Wednesday, July 16, 2008

A new guest is bugging London history museum

The experts at London's Natural History Museum are not easily baffled. They pride themselves on classifying and displaying thousands of species, from birds and mamals to insects, dinosaurs and snakes, and are confident that they can identify most living things on the planet.

Except for a tiny red and black bug that has appeared in the museum's own gardens.

The almond-shaped insect, about the size of a grain of rice, and was first seen in March 2007 on some of the plane trees that grow on the grounds of the 19th century museum.

Within three months, it had become the most common insect in the garden, and has also been spotted in other central London parks. The museum has more than 28 million insect species in its collection, but none is an exact match for this insect. Still, experts were cautious about calling it a new discovery. "I don't expect to find a new species in the gardens of a museum" said Max Barclay, collections manager at the Natural History Museum. "Deep inside a tropical rain forest, yes but not in central London." The bug resembles the Arocatuse roselii, which is usually found in central Europe but is a brighter red and lives on alder trees.

Entomologists suspect the new bug could be a version of the roeselii that has adapted to live on plane trees, but acknowledged it could be an entirely new species.

Either way, it appears the museum's tiny visitor which appears harmless, is there to say. "We waited to see if the insect would survive the British winder," Barclay said. "It did and its thriving, so now we had better figure out what it is."