Tag: Dominican Republic

New click beetle species named after Dominican Republic’s Indigenous Arawak people

Lissomus arawak measures under a centimetre long and is easily recognised by its shining and almost hairless black body, alongside its pale-yellow antennae segments.

A new species of click beetle with a glossy and highly domed black body has been described from cloud forest sites in the mountains of the Dominican Republic, and named in honour of the Arawak peoples who lived on the island before European colonisation.

Lissomus arawak measures under a centimetre long and is easily recognised by its shining and almost hairless black body, alongside its pale-yellow antennae segments. It is only the third species of the genus Lissomus known from Hispaniola, and the third recorded anywhere in the Greater Antilles.

  • Lissomus arawak, dorsal habitus. Image by J. Pirkl, 2025, used with permission.
  • Lissomus arawak, ventral habitus. Image by J. Pirkl, 2025, used with permission.
  • Lissomus arawak, lateral habitus. Image by J. Pirkl, 2025, used with permission.

The study, published in the open-access journal Alpine Entomology, was carried out by Paul J. Johnson of South Dakota State University and Jiri Hodecek of the Swiss Human Institute of Forensic Taphonomy, as part of an ongoing survey of Dominican insect life. Specimens were found at three sites in montane broadleaf and cloud forest between roughly 600 and 700 metres, near the Sierra de Bahoruco and in the Cordillera Septentrional.

Rather than resembling the two other Lissomus species already known from Hispaniola, the new beetle turned out to be structurally closer to species from Central and northern South America.

“The morphological differences suggest that the Lissomus species of Hispaniola may not all descend from a single colonisation event.

One possible explanation is therefore that ancestors of these beetles reached the Greater Antilles on at least two separate occasions. This remains a testable hypothesis rather than a demonstrated evolutionary history.”

The Research Team

The species is known from just five specimens, collected individually between 1985 and 2024, all of them female.

“With such a small sample, chance and the opportunistic nature of the collecting are probably the simplest explanations. This does not seriously weaken our confidence that L. arawak is distinct. All five females share a consistent and unique combination of morphological characters.”

The Research Team
Type locality of Lissomus arawak in Pedernales province (el. 700 m).

The name is a deliberate tribute to the island’s first inhabitants:

“We chose the name arawak to recognise the Indigenous history and continuing cultural heritage of the Antilles. We wanted the name of this distinctive endemic species to connect the biological history of the island with its human history.”

The discovery forms part of a wider effort, they added, “to document the island’s still incompletely known insect diversity,” with at least 15 further click beetle species thought to await description in the Dominican Republic alone.

The discovery forms part of EntomoDR, a long-term field and taxonomy project documenting the still incompletely known insect diversity of the Dominican Republic through repeated expeditions and collaboration with an international network of taxonomic specialists. More information about the project and its discoveries is available at https://entomodr.com

Original source:

Johnson PJ, Hodecek J (2026) Lissomus arawak sp. nov. (Coleoptera, Elateridae), a new species from the Dominican Republic. Alpine Entomology 10: 155-161. https://doi.org/10.3897/alpento.10.193434

Parasite vs. Invader: New endoparasitoid wasp can save the Dominican Republic economy

While biocontrol agents come in different shapes, often taking a lot of time for scientists to research, test and produce, natural ones always seem to be the better option. Now that Drs. Taveras and Hansson have discovered a new parasitoid wasp species in the Dominican Republic, they might have not only met the worst natural enemy for a widely spread invasive pest corrupting a large part of the essential pigeon pea crops. They are likely to have found a whole new field for investigation into the potential weapons against the eradicator of up to 76% of the essential crop. Their study is available in the open access Journal of Hymenoptera Research.

The find of this new gregarious endoparasitoid wasp, called Pediobius cajanus, is also the first time representative of this genus has been retrieved from the Asian fly. This invasive pest is estimated to destroy a huge part of the pigeon pea crops, a culture which is an essential food source for tropical America, a large part of the export and even has medicinal value. Therefore, the new species is very important not only in terms of the exploration of the biodiversity in Latin America, but also in economical sense.

Even when treated regularly with insecticides, the Asian fly manages to corrupt as much as 27% of the Dominican pigeon pea crops, a previous study shows. Although a precise figure of the damage cannot be provided due to large variations between localities and the impossibility of tracking the whole span of the pea cultivation areas, there is the case of the town of Rancho Los Vargas, Puerto Plata, where in 2012 the loss of the culture reached 76%.

On the other hand, the new wasp species was found to kill an average of 25% of the Asian fly larvae in the researched areas. In comparison, the previously known enemies of the pest are accountable for only 2%. This is why the scientists are now proposing the new species as a biocontrol agent.

In conclusion, the authors suggest that the parasitoid wasp is likely distributed across a much larger area. They believe that the new species could also be found over the entire island of Hispaniola, on neighbouring islands in the Caribbean and even in the tropical parts of the mainland in the Americas. Its record and distribution both call for a further investigation into the potential implementation of the wasp in controlling the Asian fly.

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Original source:

Taveras R, Hansson C (2015) Pediobius cajanus sp. n. (Hymenoptera, Eulophidae), an important natural enemy of the Asian fly (Melanagromyza obtusa (Malloch)) (Diptera, Agromyzidae) in the Dominican Republic. Journal of Hymenoptera Research 45: 41-54. doi: 10.3897/JHR.45.4964