There was a time – and not very long ago – when Australian summers came with a soundtrack. Not the thrum of air-conditioners or the crackle of half-truths on talkback radio, but the whirr of Christmas beetles ricocheting around porch lights like festive, slightly drunk ornaments. They were harmless, shiny, bumbling, joyful – and they were everywhere.
Now many Australians are posting the same quiet shock online: “I haven’t seen one in ages.”
It’s not nostalgia talking. It’s not faulty memory or selective childhood romanticism. It’s a data-confirmed decline so stark that scientists have had to launch citizen-science projects to figure out where these iconic beetles have gone – and why we failed to notice until they were already vanishing.
This is the story of a Christmas that’s been losing one of its most Australian symbols, in slow motion, right under our noses.
The Disappearance We All Felt Before We Understood
For older Australians, the absence feels almost eerie.
Christmas beetles once arrived in swarms, clattering into windows, carpets, windscreen wipers and outdoor gatherings with all the grace of a flying thimble. They were part of the texture of Australian life, an ecological certainty like cicadas, magpies and Boxing Day Test commentary.
But starting somewhere in the last 20–25 years, they began to fade from the landscape.
The Australian Museum confirmed what the public had already sensed: reports of Christmas beetles are down across NSW, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia.
A whole generation is growing up never having seen the creatures their parents remember stepping on accidentally every night in December.
The Uncomfortable Truth: This Is What Environmental Decline Looks Like When It Isn’t Dramatic Enough for a Headline
The vanishing of Christmas beetles isn’t a single big disaster. It’s the sum of many small, quiet ones:
Habitat loss – especially native grasslands
Christmas beetle larvae live underground for up to a year, feeding on native grasses and the roots of gum trees.
Urban development, lawn replacement, construction and soil compaction have bulldozed their nursery.
We replaced the ground beneath them – then wondered where they went.
Fewer eucalyptus trees. Adult beetles feed on eucalypt foliage.
Cities replaced eucalypts with ornamentals. Rural landscapes lost millions of trees to drought, fire and clearing.
Their food sources vanished, so they did too.
Climate change – hotter soils, fewer survivors.
Larvae die when soils dry out or heat up too quickly.
The last two decades have given us:
- hotter nights
- longer droughtsl
- less pesticides and the war on “lawn grubs”
Most households treat lawns for curl grubs using systemic insecticides. Unfortunately, those “grubs” include Christmas beetle larvae.
Without ever meaning to, we’ve been poisoning next year’s beetles – and the next, and the next.
Light pollution
The irony is rich: the iconic image of Christmas beetles buzzing porch lights is exactly what now puts them at risk.
Excess artificial light disorients them, disrupts mating, and increases exhaustion and predation.
Light pollution isn’t the main culprit, but it’s a steady drip in the bucket.
A National Blind Spot: When the Loss Is Too Quiet to Alarm Us
Australia is good at responding to spectacle – fires, floods, political theatrics, billion-dollar submarines nobody asked for.
But we’re terrible at noticing the slow, silent losses that define long-term ecological decline.
Biodiversity rarely disappears with a bang.
It vanishes with a shrug, a “Huh, haven’t seen one in a while,” and a tweet asking whether anyone else remembers how things used to be.
The absence of Christmas beetles is a warning sign, not just a wistful memory. It tells us:
- our grasslands are unhealthy
- our urban ecosystems are collapsing
- our insect life is under stress
- our climate is shifting faster than once-common species can adapt
If an insect that once existed in the millions can quietly fade away without national alarm, what else is vanishing while we argue about power prices or culture wars?
Why This Matters – Beyond Sentimentality
Christmas beetles aren’t just nostalgic baubles. They play real ecological roles:
- aerating soil
- cycling nutrients
- feeding birds, mammals and reptiles
- pollinating native trees
Their decline signals systemic deterioration in the foundational layers of our environment – the bits that rarely make headlines but hold everything else up.
If we ignore this, we’ll keep waking up to emptier summers until the silence becomes the new normal.
Can We Bring Them Back? Yes – But Only If We Care Enough To Try
Solutions aren’t complicated. They’re simply ignored.
What works:
- restoring native grasses
- planting eucalypts instead of exotics
- reducing pesticide use
- protecting urban green corridors
- rewilding suburbs
- treating insects as essential workers, not pests
Countries that have restored declining insect populations didn’t do it by accident. They did it by deciding that biodiversity matters more than immaculate lawns.
