Bumblebeetle

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The Bumblebeetle is a fictional insect created for the film The Future is Wild. The bumblebeetle is a sparrow-sized descendant of beetles that inhabits the Rainshadow Desert (southeastern Pangaea II) 200 million years from now. The wingcases of the bumblebeetle reduces into streamlined airfoils. Its body is covered in sensory hairs, specifically for detecting smell. The bumblebeetle has no mouth and practically no digestive system: the bumblebeetle spends only a day in its adult form.

Most of its life, the bumblebeetle is a larva, which is called a grimworm. When a bumblebeetle emerges as an adult, it already carries its cargo of grimworms. Then it flies away to a flish carcass. Powerful hurricanes called "hypercanes" blow dead flish into the desert. When the bumblebeetle finds a flish, its abdomen splits to release the grimworms and dies. The grimworms burrow into the flish and eat the rotting flesh. Male grimworms leave for other flish carcasses and mate with female grimworms. When the flish carcass is stripped of flesh, the grimworm females pupate and emerge as adult bumblebeetles. Thus all bumblebeetles are female.

The bumblebeetle serves another role to the Rainshadow Desert ecology. The deathbottle plant can fertilize itself, but it can not spread its seeds. So it evolves silvery leaves that imitate a flish corpse. Bumblebeetles land on this leaf and fall into a seed chamber. Covered in adhesive seeds, the bumblebeetle deposits them far from the parent plant.