Weevil Workers Connections

At the 2023 Weevil Workers Meeting I heard from Christoph Germann who was giving a talk on the Museum of Natural History Basel insect collection, and specifically their large collection of weevils, many of which were in need of identification. He mentioned that they would love it if someone could identify some of these weevils, and that they had a spare room for anyone who could do this. I live in Tasmania (a large island state off Australia’s south Coast) and thought it would be fun to do a trip over to Switzerland, more than halfway across the globe, to identify some weevils, and explore some of Europe afterwards, given I was having a gap year. 

So I emailed Christoph, explaining this, and he eagerly replied that I would be more than welcome. So, a couple of months later, I flew over to Basel, and worked at the collection for almost 2 weeks. In that time I had the pleasure of meeting with many of the people who work at the collection, and was able to identify roughly 1000 weevil specimens, largely from Australia, but also from other parts of the world.

I only really have a knowledge of weevils in the Australasia region so in preparation for my work at the Basel Natural History Museum’s insect collection, I went through Alonso-Zarazaga and Lyal “A World Catalogue to Families and Genera of Curculionoidea” and only focused on the diverse subfamilies Molytinae and Curculioninae (I couldn’t bring myself to look through the Entiminae given how many tribes there are!). I then only identified the non- Australasian weevils in the collection to tribe. 

After this amazing experience, I caught a train up to Germany (Berlin specifically), where I was able to meet up with weevil experts Jakob Jilg and Herbert Winkelmann and survey near the German- Polish border. I was amazed by their extensive knowledge of the local weevil fauna and their host plant associations, as well as by how reliably they could find them. In total we found upwards of 30 species, more than I had ever previously found in a day.

After a quick visit to Sweden to meet with friends, I flew over to London, where I was able to visit the London Natural History Museum’s insect collection, which houses one of the largest collections of weevils in the world. I had a lot of fun looking around this massive collection, meeting with some of the world’s finest entomologists (including, but not limited to Max Barclay), and examining types of Tasmanian weevils. I worked here for 4 days, and flew back to Tasmania several days later. Because of this I have been able to identify many Tasmanian weevil specimens to species level, where they were previously unidentified.

I was planning on having a meeting with Christopher Lyal, one of the world’s foremost weevil experts, but unfortunately, due to railway delays, it never eventuated. Lucky I was able to have a zoom meeting with him, which was great.