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Driving Dr. SchuhAuthor(s): Gerry CassisSource: Entomologica Americana, 118(1):16-24. 2012.Published By: The New York Entomological SocietyDOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1664/12-SN-032.1URL: http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.1664/12-SN-032.1

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Entomologica Americana 118(1–4):16–24, 2012

DRIVING DR. SCHUH

The distance Toby Schuh and I travelled

between 1995–2007 would be nearly twice the

Earth’s circumference. And I refer only to car-

distance, through which we travelled in Australia,

South Africa, and California. Across continental

transects, incidents of scientific and personal

worth inevitably occurred that are subject to

verbal exaggeration and may be lost in transla-

tion. So for posterity, hyperbole aside, and within

the scope of a Festschrift, I record this recollection

of the Australian legs of our joint fieldwork, in

celebration of Toby’s 70th birthday.

BEGINNINGS

I first met Toby Schuh in 1981, on my first visit

to New York as a Ph.D. student from Oregon State

University. We had a link through Prof. Jack

Lattin; Toby had spent his undergraduate years

working for Jack in the OSU insect collection. He

invited me to his apartment on the Upper West side

in New York, which is adjacent to the American

Museum of Natural History, and where he and his

wife, Brenda Massie, treated us to a dinner. I don’t

remember what we ate, but I recall meeting for the

first time, the arachnologist, Robert Raven, one of

my countrymen, and all together there was much

railing against paraphyly.

A full history would require a volume in itself to

describe his Australian period from 1995–2004. It

all started in the early 1990s in Toby and Brenda’s

apartment, at their kitchen table, where I asked

him to come collecting in Australia. Toby didn’t

say much but I gathered later he was listening.

It wasn’t that he wanted to see the wide-open

spaces, but more so that he needed to address the

near absence of knowledge about Australian

Phylinae. It was the missing piece in his global

puzzle. The Palearctic was under control, Africa

he knew, North America he was conquering, and

his work on the Indo-Pacific will always be a

classic of heteropterology. But Australia was a

yawning gap – just 60 phyline species described

up until 1995. It soon followed that funding

was in place and he landed in Australia in

mid-October.

With no great thoughts of where it would all

end up, we set out in the spring of 1995 on a most

excellent true bug adventure. Hereafter follows a

trip-by-trip recollection of highlights and anec-

dotes from these most memorable field trips.

1995 TRIP THROUGH NEW SOUTH WALES, SOUTH

AUSTRALIA, AND VICTORIA

The first trip we took was in 1995, where we

travelled through southeast Australia, mostly in

New South Wales, but also Victoria and South

Australia. Seventy-four locations and 110 host

plants were covered within 30 days! Starting in

Sydney on October 19, we drove north along the

Pacific Highway and crossed the Dividing Range

to the western slopes, and on to the dry country,

that so defines the Australian continent. The bugs

started to ‘rain’ near an outpost called Retreat,

where our field notes recorded the mistletoe-

inhabiting bug genus Hypsoleocus in temperate

Australia. Toby was most surprised to find it in

temperate Australia. A few days later north of the

service town Coonabarabran, we happened upon

the remarkable thaumastocorid species, Baclozy-

gum brachypterum Slater, finding it on the

enigmatic Australian plant genus Xanthorrhoea

(5 grass trees), the first host record for the

species. Way out west in New South Wales, we

came across many species that were new ‘in the

flesh’ for Toby, that we would meet time and

again in our Australian travels—the pod-feeding

bug genus Riptortus (Alydidae), the lacy shield

bug genus Cephaloplatus, the gumtree-inhabiting

bug genus Poecilometis, and the jewel bug genus

Coleotichus. But beyond these came the ‘gold’—

the plant bugs in countless numbers with few

names.

