The new species were established through detailed examination of their external anatomy and male reproductive structures, known as gonopods. Specimens were collected in July 2025 and preserved in 90% ethanol. Researchers examined them with a Nikon SMZ800N stereomicroscope, dissected the gonopods, photographed structures at different focal depths with a Sony A6000 camera, and assembled the images using Helicon Focus 7.0 and Adobe Photoshop CS6. Scanning electron microscopy was also used.

The type series of H. caobang came from Truong Ha commune on the way to Coc Po Cave. It comprised one male holotype, one male paratype and five female paratypes: two females deposited at the Institute of Ecology and Biological Resources in Hanoi and three females at the Department of Entomology at Virginia Tech. The male holotype measured 25.1 mm in body length, with prozona and metazona widths of 1.87 mm and 2.27 mm, respectively. Females ranged from 28.0 to 29.2 mm in body length.

H. caobang is generally black, with yellow middle portions of the metaterga and paraterga, yellowish-brown legs and sterna, and black antennae. Its diagnostic features include a highly elevated, coniform process between the coxae of the fourth pair of legs on sternum 5, a long and slender gonopod femorite, and a strongly spiraled solenophore that is broad apically and bears spiniform processes on its lateral and mesal sides. Although its apical solenophore resembles that of H. montana, the Vietnamese species lacks the prominent solenophore tooth present in H. montana. The specimens were found beneath leaf litter in moist limestone forest.

The second species, H. vast, was represented by one male holotype collected at Thang Hen Lake in limestone forest on 15 July 2025, one male paratype with the same collection data, and seven additional paratypes from Pia Oac-Pia Den National Park. The holotype was 26.9 mm long, with prozona and metazona widths of 2.14 mm and 2.48 mm. Male paratypes measured 24.9–26.05 mm, while the reported female was 28.5 mm long. The species was collected beneath leaf litter in moist limestone forest at an elevation of about 1,000 metres above sea level.

H. vast is generally dark brown, with yellowish-brown pleura, pale-yellow sterna and legs, and brown antennae except for the distal half of antennomere 6 and antennomere 7, which are black. It has a highly elevated, rounded process between the fourth coxae on sternum 5. Its gonopods have a long, slender femorite and a spiraled solenophore with a long acute process and a strongly bifid apical tip. These features distinguish it from H. caobang, which has a broader apical solenophore bearing two spiniform processes.

For DNA barcoding, the researchers extracted genomic DNA with Qiagen DNeasy Blood and Tissue Kits. They amplified a 680-base-pair fragment of the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I gene with the LCO1490 and HCO2198 primers and a 500-base-pair fragment of the 16S ribosomal RNA gene with either the 16Sa/16Sb or 16S-1F19 primer set. Two-microlitre portions of amplification products were screened by electrophoresis in 1% agarose-TAE, then sent to GenLab in Vietnam for purification and sequencing. The sequences were checked through an NCBI BLAST search and deposited in GenBank.

Both species yielded 16S rRNA barcodes, but the COI barcode from H. vast failed to sequence. The H. caobang sequences were deposited under accession numbers QB104726 for COI and QB104679 for 16S rRNA, while the H. vast 16S rRNA sequence was deposited as QB104680. BLAST comparisons reported genetic similarities of 85.63% for H. caobang and 85.51% for H. vast with Sellanucheza variata. Because no Hedinomorpha sequences were then available in NCBI, direct genetic comparisons with members of the genus were not possible.

Both Vietnamese species resemble H. reducta from Sichuan, China, in having poorly developed paraterga, long and slender gonopod femorites without a mesal groove, and generally comparable gonopod configurations. They differ from that species in body width and in the form of the process at the base of the solenophore: H. reducta has an unciform process, whereas the Vietnamese species have a large spine. Their morphology does not fully match the typical diagnosis of Hedinomorpha, and their closest BLAST matches were Sellanucheza species. Nevertheless, the authors retained both in Hedinomorpha because the available molecular and morphological evidence did not justify transferring them to Sellanucheza or erecting a new genus. The records confirm the genus in northern Vietnam while leaving questions about the placement of these unusual species open.

Subject of Research: Taxonomic description of two new Hedinomorpha millipede species from northern Vietnam using morphology and mitochondrial DNA barcoding

Article Title: First records of the millipede genus Hedinomorpha Verhoeff, 1934 ( Diplopoda , Polydesmida , Paradoxosomatidae ) from Vietnam, with descriptions of two new species

Article References: Nguyen, T.-A. T., Marek, P. E., & Nguyen, A. D. (2026). First records of the millipede genus Hedinomorpha Verhoeff, 1934 (Diplopoda, Polydesmida, Paradoxosomatidae) from Vietnam, with descriptions of two new species. Zoosystematics and Evolution, 102(5), 1221-1232. https://doi.org/10.3897/zse.102.208437

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/zse.102.208437

Keywords: Hedinomorpha, millipedes, Vietnam, Cao Bang Province, new species, taxonomy, DNA barcoding, morphology, Paradoxosomatidae, zoology, First, records

The Museum of Texas Tech University, founded in 1929 as the West Texas Museum, is a free-admission, multidisciplinary public university museum that serves as a regional attraction for the South Plains and West Texas. It houses six collecting divisions, including Anthropology, Arts, Clothing and Textiles, History, Paleontology, and the Natural Science Research Laboratory, which curates the natural history collections of extant animals. Combined, the museum’s holdings are estimated at a little over 9.5 million objects and specimens. Its exhibit galleries span more than 200,000 square feet, with nine permanent galleries and ten rotating ones. Yet until recently, the Invertebrate Zoology Collection had little presence in public-facing events and was not purposefully integrated into the museum’s exhibits.

