Jungle Gems by Yikai Zhang

Author:Yikai Zhang [Zhang, Yikai]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783527946
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 2019-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

After finding my first cicada, plenty more appeared

Light trapping, as it turned out, was one of the most exhilarating experiences I’ve ever had – I was so absorbed by the whole process that all sense of time was lost, and I ended up staying at the clearing until the break of dawn. After finding my first cicada, plenty more appeared, along with some enormous butterfly-like moths, announcing their arrival with some rather ungainly crashes into the bed sheet. Deeper into the night, more and more bizarre creatures began to emerge from the darkness and throw themselves at the light, some of which were the stuff of nightmares.16 By midnight there was barely an inch of space left on the sheet, and the entire surface was covered by a crawling mass of thousands of insects. Sifting through the mess and picking out the beetles was no easy business, as many of the more obscure ones could seem like wasps or flies to the untrained eye.

In just a few hours of light trapping, I collected more specimens than I had in the whole of the previous week – I could barely identify half of them to family level, let alone to genus or species, and I had every reason to believe that a good portion of my catch was new to science. You may think that I was overly optimistic, but the majority of the specimens I collected were tiny, drab-brown beetles, which are heavily understudied, and any mass-sampling method in the tropics is almost guaranteed to produce new species. That is not to say there weren’t any ‘substantial’ beetles at the light trap; indeed, far from it – about half a dozen rhinoceros beetles and various species of stag beetles showed up, as well as a very large longhorn beetle. I knew most of these beetles to species level, however, so there wasn’t much point in collecting them; I simply let them sit on the sheet until they flew away the next morning.

The highlight of the night showed up about an hour before dawn, just as the adrenalin rush was beginning to wear off and I was finally feeling sleepy. The alien creature had probably been on the sheet for some time, but had escaped my notice as it was hidden inside one of the folds of the bed sheet – it looked like a fusion between a mantis and a wasp, and had kaleidoscopic eyes that hypnotised me the more I looked into them. I immediately recognised it as a mantisfly, which had been top of my ‘insects to see before I die’ list since childhood. I marvelled at its resemblance to a mantis, and noted that its likeness to a red paper wasp served as a form of Batesian mimicry.17 In fact, it is akin to neither of them, and its closest relatives are the familiar green lacewings, which can be found in any British garden. The adaptations of the mantisfly were remarkable, and anybody who mistook this insect

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