Random Beetle Generator

What the beetle generator does

You want a beetle. For a drawing, a story, a game, a quiz, a kid deep in a bug phase, or because you saw Devil's Coach Horse on the list and had to know.

This gives you one. Pull a batch and you will get a spread from the ladybird everyone loves to armoured giants to names that sound invented.

What follows is a fact so large it reorders the animal kingdom. Beetles are not one type of insect among many. They are, by a wide margin, the most successful group of animals that has ever existed, and this list is a tiny sample of a staggering abundance.

How to use it

1. Choose how many you want. One for a subject, a handful to browse.
2. Press Generate. A fresh set every time.
3. Press Copy to take the set with you.

One in every four animals is a beetle

Here is the sentence that never quite fits in the head. Roughly one in every four known animal species on Earth is a beetle.

Not one in four insects. One in four animals, counting everything, the mammals, the birds, the fish, the reptiles, the spiders, the worms, all of it. Around four hundred thousand species of beetle have been named, which is more than all the vertebrate species put together several times over, and the true number is thought to run far higher, into the millions, most of them never described. There are more kinds of beetle than there are kinds of plant.

There is a famous line about this. A biologist was supposedly asked what the study of nature had taught him about the creator, and replied that the creator, if one existed, had an inordinate fondness for beetles. It is one of those quotes that has drifted a bit and may never have been said quite that way, but the fact underneath is rock solid and staggering. If you picked a known animal species at random from all of them, the single most likely thing to get is a beetle.

So this list of a hundred-odd beetles is not a broad survey of a group. It is a thimble dipped into an ocean. For every beetle named here there are thousands more, many living and dying in forests and soils without a human ever seeing them, let alone naming them. The beetle is the animal kingdom's runaway success story, and we, the large conspicuous animals who write the lists, are the strange exception. The rule of animal life on this planet is small, hard-shelled, six-legged, and on this list.

The beetle that navigates by the Milky Way

Pull the dung beetle off this list, because it is the setting for one of the most astonishing findings in animal behaviour.

A dung beetle's life is not glamorous. It finds a pile of dung, rolls a piece into a ball, and pushes that ball away in a dead straight line to bury it somewhere safe before a rival can steal it. The straight line matters enormously, because rolling in a straight line gets it away from the competition at the dung pile fastest, and any curve wastes precious time near thieves.

So the question scientists asked was, how does a beetle, pushing a ball backwards with its head down, keep such a perfectly straight line?

The answer, established by experiment, is genuinely hard to believe. Dung beetles navigate by the sky, and one species was shown to steer by the Milky Way itself.

Researchers took dung beetles into a planetarium. Under a full projected starry sky, the beetles rolled straight. Under only the diffuse band of the Milky Way, with no individual stars, they still rolled straight. But when the sky was switched off entirely, or when the beetles were fitted with tiny caps that blocked their view of the sky, they lost the ability and rolled in aimless circles. The beetle was using the faint stripe of our galaxy across the night sky as a compass line to hold its heading.

This was the first animal ever shown to use the Milky Way to navigate. A creature that spends its life with dung, with a brain smaller than a grain of rice, is orienting itself by the light of a hundred billion stars. It cannot know what the Milky Way is. It only needs it to be a fixed line in the sky to steer against, and that is enough. Every clear night, on this list, is a beetle rolling a ball of dung in a straight line laid down by the galaxy.

There is a Dumbledore on this list, twice

Look carefully at this list and you will find a beetle called the Common Dumbledor Beetle, and another called the Common Cockchafer. Here is the delightful thing. Those point at the same kind of creature, and the name connects to something you already know.

Dumbledore is a real old English word. Before it was the name of a wizard, it was a dialect word, centuries old, for a bumbling, buzzing, blundering flying insect, a bumblebee or a droning beetle. It sits in a little family of rhyming words, humble-bee and bumble-bee among them, all describing those large, furry, slow, droning fliers that seem too heavy for the air. Dumbledore was simply the rarest of them, a regional word for a thing that hums and blunders about.

When J.K. Rowling named her humming, music-loving headmaster, she took the word deliberately, because, in her words, she imagined him humming to himself and dumbledore was an old word for a bumblebee. So the wizard is named after a buzzing insect, on purpose.

And the word did not only mean the bee. In some dialects dumbledore also meant a particular droning beetle, the cockchafer, a large, clumsy, loudly buzzing beetle that blunders into windows on summer evenings, which is exactly the same one this list calls the Common Cockchafer. So on this list you have the same blundering, humming beetle sitting under two of its old names, one of which the whole world now associates with a wizard.

