Christmas Beetle (Anoplognathus pallidicollis)

In southeastern Australia, summer used to announce itself with Christmas beetles: glossy, tawny-gold scarabs blundering into porch lights and barbecues through the warm weeks around December. They emerge in a mass, they are strongly drawn to light, and for a few weeks they are impossible to ignore.

Adults feed on eucalyptus leaves and can gather in numbers heavy enough to strip a young tree. The larvae are fat, C-shaped grubs that spend one to two years underground eating grass roots and organic matter before emerging as adults.

That underground stage explains the problem. Christmas beetle numbers have fallen sharply across much of southeastern Australia in recent decades, and the likely causes all concern the soil: habitat clearance, changes in land management, and compaction by livestock leave the grubs nowhere loose enough to develop. The genus holds around 35 species, many of them brilliantly metallic, but it is the ordinary ones - the beetles that used to turn up every December without fail - whose absence people notice.

A vector illustration of the Christmas beetle in dorsal view, drawn for the Bugs series of insect art prints.

Bugs is a collection of natural history illustration prints drawn from the insect world - beetles, flies, bugs, butterflies, and moths selected for the strangeness, beauty, and variety of their forms.

Each illustration is adapted from Simon Tyler's book Bugs, published by Pavilion in 2017 and subsequently published in French and Chinese. The series draws on the tradition of scientific natural history illustration - precise, considered, and attentive to the details that make each species distinctive.

Insects account for the majority of all known animal species on Earth. This collection is a small survey of what that diversity looks like.

All prints are produced to order on 250gsm archival matte paper using pigment-based inks, chosen for colour accuracy and long-term stability.

Each print is rolled in acid-free tissue and shipped in a rigid cardboard tube, sealed for moisture protection, ready for framing on arrival.

Large · 50 × 70 cm · 20 × 28 in

XLarge · 70 × 100 cm · 28 × 40 in

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Australia: $14.00 AUD · 5-10 working days

Rest of World: £14.95 · 7-14 working days

All prints are produced to order and dispatched within 1-3 working days. Orders placed before 5pm GMT ship the same day. You'll receive tracking information by email once dispatched.

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Returns accepted within 30 days. Email returns@axisophy.com with your order number and we'll provide return instructions.

Return postage is the customer's responsibility except where the print arrives damaged or there's been an error - in which case we'll arrange a replacement or refund immediately, no return needed.

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