Walking Carpet WeevilDoes this weevil look like a fuzzball to you? It seems, after 10 days of search

Walking Carpet WeevilDoes this weevil look like a fuzzball to you? It seems, after 10 days of searching through leaf litter in the pouring rain, that’s what this small beetle looked like to the researchers who found it, so they named it Trigonopterus chewbacca. Yes, that means they named a weevil after Chewbacca in Star Wars (remember Han Solo saying to him “Laugh it up, fuzzball”?).T. chewbacca is found on the island of New Britain in Papua New Guinea, the largest island of the Bismarck Archipelago. Like all members of the Trigonopterus genus, it’s a flightless weevil. Males are about 3.34 millimeters (0.13 inches) in length, with a black body and hair-like structures on its antennae and legs. It also has dense scales on its head and legs that reminded the scientists of Chewbacca’s fur, hence the name.T. chewbacca is one of four new weevils found during the study; the others were named T. obsidianus, T. puncticollis, and T. silaliensis. Unfortunately, there are already concerns for the future well-being of all four newly described species; the beetles live in forested areas that are being cleared for palm oil plantations. In their paper, the researchers stress the importance of documenting the insects of New Britain “before the remaining forests are gone”.REPhoto Credit: Matthew Van Dam, Alexander Riedel, Raymond Laufahttp://bit.ly/26rNH1FReferences:http://zookeys.pensoft.net/articles.php?id=7709http://bit.ly/1W3jxhBhttp://usat.ly/1WUxLRl -- source link

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