Salagubang

Finally, the paper, Studies of tiger beetles. CLXXXIX. A new Calomera species from Mindanao, Philippines, describing a new species which the author, Fabio Cassola, told me is a new species and he will name it in honor of me is finally out. After a couple of years. I’m elated and thankful to the author, of course. Much has been going on with Fabio waiting for a colleague to respond to his emails re the description to no avail.

Calomera cabigasi CASSOLA 2011 brings to five species under the genus Calomera to occur in the Philippines with three all found in Mindanao, including this new species. According to the author, it is similar to C. decemguttata from Sulawesi but smaller and with darker elytra, among other unique characters.

A copy of the paper can be downloaded here.

Up until now, my Carabidae specimens in my collection, all collected in the Philippines, are still unidentified. I really don’t have the resources, or necessary references for these. I’m not also sure about the tribes and genera. It’s just so diverse. With the lack of references, it really is quite difficult.

Can someone help?

I was rather surprised when I received an email from Hiraku Yoshitake where he sent me his latest paper: A New Species of the Subgenus Artapocyrtus of the Genus Metapocyrtus (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Entiminae) from Mindanao, the Philippines.

What I know is that the last time a new species of Metapocyrtus and even with Pachyrhynchini in general was described by Schultze in 1934. This can also be confirmed in Yap 2008.

Now, Yoshitake has described Metapocyrtus sakaii from Surigao del Sur, Mindanao from the private collection of Kaoru Sakai. He says that the said species is different from its allied species by the presence of the conical projection on the ventral part of the rostrum for both sexes. The holotype is deposited in the NIAES type collection.

Looking at my beetle photo RAW files that I’ve taken months ago, I processed seven which I then updated in this site. All are Scarabaeidae of which four are Cetoniinae, one Valginae and two Melolonthinae. There are still many photos to be processed but due to time constraints and difficulty of doing it, will do this some other time.

I have now 1,266 photos in this site.

The subfamily Parandrinae is one of the most challenging Cerambycidae groups when it comes to identification. Prior to the work of Santos-Silva, Heffern and Matsuda, Philippine Parandrinae was lumped under a single species: Parandra janus BATES 1875.

Last July 2010, Insecta Mundi finally published the long awaited paper of the three authors: Revision of Hawaiian, Australasian, Oriental, and Japanese Parandrinae (Coleoptera, Cerambycidae) wherein they took on the gargantuan task of putting order into this very complex group. I was asked to contribute some specimens from my collection plus those from my friend Eduard Vives. The result? Seven new species of Parandrinae for the Philippines alone!

Check out my updated Parandrinae checklist. Now, I’m in the process of identifying the rest of my specimens in my collection.