Giraffe weevil
The giraffe weevil is a small beetle with a very, very long neck, just like a giraffe. Its body is black and its wing cases are bright red. The males have the longest necks, two or three times longer than the females.
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Fun facts
At night it rolls a leaf into a little tube, crawls inside and sleeps with its neck folded against its body. In the morning it comes out and stretches.
Males fight by swinging their long necks at each other like clubs, trying to push the other one off the leaf.
To win a female, a male does a dance, swaying his long neck and showing off his colours.
The mother rolls a leaf around one single egg, ties it up with silk and snips it off so it drops to the forest floor.
It spends its whole life, about one year, up in the trees.
Most asked questions about Giraffe weevil
?Why does the giraffe weevil have a long neck?
The males use their long necks to fight other males, to show off for females and to build their leaf nests.
?Where does the giraffe weevil live?
Only in Madagascar, on two kinds of trees in the forest that people call giraffe beetle trees.
?How big is a giraffe weevil?
About 2.5 to 5 centimetres long, and a lot of that is neck.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Trachelophorus giraffa
- Group
- Beetles
- Family
- Attelabidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Coleoptera > Attelabidae
- Lives on
- Africa
Where the facts come from
- Giraffe weevil (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 Vassen. CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at hello@bugwiki.app and we will fix it.
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