110 
Psyche 
[Vol. 89 
The results were verified by Dr. Kazuyoshi Kurosa of Tokyo 
(pers. comm.) who reared the beetle some 30 years ago in Oita 
Prefecture, Japan, but did not publish the results. He found no 
parental care, no sign of burying the food, and no parental 
attendance on the larvae, which grew well on fresh beef. Still, 
further observations with a natural forest soil substrate and natural 
food items like mouse or shrew carcasses would be desirable. How 
the beetles survive and “partition resources” in the face of what 
seemed to me to be severe competition from the diverse fauna of 
Japanese carrion beetles remains unknown. 
Conclusions 
It appears that the origin of parental care of larvae did not occur 
in an ancestor common to Ptomascopus and Nicrophorus, but 
seemingly in Nicrophorus itself, after the differentiation of the 
genus. If the origin was sometime after that of the genus itself we 
may expect a wider range of parental care and related behaviors in 
Nicrophorus than is generally assumed in the recent literature on 
these beetles. A greater number of Nicrophorus species should be 
studied to investigate the questions of the origin and evolution of 
sub-sociality within the genus, and the results should be evaluated 
with reference to a cladistic (phylogenetic) analysis of the evolution 
of morphological characters. 
Acknowledgments 
I thank Dr. Shun-Ichi Ueno of Tokyo and Dr. Kazuo Ishikawa of 
Matsuyama for making my Japanese field work possible and 
exceptionally informative. Field support was from operating grants 
of the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Coun- 
cil. The manuscript was read and helped by comments from R.S. 
Anderson, A.F. Newton, K. Kurosa, R.B. Madge, and D.S. Wilson. 
Literature Cited 
Balduf, W. V. 
1935. The bionomics of entomophagous Coleoptera. J. S. Swift Co., St. Louis. 
220 pp. Reprinted in 1969 by E. W. Classey, Hampton, England. 
Brewer, J. W. and T. R. Bacon 
1975. Biology of the carrion beetle Silpha ramosa Say. Ann Entomol Soc Am 
68: 786-790. 
