In June, July, and August, a project will run Malaise traps in Central Park and Prospect Park, collect small flying insects, preserve them in ethanol, and send them to a lab in Canada for DNA barcoding—then route any genetic surprises to expert taxonomists and
On a humid summer day in New York, the city’s most talked-about life may be the birds above the trees. But on the ground—on the margins of gardens, near park paths, in the ordinary cracks of daily life—there’s a different world at work, full of tiny creatures most people never notice.
This summer, a new effort is set up to notice them anyway. In both Central Park and Prospect Park. researchers will deploy tent-like Malaise traps designed to capture small flying insects. including flies and parasitoid wasps. Bugs that fly into the traps will be funneled into jars of ethanol, where they’re killed and preserved. The traps are built to focus on small flying critters. and they usually do not entrap larger animals like dragonflies. butterflies. and spiders.
The reason to do it in New York isn’t that the city is some special “bug hot spot.” The premise is broader and more unsettling: scientists believe there are almost certainly hundreds. if not thousands. of undiscovered animal species living in the middle of the city—along with countless others elsewhere. New York’s density makes the possibility feel especially vivid. The metropolis—established nearly four centuries ago by an influential Dutchman—has grown into the largest and most densely populated in the country. with no fewer than 28. 000 people per square mile. or about one person per 1. 000 square feet.
For insects, the gaps in knowledge are staggering. Taxonomists estimate that as much as 90 percent of all animal species on Earth are still unknown. In at least 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 have been described in the scientific record.
The plan runs for three summer months: June, July, and August.
Before any capture happens, there’s already a question hanging over the work: does trapping harm insects?. The Malaise traps used here are a common sampling tool for assessing diversity in flying insects like flies and wasps. They don’t use scent lures or other attractants, instead intercepting bugs as they move through the environment. The traps do kill small insects that fly into them—those that are less than about a nickel in size—but the project says the overall impact on their populations is minor. Insect populations are orders of magnitude larger than what the trap will collect.
Emily Hartop. an entomologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who’s involved in the project. also points to a different consequence: Malaise trapping has helped reveal the global decline in insects. The traps are designed to filter out larger critters too. including butterflies and dragonflies. and the team will monitor them throughout the summer to make sure that is indeed the case.
The search for a possible new species begins at the point of collection, but it accelerates through DNA.
Every month or so. the collected insects will be sent to a lab in Canada called the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics (CBG). There. scientists will sequence small fragments of their genomes to produce distinct genetic “barcodes” for each of them—unique genetic IDs meant to differentiate one species from another.
Those barcodes will then be compared to the millions of barcodes for animals in North America and around the world already sequenced by researchers. The comparison is meant to work like a fingerprint check: if there’s a match to an existing genetic ID. the specimen belongs to a known species. If there’s no match—meaning no record for animals with those same genetic IDs—that will indicate what the project found may be new.
If sequencing flags something potentially unfamiliar, the next step is to bring in taxonomists—the specialists who can confirm whether a genetic signal holds up against physical traits and existing descriptions.
CBG will send any specimens with unique, matchless codes to experts. Emily Hartop, for instance, will be tasked with examining potentially new scuttle flies. Ranjith AP, a taxonomist at CBG, will review any potentially new wasps in the families Braconidae and Ichneumonidae. If sequencing turns up potentially new bees, they will be sent to the American Museum of Natural History for examination.
The experts’ job is to take a close look at both the genetic codes and the anatomy. and to review records for similar species that have already been described in the scientific literature. If that process still fails to surface a match—with any already-described species—that means what the project has may be a new species.
Then comes the part that feels, by the project’s own description, like the payoff: naming.
For any species confirmed as new, the team will publish a formal description in an academic journal, such as Zootaxa. The publication would include evidence of its novelty along with a name, which is what makes the species “official” by adding it to the formal scientific record.
What would they name it? The project says it remains open to suggestions.
A project like this won’t suddenly fill every gap in what’s known about life on Earth. Even the team acknowledges it may not make a noticeable dent in describing life in general—or even in describing all of what’s in New York. But the goal is to reveal the scale of the unknown. at a time when the planet is losing so much.
Many insect groups are declining, including important pollinators like bees, wasps, and butterflies. Without ramping up the rate of discovery, the project warns that species may be lost to extinction before anyone knows they exist—let alone what they do and why they matter.
For more information, the project directs readers to the project homepage.
New York City Central Park Prospect Park biodiversity insects Malaise traps DNA barcoding Centre for Biodiversity Genomics taxonomy Zootaxa