Toby was enjoying the collecting but he was

more than puzzled with the Australian drawl and

idioms. I recall our first supermarket shop, in

Armidale, when after having the goods bagged

and paid for, the cashier asked him ‘if he wanted

to take it with him?’ He couldn’t utter a word, as

he contemplated this strangest of questions; you

could see the thought bubble—‘I just paid for it,

but now I am asked whether I want to take it with

me.’ I had to explain to him that this was a polite

request as to whether he wanted the groceries

home delivered.

Along the way, we ended up at the School of

Botany, at the University of Melbourne, during

the Melbourne Cup, a horse race ‘that stops the

nation,’ and in the generous company of Prof.

Pauline Ladiges and Gary Nelson, Gary being one

of Toby’s long time colleagues from the American

Museum of Natural History, who had seen the

light and moved to Australia.

1996 TRIP TO WESTERN AUSTRALIA AND BACK

The 1995 field trip was memorable, but nothing

like what we experienced in the following year, the

famous, at least famous in our minds, 1996 trip to

Western Australia. For almost three weeks we

drove from Sydney to Perth and back, collecting

almost 200 host plants and their true bug

affiliates. Nothing has ever rivalled that trip for

diversity and abundance. Images of these trips

hang as a testament in Toby’s office.

On 19 October 1996 in almost no time, we

reached the far western New South Wales town of

Balranald, where the first entry in the fieldnote

book is Coridromius—this odd animal proved to

be a common encounter for us over the next eight

years, which was odd in itself, as it was previously

known from only a handful of specimens. We

must have driven on high octane, because in two

days we were in Western Australia, as we had

reached Newman Rocks, a favoured site, on the

western side of the Nullarbor Plain in Western

Australia; this, our site L8, was portentous of

what was to come, as we collected on eight hosts,

with phylines and orthotylines aplenty. In the

three days that followed, the fieldnote book is

jammed, reaching 86 hosts, and the bugs picked

from the bushes included Australian oddballs, such

as the Lestoniidae (host Callitris) and the podo-

pine, Deroploopsis. One could sense an awakening

in Toby, as the word ‘phyline’ litters each page of

our notes, including the manuscript name ‘Walla-

bicoris’ (a name inherited from Jose Carvalho),

which Toby would later convert into a monograph

of the genus. As good as the collecting was up to

this point, nothing prepared us for a gentle slope

south of the desert village of Menzies, where upon

emu bush, native pine, sheoaks, spiderflowers, and

teatrees, amongst other trees and shrubs, the bugs

rained, and the expression was coined, ‘we couldn’t

catch ‘em all.’

Over the next few days we circled northwest

through mining stations, such as Agnew, Sand-

stone and Agnew, and by 28 October, we had

reached the Indian Ocean, at Kalbarri National

Park, where heathland spread out across the

landscape, as far as we could see, and the bugs

were there to match. At site L39, we came across a

gentle sand dune, where it seemed as if every

individual plant was flowering (Fig. 1a), and

every species of perennial shrub had multiple

mirid species. It was undoubtedly reminiscent of

Toby’s collecting in the western United States,

across the Great Basin, and about the Sierras. The

diversity of both the western United States and

Australia rival each other, but unlike Australia,

the US had the benefit of the multiple works of

Van Duzee and Harry Knight, including Knight’s

mirids of the Nevada Test Site. In Western

Australia, there were no benchmarks (aside from

Carvalho and Gross’ work on Australian ant-

mimics), no names, no specialized mirid collec-

tions; it was discovery at its most elemental.

From Kalbarri we headed south along the

Brand Highway and its tributaries, through

Dongarra and the sand plains of Eneabba, and

at the beginning of November we had reached

Perth for a bit of respite and restocking, where we

stayed with my great friends Tony Bower and

Jane Livesey, whose house proved to be an impor-

tant outpost for us in following years. From here,

we headed back to Sydney, and on November 5

we reached a site called Lillian Stoke Rock (Fig. 1b),

a place with granite outcrops and outstanding

heath, which would become one of Toby’s favou-

rite places in Australia, and where we collected

the new species Wallabicoris waitzii Schuh and

Pedraza. We were back in Sydney on November

12, and we didn’t know what had just happened.

