The jewel beetle, Trachy dilaticeps Gebhardt, 1928 has been known to occur in Japan, China, Taiwan, and Vietnam hitherto. This species is typically distributed in Oriental region. In the case of Palaearctic region, it has only been documented in Japan (Kyushu). In this study, we report T. dilaticeps for the first time from Korea, along with its diagnostic characters. Ecological and distributional information is also provided herein.

The biggest jewel beetle in Korea, Chrysochroa coreana, has been nominated as the Natural Monument No. 496 and also classified as Category I of Endangered Species by the Red Data Book. Due to the invisible feature of a saproxylic larval hood inside the host tree for years, the whole life history was hitherto been unknown to the academic world. In order to clarify the period of larval-hood and record images of the process of the final stage of emergence, we obtained sample eggs from two mated couples of adults that emerged from a dead tree of Celtis sinensis on Wando Island, which is well-known as the habitat of C. coreana. Larvae were hatched on four pieces of timber (Celtis aurantiaca) in July 2018 and kept in a growth chamber under the conditions of 25°C, 65% humidity, and in a 12-hour light/dark cycle. The development of larvae was monitored via the non-destructive C/T method every month. Six adults were emerged between February and March 2024. As a result, we obtained the fact that the larval period of C. coreana is minimum 66 months (5.5 years) under lab conditions.

In this study, we determined the complete mitochondrial genome of the jewel beetle, Chrysochroa fulgidissima (Coleoptera: Buprestidae), from four overlapping fragments. The 15,592-bp long C. fulgidissima mitogenome exhibits a gene arrangement and content identical to the most common type in insects. The start codon of the C. fulgidissima COI gene is unusual, in that no typical ATN codon is available. The 875-bp A+T-rich region is the shortest among the coleopteran mitogenomes that have thus far been sequenced in their entirety. The most unusual feature of the genome is the presence of three tRNA-like sequences within the A+T-rich region: two tRNALeu(UUR)-like sequences and one tRNAAsnlike sequence. These sequence stretches evidence the proper anticodon sequence and the potential to form secondary structures, but also harbor many mismatches in the stems. Phylogenetic analysis using a concatenation of 13 amino acid sequences of protein-coding genes among the available sequenced species of coleopteran superfamilies (Buprestoidea and Elateroidea belonging to the infraorder Elateriformnia, and Chrysomeloidea and Tenebrioroidea belonging to the infraorder Cucujoiformia) by Bayesian inference, maximum-parsimony analyses, and maximum-likelihood analysis unexpectedly revealed a lack of support for monophyletic Elateriformia.

We determined the complete mitochondrial genome (mitogenome) of the jewel beetle, Chrysochroa fulgidissima (Coleoptera: Buprestidae) from two overlapping fragments and subsequent sub fragments. The 15,592-bp long C. fulgidissima mitogenome contains gene arrangement and content identical to the most common arrangement found in insects. Most individual C. fulgidissima mitochondrial (mt) genes were well within the range found in the respective genes of other insects. The 875-bp A+T-rich region is shortest among the coleopteran mitogenomes sequenced in their entirety. The region is interesting in that it contains several stem-and-loop structures and tRNA-like structure found in the A+T-rich regions of other insect mitogenomes. As seen in other insect motogenomes the start codon of C. fulgidissima COI gene also is unusual because no typical start codon is available. Three of the 13 protein-coding genes have incomplete termination codon T or TA. All tRNA formed stable stem-and-loop structure, except for tRNASer(AGN), the DHU arm of which formed a simple loop as seen in many other metazoan mt tRNASer(AGN).