That changed in 2023, when the museum and several other public-facing units at Texas Tech were repositioned within the administrative purview of Outreach and Engagement in the Office of the Provost. This restructuring enlarged the scope of museum curators’ responsibilities to offer outreach and engagement opportunities for the Lubbock and West Texas communities. Jennifer C. Girón, curator of the Invertebrate Zoology Collection and a beetle specialist, saw an opening. She coordinated with other museum personnel to develop an in-person event with observation stations and a lecture, leveraging the collection’s large holdings of beetles from around the world, including visually striking specimens partly derived from a large group of confiscated specimens turned over by the US Fish and Wildlife Service in the early 2000s.

Defining a theme and date was straightforward. The team took advantage of June Bug Day, a national celebration of biodiversity and wildlife, and the fact that the collection holds a large assortment of beetles, including representatives of the genus Phyllophaga, the so-called typical June bugs of the family Scarabaeidae. The event was designed around three components: two observation stations equipped with insect drawers and stereo microscopes, a station hosted by the Texas Tech Entomology Club featuring live organisms, and a thirty-minute lecture about beetles for a general audience. Planning began about one month in advance with the museum’s office of Marketing and Communications, followed by coordination with the Operations team, which schedules events and auditorium access, and the Exhibits team, which decides on the use of gallery space.

A walk through the museum galleries with the Exhibits manager helped determine the best locations for the three stations, optimizing the flow of people and the lighting conditions. The Marketing and Communications officer created a marketing image to represent the event and began promoting it through the museum’s social media platforms. The specimen drawers were already prepared: one contained showy, large, and colorful butterflies and beetles, while the other was a set of eight unit trays, each holding about twenty specimens representing multiple insect orders and displaying variation in size, shape, and color. For the June beetle drawers, the curator pulled specimens from across the beetle collection, including dung beetles, rhinoceros beetles, stag beetles, hide beetles, weevils, leaf beetles, jewel beetles, darkling beetles, ground beetles, tiger beetles, water beetles, diving beetles, fireflies, and soldier beetles, to display variation in sizes, shapes, and colors.

At each viewing station, at least two student volunteers talked to the public about the specimens and facilitated close-up observation through the available microscopes. Small stepping stools were available for smaller children so they could reach the appropriate height to look through the microscopes. The Texas Tech Entomology Club, an undergraduate student organization, hosted a station with live organisms: a millipede, a hissing cockroach, and a vinegarroon. The millipede and the cockroach were allowed to be handled by the public in a controlled manner, with members of the club supervising and handling the organisms. The accompanying lecture included a brief introduction to June bugs and June Bug Day, followed by a general introduction to how to recognize a beetle and why beetles are important, emphasizing their ecological roles as decomposers, pollinators, predators, and bioindicators, and also addressing the issues beetles can create when they become pests and how other organisms, including some human societies, use beetles as a food source.

The event was come-and-go and lasted three hours, from 2:00 pm until museum closing at 5:00 pm. More than 450 people of all ages walked through the doors and passed by the observation stations, with most, though an unknown number, stopping to interact. Many visitors also went through at least some of the museum galleries before departing. About 60 people attended the beetle lecture, and several questions from the public followed at the end. Based on an online sign-up form to which fewer than 30 people responded, the lecture was originally planned for a small auditorium with a capacity of 50 people. However, the Marketing and Communications manager suggested using the larger main auditorium because summer events tend to attract more people, particularly families with children, and she noted the positive public reaction to the social media posts about the event. The Operations team facilitated the move and provided assistance in the auditorium, managing equipment and adjusting lighting and sound. The Exhibits team placed tables with extension cords and stepping stools as needed, and entrance guards provided attendance counts at the conclusion of the event.

The experience revealed both strengths and gaps. The student volunteers were able to talk about the specimens and assist attendees who wanted to observe them under the stereo microscopes, but they were only briefly introduced to the specimens shortly before the start of the event. For future iterations, the team plans to have written support available so that volunteers can prepare ahead of time and refer to documentation as the event progresses. At institutions with active entomology programs, student volunteers tend to have a general understanding of insect diversity and the ability to recognize different beetle groups with enough background to talk about them confidently during brief interactions. Because such a program does not exist at Texas Tech, providing background information to volunteers would have improved their ability to effectively communicate the importance of the organisms displayed. The students managing the live organisms station demonstrated that interacting with the public in a controlled setting helps visitors feel more comfortable with live arthropods, and the experience indicates that outreach events are important not only for public learning but for the professional development of students who communicate relevant concepts to the public.

The content shared in the beetle lecture seemed well received by attendees, who represented a broad range of ages, from small children and school-aged children to college students, adults, and seniors. However, there was no system in place to determine whether the lecture succeeded at changing perceptions of beetles from nuisance to necessary and helpful components of the environment. In the past, the museum has used the number of attendees as a metric for how successful an event was; under the new directives of Outreach and Engagement, the institution is moving toward more engaging interactions with the community that go beyond the mere provision of information. Although there are resources available on how to tackle outreach events, a lack of experience and guidance resulted in no data or feedback being gathered that could have been helpful in making adjustments to subsequent iterations of the event. There is currently work taking place at Texas Tech Outreach and Engagement to train personnel, including curators with strong backgrounds in their specific disciplines but less experience engaging with the public, on topics such as how to establish effective community partnerships and how to plan for more meaningful bidirectional interactions that can actually change people’s perception and behavior in the long run.

