"Scientist at Work" —NY Times blog

The New York Times website has been hosting a series devoted to scientific expeditions and activity—the "Scientist at Work" blog. Of particular interest are the articles by Chris Filardi. Chris is an ornithologist based at the American Museum of Natural History, but who has done a lot of work on the avifauna of Melanesia. He writes about a trip to Kolombangara Island in the Western Province of the Solomons.

Other contributors to the series are icthyologist Melanie Stiassny and mathematician Ron Eglash with current contributors ornithologist Douglas Stotz and botanist Nigel Pitman currently talking about a trip to South America

Solomon Island Caddisflies

Caddisflies (order Trichoptera) are one of the major groups of aquatic insects, well known for building cute cases out of sand, grit and other detritus.

While having a fair number of species, relatively little is known about the group in the Pacific, with the exception of some excellent work being done on the New Caledonian fauna. That being the case, it was excellent to see that nine species were described in a paper recently published in Zootaxa, authored by Kjell Arne Johansen, the man behind the current work on New Caledonian Trichoptera. With only 16 species previously described from the islands, this represents a fairly sizable addition to our knowledge of the caddisflies of the Solomon Islands.

References:

Johansen KA, Espeland M. 2010. Description of new Chimarra (Trichoptera: Philopotamidae) species from the Solomon Islands. Zootaxa 2638:25-43

Featured insect: Pantorhytes plutus (Coleoptera: Curculionidae)

The weevil genus Pantorhytes is a large genus placed in the tribe Pachyrhynchini in the subfamily Entiminae. It consists of over 74 species found primarily in New Guinea, but also being found in the Solomon Islands and Queensland. The species pictured here, P. plutus is found in the Bismarck Archipelago. A map showing the distribution of specimens in the Australian National Insect Collection (see here also) can be found here

Pantorhytes plutus and a number of other species in the genus have become major pests of cacao trees, particularly in PNG. All the species have fairly limited ranges, such that P. szentivanyi, P. albopunctulatus and P. healyi are pests in the Northern Province of PNG, P. torricellianus is a problem in the Sepik region, P. plutus through the Bismarcks, and P. biplagiatus through Bougainville and the Solomon Islands. The genus has had a surprisingly large amount of study done on their biology, including egg development, and control. A couple of studies have looked at their dispersal, including one study that used a radioactive isotope tracing technique, which provided theoretical insight into mathematical models of insect dispersal. A parasitic wasp, Pristocera rufa is known to parasitize P. szentivanyi, though not to such an extent as to be a reliable biological control agent.


They are such a threat, they have made it onto a page detailing the world's worst cocoa problems (though I cannot find any other evidence that Pantorhytes are in Tuvalu), and accordingly there's been a number of studies dealing to their control (such as this one and this one).Biopesticides, including Beauveria bassiana have also proved to be of use in their control. A photo of an infected beetle is shown above.

A circular detailing their control in the Solomon Islands recommends using ants as a form of biological control. Unfortunately, two of the species they recommend for this control are the yellow crazy ant (Anopolepis gracilipes) and the little fire ant (Wasmannia auropunctata). Both these species are highly invasive generalist predators and scavengers which have adverse effects on more than just Pantorhytes weevils in cacao plantations. Should they already be present in the area, their use as a control agent may be encouraged, but they should NOT be introduced anywhere for that purpose if they aren't already there.

References:
Gressitt JL. 1966. The weevil genus Pantorhytes (Coleoptera) involving cacao pests and epizoic symbiosis with cryptogamic plants and microfauna. Pacific Insects 8(4):915-965.
Setliff GP. 2007. Annotated checklist of weevils from the Papuan region (Coleoptera: Curculionoidea). Zootaxa 1536. 296pp.
Stibick JNL. 1978. The genus Pantorhytes (Coleoptera: Curculionidae) Division A. I Addistions and changes to the common and major cacao species. Pacific Insects 18(3&4):115-136.

Agriculture in the Pacific

Agriculture in developing countries is an area where a lot of international assistance and aid money goes. A lot of hard work, interesting information and useful resources are the fruits of these activities. Unfortunately though, this information can get easily lost in the morass of information that is the internet. The following is my humble attempt to promote a few of the sites I know that are relevant to Agriculture in the South Pacific, in addition to the ACIAR and SPC Forestry pamphlets I've talked about before.

