Category: Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift (DEZ)

Science in the sunshine: Pensoft’s month of European conferences

Pensoft participated in five conferences across Germany and Italy in September 2023.

For the Pensoft team, September 2023 was a busy and exciting month filled with conferences. Travelling across Europe, they promoted journals, connected with the scientific community, and rewarded exceptional research with free article publications. 

Let’s take a look back at all the events of the past month.

Wildlife Research and Conservation 2023

Wildlife Research and Conservation 2023 took place in Berlin between the 9th and 11th of September. Jointly organised by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria and WWF Germany, it was a fantastic event, featuring an exchange of ideas between wildlife scientists from different disciplines related to mammalian species.

Image showing the WRC2023 logo and two women promoting Pensoft at a conference.
Pensoft representatives Mrs. Boriana Ovcharova and Mrs. Anna Sapundzhieva, ready to greet attendees in the sun.

The conference looked at evolutionary adaptations from the perspective of behavioural ecology, reproduction biology, genetics, physiology, as well as nature conservation. It particularly focused on the pressing issues of wildlife research and species conservation in the context of global environmental change. Most of the ≈100 participants were young scientists from more than 30 countries.

The Pensoft team greeted fellow attendees with an exhibition stand and presented the conservation and ecology-focused journals Neobiota, Nature Conservation, One Ecosystem, and Biodiversity Data Journal. Pensoft also advocated for EuropaBon, who are designing an EU-wide framework for monitoring biodiversity and ecosystem services, and REST-COAST, whose mission is to provide the tools to restore environmental degradation of rivers and coasts. Within both European-funded initiatives, Pensoft is a key dissemination partner that contributes expertise in science communication, scholarly publishing, and the development of digital tools and platforms.

Man holding a certificate.
Joao Pedro Meireles posing with his Best Poster award.

Pensoft presented Joao Pedro Meireles from Utrecht University with the Best Poster Award for his research on pair compatibility in okapis, entitling him to a free publication in one of Pensoft’s open-access journals.

“My study looked at pair compatibility in the zoo breeding programme of Okapi. During breeding introductions, sometimes the male becomes aggressive towards the female and we decided to investigate the potential factors. We ran a survey among all zoos that house the species in Europe and we found that differences in husbandry were linked to the aggressiveness performed by the males.”

Joao Pedro Meireles, Utrecht University

GfÖ Annual Meeting 2023

From the 12th to 16th of September, the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research hosted the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of Germany, Austria and Switzerland in Leipzig, Germany. The meeting welcomed more than 1,100 participants from around the world, including scientists, policymakers, educators, and environmental enthusiasts.

This year’s meeting was held with the theme: “The future of biodiversity – overcoming barriers of taxa, realms and scales.” There was a particular emphasis on future challenges and opportunities facing biodiversity, and how to address and manage these in an interdisciplinary and integrative way. 

Woman standing beside man.
Mrs. Boriana Ovcharova (Pensoft) with Neobiota Editor-in-Chief Prof. Dr. Ingolf Kühn.

Conference participants were welcomed at the Pensoft stand, where they could learn more about the projects EuropaBon and SELINA, which deal with biodiversity, ecosystem and natural capital topics. 

The Pensoft team took great pleasure in talking to attendees about their fantastic journals focused on ecology and biodiversity, including Food and Ecological Systems Modelling Journal, Neobiota, Nature Conservation, One Ecosystem, Vegetation Classification and Survey and Research Ideas and Outcomes, as well as meeting with authors, reviewers and editors.

European Conference on Ecological Modelling

Also in Leipzig, the European Conference on Ecological Modelling took place between the 4th and 8th of September. The event focused on the transformation of how societies deal with natural resources in a world where biodiversity and ecosystem services are at high risk. 

The ECEM 2023 continued a series of conferences launched by the European chapter of ISEM, the International Society for Ecological Modelling. ISEM promotes the international exchange of ideas, scientific results, and general knowledge in the areas of systems’ analysis and simulations in ecology, and the application of ecological modelling for natural resource management.

Pensoft presented its innovative journals in the field of ecology and modelling, such as Nature Conservation, Food and Ecological Systems Modelling Journal and Neobiota, as well as the projects PoshBee and B-GOOD, which aim to help beekeepers and support healthy bee populations where Pensoft acts as the dissemination partner.

