Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior
Writer
Date: 27 March 2013 Time: 08:01 AM ET
What do you do when you run across
hundreds of nameless species of beetle in the wilderness of New Guinea?
No, the correct answer is not "run
away screaming" — at least if you're a scientist dedicated to discovering
the massive diversity of insect life. Instead, researchers from the German
Natural History Museum Karlsruhe and the Zoological State Collection in Munich turned to the
phone book to label all the new species.
After discovering hundreds of distinct
species of weevils (a superfamily of beetles) in the genus Trigonopterus,
scientists Alexander Riedel and Michael Balke realized they could spend a
lifetime describing and naming them all. So they created a scientific shortcut:
sequencing a portion of each weevil's DNA to sort out the different species and
taking photographs for the online database Species ID, a Wikipedia-like website
for cataloguing biodiversity.
"More than 100 species were brought
to the light of science and public attention this way right now — about five
times faster than possible with traditional techniques," Riedel said in a
statement.
To quickly label the species, the
researchers used common family names from the Papua
New Guinea phone book. One weevil got the moniker Trigonopterus
moreaorum after the common name "Morea."
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