Carrot beetle
Ligyrus gibbosus
The carrot beetle is a shiny, dark reddish-brown to black beetle. It is a rhinoceros beetle, a cousin of the big beetles with horns. It spends a lot of its time digging in the soil.
Lives in
North America
Length
1.3 to 1.7 cm (0.51 to 0.67 in)
Can it hurt you?
Harmless
Harmless to people. It does not sting.
What does it eat?
It eats roots, grasses and rotting plants in the soil. Farmers know it because it damages sunflowers and other crops.
How big is it?
How long is it?
🍚as long as 3 grains of rice in a row🍽️could run across a dinner table in 6.8 seconds
How big is Carrot beetle compared to YOU?
Just maths in your browser. Nothing is saved or sent anywhere.
How fast is it?
A garden snail about 0.05 km/h (0.03 mph)
A tortoise about 0.3 km/h (0.19 mph)
Carrot beetle about 0.53 km/h (0.33 mph)
A person walking about 5 km/h (3.1 mph)
cool stuff
Fun facts
1
Its babies are white grubs with a dark head that live in the ground.
2
It can be a pest in fields of sunflowers.
3
In 2022 scientists moved it back into the group called Ligyrus after it had been in another group for years.
you asked
Most asked questions about Carrot beetle
?What does the carrot beetle eat?
Roots, grasses and rotting plants in the soil, and sometimes crops like sunflowers.
?How big is the carrot beetle?
About 13 to 17 millimetres long.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Ligyrus gibbosus
- Group
- Beetles
- Family
- Scarabaeidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Coleoptera > Scarabaeidae
- Lives on
- North America
Where the facts come from
- Ligyrus gibbosus (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 Frank Peairs, Colorado State University, Bugwood.org. CC BY 3.0 us, 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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