America's Cup revamped

The America's Cup World Series had it's first winner today, and of course I'm happy because Team New Zealand won it. I've always been keen on the America's Cup, but I dare say that the latest revamp of the competition has me excited. The boats look cool, go fast, and having them essentially identical between competitors makes the competition less an arms race and more a test of sailing. The Russell Coutts/Dean Barker rivalry is still In addition, having a lead up to the main event with regattas in multiple locations will make the competition more accessable and will hopefully diminish the (valid) criticisms that the America's cup was becoming merely a distraction for the rich. Sure, there's still an awful amount of money being spent on the water there, but at least it looks cooler now... It's been in Portugal for the last week or so, and is moving to Plymouth, UK in mid-September.

Watch the replay of the 14 August fleet race here

New Zealand Weevil Image Database now online

In the last couple of days, the TFBIS funded New Zealand Weevil Image Database has been put online. The project involves taking high-quality photos of representatives of every weevil genus (including the Etheophanus sp. shown above) known from New Zealand. It is a great effort, and one that I will make full use of in my research. Not only will it help assisting others to identify NZ weevils, but it will also serve as a useful aid for overseas workers wanting to become familiar with the diversity of weevils in this country, and help in the efforts to produce a coherent classification of the world weevil fauna. Mainly though, it is a splendid showcase of the diversity and beauty of the weevils in NZ, and shows some of the extraordinary forms of many of our species. My picks for the most bizarre are Stephanorhynchus, Geochus, Ectopsis and Colabotelus.

Simplifying polygon shapefiles in R

Recently I downloaded the Crosby Code shapefile from Landcare Research's LRIS server for use in some publications I'm preparing. This shapefile is incredibly detailed, far more so than what I require. This detail means that it takes a while for the map to be plotted each time. As detail is less important for me than speed of plotting, I decided to try and simplify the map.

Pseudoscorpions

Pseudoscorpions are reasonably common, though inconspicuous, creatures that are found in a range of environments, particularly soil and leaf litter. They are predacious, feeding on things like springtails, bark lice and other invertebrates that they catch with their pedipalps.

I've been interested in pseudoscorpions for quite some time, though I have not yet deliberately retained specimens or allowed myself time to look at them. I recently stumbled across a site that contains a lot of useful information for the budding pseudoscorpion enthusiast. The pseudoscorpion site contains information on how to collect, preserve and identify these usually overlooked creatures.

For those interested in the New Zealand fauna, Max Beier published a key to the species of New Zealand and Norfolk Island in 1976 It is available online here on the Bugz Bibliography of New Zealand Insects Online. Beier also published on the pseudoscorpions of Micronesia, also available on Bugz.

NB: Bugz unfortunately does not provide completely stable URLs for the papers in the database. If the direct links to the papers do not work, search Bugz manually for access to the papers.


References:
Beier M. 1976. The pseudoscorpions of New Zealand, Norfolk and Lord Howe. New Zealand Journal of Zoology 3(3):199-246

Beier M. 1957. Pseudoscorpionida. Insects of Micronesia 3(1):1-64

Freely available Digital Elevation Models for New Zealand

For people wanting to view aspects of New Zealand's amazing topography, a number of Digital Elevation Models are freely available from Geographx, a company specialising in producing New Zealand geographic information and atlases. Thanks Geographx!

GIS Shapefile of DOC-administered land

The New Zealand Department of Conservation, fondly known as DOC is the department in charge of the bulk of New Zealand's publically owned land. Their best known pieces of real estate are the 14 national parks that conserve some of New Zealand's most iconic landscapes and least modified habitats. Less well known are the legion of scenic reserves and conservation areas that make up a substantial portion of our property. These smaller reserves are no less interesting, and tend to protect small but important areas of near-natural habitat, or intriguing aspects of New Zealand history. Until now, the main way of finding out about them is by stumbling across them while on a road trip, or by word-of-mouth. However, now DOC has released a GIS shapefile that shows the boundaries of all the conservation estate, along with information on what acts of parliament they're protected under and how large the reserve is.

It is important to note that this shapefile only shows those reserves in DOC's ownership and management. Thus, it does not show community-initiated reserves such as Maungatautari Ecological Island or QEII Covenants; nor does it show reserves owned by city councils, like the Auckland Regional Parks or Christchurch's Port Hills Reserves.

Canterbury Earthquake

4:35 am on Saturday morning, I was woken up by a 7.1 magnitude earthquake, the epicentre being approximately 30 km west of where I live in Christchurch, New Zealand. The earthquake was one of the largest that New Zealand has experienced, and has been the most destructive one since the earthquake that struck Napier in 1931. Thankfully, the suburbs around the area that I live in suffered minimal damage, with most roads and houses essentially unscathed.

While the initial earthquake was fairly scary, it has been the aftershocks that have been the most unnerving. By this time we're starting to get fairly used to them, but they are still keeping all of us on edge. There's been a number, and now that I have access to the internet, I made it my mission to find out how many there's been thus far. The New Zealand Herald newspaper has published an online article showing the locations of all the aftershocks, but a bit scant on other details.

The New Zealand research institute Geological and Nuclear Sciences (GNS) is the primary monitor of New Zealand's earthquakes and makes all their data available online. In particular their Quake Search tool allows you to download CSV, KML and other files of any earthquakes that satisfy any given criteria. The GeoNet website in general is an excellent source of all sorts of information with regard to natural hazards in the New Zealand region.

I downloaded the data for the past week and started pulling out a bunch of trends. The two that I'll post here for now are the following:

Until 6 Sep 2010 19:03 NZST there has been 257 aftershocks, ranging between 2.4 and 5.4 on the Richter scale. Of these, there have been 64 with magnitudes above 4; 24 above 4.5; and 7 above 5. The average has been 3.6.



