UW bug lover seeks new species for cataloging

LARAMIE, Wyo. — Wyoming is home to about 15,000 insect species, with about 85,000 species living in North America.

That may seem like a lot of critters, but as you approach the equator that number skyrockets, University of Wyoming professor of entomology Scott Shaw said.

Take the tropical forests of eastern Ecuador, where Shaw travels annually to study caterpillars and parasitic wasps, for example. The high-elevation cloud forest of the Andes mountains, which overlooks the Amazon basin and receives rain almost every day, is one of the most bio-diverse regions in the world.

"It's just extraordinary because the diversity of moths and butterflies in this valley is probably comparable to the number of species you'd find in all of North America," he said.

Shaw works in the University of Wyoming College of Agriculture's Department of Ecosystem Science and Management and also curates the UW Insect Museum. He specializes in wasps, and he focuses on finding new ones.

"We're looking at discovering new species," he said.

He has discovered and named 152 insect species from 29 different countries and had a dozen species named after him. Right now, he said, there are about 1.5 million living things on the planet that have been described, including about a million insects.

How many living things remain undiscovered? The most conservative estimate is about 5 million. Some scientists think there may be more than 50 million.

"The truth is, we don't know exactly, which is really quite remarkable," Shaw said.

Shaw has studied insects in Ecuador since 2004. He travels to the Yanayacu Biological Station in the Quijos Valley of Ecuador as a member of a team of researchers working on a project called "Caterpillars and Parasitoids of the Eastern Andes," funded by the National Science Foundation.

Caterpillars, the immature form of moths and butterflies, are an important plant-feeding insect in the cloud forest. Researchers take live samples from the forest and house them in a research facility that Shaw described as a "caterpillar zoo." Scientists observe what and how they feed and track their development.

"We're discovering a lot of basic biology about the caterpillars," he said.

Many of the caterpillars are also preyed upon by parasitic wasps.