Near the summit of Mount Coot-tha earlier this week, I found a beautiful orange beetle with black spots. My first impression was that it was a leaf beetle in the Chrysomelidae family, and looking up the Brisbane Insects website later confirmed not only this, but its membership to the Cryptocephalinae subfamily, with a tentative genus placement of Cadmus. I often find it more helpful to learn about insect families, subfamilies and tribes than it is to have a narrow focus on genus and species, and that was the case with this beetle. Reading the Hangay and Zborowski (2010) field guide to Australian beetle families, I was informed that when the female cryptocephalinid beetle lays eggs, she coats them in faeces which then become a shelter-providing case that each larvae lives inside of. This caught my attention because when I examined the photos I had taken of the beetle I had seen, I could see it was depositing large droppings onto the dead stump, and it turns out these may have actually c