Move over, sunburnt Santa in flip-flops holding a cricket bat, the land Down Under has a new favorite Christmas character – a golden beetle that will have entomologists more excited than they usually are. Which says a lot.
This week, the gold Christmas beetle (Anoplognathus aureus), native to the northern region of the state of Queensland nabbed nearly 40% of votes in the annual Aussie Insect of the Year competition.
Some 44,472 Australians voted once the field was narrowed down to six finalists, with 17,454 choosing the stunning golden beetle as the winner of the contest, now in its third year.
Beetles obviously come in all shapes and sizes (and colors), and are admittedly polarizing insects – something researchers have investigated and formed some hypotheses in relation to.
However, this stunning gold beauty even beat out two more traditional beauties – the Mallee Bronze Azure butterfly (Ogyris subterrestis) and orchard swallowtail butterfly (Papilio aegeus).
While we don’t have a breakdown of the online participants who had their say on the final six, this year’s contest attracted 86% more people than 2025’s poll – and the 2026 winner received a resounding 39.3% of votes.
Nostalgia might have something to do with the winner, though; Australia has 35 native species of Christmas beetles, many of them concentrated in New South Wales. So if you want to find this incredible gold beauty, you’ll need to head much further north in the hope of seeing one. Unsurprisingly, given their common name, the often brightly colored adults generally appear in December before disappearing by the new year.
Increasing urban spread in Sydney in particular has seen a decline in numbers, so they’ve become a bit of a Christmas treat. They’re not dangerous, they move slowly, and while they’d prefer to be left to their own devices, I have to admit they are bizarrely quite enjoyable to handle.
And like another Aussie icon, the koala, the adults feed on leaves from eucalyptus trees.
Source: Australian Pollinator Week
