A group of scientists have been touring South Australia to study the effects of the January flood on mosquito population and they ended up discovering several new species of the insect.
Craig Williams, head of the mosquito research unit at the University of South Australia, said the tour was a fruitful exercise and it threw up some astonishing results, like discovering new breeds of mosquitoes.
Williams said,
We actually turned up some species which we think are new to the state or that we hadn’t previously discovered in South Australia before and so we’ve sort of expanded the number of mosquitoes that we know live in South Australia.
He also claimed that the team had found several species that have not been formally described.
He further said,
We found another one, which we still don’t know what it is and we pulled that from Tarcoola. There’s this really strange one that we just cannot work out what it is so we’re going to send that off to some colleagues interstate to see if they can make sense of it.
So from a really geeky, insect collecting point of view – it’s been fascinating.