It was September 2012, and spring was arriving in St. Helena, a volcanic island in the South Atlantic Ocean and Lisa Fowler was out for a drive with her partner. “We stopped by the side of the road in this nice lush grassy area, and we were just sitting in the truck, and this thing came in and landed on my partner’s hand. And I just said ‘oh, I’ve got to take a picture of it’”, says Fowler. “It just looked strange to me, and it was quite big.” Fowler drove back home with her partner, snapping shots of whatever interested her along the way. For weeks, she thought no more of the bug, except when sieving through photos, deciding which to delete. “Something in the back of my mind kept saying ‘keep it’”, she recalls.
A stroke of luck
Soon after the encounter, Fowler got a job at the St. Helena National Trust. Their work on local conservation and education projects suited Fowler, who loved to roam the wilds of the island where she was born and raised. She soon discovered that her other passion – photography – was also a valuable asset for the Trust’s work. At the Trust, insect specialist Dr. Roger Key was producing a guidebook of St. Helena’s invertebrates, and guidebooks need pictures. So once again, Fowler sieved through her photos. She sent all her insect snapshots to Key – including the one of the strange big bug on her partner’s hand.
Key was able to put a name to the mystery bug: Basilewsky’s cranefly. Scientists hadn’t seen the species for over 40 years, and it was thought to be extinct. “It was a stroke of luck really, to have that photograph, and that he could identify it from the photograph”, says Fowler. Fowler and her colleagues have since found more of these craneflies on the mountain where she snapped that first photo, and on nearby Diana’s peak. These high, humid areas are lush with native plants. Many of these plants can be seen only on the island, which is one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world. The nearest island, Ascension, is 1,000 km away; mainland Africa 2,000 km away, and to reach South America a cranefly would have to cross 4,000 km of ocean! Being so far away from any other landmasses means that plants and insects on the island are isolated. They can’t mix with their counterparts on the continent and have been evolving in isolation for thousands of years. As a result, these are unique species, found nowhere else on Earth. If they disappear from St. Helena, they’ll be lost forever. But with an island this remote, it can be hard to even know what’s there.
Gathering essential information
Before Fowler snapped the cranefly’s photo, there had been a few surveys of insect species on the island. These surveys didn’t include High Peak or Diana’s Peak, which probably explains why scientists were unaware that the species still lived. Fowler also points out that these surveys typically ran only for a month or two. So, if cranefly populations fluctuate throughout the year, even if the experts were looking in areas that did have craneflies, they might have missed them if they happened to be surveying during the craneflies’ ‘low season’. At the moment, scientists don’t know if the number of Basilewsky’s craneflies does fluctuate throughout the year, or how. Fowler is working to find out. She’s part of the team conducting a long-term survey of insects on the island. Due to end in February 2018, the survey is gathering valuable information not just about Basilewsky’s cranefly, but about many other invertebrates. Fowler and colleagues are generating a treasure trove of knowledge that will help to understand the 400-plus species of invertebrate that can be found only on St. Helena – like the spiky yellow woodlouse, a brightly-coloured isopod which is one of the rarest species in the world.
One question the survey may answer is how close Basilewski’s cranefly is to truly go extinct. Scientists hope to get an idea of how adaptable the species is, how dependent it is on specific plants, and how much the craneflies are targeted by predators like spiders and mites, which humans unwittingly brought to the island. While scientists work to learn more about the species, Fowler’s find raises the hope that other species that are presumed extinct might still be fluttering around remote regions, waiting for the right person to drive by.
From hobby to toolkit
As for Fowler, her camera has very much become a tool of the trade. By photographing the insects she finds while out surveying, she can provide a new view of a species, since many of the island’s insects are only known from specimens that have been pinned in museum collections for decades. And she admits that even on her days off, she makes sure to take her camera everywhere, just in case.
References
- Paul Hetherington, Buglife. 2016. “New bugs discovered on remote Atlantic island” https://buglife-newsroom.prgloo.com/news/new-bugs-discovered-on-remote-atlantic-island
- Zoe Gough, BBC Earth. 2015. “The race to save St. Helena’s rare species” http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150722-tiny-british-colony-boasts-hundreds-of-unique-species
About the author
Once upon a time, Sonia Furtado Neves was a two-year-old staring transfixed at a documentary on polar bears for the better part of an hour. Now, she gets a thrill from helping people see how weird and wonderful life is. A bilingual biologist turned science communicator, Sonia worked in Lisbon Zoo’s education department and then in the communications department at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). She is currently communications officer at the Portuguese Society for the Study of Birds (SPEA). Although she can’t draw to save her life, Sonia once made Edvard Munch’s The Scream out of pancakes.
