Who’S Who In Png’S

World Of Bugs

And Beetles

Sponsored by the Bishop

[useum of Honululu. the Wau oology Institute, situated in e highlands of the Morobe rovince of Papua New uinea, promotes education

ir ecology and conservation,

here is a large arboretum of itive plants, a zoo, a small useum, and some facilities •r research. Members and col borators of the Institute

idertake ecological studies.

One of the Institute’s recent Liblications is the Handbook of ommon New Guinea Beetles, >mpiled by J.L. Gressitt, the istitute’s director, and R.W. omabrook, one-time director f the Institute of Medical Re :arch and then professor of icdicine in the University of apua New Guinea.

The handbook covers the itire island of New Guinea id nearby islands but it deals tily with selected represen itives of the more than 25 000 )ecies. About one-third of the ell over 100 families of the

rder Coleoptera (beetles)

ave been selected, but they in ude about 90% of the kinds of eetles that the average student

light find without using

lecial methods for the very

nail species.

The authors point out that mch of the work on New Guinea’s beetles has been done n collections by German, Bri sh, Hungarian, French and

talian expeditions, and that

ustralians, Americans, Japan

ese. New Zealanders, Indo nesians and Papua New Guineans are relative new comers in the field.

Entomology got off to a splendid start through the field work of D’Albertis, Denton and a handful of intrepid people in the 1870 s and Ger man scientists prior to 1914.

Apart from Evelyn Cheesman, an incredible Englishwoman whose biography is long over due, little of note was accomplished between the two World Wars, except for J.L.

Froggett and B.A. O’Connor and a few others who were

engaged in commercially

orientated research, eg on coconut pests.

Since 1945, there has been an upsurge in entomological activities, with J.J.H. Szent- Ivany the first government entomologist, who was not

only interested in agricultural pests but also in Van pour Vart insect fauna research. By 1968, there was enough material for Szent-Ivany and Gressitt to produce a bibliography of New Guinea entomology of no less than 674 pages.

Even so, a great deal of re search remains to be done, es pecially in the matter of identification and, most im

portantly, on biological and

chemical control of insect pests. The coconut palm, no less important as a provider of food and shelter for villagers as it is in earning export income, is often subjected to the dep redations of beetles, eg Asian rhinoceros beetle, Brontispa and Prometheca; grasshoppers, eg Segestidea and Segestes; and bugs which, if uncon trolled, can destroy the crop of every palm over a wide area.

Coffee and cacao, too, are threatened in some years by one or the other of several major insect pests, while rub ber has only one major pest; a bug which causes tip-wilt and even death of seedlings. And subsistence crops such as sweet potato, taro, sugar cane and sago palm come under attack, too. In 1966, for instance, every sugar cane in village gardens on Goodenough Island was

completely defoliated by the

migratory locust.

Relevant work by the Ecol ogy Institute at Wau is, there fore, of vital importance to the well-being of subsistence and cash cropping in Papua New

Guinea. The rapidly growing

urban population needs more fresh food, and the govern ment’s programme for autarky depends, in part, on the suc cessful development of inex pensive means of insect pest control.

This handbook, written for students and showing excellent water colour paintings of some of the country’s most beautiful beetles together with a large number of black and white

drawings and photographs of

others, is most useful, too, for the layman with a peripheral interest in beetles, eg anyone concerned with the ecological aspects of development.

Harry Jackman

(Handbook Of Common New Guinea Beetles.

By J.L Gressitt and R.W. Hornabrook. Published by Wau Ecology Institute. 1977. K 3)