Resources

Many traditional stories about bark and ambrosia beetles have been re-examined, and we now see that many were incomplete, even wrong. We thought that bark beetles were pests of conifers; now we see that their outbreaks are a symptom of the climatic and silvicultural pressures on the world’s forests. We thought that ambrosia beetles were deliberate farmers of hapless fungal crops; now it looks more like an evolutionary addiction of the beetles to the fungi who run the metabolic show. We used to think that mycangia were fungus pockets, now we emphasize their fungus symbiont enforcement. Nobody seriously thinks that ScolytiDAE are a separate family of beetles any more, but even the classification within ScolytiNAE is being reshuffled. If you are interested in recent summaries, you can start with our chapters Bark Beetles and Ambrosia Beetles in the freely downloadable new book Forest Entomology and Pathology. But ultimately, we all really need to look at this group with fresh eyes. So do not rely on summaries of old information in your web browser (here is why); instead, go out and explore the beetles!