Coffee Table Critter

I was sitting in the family room when I saw a little 4mm brown speck slowly patrolling the coffee table. With a few macro photographs and a trip to INaturalist, I came up with the ID, a broad-nosed weevil (BNW) named Pseudoedophrys hilleri.

Rosy maple moth caterpillar exuvia and a ballpoint pen

This is a species introduced from Japan, so what introduced it to our house in town?  Adults eat foliage of woody plants, especially maples and witch hazels.  I had just been photographing a dead maple leaf with an exuvia, the dried skin left when a rosy maple moth caterpillar molted.  Evidently the weevil had been laying unseen in the shell.

P. hilleri is a member of the beetle subfamily Entiminae, the broad-nosed weevils.  Weevils are small beetles, generally less than 6mm long, so you have to look closely at them or you will "see no weevil."*  They are herbivorous, eating a wide variety of plants and can be destructive to many crops.  The boll weevil is most famous, known in song for destroying cotton crops.

Click to enlarge

There are lots of photographs of P. hillerion on the web but virtually nothing about their lifecycle.  Ours is the first reported in INaturalist in Missouri.  Although they are native to Japan, the US distribution is predominately east coast.  Maybe they arrived when Japanese maples became a popular landscape plant?

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* I bet that you didn't know that the three wise monkeys of Japanese fame have names.  "See no evil" who covers his eyes is named Mizaru.