New click beetle species named after Dominican Republic’s Indigenous Arawak people
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A new species of click beetle with a glossy and highly domed black body has been described from cloud forest sites in the mountains of the Dominican Republic and named in honor of the Arawak peoples who lived on the island before European colonization.
Lissomus arawak measures under a centimeter (0.4 inches) long and is easily recognized by its shining and almost hairless black body, alongside its pale-yellow antennal segments. It is only the third species of the genus Lissomus known from Hispaniola and the third recorded anywhere in the Greater Antilles.
The study, published in Alpine Entomology, was carried out by Paul J. Johnson of South Dakota State University and Jiri Hodecek of the Swiss Human Institute of Forensic Taphonomy as part of an ongoing survey of Dominican insect life.
Cloud forest clues to island origins
Specimens were found at three sites in montane broadleaf and cloud forest between roughly 600 and 700 meters (2,000 and 2,300 feet), near the Sierra de Bahoruco and in the Cordillera Septentrional.
Rather than resembling the two other Lissomus species already known from Hispaniola, the new beetle turned out to be structurally closer to species from Central America and northern South America.
“The morphological differences suggest that the Lissomus species of Hispaniola may not all descend from a single colonization event,” the researchers explained. “One possible explanation is therefore that ancestors of these beetles reached the Greater Antilles on at least two separate occasions.”
They caution, however, that “this remains a testable hypothesis rather than a demonstrated evolutionary history,” pending a fuller phylogenetic analysis.
An Indigenous name for a rare beetle
The species is known from just five specimens, collected individually between 1985 and 2024, all of them female. “With such a small sample, chance and the opportunistic nature of the collecting are probably the simplest explanations,” the researchers said, adding that this “does not seriously weaken our confidence that L. arawak is distinct. All five females share a consistent and unique combination of morphological characters.”
The name is a deliberate tribute to the island’s first inhabitants. “We chose the name arawak to recognize the Indigenous history and continuing cultural heritage of the Antilles,” the researchers said. “We wanted the name of this distinctive endemic species to connect the biological history of the island with its human history.”
The discovery forms part of a wider effort, they added, “to document the island’s still incompletely known insect diversity,” with at least 15 further click beetle species thought to await description in the Dominican Republic alone.
More information
Paul J. Johnson et al, Lissomus arawak sp. nov. (Coleoptera, Elateridae), a new species from the Dominican Republic, Alpine Entomology (2026). DOI: 10.3897/alpento.10.193434
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