A new species of clearwing moths is named after a professor of Altai State University
Since they are very rare for entomologists, finds of new species are still not rare. In a recent article, a leading researcher at the Institute of Animal Morphology and Ecology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Biology Oleg Gorbunov, described two species of butterflies from Western Mongolia, one of which is named after the professor of the Institute of Biology and Biotechnology of Altai State University, a famous entomologist Roman Yakovlev. The species was named Bembecia yakovlevi, and was first discovered in the highlands of the Gobi-Altai aimag of Mongolia.
“This find is one of the many results of our expeditions to the Mongolian Altai. There were 14 of them in total, and we organized the first one in 1999. The results of the research were a huge number of finds, new species, a fundamentally new scheme of zoogeographic zoning of the Mongolian Altai. This is reflected in dozens of articles in leading scientific publications - Zoological Journal, Zootaxa, Nota lepidopterologica, Russian Entomological Journal, Arthropoda selecta and others, as well as in a monograph published in the Czech Republic in 2009. Many materials were distributed to specialists, and new species from different groups of insects are still being described. Now it's the turn for clearwing moths, which I found in 2010 in the high mountains of the Mongolian Altai. Of course, it’s nice that the country’s leading expert on this unique group of butterflies named the species in my honor,” Roman Yakovlev comments on the find.