Biologue

Australia is home to over 200,000 species of insects, and discovering the identity, distribution and relationships is a "big science" research programme critical to the management of our biological heritage. The task requires significant resourcing, and increasingly this research is being funded by consortia of organizations and funding bodies with complementary agendas. Like ABRS, The US National Science Foundation (NSF) Partnerships for Enhancing Expertise in Taxonomy (PEET) programme supports systematic research projects that target groups of poorly known organisms such as insects. ABRS, together with NSF PEET, CSIRO and the Schlinger Foundation, has formed a partnership to enhance and stimulate systematic research and help prepare future generations of taxonomic experts. Besides training and producing systematic research, this effort is designed to translate current expertise into electronic databases and other formats with broad accessibility to the scientific community. The focus of this particular partnership is stilletto flies (Diptera: Therevidae).

The PEET grant itself is a collaboration between three principal investigators, Professor Michael Irwin at the University of Illinois, Associate Professor Brian Wiegmann at North Carolina State University and David Yeates. Worldwide, the family Therevidae contains around 3,000 species, and we estimate that about 30% of these occur in Australia. This disproportionately high species diversity results from a number of evolutionary radiations in our semi-arid and arid ecosystems. Adults feed on nectar and pollen and the predaceous larvae live in dry, friable, often sandy soils and consume other insect larvae and macroinvertebrates in the soil. We don't really have a good explanation for Australia's high therevid diversity, but it may be generated through intense larval prey resource partitioning. Only a small proportion of Australia's Therevidae are described, and they are poorly represented in collections.

Adult stiletto flies are cryptic, and most efficiently collected with malaise traps. These are tent-like structures that are particularly effective for sampling diurnal flying insects such as flies and wasps. In order to comprehend and describe the fauna, new fieldwork is required to intensively sample select habitats using malaise trapping techniques. One recent expedition supported directly by ABRS focussed on a newly gazetted National Park on the Great Dividing Range at the base of Cape York. Black Braes National Park is situated on a plateau standing at 1,000 metres above sea level and about 300 km (as the crow flies) west of Townsville. Vegetation in the area comprises a mosaic of open woodland communities depending on soil type and rainfall, with isolated patches of dry vine thicket in fire shadow areas. This locality was selected because it complemented other survey localities on the east coast which had uncovered very high levels of therevid diversity on or adjacent to part of the Great Divide such as the Warrumbungle Mountains, Mt Kaputar, and Carnarvon Gorge.

The expedition lasted 3 weeks during November 2001, and included CSIRO Entomology staff David Yeates, Christine Lambkin, Noel Starick and Joanna Hamilton. Dr Christine Lambkin, a CSIRO Postdoctoral fellow, is employed to conduct revisionary systematics of Austraslian Therevidae;her primary focus will be a clade containing the genus Ectinorhynchus Macquart and its relatives. The expedition was mounted from CSIRO Entomology's Australian National Insect Collection (ANIC) laboratories in Canberra. Driving the 4 wheel drive expedition vehicle and trailer from Canberra took the best part of three days in each direction. Once at the park, we received assistance, advice and accommodation from the rangers in charge, Jamie Anderson and Joy Atkinson. The bulk of the expedition time was spent setting a total of 25 malaise traps, servicing the traps every few days and sorting the samples into taxonomic groups for further processing. We also spent 4 days just north at Undarra Crater National Park, and liased with Rangers and the general public there about the nature and relevance of our work.

Although samples are still being processed, over 1500 therevid specimens representing almost 30 species belonging to 10 genera were obtained during the expedition. Most of the species and genera are undescribed. Species overlap was surprisingly low between Black Braes and Undarra Crater, belying their geographic proximity and suggesting a high beta diversity in the region. Joanna Hamilton and Christine Lambkin are now processing and curating the specimens and adding data to the large Biolink specimen database of Therevidae in ANIC. These specimens will be included in systematic revisions of the fauna conducted by Christine, and complement the material obtained during other fieldwork and that already held in collections. Another ABRS-sponsored expedition is planned this year to the Mount Moffatt section of Carnarvon Gorge National Park in central Queensland.