The dark killers

Whenever you turn over a stone or a thick branch that is lying on the ground, there is usually a shiny, black beetle racing away at a furious pace, and disappearing amongst the plants on the forest floor. This is a ground beetle, and there are many different kinds of them. The largest, Carabus coriaceus, can smell worse than a skunk and is between three and four centimetres long, while the smallest is just a few millimetres long.

Ground beetles are greedy predators that spend all their time running around catching and killing other insects and small animals. Some ground beetles eat earthworms, and the larger ones even attack snails. If there is a food shortage, the ground beetles might even eat each other.

You don’t really see ground beetles in the daytime. They lie hiding under stones and branches, but at night, when it is dark, they come out and hunt. It can be interesting to walk around in the forest with a torch and watch what the ground beetles catch.