The Bundesinstitut für Risikobewertung team presented a poster on the Formal Model format and potential new MiDox formats, unique publication types that can be submitted to Pensoft’s Food and Ecological Modelling Journal.

118th Congress of the Italian Botanical Society

Three men sitting before a projector screen at a conference.
Speakers at the 118th Congress of the Italian Botanical Society.

Pensoft was proud to sponsor the 118th Congress of the Italian Botanical Society, which took place in Pisa, Italy from the 13th to 16th of September. Experts in various fields of Botany gathered to share their research on the following topics:

  • Molecular and cell biology
  • Taxonomy, systematics and evolution
  • Biodiversity
  • Environmental monitoring and policies
  • Biotechnology and applied botany
  • Ecology

Pensoft awarded Emma Cocco, University of Cagliari, and Lucrezia Laccetti, University of Naples Federico II, a free article publication in any of Pensoft’s journals related to botany.  Additionally, Silvia Cannucci, University of Siena, and Flavia Guzzi received the Italian Botanical Society’s support for publishing papers in Italian Botanist for their excellent research.

Four people at a certificate presentation.
Best poster award, presented by Pensoft.

94th Annual Meeting of the Paläontologische Gesellschaft

Finally, between the 18th and 22nd of September, the 94th Annual Meeting of the Paläontologische Gesellschaft was held in Jena, Germany. Pensoft couldn’t make it in person, but still made sure to showcase journals publishing papers in palaeontology, especially Zitteliana and Fossil Record. The international meeting was a great success, and focused on cutting-edge research from palaeobiology, palaeontology, geobiology and related subjects.

Journals promoted by Pensoft at the 94th Annual Meeting of the Paläontologische Gesellschaft.

Summer may be well and truly over, but as a new academic year begins, Pensoft looks forward to attending more conferences, rewarding more incredible research, and connecting with more of the scientific community. Thank you to everyone who contributed to or engaged with Pensoft’s open-access journals this year, and here’s to a successful final quarter of 2023.

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The amazing diversity of the Caribbean pygmy jumping leaves

Pygmy grasshoppers come in many shapes and colors and are often exciting to see, but their taxonomy is a mess.

Guest blog post by Josip Skejo & Niko Kasalo

A lovable mess

Tetrigidae, commonly known as pygmy grasshoppers, are an ancient and diverse family, currently numbering about 2000 species. As their name suggests, tetrigids are very small; their largest representatives are barely several centimeters long, so they might be difficult to spot on a casual stroll through tropical vegetation. However, when they are spotted, they are immediately recognizable by their elongated pronotum, a hard structure that starts behind the head and covers the entire body like a hood. They come in many shapes and colors and are often exciting to see, but this comes with a price—the taxonomy of Tetrigidae, the way they are organized into natural groups, is a mess. This is where we come in.

The mini grasshoppers that outlived dinosaurs: the fascinating world of Tetrigidae

In our latest paper, we dealt with Choriphyllini, a small Caribbean tribe that belongs to the subfamily Cladonotinae. This subfamily had been filling up with unrelated but similar-looking tetrigids for more than a century. It had never been clearly defined so almost everything wingless and robust was assigned to Cladonotinae. We decided to put an end to this by slowly removing the superficially similar genera from the subfamily and describing tribes to group the genera that are clearly related to each other. We piloted this system just last year, when we described the tribe Valalyllini from Madagascar, with only two endemic (and endangered) genera and species.

The diversity and the distribution of the tribe Valalyllini, the Malagasy dead-leaf-like Cladonotinae. Both species are endemic to small areas and are likely endangered because of deforestation. Both species most probably inhabit rainforest leaf litter.

Put the species of Choriphyllini and Valalyllini together, mix them up, and try to guess which belongs where—this is no simple task; they are all doing their impressions of dead leaves that our primate brains struggle to differentiate. And there’s more: such leaf-like grasshoppers live in Africa and South East Asia as well, and then there are those that look like twigs and spiky tree bark.

Only now that we have an idea of what the true Cladonotinae are can we be properly amazed by the duality they represent to us. On the one hand, they are incredibly diverse with every species having its own variation on the basic shape. On the other, they are so alike that they either represent the best example of convergent evolution ever documented or they all stem from a common ancestor that is currently supposed to have lived during the Mesozoic. The evolutionary history of Cladonotinae will take many years to unravel, but the work can only begin after we define what to call by that name.

