This beetle is found in Europe, Northern Asia (excluding China) and North America.

A. curtula has been known to occasionally live in eastern Japan, and tropical regions of Africa.

They prefer warm weather, and often do best when the situation helps attract their favorite prey.

Their favorite prey often includes flies and other carrion specific scavenger insects.

Males can often avoid intermale aggression by presenting with excess female sex pheromones.

A. curtula mates year-round, meaning that females need a tactic to regulate when they want to reproduce.

Often, individual females will spend most of their lives mimicking males so they can selectively choose when they wish to mate.

They can often track and find these pupae due to volatiles and waste matter dispelled from the pupal insects.

This creates competition between siblings that were laid on the same carcass, as well as from unrelated A. curtula individuals.

As individuals age, their general size is determined by their larval success in finding larger insect larvae to predate on.

[5] As males age, they slowly lose the ability to produce the female sex hormone.

The endophallus of the male will be inserted into the female’s genital chamber and wrapped around her spermathecal duct.

This action forces the endophallus into a U-shape, filling the chamber and helping with the implantation of the spermatophore.

Females become sexually mature before males do and often start producing pheromones while still in the egg stage.

Because female sex pheromones are stored in a waxy coating on their surface, this means the wax can rub off and onto males as they are copulating.

Males who have higher rates of female sex pheromones often have smaller spermatophores and in turn, fertilize less eggs.

Furthermore, the high rates of female sex pheromones can indicate a general lack of success in a male.

These males also have low levels of female sex pheromones but are often selected against due to their size and age.

The ovaries are the most internal structure, and they are numerous in comparison to other beetles, averaging around 30 ovarioles.

[9] Individual males are discouraged from having large numbers of mates as females select against this trait.

This also means that females can be especially choosy, as each individual can choose to just mate with better males until fertilization occurs.