The lessons from Come Bug Me extend well beyond Lubbock. The team recommends planning strategically, since success measured only by attendance cannot gauge whether organizing such an event is worth the effort beyond having people come through the doors. They recommend coordinating effectively, because multiple eyes and experiences can optimize both the work to put together the event and the experience guests get from it, and planning ahead allows plenty of time to adjust as necessary. They recommend creating documentation for volunteers, since one person cannot be everywhere at once and student volunteers are fundamental to the success of such events, which requires specimen displays and associated information to be ready in advance to allow time for volunteers to become familiar with the material. Finally, they recommend documenting the event from scheduling to execution and assessment, including delegating the task of capturing images during the event, as these images can serve as support when requesting space for future events and promoting the institution through marketing. As the first attempt by the Invertebrate Zoology Collection to organize and conduct an outreach event, Come Bug Me turned a research collection into a public attraction and set a template that other institutions caring for biological collections used primarily for research can adapt for their own communities.

Subject of Research: science communication

Article Title: Come Bug Me: the first attempt at an outreach event showcasing the Invertebrate Zoology Collection of the Museum of Texas Tech University

Article References: Girón, J. C. (2025). Come Bug Me: the first attempt at an outreach event showcasing the Invertebrate Zoology Collection of the Museum of Texas Tech University. Natural History Collections and Museomics, 2, 1-8. https://doi.org/10.3897/nhcm.2.153552

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/nhcm.2.153552

Keywords: Come, first, attempt, outreach, event, showcasing, Invertebrate, Zoology, Collection, Museum, Texas, Tech

The pericopine moths belong to the tribe Arctiini, one of four groupings currently recognized within Arctiinae, alongside Lithosiini, Syntomini and Amerilini. The subfamily as a whole encompasses more than 11,000 species, roughly six percent of the world’s lepidopteran diversity, and the Neotropics are estimated to harbor at least thirty percent of all lepidopteran species. Yet the taxonomic history of these moths remained obscured for centuries, mainly because distinct lineages with high morphological resemblance were squeezed into classification systems that produced unnatural groupings. Several authors even erected artificial groups to accommodate species that did not fit pre-existing categories, compounding the confusion. Modern analyses have cleaned up the higher classification, but at the species level the pericopines remain a focal group for revisionary work, precisely because their collections rarely yield large specimen counts and most species are poorly represented in museums.

One of the most striking biological themes running through the catalogue is chemistry. Tiger moth caterpillars carry primary and secondary setae that provide physical and chemical protection against predation, and their strong association with larval host plants is mediated by plant secondary compounds. Larvae of Arctiini forage on host plants that include members of the families Asteraceae, Boraginaceae, Apocynaceae and Fabaceae, all known for the presence of pyrrolizidine alkaloids. These alkaloids are sequestered by the insects and retained through metamorphosis, appearing in the chorion of eggs, the integument of adults, the hemolymph, the larvae and the larval setae, or released as secretions through thoracic glands. The compounds are transferred from immature stages to adults, biparentally to eggs, and from males to females during courtship. This chemical armor confers unpalatability, which synergistically complements visual color signals in a display of aposematism, and even ultrasonic sound, as deterrents against predation.

The catalogue’s species accounts reveal how this chemical ecology intertwines with mimicry. Calodesma maculifrons, for instance, has highly distinctive wing patterns with an orange background, yellow post-discal maculae and parallel yellow stripes on black, and moths from other families share the same patterns, including species of Pyralidae, Tortricidae, Geometridae, Zygaenidae, Crambidae and Notodontidae, as well as some Central American butterflies in the genus Mesene, suggesting a mimicry ring. Chetone phaeba, known from a Peruvian female, carries a coloration resembling the Heliconius butterflies Heliconius erato emma, Heliconius melpomene aglaope, Heliconius demeter demeter and Heliconius xanthocles melittus, together with the nymphalid Castilia perilla. Netoche histrio exhibits tiger-pattern imitation coloring resembling Heliconius and Eresia butterflies, tiger-patterned Ithomiini and the riodinid Stalachtis calliope, all occurring in the Amazon. These convergent wing patterns are the visible face of a shared chemical defense, warning predators of a bad taste that the moths themselves may have borrowed from their host plants.

Sexual dimorphism emerges as the second great source of taxonomic chaos in the group. Many pericopine species show extreme differences between males and females, and the catalogue documents case after case in which the two sexes were described as different species. In Dysschema amphissa, males have a white wing pattern with brown obscured regions while females display an orange pattern similar to other Dysschema species involved in mimetic rings with Heliconiinae and Ithomiini butterflies. For some species, such as Dysschema amphissa and Euchlaenidia trancisa, males are sampled with light traps during the night while the females have a diurnal habit and are apparently rare or difficult to find. This variation in flight period between the sexes, associated with their sexual dimorphism, resulted in descriptions based on only one sex, and not rarely females and males were described as different species, contributing to the taxonomic disorder that the new catalogue helps to untangle.

The genus Dysschema dominates the Hamburg collection, and its species accounts illustrate both the problems and the solutions of modern revisionary work. Dysschema sacrifica, a relatively common and widespread South American species extending from the Cerrado and open Atlantic Forest into Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay and north-central Argentina, turns out to be highly polyphagous, with larval records in Amarantaceae, Asteraceae, Myrtaceae, Nyctaginaceae and Urticaceae. Remarkably, it was introduced in South Africa as a biological control agent against the invasive weed Chromolaena odorata. Dysschema picta shows males with a wing pattern similar to glasswing butterflies while females have wing polychromatism and a black, yellow and orange tiger pattern; immatures were reared in Mikania hirsutissima, Senecio brasiliensis and Vernonia polyanthes, all Asteraceae, and the documented female polychromatism resulted in the establishment of synonyms. Dysschema terminata, whose pairing of sexes was confirmed by collections at the Boracéia Biological Station in São Paulo, has males that are polychromatic on the hindwings, with a red submarginal band that is quite evident or gradually reduced until its complete absence.

