Future Beetles were eusocial, swarming, carnivorous beetles from the future.
Characteristics
Future Beetle drones were each about two inches long, while the queen was about the size of a small dog. They were carnivorous and highly aggressive towards animals many times their size. Unlike modern day beetles, future beetles lived in large, swarming colonies, each with thousands of drones and a queen; the queen beetle controlled the drone beetles, and the drones would follow the queen wherever it went, but would scatter if they outlived the queen.
The bite of a single beetle alone was virtually harmless (unless the bitten victim was allergic to insect bites, in which case the bite would cause a severe allergic reaction). But in swarms, the beetles' bites were collectively so strong that they could chew through reinforced concrete in minutes, and could eat a full grown man alive very quickly with a piranha mentality; to the extent that within seconds of bringing the victim down, there would be no trace of it left.
Like cockroaches, it was very difficult to kill these beetles; a beetle could survive and almost instantly recover from being directly crushed under a boot. Two of the few ways of actually killing the beetles were EMD shots and a powerful gamma ray.
Incursions and encounters
Episode 5.4
A scout Future Beetle came through the First Man-made Anomaly into Connor Temple's lab in the Anomaly Research Centre in the present, but was caught and sent back through by a guard. Unfortunately, a whole swarm of Future Beetles then came through the Anomaly into the lab, killing the soldier and triggering the ARC's lockdown. After the swarm's Queen came through, the Beetles burrowed through the lab's walls and into the ARC's air shafts.
The ARC team trapped the Queen Beetle in a box when she and the swarm fell in the control hub through an air vent, and they began killing the Future Beetles with pesticide. At first, their plan worked, but the workers started chewing through the box and helping the Queen out. Becker then killed the Queen with his EMD, and without the Queen to direct them, the drone Beetles spread out all over the ARC.
The Future Beetles "developed a taste" for the wiring in the ARC's walls, and began to tunnel through the walls. Connor recalibrated the First Man-made Anomaly to release a huge gamma ray into the ARC, which killed all the Beetles before they could burrow out of the ARC.
Trivia
- Future Beetle drones are very similar to the Jurassic Beetle drones from Fear of Flying; both species are swarming eusocial carnivores which rely on very large numbers to overwhelm and devour human prey within seconds. Also, in both species, the drones are only slightly larger than modern-day beetles while the queens are much bigger.
- The Future Beetles are similar to the siafu from Indiana Jones and the scarabs from the 1999 film The Mummy.
- As the Future Beetles are incredible burrowers, and due to the harsh conditions on the surface of the Earth in the future they came from, it has been speculated by a few fans that they probably live primarily underground.
- It was never mentioned what modern species the Future Beetles were/could have been descended from; though some fans have speculated based on their characteristics that they could have evolved from cockroaches, or termites, to adapt to the harsh conditions in the sterile future.
- The Beetles were eusocial like ants, bees, and termites, even though few, if any, modern day beetles behave this way. A few fans have suggested that the Future Beetles evolved a social life due to the fact that all other known surviving species in the Sterile Earth future were large animals, and since they were too small to attack large prey singularly, they had to evolve a colony life in order to overpower larger species with their sheer numbers.