[1] The larvae bore into the timber, feeding for up to ten years before pupating, and later emerging from the wood as adult beetles.

To attract mates, the adult insects create a tapping or ticking sound that can sometimes be heard in the rafters of old buildings on summer nights.

For this reason, the deathwatch beetle is associated with quiet, sleepless nights and is named for the vigil (watch) being kept beside the dying or dead.

[3][4] This beetle is found in Europe, including the United Kingdom, as well as North America, Corsica, Algeria, and New Caledonia.

[1] Its natural habitat is dead or decaying hardwood, or in some cases coniferous wood, especially when the timber has been softened by fungal attack.

The beetle does not infest wood that has recently died; about sixty years must pass for dead oak to reach a suitable condition for attack.

[4][8] In buildings, deathwatch beetles infest old oak timbers, especially those that have been the subject of fungal decay, usually by the fungus Donkioporia expansa.

This fungus affects damp timber, often gaining entry where rafters or joists are embedded in stone walls, or in the vicinity of leaking roofs or overflowing gutters.

[12] An adult female deathwatch beetle is short-lived (1–2 months) and must find a suitable host in which to lay her eggs relatively quickly.

[15] A deathwatch beetle communicates by hitting its head on a substrate to create a noise, a method called tapping.

By giving up this much body weight, males are reducing the likelihood that they will mate with an additional female due to a lack of resources for a further gift.

Recent studies have suggested that most of the previously accepted practices of external application of insecticides are largely ineffective.

[9] Modern techniques of ultrasound examination now allow the extent and localisation of an attack within timbers to be determined with great accuracy, and, for historic properties where damage to ornate plasterwork must be avoided, can be followed by micro-drilling and highly-targeted injection of insecticide via hypodermic needle.

Alternatively, where a degree of damage to the fabric of a building is acceptable, larger 6 mm holes can be drilled deep into the timbers, and a thick, insecticide-laden paste introduced which does not seep out into surrounding areas.

In all situations, any structural damage which has permitted water to ingress and moisten the timbers now being attacked should be addressed in order to slow down the life cycle of the insects, and thus minimize their spread.

[19] The tapping sound of the deathwatch beetle has long been associated as a harbinger of death, being most audible on quiet nights in the rafters of old houses, and in silent bedside vigils for the dying.

[20][21] The English writer, physician, and naturalist Thomas Browne (1605–1682) attempted to correct misconceptions about the deathwatch beetle as an omen of death in his encyclopedic catalog of common errors, Pseudodoxia Epidemica: Few ears have escaped the noise of the dead-watch, that is, the little clickling [sic] sound heard often in many rooms, somewhat resembling that of a watch; and this is conceived to be of an evil omen or prediction of some persons death: wherein notwithstanding there is nothing of rational presage or just cause of terrour unto melancholy and meticulous heads.

We have taken many thereof, and kept them in thin boxes, wherein I have heard and seen them work and knack with a little proboscis or trunk against the side of the box, like a picus martius, or woodpecker against a tree....He that could extinguish the terrifying apprehensions hereof, might prevent the passions of the heart, and many cold sweats in grandmothers and nurses, who in the sickness of children, are so startled with these noises."

(II.vii, 1650 edition)[22]Its notoriety as an ill omen is alluded to in the fourth book of John Keats' 1818 poem "Endymion": ... within ye hear No sound so loud as when on curtain'd bier The death-watch tick is stifled.

[23] The term "death watch" has been applied to a variety of other ticking insects, including Anobium striatum; some of the so-called booklice of the family Psocidae,[24] and the appropriately named Atropos divinatoria and Clothilla pulsatoria (in Greek mythology Atropos and Clotho were two of the three moirai (Fates) associated with death).

"[26] Even Beatrix Potter references the beetle in her children's book The Tailor of Gloucester (written 1901, published 1903) when the mice under the tea-cups start up "a chorus of little tappings, all sounding together, and answering one another, like watch-beetles in an old worm-eaten window-shutter—".

[citation needed] In Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night (chapter 17), the mechanism of the ticking of the death-watch beetle is discussed, and it is compared with a clicking sound made by an ill-fitting hard shirt front.

[27] In 1995, Alice Hoffman made reference to the deathwatch beetle in her novel Practical Magic, using it as an omen of death; the main character hears it shortly before her husband dies.