April, ’24] 
BRITTON: ANOMALA ORIENTALIS 
309 
AN ASIATIC BEETLE {ANOMALA ORIENTALIS) IN 
CONNECTICUT 
By W. E. Britton, State Entomologist, New Haven, Conn. 
Abstract 
Specimens of Anomala collected in a nursery in New Haven in 1920 and 1921 were 
identified in May, 1922, as Anomala orientalis. In 1923, white grubs injured the 
roots of grass in lawns in the vicinity. Adults were reared and proved to be this 
species. 
On July 16 and 29, 1920, and July 26, 1921, Messrs. M. P. Zappe 
and B. H. Walden, Assistant Entomologists, collected on weeds and grass 
in a nursery in New Haven, some beetles which they recognized as 
belonging to the genus Anomala, but differing from any speices in the 
Station collection. At that time Mr. Charles Schaeffer of Brooklyn, 
N. Y., was engaged in studying the American species of Anomala, so we 
sent some of these specimens to him. He was unable to identify the 
newly-collected material, but stated that it was different from any 
American species that he has seen, and that probably it had been intro¬ 
duced from some other part of the world. Later he sent the material to 
the British Museum, where it was identified by Mr. Arrow. On May 17, 
1922, I received from Mr. Schaeffer a letter reading as follows:—“He 
identified it as Anomala orientalis Waterhouse, a Japanese species, he 
tells me, which is reported as a destructive pest on sugar cane in the 
Hawaiian Islands. If it should get a good foothold here it may prove as 
injurious as Popillia japonica (the Japanese beetle) in New Jersey, 
also an introduced species.” 1 
Late in the fall of 1922, one of my neighbors complained to me that 
white grubs were injuring his lawn and on November 2, I visited his 
place and collected a few specimens. At the laboratory we took them to 
be ordinary white grubs, though they were rather small and varied 
considerably in size and were quite active. These grubs all died, prob¬ 
ably having injured each other with their mandibles, as we afterward 
learned they are apt to do when confined together with little soil . 
The spring of 1923 had scarcely opened when other residents of the 
neighborhood also complained of similar injury to their lawns, and alto¬ 
gether perhaps a dozen such complaints were received. There were 
many lawns where the grass was entirely killed in patches eight or ten 
feet in diameter, and in other places a part of the grass still remained 
green. Now this neighborhood is in the same locality where the beetles 
*See Journal of Economic Entomology, XV, 311, 1922: Report Connecticut 
Agricultural Experiment Station for 1922, 345, 1923. 
