Webinar: Beetles (Great Southeast Pollinator Course, Week 7 of 7)
Webinar Date: July 28, 2026
Speaker: Dr. Joe McHugh, Department of Entomology, University of Georgia; Curator of Arthropods, Georgia Museum of Natural History
Host: Becky Griffin (National Coordinator, Great Southeast Pollinator Census)
Series: Great Southeast Pollinator Course
Source: Corrected SRT (Stage 1), GTBOP_Transcript_2026-07-28_Beetles.srt (989 blocks); Archive Package (Stage 2) for structural reference
Purpose: Fourteen prompts, each pointing at a stretch of video with one task. Taken in order they also split the 1:13:54 recording into Moodle sections. The break at 51:18 is the real one: everything before it is McHugh on beetles, everything after is Griffin on the census. Prompts 1 through 12 cover McHugh’s half, prompts 13 and 14 cover the census wrap-up.
Audience note: Written for home gardeners, school and community garden leaders, and Great Southeast Pollinator Census counters. Prompts 11, 13, and 14 pay off directly on census day. Prompt 11 is the one to assign if you only assign one.
Carry McHugh’s warning into all of these. At 7:52 he told the audience that with beetles there is an exception to every rule, so nearly everything he was about to say is a partial truth. These prompts ask what he said, not what is universally true of beetles.
Part One: Dr. Joe McHugh on Beetles
Review Task 1
Watch: 0:00 – 6:04
Task: Note who is speaking and what McHugh says about his own angle on the subject before he starts.
Key Points to Identify:
- Rich Braman opens and hands off to Becky Griffin, National Coordinator of the Great Southeast Pollinator Census. Griffin introduces McHugh, who has been on the UGA Entomology faculty for over thirty years and curates the arthropod collection at the Georgia Museum of Natural History, over 2.2 million specimens.
- He is presenting from a public library in Vergennes, Vermont, where he had just arrived with a moving truck helping his daughter relocate.
- He names his own specialism and his bias: he is a systematist, someone who studies the science of biodiversity, and he is not an ecologist, not a pollination biologist, and not a conservation biologist. He says his presentation will have a different focus from the ones before it.
- His roadmap, given at 5:38: a little about anatomy, a little about the history of beetles, a little about their diversity, their biology, and then the beetles common in the southeastern United States.
Review Task 2
Watch: 6:04 – 7:31
Task: Write down how long beetles have been treated as a group, and the twist McHugh puts on that.
Key Points to Identify:
- Aristotle recognized beetles as some sort of natural cohesive group 2,300 years ago; he could see the features.
- Linnaeus recognized the order Coleoptera in Systema Naturae, so beetles have been a formal group since 1758, the start of zoological nomenclature.
- The twist: the deeper you dig into beetle diversity, the fuzzier the things that make a beetle a beetle get. McHugh said the more you look, the more confused you get.
Review Task 3
Watch: 7:31 – 11:33
Task: Trace the trade at the center of beetle anatomy, from the name of the order to what the armor bought.
Key Points to Identify:
- The warning, at 7:52: there is an exception to every single rule with beetles, so nearly everything that follows is a half-truth or a partial truth.
- Most flying insects have four large flight wings, and the forewings are usually the bigger, more powerful pair. Beetles turned that pair into hard shells over the abdomen, which is what Coleoptera, “sheath wing,” refers to.
- The hind wings are still there underneath, membranous and folded or coiled up. Flying on the hind wings alone is posteromotorism.
- What it bought: beetles could bore through wood, burrow underground, crawl through rocks, live underwater and swim, and still pop the elytra open and fly away. McHugh called it the best of both worlds and a really important adaptation.
Review Task 4
Watch: 11:33 – 14:19
Task: Collect the two anatomical facts that make beetles awkward at the job of pollinating.
Key Points to Identify:
- Armor and rigidity: heavily armored, hard crunchy plates fitting tightly together, very little exposed membrane, not flexible. McHugh’s word for the result was a tank. That plus the loss of two flight wings makes beetles clumsy fliers. Flies, Hymenoptera, and Lepidoptera can hover and fly precisely; beetles cannot.
- Mouthparts: mandibulate, meaning biting and chewing, with opposed mandibles that work like chisels. Male stag beetles have gigantic ones; a carabid has normal-sized ones.
- The weevil objection and the answer to it: a weevil’s long rostrum looks like a straw, but it is an elongated head capsule with little biting and chewing mandibles at the tip. Weevils are not drinkers either.
Review Task 5
Watch: 14:19 – 16:03
Task: List what other pollinators drink with, and what beetles have on their antennae instead.
