Cook Islands Insect Expedition: Funding Granted!

Satellite image of Rarotonga, Cook Islands. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public Domain.

As the tagline of this blog suggests, I have a profound interest in the biota and people of the South Pacific. I was fortunate to spend an influential part of my childhood in the Solomon Islands, then managed to work on beetles across the South Pacific for my MSc research. Since I've moved on to studying weevils, I've been very keen to contribute to a greater knowledge of the weevil fauna of the Pacific; but until now I haven't had the financial support, nor a topic that is simultaneously ambitious enough to be useful but also achievable.

The Cook Islands caught my eye about a year or so ago, when I realised that the weevil fauna of the group was essentially unknown. What little was published usually didn't get beyond a mention of "Rarotonga" or "Cook Islands" in the Distribution section of a species account in papers that had a different geographic focus. The superb Cook Islands Biodiversity Database lists 35 species of weevil from the Islands, which included several undescribed species and unidentified taxa. Further investigation of the literature revealed that it wasn't just the weevils that were barely known from the Cooks—few collecting expeditions have been undertaken, and not many insect taxa have published data available.

Holotype of Ptilopodius aitutakii Beaver and Maddison. One of two weevils described from the Cook Islands. Image courtesy of Auckland Museum. Licence: CC: BY.

This lack of knowledge surprised me, given the Cook Islands' strategic location in the South Pacific. Being approximately halfway between Samoa and Tahiti, it's in a key position to test hypotheses of the cause of the eastward attenuation of species richness and diversity that is such a feature of the biogeography of the South Pacific. Much has also been made of the fact that several taxa find their eastward limit around Samoa and Tonga, without having data from Niue or the Cook Islands to ascertain if this eastward limit is truly the case or not. A comprehensive work on the weevils of the Cook Islands would be able to confirm or refute some of these ideas of distribution of species in the South Pacific.

The small size of the islands made them attractive too. Rarotonga, the largest and highest of the group, is still only 62 km² in area and 650 m at its highest point. Not too much time (in theory at least!) would be required to make comprehensive collection in the available habitats.

The combination of the geographic location of the Cook Islands, and their small size lets me predict that weevil fauna will be fairly small and depauparate. I'm expecting that the total number of species will be around 200 or so. This is also beneficial, as it gives me hope that I may be able to write up the results of any collecting done in a timely and efficient manner. Additionally, although I expect a lot of the species to be endemic to the Cooks, the genera they represent are likely to be widely distributed, which would result in this work giving me a good foundation for further, future work on the weevils of other Pacific archipelagos

So there were the Cook Islands: small enough to collect everywhere in the space of a few weeks, an unknown fauna with a low number of species that could be written up in a short period of time and opportunity for first-hand experience with Pacific weevil taxa. In my opinion at least, this potential project held a lot of promise.

I am honoured that the board of the New Zealand Winston Churchill Memorial Trust considered it to have a lot of merit also. The trust funds overseas travel that bring New Zealanders into contact with other cultures, learn from their experiences and contribute to the community through their research and knowledge. Over 850 fellowships have been granted since the establishment of the Trust in 1965 and includes artists, educators, economists, academics and musicians. It's an impressive list of highly talented people and it's very humbling to be included among them.

The Trust has offered funding to cover two months in the Cook Islands, collecting weevils and other insects on Rarotonga, Atiu, Mangaia and Mitiaro. I expect it to be a great adventure, and one that I hope will prove productive and useful. I plan to go in March 2017, and intend to post semi-regular updates on aspects of the preparation for the trip, the expedition as it happens, and the aftermath of specimen sorting, preparation and identification. I very grateful that the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust has provided support for this expedition, and I'm excited about being able to make a significant contribution to our knowledge of the insects of the Cook Islands.

South Pacific Biodiversity Science funders

The following is a list of organisations that provide funding for biodiversity and conservation science, whose scope includes the South Pacific region.

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American Museum of Natural History: Research and Fellowships

The American Museum of Natural History offers academic fellowships and research grants in biology, ecology, zoology, wildlife conservation, paleontology, anthropology, and some fields of the physical sciences.

Featured insect: Polyrhanis dabraensis (Coleoptera: Cicindelidae)

Tiger beetles (family Cicindelidae) are active predators as adults, pursuing their prey by running and flying. The larvae are bizarre looking things, and catch their prey by sitting and waiting in holes in clay banks and the like (such as one I found in my youth in the Solomon Islands that had taken up residence in a spent WWII rifle cartridge)

Polyrhanis dabraensis is a beautiful tiger beetle from Western New Guinea that was recently described by Andrey Matalin and Fabio Cassola. The insect fauna of this region is fairly poorly known, but the tiger beetles are doing fairly well for themselves. A total of 64 species are known from the region, though undoubtedly more are yet to be discovered. A list of the known species is available on the Website of the Papua Insects Foundation, which also includes images for a select number of species.

Picture courtesy of the Korean Society of Applied Entomology, Taiwan Entomological Society and the Malaysian Plant Protection Society.

