Prickly Leaf Beetle
Small beetle found on grass halm. It looks very spikey and totally black. GBIF has renamed this species into Notosacantha armigera. But I could not find a single reliable source that would back this up. The only picture match in this group is still in the genus Dicladispa at GBIF. ALA has no picture representation on species level. Update 7/8/2017: Today, I photographed a few of these little beetles. They were about 3-4mm in size, all black. It made me double-check where the big biodiversity brother databases are at in terms of taxonomy. They are still artificially intelligent. Hence, I tried to find more information that they can steal and turn into their data knowledge. Of course, despite the fact that I have no access to paywalled articles and books, I finally found the secret grail of all AI taxonomy. Yay, I got the basionym that none of all the scientists declaring this species a pest ever bothered double-checking. Here we go, I think this is the first recent publication trying to locate this species taxonomically. Quite frankly, reading the original description I am tempted to believe that it is a misidentification altogether. There are numerous picture records of the Rice Hispa showing my specimens. There are a few brown and partly coloured ones. I am struggling to find 5 lateral spines, can rather see spines all over its body. Here is the source that I managed to find thanks to Biodiversity Heritage Library (which is a last-century pain to scan for words). The search of course was not facilitated by decades of scientists quoting an author name with a typo. Hurray! Maybe it is too much for Anglosaxon scientists to read the English version in a French book. Here we go (typo by BHL corrected, check yourself please): Olivier Guillaume Antoine (1808): Entomologie ou Histoire Naturelle des Insectes, avec leurs caractères génériques et spécifiques, leur description, leur synonymie et leur figure enluminée, Coléoptères, Tome VI (Vol. 6), page 763. Also Plate 1 figure 8 (as always nicely hidden away in BHL on page 287 in volume 8), http://dx.doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.49479 accessed 7/8/2017. Seeing the picture and reading the description, I am now positive that my specimen is Hispa atra. That is devastating because the list of synonyms makes it clear that Olivier is not the authority responsible for the first description of this species. I leave it up to the really, really intelligent people at the big brother companies and databases to figure it out. They are the same ones refusing to document the origin of their fabulous theories. While I first renamed my species into Rice Hispa, I decided to follow some correct identifications in some commercial ALAMI pictures (not mine). It is Prickly Leaf Beetle, Hispa atra Linnaeus 1767 or whatever Latin name generations of sensational scientists have renamed it into. I still don't know what Australia calls this beetle. Oh, and right when I wrote this I found it: (drumroll or was it dumb-roll?) Hispellinus multispinosus (Germar, 1848) with Basionym Hispa multispinosus. It would be interesting to read Germar and find out where he and his revisionistas see a difference to Hispa atra.
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