Tupperware containers packed with pillboxes,

loaded in layers of tissues with thousands of speci-

mens, most of them new to science. It was a

treasure collected that will serve as a milestone for

Australian heteropterology, and global miridology

for years to come.

The conditions were right for such an explora-

tion—the winter rains of 1996 in southwest

Australia were ideal, and the botanists told us

that it was one of these years where the flowering

was extreme. Toby had proven to me that he had

a field method bar none, and his and my students,

are all using the Schuh collecting techniques; the

bathtub beating sheet, the pressed plants, the

relentless sampling of specified hosts, pillboxes,

and fieldnote books with a site per page.

Toby had grown up in southeast Oregon in the

desert country of Klamath Falls, where his father

Joe, a potato entomologist, had him collecting

bugs and beetles from an early age. We talked a

2012 DRIVING DR. SCHUH 17

Fig. 1. Field photos from the Western Australia 1996 and Birdsville 1998 trips. A. The mirid ‘dream site’ where

the collecting was breathtaking, north of Kalbarri National Park on the coastal highway, Western Australia (Site

WA96 L39). B. A Toby site favourite, Lillian Stoke Rock, Frank Hahn National Park, Western Australia (site WA96

L66, site WA99 L19), the site of Wallabicoris waitzii Schuh and Pedraza. C. A site somewhere near Birdsville,

Queensland, with the perennial de-camping activity in play. D. A campsite near Cooper’s Creek, Queensland, with

Rossana Silveira in the background. E. The spectacular beach at Rossiter Bay, Cape Le Grande National Park (site

WA99 L29). F. The spectacular forest near Walpole on the south coast of Western Australia (site WA99 L56).

18 ENTOMOLOGICA AMERICANA Vol. 118(1–4)

lot about desert country in our trips, and from his

own voice, he drew parallels between the deserts

of Australia and the US. Although he had spent

much time collecting bugs in the New World

tropics, he would vote every time for dry country,

beating rabbit bush, Atriplex, creosote in the

Great Basin, and now in Australia, wattles,

smokebush and hakeas, to name but a few.

1997 TRIP TO WESTERN AUSTRALIA

With 1996 in mind, the selection of our 1997

fieldtrip was easily cast. Back to Western Aus-

tralia, but this time we cut out the long haul. As

seductive as ‘driving across the country is’ being

on your feet is better than behind the wheel, when

your aim is catching bugs. This time we thought

this was too much fun, and we loaded up the car

with two more heteropterists. Harry Brailovsky

of UNAM from Mexico City, a ‘tumbleweed’

extraordinaire (has anyone travelled as much as

Harry?), and Adam Asquith, then of the US Fish

& Wildlife Service in Hawaii, came along, both

with their giant-sized beating sheets.

The first entry of the fieldnote book is ‘Locality

1 Moorine Rocks, just north of the Great Eastern

Highway on the Noongaar Road. Host 1, states

Coleotichus costatus (Fabricius), Mictis profana

(Fabricius), Riptortus sp., and a monaloniine

mirid species that we would encounter again on

our travels, with all them from Acacia saligna. For

the next few days, we drove in very dry country

around the service town of Southern Cross. This

differed from what we had seen in 1996, as we

collected on shrubs such as Dicrastylis, Verticor-

dia, Isopogon and Dryandra. The latter two genera

belong to the Proteaceae, a plant family that

reaches its zenith in temperate Australia and

southern Africa. The story from South Africa,

was that in the fynbos, where proteaceous plants

abound, bugs are ‘thin on the ground.’ This was

anecdotally held for Australia as well, but in this

trip, we were confirming what we started to see in

1996; namely, that the Proteaceae were actually

attractive to land bugs. From these collections, we

found a new species of thaumastocorid, Onymo-

coris stysi Cassis, Schuh and Brailovsky from

Dryandra sessilis (Knight) Domin, which we

described in honour of another heteropterologist

of repute, Pavel Stys.