It is a small perfect example of how these names work. A beetle name is often a fossil of ordinary old speech, a word people used when this droning thing bumped into their candle, preserved now in a species list and, by pure accident, in one of the most famous character names ever written. The next time you meet a cockchafer thudding against a summer window, you can greet it correctly. It is a dumbledore, and it was one long before Hogwarts.

Where these come from

The beetles here come from a list our team put together and checked by hand. Press the button and one is drawn out of it at random.

That is the whole thing, and it runs on your own device.

Reading the names

Beetle names are unusually rich, and once you can read them a random pull becomes a set of tiny descriptions rather than a list of labels.

Many tell you the job. A dung beetle rolls dung, a carrion beetle eats the dead, a bark beetle lives under bark, a leaf beetle eats leaves, a diving beetle swims. These names are honest little occupation labels, and they tell you where in the world to look for the animal and what it does when you find it.

Some tell you the look. A jewel beetle is iridescent enough to have been used in jewellery, a tiger beetle is striped and a fierce hunter, a longhorn beetle has enormous antennae, a tortoise beetle is domed and armoured like its namesake. The name is a thumbnail portrait, painted by whoever first described it.

Some are warnings or curiosities. A blister beetle can raise a blister on your skin with a defensive chemical, so the name is genuine advice. A click beetle can snap its body with an audible click to flip itself upright, and is named for the sound. A deathwatch beetle taps inside old timber, and the eerie ticking in the walls of a quiet old house at night, once thought to foretell a death, is this beetle knocking for a mate.

And some, like the dumbledore above, are fossils of old speech, words that were ordinary once and survive now mostly in the name of a bug. So a batch from this list is really a set of very short stories. Each name is somebody, often centuries ago, trying to capture an entire small creature in two or three words, by what it does, how it looks, what it warns of, or what people used to call it. Read them that way and the list stops being names and becomes a field guide written by generations of people who looked closely.

Questions people ask

Is a ladybug really a beetle?

Yes, completely, and the name is the giveaway once you know it, because in much of the world it is called a ladybird beetle or simply a ladybird. It has all the beetle hallmarks, hardened wing cases forming that domed shell, folded flight wings underneath, chewing mouthparts. The cute spotted dome is a classic beetle body plan. So despite the friendly name, a ladybird is as much a beetle as a stag beetle is, just a small round charming one, and it is on this list correctly.

Why is a firefly on a beetle list?

Because a firefly is a beetle too, despite the name, which is why you will also see it called a lightning bug, and neither fly nor bug is accurate. Fireflies are soft-bodied beetles that happen to produce light through a chemical reaction in their abdomen, one of the most efficient light-producing systems known, giving off almost no heat. So the magical summer light show is made by beetles signalling to each other to mate, flashing in species-specific patterns, and it belongs on this list as much as any armoured giant does.

How many kinds of beetle are there?

Around four hundred thousand named species, with the true total estimated in the millions and most still undescribed, which makes beetles the largest group of animals on Earth by a wide margin. They make up roughly a quarter of all known animal species and something like forty percent of all insects. New species are found constantly, especially in tropical forests, so the number keeps climbing. This list samples barely a rounding error of the real diversity out there.

Why did ancient Egyptians worship a dung beetle?

The scarab, first on this list, is a dung beetle, and the Egyptians connected the beetle rolling its ball of dung across the ground to their sun god rolling the sun across the sky. The beetle became a powerful symbol of creation, renewal and the rising sun, and scarab amulets were among the most common sacred objects in Egypt, placed with the dead for protection and rebirth. So one of the most important religious symbols of a great civilisation was, quite literally, the beetle on this list that rolls dung, elevated into a symbol of the sun itself.

Can I use this for a school project?

That is a lot of why it is here, and beetles make a genuinely rich subject because of the sheer scale and strangeness of them. Pull one, then find out what it eats, where it lives and what it does, and any of the threads above, the mind-bending diversity, the Milky Way navigation, the Egyptian scarab, can turn an ordinary bug report into something memorable. Start with what the beetle does for a living, which its name usually tells you, and the rest of its story opens from there.

References

1. Dacke, M., Baird, E., Byrne, M., Scholtz, C. H. and Warrant, E. J. (2013). Dung beetles use the Milky Way for orientation. Current Biology, 23(4), 298 to 300. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.12.034
2. Stork, N. E. (2018). How many species of insects and other terrestrial arthropods are there on Earth? Annual Review of Entomology, 63, 31 to 45. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-ento-020117-043348
3. Oxford English Dictionary. Dumbledore. https://www.oed.com/