There are many unique characteristics attributable to A. incompertus, like their gallery excavation in several Eucalyptus species, their obligate eusocial behavior, their relationship with fungi, and their unusual sexual dimorphism.

Also, characterization of the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase 1 gene showed that there was substantial genetic divergence between southern and northern populations in Australia.

[1] With the use of genome-wide markers, one study shows that the genus Austroplatypus is dispersal limited but resilient to extinction despite low levels of heterozygosity and gene flow.

[3] The mycangia of A. incompertus and the specific manner in which the species acquires fungal spores for transport have been studied and compared with the mechanisms used by other ambrosia beetles.

[4] Fertilized females begin tunneling into trees in the autumn and take about seven months to penetrate 50 to 80 mm deep to lay their eggs.

[5][4] An assessment done by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) on unprocessed logs and chips of 18 eucalypt species from Australia discovered A. incompertus in most of them, including: Eucalyptus baxteri, E. botryoides, E. consideniana, E. delegatensis, E. eugenioides, E. fastigata, E. globoidea, E. macrorhyncha, E. muelleriana, E. obliqua, E. pilularis, E. radiata, E. scabra, E. sieberi, and Corymbia gummifera.

[6] In Australia, A. incompertus is regarded as a pest, given its life cycle, tendencies to excavate galleries into timber, and its relationship with Raffaelea fungi.

Female A. incompertus are believed to require a longer and more robust thorax, as they use their elytral declivity and reinforced central and peripheral spines to guard gallery entrances from predators (phragmosis) and aid in waste shoveling.

Prior research had incorrectly described A. incompertus with four segmented maxillary palps, which contributed to the frequent taxonomic misidentification of the species.

Size variation in A. incompertus is consistent with Bergmann's rule, which states individuals of a species/clade at higher altitudes or latitudes will be larger than those at lower ones.

[10] A fertilized female attempts to start a new colony by burrowing deep into the heart of a living tree, eventually branching off and depositing her fungal spores and larvae.

This physical barrier traps the newly-emerged females, and they remain unfertilized, participating in maintenance, excavation, and defense of the galleries, but without reproducing, thereby forming and maintaining a social hierarchy.

More importantly, analyses indicate that this species transitioned from biparental monogamy to exclusive maternal care complemented with lifetime sperm storage.

Eusocial insects develop large, multigenerational cooperative societies that assist each other in the rearing of young, often at the cost of an individual's life or reproductive ability.

This altruism is explained because eusocial insects benefit from giving up reproductive ability of many individuals to improve the overall fitness of closely related offspring.

However, this theory can not explain the behavior of this ambrosia beetle, because workers are not present at the initial and very risky period of colony foundation; instead, the perceived benefit is that a worker is born into a colony that has already survived the risky initial phase, and a female is better off with a very high likelihood of helping to produce numerous siblings than dispersing and having a high likelihood of failing to reproduce at all.

[17] The female that begins the colony brings the weevils' source of food, its symbiotic fungi, to grow in the wood galleries that it excavates.

[4] This could represent the "life insurer" model, in that benefits to a female from assisting her mother are substantial, giving a better chance of gene propagation through kin selection.