Genitalia and other anatomical details provide the technical backbone for separating such lookalike species. Dysschema boisduvalii males are distinguished from related species such as D. centenaria and D. inominatum by spiniform projections at the base of the valva, whereas females are distinguished by having the opening of the ostium in the middle of the seventh sternite and an enlarged ductus bursae. Dysschema centenaria, whose immatures were reared in Eryngium paniculatum and E. eburneum, allowing the association between males and females, is externally distinguished from D. boisduvalii by white or yellow scales dorsally on the apex of the forewings, yellow spots on the hindwing base and a brown abdomen ventrally, with differences in the morphology of female and male genitalia corroborating the status of distinct species. Dysschema marginalis, by contrast, has genitalia that do not exhibit discernible distinctions across species, indicating that it constitutes a cryptic species complex with D. lycaste. Dysschema tricolora even possesses asymmetric structures in both male and female genitalia, which is unusual for the genus.

The catalogue also engages directly with molecular systematics and its pitfalls. Eucyane dejanira was previously allocated in the genus Hypocrita and subsequently moved to Eucyane based on a maximum likelihood analysis using the CO1 gene. The authors caution that this taxonomic decision shall be taken with care, because while CO1 is effective for species-level identification, its high mutation rate can make it challenging to compare sequences across very diverse taxa, since similar nucleotide changes may occur independently in different lineages, leading to misleading phylogenetic relationships. Moreover, the taxonomic coverage of that analysis was narrow. Recent phylogenetic work has shown that the genus Hypocrita is polyphyletic, consisting of two unrelated groups, one phylogenetically close to Netoche and the other close to the genera Ephestris and Thirgis. A wider taxonomic sampling and the use of nuclear genes are needed to clarify the relationships and taxonomic validity of the genera Eucyane, Hypocrita, Chetone and Netoche, mainly because the evolution of color pattern within these genera was driven by mimicry relationships.

Not every species in the collection is a showstopper, and the catalogue is candid about the knowledge gaps that remain. Hyalurga fenestra, Hyalurga fenestrata, Hypocrita fenestraria and Hypocrita plagifera are species for which available information is limited to the original description and inclusion in faunal survey lists, despite their prevalence in collections and broad distributions spanning the Amazon and Atlantic Forest biomes. Composia credula, distributed mainly in Central America with records on the islands of Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Cuba and the Dominican Republic, is another species about which scant information can be found in the literature. By contrast, Gnophaela vermiculata, a North American species without sexual dimorphism, has well-documented immature stages reared in Mertensia virginica, and adults are recorded to contain pyrrolizidine alkaloids, a chemical signature that ties this northern moth into the same defensive syndrome as its tropical relatives.

The broader significance of the Hamburg catalogue lies in what taxonomic catalogues do for biodiversity knowledge as a whole. By offering updated and standardized use of scientific names, together with data on geographic distribution, ecological relationships, host plant use and participation in mimetic rings, such inventories assist in closing knowledge gaps and enable a biological system to be convincingly described in detail and with clear nomenclature. The pericopines, with their incredible diversity of wing patterns that attract butterfly collectors, are a focal group for museomics studies, particularly for the rare or under-sampled species whose low representation in collections makes them nearly invisible to conventional research. Every photographed specimen, every synonym resolved and every host plant record added brings the hidden diversity of the Neotropics a step closer to being discovered, named and understood before it disappears.

Subject of Research: Illustrated catalogue of Pericopina (Lepidoptera, Erebidae, Arctiinae) in the Museum of Nature Hamburg – Zoology

Article Title: Illustrated catalogue of Pericopina ( Lepidoptera , Erebidae , Arctiinae ) in the Museum of Nature Hamburg – Zoology

Article References: Moraes, S. D. S., Freitas, A. V. L., & Silva-Brandão, K. L. (2025). Illustrated catalogue of Pericopina (Lepidoptera, Erebidae, Arctiinae) in the Museum of Nature Hamburg – Zoology. Evolutionary Systematics, 9(1), 123-134. https://doi.org/10.3897/evolsyst.9.150930

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/evolsyst.9.150930

Keywords: Illustrated, catalogue, Pericopina, Lepidoptera, Erebidae, Arctiinae, Museum, Nature, Hamburg, Zoology, scientific research

The expedition was led by the Berlin plant geneticist Hans Stubbe of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Berlin-Dahlem, who had already conducted a collecting trip to the Balkans in 1941. Stubbe’s ambitions were tied to the planned founding of a dedicated Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Crop Plant Research, which would eventually be established in Vienna in 1943. His collecting trips were meant to legitimize that institute, and they were framed in explicitly economic terms. In a March 1942 application to the German Research Foundation, Stubbe stated that the goal was to collect wild forms of crop plants of decisive importance for breeding, particularly in the German East, tying the expedition directly to the agricultural economics of the Nazi war of annihilation against the Soviet Union.