Australia can do the same – but only if we recognise that environmental loss doesn’t always look like catastrophe.
Sometimes it looks like nothing at all.
Sometimes it looks like a child asking, “What’s a Christmas beetle?”
The Final Thought: What Disappears Quietly Rarely Returns Loudly
The vanishing of Christmas beetles is a reminder of how easy it is for a nation to lose its natural heritage through a thousand small cuts. It also exposes a deeper cultural truth: Australians have been conditioned to respond to crises only when they arrive with flames or talking points.
But the quieter stories matter too.
They always have.
A country that can lose something as iconic and abundant as the Christmas beetle without realising it is a country that needs to relearn how to look – and how to listen – before the silence spreads.
See also:
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Such a heart breaking and beautifully written essay, Lachlan.As a 87 year old I have been missing the golden Christmas beetle as each year passes.
I haven’t see a Christmas Beetle here in at least 6 years. It probably doesn’t help that the bloke next door is a cherry grower and almost firehose sprays pesticides all over the place. Generally, however, there has been a very noticeable and sad dearth of insects of all types over the years. It’s rare to even see an insect kamikaze into the windscreen.
We live in a rural area, plenty of eucalypts around my house, native gras, I never use pesticides. But we don’t have any either 🙁
It’s a sad loss
Not just Christmas beetles. Insects generally. Drive out into the country especially at dawn or dusk, once upon a time you could come back with windscreen splattered with the lives of countless insects of many varieties. A while ago I drive from Brisbane to Tenterfield, there just after dawn and back late afternoon, and not one insect on my windscreen.
It is not just the back yard gardeners that are poisoning our eco systems, commercial crop growers use them almost indiscriminately to the detriment of those insects that we need to continue to pollinate crops that provide our food.
And speaking of bees, I let a few clumps of clover grow in my lawn in the spring and there are usually lots of bees around, not this year, hardly any at all.
The insects and animals of this planet are telling us that we are damaging our only ecology, the one that keeps us alive, and we are by and large ignoring it.
A pertinent reminder of the costs of human impact. I’d be interested to know which countries the author refers to when he mentions “[c]ountries that have restored declining insect populations…” an observation that is in contrast to what I believed was the general phenomenon of insect decline everywhere as a consequence of global warming and climate change pushing species outside the boundaries of their normative environments.
But most certainly, aside from the increasing impacts of the frog in the pot phenomenon, we the humans have done an extremely efficient job at making life harder for most if not all other species on the planet.
How many species would that be? A Google query furnishes mixed results… AI couching its interpretation, but it suggests the following:
“There are an estimated 8.7 million living species on Earth, although this number can vary between a few million and several billion depending on the estimate. Scientists have only described about 1.2 million of these species, meaning the vast majority are still undiscovered.
The 8.7 million figure is based on a 2011 study that used a statistical method to analyze taxonomic data to estimate the total number of species.
Other estimates exist, ranging from a few million to as high as 1 to 6 billion, with the main uncertainty being in the number of bacteria and other microorganisms. Of the estimated 8.7 million species, around 86% of land species and 91% of marine species remain undiscovered.”
Whether it’s millions or billions, those numbers include all environments – terrestrial, fresh water & salt water – and all life forms – mammals, reptiles, birds, fish, invertebrates, bacteria & viruses, along with all flora and all (already described) fungi.
Not every species is headed for extinction, but many are. A second Google query responds accordingly:
“Around 1 million species are currently threatened with extinction, according to a landmark UN report, with some analyses suggesting the number of species at risk could be as high as 2 million, largely driven by human activity. The IUCN Red List shows over 48,000 species assessed are threatened, highlighting major risks for amphibians, corals, mammals, and trees. This represents an unprecedented crisis, with extinction rates hundreds to thousands of times higher than the natural baseline.
Key Figures & Estimates:
1 Million+ Species: A UN-backed IPBES report states about 1 million animal and plant species are threatened, many within decades.
2 Million Potential: More recent analysis, especially considering insects, suggests the number at risk could be double previous estimates, reaching 2 million.
IUCN Red List: As of recent counts, over 48,000 of the over 172,000 assessed species are threatened, including significant percentages of corals, amphibians, trees, and mammals.
Critically Endangered: Over 10,000 species are critically endangered, meaning they are on the brink of extinction.”
It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that for all our achievements, our greatest is also our most tragic… the inexorable killing of the majority of other life forms with which we share this treasured celestial orb. Perhaps it’s the case that, as offered by Yogi Berra, “it’s like déjà vu all over again.”
