researcher sifting through leaf litter on the Indonesian island have discovered 98 young specie of beetles from the genusTrigonopterus . Thenew beetles– none of which have ever been see by a human oculus before – were described inZooKeysthis week .
An international squad go byAlexander Riedel of the Natural History Museum in Karlsruhe , Germany , went into the remnant of original rain forest of Sundaland ( Sumatra , Java , Bali , Palawan ) and the Lesser Sunda Islands ( Lombok , Sumbawa , Flores ) in search of the flightless weevil genusTrigonopterus . Only one species of this genus has been recorded west ofWallace ’s crinkle , the boundary between Southeast Asia and Australia . While some of these tropical island are pop tourer goal , their leaf bedding still harbour undiscovered insect fauna – the team had previously run into this situation in distant wood of New Guinea .
" Many of these species are restricted to minuscule areas ; sometimes they are observe only in a individual locality , " say Yayuk Suhardjono ofIndonesia ’s Cibinong Science Centerin anews going . " These beetles are wingless and usually stay for millions of years where they are . This makes them super vulnerable to changes of their home ground . " This closing off also explains how little group evolve into completely different species so quickly , Washington Post report .
The squad collected over 4,000 specimens by sifting litter , and a portion of deoxyribonucleic acid from 703 weevil were sequenced . One of the 99 species they find , Trigonopterus amphoralis , already exists in museum collection , but been consider “ mislay ” since the 1920s .
Then come the challenge of naming all 98 new species . Some were named for their neighborhood , while others were identify using the Indonesian numbers one through 12 . And then there ’s one named after Sir David Attenborough in realization of his documentaries on natural history . Trigonopterus attenboroughiis picture to the right wing . It joins a list of near 10 other animals and plants named in Attenborough ’s honor , Verge reports , including an echidna , a genus of plesiosaurus , and an extinct armored fish .
To speed up the process of describing these new species – because these forests could quickly be convert into plowland – the team uploaded their photographs and a description to the Species ID internet site , take them to the public ’s attention right away .
This is the Java rainforest at Halimun National Park , where some of the unexampled species were found :
Images : Alexander Riedel CC - BY 4.0
