KOLKATA: Scientists from Zoological Survey of India (ZSI) have described a total of 9 new species of Sericini chafer beetles, all from museum specimens of the ZSI itself. Surprisingly most of them are nearly 100-year-old and were intact with its all morphological characteristics making it evident that they somehow escaped from anthropogenic threats, in in situ as well as ex situ conditions.
“The findings have proved that museums play a huge role in unveiling some taxas which were unexplored due to lack of entomological experts. Most of the time new taxa are emerging from valuable museum specimens which were collected many years back and were kept in the insect cabinets of the museums like unpolished and unrecognised diamonds,” Dhriti Banerjee, Director ZSI said.
The abstract titled “ Discovering the Undiscovered: the Story of Sericini” has been published by Royal Entomological Society, in Student Forum 2023, authored by Debika Bhunia, Devanshu Gupta and Subhankar Kumar Sarkar.
Sericini chafer beetles (Scarabaeidae: Melolonthinae) are herbivores, with a worldwide distribution of nearly 4,600 described species globally but are poorly explored in taxonomy for many regions in the world.
Approximately 682 species of Sericini are known from India, which accounts for 16 per cent of the global diversity of the tribe.
The majority of the species are reported from the Himalayas and southern areas of the country, while many regions remained poorly sampled or represented only by old collection records which had too inaccurate data to be geo-localized.
Despite their great diversity, almost nothing is known about the ecology of Sericini.
“Our study aims to exemplify the importance of preserving and maintaining museum specimens as they provide baseline information for many unexplored taxa like Sericini, and we will also fill the spatial and temporal gap in the sampling effort of this tribe by proper identification and distributional mapping,” Devanshu Gupta, ZSI scientist , one of the lead authors of the study said.
Insects are the most diverse group of organisms consisting of 8 to 10 million species in the world which covers almost 80 per cent of the world’s species.
But as per scientists only around 1 million species of insects, and new species are constantly being discovered, which leaves 60 to 70 per cent of entomofauna undescribed.