A New World Order

Abstract

At least in one way, I am a little like the late comedian Milton Berle (not in too many ways, though; he probably enjoyed wearing dresses more than I do). Until his death in March 2002 at the age of 93, Milton Berle was always the person newspaper editors turned to for a pithy quote whenever any prominent aging vaudevillian died (the pithy quote when Berle himself died was provided by Bob Hope, who, going on 99, is left as spokesperson for nonagenarian comedians). Whenever a particular kind of insect news hits the headlines, I get a call from some media outlet or other for my reaction. People do not call me for stories about mosquito-borne West Nile virus in Chicago or locust plagues in Afghanistan or other typical insect disaster stories. Rather, I get calls for the “feel-good” insect stories. Needless to say, I do not get called all that often. I get calls for quotes once a year when woollybear caterpillars start to cross the roads in droves and when the first “bees” of spring (which are usually syrphid flies) make an appearance. I also get called whenever any insect-related movie opens in town. Most recently, I went all the way to Chicago for a live television interview about the opening of the new “Spiderman” movie, even after I explained to the production assistant that spiders are not insects. Every now and then, though, I get asked about a real story. This happened not long after the first report appeared of the discovery of the Mantophasmatodea, the first new order of insects to be described in more than 80 years. I first became aware of this story myself when I saw an April 8th post from Carlos Flechtmann on the Entomology Discussion List (entomo-l), containing a link to a National Geographic web site (http:// nationalgeographic.com/news) with the story of the new taxon. Basically, the story, dated March 28, 2002, described the work of Oliver Zompro, a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute of Limnology in Plon, Germany, interested in stick insects, or phasmids. Zompro noticed a resemblance between phasmid-like fossil insects found in 40-million-year-old Baltic amber (familiar but puzzling to paleoentomologists because the fossils did not clearly belong to any extant orders) and a phasmid-like insect on a pin in the British Museum collected a half-century ago in Tanzania. Intrigued, he made a concerted effort to determine if this group of peculiar insects was still around. A query to museums in Africa produced a response from Eugene Marais, curator of the National Museum of Namibia, that their collection had a specimen from the Brandberg Mountains. Conservation International, the Max Planck Institute, and the National Museum of Namibia joined forces to mount a 16person multinational expedition to the Brandberg Mountains, which resulted in the capture of over a dozen living specimens. The designation of new order status was evidently merited by the unusual morphology and apparent behavior. Zompro called this insect “the gladiator” in honor of the movie of the same name. Zompro was quoted in the article as describing the insect as a “cross between a stick insect, a mantid, and a grasshopper” but details beyond that were not provided in the article, other than to say that the gladiator displays the very un-phasmidlike behavior of eating other insects. Needless to say, this story piqued my interest, and I immediately forwarded it to Jim Whitfield, the insect systematist whose office is across the hall from mine (I guess I must have assumed that email would be faster than just walking across the hall and knocking on his door). Of the many questions I had, the most important was whether Jim thought this was a legitimate report, given that there was no indication in the National Geographic account of a publication in a refereed journal article about the find. He did a quick web search and confirmed that, according to the Max Planck web site, a publication by Klaus Klass, Oliver Zompro, Niels Kristensen, and Joachim Adis describing a new order named Mantophasmatodea was in fact pending. The article eventually came out in Science, published online on April 18 (www. sciencexpress.org/ 18_April_2002/Page1/10/ 1126/science.1069397) and in print in the May 24, 2002 issue (Klass et al. 2002). Details were readily available in the article. Mantophasma zephyra (aka the gladiator) exhibits a phasmid-like general resemblance to a stick, but, unlike phasmids, it lacks an elongate mesothorax. Unlike the resolutely vegetarian phasmids, the gladiator has an apparent mantis-like taste for insect prey but, Stay away from him! He’ll eat anyth ing! Who ’s the n ew guy?