We headed south in the first week to the

magnificent Fitzgerald National Park, where

recent wildfires had kept the bugs down a little.

Soon after this time, Adam and I returned to

Sydney for a few days for a conference, and Toby

and Harry headed northeast of Perth, finding

themselves in the wheatbelt, where near Payne’s

Find, they collected the best ever series of the

lestoniid species, Lestonia haustorifera China. On

their own, they were interrogated by ‘officials’ on

a minor road, which caused them I gather, an

amount of discomfort.

We rejoined Toby and Harry on the 14th of

December and headed south of Perth on the coast

road. In Yalgorup National Park, we found an

outstanding series of an anthocorid species in the

flowers of Banksia attenuata R.Br., and during the

same day, we collected an upsidedown fly in the

crown of a grass tree species (Xanthorrhoea preissii

Endl.), which proved later to be of great interest

to dipterists. We then headed south to the forests

of the southwest corner of Western Australia. We

ended up at Windy Harbour, a place that deserves

its name. Driving north we camped on the side of

the road near Mt. Chudalup, where we were

disturbed in the night by two unsavoury gents,

who seemed to have plans for us, and it wasn’t a

game of Parcheesi. Toby was engaging them so

that a line was not crossed in our campsite; Harry

was having thoughts of Mexican bandits; and I

was heading for the bread knife. They finally

decided that we were too much of a challenge or

probably better to them, there was likely another

six pack on the driver seat that required dispens-

ing.

With the robbers behind us, we drifted towards

the southern town of Denmark, where we relaxed,

and headed back to Perth along the Albany

Highway. So ended our trip on December 8,

where we handed in our plants at the Western

Australian Herbarium to Sue Carroll, who so ably

helped us with plant identifications over the years.

And to top it off in their car park, we found a

phyline on a planted specimen of Eucalyptus

macrocarpa Hook., a threatened plant of great

beauty. Toby had no idea what the phyline was

and we had never seen it before. Sixty-five sites

and 132 hosts were added to the Australian

adventure.

1998 TRIP TO BIRDSVILLE AND BACK

Just to mix it up, as much as we wanted to head

back to the west, we thought it best to put more

dots elsewhere on the Australian map. The 1998

fieldnote book carries on its cover the epithet,

2012 DRIVING DR. SCHUH 19

‘The Birdsville Trip,’ and for non-Australian

readers this requires explanation. Birdsville carries

a certain mystique for Australians, a people who

in the main, hug the coast in cities and but dream

or makeup stories of the outback. This tiny

community below the Simpson Desert in western

Queensland is home to an annual horse race and

tent boxing, which are both synonymous with

alcohol consumption. Otherwise, it’s home to a

few intrepid folk, countless flies, and broken

thermometers.

This trip we took along my new assistant

Rossana Silveira, a person who would join us on

all our remaining trips, and became a great friend

and most excellent collector. After a quick visit to

Brisbane to visit Geoff Monteith, Robert Raven,

Geoff Thompson, and the other entomological

crowd at the Queensland Museum, we headed

west through Toowoomba, stopping off at the

property of my sister, Magda Close, and her

husband Brian. On their property we collected by

hand the cryptic Australian family Hyocephalidae

(Maevius species), and we are likely one of the few

to see these animals alive.

We headed east to far off towns such as Roma,

Mitchell, and Charleville, reaching Adavale on

November 2. Along the way, we collected on

sheaoks, wattles, Myoporum, Correa, and grasses.

Mirids again, and along the way we also found

enigmatic taxa, such as the shieldbug Boocoris

bufiformis Gross, which ran around like a spider

on the grimmest of plants. Although it was not

Western Australia, we nonetheless were collecting

new species.

