A bark beetle is one of approximately 220 genera

Genera

Genera is a commercial operating system and development environment for Lisp machines developed by Symbolics. It is essentially a fork of an earlier operating system originating on the MIT AI Lab's Lisp machines which Symbolics had used in common with LMI and Texas Instruments...

 with 6,000 species

Species

In biology, a species is one of the basic units of biological classification and a taxonomic rank. A species is often defined as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. While in many cases this definition is adequate, more precise or differing measures are...

 of beetles in the subfamily Scolytinae. Traditionally, this was considered a distinct family

Family (biology)

In biological classification, family is* a taxonomic rank. Other well-known ranks are life, domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, genus, and species, with family fitting between order and genus. As for the other well-known ranks, there is the option of an immediately lower rank, indicated by the...

 Scolytidae, but now it is understood that bark beetles are in fact very specialized members of the "true weevil

Weevil

A weevil is any beetle from the Curculionoidea superfamily. They are usually small, less than , and herbivorous. There are over 60,000 species in several families, mostly in the family Curculionidae...

" family (Curculionidae

Curculionidae

Curculionidae is the family of the "true" weevils . It was formerly recognized in 1998 as the largest of any animal family, with over 40,000 species described worldwide at that time...

). Well-known species are members of the type genus

Type genus

In biological classification, a type genus is a representative genus, as with regard to a biological family. The term and concept is used much more often and much more formally in zoology than it is in botany, and the definition is dependent on the nomenclatural Code that applies:* In zoological...

 Scolytus

Scolytus

Scolytus is a genus of bark beetles . It includes several species notorious for destroying trees in the forests. The Dutch elm disease is spread in North America by two species : the native elm bark beetle, Hylurgopinus rufipes, and the European elm bark beetle, Scolytus multistriatus...

- namely the European elm bark beetle

Dutch elm disease

Dutch elm disease is a disease caused by a member of the sac fungi category, affecting elm trees which is spread by the elm bark beetle. Although believed to be originally native to Asia, the disease has been accidentally introduced into America and Europe, where it has devastated native...

 S. multistriatus and the large elm bark beetle S.