Nature is replete with examples of identifiable populations known from different continents, mountain ranges, islands or lowland regions. While, traditionally, many of these have been treated as subspecies of widely-ranging species, recent studies relying on molecular biology have shown that many former “subspecies” have in fact been isolated for millions of years, which is long […]
New animal species are sometimes named after celebrities because of their trademark looks. That’s how we got the blonde-haired Donald Trump moth and the big-armed Arnold Schwarzenegger fly, to name a few. However, some well-known people are enshrined in animal names not for their looks, but rather for what they do for the environment. This is exactly how a […]
Since 1888, a lone crab species living in an extraordinary symbiosis has been considered to be one of its kind At the turn of the twentieth century, two independent marine scientists – JR Henderson in 1888, and A Alcock in 1899, described two unusual blanket-hermit crabs from the Indo-West Pacific. Unlike other hermit crabs, these […]
In an effort to improve the quality of biodiversity records, the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) use automated data processing to check individual data items. The records are provided to the ALA and GBIF by museums, herbaria and other biodiversity data sources. However, an independent analysis of such records reports that ALA […]
Amongst the countless fascinating plants and animals inhabiting the tropical rainforests of Southeast Asia, there are the spectacular “exploding ants”, a group of arboreal, canopy dwelling ants nicknamed for their unique defensive behaviour. When threatened by other insects, minor workers can actively rupture their body wall. Apart from leading to the ants’ imminent death, the […]
New members have joined the ranks of the snout moths – one of the largest groups within the insect order known formally as Lepidoptera, comprising all moths and butterflies. Recently, taxonomists Dr. Mingqiang Wang, Dr. Fuqiang Chen, Prof. Chaodong Zhu and Prof. Chunsheng Wu of the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences described two […]
Evolutionary Systematics is the latest authoritative journal to join the lines of the open access titles published on the Pensoft-developed technologically advanced journal publishing platform ARPHA. Launched in 1884 and 1912, respectively, University of Hamburg’s journal Mitteilungen aus dem Hamburgischen Zoologischen Museum und Institut and Entomologische Mitteilungen are now resurrected under the name of Evolutionary Systematics. Rebranded and refreshed, the journal has acquired […]
The discovery of a new subspecies of longhorn beetle from Scandinavia triggered a discussion on the vague organism classification rank ‘subspecies’. As a result, a newly proposed definition of subspecies has been published along with the description of the taxon in the open access journal ZooKeys by the research team of Henrik Wallin and Johannes Bergsten from […]
Vladimir Lukhtanov, entomologist and evolutionary biologist at the Zoological Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, made a startling discovery: what people had thought was a population of a common species, turned out to be a whole new organism and, moreover – one with an interesting evolutionary history. This new species is named Acentria’s fritillary (Melitaea acentria) […]
Much like gym enthusiasts, every year Asiatic black bears seem to be on the lookout for protein-rich food ahead of the summer, so that they can bulk up on lean muscle mass in place of the fat tissue formed last year prior to hibernation. This was concluded in a study by Dr. Shino Furusaka, Tokyo […]