The scientific paradigm behind these efforts traced back to the Soviet geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, whose theory of centers of origin identified the Mediterranean as a key region for the wild ancestors of cultivated plants. Plant breeding researchers hoped that wild and primitive forms, with their resistance to pests and drought, could provide the genetic foundations for raising agricultural productivity in an autarkic wartime economy. Stubbe’s 1941 Balkan expedition, funded with 10,000 Reichsmark by the Reich Research Council just days after its application, had already yielded more than 2,000 seed samples and 2,000 herbarium specimens, collected by a nineteen-person team formally subordinated to the military and traveling with three cars and a truck.

On the Austrian side, the driving force was the zoologist Otto Wettstein, curator of the herpetological collection at the Natural History Museum Vienna. Wettstein had long pursued research on the Aegean islands, and after the German occupation of Greece in April 1941 he immediately recognized the military situation as a unique scientific resource. In May 1941 he applied for a collecting trip to three Aegean islands to shoot wild goats, noting that under normal circumstances collecting permits for these protected animals were impossible to obtain and that the occupation offered an opportunity that might never come again. Although Viennese authorities rejected that application as premature, Wettstein persisted, and by early 1942 he had secured a place on the Crete expedition, bringing with him two colleagues from the Vienna museum: the botanist Karl Heinz Rechinger and the ornithologist Günther Niethammer, who had previously served as a guard at the Auschwitz concentration camp and joined the expedition seconded from the SS.

The expedition team was formally integrated into the Wehrmacht for the duration of the trip. Some participants, like Wettstein, held the rank of war administration councillor only during the journey, while others, like Rechinger, were seconded from their existing military units. The group split into two parties: one, including Wettstein, Rechinger and Stubbe, traveled to Crete, while a second group worked on the Peloponnese. On Crete the team, which Stubbe called the Biological Research Detachment, was placed under the staff of the fortress commander, General Alexander Andrae, who provided vehicles, soldiers as helpers, and even a confiscated villa near Chania as accommodation. That villa, Bella Campagna, had belonged to the Greek olive magnate Alexander Manos, who was denounced as pro-British and lost his estate and a private library of 3,000 volumes.

The researchers’ travel diaries reveal how thoroughly the military infrastructure shaped their work. Wettstein marveled at the profligate use of aviation fuel when the group was flown 160 kilometers across the island because a bus lacked petrol, and he noted that the soldiers accompanying the detachment were indispensable: without the preparator Bernhard Mihan, he wrote, his yield would have been only half as large. The team also benefited directly from the brutality of the occupation. In April 1942 Wettstein recorded that near the village of Fournes, where a settlement had been blown up and its male population shot as reprisal for resistance, the military had confiscated the orange groves of the executed inhabitants, and the researchers filled an enormous sack with fruit. The executions referenced were part of German reprisals that would later be classified as war crimes under international law.

The Greek population itself also assisted the researchers, sometimes willingly, sometimes under the implicit duress of armed escorts. Local civilians drove the pack animals, up to fifteen donkeys and horses at a time, that carried the team into otherwise inaccessible mountain regions. Children guided the botanists through the mountains and carried more than the adults. A pharmacist in Sitia gave Wettstein an exceptionally rare giant scorpion as a gift, and a Greek doctor brought the team a snake he considered special. Yet the researchers’ diaries also document the famine gripping Greece, with Rechinger recording people begging for bread and lying unconscious or dead on the streets of Saloniki, and noting that local helpers refused money and accepted only bread, cigarettes or canned goods as payment, because the occupation economy had rendered currency nearly worthless.

The expedition’s scientific output was substantial. Rechinger collected 3,427 herbarium specimens and reported 80 new plant species, 42 of them new to Crete. Wettstein returned to Vienna with twelve crates of material, including 77 mammals, 161 birds, roughly 300 amphibians and reptiles, and around 1,000 each of arthropods and snails. His later publications described numerous new subspecies, including a gecko he named after the expedition leader, and his 1953 herpetological masterpiece on the Aegean drew heavily on the 1942 collections. By August 1944, fourteen scientific articles based on the expedition had been written, nine of them already published, more than half concerning Crete. The expedition also cemented research networks that persisted well beyond 1945 and advanced the careers of its participants, most notably Rechinger, who became director of the Vienna museum, and Wettstein, whose Aegean research was crowned by the Cretan material.

Yet the expedition also exposed the limits of what military power could deliver for science. The team’s most coveted prize, the wild goats of Crete, proved elusive. Although the Wehrmacht High Command had explicitly lifted its own protection order to allow the researchers to shoot Bezoar goats for German museums, General Andrae refused to permit further killings, telling the zoologists they could observe the animals as much as they liked but not shoot them. Wettstein fumed in his diary that the hunt had completely failed. The team then drafted a memorandum proposing conservation measures for the remaining 80 to 100 wild goats, but framed them in the racial-political language of the regime, warning against the bastardization of the wild stock with feral domestic goats and demanding German control of hunting protection, while denouncing a local family for allegedly possessing hidden weapons.

The study shows that the military occupation of a territory was not merely a backdrop but a constitutive condition for scientific success. The researchers, formally part of the occupying apparatus, could take without asking, receive gifts without payment, shoot animals in populated areas, and demand support from a population suffering under occupation, famine and reprisals. They witnessed German war crimes, including the destruction of villages and the execution of civilians, and in at least one instance they themselves acted with military police authority, disarming and detaining a group that turned out to be a German special unit. The expedition, the author concludes, was the continuation of a long research tradition by other means, one that allowed German and Austrian scientists to maintain their dominant position in the study of Cretan flora and fauna precisely because the Nazi war machine had opened the island to them.