Valalyllum folium, a member of the tribe Valalyllini, subfamily Cladonotinae. This species, endemic to Madagascar, is a relative of Choriphyllini.

It only took 250 years

The first species of Choriphyllini, Phyllotettix rhombeus, was described in 1765 as Cicada rhombea, that is, as a member of an entirely different order of insects. Continuing in this manner, many authors (including the great Linnaeus himself) made many taxonomic and nomenclatural mistakes that compounded over the centuries and made these grasshoppers difficult to identify and refer to. It didn’t help that new species and new records kept being reported without being contextualized by comprehensive literature reviews. Like detectives, we followed the scattered crumbs of data and arrived at a synthesis that will make future research in the region much more pleasant.

Hancock’s plate I from the “Tettigidae of North America” shows leaf-like Caribbean species under the numbers 1), 2) and 7), but has many taxonomic and nomenclatural errors. 1) – Phyllotettix foliatus (= female holotype of Hancock’s Choriphyllum foliatum), 2) – Phyllotettix rhombeus (= Hancock’s Choriphyllum westwoodi), 7) – Choriphyllum saussurei. (= Hancock’s Phyllonotus saussurei). Source: Biodiversity Heritage Library, available at https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/25899#page/10.

This is not where interesting facts about Phyllotettix rhombeus stop. While looking through the literature, we tried to extract the measurements of drawings. Most of the drawings had a scale bar printed next to them, but the archaic usage of “lines” as the standard measurement initially gave us some trouble. That is why at first we doubted one of our most fascinating discoveries: with the pronotal length measuring nearly 3 centimeters, Phyllotettix rhombeus is the largest tetrigid ever recorded! Many, many authors dealt with this species over the last 250 years, but this record was never made explicit.

It should not go unnoticed now that its proposed common name is “Jamaican Colossal Jumping Leaf”. Inspired by this, we took the measurements of the other species as well and made a figure where all the specimens are resized to a common scale, which shows the diversity of both shapes and sizes.

The genera and species of the tribe Choriphyllini. All specimens are drawn to scale.

Besides P. rhombeus, there are three more species in the genus Phyllotettix: P. plagiatus, P. foliatus, and P. compressus. All four of them are known only from Jamaica. P. foliatus and P. compressus are known from the Blue Mountains, but for the other two no precise localities are known; we still don’t know where exactly the largest tetrigid lives. The other genus of the tribe is Choriphyllum, also with four species. Three of them, C. sagrai, C. saussurei, and C. wallaceum live in Cuba, while C. bahamense is all alone on Hummingbird Cay island in the Bahamas. The easiest way to differentiate these two genera is a little strange but practical, the tallest point of the leaf-like crest in Choriphyllum species is in the front, while in Phyllotettix species it is in the back.

A map of all known Choriphyllini records. For three species, not a single precise locality is known.

Some Caribbean leaves dance and jump

For each species, we proposed a common name as a means to give these animals even more character. Names, such as “Jamaican Bitten Jumping Leaf” and “Old Cuban Dancing Leaf” may not be “official”, but they have certainly found their audience. The tweet in which we shared the collage of all the species was viewed over 17000 times; everyone was amazed by the pretty shapes and some even noted that they especially liked the crazy common names. We were very glad to see our scientific and artistic package that is Choriphyllini be so warmly received.

Another hit on Twitter, with over 20000 views, is the post showcasing the newly-described species from Cuba, Choriphyllum wallaceum. The holotype of this species has been awaiting description for a long time. We found it in Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid, Spain, with a note from Ignacio Bolívar, the father of the Tetrigidae classification system. He referred to it as “Choriphyllum Seoanei” but never managed to publish it.

This “new” species presented us with the perfect opportunity to honor the 200th anniversary of Alfred Russel Wallace’s birth. Wallace is often called the “father of biogeography” but is all too often neglected when discussing the origins of the theory of evolution, with which Charles Darwin is considered synonymous. Wallace, with his independent arrival at the key concepts of the evolutionary theory, his correspondence with Darwin, and his staunch defense of Darwin’s ideas, was (and is) at the very least equal to Darwin and deserves much more recognition than he currently gets.

