New, big stinkbug

The past two times I have gone out in the field on Mo'orea I have seen a lot of these stinkbugs crawling around on native vegetation. They're about two centimeters long, which is pretty big for a Polynesian insect. Anything this big and colorful I just assumed had to be introduced, but I sent a picture off to a colleague last night and he wrote back to say that it's an undescribed species of Catacanthus (Pentatomidae) endemic to French Polynesia. I'm not the first person to find these, though--they have been collected previously from Raivavae in the Australs and from Tahiti, although apparently not from Mo'orea.

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