Popillia japonica Laboratory Exercises for ES 300, Biodiversity 18jan2000a Richard Fox Lander University sPh. The Japanese beetle, Popillia japonica , is an introduced scarab beetle that is all too abundant in summer in the southeastern United States. They belong to the scarab beetle family and the shining leaf chafer subfamily. These are mandibulate insects and the herbivorous adults and larvae are serious pests in lawns, orchards, and gardens. The grubs live in the soil where they feed on the roots of overlying vegetation, especially lawn grass.
Adults feed on foliage and fruit of a variety of plants.
The purpose of this exercise is to familiarize you with the external anatomy of a typical insect as represented by a beetle. The emphasis of the exercise will be on characters of importance in insect identification. It assumes that you are already familiar with basic insect anatomy. Anatomy Place a preserved beetle in a dissecting pan of tap water and examine it with the dissecting microscope at about 7X magnification. In spite of their evil reputation, these are really quite beautiful insects, especially when viewed with magnification.