What we lacked in diversity on this trip, we

made up in colourful places and characters,

camping many a night by the side of a road or

near a creek (Fig. 1c, d). On reaching Adavale, we

were perplexed to see the few houses and the

public telephone on stilts, only to realise that this

channel country would on occasion flood through

the village, and that this dry country could

transform in a matter of moments. On through

the town of Quilpie, we headed for Birdsville. On

the way we arrived unknowingly at Windorah on

Melbourne Cup day. On its outskirts, we stopped

at a petrol station, where upon filling up, we asked

the attendant if we could drink the local water, as

our water containers were near empty. He said he

had drunk it all his life. We filled up our water

tanks from the petrol station taps with water that

was as brown as floodwater. It turned out the

attendant was blind as could be and we wondered

to ourselves whether the water had something to

do with it. At site L22 west of Windorah we

collected where the temperature was 52 degrees

Celsius – give me Death Valley! Notwithstanding,

our heads throbbing from the heat, we caught two

species of phylines and a tingid. Onwards, we

skirted to the south into South Australia, where at

Innamincka, we put up the light sheet and were

inundated with waterbugs and waterbeetles,

around our feet, in our ears and noses. From

here we headed into the hidden and rugged

Flinders Ranges, which were dry but rewarding.

We finished off in the Ngarkat and Scorpion

Springs National parks, which proved to be the

best collecting of the whole trip.

1999 TRIP BACK TO THE WEST

After the dry country of Queensland and South

Australia, it was obvious that a return to the west

was needed. The now old firm of Schuh, Cassis

and Silveira were back in Perth in mid-November,

and adjacent to the house of our Perth host, in a

suburban park, we found four species of thau-

mastocorids, not bad, for a bug family with fewer

than fifty species worldwide.

The last page of the fieldnote book reveals 70

localities and 219 host plants. From 15th November

to 4th December, we travelled back to Southern

Cross and then headed south, with the aim of

gaining better coverage of the southern coast.

Whether it was nostalgia or something other,

we headed to our 1996 mirid-mecca of Menzies,

and curiously it proved to be far less productive.

We then headed south towards Norseman, and

found the area around Peak Charles and Lillian

Stoke Rock. From here onwards we headed to

the coastal national parks, Cape Le Grande

National Park and Cape Arid, east of the service

town Esperance, across which are arguably the

most spectacular beaches one could wish to see

(Fig. 1e). Near the end of November, we ended

back at Fitzgerald National Park, and tracked

our way back to Perth through Denmark and

Walpole, and the world-renowned wine region of

Margaret River.

Flicking through the fieldnote book, the plant

host genera, Callitris, Grevillea, Allocasuarina,

Eremophila, Melaleuca, Leptospermum, Callisto-

men, Leschenaultia, Verticordia, Pimelia and

Hibbertia stand out. Many of these genera are

not familiar to entomologists from other places,

20 ENTOMOLOGICA AMERICANA Vol. 118(1–4)

but it is well known that plant diversity in the

southwest of Western Australia rivals any place in

the world. What was not known is how diverse the

land bugs are on these plants, a story of great

evolutionary interplay between insects and plants

that in the fullness of time will reveal associations

of global significance.

Toby was again struck by the diversity of bugs in

the west, but by this stage it was also obvious that

Australia had grabbed him like few other places.

Although you would not call Toby a particularly

sentimental person, there was a sense of covering

the same ground as his mentor Prof. Jim Slater,

whose handful of lygaeoid collections in the

southwest of Western Australia in the 1970s had

alerted Toby to the prospect of unknown true bug

biodiversity. He also got to see the grand Eucalyp-

tus forests (Fig. 1f) in the southwest corner, where

the wood from trees such as jarrah makes the

carpenter in people such as Toby, twitch.

