Britain as a source of new species

Staff at the Natural History Museum in London recently had a surprise when they found an insect they could not identify in their own wildlife garden. The nearest they could get was Arocatus roeselii, a native of eastern Europe that lives on alder trees.

However, the museum’s new bug is a darker red than A roeselii and lives on plane trees. It may be a new and so far undescribed species.

What? A new species in London? Some might be incredulous. However, it is not unknown for such discoveries to be made in the wildlife of our crowded and, one would think, well researched isle.

In the early 1970s a naturalist, Jenny Owen, moved to a house in suburban Leicester and for 15 years recorded all the animal and plant species that appeared in her garden. She noted the diversity, abundance and yearly fluctuations of 1,757 species of animal (almost all invertebrates) and 422 species of plant. Among the insects were several small bugs new to science.

Her book, ‘The ecology of a garden: the first fifteen years’, was published in 1991 by Cambridge University Press.

Such an abundance of species may seem incredible for a garden in a Midlands city, but it is not unusual. At a conference on biodiversity organised by the Royal Horticultural Society in 2002, Kevin Gaston of the University of Sheffield described the BUGS (Biodiversity in Urban Gardens in Sheffield) project, in which 61 gardens, large and small, scattered across Sheffield, were examined by researchers for the plant and animal life that they contained.

They found no fewer than 1,176 species of plants. Admittedly, most were aliens, probably bought from garden centres, but there were also many native species. Professor Gaston stated that such a diversity of plants would rival that of a tropical rain forest. Of the insects, however, there were 786 species, including 55 species of crane fly.

These results were only from a snapshot of the gardens, whereas Dr Owen had studied her garden for many years. Who says that gardens cannot be havens for wildlife?