Australia is, as you probably know, more or less a complete continent (including Tasmania). Among continents it is unique in being under one political centre with one dominant language. This is how it was sold to me as a young undergraduate in the UK, looking for somewhere to do a PhD – ‘Go to Australia, there’s nowhere else where you can go from alps to desert to tropical rainforest without having to use a passport, or change language, and to cap that, the insects are largely unexplored’.
I was pretty naive about Australia. In the UK, I gave a lift to three Australians who told me they had to drive with the windows permanently up in case kangaroos jumped in. It made sense at the time.
Thirty-eight years ago when I arrived there was no internet and it was difficult to get a sense of what was known and what wasn’t known about insects. Now there is the online Atlas of Living Australia (generally referred to as the ALA), which is an attempt to map all flora (plants) and fauna (animals), funded by the Federal Government.
I’m particularly interested in leaf beetles. If you look at the dot map of all records of that group (family Chrysomelidae) on ALA, you’ll find that the south-east of Australia is a solid mass of records, but the arid and semi-arid centre is mostly empty. Lines of dots on this map, such as the one across north-western New South Wales, represent collecting beside roads.
Clearly some bits of the continent are blanks on the map, at least as far as leaf beetles go. And leaf beetles are relatively well-known compared to many other groups, so these blanks are likely to be true for other groups too. For this reason, there is another federally funded organisation, called Bush Blitz, which is dedicated to filling in the gaps.
I was privileged to be invited on a recent Bush Blitz expedition, which took place in the southern part of Kosciuszko National Park, The Pilot Wilderness area, in the first week of February this year. I was part of an assemblage of 20 biologists from several different universities, museums and botanic gardens, from Victoria, NSW and the ACT. My particular interest was flightless alpine beetles, because these tend to be unique to mountain tops and have nowhere to go with global warming. Feral horses and deer don’t help.
Normally in such a place I’d enjoy the walk in as much as the arrival, but because collecting time was at a premium we were helicoptered into the remotest parts, a first for me.
It was a fantastic experience and I’m very grateful to the Bush Blitz staff who made sure that everything went smoothly. And, of course, the helicopter pilots.
The results? I found about 150 species of beetle, including three new species in the group I was chasing. Now I need to find time to name them, before they disappear…
Further reading
Records for leaf beetles on Atlas of Living Australia.