A bosszú istennőitől a kollegialitásig – tudományra új fürkészdarázsfajok a Magyar Természettudományi Múzeumból = From the Goddesses of Vengeance to collegiality – new ichneumon wasp species from the Hungarian Natural History Museum

Vas, Zoltán (2018) A bosszú istennőitől a kollegialitásig – tudományra új fürkészdarázsfajok a Magyar Természettudományi Múzeumból = From the Goddesses of Vengeance to collegiality – new ichneumon wasp species from the Hungarian Natural History Museum. ANNALES MUSEI HISTORICO-NATURALIS HUNGARICI, 110. pp. 123-130. ISSN 0521-4726

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Abstract

Ichneumon wasps (Ichneumonidae) represent one of the most diverse families of the animal kingdom with a potentially great significance in biological control; despite that, they are one of the poorest known insect groups even in the European fauna. For several decades, there has been no specialist researcher of ichneumon wasps in the Hymenoptera Collection of the Hungarian Natural History Museum (HNHM, Budapest). Hence, a huge amount of undetermined material has gathered in the collection due to the collecting expeditions and faunistical surveys obtained by the devoted field work of the past and present staff members of HNHM. However, in the natural history collections these undetermined, unprocessed materials are not forgotten “leftovers”, rather an investment into the future. Sometimes decades pass until these materials have a chance to be determined and scientifically evaluated by a specialist researcher, but sooner or later it shall happen, and until that, the museum collection carefully preserves the material. The now ongoing identification process of the ichneumon wasp material already yielded several faunistical and taxonomical results regarding the ichneumon wasp fauna of Hungary and other countries of the Palaearctic region. In this paper, as a few examples for the above described phenomenon, some new ichneumon wasp species, which were recently described by the author in the Hymenoptera Collection, are introduced along with the circumstances of their discovery. Among them, Temelucha flavia and Teleutaea pantherina give us examples how greatly the amount of time between collecting of the specimens and describing them as new species is dependent on the availability of a specialist in the museum, while, as in the case of one of the new Thaumatogelis species, we can see how the hard and devoted field work during collecting expeditions shall yield important results even decades after the expedition. These new species, besides their scientific value, represent several other important inferences, such as careful preservation in the natural history collections and the possibility for collecting expeditions are investments into the future of taxonomical and faunistical science and into the possibility of their applied utilizations.

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