Western Mediterranean coasts, including southern France, the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa.
Fine-art photographic collection
Calomera littoralis nemoralis
A beach predator that stunned entomologists by gathering in a hundred-strong crowd to eat pasta.
About this species
Calomera littoralis nemoralis(Olivier, 1791)
Information reviewed15 July 2026
Calomera littoralis nemoralis is a Mediterranean shore tiger beetle built for visual pursuit on hot sand. Although tiger beetles are celebrated predators, this subspecies produced the first reported case of grain feeding in the family.
Taxonomy
Animalia · Arthropoda · Insecta · Coleoptera · Carabidae · Calomera
Accepted subspecies of Calomera littoralis. · checked 2026-07-15
Western MediterraneanBroad documented range and selected reference localities — not a complete occurrence map.
What makes this species remarkable?
About one hundred adults were recorded packed into roughly five square metres while eating maize grains and cooked macaroni on an Albanian beach.
That observation became the first published record of a tiger beetle feeding on plant grain, overturning the assumption that the group was strictly predatory.
Mobile prey is detected visually from only a few tens of centimetres away, after which the beetle closes the distance in rapid stop-start sprints.