Terracircle is an NGO that works primarily in Melanesia promoting sustainable agriculture through technical training, publications, consultancy and the provision of small grants for communities.

Working in close association with Terracircle is the Kastom Gaden Association (another website is under construction here) and the Planting Material Network, both based in the Solomon Islands. Both these organisations operate much more on the grass-roots level, connecting farmers within the Solomons to each other and encouraging communication at that level.

The Melanesian Farmer First Network is broader in scope than the two above, supporting farmers throughout PNG, the Solomons and Vanuatu. I liked the Innovations page on their site, though unfortunately it is only very infrequently updated.

OISAT (or the "Online Information Service for Non-Chemical Pest Management in the Tropics" in full) aims to detail control methods for tropical crops and pests. It seems to have more of a focus on Asia, but the information that is here will be of worth in most places with these crops and pests. It is currently fairly incomplete, with few of the insects in the Pest Management strategy having any information beyond a picture. However, there was a note saying the page had been updated in some form a day ago, so there is hope that this will change in the future.

Conservation Biology papers with a Pacific focus

The most recent (April 2010) issue of Conservation Biology has a number of papers which focus on the fauna, flora and environment of the South Pacific.

The issue starts off with an editorial by David Melick on economic schemes to negate carbon emissions. In particular he deals with the scheme to compensate landowners for NOT cutting down forests on their land (REDD) and the way this has played out thus far in the Papua New Guinea scene. He ends with this very pertinent statement:

... REDD will come to nothing if the system is not supported by the people who own and live in the forests. If the process is not rushed (it may take years, not months) and the PNG government is willing to accept international scrutiny and advice, forest governance and communitybenefits for the rural poor may finally be improved significantly...

Highly relevant for all who work in the South Pacific, particularly those of us with a western, productivity-based mindset. As the Mainland cheese ads say---Good things take time.

William Laurance and others discuss the impact of Oil Palm cultivation and some of the issues and opportunities surrounding it. In particular, they discuss the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) a nonprofit organisation that hopes to promote and market sustainably grown palm oil. Unfortunately, its track record appears to be fairly poor. The seeming blind eye the organisation has taken toward the destruction caused by growing oil palm in peat swamps is singled out as being a major failing of the RSPO. however Laurance et al. refuse to be pessimistic about the situation and make some recommendations, most of which involve fairly major restructuring of the RSPO and developments in its monitoring and enforcement policies. However, the real problem in the situation is the lack of market demand for sustainably grown palm oil, meaning that the RSPO has little clout.

Alison Boyer revisits the very high extinction rate of Pacific Island birds, this time investigating what ecological traits seem to have an influence on extinction rate. She concludes that differences in endemism, body size and diet influence the potential for extinction and gives a list of bird species that may be worthy of a higher threat category than currently given.

Shankar Aswani and Armagan Sabetian look at the impact that urbanisation has had on the parrotfish population around Gizo and Munda, in the Western Province of the Solomon Islands. Not surprisingly, they found that over the period 2004--2005 parrotfish numbers decreased around Gizo. However, they did find that some customary management systems were effectively preserving larger and greater numbers of parrotfish. The most effective systems were those that prevented all fishing in certain areas.

Mayeul Dalleau and team looked at shallow marine habitats around Wallis Island and used digital imagery and habitat maps as surrogates for biodiversity in the proposal of marine protected areas. While they promote this method as being an effective and efficient of surveying large areas, they do recognise that it is very desirable to do some actual field work to complement the habitat data, particularly in regions such as the Red Sea which has a very different environment from the oceanic Pacific islands.

It's a good issue. Well worth a read, certainly if any of the above issues pique your interest.

