Zootaxa – Eideard

Where’s Matilda?

A new species of brightly coloured snake has been found in a remote area of Tanzania in East Africa.

The striking black-and-yellow snake measures 60 cm and has horn-like scales above its eyes. The newly discovered snake, named Matilda’s horned viper, has been described in the journal Zootaxa.

The exact location of the new species is being kept a secret, because it could be of interest to the illegal pet trade.

Campaign group the Wildlife Conservation Society said the snake’s habitat, estimated at only a several square km, is already severely degraded from logging and charcoal manufacture.

The authors of the study in Zootaxa expect the viper will be classified as a critically endangered species. They have already established a small captive breeding colony.

Watched the film “CREATION” last night – about that critical period in Darwin’s life when he had to confront both his daughter’s death and the matching conflict with his family, his own circle of friends and neighbors, over completion of “ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES”.

Sad, always moving, triumphant in the decision we all know he made. He would have felt the effort to save these snakes from society’s despoilment of nature as worthwhile this week – as he did in his own day.

My kind of geek

A York University doctoral student who discovered a new species of bee on his way to the lab one morning has completed a study that examines 84 species of sweat bees in Canada. Nineteen of these species – including the one Jason Gibbs found in downtown Toronto − are new to science because they have never been identified or described before.

Gibbs’ expansive study will help scientists track bee diversity, understand pollination biology and study the evolution of social behaviour in insects. It is also much anticipated by bee taxonomists who, like Gibbs, painstakingly examine the anatomy (morphology) of bees to distinguish one type of bee from another…

Sweat bees − named for their attraction to perspiration − can be smaller than 4 mm in length, often have metallic markings, and make up one-third to one-half of bees collected in biodiversity surveys in North America. Complete species descriptions of 84 metallic sweat bees in Canada are included in Gibbs’ monumental study, “Revision of the metallic species of Lasioglossum (Dialictus) in Canada.” It was published by the peer-reviewed journal Zootaxa as a single issue.

Despite their numbers and their importance as pollinators, sweat bees remain among the most challenging bees to identify to species, perhaps because they evolved so rapidly when they first appeared about 20 million years ago. Gibbs’ research significantly improves upon all other available tools for the identification of these bees…

Among the 19 new species of sweat bee identified by Gibbs is one that he collected on his commute from downtown Toronto to York University. When he arrived at his York lab and examined it, he knew he had found a new species, never before identified by science but, as it turns out, quite common in Toronto and throughout eastern Canada and the USA. He also identified and described 18 other species from Canada that are new to science including a cuckoo bee: like a cuckoo bird, it doesn’t build a nest or collect food but it has big mandibles for fighting. This cuckoo sweat bee is believed to invade the nest of another sweat bee species to lay its eggs on the pollen and nectar collected by its host.

Bravo!