2001 TRIP TO THE RED CENTRE

In 2001 we had a big idea—to visit Uluru, and

the central deserts of South Australia and

Northern Territory. On this occasion, Michael

Wall, who was a PhD student visiting my lab on a

Fulbright scholarship, Rossana Silveira, and I

drove from Sydney to Alice Springs. There we met

Toby and our old friend, Mr. Mirid, Michael

Schwartz. Very quickly Michael acquired the

moniker, ‘The General’ in reference to the US

General, Schwarzkopf, by which he is now

universally known. We headed northwest on the

Tanami track, a remote dirt road that took us

through aboriginal land, that was very dry and

dusty, and not particularly ‘bug productive,’ but

we did add new dots on the bug map of Australia.

Visits to the fieldtrip book reveal lots of bugs off

the shrub genus Eremophila, which although not

familiar to many entomologists, is the most

speciose genus outside of Acacia in Australia,

and has been very productive for tingids. On this

trip, we also collected on other xerophilic plant

genera, including chenopods, sennas, hakea, and a

range of shrub myrtles, which have all proven to

be a rich source for phyline and orthotyline

mirids. On our way to Uluru, we drove along

the Ernst Giles Road, with four stops that were

remarkably productive, including site L37, where

we collected on 16 vouchered host plants. On

finally reaching Uluru, all our party was taken by

the majesty of this unique monolith, but we were

soon ‘beating the bushes,’ and the spiderflower

genus Grevillea, was ‘dripping’ with mirids. We

drove on to Uluru’s companion, Kata Tjuta

(Fig. 2a), where we put down our nets for a bit

of rest and reflection (Fig. 2b).

With the tourist trek complete, Michael Wall

headed back to Sydney, and we continued on our

way to Kings Canyon and Watarrka National

Park, where Toby was energised by the collection

of a new Hypsoleocus species in the campground.

The trip ended with collecting in the loop of the

West MacDonnell Range, where the temperatures

were extreme, and even the bugs found it too hot.

At the end of the first week of November, started

off back home, through South Australia, return-

ing to Sydney with a record number of vouchered

hosts—329 in all. A few days later, we all went

down to Royal National Park on the Southside of

Sydney, and added another 20+ hosts, just for the

fun of it!

2002 TASSIE AND BACK AND TOBY’S FINAL

‘REAL TRIP’

Toby couldn’t make it in 2000 because of other

commitments. But we were soon planning our

seventh trip. We debated whether we should go

west again and I was able to twist his arm to go to

the apple isle, Tasmania, where mirids have

received little attention. The same mob as

before—Schuh, Schwartz, Silveira and I—packed

up two cars and drove from Sydney, travelling

across the Bass Strait on the ferry. First of all, we

headed inland in New South Wales, so that we

could travel a loop, returning home along the

south coast of my home state. Toby was very keen

to return to Little Desert National Park, in

Victoria, a stretch of heath that is spectacular in

its diversity and configuration. He found it very

amusing that the sand track through this park was

called the McDonald Highway and that we saw

next to nobody in the park. On this trip we came

across a fantastic series of the rhyparochromid

genus Laryngodus, which we were working on

together with Jim Slater, who unfortunately

passed away before that work was published.

One aspect of our collecting was the claims and

counter-claims as to who was the superior

collector. It was always in good fun.

We trawled our trade along the banks of the

Murray River that marks the boundary between

New South Wales and Victoria, where in Nyah

State Forest, we peeled the bark of River Red gums

2012 DRIVING DR. SCHUH 21

Fig. 2. Field photos from Central Australia 2001 and Tasmanian 2002 trips. A. Kata Tjuta National Park,

Northern Territory. B. Toby Schuh and I at Kata Tjuta with hats off. C. Nyah State Forest, on the Murray River,

Victoria [Site TAS02 L3] – inset: nymphs and adults of Ptilocnemus femoralis Horvath on the bark of Eucalyptus

camaludensis Dehn. (River Red Gum). D. Wilsons Promontory National Park, Squeaky Bay track (site TAS02 L43).

E. Toby with Lionel Hill’s monster D-Vac, collecting dipsocoromorphans, the smallest of bugs, at Sandspit River

Forest Reserve, Wielangta Forest Drive, Tasmania (Site TAS02 L36). F. Toby in southwest Tasmania.

