Back from the missing list: a rare beetle is breeding in Wales again after 60 years

The short-necked oil beetle needs a very particular world: flower-rich coastal grassland and healthy solitary bees, whose nests its larvae hitch a ride into. When that world frayed, the beetle vanished from Wales — unrecorded since 1948 and classed as nationally rare. After three years of targeted searching at Castlemartin Range in Pembrokeshire, surveyors who last year found only dead adults have now found larvae: proof of a breeding population, the only known one in Wales. Natural Resources Wales says the spread of larvae shows a successful breeding cohort is established. The beetle's return doubles as a health check for the whole coastline — where it can breed, the flowers and bees it depends on are thriving too.

SDG 15 · Life on land — Mechanism: institutional program