Hillary caught up in scientists' beetle mania

By SIMON COLLINS science reporter

In the human world, Sir Edmund Hillary stands almost two metres tall, with all the mana that comes with being the first to scale the world's highest peak.

In the beetle world, Baeocera hillaryi is just 1.5mm long and is believed to feed mainly on slime moulds.

No insult, however, was intended when beetle experts Rich Leschen and Ivan Lobl named one of 15 new beetle species after the conqueror of Everest.

Sir Edmund is in good company. Other new species include Baeocera tensingi, named after his colleague Tensing Norgay, Baeocera tekootii, named after the East Coast warrior Te Kooti, and even Baeocera benolivia, a South Island species named after the young friends Ben Smart and Olivia Hope, who were killed in the Marlborough Sounds in 1998.

Auckland Museum entomologist John Early and a volunteer beetle expert at the museum, Stephen Thorpe, are commemorated in two species of a beetle family that has never been found in New Zealand before, Cyparium earlyi and Cyparium thorpei.

All the new species are described in a book by Dr Leschen and Dr Lobl in the series Fauna of New Zealand, published by Landcare Research, where Dr Leschen has worked since 1997.

Dr Lobl, of the Natural History Museum in Geneva, has collected beetles in Nepal, and the two authors dedicated the book to Sir Edmund and Tensing Norgay out of "respect for mountaineering and the quest for knowledge".

Sir Edmund, who was sent a copy of the book just before Christmas, said the dedication was a "nice gesture".

"It was very nice of them to put my name to it, but I'm not a great authority on beetles," he said.

Arkansas-born Dr Leschen, who is New Zealand's only fulltime paid coleopterist (beetle specialist), says the pinhead-sized scaphidiine rove beetles have evolved over millions of years from feeding on other tiny animals to eating fungus instead.

"This unusual switch has occurred so rarely in the insect world that scientists are still unsure how it can happen," he said.

Most likely, he believes, they switched first from live animals to dead organic matter, and then to the fungus growing on dead wood.

Baeocera hillaryi is one of several species that are now found exclusively on slime moulds, lumps of single-celled animals that slither across the forest floor in search of dead matter.

The slime moulds form single-celled reproductive spores and were once believed to be a kind of fungus.

"Scientists know better now and place them in a group that is related to other amoebas," Dr Leschen said.

Apart from the 15 new species, New Zealand has eight previously described species of scaphidiines.

All but two of the total of 23 species are found only in this country.

Dr Leschen believes that some of New Zealand's unique species are a primitive kind of beetle that once roamed more widely in the world, and have survived here long after dying out elsewhere.

"It appears that we have in New Zealand some very primitive things," he said.

He and Dr Lobl are now working on a family tree of all the world's 1400 scaphidiine species.

A guitar-playing country bluegrass fan, Dr Leschen started out studying amphibious salamanders but switched to beetles because of their huge diversity, with about 200,000 species occupying nearly every ecological niche from deserts to the poles.

"Beetles do everything. They are the largest group of described organisms," he said.

"There are things that are predators, things that feed on plants, things that feed on fungi, things that feed on carrion, things that feed on fluids, there are even filter feeders.

"You name it, beetles do it."

He is responsible for the 10,000 beetle species found in New Zealand, which form about two-thirds of Landcare's insect collection.

His Mexican-born wife, Dr Elena Hilario, is a HortResearch scientist. The couple met in Auckland, and Dr Hilario has been immortalised in another new beetle species, Baeocera elenae.

"When it comes to naming there are some criteria, but usually you name them for their morphology [body type], or places they were collected from, or people who you want to honour," Dr Leschen said.

"It's quite a fun thing to do. It's one of the perks of being in somewhat of a thankless position as a taxonomist [someone who classifies species].

"In papers where there are lots of species, I just get tired of naming things. But I try to give people credit.

"The fact that Ivan and I honoured Hillary and Tensing means a lot to us."

* Scaphidiinae, No.48 in Fauna of New Zealand, $37.50, Manaaki Whenua Press