News

Posted: Nov 15, 2015 - 12:00pm

A new species of whirligig beetle is the first to be described in the United States since 1991. Grey Gustafson, a Ph.D. student at the University of New Mexico, and Dr. Robert Sites, an entomologist at the University of Missouri's Enns Entomology Museum, describe the new species in an article appearing in the Annals of the Entomological Society of America.

Whirligig beetles belong to the family Gyrinidae and are well known for their whirling swimming pattern. Gustafson found the new species in Alabama's Conecuh National Forest while hunting for similar whirligig beetles, and he noticed that they looked very similar to specimens in the Enns Entomology Museum that had not yet been identified.

Read the full story at UNM Newsroom.