References:

Aswani S, Sabetian A. 2010. Implications of Urbanization for Artisanal Parrotfish Fisheries in the Western Solomon Islands. Conservation Biology 24(2): 520-530

Boyer AG. 2010. Consistent Ecological Selectivity through Time in Pacific Island Avian Extinctions Conservation Biology 24(2): 511-519

Dalleau M, Andréfouët S, Wabnitz CCC, Payri C, Wantiez L, Pichon M, Friedman K, Vigliola L, Benzoni F. 2010. Use of Habitats as Surrogates of Biodiversity for Efficient Coral Reef Conservation Planning in Pacific Ocean Islands. Conservation Biology 24(2): 541-552

Laurance WF, Koh LP, Butler R, Sodhi NS, Bradshaw CJA, Neidel JD, Consunji H, Vega JM. 2010. Improving the Performance of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil for Nature Conservation. Conservation Biology 24(2): p 377-381

Melick, D. 2010. Credibility of REDD and Experiences from Papua New Guinea. Conservation Biology 24(2): 359-361

Featured insect: Platytenes occultus (Coleoptera: Curculionidae)

Last year, Gregory Setliff (of New Guinea weevil checklist fame) and Peter Larson described Platytenes occultus, a handsome, widespread and common weevil found throughout the Solomon Islands including Bougainville. Until this time, this species has been mistaken for Platytenes varius; until now the only known member of the genus. Platytenes varius is much more widespread, being found from Sulawesi, to New Britain and the Cape York Peninsula. These weevils are part of the subfamily Cryptorhynchinae which are found throughout the world. Most species localised in distribution and so the wide range of both Platytenes species is remarkable.

Both species of Platytenes are frequently found in association with the betel nut palm (Areca catechu) which is grown throughout the Solomon Islands, New Guinea and the Molluccan islands for its fruits which are chewed with pepper leaves and lime powder as a stimulant. This suggests that the wide range of these species may be due to human-mediated movement through the historic trade of betel nuts and palms within the region.

In keeping with typical cryptorhynchine development, the Platytenes species have been reared from wood. As yet, there are no records of specimens being reared from betel palm; rather they've been reared from Ficus and Nauclea species.

This paper is a well-described, thorough description of a very attractive weevil and one which may have some economic impact due to its (as yet improperly determined) association with betel nut palms. Gregory Setliff has already produced an essential checklist for anyone interested in weevils of the region, and this paper further confirms that he's someone to watch with great interest in anticipation of more great work such as this.


References:
Setliff GP, Larson PA. 2009. The Indo-Australian weevil genus Platytenes Pascoe, 1870 (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Cryptorhynchinae). Insecta Mundi 00-79: 1-14.

Earthquake maps

There's been a number of earthquakes in the Solomon Islands over the past few days, including one that caused a tsunami to partially destroy the village of Baniata on Rendova, Western Provence. You can see exactly how many earthquakes have occurred there by heading over to http://maps.google.com and pasting into the search box this url: http://www.sdjbrown.110mb.com/equake.kml.

I created that map using data from the USGS Earthquake Hazard program and whipping up an R script to create the KML file. Up to that stage it was pretty easy. Creating the different icons was a little more difficult and required a crash course in the kml specifications, how they differ in Google maps and where to find icons for use in the map (and here too). All in all, it required too much playing around than I should really afford at the moment, but I ended up learning a lot of stuff. There's a number of other things which could be done with this setup, but I probably should go back to doing something important....

Fire ant origins and genetics

The fire ant Wasmannia auropunctata is one of the most annoying things in the Solomon Islands. They have a very irritating and itchy bite, are so small as to be invisible, and they have a penchant for living in your underwear draw. Not pleasant. Unfortunately, they are another of the invasive species that have invaded the islands from elsewhere, in this case South America. They are found naturally through a large part of South America, from Argentina to the Caribbean islands. They have been introduced to a number of places, including Hawaii and the United States, Gabon in West Africa, and in the South Pacific both the Solomon Islands and New Caledonia.

To investigate where these ants came from, Alexander Mikheyev and Ulrich Mueller conducted a genetic study on a bunch of both natural and introduced populations of the fire ant. Looking at a little bit of the mitochondrial COI gene, they discovered that the Solomon Island populations have affinities with US and Hawaiian, and Northern South America and Caribbean populations. New Caledonian specimens were quite different, originating from southern natural populations in Argentina and Brazilian populations. Gabon has also been invaded by this group. This suggests that the two Pacific populations sampled were independantly derived, probably through trade or troop movements during WWII.

An assumption that I've usually made with invasive species in the Pacific is that they tend to do a bit of island-hopping, and in this case I would've hypothesised that the New Caledonian and Solomon Island populations would be the same. This is obviously not the case here, and it is a reminder that it's worth keeping in mind that there are many ways for organisms to get from place to place.

