Description: A large (22-26mm), greenish-bronze ground beetle with reddish or coppery pronotal edges. Lives under stones, loose bark and among litter in gardens and agricultural land. Also high ground to hill summits in many areas.

NI account: Widespread and fairly common across the northern half of Ireland but probably under-recorded in the south.

Ecology: A very eurytopic species, clearly favoured by human activities and widespread in gardens, parks, pastureland and woods in lowland areas. More local but still widespread on hill peat to the summits of the highest mountains. Collected virtually everywhere where pitfall trapping has been undertaken in gardens and cultivated land, but rarely encountered by casual hand searches. Probably the commonest garden Carabus in Ireland where it replaces the widespread British garden species, C. violaceus.

Distribution: A European Wide-temperate species (63), widespread in west and central Europe south to northern Spain and east to Moscow. Introduced in North America.

Key Identification Features:

• Large, with sculptured elytra and metallic reflections
• Elytral sculpture irregularly granulate, with 4-5 very weak ridges
• Broad and convex
• Upper surface uniform brassy or greenish but with margins of elytra and pronotum deep metallic reddish or violaceous

Distribution Map from NBN: Carabus nemoralis at National Biodiversity Network mapping facility, data for UK.

iNaturalist: Carabus nemoralis at iNaturalist World Species Observations database.

GBIF data for Carabus nemoralis | Classification: Insecta, Coleoptera, Carabidae, Carabus

Thumbnails for genus Carabus