Beetles are a class of insects, also known as Coleoptera, and are one of the most important taxa of insects. In order to collect specimens of step nails, it is first necessary to understand the life habits of step nails that sting during the day, haunt at night, and like to eat aged vinegar and white wine. In order to find these rare insect specimens, scientists even came to the alpine gravel beach at an altitude of about 4800 meters to open the rubble...
Produced by: Gezhi Dao Pulpit
The following is the transcript of the speech of Shi Hongliang, associate professor of forest protection at the College of Forestry, Beijing Forestry University:
I'm from Beijing Forestry University, and my main research direction is one sentence: I do insect taxonomy.
You may be familiar with "insects", but what is taxonomy?
As a taxonomist, my daily research is divided into many directions, but in order to make everyone more interested, I will talk about one thing that everyone is most interested in: catching insects.
The title of my report today is "I am a beetle hunter", which is to tell the story of my catching beetles.
You may think that catching bugs is a very simple, very small thing, and I started catching bugs when I was in elementary school.
At that time, the school and parents were not so strict, and when there were caterpillars on the trees in our school, I would catch the caterpillars and put them in the pencil case.
When the teacher was not listening well in class, I took out the caterpillar and plated it.
When I became a college teacher now, how did I catch bugs? In other words, as a professional taxonomist, how do you catch bugs?
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > the work of insect taxonomists</h1>
First of all, I will show you a bug that I caught, this bug is very powerful, why is it very powerful?
Take a look at this picture, where did this bug come from?
This bug originated from Pulan County, Tibet, China, located at the junction of China, Nepal and India, it is very difficult to go, very far, then it must not be easy to catch this bug.
Not only is it not easy to catch it, but the genus is called Hilalopenetretus, a genus endemic to the western Himalayas, and only two species are known so far.
And not only do we know only two species, these two known species, and there are only four first two kinds of specimens that have been reported in science, but this is only the fifth specimen of this genus known to the whole world, and it is a new species.
We just published an article this year describing that this specimen represents a latest discovery in China in this genus.
And a new species is described, which is the only specimen known to this species.
After this article was published, I concluded that this article is very simple to write and the content is also very simple, but what is the hardest part of it?
The most difficult thing is to collect specimens, that is, to catch bugs. Here's an example.
In a place very close to the border between India and Nepal, this place is 4800 meters above sea level, and a little up is the permanent glacial tundra.
All the known specimens of this genus were all taken at an altitude of more than 4,000 meters, very close to the glacier, does it sound quite powerful?
In 2019, we went around Tibet in a big circle, and our main focus at that time was the southwestern part of Tibet, as far as the southwestern corner of Tibet , Ali.
Tibet is the roof ridge of China, ali is known as the roof ridge on the roof, is the highest place in Tibet.
That year, we collected the foot armor, collected to the highest place, 5600 meters above sea level, what is the concept of 5600 meters?
The oxygen on the summit of Everest is one-third of the oxygen on the ground, and the place where we go is only about half of the oxygen on the ground.
The image above shows three landscape photographs of Tibet, which are not intended to show you the scenery of Tibet, but to introduce the three main habitats of concern that we have collected at our core.
The first one is in the gravel pool of the high mountains at an altitude of about 5,000 meters plus tundra, where there are a lot of beetles that I am concerned about.
The second is the middle altitude, that is, the alpine elm forest of three or four thousand meters.
The third is the river beach along the dry hot river valley, where we also collected very valuable specimens.
The species is actually distributed in Kashmir and is also the first to be found and documented in China.
Every year I spend about 1-3 months in the wild catching insects, and the rest of the time, I spend more time making specimens in the lab and classifying them after production.
If there are new scientific research results, I will write articles and publish them.
These are some of the foot armor specimens that I have made or collected.
In general, I think that as a taxonomist, the core work is to collect specimens, classify identification, write articles and publish, and through some of the results I have written, let people have some understanding of these taxa, as a basis for identification.
