Melanophila is a genus of buprestid beetles commonly known as fire beetles. They have extraordinary sensitivity to infrared radiation (heat), using a specialized sensor organ near their legs. They seek out fires in order to mate and lay eggs in freshly burned wood.
Melanophila is a genus of buprestid beetles commonly known as fire beetles. They have extraordinary sensitivity to infrared radiation (heat), using a specialized sensor organ near their legs. They seek out fires in order to mate and lay eggs in freshly burned wood.
==Species== The genus Melanophila consists of the following species: Melanophila acuminata (DeGeer, 1774) Melanophila atra Gory, 1841 Melanophila atropurpurea (Say, 1823) Melanophila caudata (Laporte & Gory, 1837) Melanophila consputa LeConte, 1857 Melanophila cockerellae Wickham, 1912 Melanophila coriacea Kerremans, 1894 Melanophila cuspidata (Klug, 1829) Melanophila gestroi Obenberger, 1923 Melanophila handlirschi Wickham, 1912 Melanophila heeri Wickham, 1914 Melanophila ignicola Champion, 1918 Melanophila notata (Laporte & Gory, 1837) Melanophila obscurata Lewis, 1893 Melanophila occidentalis Obenberger, 1928 Melanophila unicolor Gory, 1841
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).