Vondelpark, a public urban park in the southwest part of the city of Amsterdam, is far from secluded. Even though it’s a weekday, it’s crowded with people walking on the neatly mowed lawns, playing soccer, and chatting with friends.
There are countless people riding bicycles on the wide paved roads. This is the Netherlands after all.
Vondelpark may not seem like the ideal place to look for new insect species, but biologist Iva Nyunic insists otherwise.
“Even in places dominated by humans, unknown biodiversity lurks everywhere.”
Njunjic works for Taxon Expeditions, a Netherlands-based organization that offers ecotourism trips, usually to places like Borneo, Panama and Montenegro.
Last year, they embarked on a week-long citizen science project searching for new species in a small island nature reserve called Koenweide (“Cow Meadow”) in Vondelpark.
A single road leads into the reserve, but it is padlocked and clearly off limits to the public.
Taxon Expeditions biologists Norbert Peters and Iva Nunzic in front of the gates of Koenweide Image: DW/B.osteras
Coenweide (an island surrounded by canals), managed by an initiative of Amsterdammers, has apparently not seen a lawnmower for a long time.
collect what is there
Eight amateur researchers set traps on the island every day for a week to capture a variety of resident creatures, including spiders, beetles, earthworms, and moths.
“I don’t know how many species we caught, but we were surprised because there were so many,” participant and philosopher Norbert Peters from Leiden told DW.
Iva Njunjic says this group alone has collected 143 species of moths. Taxonomy experts from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam helped amateur researchers identify the species using a microscope.
Image: With the help of Taxon Explorer Menno Schilthuizen, citizen scientists have identified all the insect species caught in Vondelpark Image: Taxon Explorer
“By the end of the week, we had some hints that we might be onto something,” Peters said.
It turned out that the group had discovered two types of insects that had not been previously described by scientists.
Nujunjik unscrews a small plastic container to reveal one of his new finds. This is a small black dot no larger than 3 mm or 1/8 inch, pasted onto a piece of paper and neatly labeled.
Read more: How to stop the insect apocalypse
According to her explanation, it is a beetle that belongs to the beetle family, commonly known as the “round mushroom beetle.”
Most likely they live underground. “We found this species in a trap containing meat and cheese, so we think this species is probably feeding on decaying organic matter and fungi.”
that dick gave it
How did they know this beetle was a new discovery?
“It has a different penis shape than its very close cousins from southern Europe,” Nujutsch explains with a laugh. “When we study insects, we compare male reproductive organs, so we had to dissect the penis and look at it under a microscope.”
The group decided to name the new species after the band The Beatles. That’s because, as Nujutsch says, “It’s kind of unfair that we don’t have a species of beetle named after them yet.” Their official name is Ptomaphagus Beatles.
A new species of beetle is identified by the shape of its penis Image: VU University/R. van Elsas A new species of parasitic wasp, Aphaereta von der Park, measures only about 3 mm Image: VU University/R. van Elsas
The group of researchers also discovered a new species of parasitic wasps, tiny insects that lay eggs on or inside the bodies of other invertebrates, sooner or later killing their hosts.
The new parasitic wasp will be named Afaeleta Vondelpark, after the place where it was first discovered.
Further revelations
Martin Kubiak, an entomologist at Hamburg University’s Natural History Center who was not involved in the study, said the Vondelpark expedition’s results were “not surprising.”
Read more: Mexico: protecting vanilla’s only natural pollinator
The fauna of Central Europe is well studied in terms of vertebrate, butterfly and dragonfly species, but there is still much to discover in other parts of the animal kingdom.
“We still know surprisingly little about groups of insects such as beetles, wasps, wasps, flies, and mosquitoes, especially when they are just 1 to 2 millimeters in size,” Kubiak says.
In 2011, biologists at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, estimated that there were a total of 8.7 million species on Earth.
So far, scientists have described only 1.5 million species.
There may be more life in Europe’s parks than meets the eye Image: DW/B. Osteras
Researchers use a technique called DNA barcoding to identify species by analyzing short sections of DNA.
Biologists from the Bavarian State Zoological Collection in Munich analyzed the genetic material of scores of insects captured across Germany and found that there are 930 species of midges living all around us. , the number could be estimated to be only 800 types. So far we have talked about seeds.
biodiversity and cities
Many people, like Norbert Peters, may think that cities are not the places where animals are most likely to be found.
But Menno Schilthuizen, an evolutionary biologist at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden and co-founder of Taxon Expeditions, says the opposite is true.
“In countries like the Netherlands, cities are actually biologically richer compared to the countryside,” he told DW. This is because intensive agriculture is practiced everywhere.
Organizers hope that the results of this study will shed light on the importance of insects.
“Even though they are very small, they perform many important functions, such as aerating the soil, decomposing organic matter, and pollinating plants,” says Iva Njucci. “Everyone wants to save pandas and lions, but insects are actually more important.”
What have insects done for us?
A planet without insects means no coffee and more spoilage. But scientists estimate that 10% of all insect species could become extinct in the next few decades. DW looks at why they disappear and what might be lost if they do.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/P. Pururu
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