You should read this paper because…..
You should read this paper simply because the caterpillar of this species is so beautiful and is appropriately called the “rainbow battleship” caterpillar. In the Agroecology team we spend a lot of time working on pest species and figuring out solutions to reduce pest numbers, so let’s all just take a second to remember how amazing caterpillars are. This new research by Lyn Cook, Jessa Thurman (in our team) and Andrew Walker was recently published in Austral Entomology.
Jessa explained:
“We found this species during a survey of a Queensland Trust for Nature’s property, Aroona Station, in 2019 and they allowed us to collect it for research on the caterpillar’s venom. We first assumed it was one species based on photos online, but rearing revealed that this identification was not correct. So, we resorted to DNA and records of Limacodids made available through previous barcoding projects to identify which species this mystery caterpillar was. It was confirmed based on COI that the rainbow battleship is Comana albibasis, which no one had connected before.”
Photo: Andrew Maynard and Jessa Thurman
The team’s work highlights how useful COI barcoding can be for identifying species and this finding suggests that there are likely to be several undescribed species in Australia.