When Petals Fall do they Rise as Butterflies?
The unknown poet who created these lines was far closer, at least in one sense, to the truth than he may have known, for the number at any one time of butterflies and other insects certainly exceeds the number of falling petals.
It is nor widely recognized that insects comprise at least three quarters of all the many different species of animal life on earth. Already nearly a million insect species have been named and are available for study in the world’s great natural history collections. What the total number of species will eventually turn out to be is not known, but correct estimates put the figure as upwards of two million.
The success of any animal group may be judged on many criteria. Any such evaluation would certainly include the number of species in the group, the number of individuals in the environment, the total weight of the group (which is the measure of its ability to store energy in competition in other groups), and its capacity to control its environment. On the last count man is the outright winner (although there are those who would use ‘destroy’ instead of ‘control’ for many of man’s activities). On the other hand, insects are certainly vastly superior on the first criterion and overall winners on the second and third, at least as far as terrestrial life is concerned.
Whereas hard – to – distinguish, insect – like fossils have been reported from the world’s oldest rocks (Precambrian, at least six hundred million years old), fossil insects are known with certainty only from about Carboniferous times, some three hundred million years ago. Most of the many groups of insects then represented were already winged and, since ancestral insects were almost certainly wingless, their true origins must have extended many millions of years further back to enable them to attain their remarkable Carboniferous diversity: insect diversity is even more notable today. During this same groups of comparable antiquity have failed to diversify in similar fashion and others have become extinct.
Insects probably originated on land and their ancestors may well have required a rather moist environment. One of several factors underlying their success was the development of a specialized surface layer that greatly retards the loss of water from the body, so they could move out, without desiccation and death, from the moist environment to which the majority of other animals without backbones are still restricted. Another important factor was the development of the power of flight, shared only by the birds, bats and some extinct reptiles. The habitats that insects have come to occupy range from the equator to the polar ice caps, from sea level to high alpine regions, from deserts to tropical rain forests and from hot springs, even oil wells, to ice-cold water. The range of food exploited by insects is unparalleled by any other group of multicellular animals. There are species that attack fruits, leaves, stems, roots and a very wide range of plant products. Numerous intricate and specific relationships with plants betoken long periods of co-evolution
Man and his domestic animals do not escape the attention of insects, as described in 1856 by the American entomologist, Townsend Glover.
From red-bugs and bed-bugs
From sand flies and land files
Mosquitoes, gall nippers*and fleas
From hog ticks and dog ticks
From hen lice and men lice
We pray thee, good Lord, give us ease
And all the congregation shall scratch and say Amen.
Neither are the species of insect immune to attack as Augustus Morgan’s well-known couplet (1872) cleverly recounts
Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em
And little fleas have lesser and so ad infinitum.
Insects range in size from parasitic wasps so small that it would require five or six placed in line, head to tail, to extend to one millimeter, up to the Atlas moth which has a wingspan of about thirty and a half centimeters. Making it comparable in size to one of the larger birds.
With this very brief account of some of the outstanding characteristics of insects-arguably the most successful from the animal life on planet earth – it is not surprising that man, their competitor for that title, should wish to study and document facts about them. If this information, as it is gathered progressively, is to be stored and be made retrievable, a name must be given to each group of insects capable of interbreeding in nature. The system that is now universally used for naming animals and plants for scientific purposes was devised by a little Swedish naturalist Linnaeus. Because each grouping of related organisms is termed a tax on, the science of them to be named and arranged systematically, in order to show describing, naming and classifying organisms has become known as ‘Taxonomy’. Taxonomy is thus the study of organisms so as to be able to distinguish one from another and to allow them to be named and arranged systematically, in order to show their relationships to one another. For example, in Linnaeus ‘system the common housefly was named Muscat domestic. It is thus distinguished from a range of other closely related Muscat species by its specific name, domestic. At the same time all species in the group Muscat (the group is known as a ‘genus’ and, by convention, is spelt with an initial capital letter) are closely related, as indicated by similarities in body structure and characteristics. Modern man is known as Homo sapiens to distinguish him, for example, from one of his now extinct relatives Neanderthal man, Homo neanderthalensis.