Key Points to Identify:
- Bees lap nectar with a tongue. Butterflies and moths have a coiled proboscis, a straw they push deep into a flower. Flies use a labellum to lap liquid. Beetles have none of it and cannot drink up liquid food.
- Beetle antennae are wildly variable and matter for taxonomy, but for pollination the point is the sensoria covering them: structures that detect chemical cues, temperature, humidity, touch, and sound vibrations.
- The two that matter here are chemical and temperature, because those are what flowers use to lure pollinators in. Hold onto this; it explains the flower syndrome in Task 10.
Review Task 6
Watch: 16:03 – 19:23
Task: Put the beetle lineage on a timeline against two reference points McHugh chose, and note what that means for pollination.
Key Points to Identify:
- The method: fossil evidence plus molecular phylogenetic dating.
- The reference points: the dog family Canidae appears in the record about 40 million years ago. Dinosaurs are dated to somewhere around 230 million, with debate around the figure.
- Beetles go back at least 300 million years, older than the dinosaurs, and are still here in huge numbers. They were pollinating ancient gymnosperm and cycad forests over 150 million years ago, before bees, before butterflies, and before angiosperms with flowers. McHugh called them the pioneers of the pollinating world, and noted thrips were involved too.
- The living remnant: cycads, water lilies, and magnolias are still beetle-pollinated today.
Review Task 7
Watch: 19:23 – 24:18
Task: Record the diversity comparisons and the caveat McHugh attached to all of them.
Key Points to Identify:
- Family against family: about 35 species in the dog family Canidae, about 65,000 in the weevil family Curculionidae. And weevils are probably only the second-biggest beetle family; Staphylinidae is the biggest.
- Family against order: the whole order Carnivora, which takes in bears, skunks, seals, whales, raccoons, cats, and pandas as well as dogs, comes to 270 species.
- Order against kingdom: about 400,000 described beetle species against 320,000 in the kingdom Plantae. One in every four described animal species is a beetle.
- The caveat: “described” only counts what a scientist has formally named. McHugh said estimates of actual diversity run from a million species to eight million and even higher, so we have barely scratched the surface. Sizes run from a baseball down to a single-celled paramecium, and beetles occur in almost every type of habitat except the marine one, on every continent except Antarctica.
Two figures in this stretch, the species counts for class Mammalia and phylum Chordata, are inconsistent in the recording and are not part of any assessment in this set. Do not build an activity on them.
Review Task 8
Watch: 24:18 – 30:00
Task: Collect McHugh’s “beetleverse” examples, and note the one that connects directly to pollination.
Key Points to Identify:
- Body-form analogs: elephants, giraffes, a Triceratops answered by Atlas beetles, and iridescent beetles to match a peacock. Any horned animal you can picture has a beetle to match it.
- Mimicry: a lot of beetles that hang out on flowers become mimics of stinging Hymenoptera so predators do not want to mess with them. There are also moth-like beetles in a Müllerian mimicry complex, where both partners are thought to be toxic.
- Behavior: stag beetle males fighting with enlarged mandibles to throw each other off a log; dung beetles burrowing, making galleries, and provisioning cells with dung balls; bess beetles pre-chewing food for their larvae in rotting logs, protecting them, and communicating by stridulation; five different beetle families that produce bioluminescent light, fireflies (Lampyridae) among them.
- The pollination one: many beetle pollinators carry an unusual vestiture of setae, hairs or scales, that picks up pollen like a dust mop and moves it more effectively.
- The 2015 phylogeny his lab worked on with Duane McKenna shows known pollinators scattered all over the tree, so beetle pollination evolved multiple separate times.
Review Task 9
Watch: 30:00 – 32:35
Task: Note which life stage does the pollinating and where the other stage lives.
Key Points to Identify:
- Beetles are holometabolous: eggs hatch into larvae, larvae pupate, pupae give the adult. Complete metamorphosis, like butterflies, bees, wasps, and flies.
- The larva is the longest-lived stage, sometimes two years or more, and does most of the feeding.
- Pollination in beetles is always limited to the adult stage.
- The split that surprises people: in beetle species known to be pollinators, the larvae typically have nothing to do with flowers. They are borers in wood, detritivores in leaf litter, or soil dwellers, totally disconnected from what the adult is doing.
- Ecological roles run to everything: predaceous, parasitic, coprophagous, necrophagous, detritivorous, mycophagous, herbivorous. Within the plant-feeding side, only a few of the categories he listed relate to pollination.
Review Task 10
Watch: 32:35 – 37:30
Task: Define cantharophily in McHugh’s terms, then list the features of a flower built for beetles.
Key Points to Identify:
- Cantharophily is pollination by beetles, literally the love of beetles.
