ASU scientist carries out complete revision of tropical butterfly family

11 September 2018 Faculty of Biology

Professor of the Department of Ecology, Biochemistry and Biotechnology Roman Yakovlev published an article devoted to the complete revision of the butterfly family Ratardidae.

"The study of biological diversity is one of the most relevant tasks for modern biologists. Our research group of entomologists of Altai State University is actively working on this subject, and the focus of research is not regional, but international – we study one of the most interesting topics concerning the tropical and subtropical regions of the planet. In recent months, Candidate of Biology Petr Ustyuzhanin published serious reviews on the fauna of Cameroon, South Africa, Tanzania and Panama, postgraduate student Alexander Fomichev published a large article on the fauna of northern Iraq. I managed to publish a number of articles on the fauna of Africa, Afghanistan, Pakistan and for the first time in the world to publish a complete revision of a small tropical butterfly family Ratardidae. Representatives of this particular group of insects are found in tropical Asia: India, South China, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia. The study of materials in the UK, Germany, Japan and the Netherlands allowed doing this review. A new species collected in Thailand turned out to be new for science and was named in honor of our employee, qualified entomologist, my wife Elena Guskova. I hope that we will be able to do some of the graduation projects on tropical fauna as well: now, for example, one of my students, Artem Naidenov, is actively working on the fauna of South America. Focusing on regional problems seems one of the most incorrect strategies for the development of science in universities; we must set ambitious tasks of the world class and solve them," Roman Yakovlev said.

The article by Roman Yakovlev entitled “World catalogue of the family Ratardidae (Lepidoptera, Cossoidea) with the description of a new species from Thailand and the establishment of a new synonymy and a new status for Ratarda javanica Roepke 1937” was published in Russian Journal of Zoology, and the articles of colleagues mentioned above are published in the journals ZooKeys, Zootaxa, Zoology in the Middle East, Russian Entomological Journal and Far Eastern Entomologist.

In September–December 2018, the staff of the Laboratory for Fundamental and Applied Zoology will visit a number of countries: Mongolia, Great Britain, Germany, Norway and India.

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