I've just talked about what taxonomists do, and then I'll add a little bit of the basics.
I'm a beetle hunter, so what is a beetle?
Beetles are one of the insects, and they are very easy to identify.
We all know that all insects have two pairs of wings: forewings and hindwings.
This open-winged beetle, its forewings thickened, hardened to form "elytra", protecting the body, so the beetle is called Coleoptera, very easy to identify.
Beetles are a very important group of insects, why are they important?
Of all living things, there are about 1.9 million described species, and of these 1.9 million, 1.45 million are animals.
Of these 1.45 million animal species, there are 1.15 million arthropods, of which about 1 million are insects.
So insects make up more than half of all known organisms.
Among insects, beetles are the most important taxon, with 380,000 known species, which is a very large number.
Now all the people, animals, mammals, birds, mammals, snakes, and fish we know, adding up to only 60,000 species, beetles are a very large group compared to them.
What beetles are around us? Fireflies, ladybugs, dung beetles, etc., are all in line with what I just explained to beetles.
But my research direction is not all beetles, and here's my favorite family of beetles.
There are about 40,000 species of foot beetles in the world, and 4,000 species in China, and I just talked about a very high-level step armor, in fact, there are many species in the step armor that are not so advanced.
Most of the species I've shown here are even easily seen in the cities or plains of Beijing.
There are about 200 kinds of rifle armor in Beijing, and if you are interested, you can slowly look for it in the future.
< h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > method for the collection of step nail specimens</h1>
How are these step nail specimens collected?
Rifles have a habit of life, they sting during the day, they will come out at night, hide under stones and grass roots during the day, and come out at night to hunt.
If you want to collect rifles during the day, there is one easiest way.
We go out and look under this stone, move the stone away, and sometimes we find the foot armor hiding underneath, hiding from predators, birds, beasts, or those of us who catch bugs.
We turn the stones over and we can catch them.
Another method is also a very efficient method.
In the wild, especially in lawn, grass or understory environments, we dig a pit in the ground, bury disposable plastic cups below the surface, make the cup mouth flush with the ground, and put some of the things that beetles like to eat in it.
What do they like to eat?
They like to add vinegar and white wine, mix the two things together, pour a little into the glass, and then we go back to where we live and look at it the next day.
At night, when the foot armor comes out to move, it will fall into the trap and then be caught.
There is also a habitat that we really like, that is, the open river beach by the river, which also has a lot of foot armor on it.
But it is not easy to collect this kind of foot armor, because there are too many stones on the river beach, we can't open them one by one, so what do we need to do?
At night, we will turn on flashlights and headlights, go to the river beach, and we will find that the river beach is quiet during the day, and the situation is different at night.
The armors all stood up and walked around the river beach, and we could easily catch them.
This genus is called shanli bujia, and in China, they are distributed on a very high plateau, in western Sichuan and eastern Tibet, and there are many species.
The two insects in the picture are very good-looking, but they are actually two species in the same genus, what environment do they live in?
In southern Tibet, on alpine gravel beaches at an altitude of about 4,800 meters, there is no such thing as snow lines and gravel slopes.
There are some places with long grass on the side, and there are some gravel where the grass is long, and if we open these gravel during the day, it is possible to collect this very beautiful rifle.
Why do I always have to go to hard, hard places to collect foot armor?
First of all, if this place is difficult to go, then the specimens that can be collected must be relatively rare, and it is possible to find species that have not been discovered by others.
Second, the terrain of the Hengduan Mountains is very complex, and the geological changes are very complex, and almost all of China's major earthquakes occur in the Hengduan Mountains in the southwest.
The geological changes here are complex, the species evolution rate is also fast, and the species isolation is also strong, so here, it is possible to collect different species every 50 kilometers, at different mountains.
Species in Beijing are likely to be distributed all the way to the northeast, or all the way to Xinjiang, and 2,000 kilometers of roads may be collected, and the same species is collected.
