Rutgers researchers' discovery of new insect species limited by Brazil museum fire

On the verge of uncovering new life, two Rutgers researchers are in need of an artifact once housed within a 200-year-old Brazilian museum engulfed by flames earlier this year. 

Megan Wilson and Stephanie Bondockawa Mafla-Mills, both graduate students at Rutgers—Newark, were conducting fieldwork in the Rupununi region of Guyana, on the border of the Brazilian Amazon, when they discovered two new species, according to an article by NorthJersey.

For Wilson, it was a new species of termite which she believes carries unusual sacks on its legs with a wax that no other recorded female termites have, according to the article. Mafla-Mills said she discovered a new dragonfly species native to Guyana that may have Brazilian ancestry. 

On Sept. 2, the National Brazilian Museum was devastated by fires that destroyed nearly all of its more than 20 million items, including much of its entomology collection featuring dragonflies and beetles. Its collection on lace bugs was preserved in no other museum, according to The New York Times.

Marcus Guidoti, a Brazilian entomologist and former researcher at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, said there was approximately a quarter of Brazilian lace bug holotypes and specimens like them used to describe other species lost in the fire, according to The Times article. 

“We just lost a large chunk of history that we’ll never get back,” Wilson said in the NorthJersey article.

Wilson and Mafla-Mills are now finding it difficult to continue their research without comparing their recent discovery to the dragonfly and termite holotypes — the specimens used as a universal reference for a particular species, according to the article. 

“I’ve been working to describe this new thing, but I needed something really solid to compare it to,” Wilson said. “That’s gone now.”

The duo will use text descriptions of the destroyed artifacts when they write about their findings in scientific papers in hopes that academic journals will publish them, according to the article. 

“This contributes to the bigger picture,” Mafla-Mills said. “You know that this dragonfly existed in this forest in that year. If I go back to that forest and it’s not there years from now, it says something about what has changed.”