Margaret Thayer
HH: Are rove beetles the largest family of beetles?
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MT: In North America they’re the largest family, but worldwide they may be second to weevils.
MT: There have been annual meetings of staphylinid workers for the last 19 years, started by East German workers when they had difficulty traveling elsewhere. The 2004 meeting was attended by around 40 people, mostly taxonomists, but another 20 or so of us missed it.
HH: Meanwhile new species keep being described?
MT: It’s a really underexplored fauna, for starters, but our justification for the National Science Foundation grant that supports the project was that many groups of staphylinids have species in at least three of these areas–Chile, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand–and nowhere else. We want to study them to figure out how this happened and whether it’s part of a pattern involving other groups too. Did they evolve before the breakup of Gondwanaland [the prehistoric continent joining South America, Africa, India, Australia, and Antarctica] starting 150 million years ago? Or evolve later and then disperse across the oceans somehow? Or disperse southward from the northern continents? Or get separated by a possible expansion of the Pacific Ocean? Besides learning about the beetles’ evolutionary history, we’ll increase knowledge of these southern temperate habitats, many of which are under serious threat.
