A collection of 25,000 beetle specimens has been acquired by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Research Service (ARS) to help researchers study the genus Agrilus, a potentially invasive species that threatens U.S. agriculture and forestry.
The collection, developed in Slovakia by Agrilus expert Eduard Jendek, is one of the most complete ever assembled – comprising half of the known species in the genus, “more than 95 percent of the known species diversity in Russia and China” and more than 80 percent of species in South and Southeast Asia, according to the USDA, which announced the acquisition Jan. 5.
“The result of Jendek's efforts is manifested now in a collection that includes thousands of authoritatively identified specimens, many reared from recorded host plants and rare species known only from the single type specimen,” ARS Research Entomologist Lourdes Chamorro said in the announcement. “The collection is also especially unique in that it is databased and includes specimens from new, unpublished distribution records."
Jendek collected the specimens in highly remote areas over the course of 30-40 years, the USDA stated. The hundreds of locations he traveled to are either very remote and hard to access or have since been deforested, making the collection especially valuable, according to the USDA.
Beetles belonging to the genus Agrilus are considered destructive to natural resources. Ash trees are particularly vulnerable to some of these beetles, the USDA reports, and in two recent instances, the collection and Jendek have been the only ones to confirm the identity of these new pests, the USDA reports.
“Acquiring this large collection of expertly identified material will greatly enhance USDA-ARS' ability to identify potential new pest species of Agrilus within the nation,” ARS Research Associate Kojun Kanda said in the release. “With the current advances in sequencing DNA from pinned specimens, we also hope to use this material to gather molecular data that can be used for identification purposes and to study the evolution of various traits like host-plant usage.”
The collection is currently being housed at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., the USDA stated. It is cooperatively curated by USDA and Smithsonian Institution staff.
“Because the collector is a world expert on this group, the collection is well-curated and all specimens identified,” Floyd Shockley, entomology collection manager of the National Museum of Natural History said. “This really is one of those once or twice in a career major acquisitions.”
