Leaf Beetle

From the late summer of 2006: a tiny orange-brown leaf beetle.  At that time I held out no hope of identifying such a small insect; there was nothing like it in the two Michael Chinery books that I owned, and I had not yet come across any web-sites that were really useful for identifying obscure beetles like this one.  Even now I find the major beetle site, koleopterologie.de, a lot more difficult to browse than, say, the corresponding sites for moths and flies ukmoths.org.uk and diptera.info.

However, I recently realized that this beetle was similar in structure to the irridescent green dock beetles Gastrophysa viridis that I had also seen in the same area.  That then led me to Mike Hackston's keys for UK Chrysomelidae which enabled me to final identify the beetle as Gonioctena olivacea (Coleoptera: Chrysolmelidae).

Photo taken in Whiteknights Park, Reading University grounds, Reading, UK, on 2006-08-27.