Articuno
Moltres
Zapdos
ENMU Professor Discovers and Names New Beetle Species By Alicia St. Denis After Pokémon Characters When most people see a bug in their home, they see a reason to call an exterminator. When Dr. Darren Pollock sees one, he sees a research opportunity. Dr. Pollock, professor of Entomology at ENMU, and his colleague Yun Hsiao, a Ph.D. student at Australian National University, have named three new species in a genus of Australian beetles. Hsiao was revisiting the dissertation Pollock published in 1995 about a newly described genus of beetles named Binburrum, based on an Aboriginal name for eucalyptus, one of the trees where these beetles are found. Hsiao soon realized that three Binburrum species represented in the Australian National Collection of Insects were new species and had never been characterized or named. The pair collaborated on the paper, published by the Canadian Entomologist in 2020, where they introduced the three new named species to the scientific community. “We wanted to make sure that the names were unique. In his youth, Yun was a real Pokémon enthusiast. He mentioned to me that he wanted to be a Pokémon trainer when he grew up,” Dr. Pollock said. “So, we figured that if we named the three Binburrum species after Pokémon characters, there was almost no chance of us accidentally duplicating somebody else’s earlier name.”
Photo by Todd Fuqua
“What makes ours special is the two specimens,” he said. “The top specimen on the pin is the predator, and the bottom specimen is the prey. Very few collections have both the robber and its prey associated.” The ENMU collection is currently sitting at 9,983 flies plus their prey. Dr. Pollock considers the collection a veritable goldmine of information about these important but understudied flies.
The Pokémon names chosen are in honor of three rare “legendary” bird Pokémon. The two selected these bird characters because of the newly identified beetles’ extreme rarity in collections. “That’s how Binburrum articuno, B. moltres, and B. zapdos were born,” Dr. Pollock explained. Naming new beetle species is nothing new for Dr. Pollock, who has described many others and named a newly-discovered beetle species known as Trictenotoma pollocki. Dr. Pollock is now looking to the future with anticipation of adding to one of the world’s largest and most unique assassin fly collections.
A
B
C
Meet the Beetles: The three species jointly discovered and named by Dr. Darren Pollock and Yun Hsiao. (A) Binburrum articuno, (B) Binburrum moltres, (C) Binburrum zapdos.
Green & Silver | September 2021
13
