New Discoveries: Chewbacca Beetle, Brad Pitt Wasp, and Less Famous Species

New Discoveries is a collaboration between Stanford and Academy scientists and staff, appearing on the second and fourth Wednesdays of every month. Here we celebrate newly described species and demonstrate how much more there is to learn about life on Earth.

Scaly, But Small

Getting named after Star Wars’ Chewbacca could be seen as a joke when you’re only around three millimeters long as an adult—the famous Wookiee is more than two meters (around eight feet) tall. But what the recently described beetle, Trigonopterus chewbacca, does have going for itself are dense scales covering its head and legs that reminded scientists of Chewbacca. The new species was discovered in Papua New Guinea—along with three other less scaly, less Wookiee-like beetles—over ten days of sifting leaf litter and beating foliage in 2014. No reports of whether the beetle speaks Shyriiwook like its namesake.

A Handsome Parasitic Wasp

Buntika A. Butcher of Chulalongkorn University in Thailand and her colleagues just described a new species of parasitic wasp from Kosi Bay on the east coast of South Africa. Parasitic wasps in the group lay eggs on the caterpillars of butterflies and moths. When an egg hatches, the wasp larva eats its way through the caterpillar as a ready source of food. The newly-discovered wasp is small, about the width of a pencil lead, and has a famous namesake: Conobregma bradpitti. Guess who Butcher’s favorite actor is? The new wasp is described in the latest issue of the journal ZooKeys.

Speaking of Parasites…

Hermógenes Fernández-Marín was studying fungus-growing ants in Panama when he noticed something unusual—fly larvae stuck to ant larvae. The ants, Apterostigma dentigerum, seem to take care of all of the larvae—lucky flies! The fly, Pseudogaurax paratolmos, is the first within its family known to parasitize ants. Scientists still aren’t sure why the fly larvae go undetected in the ants’ nest—it could be scent, chemical signals, or something else. But the flies do seem to be picky—A. dentigerum is the only ant it will target.

California Scorpions

“2016 will be an exciting year for scorpion discoveries... the more I study them, the more I realize that we've only just scratched the surface. A lot of scorpion diversity remains to be described.” Warren Savary has been studying scorpions in our great state for decades and just published one new find. It sounds like we should expect many more of these arachnid neighbors this year. Pseudouroctonus maidu was uncovered in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada near the confluence of the North and Middle Forks of the American River in El Dorado County, but the specimens now live in the Academy’s entomology collection. The new scorpions reach up to 40 millimeters (1.6 inches) in length and are a dark reddish brown, according to the description, published last month in ZooKeys.

Images: Alexander Riedel and Robert Bryson Jr.