It is possible to study insects and other organisms in a variety of ways.
Many aspects, such as behavior, can only be investigated by observing living insects. Other important features, such as internal anatomy and some aspects of external anatomy, require dead material.
Comparative studies of insects from many parts of a continent or, indeed, the earth are possible only if specimens are collected and brought together in one place. In this way the great natural history collections of the world have developed. In them there are preserved for present and future study specimens of many species that become extinct since the collections began and also many samples from populations of species that still exist in nature.The first European record of Australian insects is probably that of Diego the Prado, a companion of the explorer Torres, who wrote of ‘great quantities of flies’ in the Torres Strait islands late in September 1606. The next record is from Francisco Pleaser who was wrecked in the ship Batavia off Gerald ton, Western Australia, in June 1629. In his ‘sad daily notes’ he talks of their vain search of water on the mainland and goes on : ‘the country was flat again without trees, foliage or grass, except for high anthills thrown up of earth, which in the distance were not unlike the huts of people. Was also such a host of flies, which came to sit in the mouth, and the eyes, that they could not be beaten off’. He referred, of course, to the pestiferous Australian bush fly, Muscat vetustissima, first given a scientific name more than two hundred years later. It is clearly related to the housefly, as its generic name Muscat indicates.
Captain Cook noted in his log a small butterfly fluttering over the sea as he neared south-eastern Australia on 16 April 1770. However, it was not until 29 April that the first insects were collected by Joseph Banks and Daniel Slander at their initial landfall on Australian soil at Botany Bay, a few kilometers south of where Sydney stands today. These insects and others from places on the Queensland coast, notably Cook town, still exist today in the Banks Collection at the British Museum of Natural History in London and a facsimile collection of these has been assembled in Canberra. The first Australian insects to be given scientific names were described in 1775 by the Danish entomologist Fabric us, a pupil of Linnaeus, and the very first Australian animal of any kind to be given a scientific name.
Special mention has been made of European man’s first encounters with Australian insects but Aboriginal man had long observed and been concerned with native insects. His nomadic hunting habits and the fact that he had no means of storing foods exposed him to irregular and sometimes prolonged periods of food shortage. Possibly because insects were, at times, almost the only available foodstuffs, but partly because some were regarded as special delicacies, the use of insects as food was widespread, if not universal among Aboriginal communities. Some are represented on totems, and sacred increase ceremonies were performed to promote their abundance. Among the most prized were several species of honey pot ants, the honey and brood combs of stingless bees, witchetty grubs (moth caterpillars) and adult bogging moths. The aboriginal bark painting depicted here hangs in the Australian National Insect Collection and is one of a relatively few with insect motifs. This bark was painted by Binyiniwuy0 of Milingimbi in the Northern Territory and depicts a small part of the sugar bag totem, a high totem of the Gupapuynu people, which is important in the Birrkulda Narre ceremony for the old men of the tribe.
For many decades after the colonization of Australia by white man, the specimens of plants and animals that were collected were sent for study and naming to the great European museums, in particular to the British museum of natural history. Eventually natural history collections were established in the capitals of each of the colonies. These museums contain much valuable, indeed irreplaceable, early material as well as extensive modern accession.
The Australian National Insect Collection (ANIC) had its origins in 1928 with the establishment of the Division of Economic Entomology of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Canberra (now the Division of Economic Entomology of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization). It was released at the outset that both basic and applied research on insects in Australia could not be carried out unless they could be properly identified. A collection of insects was thus started and since then it has grown steadily by the addition of specimens gathered by members of the start and by the gift or perchance of major collections made by amateur entomologists. Many specimens of great scientific value have been added in this letter way. In addition to collecting by individual members of staff, larger-scale collecting expeditions are occasionally sent to remote parts of Australia, or to areas mining to other developments are likely to produce major changes in the environment.
