The past week I have been in Ecuador visiting my colleague Maria Cristina Peñuela at Universidad Ikiam in Tena, Ecuador. Cristina's students have been working with palm pollinators for their theses and therefore collected a lot of beetles, with weevils being a large part of them. As anywhere in the Amazon, those species turn out to be mostly undescribed, and in some cases it is even hard to fit them in the known genera of flower weevils.
Sampling beetle pollinators in Jatun Sacha reserve
Therefore, we partnered up to do a hands-on workshop on pollinator beetles, including discussions on their ecology and evolution and an overview of the taxonomy of main groups. At the end of the week, we had built a curated reference collection of pollinator beetles from the Napo province, which will support future work on ecology and systematics.
Lab component of the workshop, in which we mounted and identified palm flower beetles
This was not only my first time in Ecuador, but the first time in years teaching in person and visiting the Amazon. It was a great relief from the pandemic experience and really joy! It turns out it was also the beginning of the first semester with in-person classes at Ikiam too, so students were also highly motivated. I hope this was just the first step in a long-term collaboration and also the first of many initiatives to facilitate work on tropical beetle pollinators.
End of the workshop, with Maria Cristina Peñuela, students and the three boxes of insects forming a reference collection for further studies