#1942 - Eucolaspis sp. - Bronze Beetle
A genus of Eupolmine leaf beetle, native of New Zealand and Fiji. Serious pests of fruit trees, although this one was on a Bentham's Cornel (Cornus capitata). Adult beetles feed on leaves, flowers and fruit, and the larvae and feed on small roots. Annual loss to organic apple orchards in New Zealand is estimated to reach 10–15 million NZD.
There’s a certain amount of ambiguity in the number of known species, but the eternal conflict between Lumpers and Splitters is hardly going to reach a truce even for a small genus like Eucolaspis.
By the early 20th Century, there were fifteen species described from New Zealand by Fabricius (1781), White (1846) and Broun (1880, 1893, 1909), but in 1957, Stanley Shaw revised that down to three and two newly described species of his own. This work was largely ignored, although two more species were described from Fiji in the same year.
However, in 2015, morphological and genetic evidence indicated just three lineages (or putative species) on the mainland of New Zealand. Four years later Spanish entomologist Jesús Gómez-Zurita generally agreed with the 1957 paper, identifying at least five species in New Zealand, and adding a sixth - Eucolaspis kotatou, from Te Paki, near Cape Reinga.