Subject of Research: A 1942 German Wehrmacht-backed botanical and zoological collecting expedition to Nazi-occupied Crete and the Peloponnese and its scientific and political consequences

Article Title: Die Fortsetzung des Sammelns mit anderen Mitteln. Aufsammeln im Rahmen der Deutschen Wehrmachtsexpedition nach Kreta 1942

Article References: Mayer, T. (2026). Die Fortsetzung des Sammelns mit anderen Mitteln. Aufsammeln im Rahmen der Deutschen Wehrmachtsexpedition nach Kreta 1942. Annals of the Natural History Museum Vienna, 127, 39-68. https://doi.org/10.3897/anhmw.166676

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/anhmw.166676

Keywords: history of science, Crete 1942, Wehrmacht expedition, Nazi occupation, museum collections, botany, zoology, Otto Wettstein, Karl Heinz Rechinger, Hans Stubbe, wild goats, provenance research

Technau joined the journal as Co-Editor-in-Chief in 2014, succeeding Diethard Tautz, and for more than a decade led the journal alongside Jürgen Heinze. Following Heinze’s departure at the end of 2024, Stollewerk joined as Co-Editor-in-Chief in January 2025, and the two worked together until Technau’s departure this summer. That handover sequence matters for continuity, because editorial leadership transitions at society-owned journals are often the moments when scope, standards and community relationships either drift or consolidate. The editorial frames Technau’s tenure as a period of stability for the journal’s scientific quality and its deliberately broad zoological remit, a claim that carries weight given how fragmented the discipline has become over the same period.

The fragmentation is worth unpacking, because it explains why the journal’s next move is significant rather than merely administrative. Zoology today is not a single field but a federation of them: molecular evolution, developmental biology, physiology, morphology, behaviour, ecology, systematics, evolutionary biology and biodiversity science all study animals, yet they often publish in disjointed venues, use different methods, and speak different technical languages. A journal that claims to span that range needs editors who can evaluate work far outside their own specialisation, or an editorial board whose collective expertise covers the entire territory. Technau’s own research program illustrates the kind of integrative perspective the journal has prized. Working with cnidarians, the group that includes corals, jellyfish and sea anemones, he investigates the origin and evolution of animal body plans, using genomic, molecular and developmental approaches to probe fundamental features of animal organisation such as germ layers and nervous systems. Cnidarians occupy a pivotal position on the animal tree, sitting outside the bilaterians, which makes them powerful models for asking which aspects of animal development were present in the common ancestor of all animals and which arose later. That expertise in molecular evolution and evolutionary developmental biology, the editorial notes, has been particularly valuable for a journal dedicated to integrating the many disciplines of modern zoology.

Beyond manuscript-level judgement, the editorial highlights a less visible but arguably more consequential part of the job: building the editorial board itself. The quality of a journal’s peer review depends heavily on whether its Associate Editors collectively cover the field’s diversity, and on whether those editors are drawn from the international community rather than a narrow network. Technau is credited with identifying and recruiting Associate Editors from different areas of zoology and from around the world, cultivating the close exchange between Editors-in-Chief and Associate Editors that shapes a journal’s scientific profile while tying it to the wider research community. Stollewerk also offers a personal note of thanks, describing the collaboration since her arrival in January 2025 as marked by thoughtful judgement and a willingness to discuss both individual manuscripts and broader editorial questions, which she credits with easing her own transition into the role. On behalf of the journal, its Editorial Board and the DZG, she extends warm thanks for his twelve years of commitment.

The incoming Co-Editor-in-Chief brings a complementary profile. Stefan Richter’s research spans morphology, systematics, phylogenetics and evolutionary biology, with a particular focus on understanding organismal diversity and evolutionary relationships. Where Technau’s work reached down to the genomic and developmental basis of body-plan features, Richter’s tradition reaches across the comparative anatomy and phylogenetic reconstruction that have long anchored zoological classification. He also arrives with substantial editorial experience from a number of journals in zoology, systematics and evolutionary biology, which should shorten the learning curve that typically accompanies a handover of this kind. In practical terms, the pairing suggests the journal intends to keep one foot in molecular and developmental zoology and the other in organismal and comparative biology, the two poles between which much of the discipline’s integration problem lies.

Richter’s connection to the journal’s founding society is unusually direct. He served on the Executive Board of the German Zoological Society for many years and was the DZG’s President in 2017 and 2018. The editorial argues that his appointment comes at an especially appropriate time, because Frontiers in Zoology is currently strengthening the integration between the journal and the society that founded it. That relationship is not cosmetic. Society journals live or die by their standing within their disciplinary communities, and the DZG’s subdiscipline groups represent precisely the network of specialists a broad-scope journal needs to draw upon for review, section leadership and agenda-setting.

The concrete expression of that integration is a new editorial structure now being introduced. The expertise of the Editorial Board is being organised into the major subdisciplines of zoology, and authors will be able to submit their work directly to the section most appropriate for their research. Members of the DZG’s corresponding subdiscipline groups have joined the journal as Section Editors and will help develop these sections, further strengthening the connection between the international Editorial Board and the scientific community represented by the society. For authors, the immediate effect is navigational: rather than a single undifferentiated stream of submissions, papers on, say, neurobiology, systematics or behavioural ecology will enter through dedicated channels staffed by editors from those communities. That can shorten the distance between a submission and an editor who genuinely understands the field, improve the matching of reviewers, and signal to readers that the journal’s scope is not nominal but actively curated.