- Why “mess and soil” pollinators: they chew the petals and the sexual parts, plow around doing damage, mate on top of the flower, and defecate on it. Part dust mop picking up pollen, part tractor.
- Fragrance: these flowers tend to have strong ones, which may be fruity, spicy, fermenting, or musky. This is what those antennal sensoria are reading.
- Timing and color: they tend to open during the day, partly because heat spreads the scent. Color tends to white, yellow, pale green, sometimes reddish-brown or burgundy, but color matters less to beetles than to other pollinators.
- No nectar guides, because beetles are not there for the nectar. They come for protein-rich pollen and petals to chew.
- Shape: a big open bowl with thick fleshy petals, a wide open face like a sunflower, or a broad cluster of tiny flowers. Beetles need a big landing pad to flop onto.
Review Task 11
Watch: 37:30 – 46:26
Task: Build yourself a field card. For each of the eight groups, write the common name and the one or two characters you could actually use standing in front of a flower.
Key Points to Identify:
- Scarabaeidae, 38:44, the scarabs, June beetles, and chafers: stout and humped, fan-like antennal clubs that open and close, thick toothed front legs, and normally the abdomen tip showing past the elytra. McHugh’s pictured example is one of the fuzzy ones, covered in setae and picking up pollen as it crawls.
- Cerambycidae, 39:46, the longhorn beetles: elongate, cylindrical or diamond-shaped, thread-like antennae at least half the body length and sometimes longer than the whole beetle, shoulder-pad elytra.
- Chrysomelidae, 40:43, the leaf beetles: small, oval to round, strongly convex, weevil-like but with no snout, usually a sharp lateral edge on the pronotum, hard crunchy elytra covering the whole abdomen, fat spongy pads under the tarsi.
- Cantharidae, 41:37, the soldier beetles: yellow, brown, or reddish, oftentimes with black markings, squishy and leathery rather than crunchy, long thread-like antennae. Looks like a firefly, but the head is visible from above, there is no light organ, and it cannot bioluminesce.
- Meloids, 42:27, the blister beetles: neck-like narrowing behind the head, narrow pronotum, soft floppy or sometimes very short elytra, coloration usually striking and aposematic. They exude cantharidin from the body joints and it blisters skin. Do not pick these up.
- Click beetles, 43:29: elongate, with a hinge between the front and rear of the body that latches the clicking mechanism and pops them into the air, plus a sharp backward-projecting tooth at each rear corner of the pronotum.
- Nitidulidae, 44:25, the sap, picnic, and pollen beetles: flattened rather than convex, broad head visible from above, antennae ending in a round flat club like a lollipop on a stick, elytra cut straight across and usually exposing two or three abdominal segments. Known pollinators of pawpaw, and one of the key pollinators for that fruit, the largest edible fruit in North America.
- Mordellids, 45:39, the tumbling flower beetles: humped back, tiny head tucked underneath, a long spike off the end of the abdomen, fine fuzzy scales. Get too close with a camera and they pop off and drop to the ground, pushing off with big hind legs and that spike.
The click beetle family name is not in this list on purpose. It could not be resolved from the recording, and no name is asserted anywhere in this course’s Week 7 materials. The two characters above are what McHugh gave, and they are what identifies the group.
Review Task 12
Watch: 46:26 – 51:18
Task: Note where McHugh sends people who want to go further, and what he answered in the live questions.
Key Points to Identify:
- References: bugguide.net for identification, with photographs of all different kinds of beetles, and Beetles of Eastern North America by Arthur V. Evans, which McHugh said covers pretty much every beetle genus in the southeastern United States with descriptions, diagnoses, and biological information. Image credits for his slides go to canva.com and Bugwood contributors.
- His closing line, which Griffin picked up as a life lesson: being a clumsy, weak flier, lacking specialized mouthparts for sucking or lapping nectar, and being a sloppy, destructive, inelegant diner does not stop you from being a really important pollinator.
- Live question one, how beetles get water: a lot of it is what they ingest. Maxillae and a labium can maybe pick up a little liquid, but a lot of it is just what they are eating. On top of that they have recycling mechanisms in the digestive system for holding the little water they get, which is why stored product pests run many generations inside a bag of flour, dog food, or seed for a whole year with no access to free water.
- Live question two, on the age of vespid mimicry: no, the vespids do not have to be 300 million years old. The beetles doing the mimicking came much later. Ancient lines were associated with cycads, but many beetle groups became pollinators far more recently, and it is those that got into mimicry complexes.
- One question went unanswered. An attendee asked whether beetles pollinate coontie, and both Griffin and McHugh said they did not know. He was sent to the written Q&A at 51:18, and those typed answers are not part of this recording.
Part Two: Becky Griffin on the Census
Review Task 13
Watch: 51:18 – 1:04:03
Task: Make your own to-do list for census day from what Griffin walks through.
