They live both in underwater biotopes and in the high mountains: the weevils. The Natural History Museum in Basel has now inherited a whole collection.
Onyxacalles verrucosus: A humpbacked hooked acalles from the laurel forest of Tenerife and El Hierro. The camouflage on tree bark is perfect, so the animal can hardly be recognized.
If you hunt the weevil through the search engine, you will first get a bunch of suggestions: fight, fight successfully, fight biologically, get rid of it. In contrast to the ladybug, which is associated with luck and which is also recommended as an aphid hunter, the weevil has few friends.
This is not surprising at first, since the bark beetle also belongs to the weevil family. This is the umbrella term for several species that bore tunnels in the bark or wood of trees to lay their eggs in. If the bark beetle multiplies massively, it can destroy entire forest stands. Due to the hot, far too dry summers of the last few years, the trees are more susceptible and a found food for the bark beetles, which are multiplying in large numbers.
But other members of the branched family of weevils also attack all sorts of things: the grain weevil threatens stored crops and the boll weevil can severely decimate the cotton harvest. Fruit trees and shrubs can also be affected.
Four million beetles in the Basel museum
Nevertheless, 20,000 weevils have now found a new home in Switzerland. You have to say: they are dead and represent the latest addition to the Natural History Museum in Basel. As the museum writes, it is a German collection. The weevils come from several groups of islands in the Atlantic, stretching from south of Cape Verde through the Canary Islands to north of the Azores.
The collection includes 552 species comes from Peter Stüben from Mönchengladbach. Stüben’s dissertation topic: “The structure and function of transcendental argumentation figures: A theoretical argumentation contribution to the philosophy of science” reveals nothing about his passion for beetles. He worked full-time as a teacher for a long time, had teaching assignments in Switzerland, and campaigned for the Society for Threatened Peoples.
At the beginning of the 1990s he devoted himself – again – to the taxonomy, biology and ecology of weevils. For 20 years Stüben researched on the Atlantic archipelago and described hundreds of new species. The fact that his beetle collection is now going to Basel is probably also due to the fact that the current curator of the local biological sciences and of the Frey beetle collection, Christoph Germann, accompanied Stüben on several expeditions and further projects are planned for the future.
The beetles live underwater and in the high mountains
With more than 62,000 species described so far and another 150,000 species to be expected, weevils represent the most species-rich family of beetles in the world. They come in a wide variety of shapes, species and colors and are at home both in underwater biotopes in the lowlands and in the high mountains at over 4000 meters.
The Natural History Museum Basel has an excellent reputation when it comes to beetles: According to its own statements, every third species known to date in the world is represented among the four million beetles in the collections. In Switzerland alone, around 7,000 different species of beetle have been identified, of which around 1,080 weevil species have been documented.
