. 1995. Funktionsmorphologische Studien zum Sprung der Stachelkafer (Coleoptera, Mordellidae). Acta Biologica Benrodis 7(1-2): 99-133

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