Key Points to Identify:
- The count is August 21 and 22, 2026. Griffin asked anyone who has not been to the census website to go ASAP: PowerPoints for training a garden club, videos on how to count, educator lessons and games, rack cards and bookmarks you can send to a printer with your own event information added.
- The “other insects” category is where the things outside the eight named categories go. Her examples: a flower beetle on jewelweed, dragonflies, mantids, an ambush bug on mountain mint, lady beetles. Hummingbirds do not count, because the census counts insects.
- The count form has been updated and now has a beetle on it, which the original did not. This year’s “I Counted” sticker features lady beetles in McHugh’s honor, and the insect mascots by Megan McCoy are free to use on shirts, hats, flyers, and school signs with no permission needed.
- Two Facebook pages and the difference between them: the community page, over 10,000 members, for photos and discussion, and a separate events page so event postings do not get lost in the shuffle.
- New this year: you can count on your phone. Uploading opens at 12:01 a.m. on the first day. The form still captures what flower you counted on, the temperature, and the weather conditions, which is why the census runs its own tool rather than using iNaturalist.
- The event-day tip worth taking: do not collect fifty count sheets and plan to upload them yourself. Have people scan the QR code and upload their own counts. It takes them two minutes.
- School participation last year, in her own words with the self-correction she made mid-word: “we had five hund- ninety-four schools participate” for the no-cost STEM event. Teachers who do not trust a class’s counts simply do not upload them.
Review Task 14
Watch: 1:04:03 – 1:13:54
Task: Note the closing announcements, and what is happening in your state.
Key Points to Identify:
- This year’s census is dedicated to Walter Reeves, known across the southeast for his radio show and his love of the environment.
- A Grand Marshal opens the census officially. Griffin would not name this year’s, said it should be announced around Monday morning, and hinted that working with Amanda points to a North Carolinian.
- Rich Braman on logistics: go straight to the count page, do the whole thing on your phone if you want, and print sheets if you count somewhere without cell service, as he does. He dropped a QR code for the count page in the chat for anyone putting the census on a flyer, and said all the QR codes would go out with the recording announcement.
- Mississippi joins this year. Georgia participants are asked to invite a friend.
- Amanda Bratcher on North Carolina: the state has been doubling its participation since joining in 2023. This year’s goal is 10,000 counts and a count in every county. Of North Carolina’s 100 counties, 92 were represented last year. Thirty-two events were already scheduled when she joined the call, and she is building a map of them. She has NC State-branded material for hosts.
- Also mentioned: Atlanta forecasters give a weather forecast for the census, there is a public Spotify playlist, state gardens are giving admission discounts to counters, and counting happens at the Governor’s Mansion.
Verification
- All fourteen prompts cover the recording end to end with no gaps and no overlap: 0:00 to 1:13:54 in fourteen consecutive spans, with boundaries placed on McHugh’s own transitions (“let’s stop the history lesson, let’s switch over to diversity”) and on Griffin’s handoff at 51:18.
- Every key point traces to numbered blocks in the corrected SRT. The identification tour in Task 11 follows blocks 517 to 617 in order; the census section in Tasks 13 and 14 follows blocks 686 to 987.
- Speaker hedges are preserved: the scarab abdomen normally shows past the elytra, soldier beetles are oftentimes marked with black, blister beetle coloration is usually striking, nitidulid elytra usually expose two or three segments, weevils are probably the second-biggest family, beetles occur in almost every habitat, and the flower syndrome features are ones these flowers tend to have.
- Nothing in these prompts asks a student to supply information from outside the recording.
- Three items from the Stage 1 log are handled the way the earlier stages handled them. The click beetle family is not named (block 579 flag still open). The Mammalia and Chordata species counts are excluded, with a note in Task 7 telling a course developer why. The chordate nerve cord claim at block 300 is a speaker slip and appears nowhere in this file.
- Two small departures from the spoken words, both deliberate and both consistent with Stage 2. The Evans book is cited in its published form, Beetles of Eastern North America by Arthur V. Evans; McHugh said “The Beetles of Eastern North America” and did not give a middle initial. And Griffin’s school figure at block 827 is quoted rather than resolved, because she self-corrects mid-word and the recording will support either 594 or 94. Stage 2 reads it as 594. This is worth a listen the next time someone has the audio open.
- The coontie question is written up in Task 12 as an open question, not as content to be learned.
Moodle activities produced for UGA Center for Urban Agriculture / Great Southeast Pollinator Course · gsepc.org
Source: Corrected SRT (Stage 1), GTBOP_Transcript_2026-07-28_Beetles.srt (989 blocks); Archive Package (Stage 2)