first new beetle in Sweden in 100 years?!
New beetle species?
From such a well-known fauna?
Is it possible?
From such a well-known fauna?
Is it possible?
I came across this article in my insect news feed about a recent taxonomic discovery in Europe. Two thoughts ran through my head when I read first sentence:
For the first time in 100 years, a new species of beetle has been confirmed in Sweden...
- That cannot be true, can it? I know Europe's (and especially Sweden's, given that the founding father of modern taxonomy came from that country!) insect fauna is well known, but Coleoptera is a gigantically diverse taxon - perhaps the largest order of Insecta, with >300,000 species already described worldwide. Surely some Staphylinidae species have been described from Scandinavia in the past 100 years. What about physically small beetles that could get lost in the mix, like Ptiliidae? A taxon as diverse as Coleoptera must have numerous undiscovered species that slowly come to press every year or two, even in Europe. I think they meant that no new Cerambycidae, which are conspicuous and relatively popular subjects of taxonomic research (not to mention objects of desire amongst collectors), have been described in 100 years from Sweden.
- I wonder how long it be before we can say something like that about Hymenoptera of, say, the Neotropics (and be referring to the fact that we know so much already about Hymenoptera taxonomy!)
L. linnei's sister species (maybe?), Leiopus nebulosus (Linneaus, 1758) in action. Photo by Mick Talbot.
I tracked down the original article in Zootaxa (Wallin et al. 2009). The new beetle is named Leiopus linnei Wallin, Nylander, & Kvamme, 2009 (named after that famous Swede alluded to earlier). The authors provide a lot of convincing evidence to justify describing this new taxon, including natural history data, morphology, and DNA sequences. I wonder if the amount of data included within a new species description is inversely proportional to the amount of undescribed species left for a particular taxon in a particular region...
As a senior author of the publication I can inform that this refers to an incomplete English translation of the original text published in Swedish in a local newspaper in Uppsala. The word Cerambycid was unfortunately missing from the sentence. Of course there a numerous beetles described as nov.sp. from Sweden the last 100 years.
Posted by Henrik Wallin on March 04, 2009 at 02:21 AM EST #
Thanks for the comment. I could see that from the first line of your Zootaxa paper: "The cerambycids of Northern Europe are among the most thoroughly studied insects..." [emphasis mine]. It's a minor detail that doesn't bother me at all. In fact, that error makes the story more compelling; that line is what drew me in and made me want to learn more about this new species! I can imagine that once we look at more natural history data, sequence more COI (and other) fragments, and as we explore more morphological
character systems we will undoubtedly uncover more new beetles for Europe...even more Cerambycidae.
Posted by ardeans on March 04, 2009 at 08:30 AM EST #