2016 Volume 67 Issue 2 Pages 97-99
We collected adults and larvae of Gnatocerus (Gnatocerus) cornutus from spilled flour using gloved hands from the pipe of an exhaust duct system under the roof of the second floor of a food factory in Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan, on June 25, 2015. There were no other stored-product insect pests in the spilled flour sample. The presence of developing larvae and adults of G. cornutus suggested that the beetle had reproduced successfully at the food factory. This species is an introduced insect pest of stored products and has been reported sporadically in the Kyushu district in the 1950s, in Kinki district from 1957 to 1960, on Okinawa, Miyako and Yaeyama islands in 1973, in Kagoshima Prefecture (date unknown), and in Kanagawa Prefecture in 1993. In conjunction with these collection records, the discovery of G. cornutus described here suggests that this beetle could potentially colonize new localities in future. The progeny of G. cornutus collected in this study were designated as the Fukuoka strain and maintained at the Technical Research Laboratory of IKARI Corporation in Chiba Prefecture.
