Japanese beetle
The Japanese beetle is a shiny little beetle with copper-coloured wing cases and a bright green head. Along its sides it has a row of tiny white hair tufts. In Japan it is just one of many beetles, but in America and Europe it eats lots of garden plants.
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Fun facts
It eats the soft green part of a leaf and leaves the veins, so the leaf looks like lace.
It spends most of its life as a white grub curled like the letter C under the grass.
The grown-up beetle lives only about 30 to 45 days.
It probably came to America hidden in a box of flower bulbs, more than 100 years ago.
Beetle traps can be tricky: many beetles fly to the trap but land on the plants nearby instead.
Most asked questions about Japanese beetle
?Why is the Japanese beetle a problem?
Outside Japan it has few enemies, so it can eat the leaves of hundreds of kinds of garden plants.
?How big is a Japanese beetle?
About 15 millimetres long and 10 millimetres wide.
?Do Japanese beetles bite?
No. They are harmless to people. They only munch plants.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Popillia japonica
- Named by
- Newman, 1841
- Group
- Beetles
- Family
- Scarabaeidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Coleoptera > Scarabaeidae
- Lives on
- Asia, North America, Europe
Where the facts come from
- Japanese beetle (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 Bruce Marlin. CC BY 3.0, 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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