The editorial is careful to frame the reform as an affirmation of an old principle rather than a departure from it. Since its foundation, the journal has operated on the premise that zoology gains its strength from the diversity of its disciplines and from bringing together different approaches to understanding animals, from molecules, development and physiology to morphology, behaviour, ecology, evolution, systematics and biodiversity. The new sections are intended to make that breadth more visible while maintaining the high standards of scientific quality that remain at the heart of the journal. In other words, the structural change is presented as a visibility problem solved: the breadth already existed in the board’s expertise, and the sections simply expose it.

The timing also reflects broader pressures on scientific publishing. Journals across the life sciences are competing for submissions in an environment where preprints, megajournals and specialised outlets all pull at authors’ loyalties, and where society journals must demonstrate added value beyond a brand name. Direct-to-section submission is one of the mechanisms journals use to differentiate themselves, because it promises faster, better-informed editorial triage. For a journal owned by a national zoological society and published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, the calculation is clear: the more visibly the journal maps onto the society’s own disciplinary structure, the more it becomes the natural home for that community’s output, and the more the society’s members have a stake in its success.

What happens next will be watched by authors in organismal biology, a community that has watched several broad-scope zoology venues narrow or reposition over the past decade. The editorial closes with a double gesture that captures the moment: a welcome to Richter and a commitment to work with the Editorial Board, the DZG and the journal’s authors to develop the journal and promote excellent research across the full breadth of zoology, alongside a renewed thanks to Technau for twelve years of dedicated service and best wishes for his future. Leadership changes at journals rarely make headlines, but in a discipline as sprawling as zoology, who sits in the editor’s chair, and how the editorial machinery is organised beneath them, shapes which questions get published, which communities feel at home, and ultimately which strands of animal science stay connected to one another. Frontiers in Zoology has bet that the answer lies in formalising its breadth, one section at a time.

Subject of Research: Editorial leadership transition and new section-based editorial structure at the journal Frontiers in Zoology

Article Title: Continuity and new perspectives at Frontiers in Zoology

Article References: Stollewerk, A. (2026). Continuity and new perspectives at Frontiers in Zoology. Frontiers in Zoology, 23(1), Article 36. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12983-026-00636-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12983-026-00636-z

Keywords: Frontiers in Zoology, zoology, editorial leadership, German Zoological Society, Stefan Richter, Ulrich Technau, evolutionary developmental biology, systematics, open access publishing, editorial board, phylogenetics, scientific journals

The research, published in The Science of Nature, took a two-pronged approach that combined living feeding trials with laboratory simulations of avian digestion. Led by Judith Burack, Eberhard Haase, Stanislav N. Gorb and Thies H. Büscher, the team selected eggs from seven phasmid species chosen specifically to represent the extraordinary morphological diversity of the order. Among them were the small capitulate eggs of Carausius morosus, the large capitulate eggs of Tirachoidea jianfenglingensis, lentil-shaped eggs of Dajaca napolovi, pinnate eggs of Phyllium mabantai, hairy eggs of Orestes draegeri, rough-surfaced eggs of Nuichua rabaeyae, and the eggs of Sungaya aeta, which females bury using a secondary ovipositor. By spanning this range of shapes, sizes and surface structures, the experimenters aimed to determine whether any egg morphology confers a survival advantage during a trip through a bird’s digestive tract.

The feeding experiments used domestic pigeons, Columba livia f. domestica, as the granivorous test subjects. For each trial, batches of 16 to 25 eggs from a single species were packed into a one-milliliter gelatin capsule that was placed deep into the bird’s throat to guarantee swallowing, sidestepping the possibility that pigeons might simply crush the eggs with their beaks. Each pigeon was then housed individually for 24 hours in a nest box fitted with a wire mesh grid above a paper sheet, allowing droppings to be collected and sieved for eggs and egg fragments. Every recovered intact egg was incubated on damp paper towels at room temperature and monitored daily for hatching. The stakes of this design were clear: any egg that survived the full digestive journey and later produced a nymph would constitute direct evidence of ornithochory, the bird-mediated dispersal conventionally associated with plants.

The results were unambiguous. Across all seven species, most eggs emerged from the pigeons ground into tiny fragments, and not a single egg that passed through the digestive system hatched afterward. The lone partial exception was Dajaca napolovi, the species with disc-shaped eggs: eight of the fifty eggs fed to pigeons were recovered structurally intact from the droppings, along with assorted eggshell pieces from other species. Interestingly, the fatty capitula of several species frequently emerged fully undamaged, a testament to the resilience of that lipid-rich structure, but capitula alone cannot hatch. The mechanical gizzard, with its grinding stones, had effectively destroyed the embryos of every species regardless of how convincingly their eggs resembled seeds. The finding echoes earlier work by Matan Shelomi, who in 2011 fed more than 900 phasmid eggs to quails and chickens and recovered only one unbroken egg.

Yet intactness alone does not guarantee viability, and this is where the study’s laboratory simulations proved decisive. The researchers dissected the digestive gauntlet into its three principal stressors: acidity, heat and mechanical abrasion. They subjected batches of 50 eggs each of Carausius morosus and Dajaca napolovi to distilled water at 38 to 42 degrees Celsius to mimic avian body temperature, to hydrochloric acid diluted to a pH of 1.9 to 2.2 matching the avian proventriculus, and to vigorous stirring with two-to-three-millimeter stones replicating gizzard action. A fourth treatment combined all three stressors, and untreated control groups allowed baseline hatching rates to be established. Eggs were then incubated for months, because phasmid embryos are famously patient, sometimes taking more than half a year to emerge.