References:
Mikheyev AS, Mueller UG. 2007. Genetic relationships between native and introduced populations of the little fire ant Wasmannia auropunctata. Diversity and Distributions 13:573-579.

Fruit bats going the wrong way

A couple of years back, Jeremy Pulvers and Don Colgan published an interesting paper on the intriguing fruit bat genus Melonycteris, that is restricted to the Solomon Islands and the Bismarck Archipelago. The fascinating thing about this bat is that it is believed to be placed right at the base of the Megachiroptera (flying foxes and their ilk). Why it is that this supposedly old lineage is restricted to these isolated island groups is still unknown, but it is not alone in this pattern. In the birds, a number of the more ancient groups are found in and around New Guinea and the Australasian region.

This however, is not the thrust of the Pulvers and Colgan paper. What they did is look at the genetic systematics and variation within the genus, particularly the Solomon Island species. To summarise, they found that the Solomon species are a group separate from the single Bismarck species. What was more interesting was the pattern of relationships within the Solomon Islands population. They found that the species on Makira (San Cristobal) was sister to the rest, followed by the Malaitan species, then the species found in the New Georgia group. Choiseul, Isabel and Guadalcanal populations composed a single group and were the most derived.

What is interesting about this pattern is that it is the opposite of what would be expected from a simple dispersal model originating in the Bismarcks. If that was the case, you would expect the sequence to be essentially the opposite---New Georgia; Choiseul, Isabel and Guadalcanal; Malaita, then Makira.

There has been increasing evidence from birds that the "Dispersal from New Guinea" model of the makeup of the Solomon Island fauna is not the only story, but as far as I'm aware, this is the first publication of evidence in vertebrates other than birds.

Reference:
Pulvers JN, Colgan DJ. 2007. Molecular phylogeography of the fruit bat genus Melonycteris in northern Melanesia. Journal of Biogeography 34:713-723.

Proc. Roy. Soc. special issue on the Solomons

While searching for a paper on insect distribution on the Solomon Islands, I came across the 1969 special issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society A on aspects of the biology and geology of what was then known as the British Solomon Islands Protectorate. It's an eclectic mix - articles include details on the soil, vegetation, fungi, Collembola, molluscs and shoreline ecology of the islands.

Unfortunately though, the articles aren't available for the general public - articles are only available with a subscription, or if you want to fork out some hard-earned cash to see the article. The latter option may or may not be too bad, but they don't make it easy to find out exactly what it'll cost you to see each article. Experience with previous journals would suggest it could be rather excessive - I've seen some which try and charge $25-30 USD for a 10-page article... Not my idea of a bargain.

It's great this issue is online. It is rather unadvertised and unknown (at least... I've never come across it before...), but it is a shame that it's not freely available. Oh well.....

Solomon Island Freshwater Insects

A few months ago, Dan Polhemus and a team from the Bishop Museum in Hawaii published a report on the freshwater insects of the Solomon Islands. Funnily enough, it makes for some very interesting reading. The Solomons are a fascinating and beautiful place, though somewhat off the track and as such the fauna and flora are relatively little known. It's isolation and temperamental politics combine to make it somewhat unattractive to visiting scientists. There is information out there though, if you put the effort in to find it.

Coming back to the report in question: having skimmed through it I am determined to read it in much greater detail in the future. It has a summary of the geological history of the islands which is of use to anyone wanting to understand the biota of the islands. They also summarise the work done on freshwater fauna and augment it with the results of a expedition there in 2004-2005 in which they visited the six main islands and several surrounding ones. They record the variety of fish and aquatic insects from each site before finishing with comments on the conservation status of these environments and the patterns of endemicity.

The other great thing about this report is that it has some really cool pictures! The photo above is one that I stole from it. It's a beautiful Nososticta salomonis from Choiseul...

All in all a very interesting and timely publication, and one that I may have to revisit sometime.

Reference:
Polhemus DA, Englund RA, Allen GR, Boseto D, and Polhemus, JT (2008.)
Freshwater biotas of the Solomon Islands. Analysis of richness, endemism, and threats.
Final report prepared for Conservation International, Washington, D.C. 127 pp. [PBS 2008-013]