Last Friday morning while I was doing my routine watering of the potted plants in the early morning before, I found a surprised visitor hiding under the broad leaf of the Chinese Silk Plant (Boehmeria nivea) and it was feeding on leaf. It was a large green beetle likely to be (Anomala albopilosa). I quickly took some photos and off I went to work. I had thought that the beetle would have left by the time I got back home in the evening.

To my surprise, it was still around on Saturday except that it had decided to migrate to another plant in my pot, the Giant Sword Fern (Nephrolepis biserrata). It positioned itself on the tender end of a semi-matured frond and continued with its feast. Judging from the amount of damages done to the frond, the fern appeared to be tastier than the Chinese Silk Plant. By Sunday, it was eventually gone. With this encounter, I now knew one of the fern eaters. I had often seen similar damages to ferns in the wild though the causative agents might be more than just beetles.

According to the Hawaiian Scarab ID website, its native range is in East Asia such as Japan, Korea and Taiwan. As for Singapore, there was a blog post in 2010 that described the sighting of the beetle and there were many more pictures on its local sightings being shared over the Internet.

The last time that I shared a beetle feeding on my potted plant was in July 2016. It was an unknown brown beetle then, feeding on the leaves of the Sweet Leaf Bush (Sauropus androgynus).