Choriphyllum wallaceum, a newly-described species from Cuba, named after Alfred Russel Wallace.

This is just the start

Choriphyllini are a pretty package, but one that merely introduces the real problem. The history of this tribe is long, yet we have very few specimens to work with. Although we have an understanding of how morphology varies within species, P. compressus and P. foliatus are not only suspiciously similar to each other, but they also live in the same general area of the Blue Mountains. It remains to be seen if they are in fact a single species.

Much more pressing is that we have only a vague idea of where these animals live and how their populations are impacted by various factors such as human activity and climate change—we do not have a baseline against which to assess their conservation status. Then there is the fact that there are many more islands in the Caribbean, making the possibility of discovering new Choriphyllini species on them real and exciting. We can only guess what the future holds for these neglected animals.

Old Cuban Dancing Leaf (Choriphyllum sagrai) in its natural environment among the leaf litter in Cuba, photographed by Sheyla Yong.

The stage is set; everything we know about this group is laid out in the paper and now there is no path but forward. Research is expensive, dedication to this work takes a certain kind of soul, and everything takes time. It is our sincere hope that someone someday takes this further. The pygmy jumping leaves will wait for as long as they can, on their islands, hopping without a care in the world.

References:

Deranja M, Kasalo N, Adžić K, Franjević D, Skejo J (2022) Lepocranus and Valalyllum gen. nov. (Orthoptera, Tetrigidae, Cladonotinae), endangered Malagasy dead-leaf-like grasshoppers. ZooKeys 1109: 1-15. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.1109.85565

Skejo J, Yong S, Bogić D, Kasalo N (2023) Caribbean pygmy jumping leaves (Tetrigidae, Cladonotinae, Choriphyllini). Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift 70(1): 129-141. https://doi.org/10.3897/dez.70.98982

Pensoft among the first 27 publishers to share prices & services via the Journal Comparison Service by Plan S

All journals published by Pensoft – each using the publisher’s self-developed ARPHA Platform – provide extensive and transparent information about their costs and services in line with the Plan S principles.

In support of transparency and openness in scholarly publishing and academia, the scientific publisher and technology provider Pensoft joined the Journal Comparison Service (JCS) initiative by cOAlition S, an alliance of national funders and charitable bodies working to increase the volume of free-to-read research. 

As a result, all journals published by Pensoft – each using the publisher’s self-developed ARPHA Platform – provide extensive and transparent information about their costs and services in line with the Plan S principles.

The JCS was launched to aid libraries and library consortia – the ones negotiating and participating in Open Access agreements with publishers – by providing them with everything they need to know in order to determine whether the prices charged by a certain journal are fair and corresponding to the quality of the service. 

According to cOAlition S, an increasing number of libraries and library consortia from Europe, Africa, North America, and Australia have registered with the JCS over the past year since the launch of the portal in September 2021.

While access to the JCS is only open to librarians, individual researchers may also make use of the data provided by the participating publishers and their journals. 

This is possible through an integration with the Journal Checker Tool, where researchers can simply enter the name of the journal of interest, their funder and affiliation (if applicable) to check whether the scholarly outlet complies with the Open Access policy of the author’s funder. A full list of all academic titles that provide data to the JCS is also publicly available. By being on the list means a journal and its publisher do not only support cOAlition S, but they also demonstrate that they stand for openness and transparency in scholarly publishing.

“We are delighted that Pensoft, along with a number of other publishers, have shared their price and service data through the Journal Comparison Service. Not only are such publishers demonstrating their commitment to open business models and cultures but are also helping to build understanding and trust within the research community.”

said Robert Kiley, Head of Strategy at cOAlition S. 

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About cOAlition S:

On 4 September 2018, a group of national research funding organisations, with the support of the European Commission and the European Research Council (ERC), announced the launch of cOAlition S, an initiative to make full and immediate Open Access to research publications a reality. It is built around Plan S, which consists of one target and 10 principles. Read more on the cOAlition S website.

About Plan S:

Plan S is an initiative for Open Access publishing that was launched in September 2018. The plan is supported by cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funding and performing organisations. Plan S requires that, from 2021, scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms. Read more on the cOAlition S website.

