Talk:Deathwatch beetle

Deathwatch beetle has been listed as one of the Natural sciences good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
October 28, 2019	Good article nominee	Listed

A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on November 30, 2019.

The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that the tapping sound of the deathwatch beetle has long been considered an omen of an impending death?

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Untitled

If anyone moves this page to Wikispecies please ensure that Woodworm is updated too. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Evil Monkey (talk • contribs) 04:08, 24 January 2005

reqimage

Is it Death watch beetle, or is it Deathwatch beetle? This article uses both, confusingly. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.254.12.114 (talk • contribs) 21:40, 13 August 2006

Also, what about its life cycle? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Axtri (talk • contribs) 12:41, 13 June 2007

Akashe

I'm fairly certain it can be used interchangably. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.62.159.227 (talk • contribs) 22:37, 23 September 2007

And this is all I could find on the life cycle. Meh. http://www.dampcondensation.co.uk/insect.htm — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.62.159.227 (talk • contribs) 22:40, 23 September 2007

Myth is true

In a sense, the death watch beetle's clicking actually is an omen of death. Every person dies eventually, so hearing the clicking is technically an omen of impending death...just not always soon after you hear it. Groundlord (talk) 17:45, 21 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That's like saying clouds in the sky are an omen, or breathing, or drinking a glass of water. Ridiculous. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.78.199.94 (talk) 02:31, 24 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Being born is an omen then too, because that person is just going to die eventually. See the logical fallacy in your statement? C. Pineda (クリス) (talk) 01:56, 12 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Prior fungal decay

"provided that the wood has experienced prior fungal decay" don't see evidence of this in samples from oak buildings or my firewood pile, maybe its invisible to the eye.

From the source quoted:

Furthermore, it is well known that wood-destroying fungi can break down lignin, and until proof is available that insects cannot also do so, the assumption that the lignin is not altered during larval digestion is hardly justifiable. TBrockaly24 (talk) 12:32, 23 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Deathwatch beetle much more common

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the proposal was moved. --BDD (talk) 18:03, 7 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Death watch beetle → Deathwatch beetle – Much more common, including among reference works. See below DCDuring (talk) 14:01, 30 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

At my search on Google books there were no hits (besides WP) for the "death watch beetle" spelling, one hit for death-watch beetle and some 3,500 (probably less in fact) for "deathwatch beetle". If this is too much like the scorned original research, compare the number of reference works that have entries for "deathwatch beetle" with the number for "death-watch beetle" or "death watch beetle" at OneLook.com. DCDuring (talk) 13:57, 30 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Support per the research above (which is, incidentally, perfectly fine to do - original research is prohibited in article content, not in discussions). I would have preferred to support the hyphenated form, which I'm more familiar with, but the numbers are clear enough. 168.12.253.66 (talk) 13:54, 31 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.