Wednesday 17 August 2016

The Wonderful Weevil of Oz!

Last week, I was undecided about going to the Devon Bryophyte Group field meeting last Saturday at Brook Manor just outside Buckfastleigh seeing as I have a huge backlog of specimens to attend to and did not really fancy adding to it. That was until Nicola kindly asked me if I wanted to go and it turned out to be well worth going. Three healthy tubes full of samples (oh gawd) currently reside in the freezer awaiting initial processing but I focussed on an interesting weevil found by a small woodland stream lined with ferns.


It proved quite a frustrating specimen to get a handle on. Several scans of the images in the hefty German weevil book drew a blank. I began to think it was a specimen that had lost the majority of it's scales and looked for similarly shaped specimens in said book in vain but somehow it prompted me to pick up Mike Morris' True Weevils (Part One) and it keyed out very easily to Syagrius intrudens.

This is an Australian species that is probably extinct there and is now only found in the UK thanks in likelihood to gardeners and their penchant for exotic ferns. Googling the internet for this species found a similar experience by Mark Telfer and Graeme Lyons here....... A non-native endemic!

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