Insects and the great unknown
By: Gary Hartley
Tags: Conservation, Adventure, Insects, Ecology, Nature

The fact there are just so damn many insects can feel daunting — I imagine even to seasoned entomologists at times. But at risk of seeming like I’m quoting directly from a sunset motivational meme, with abundance comes great opportunity.

As just a small hint of such possibilities, a friend of mine who works in nature tourism, predominantly in the Balkans, brought to my attention the damselfly Pyrrhosoma elisabethae, roughly translated as flame-bodied Elizabeth but more commonly known as the Greek red damselfly.

They’d recently been in contact with a Odonata expert with particular interest in the species. One of those cases where it’s a good job someone is, as there is very little by way of published research on it.

Mapping out Elizabeth’s range

Aside from being an aesthetically-pleasing insect with a cracking name, it’s one where the knowledge gaps are almost greater than the knowledge. Little is known about where its range begins and ends, and it can only be identified by its appendages. Examples of its exuviae (shed larval skin) were only collected for the first time in 2013.

For a long time, it wasn’t thought to be a distinct species at all, such is its extreme similarity to Pyrrhosoma nymphula, a common species found everywhere in Europe except for the Peloponnese and parts of north west Greece, Corfu and Southern Albania — the domain of P. elisabethae, or ‘Our Lizzy’ as it’s known to absolutely nobody, for shame.

My friend went on to suggest that I should give serious consideration to jacking in the UK for a while when it’s safe and legal to do so and dedicating myself to hunting down P. elisabethae in Balkan locations it hasn’t been sought before, adding more points on the map to the known range of this rare predator.

Well, someone managed to get a picture. Photo: inaturalist/philbenstead

The appeal of the discovery trail

Having lived in Greece for a little while previously, being often jaded with the UK, and with reasonable knowledge on what is a pretty incredible corner of Europe, such jaunts have something of a natural appeal. Plus, there is a lot about damselflies and dragonflies — the speed, grace and directness, for three qualities — which particularly sparks the adventurous spirit.

Another friend, who pre-Covid spent a year or so in the jungle in Vietnam, told of how their colleagues at the research base there tend to discover new dragonfly species on what seemed like a bi-weekly basis. The problem is, the Vietnamese jungle is a world of entomological unknowns; this is the comparatively well-trodden Europe, and I am not those colleagues.

Idly fantasising over life scouring the waterways of a beautiful part of the world is all well and good, but the truth is, I probably lack the acute identification skills necessary to tell the common and the elusive of the Pyrrhosoma genus apart. I’d probably struggle to differentiate it from several other red damselflies, all told.

Little-known lives

P. elisabethae is hardly the only insect about which you can find scanty information. Flicking through the hefty and brilliantly-illustrated The Book of Beetles recently brought home the fact that, for swathes of species, even basics like their diet are unknown.

In an age of big genetic data creating ever more complicated phylogenetic trees, and statistical modelling work that often combines the brilliant and the bewildering, there is a possibility that the study of insects is drifting into the theoretical realm. Perhaps there just aren’t enough people out there looking for insects, then looking at them long enough to establish what they’re doing with their lives. The old-school stuff that laid the foundations of everything else.

A shift back towards basic observation?

It’s notable that often, reports on field observations, like the two papers on P. elisabethae linked to above, see limited light of day in pretty niche publications. In these cases, the International Journal of Odonatology and Libellula, the journal of the Society of German-speaking Odonatologists.

It’s good news, then, to see that the high-profile journal Biotropica has just announced a plan to go ‘back to basics’ and publish short field observations in its pages — a move that will hopefully precipitate others following suite.

Finding out the fundamentals is a particularly pressing task in entomology, simply due to the numbers out there. With insect species facing multiple challenges just to stay alive, from urbanization to intensive farming, many will go extinct before anything is known about them — in some cases, even the very fact of their existence.

If I was at any point leaning towards following my mate’s tipoff and heading off on a dragonfly hunt in southern Europe, any plans would have very much been kiboshed by continued pandemic-prompted travel restrictions.

That’s not to say that notable observations can’t be made close to home — just ask the person in the Hebrides who caught a caddisfly thought extinct in the UK, with no previous records in the last century, or the householder with the largest recorded British colony of stick insects in their back garden. Not all of us can add to scientific knowledge through following curiosity, but often just keeping eyes open and taking in the world of insects can be reward enough. It never hurts to hope, though…