Mont Tohiea, Moorea island of the Society Islands, where two of the Mecyclothorax species were discovered.
Along with being a beautiful tourist destination, Tahiti is also a good place to discover unknown insects. A Cornell entomologist has known these facts since the early 1990s, when he began traveling to Pacific islands for research. Now James Liebherr, professor and curator of the Cornell University Insect Collection, has discovered 14 new beetle species in the Society Islands, all within the genus Mecyclothorax . Liebherr has discovered about half of the 400 total known Mecyclothorax species. The genus originated in the Australian region, but there are only 25 species known from Australia, and around 40 more distributed from New Zealand to Java. The most abundant species in Australia can fly, but researchers have discovered 239 flightless species in Hawaii and another 100 in the Society Islands. This phenomenon - a single species dispersing from its place of origin and diversifying into new species elsewhere - is known as adaptive radiation.
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