Dear Colleagues,
I am looking for information about predators of flower-visiting beetles (especially longhorn beetles).
Cheers,
Jakub
Hello Jakub; I've seen crab spiders holding various small Cerambycids that they had caught on mountain meadow flowers. Red-wing blackbirds also glean the cerambycids from flowers in the same meadows. I can't tell you which spiders or cerambycids were involved. The meadows I seen these events are in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California and the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming in the USA. Not much help but maybe a start. Best regards, Jim Des Lauriers
Jakub, as is true for Latvia (all based on personal observations), their predators are various spiders, birds (especially woodpeckers - prefer instars of Cerambycidae), amphibians and Asilidae (Diptera).
On New Guinea (if you question is in broad sense) these are lizards, amphibians, spiders, birds, ants. In Gabon - spiders, birds, ants.
With focus on the flower-visiting habit, I would definitely go for crab spiders, as these spiders are specialised to hunt exactly there. In Europe, e.g. Xysticus cristatus hunts a lot of flower-visiting beetles, and can even subdue hornets.
You might also look into predatory flies like the Asilidae. They are known to perch near flowers and target anthophilous visitors. I have not seen many in the field with known flower-visiting cerambycid prey, but that is anecdotal.
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