1 of 2 new species of beetles named after Filipino Jesuit priest

A newly discovered species of beetles will be known as the "Fr. Jett beetle," so named after former Ateneo de Manila University (ADMU) President Fr. Jett Villarin, the university announced on Thursday.

The Byrrhinus villarini was one of two new species of beetles discovered on the island of Negros in Western Visayas by Emmanuel D. Delocado and Hendrik Freitag from the Ateneo Biodiversity Research Laboratory of the Department of Biology.

Delocado and  Freitag named the new species after Villarin "in recognition of his strong push for the environmental research agenda in the University during his nine-year tenure."

Villarin, the incumbent executive director of the Manila Observatory, is also a researcher in the field of environment and sustainability.

The Jesuit priest was also part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for its "evaluation of the status and recommendations on circumventing the global climate crisis."

The other species was named after the island of Negros from which both species were collected. Thus it will be called Byrrhinus negrosensis.

According to the announcement of the university, "the discovery was remarkable because the two species were the first additional new species of Philippine Byrrhinus in the last 28 years."

There are now seven Byrrhinus species and four of these, including B. villarini and B. negrosensis are found only in the Philippines.

"In addition, this discovery comes at a time of heightened anthropogenic activities in the island of Negros, especially in the protected areas. Thus, findings like this provide an additional reason to push for the continued protection of such pristine localities despite the strong movement to privatize and commercialize these areas," ADMU said.

The findings have been published in the scientific journal ZooKeys in an article entitled “Two new species of Byrrhinus Motschulsky, 1858 (Coleoptera, Limnichidae, Limnichinae) from Negros, Philippines.”

The expedition that led to the discovery of the new species by the two scientists was part of the Freshwater biodiversity surveys project, which is funded by the School of Science and Engineering Indus­try 4.0 Research Fund (SI4-013) of Ateneo Research Institute of Science and Engineering (ARISE) and the Biodiversity Teaching in a Philippine-Cambodian-German Network (BIO-PHIL) project. -- BAP, GMA News