This month, Jennifer Girón, myself and collaborators have described a new species of weevil from Panamá. This was my first time describing a species of Entiminae, but not the first attempt. My first undergrad project was to describe a weird entimine the my advisor Sergio Vanin had found in the collection. When he contacted Analía Lanteri to request more samples in case she had some, we discovered that she was already working on a description, which ended up published here:
This time around, I was the one contacted, and the reason was the covid19 pandemic. Jennifer is the real expert on Entiminae here, but it was logistically impossible for her collaborators in Panama who found the beetle feeding on crops to send samples in 2020. Since I had started a postdoc at STRI by then, she asked for my help to get the samples from Chiriquí and describe the species together.
This turned out to be much more challeging than usual: I arrived at STRI right before Sars-Cov-2. By then I needed a special request to go to the lab and to visit collections. I had no dissection equipment because mine was (and still is) stranded at my previous job at Harvard University. With a lot of help from Don Windsor and Annette Aiello at STRI, I was able to use their equipment, do the dissections and imaging. Jennifer and I discussed characters over e-mail, and we finally realized something very cool: our new species is just one of many at higher elevations in Central America! Most of these are currently identified as Epicaerus inaequalis in collections, but for now we only gave a name to the species found near Volcan Baru in Chiriqui, since it might turn out to be an important pest.
You can find more in the paper:
Atencio R, Barba A, …, de Medeiros BAS, Girón J. 2022. A new species of Epicaerus Pascoe, 1881 (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Entiminae: Geonemini) associated with potato cultivars in Tierras Altas de Chiriquí, Panama. Zootaxa 5115: 103–121. http://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5115.1.7