Thanks, Canguro — and you’re right to flag that the overall global story is still one of insect decline, not recovery. When I wrote “countries that have restored declining insect populations”, I was talking a bit too loosely. What I meant was countries where specific policies have led to local or group-specific recoveries, not nations that have magically reversed the big global trend.
A few concrete examples you could point to:
France / EU – pesticide bans and insect-eating birds
France banned several neonicotinoid pesticides from 2018. A recent study there has found insect-eating bird populations starting to recover by a few per cent in areas where those chemicals were phased out, compared with continued declines elsewhere. Birds are acting as a proxy for insect biomass: fewer neonics → more insects → slow bird recovery.
UK and parts of Europe – “agri-environment” and wildflower schemes
In the UK, long-term monitoring shows that farms enrolled in agri-environment schemes (wildflower strips, hedgerows, reduced chemicals) have higher butterfly abundance and richness than comparable conventional farms, and these gains have held over time.
Similarly, replacing mown grass or shrubs with wildflower meadows in towns and along roadsides has measurably boosted local pollinator and insect diversity — essentially little “insect refuges” inside heavily modified landscapes.
Tropical reforestation – specific groups bouncing back
In regenerating rainforest in Costa Rica, dung beetle diversity and functional traits have been shown to recover to levels similar to old-growth forest when habitat is allowed to regrow and is managed well. That doesn’t contradict the wider picture of decline, but it does show that if you give some insect guilds their habitat back, they can rebound.
So you’re absolutely right: the default trajectory, globally, is still steep decline, driven by habitat loss, chemicals and now climate stress.
The point I was trying to make (and should probably phrase better in a future edit) is:
We do have real-world proof that when countries and regions deliberately change land use and chemical rules, some insect groups recover at farm, landscape or city scale.
Those pockets of success tell us that decline isn’t inevitable fate — it’s policy. And policy can be changed.
For Australia and our missing Christmas beetles, we’re still mostly in the “documenting the loss” phase. But the same levers that are working elsewhere — native grasses and trees, pesticide reduction, insect-friendly urban design — are available to us too. The question is whether we use them early enough that future kids don’t have to ask, “What’s a Christmas beetle?”
We are in big trouble. Losing insects means losing the pollinators whose activities underlie the development of the vegetables we rely on. People who grow a few backyard vegies will be noticing poorer yield from plants including pumpkins and tomatoes. Meanwhile, what are the insectivores eating? I know the plethora of Christmas beetles used to be accompanied by the bats, now I see neither in my locality.
Back in the 1970s Mum and Dad took us kids on annual camping trips. I clearly recall the windscreen and grill of our car absolutely splattered with insects. Now? Nothing. The canary in the coal mine is dead.
Thanks for the clarifications, Lachlan. I guess you’d be aware that neonicotinoid pesticides are still sold in Australia, and that the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) has stated there is no evidence of declining honey bee populations in this country. I’d bet my hat there’s a negative impact on honey bees and other native insect populations that come into contact with this neurotoxic poison. Methyl Bromide is still allowed, albeit controlled. Liquid anhydrous ammonia, close to 2 million tonnes worth, is injected annually into Australian soils as the primary nitrogen source for broadacre farming. I knew a farming family in the Coonamble district in NSW who told me that when they bought that property some 30 years earlier, they could dig up a spadeful of earth anywhere in the property and it would be teeming with invertebrates & worms. After years of injecting ammonia, the wife of that family said that they’d killed the soils… all the soil biota had vanished. No other outcome possible when you’re flooding the A-Horizon with a toxic material with a pH around 10-12. It’s no wonder that the planet’s in crisis when one does a comprehensive global stocktake of what chemicals are used in farming and horticulture.
Yes, in much of the appalling EU, nations at a local government and NGO level are rewilding parts of urban parks and streets with native plants to attract more insects.
Locally have observed similar in parts of inner city Melbourne, bush less so; but too often traffic and car parking gets priority?
I just realised something else, there has been a noticeable decrease in the number of bees as well as blowflies (and even mozzies) over the past couple of years or so in our area. That most definitely can’t be good in the overall scheme of things.
I have a couple of patches of scaevola in my yard, amongst all the other natives. This time of year it’s covered with flowers, and used to be covered with bees, butterflies and hoverflies feeding on it. Hardly any this year. Even the mozzies which used to make me miserable through the late spring and summer are few and far between.
Ants are doing well, but. It is they who will inherit what we leave of the earth …