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Weevil (Pachyrhynchus congestus), family Curculionidae, Philippines

photograph by Frank Deschandol

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Jewel weevil, Pachyrhynchus pulchellus, Curculionidae

Photographed in the Philippines by Frank Deschandol // Instagram

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Pachyrhynchus apoensis Yoshitake, 2012, male

Mt. Apo, Mindanao, Philippines. February 2005.

This is a specimen I got in a large lot of secondhand unmounted specimens from a local entomology supplier. It came with data labels thankfully, but no identification. I generally do not agree with commercial collection, but when the specimens have already been collected long ago, I would rather give them a home where they can be properly mounted, curated and hopefully eventually donated to an institutional collection, or used in outreach if data has been lost.

I initially misidentified it as Pachyrhynchus gemmatus purpureus Kraatz, 1888 based on likely mislabeled specimens such as this one, but looking further into the literature, I found that P. gemmatus ssp. purpureus is only found in the Greater Luzon island complex, not in Mindanao. Pachyrhynchus apoensis, meanwhile, is known only from Greater Mindanao with Mount Apo (a famous locality for the insect trade) being the type locality (Rukmane-Bārbale and Cabras 2021, Ho et al. 2025).

In 2016, Rukmane and Barševskis described a highly similar species, P. pseudapoensis, from a single female supposedly from Luzon (Rukmane and Barševskis 2016), which was synonymized in the same year by Yoshitake as being simply a female P. apoensis with an erroneous locality label. Members of this genus are popular among hobby collectors and thus prevalent in the specimen trade. The commercial collecting process often results in poor or incorrect data labels, which is a significant problem when species are described from these commercially collected specimens as was the case here (Yoshitake 2016). Pachyrhynchus specimens with incorrect species identifications and/or imprecise or incorrect locality labels can easily be found in online stores.

Weevils of this genus tend to be endemic to one island as their flightless nature (their elytra are completely fused) and specialization to mountain ecosystems limits their dispersal ability (Rukmane-Bārbale and Cabras 2021), but the eggs of P. moniliferus and P. infernalis have been shown to be able to pass through the digestive track of certain birds and still hatch, making endozoochory a potential method of colonizing new localities (Lin et al. 2021).

The larva and pupa of P. apoensis remain undescribed. The adults seem to favor Impatiens platypetala as a food source and have also been observed feeding and copulating on Melastoma sp. They most likely occur year-round (Cabras and Yoshitake 2016).

References and dorsal view below read more.