Cercyon laminatus

This is meant to be quite a scarce species and as such I'm a bit annoyed with myself for not keeping better records of how it was identified (or the specimen). It was after I'd acquired the relevant Duff volume so I think I would have used this, probably alongside Hackston.

Cercyon laminatus, Wendling Beck Environment Project (Norfolk, UK), 25th September 2021

My annoyance at the last one dissipated when I caught another nearby, again to light, this time LED lights. This time I initially used Duff to key it. My only hesitation in calling it laminatus was that the eyes did not seem especially large to me, and they were hardly protuberant at all. I turned to Hackston and found that he used a very different set of criteria, but I still ended up at laminatus - except again that I was unconvinced by the size of the eyes. A search of online images of all Cercyon species came up with a small number of insects that looked like mine and every one of these was labelled laminatus, so this upped my confidence, but my mind was finally made up when I checked if coleo.net had images of the genitalia. It does, and the aedeagus in flat view was a good match for mine (in side profile theirs was slightly more sinuous but very base of mine seems to be missing (broken?) so I think that might explain the discrepancy in that view). Although it's a relatively scarcely recorded species several references mention that it comes to light - I generally find that those beetle species documented as ones that readily come to light are species that I record relatively often compared to the overall number of records, and I assume that is because relatively few coleopterists regularly use light-trapping as a means of finding beetles.

male Cercyon laminatus, Wendling Beck Environment Project (Norfolk, UK), 26th August 2024