. British journal of entomology and natural history. Natural history; Entomology. a b Fig. 3. Male genitalia (part), a. R. /intra, b. R. (after Bielawski. 1959) private cars travel from mainland Europe to Britain each year (source: Eurotunnel annual report, 1998). The chance of importing individual insects is clearly high but it is nevertheless doubtful whether enough specimens could come in to found a breeding colony. A more probable means of importation would be with young trees imported from Continental nurseries. The chance of this specimen being a primary immigrant is low
. British journal of entomology and natural history. Natural history; Entomology. a b Fig. 3. Male genitalia (part), a. R. /intra, b. R. (after Bielawski. 1959) private cars travel from mainland Europe to Britain each year (source: Eurotunnel annual report, 1998). The chance of importing individual insects is clearly high but it is nevertheless doubtful whether enough specimens could come in to found a breeding colony. A more probable means of importation would be with young trees imported from Continental nurseries. The chance of this specimen being a primary immigrant is low—for an example to be discovered by casual beating it is more likely that colonies already exist. I have not been able to return to the site of the discovery with sufficient spare time to make a further search, but during the last three years I have dissected over 300 specimens of Rhyzobius swept from its usual grassland habitat and confirmed that all the males were litura. Meanwhile it is recommended that all specimens of Rhyzobius are examined carefully, particularly if they have more extensive dark marks than usual. or are beaten from trees or bushes, since Fiirsch (1967) noted that chrysomeloides was found especially on pine trees and bushes, often near water. Indeed, as this note was being prepared, a thriving colony of R. chrysomeloides was subsequently discovered in West Molesey, Surrey (Menzies, 1999 and pers. comm.). Acknowledgements Thanks are due to Graham Collins for tidying up my lop-sided drawings. 1 am also grateful to Roger Booth (CABI Bioscience) for convincing me that the specimen was a male and for performing the rather intricate dissection needed to confirm its identitj. The specimen has been presented to the Natural History Museum. References Bielawski, R. 1959. Klucze do oznaczania owadow Polski. Zeszyt 76. Coccinellidae. Warsaw. Fiirsch, H. 1967. Family Coccinellidae. In: Freude-Harde-Lohse, Die Kafer Mitteleuropas, vol. 7, pp. 227-278. Goecke & Eve
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