New York City is one of the most well-explored places on Earth.
Lucy Jones for Vox
Established nearly four centuries ago by an influential Dutchman, the city has since grown into the largest and most densely populated metropolis in the country, with no fewer than 28,000 people per square mile, or about one person per 1,000 square feet. People are everywhere.
That’s what makes this so astonishing: Scientists believe there are almost certainly hundreds, if not thousands, of undiscovered animal species living in the middle of New York, among the city’s parks, gardens, and streets. I’m not talking about the big stuff — birds, frogs, and so on — but small critters, including flies, wasps, and other insects.
It’s not that NYC is some sort of global bug hot spot. (Despite what it might feel like in the summer, it is not.) Rather, the bulk of species in many insect groups, wherever they’re found, remains unknown. As one example, there may be as many as 1.8 million species globally in a single fly family called Cecidomyiidae, known as the gall midges. Yet only about 7,000 of them have been described in the scientific record and are thus known species. Broadly speaking, taxonomists estimate that as much as 90 percent of all animal species on Earth are still unknown. That is, of course, nearly all of them.
This summer, Vox is setting out to play a small role in filling these giant gaps in the global tree of life — by trying to discover a new species, right here in New York. It’s a goal we understand to be both attainable and useful: Documenting the world’s biodiversity is essential to any argument and effort to protect it. And to be clear, protecting insects is among the most self-serving acts humans can partake in, given the role bugs play in pollinating our foods, cleaning up our feces, and feeding other wildlife.
Here’s how the process will work.
In both Central Park and Prospect Park, we’ve deployed a tent-like structure called a Malaise trap to capture small flying insects, including flies and parasitoid wasps — the latter a vastly understudied group of wasps that lay their eggs in other insects. Bugs that fly into the trap are funneled into a jar of ethanol, where they’re killed and preserved. The traps are designed to capture only small flying critters, and usually do not entrap things like dragonflies, butterflies, and spiders.
Will this process harm insects?
Malaise traps are a common sampling tool to assess the diversity of flying insects like flies and wasps. They don’t use scent lures or other attractants but rather intercept bugs as they’re moving through the environment.
The trap does kill small insects that fly into it — those that are less than about a nickel in size — but overall the impact on their populations is minor, according to Emily Hartop, an entomologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who’s involved in the project. Insect populations are orders of magnitude larger than what the trap will collect. And in fact, Hartop says, it’s Malaise trapping that’s helped reveal the global decline in insects.
The traps we’re using are also designed to filter out larger critters including butterflies and dragonflies, and we’ll monitor them throughout the summer to make sure that is indeed the case.
The traps will be open and collecting insects for three summer months: June, July, and August.
Step 2: Sequence their DNA
Every month or so, we’ll send the insects we collect in the city to a lab in Canada called the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics (CBG). There, scientists will begin to sequence small fragments of their genomes, producing distinct, genetic “barcodes” for each of them. These barcodes are unique genetic IDs that help differentiate one species from another.
Once CBG scientists have barcodes for our NYC insects, they can then compare those IDs to the millions of barcodes for animals in North America and around the world that researchers have already sequenced. It’s sort of like running fingerprints from a crime scene through an FBI database to identify a suspect. If there’s no match — meaning, there’s no record for animals with those same genetic IDs — that will indicate that what we found may be new.
Step 3: Bring in the expert taxonomists
If genetic sequencing turns up bugs with unique, matchless codes, CBG will send those specimens to the entomologists who know them best, for a more thorough analysis. For example, Emily Hartop, a taxonomist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, is a global expert in scuttle flies; we’ll send potentially new scuttle flies to her. Meanwhile, Ranjith AP, a taxonomist at CBG, will review any potentially new wasps in the families Braconidae and Ichneumonidae. Should genetic sequencing turn up any potentially new bees, we’ll send those to the American Museum of Natural History for examination.
Lucy Jones for Vox
The job of Hartop, AP, and other taxonomists is to take a closer look at the specimens’ genetic codes and anatomies, and review records for similar species that have already been described (those that are named in the scientific literature). Should that process also fail to surface a match — with any already-described species — that means what we have is new.
Step 4: Give the species a name
The next and final (and admittedly most exciting) step is to publish a description of the species, including evidence of its novelty, along with a name, in an academic journal, such as Zootaxa. That will make the new species official by adding it to the formal scientific record.
What will we name a new species, should we be lucky enough to discover one? We remain open to suggestions.
Ultimately, a project of this size is not going to make a noticeable dent in describing life on Earth, perhaps not even life in NYC. What we hope it will do is reveal the scale of the unknown and at a time when the planet is losing so much. Many insect groups are declining, including important pollinators like bees, wasps, and butterflies. And that means that unless we ramp up the rate of discovery, we will almost certainly lose species to extinction before we even know they exist, let alone what they do and why they’re important.
For more information, please visit the project homepage.
