Help needed (and more characters for this field)

1

Could I ask one of the good entomologists to have a look here please?


On my suggestion, oap dogwalker “split” the original post (referenced in the comments), as it appeared there were two species. But another user has added a different identification, suggesting that the two are the same species. They haven’t given any explanation, and I’d really like to know if it’s right.
2

I believe only the male has the swollen thighs à la Sir Chris Hoy.

3

If you go to this wonderfully helpful German site…
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https://www.kerbtier.de/cgi-bin/enFOverview.cgi
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… then scroll down to and click on Oedemeridae, the defaul view is males - the noble male Oedemera nobilis is at the end of the third row.
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If you then scroll back up that page and change Gender (should be Sex) from male to female and then scroll back down, you’ll see that the female O nobilis has puny legs.

4

Sorry, I’ve not made myself clear. The point is that both have swollen thighs, hence males, but they seem different in colour and size. O. femoralis has this feature, which is why I was suggesting the one on the right is this species.The one on the left is more typical O. nobilis.
My question is whether they are different species (as oapdogwalker wondered, and as I also suspect: which is why I suggested a second posting of the photo) or the same (as the revised ID suggests).
If they are the same, O owe oapdogwalker an apology for suggesting the re-post.

5

No problem i’m just watching from the sidelines…

6

Doh! How stupid of me - sorry, Amadan.
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I’m really not sure. Oedemera nobilis varies in size, and might the apparent elytra colour have been a function of the light conditions? There appear to be four species within the genus in UK as per https://www.coleoptera.org.uk/family/oedemeridae - although it seems that males of at least one species lack the swollen thighs. O femoralis looks to be a somewhat different body shape in most photos if you google it, although that isn’t true of the images on that UK beetle site or one or two central European ones. The Brecks is a rich area for invertebrates so it could well be a more unusual species than the ubiquitous nobilis.

7

Thanks: I begin to suspect that this is not going to be resolved from a photo alone.

8

By coincidence, this has just been put out in the NBN newsletter:

https://nbn.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/False-Blister-Beetles-survey.docx