A group of scientists headed by Dr Alexander Riedel of Natural History Museum Karlsruhe in Germany has described 98 new species of the beetle genus Trigonopterus from Java, Bali and other Indonesian islands – including one named after Sir David Attenborough, a British naturalist and filmmaker.
These are the 98 new species of Trigonopterus plus T. amphoralis (row 1, 7th from left), a species lost since 1922. Image credit: Alexander Riedel.
The tropical islands of Java, Bali and Lombok are popular tourist destinations, but remnants of their original rain forests still harbor a largely unexplored insect fauna.
Dr Riedel and his colleagues went to the woods and searched the leaf litter for a specific group of beetles, the weevil genus Trigonopterus.
Only one out of 99 species in the genus had already been stored in museum collections. All the other 98 had never been seen by a human eye before.
“It was surprising that in Bali even areas regularly visited by package tours can be the home to unknown species,” said Dr Yayuk Suhardjono of Zoological Museum in Jakarta, who is the senior author of a paper published in the journal ZooKeys.
“Many of these species are restricted to small areas; sometimes they are found only in a single locality.”
“These beetles are wingless and usually stay for millions of years where they are. This makes them extremely vulnerable to changes of their habitat.”
Trigonopterus attenboroughi. Image credit: Alexander Riedel.
The scientists noted: “to describe all these new species using traditional approaches would take a lifetime, but there is no time to waste! Java, Bali and Lombok are densely populated, so natural forests are easily converted to agriculture if the public is unaware of their value.”
A portion of each weevil species’ DNA was sequenced, which helped to sort out and diagnose species efficiently.
“It was also a challenge to find suitable names for so many new species. Some could be based on their respective localities; others were named by the Indonesian numbers one to twelve,” the entomologists said.
“However, the easiest choice was to name one for Sir David Attenborough in recognition of his outstanding documentaries on natural history.”
“It can be hoped that the documentation of nature’s beauty finally leads to an effective protection of this heritage.”
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Riedel A et al. 2014. Ninety-eight new species of Trigonopterus weevils from Sundaland and the Lesser Sunda Islands. ZooKeys 467: 1-162; doi: 10.3897/zookeys.467.8206