Pensoft’s ARPHA Publishing Platform integrates with OA Switchboard to streamline reporting to funders of open research

By the time authors open their inboxes to the message their work is online, a similar notification will have also reached their research funder.

Image credit: OA Switchboard.

By the time authors – who have acknowledged third-party financial support in their research papers submitted to a journal using the Pensoft-developed publishing platform: ARPHA – open their inboxes to the congratulatory message that their work has just been published and made available to the wide world, a similar notification will have also reached their research funder.

This automated workflow is already in effect at all journals (co-)published by Pensoft and those published under their own imprint on the ARPHA Platform, as a result of the new partnership with the OA Switchboard: a community-driven initiative with the mission to serve as a central information exchange hub between stakeholders about open access publications, while making things simpler for everyone involved.

All the submitting author needs to do to ensure that their research funder receives a notification about the publication is to select the supporting agency or the scientific project (e.g. a project supported by Horizon Europe) in the manuscript submission form, using a handy drop-down menu. In either case, the message will be sent to the funding body as soon as the paper is published in the respective journal.

“At Pensoft, we are delighted to announce our integration with the OA Switchboard, as this workflow is yet another excellent practice in scholarly publishing that supports transparency in research. Needless to say, funding and financing are cornerstones in scientific work and scholarship, so it is equally important to ensure funding bodies are provided with full, prompt and convenient reports about their own input.”

comments Prof Lyubomir Penev, CEO and founder of Pensoft and ARPHA.

 

“Research funders are one of the three key stakeholder groups in OA Switchboard and are represented in our founding partners. They seek support in demonstrating the extent and impact of their research funding and delivering on their commitment to OA. It is great to see Pensoft has started their integration with OA Switchboard with a focus on this specific group, fulfilling an important need,”

adds Yvonne Campfens, Executive Director of the OA Switchboard.

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About the OA Switchboard:

A global not-for-profit and independent intermediary established in 2020, the OA Switchboard provides a central hub for research funders, institutions and publishers to exchange OA-related publication-level information. Connecting parties and systems, and streamlining communication and the neutral exchange of metadata, the OA Switchboard provides direct, indirect and community benefits: simplicity and transparency, collaboration and interoperability, and efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

About Pensoft:

Pensoft is an independent academic publishing company, well known worldwide for its novel cutting-edge publishing tools, workflows and methods for text and data publishing of journals, books and conference materials.

All journals (co-)published by Pensoft are hosted on Pensoft’s full-featured ARPHA Publishing Platform and published in a way that ensures their content is as FAIR as possible, meaning that it is effortlessly readable, discoverable, harvestable, citable and reusable by both humans and machines.

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Follow OA Switchboard on Twitter and Linkedin.

The first Red List of Taxonomists in Europe is calling for the support of insect specialists

The Red List of Taxonomists portal, where taxonomy experts in the field of entomology can register to help map and assess expertise across Europe, in order to provide action points necessary to overcome the risks, preserve and support this important scientific community, will remain open until 31st October 2021.

About 1,000 insect taxonomists – both professional and citizen scientists – from across the European region have already signed up on the Red List of Taxonomists, a recently launched European Commission-funded initiative by the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the scholarly publisher best-known for its biodiversity-themed journals and high-tech innovations in biodiversity data publishing Pensoft.

Insect taxonomists, both professional and citizen scientists, are welcome to register on the Red List of Taxonomists portal at: red-list-taxonomists.eu and further disseminate the registration portal to fellow taxonomists until 31st October 2021.

Within the one-year project, the partners are to build a database of European taxonomy experts in the field of entomology and analyse the collected data to shed light on the trends in available expertise, including best or least studied insect taxa and geographic distribution of the scientists who are working on those groups. Then, they will present them to policy makers at the European Commission.

By recruiting as many as possible insect taxonomists from across Europe, the Red List of Taxonomists initiative will not only be able to identify taxa and countries, where the “extinction” of insect taxonomists has reached a critical point, but also create a robust knowledge base on taxonomic expertise across the European region to prompt further support and funding for taxonomy in the Old Continent.

On behalf of the project partners, we would like to express our immense gratitude to everyone who has self-declared as an insect taxonomist on the Red List of Taxonomists registration portal. Please feel welcome to share our call for participation with colleagues and social networks to achieve maximum engagement from everyone concerned about the future of taxonomy!