22 ENTOMOLOGICA AMERICANA Vol. 118(1–4)

to find the most outstanding collection of the

feather-legged bug, Ptilocnemus femoralis Horvath

(Fig. 2c). On the 11th of November we landed in

Tasmania, where we collected for a week, docu-

menting 39 hosts. Along the way we met up with

Dr Lionel Hill in Devonport, who is undoubtedly

one of the best dipsocoromorphan workers study-

ing this odd group of insects. Lionel was most

generous to us, and we borrowed his D-VAC,

which Toby put to get use at Sandspit River

(Fig. 2e). Although the collecting was not on par

with Western Australia, the scenery was remark-

able (Fig. 2f) and we got to collect oddball taxa,

such as the idiostolid, Trisecus pictus Bergroth. We

returned to Victoria and had excellent collecting at

Wilsons Promontory National Park (Fig. 2d) on

our return to the mainland. We meandered up the

south coast of New South Wales, and reached

Sydney in the third week of November, having

collected 134 hosts, and fifty-three sites.

From 1995–2002, we were able to produce a

‘systematic’ sample of temperate and arid Austra-

lia, with a great number of dots on the map, and

many host plants and bugs co-collected (Fig. 3).

PLANT BUG INVENTORY – THE GREAT OPPORTUNITY

It soon followed that all this collecting was

attractive to others, including the US National

Science Foundation, which awarded Toby and I, a

Planetary Biodiversity Inventory grant in 2003.

Many heteropterists then joined in the next phase

of the great mirid adventure, including Thomas

Henry, Michael Schwartz, Christiane Weirauch,

Michael Wall, Denise Wyniger, Nikolai Tatarnic,

Katrina Menard, Dimitri Forero, Fedor Kon-

stantinov, Dan Polhemus, Hannah Finlay, Anouk

Mutatantri, Anna Namyatova and Tomohide

‘Pseudoyeti’ Yasunaga. Toby returned to Austra-

lia in 2004 for a PBI group meeting in Sydney, on

his way to South Africa.

Fig. 3. Collection sites for Schuh and Cassis trips between 1995–2002.

2012 DRIVING DR. SCHUH 23

NEW BEGINNINGS

In Toby’s passport, the black ink of eight trips to

Australia must be stamped, and he has entered

Australian landscapes that few have savoured. In

the process, he has added to a personal list of

collecting sites that span the world. A cursory

examination of the American Museum of Natural

History collection reveals one of the greatest

heteropteran collections amassed, modern, broad,

and with host plants documented in a way that few

have done so far. And to add to this is what he went

on to produce - monographs, phylogenies, catalogs,

websites, and mentoring of future heteropterists.

The yearly trips to Toby’s office at the

American Museum of Natural History have

become fewer, but on his walls, are photographs

of his Australian adventure. Maybe the greatest

legacy of these trips will be the thousands of

specimens that will pass through the hands of

others as they focus their microscopes, and

examine pages of descriptions and drawings. The

pieces of the Australian Phylinae puzzle have been

found.

On the occasion of his 70th birthday, it is

opportune to thank Toby for his contributions to

the world of bugs. Notwithstanding he has much

to contribute to the cause of true bugs, and 70

is now the new 50, so we hope to see, and

undoubtedly will see, more to come.

I cannot let it pass without saying that Toby’s

achievements have also been a product of the

immense support of his family. His wife Brenda

and daughter Ella, have been there along the way,

and provided a warm place for bug travellers like

myself, amongst many others.—Gerry Cassis,

Evolution & Ecology Research Centre, School of

Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences,

University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2052

Australia, (e-mail: gcassis@unsw.edu.au)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Rossana Silveira and MarinaCheng for assisting with selecting the images andpreparing the plates. I thank Celia Symonds, HannahFinlay and Nik Tatarnic for reading the manuscript.

24 ENTOMOLOGICA AMERICANA Vol. 118(1–4)