Millennium
Bug Found By Australian Entomologists
CSIRO Australia
It's the moment the world
has been waiting for. Taxonomists at CSIRO Entomology have announced
the discovery of the "real" Millennium Bug.
Head of the Australian National
Insect Collection, Dr Ebbe Nielsen, reports that the bug, a small
water strider, is harmless to computers. "It feeds on flies and
other small insects, not files," he says. Found at altitude in
mountain streams of southeast Queensland and northeast NSW, this true
bug is presently known to exist at only eight localities in that region.
At about two millimetres in
length, it lives on the surface of the water in quiet areas of freshwater
streams. "The "Millennium Bug" is a 'waiting' predator/scavenger
that feeds on small insects," Dr Nielsen explains. The bug's actual
scientific name cannot be made public until international procedures
for scientific naming are complete, but both its scientific and common
names will be the "Millennium Bug".
The "Millennium Bug" belongs
to a new genus of the family Veliidae (small water striders) that
scientists Mr Tom Weir of CSIRO Entomology and Dr Nils Møller Andersen
of the Zoological Museum, University of Copenhagen will describe in
a scientific paper to be published shortly in the Australian journal
Invertebrate Taxonomy. "Inland freshwater is one of Australia's
most important and precious resources, in terms of planning our future,"
Dr Nielsen says. "Protecting it is one of the great challenges
we face in the new Millennium."
"The reason I asked Dr
Andersen, who is the world authority on this group of insects, and
Mr Weir to work on water striders is so we can use them to monitor
the quality of freshwater all over Australia.
"Insects are very fine
instruments for indicating the biological health of their environment.
The goal here was to identify the various species of small water striders
so we know exactly what they can tell us about the health of our streams
and waterbodies."
Bugs from the Veliidae family
are often found in tropical and subtropical regions of the world and
occur on many oceanic islands. Relatives are the only insects to inhabit
the surface of the open oceans. "This new genus includes four species,
of which three, including the Millennium Bug, are new to science,"
says Mr Weir. "These bugs have an interesting adaptation of the
tarsi (feet) that enables them to 'glide' across the surface of the
water without breaking the surface tension."
"The study of the Millennium
Bug and its relatives is part of a much larger project that involves
the study and identification of thousands of specimens from the Australasian
region belonging to the infra-order Gerromorpha, the most diverse
group of animals associated with water surfaces," he explains.
In 1992-1994, the Australian
Biological Resources Study (ABRS) funded a project to study the semi-aquatic
bugs of Australia, in particular their taxonomy, evolution, and biogeography.
From a starting point of one genus, Microvelia, Mr Weir and Dr Andersen
have now described eight related genera in Australia. "This is
yet another remarkable indication of how much of Australia's biological
wealth remains undiscovered at the start of the 21st Century,"
says Dr Nielsen. "So far we have scientifically described fewer
than a third of the insect species on this continent. The work of
exploring Australia scientifically is still in its early stages."
The World fauna of semi-aquatic
bugs is placed in eight families of which six are represented in the
Australian fauna. Today, about 126 species are known from Australia.
The diversity varies significantly among different parts of Australia,
from Tasmania (5 species), South Australia (7), Victoria (12), and
NSW (21), to WA (26), NT (56), and Queensland (85 species). The largest
families are the Gerridae (35 species) and Veliidae (66 species).