Acidity emerged as the silent killer. In the control groups, 70 percent of Carausius morosus eggs and 72 percent of Dajaca napolovi eggs hatched, but after acid exposure the hatching rate for both species was zero. Scanning electron microscopy revealed why: the acid attacked the chorion, the outer eggshell, dissolving its mineralized layers and leaving holes, structural damage and crystalline precipitates that likely represent calcium salts leached from the shell. Phasmid eggshells are known to incorporate biomineralized material, including calcium oxalate, which lends rigidity against physical threats but turns out to be chemically vulnerable in strong acid. The findings align with prior research showing that acid exposure dissolves the calcium oxalate-rich middle layer of the chorion and degrades its mechanical properties, and with studies on mayflies and mosquitoes demonstrating that low pH disrupts embryonic development in other insects as well.

Heat and mechanical stress produced species-specific effects. For Carausius morosus, a species native to India where pre-monsoon temperatures routinely climb above 35 degrees Celsius, the heat treatment was surprisingly benign: 60 percent of heated eggs still hatched, albeit after a longer incubation of about 112 days compared to roughly 80 days in controls. Dajaca napolovi, which inhabits cooler mountainous regions of northern Vietnam, fared poorly under the same thermal challenge, with only two of 50 eggs hatching after incubation periods exceeding 200 days. Mechanical stirring with stones crushed most Carausius eggs, but a larger share of the slippery, disc-shaped Dajaca eggs survived, and ten of those hatched. Friction experiments on a motorized tilting stage explained the disparity: Dajaca napolovi eggs slid at angles as low as roughly 5 degrees on smooth substrates, compared with more than 22 degrees for Carausius morosus, meaning the Vietnamese species’ low-friction eggs may simply slip between gizzard stones rather than being crushed between them.

Synthesizing the feeding trials and the simulations, the authors conclude that successful bird-mediated dispersal of a single phasmid egg through a granivorous bird would require a trifecta of preadaptations: mechanical toughness or slipperiness to survive the gizzard, chemical resistance to withstand gastric acid, and thermal tolerance to endure body temperatures around 40 degrees Celsius. No species tested possessed all three. Even the eight structurally intact Dajaca eggs recovered from pigeon droppings failed to hatch, most likely because the acidic phase of digestion, not the mechanical phase, had already doomed their embryos. For the investigated phasmatodean species, long-distance dispersal via granivorous birds therefore appears highly unlikely, and the visual mimicry of seeds seems to serve other purposes, such as defense against egg parasites, rather than a ticket through a pigeon’s gut.

The story may not be over, however, because not all birds digest seeds the same way. Previous work by Kenji Suetsugu and colleagues showed that when eggs excised from gravid females of three phasmid species were fed to insectivorous brown-eared bulbuls, five to twenty percent remained intact depending on species, and two eggs of the flightless Japanese stick insect Ramulus mikado actually hatched. Phylogeographic analysis of Ramulus mikado has since provided evidence consistent with historical long-distance dispersal, and the facultative parthenogenesis of many phasmids means that viable eggs inside a gravid female could potentially survive her predation and be dispersed when the female herself is eaten. Because insectivorous birds lack the stone-filled gizzards of seed-eaters and process prey differently, the digestive conditions their eggs encounter may be far gentler. The Kiel team suggests that future research should examine the digestive physiology of frugivorous and insectivorous birds and the protective role of the maternal body, to determine whether rare dispersal events through predators, rather than through seed-mimicry, could explain how flightless stick insects colonize distant habitats. For now, the seed disguise remains a marvel of convergent evolution, but as a dispersal strategy aimed at granivorous birds, it appears to be a costume without a function.

Beyond the immediate question of bird digestion, the findings carry weight for a broader puzzle in phasmid biology: how flightless, slow-moving insects achieve the geographic isolation that drives speciation. With wings reduced or absent in many species and even functional wings rarely used, adult stick and leaf insects have few options for crossing inhospitable terrain. Passive transport of the egg stage has therefore long been considered the most plausible route to new habitats, making the fate of eggs inside potential animal vectors a matter of evolutionary consequence rather than mere curiosity.

The study also highlights how little is known about the chemical ecology of phasmid eggshells. The biomineralized layers that give the eggs their rigidity appear to be a double-edged adaptation, hardening the shell against physical hazards while creating a chemical vulnerability to the low pH of a bird’s proventriculus. Understanding how different species vary the composition and thickness of these layers could reveal whether any lineage has evolved genuine resistance to gastric conditions.

There is an ecological irony in the results as well. The capitulum, the lipid-rich appendage atop many phasmid eggs, chemically and visually mirrors the elaiosome of myrmecochorous seeds, and ants respond to it similarly, carrying eggs into their nests and gnawing off the capitulum without harming the embryo. Ant-mediated dispersal, unlike bird-mediated dispersal, involves no grinding gizzard and no strong acid, suggesting that the seed-mimicry of phasmid eggs may be aimed at a much smaller and far more forgiving partner than the birds the resemblance superficially invokes.

Subject of Research: Experimental testing of whether stick and leaf insect (Phasmatodea) eggs can survive digestion and dispersal by granivorous birds.

Article Title: Can granivorous birds disperse stick and leaf insect eggs? Integrating in vivo digestion trials and in vitro functional experiments

Article References: Burack, J., Haase, E., Gorb, S. N., & Büscher, T. H. (2026). Can granivorous birds disperse stick and leaf insect eggs? Integrating in vivo digestion trials and in vitro functional experiments. The Science of Nature, 113(5), Article 106. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-026-02157-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00114-026-02157-5

Keywords: Phasmatodea, stick insects, egg dispersal, ornithochory, granivorous birds, pigeons, seed mimicry, gizzard, gastric acid, eggshell biomineralization, friction, zoology