What kind of plant does this possible new species thrive best on? Photo: Agne Ødegaardīut Ødegaard didn’t let himself become discouraged. “It felt like looking for a needle in a haystack, trying to find deviant shapes among the hundreds of thousands of beetles that need to be distinguished from each other under the microscope,” he said.īeing a bug researcher can require the patience of a saint. He didn’t find a single specimen of Beetle X, although he combed the meadowsweet wetlands where Galerucella tenella thrives, and netted thousands of beetles. The researcher returned to southern Norway in 2014, but the results were disappointing. You need to find out where and how this new species lives, which isn’t that easy when dealing with a small crawly bugs. Searching for Beetle X among hundreds of thousandsĭescribing a new beetle for science is no glamorous job. Ødegaard had now come a step further in solving the mystery of the blunt-tipped beetle penis, and the investigation entered a new phase. Usually you find species that are known from other places, and that are only new to Norway,” he says. It’s really rare to find completely new beetle species in Norway. ![]() Suddenly, the improbable became probable: everything indicated that this beetle was a whole new species – which is far from an ordinary occurrence for a Norwegian insect scientist. Farther south in Europe and in tropical regions there were no other known species in this subgenus. Ødegaard then examined the Russian and Chinese leaf beetle literature, but neither provided an answer to the true identity of Beetle X. “My first suspicion was that it could be an American species, so I contacted Canadian and American leaf beetle researchers, but they quickly ruled out that this was a species from their home area,” he said. “The next stage involved trying to find out which species this unknown shape actually belonged to,” the researcher said. ![]() The colour of the antennae was different, their wing cases had denser hair, and the depth of the indentation in the rearmost abdominal segment was different. As he studied the insects more closely, he found further subtle differences. ![]() Ødegaard quickly became sure that this was not just a variant. StaverløkkĬould this specimen be a variant of the common species? Could it be a foreign species that had spread north or been introduced by humans? Or could it simply be a whole new and as yet undescribed species? Blunt or pointed? Nature is smart: The purpose of the difference is to prevent related species from mating with each other.
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