By proclamation in the Commonwealth gazette on 8 March 1962 The Australian National Insect Collection was officially recognized as part of the national heritage. It forms an absolutely indispensable adjunct to the work of the Division of Entomology and is today saved by twelve full-time and some eleven part-time taxonomists, in addition to many visiting workers from other parts of Australia and from overseas.
The ANIC is by far the world’s largest and most comprehensive assemblage of specimens of Australian insects. It has recently been housed in a new, specially-conditioned, well-equipped, two-story building designed to ensure that the insects are maintained in excellent condition. The collection currently comprises over five million specimens, many of them mounted and pinned, and stored in twelve thousand cabinet drawers. Other specimens, for example of immature stages, are in liquid preservative. Some minute, whole insects and various dissected parts are preserved on many thousands of specimens whose pigmentation fades after death. The ANIC also includes photographs of many ‘type’ specimens of Australian species, when these are located in other collections in Australia or abroad. The primary type (or holotype) of a species in the actual specimens to which the name is attached when a species is described. If it is later proposed to establish a further new species often necessary to compare its characters with those of the heliotypes of closely related species so as to establish its distinguishing features. There are some eight thousand primary types in the ANIC and many more are being designated each year in the course of current research. What is known about the insect fauna has been well documented in the insects of Australia published in 1970. Most of the authors of this multi-author text were workers in the ANIC.
The insect fauna of Australia is thought to comprise a hundred and fifty thousand or so species. Compare this with about four hundred and fifty mammals and about seven hundred and fifty birds in Australia. Names have so far only been given to about fifty thousand of the insects, although perhaps fifteen to twenty thousand as yet unnamed species are represented in the ANIC. Probably because of its uniqueness and the fact that it has been studied for a far shorter time than that of other regions, the insect fauna of the Australasian and Indonesian regions is probably the least known in the world. There is thus an enormous and exciting task ahead to collect and describe the remaining species. Exciting, because in the insect fauna there are groups (or species) just as primitive and interesting as our unique marsupials. Let us examine two examples.
The ant Nothomyrmecia macros considered to be the most primitive living member of its group. Its closest relative appears to be an ant preserved in Baltic amber for about seventy million years. Nothomyrmecia was first collected in 1932, but not seen again until rediscovered in 1977 by an ANIC expedition. It is now the subject of active international study, which is revealing much about the evolution of the structure and behavior of ants. Many specimens are available for study in the ANIC.
The rare cricket-like corolla monster, corolla predator, is represented is the ANIC by five out of a total of twelve known specimens. It was discovered in 1976 in the rainforests of south-east Queensland in Coloma National Park, near Fraser Island. The bizarre monster possesses a number of highly unusual characteristics not seen in any other insect in any part of the world. It spends most of its time burrowing in the sandy soil. Females seem to be entirely subterranean with eyes accordingly reduced to mere sports, whereas males have better developed eyes and wander on the surface at night after rains searching for females to which they are presumably let by a chemical sex attractant.
Correct identification can be of great economic importance. For example, fumigation of a grain ship is ordered if living insects found in its hold at an Australian port are identified as potentially harmful, like the kappa beetle, Trogoderma granaries. This serious pest does not occur in Australia and it is totally prohibited in cargoes by a number of major grain-importing countries. Fumigation and the resultant delays in shipping may cost a hundred thousand dollars or more. It is certainly costly of error if there is mistaken identity because of confusion with one of several other similar, but relatively harmless, species of Trogoderma.
Then again, successful biological control of a citrus pest, the wide wax scale, was not achieved for several decades because the parasites first introduced in the mid-thirties from Africa, the home of scale, were collected from a similar but different scale that had been misidentified. Once the true identity of the white wax scale was established, and its specific parasites collected and introduced in the seventies, the scale was successfully controlled, with significant resultant saving. There are many similar examples.
Thus, in addition to man’s intrinsic interest in learning and documenting more about insects, there are powerful economic reasons for being able to identify species accurately. The Australian National Insect Collection is serving as an anonymously important data bank which is drawn constantly upon for taxonomic research, identification and related purposes. It is indeed a vital part of Australia’s National Heritage.
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