This specimen is very beautiful, it is a large stride armor that I collected with a cup on the alpine rhododendron bush at an altitude of about 4,000 meters in The Conch Ditch in Sichuan Province, and its body shines with the light of golden stars.
This is also our favorite habitat, called alpine cloud forest, where the number of foot beetles is very large, and sometimes a large number of specimens can be collected in a day.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > "dangerous character" encountered in the wild</h1>
I've been to so many places, have I ever encountered danger in the wild?
As an entomologist, I feel that many of the dangers I encounter in the wild are something I can control because I know very well the dangers of insects in the wild, and other big animals, and I don't bother with them.
But of all the insects, what is the most dangerous?
I think of all the insects, the most dangerous is the wasp.
I have also encountered wasps in the wild, and I generally don't provoke them, but there is a very important method of collecting beetles, called the vibratory method.
I take a piece of cloth, take a stick in my right hand, and knock the branch down on the vibrating cloth, and I can pick the beetle back.
Once, when I accidentally knocked the wasp and knocked it on my cloth, it was terrible, so I ran away and didn't want anything.
After running away, I waited for about half an hour, and it was quiet, before I quickly took my tools away.
Are the rifles I pick dangerous?
Most are not dangerous, but there is also a guy who is dangerous, and this dangerous guy is called a fart.
As the name suggests, it is dangerous to fart, its fart is not the same as your fart, its fart temperature is as high as 150 degrees, it is a very hot fart.
Sometimes, when we get it with our hands, we will hear a "poof" sound, and the hands will be burned red and burned very painfully.
How to catch farts in the wild?
Sometimes I would take a large forceps, clip it up with tweezers, and put it in a bottle.
But occasionally I didn't take the tweezers, then I can step on it with my foot, and I will hear a "poof" under my feet, and then I will step on it again, and "poof" another sound.
It "poofed" three or four times, and finally had no strength, why?
Because it runs out of defense fluid in its body and has no fart function, then I can grab it with my hands.
Why does the fart step armor produce such a hot gas?
This is a very special example of an insect defense system, some time ago, I looked up an article and saw the defense system of the fart rifle.
On the right is a schematic diagram of its defense system divided into two parts.
Entomologists have found that its farts emit hot things, mainly a chemical called benzoquinone.
In its defense system, it is actually in the blue defense line at the base, storing a mixture of two chemicals, hydrogen peroxide and phenol.
Hydrogen peroxide and phenol do not react under normal circumstances, but when they are catalyzed by peroxidase, they react to form benzoquinone and produce a lot of heat, which is the source of its fart.
The pink area below stores catalase, and when a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and phenol encounters catalase, it produces this hot fart.
Finally, I would like to use this picture to conclude this debriefing.
This picture of the foot armor is not very good, very ordinary, even missing an arm and a broken leg, and the gray-white label in the middle of the right side shows the collection information of this specimen.
It was collected in 1900 in Bangalore, southern India, which is now a very densely populated area.
How old is this bug? 10 years older than my grandfather and very old.
It was a new species that I published in 2013, and when this new species was published, only this one specimen was known, and the specimen was very rare, and it suggested that the species is most likely no longer there.
The place where it was collected was very bustling and very densely populated.
Some time ago I saw an article on fruit shells that said that in the past 26 years, we may have saved 27 species to avoid extinction.
When I read this article, I was very impressed that conservation biologists have used many methods to avoid the extinction of these species.
But insects are humble, and a large number of species may have gone extinct even before humans knew them.
This species was very fortunate that it was collected by beetle hunters more than 100 years ago and collected in the herbarium, so that we can know them.
But aren't there more beetles still hiding in the forest? Their habitat is under such serious threat that they don't even have a chance to be recognized by humans.
Beetles are humble, but they still deserve a name, and that's one of the things we taxonomists are trying to do today.
Maybe we can't save them from extinction, but we can take them to the herbarium and give them a name.
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