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Read more about the rationale of the Red List of Taxonomists project.

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Follow and join the conversation on Twitter using the #RedListTaxonomists hashtag. 

Recruiting participants to the first European Red list of insect taxonomists

Revolutionary method could bring us much closer to the description of hyperdiverse faunas

A novel approach relying on a short sequence of mitochondrial DNA in conjunction with a lateral image of the holotype specimen was proposed to greatly accelerate species identification and description, especially when it comes to hyperdiverse taxa, such as parasitic wasps.

At today’s rate, it could take another two millennia for science to document all currently existing species of multicellular life

Two hundred and sixty-one years ago, Linnaeus formalized binomial nomenclature and the modern system of naming organisms. Since the time of his first publication, taxonomists have managed to describe 1.8 million of the estimated 8 to 25 million extant species of multicellular life, somewhere between 7% and 22%. At this rate, the task of treating all species would be accomplished sometime before the year 4,000. In an age of alarming environmental crises, where taking measures for the preservation of our planet’s ecosystems through efficient knowledge is becoming increasingly urgent, humanity cannot afford such dawdling.

“Clearly something needs to change to accelerate this rate, and in this publication we propose a novel approach that employs only a short sequence of mitochondrial DNA in conjunction with a lateral image of the holotype specimen,”

explain the researchers behind a new study, published in the open-access journal Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift (DEZ).
Description rate of parasitic wasps species (superfamily
Ichneumonoidea).
Data from Taxapad (Yu et al. 2016).

In standardized practices, it is required that experts conduct plenty of time- and labor-consuming analyses, in order to provide thorough descriptions of both the morphology and genetics of individual species, as well as a long list of characteristic features found to differentiate each from any previously known ones. However, the scientists argue, at this stage, it is impossible to pinpoint distinct morphological characters setting apart all currently known species from the numerous ones not yet encountered. To make matters worse, finding human and financial resources for performing this kind of detailed research is increasingly problematic.

This holds especially true when it comes to hyperdiverse groups, such as ichneumonoid parasitoid wasps: a group of tiny insects believed to comprise up to 1,000,000 species, of which only 44,000 were recognised as valid, according to 2016 data. In their role of parasitoids, these wasps have a key impact on ecosystem stability and diversity. Additionally, many species parasitise the larvae of commercially important pests, so understanding their diversity could help resolve essential issues in agriculture.

Meanwhile, providing a specific species-unique snippet of DNA alongside an image of the specimen used for the description of the species (i.e. holotype) could significantly accelerate the process. By providing a name for a species through a formal description, researchers would allow for their successors to easily build on their discoveries and eventually reach crucial scientific conclusions.

“If this style were to be adopted by a large portion of the taxonomic community, the mission of documenting Earth’s multicellular life could be accomplished in a few generations, provided these organisms are still here,”

say the authors of the study.

To exemplify their revolutionary approach, the scientists use their paper to also describe a total of 18 new species of wasps in two genera (Zelomorpha and Hemichoma) known from Área de Conservación Guanacaste, Costa Rica. Currently, the team works on the treatment of related species, which still comprise only a portion of the hundreds of thousands that remain unnamed.

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Original source:

Meierotto S, Sharkey MJ, Janzen DH, Hallwachs W, Hebert PDN, Chapman EG, Smith MA (2019) A revolutionary protocol to describe understudied hyperdiverse taxa and overcome the taxonomic impediment. Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift 66(2): 119-145. https://doi.org/10.3897/dez.66.34683

The world’s 3rd oldest entomological journal Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift (DEZ) turns 160 years

Near the closure of an extremely successful year at Pensoft, we’re pleased to be part of yet another great celebration – the 160th anniversary of the Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift (DEZ) journal.

Being the third oldest of world’s currently existing entomological periodicals, the Museum für Naturkunde’s historical journal has never ceased to progressively make a difference in the world of systematic entomology, as well as science in general.

Originally founded in the distant 1857 under the name of Berliner Entomologische Zeitschrift by the young and dedicated visionary Ernst Gustav Kraatz and the Berliner Entomologischer Verein (BEV) society, the journal was intended to turn into the publishing platform of the soon to be established German Entomological Society (Deutsche Entomologische Gesellschaft).  

