A newly discovered bee species belongs to the genus Megachile and is a visitor to an endangered species of flowering plant called Marianthus Aquinaris.
New Megachile variety. Image credit: Keith Prendergast and Joshua Campbell, doi: 10.3897/jhr.98.166350.
Australia faces a pollination crisis stemming from a lack of information about plant pollinators as well as taxonomic barriers.
Visitors to many endangered plants are unknown, compromising our ability to conserve their populations.
The native Australian bee fauna is also under threat due to a lack of monitoring, many regions have not been surveyed and many native bees remain undescribed.
New Megachile the bee species was discovered during the survey Marianthus Aquinarius it grows only in the Bremer Ranges region of Western Australia.
“I discovered this species while examining a rare plant in the Goldfields and noticed that this bee was visiting both an endangered wildflower and a nearby mallee tree,” said Dr Keith Prendergast, a researcher at the University of Southern Queensland and Curtin University.
“DNA barcoding confirmed that the male and female belonged to the same species and that they did not match any known bees in DNA databases, and the specimens I collected did not morphologically match any species in museum collections.”
“This is the first new member of this group of bees to be described in more than 20 years, which really shows how much life we still have to discover, including in areas at risk from mining such as the Goldfields.”
Opening new Megachile The species highlights the importance of understanding native Australian bees before their habitat is disrupted.
“Because the new species was discovered in the same small area as the critically endangered wildflower, both may be at risk from habitat disturbance and other threatening processes such as climate change,” Dr Prendergast said.
“Many mining companies still do not conduct research on native bees, so we may be missing out on undescribed species, including those that play a critical role in supporting endangered plants and ecosystems.”
“Without knowing what native bees exist and what plants they depend on, we risk losing both before we even realize they exist.”
The discovery is reported in paper published this week in Journal of Hymenoptera Research.