References

Matalin AV, Cassola F. 2012. A new species of the genus Polyrhanis Rivalier, 1963 (Coleoptera: Cicindelidae) from Papua (New Guinea, Indonesia). Journal of Asia-Pacific Entomology 15(1): 196-199.

Bishop Museum Occasional Papers

I thought that I had blogged here before regarding the availability of the Bishop Museum Occasional Papers; but it seems that I was mistaken. Suffice to say, the Bishop Museum is in the process of digitising the issues of BMOP and making them available online. It is actively occuring—today I was able to see a few articles that were unavailable previously. The Occasional Papers and pretty much everything published by the Bishop Museum form a immensely valuable body of knowledge for South Pacific biology; and it should be considered a first port-of-call for anyone keen on the fauna and flora of the region.

Moorean Insects on Flickr

The Moorea Biocode is an ambitious project that aims to DNA barcode every organism on the island of Moorea in French Polynesia.The project has an online database with records of the specimens collected thus far, many of which contain photographs (e.g. the weevil gallery). There's also a Flickr stream that have a number of nice photos, including the beautiful Cranopoeus pictured above, and a cool-looking Proterhinus.

Unfortunately, it's still a little to early to really see the benefits of the project. The DNA sequences are not yet available (as far as I can tell); and many of the photos above are unidentified, or worse, misidentified at the family level. The project has great potential, but we'll have to wait a little while longer before the above resources become really useful for South Pacific zoology.

Picture courtesy of the Moorea Biocode Flickr stream

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

Ubuntu translations

A key part of the Ubuntu philosophy is their emphasis on making computers usable in one's language of choice:

We believe that every computer user should be able to use their software in the language of their choice.

The wiki page provides an entry point for those interested in contributing translations to the project. The process is managed through a project launchpad. Of most interest to me are the Samoan, Maori and Marshallese translations.

South Pacific Study

South Pacific Study is a Japanese periodical that publishes scholarly articles on a diverse range of subjects of relevance to the South Pacific in a very broad sense. The scope of the journal is extremely wide—you'll find articles ranging from analyses of Buddhist missionary activity, to measurements of volcanic SO₂, to the biology of pests, to taxonomic papers. The icing on top is that these articles are freely available online, back to around 2000. Tables of contents and some articles prior to then are also available.

Pacific Island Ecosystems at Risk (PIER)

The Pacific Island Ecosystems at Risk (PIER) website is an excellent resource to the weeds of importance throughout the tropical Pacific region. The main strength of the site is the extensive list of species fact sheets (including Sphagneticola trilobata, an important lowland weed in Western Viti Levu, Fiji; pictured above) It also includes assessments of the weed fauna of several Pacific Islands, primarily within Micronesia and Polynesia.

While on the subject, SPREP has published some guidelines for the management of invasive species in the Pacific, an important document for those dealing with such things in the region.

Pacific Disaster Network

The Pacific Disaster Network is a website devoted to the monitoring of natural disasters within the region and the dissemination of publications, reports and conference proceedings relevant to regional humanitarian efforts.

Its stated aim is to be:

the largest and most comprehensive information resource for Disaster Risk Management for the Pacific Island Countries.
...
The portal will provide a valuable resource to all Disaster Risk Management partners working in the Pacific region including government agencies, regional bodies, non-government organisations and international agencies.

The website displays alerts of natural disasters, has a LOT of publications and reports of relevant to natural disasters, public health and agricultural issues. It is a fairly exhaustive site, but unfortunately one that is fairly unintuitive to use(for me at least..) at first glance. Exploring it further reveals more of its power and utility. The homepage leads with a satellite map from Google and a box giving the latest alerts, giving the promise that the location of these alerts will be visualised. Unfortunately this is not the case; a pity for people like me who like to be able to see where events are occuring on a map.

The website is a collaboration between the South Pacific Applied Geosciences Commission (SOPAC), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the International Red Cross and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Tonga Science Network

In a collaboration between the University of Canterbury and the Tongan Ministry of Education, a new website has been launched: the Tonga Science Network. This website aims to promote and help disseminate science that is relevant to Tonga's environment and economy. Researchers are invited to register on the website and contribute content to smooth the flow of knowledge back to those who need to use it. Another cool feature is the "connections" that shows who has worked with who, and encourages the formation of new collaborations.

All in all, it's a neat initiative and hopefully will resolve one of the major issues I see with science in the Pacific, namely that most research is done by foreigners. This in turn means that relatively little of the results (despite the best intentions of most researchers) is returned to interested parties within the country, other than by laborious and ongoing literature searches. As with all community-type initiatives, it will only be as good as those who use it. It's made a good start though, and here's hoping that will continue.

NZ Scholarships for Pacific Island Students

Good news for those Pacific Island students wanting to study in New Zealand. John Key has just announced that the number of scholarships available to Pacific Islanders will increase from 100 to 200 next year. These include full scholarships as well as a deal where students will be given a student loan that will be written off if they return to their country of origin. The scholarships will be administered by NZAID. Those currently offered can be seen on their scholarships page.

Read the article in the New Zealand Herald here.

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.

