Snail-eating Ground Beetle (Capsule Q Museum: Japanese Animal Collection, Tohoku by Kaiyodo)

The ground beetles are a large, cosmopolitan family of beetles (Carabidae) with more than 40,000 species worldwide. Many species of ground beetles (adults and larvae being predators of many invertebrates, including various pests) are considered beneficial organisms to humans.

Carabus blaptoides is a species ground beetles distributed in Russia and Japan having many subspecies. This Kaiyodo figurine was released in the first Capsule Q Museum Japanese Animal Collection series 1 Tohoku, a continuation of the Animatales series.  This species is frequently marketed as Damaster blaptoides, although Damaster is generally regarded as a subgenus of Carabus.

The Capsule Q Museum set including this species was released in January 2014 and the designer of the prototypes is Shinobu Matsumura.

The model is very detailed and therefore kind of fragile (slender) legs and antennae. There are two colour morphs in this set. One with a metallic red/purple  head and pronotum and green elytra, the other with a metallic blue head and pronotum having a black (with metallic blue shine) elytra. The ventral side of both is black with a metallic purple sheen.

The set covers the animals from the Tohoku region. Considering this and the colours, it is probably the northern subspecies of Carabus blaptoides, Carabus blaptoides viridipennis Lewis, 1880. It is closely related to Carabus blaptoides rugipennis Motschulsky,With its 5 cm length it can be scale 1:1. Being a rather big specimen. The form of the elytra suggests it’s a male beetle.

The reference numbers for this figurine and the colour variant also in the set are; set number 008a and 008b for respectively the red/green colour version and the blue/black version. In the Animatales series they represent numbers #257-a and #257b.

So, another very fine beetle by Kaiyodo. It is still available in some auctions and sometimes the turn up on Ebay. If you are collecting beetle figurines this is a nice variety species wise since the main beetle output of Japanese companies are Rhinoceros beetles or Stag beetles.

There was also a transparent yellow version released in a tin can with al figurines from the set in transparent yellow plastic, being sort of a collector’s item I guess.