‘I couldn’t believe what I was seeing’

By Don Rush

Last week, Oakwood Village resident Sylvia Runyon was outside on the big back porch of her old farmhouse.

“I looked down and saw this critter barely moving,” she said. “It was black, about an inch long, with six legs and a tail. AND, those two little black eyes. I’ve lived here for 47 years and I have never seen anything like it.”

She said she used her flyswatter and gave it a whack. “I didn’t really hit it hard, I thought he’d just scoot on off, but I killed him. I haven’t been able to sleep too well because of that, I didn’t mean to kill him.”

She put the dead critter in a plastic food container and took it to hardware stores and to feed stores to see if anyone knew what it was. “Nope. They didn’t know either,” she said.

She called the Leader office last Friday, four days after first seeing the insect. We took a picture and went to work to identify it and discovered it’s an Eastern Eyed Click Beetle. According to a Michigan State Extension article, the “Alaus Oculatus” is a “very handsome beetle and is our largest member of the click beetle family, Elateridae. Its common name comes from the two large eye-spots on the pronotum. The larvae, which may reach nearly two inches in length, live in moist, decayed wood, especially stumps. The larvae are predaceous on other insects. These handsome beetles are harmless.”

According to the website insectidentification.org, the “two little black eyes” Sylvia referenced are not the critter’s eyes. “(the) Click Beetle has two large black ‘eyespots’ on its pronotum. Each eyespot is surrounded by a thick, white ring, making the pair very conspicuous. Predators see the eyes and assume the rest of the creature is proportional in size. Attacking anything assumes a risk and many animals move on when they believe they may be outsized.”

There you go, Sylvia. Thanks for calling us!