Japanese jewel beetle
The Japanese jewel beetle shines like a real jewel. Its long wing cases glow green and red, and the colours change when you look from a different side. It likes to fly in the hot summer sun in the woods.
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Fun facts
Long ago in Japan, people decorated a tiny temple shrine with thousands of its shiny wings. You can still see it today.
Because its colour keeps changing, nobody can say for sure what colour it is.
In Japanese, saying something is beetle coloured means it can be understood in more than one way.
It is one of the bigger beetles, about as long as your thumb.
Most asked questions about Japanese jewel beetle
?Why does the jewel beetle shine?
Its wing cases are iridescent, so they glow with different colours depending on how the light hits them.
?Where does the Japanese jewel beetle live?
In Japan and Korea, in sunny woods and forests in summer.
?How big is a Japanese jewel beetle?
It grows about 30 to 41 millimetres long.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Chrysochroa fulgidissima
- Group
- Beetles
- Family
- Buprestidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Coleoptera > Buprestidae
- Lives on
- Asia
- Also known as
- Yamato tamamushi, Jewel beetle
Where the facts come from
- Chrysochroa fulgidissima (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by ‘Uncle Carl’ (カールおじさん).. CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons. The sticker of this bug is drawn from this picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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