Proceedings of the Hawaiian Entomological Society

The Proceedings of the Hawaiian Entomological Society is one of the key journals for South Pacific entomology, and now it is freely available online. There's a lot of very cool things in here, including a large number of papers by Elwood Zimmerman on weevils from throughout the South Pacific.

South Pacific insects in a Russian Journal

The Russian Entomological Journal is not the usual outlet for taxonomic research on South Pacific insects. That said, it has published a number of papers over the last few years that are freely available to everyone on their website. For some reason, they all deal with the Hemiptera. So, if you ever wanted to know about Microveliines from Fiji, Maana emeljanovi (Lophopidae) from West Papua, or Nerthra kerzhneri (the first species of the Gelastocoridae found from New Caledonia, pictured), now you know where to look.

Pacific Island Agroforestry documents

The Secretariat for the Pacific Community (SPC) teamed up with a number of North American organisations to produce a series of pamphlets to promote agroforestry in the Pacific. These pamphlets take the form of species accounts and are an excellent source on information to the propagation, cultivation, uses and enemies of a number of different plant species. While the hard copy editions went out of print a while ago, PDFs are freely available online.

The species accounts include details on how to propagate species in the the mangrove genera Bruguiera and Rhizophora. With the fear of the effects of climate change on the vulnerable islands of the South Pacific, I believe that these plants should become much more widely planted to protect against shoreline erosion and seawater inundation. The accounts do make the very important recommendation to not plant these species outside of their natural range, as they can be invasive. They are however found naturally throughout the Pacific, so that should not be a problem for the most part. The plants are very easily propagated and propagules can be sourced from local trees. There may be some downsides in terms of coastal access; and they may not grow so readily on the weather coasts of atolls. However, I do think that more research and promotion of the propagation of these trees is one of the most pro-active ways that the Pacific Islands can fight the effects of climate change.

Featured insect: Aureopterix micans (Lepidoptera: Micropterigidae)

The moth fauna of the Pacific is still fairly unknown, with most of the work that's been done on the region's being rather old and with few recent revisions. An addition to the literature was recently published by George Gibbs in Zootaxa today on the Micropterigidae of Australia, New Zealand and New Caledonia. In it, he describes the species pictured:

Aureopterix micans from New Caledonia. This beautiful species is fairly widespread and common throughout New Caledonia at moderate altitudes.

As suggested by the name of the family, the Micropterigidae are part of the microlepidoptera---an informal name for a bunch of families that are small and tend to escape the notice of the public. They also tend to escape the notice of most specialists, and so their biology is not particularly well known. This is true for Aureopterix micans, however, the larvae for some of the other species described in the paper are known to feed on foliose liverworts. This is likely to be true of A. micans also.

It is believed that the distribution of the Micropterigidae may offer insights into the biogeography of the South Pacific region. The distribution of Auropterix offers a fairly standard interpretation of New Caledonian biogeography. While A. micans is restricted to New Caledonia; the only other species currently known in the genus, A. sterops, is found in northern Queensland, Australia. This East Coast Australia---New Caledonia connection is fairly typical of a lot of the fauna of the island. Other species of Micropterigidae however do not show this pattern, being closer to species in New Zealand than Australia. While Biogeography is full of interesting details such as these, going from hypotheses of pattern to process can be difficult to test, and will require greater research into the fauna of each area and underlying geology and ecology of the species involved.

References:

Gibbs GW. 2010. Micropterigidae (Lepidoptera) of the Southwestern Pacific: a revision with the establishment of five new genera from Australia, New Caledonia and New Zealand. Zootaxa 2520: 1-48.

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

Insects of the Pacific Rim

J. Linsley Gressitt (and here) was an incredibly productive (some might say workaholic) man. I've heard stories of him typing up manuscripts on military aircraft that weren't the quietest or smoothest of rides. He was passionate about the insect fauna of the Asia-Pacific region and published a lot on the taxonomy and biogeography of several groups, and established the Wau Ecology Institute which has been an important centre for much research on the natural history of PNG.

It is fitting then that one of the finest collections of South Pacific insects is named after the man. The J. L. Gressitt Centre for Research in Entomology is housed at the Bishop Museum in Hawaii and houses over 14 million specimens, many of which were collected by the man himself. They've recently got themselves an automontage facility, and have begun putting spectacular photos of South Pacific insects online (such as the PNG brentid weevil above). Check out the Solomon Island staphylinids as well... They say they're going to put up something new each week. I really hope they do, because the photos are pretty cool.

Pacific trade statistics

I am not an economist, nor have I ever considered becoming one. But sometimes a man just HAS to know about the exports, imports and trade of South Pacific island nations and when he does, here's a few sites to check out...

The Pacific Economic Monitor is a quarterly publication of the Asian Development Bank that describes the current economic climate of the Pacific Islands. It started at the beginning of this year, and contains a lot of information if you know what it's talking about.

The Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat has a couple of pages on regional and international trade, and has a large, serious document that discusses Pacific regional trade and economic cooperation.

The Pacific Islands Trade and Investment Commission NZ is an organisation that promotes trade between New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. They have a statistics page.