The comparison between the earthquakes recorded prior to and following the earthquake is remarkable. The four days prior to the earthquake there were no earthquakes originating within the Canterbury region (defined as being between 42--44 degrees S and 171--173 degrees E). Since Saturday morning, the region has been shaking like nothing else.



A line plot only of the Canterbury earthquakes does show that the aftershocks are lessening in frequency and intensity. Further playing around with the data and the plot might show this more effectively though.



A plot comparing the magnitude of each quake with its depth is quite interesting. The vast majority of the Canterbury earthquakes are fairly shallow (<20 km). Once again, further analysis will show if this is a significant thing or not, but it does explain why they've been so easily felt.

Feel free to look at the R code and the CSV file I used for the plots above.

Crosby Codes

Entomologists with any interest in the New Zealand fauna will no doubt have come across the two-letter codes affectionately known as "Crosby codes". These codes denote geographical regions in New Zealand and are used for the purposes of grouping and retrieving specimens. They are named after Trevor Crosby, the lead author of two papers in 1976 and 1998 where these codes were defined. The 1998 paper expanded the codes to include New Zealand's offshore islands, and includes written descriptions of the boundaries between each region.

The codes have proved to be very useful in the entomological context, and have also been used in many other fields where the distribution within New Zealand is important.

Reference:

Crosby TK, Dugdale JS, Watt JC. 1976. Recording specimen localities in New Zeland: an arbitrary system of areas and codes defined. New Zealand Journal of Zoology 3:69 + map.

Crosby TK, Dugdale JS, Watt JC. 1998. Area codes for recording specimen localities in the New Zealand subregion. New Zealand Journal of Zoology.25:175-183

A mystery... scale insects on European manuka

Manuka (Leptospermum scoparium) is native to New Zealand and southeast Australia. It is common throughout New Zealand and is well known for being the source of manuka honey which is sought after for its healing properties, and for being a good source of firewood (particularly for smoking fish). Its trait of having numerous white flowers has also ensured that it is fairly commonly grown as a garden plant, and so has been exported around the world for this purpose.

So when a scale insect that apparently is specific to the plant is found in Italy and Corsica in 2004 and 2006, one would imagine that it came from New Zealand or Australia right?

Acanthococcus mariannae was described yesterday in a Zootaxa paper by Giuseppina Pellizzari and Jean-François Germain. The 30 or so specimens that went into the description were all collected from manuka from Italy and France. Surprisingly though, despite the author's (reasonable) assumption that the insect was introduced to these countries on the plants, this species has not (yet?) been found in either New Zealand or Australia. Moreover, specialists familiar with scale insects in these countries had not noticed it before. While it is likely that further searching will reveal it on manuka in NZ or Australia. However there is the lingering question: if it's not, where did it come from and how has it started attacking manuka?

Scale insects aren't glamorous. They are little more than a bag of fluid that get sap pumped into them. But they are important in a properly functioning ecosystem; and when they get out of control the consequences can be severe. This can be illustrated by an example that also involves manuka: the incidence of manuka blight in New Zealand in the 1940s and 1960s.

Manuka naturally harbours large numbers of the scale insect Coelostomidia wairoensis which produces a lot of honeydew. This in turn provides a food source for the sooty mould Capnodium walteri which covers the branches of manuka forming thick, black deposits.

In the late 1930s manuka in Canterbury (South Island of New Zealand) started to grow sick and die. By the late 1940s it was reported that it was hard to find living manuka in the region. Farmers assisted in the spread by moving infected manuka around the country to control what they viewed as a weed. The culprits were found to be two species of Eriococcus scale insect that presumably had been introduced from Australia. The effect on the plant appears to be due to nutrient stress from having large numbers of scale insects sucking on it as opposed to being a disease transmitted by the insects.

In 1957 it was discovered that a fungus was killing E. orariensis, the species that damaged manuka most severely. Subsequently, the numbers of this scale insect declined dramatically with a corresponding increase in manuka numbers. Manuka has also seen a rise in popularity and is no longer viewed as being as significant a weed.

References:

Epenjijsen CW, Henderson RC, Carpenter A, Burge GK. 2000. The rise and fall of manuka blight scale: a review of the distribution of Eriococcus orariensis (Hemiptera: Eriococcidae) in New Zealand. New Zealand Entomologist 23: 67-70.

Pellizzari G, Germain J-F. 2010. A new species of Acanthococcus (Hemiptera, Coccoidea, Eriococcidae) on Leptospermum scoparium (Myrtaceae) from Italy and France. Zootaxa 2543: 51-63

Lots of undescribed species!!!

This August, a seminal paper was published by the Entomological Society of New Zealand's news bulletin The Weta. I am of course, talking about the note entitled "Insects associated with the mature seedheads of Buddleja davidii Franchet (Scrophulariaceae)" written by yours truly. It is my first entomological paper of sorts, and as such I am relatively pleased with it.

It came about when doing some work to finish off my undergrad degree and I ended up seiving some buddleja seedheads to get the seeds. I was surprised to see lots of insects in the seedheads and so I decided to keep them and identify them for my own interest. What interested me most was the diversity of insects, particularly ones which are considered to be native to New Zealand. You tend not to expect such high numbers of indigenous species on introduced weeds. At least I didn't.

The other things which really interested me was finding three undescribed wasp species. This really brought home to me how much we don't know about the world around us. It also gave me an interesting story to tell people who express surprise when I tell them that there are still lots of insects to describe.

For a paper that was somewhat of an afterthought, it's not too bad I reckon. Let me know what you think though....