Horned fungus beetles breeding again!

AlexW said:
Ooo, Penthe is one of my drool-list beetles!

Sadly, no online PDFs exist that detail the captive care of Penthe species. It is all guesswork from here.

Best bet: find a colony of Penthe in the wild, and carefully observe what species and how moist the host is (some fungus beetles are specialists and do not accept wrong fungi). Also take detailed notes of surrounding environment, behavior, etc. and try to replicate that in captivity. You may also want to look at bugguide pics of both Penthe species to get a vague idea of its host range. Do note that some fungi may be suitable for adult eating but not reproduction.

If Penthe turns out to be a species that uses soft watery poly pores for breeding, these instructions are probably good:

http://beetleforum.net/forums/index.php?s=ad7c70bedf3ac38fb84df9782d9d2690&showtopic=3530

Some links which may be useful (beware, some advice may be very false or harmful for Penthe, these are only suggestions)

https://bugguide.net/node/view/100833

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/47935050_Collecting_and_rearing_fungivorous_Coleoptera
Click to expand...
I wanted to mention that I found some Penthe adults a while back, and they were living in logs with a few different species of fungi. I am not very good with identifying most mushrooms, but I saw large quantities of Trametes versicolor growing on the logs. I am trying to culture the T. versicolor, so I can feed it to the three hibernating adults I collected. I will hopefully return to the location where I found them soon and plan to conduct a more thorough analysis of the fungi growing on the logs. 

Also, the Beetleforum link in your post does not work. Do you have an updated link? 

 
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No updated link, but here is a summary: keep detached polypore in a dry area of tank to avoid liquification, keep supplemental fruits/vegetables on another dry area, and add a moist area so the beetles can self-hydrate

Of course, if one can either provide captive living fungi or a constant supply of freshly picked ones, and larvae/adults do well on these, there is no need to follow the summary above.

Also, have I mentioned that P will eat beetle jellies and presumably thus also fruits/vegetables?

 
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