Word: barclay
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...field work has taken me all over the world - to Thailand, Bolivia, Peru. So I was surprised to be confronted by an unidentifiable species while having a sandwich in the museum's garden," Barclay says...
...Despite working with an insect collection of over 28 million specimens, Barclay and his colleagues at the Natural History Museum have been unable to identify the almond-shaped insect, about the size of a grain of rice, that has in the past year made itself at home in the sycamores trees on the 19th-century museum's grounds in central London...
...Several months of research led Barclay to discover that the insect, which resembles the common North American box elder bug, is actually most closely related to to Arocatus roeselii. But that European bug is also associated with alder trees rather than sycamores. An insect specimen found in Nice on France's Mediterranean coast, which is now in the collection of the National Museum of Natural History in Prague, turned out to be identical to the mystery London bug. But that specimen, it turned out, had been misidentified as Arocatus roeselii...
...There are two possible explanations," says Barclay. "One is that the bug is roeselii and by switching to feed on the [sycamores] it has suddenly become more abundant, successful and invasive. The other possibility is that the insect in our grounds may not be roeselii...
...Barclay is not convinced that climate change is responsible for these new inhabitants. "It's very difficult to judge because the period of time we have seen global warming potentially influencing the insect fauna is almost exactly the same period of time since the [European Union] opened up its trade barriers between member states. So in the last decade and a half we've been importing a lot more from Italy and Spain and Southern France and we've had this climatic change - so we have two potential causes...