Visiting Dr Ochi and Dr Kon to describe Singapore species

From 10-11 June 2026, TEE Lab PhD student Zann Teo Jiexin spent some time working with Dr Teruo Ochi and Dr Masahiro Kon in Osaka, Japan, to describe some new species of dung beetles in Singapore.

I was extremely privileged to visit the private collection of Dr Teruo Ochi, which is possibly one of the most comprehensive collections of dung beetles in our region.

I was gifted a signed copy of Dr Ochi's thesis, which I will treasure throughout the rest of my academic journey! It has such bountiful information about Bornean species. (Left: Dr Kon, Middle: Dr Ochi, Right: Zann)

Our workstation for the two days - lots of specimens!

Dr Ochi reviewing my manuscript and giving valuable feedback on my preliminary descriptions.

My recent visit focused on species of the Indachorius subgenus, which is notably cryptic, meaning that they look extremely similar! I relied heavily on evidence from DNA barcoding to assign males and females to a single species, and am truly in awe by how traditional taxonomists could confidently “match” males to females purely with external traits. Furthermore, it is not uncommon for intraspecies variation to overlap greatly with interspecies variation – there can be so much variation in a single species at first glance (e.g. size, colouration), that we have to look at much finer details (punctation, curvature of head structures) to more confidently differentiate species. For males, they are sometimes unidentifiable without the aedeagus (male reproductive organ)!

I was fascinated to see this book being translated from Russian to Japanese in handwritten notes.

Through a mix of morphological and molecular evidence, we have identified three species of Indachorius in Singapore, of which one is likely to already be described (“known to science”), while I will be working on having the other two described.

I look forward to describing these new species and am grateful for this opportunity to work with taxonomists from around the world to describe them. By the end of my PhD, I hope to have described several new dung beetle species from Singapore, and thus take some steps to reduce the taxonomic impediment in our region.