The journal managed to overcome a number of perils, which dominated the first fifty years of its existence. Those included two world wars, splitting of the society and personal controversies. Nevertheless, the title was only to rise like a phoenix from the ashes. In retrospect, the journal has published the astonishing total of 22,613 species new to science.

Most of the credit to all those glorious defeats goes to the Kraatz, who promoted a number of nomenclature rules and practices in entomology that scientists abide by to this day.

Amongst the latest steps in building DEZ’s excellent and solid reputation was joining the ranks of openly accessible academic titles when it moved to Pensoft – a scholarly publisher well-known for its dedication to transparent and easily discoverable open science.

In an era, where specimens were commonly kept in personal collections and curators could deny or allow access to material at their sole discretion, Kraatz was already a fervent proponent of inclusive and facilitated access to knowledge. It was his desire to help any entomology aficionado that made him plan and eventually establish the Entomological National Museum to bring together the collections and libraries of all German entomologists. The institution is still standing today under the name of DEI – Deutsches Entomologisches Institut.

“It would have certainly pleased Gustav Kraatz that since the transfer of the DEZ to open access with Pensoft in 2014 all articles are freely accessible to anyone anywhere in the world, likewise facilitating the access to knowledge,” says the journal’s Editor-in-Chief Dr. Dominique Zimmermann.

“Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift is the journal I’ve grown up with as entomologist some 30 years ago,” adds Prof. Lyubomir Penev, Pensoft’s founder and CEO. “At that time it was published in East Germany, hence it was easy to access, read and publish with if you were an Eastern European scientist. It’s delightful for me to be part of this iconic title’s journey on the road to next-generation technology, innovation and openness.”

At Pensoft, we would like to congratulate all editors, authors and reviewers of DEZ for yet another conquered milestone and express our deepest gratitude for sharing this marvelous achievement with us.

We are looking forward to many more decades of disseminating the finest of entomological research with the world!

A special Editorial was recently published in DEZ to celebrate the anniversary and conclude the journal for 2017.

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New blind and rare planthopper species and genus dwells exclusively in a Brazilian cave

This cave planthopper species new to science is only the second dwelling exclusively in the subterranean depths of Brazil from its family. Surviving without seeing the light of the day at any point of its life, this species has neither the eyes, nor the vivid colouration, nor the functional wings typical for its relatives.

Yet, these are only part of the reasons why the new planthopper needed to have a separate new genus established for itself. The new species is described by a research team from the Center of Studies on Subterranean Biology, Brazil, in the open access journal Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift.

The planthopper is called Iuiuia caeca, with the genus name (Iuiuia) referring to the locality, where it was found, and its species name (caeca) translating to ‘blind’ in Latin. It is predominantly yellowish insect that measures only 3 mm, which is small even by planthopper standards.

At first glance, the new cave planthopper appears as if it has been hiding from human eyes all along. So far, it has been located in a single cave in the Iuiú municipality, Bahia state, Brazil, where the team of Prof. Rodrigo Ferreira, Federal University of Lavras (UFLA), Brazil, spotted the insect. He then contacted cave planthopper specialist at the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, Prof. Hannelore Hoch, and collaboratively they decided to document and describe the new species. The limestone cave is yet to be fully explored since it floods during the rainy periods.Image 2

In the meantime, the cave’s only entrance is a small opening, which, on the other hand, clearly imposes a huge stability to the atmosphere. Moreover, although the researchers visited the cave on five occasions, they managed to find the species on two of them only. The planthopper was nowhere to be find in the neighbouring subterranean habitats either, which strongly suggests that it is a rare short-range endemic.

Being such a rarity, the blind new planthopper ought to be on the conservation radar. Although the scientists did not notice any signs of the cave having ever been visited by humans before; and its immediate surroundings have not been impacted by mining activities, yet, such threat is not to be excluded. In fact, the area is being currently evaluated for its potential for limestone extraction.

“It is to be hoped that legal measures for the conservation of the subterranean fauna of Brazil – which constitutes one of the country’s unique biological resources – will be developed and consequently reinforced,” conclude the authors.

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Original source:

Hoch H, Ferreira RL (2016) Iuiuia caeca gen. n., sp. n., a new troglobitic planthopper in the family Kinnaridae (Hemiptera, Fulgoromorpha) from Brazil. Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift63(2): 171-181. doi: 10.3897/dez.63.8432