New Delhi: When we think of scientists searching for undiscovered species, remote islands and deep forests come to mind. But Vox is looking for a hitherto unknown bug in the heart of New York City.
The team has set up insect traps in Central Park and Prospect Park, complete with a tent-like funnel mechanism and an ethanol bottle where the bugs collect, die quickly, and get preserved. They’re then sent to a lab and taxonomists specialising in flies and parasitoid wasps. These are the insect groups the team is most interested in.
The mechanism, called a Malaise trap, is designed to trap small flying insects and doesn’t catch bigger insects such as dragonflies, butterflies, and spiders.
“I see one of my missions as a journalist as informing people about what’s going on on our planet,” journalist Benji Jones, who is working on the project, told NiemanLab. “I think we have to find more and better ways to tell people about biodiversity loss, because that message is not breaking through right now.”
The project is a rare meetup of journalism and science, disciplines that otherwise move at a vastly different pace. Scientific research can take years to compile, while journalism is concerned with the new and the now.
How the project will work
The project will collect insects during June, July, and August. Jones checks the Malaise traps every two weeks, packs up the collected bugs in Ziploc bags, and sends them to a lab in Canada called the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics (CBG).
Scientists at the lab would sequence fragments of the insects’ genomes and produce unique genetic barcodes for them. These genetic IDs will then help differentiate between species. If no match is found for a sampled insect, it means there is no record of the species, signalling that the insect found may be new.
Taxonomists Emily Hartop from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and Ranjith AP from CBG will compare the unmatched creatures against similar species in the records. If this second step also fails to surface a match, the team will have a newly discovered insect in its hands.
“Some scientists might shy away from collaborating with journalists, because if it’s done improperly I think that it could come across as very performative science… But if I can do my science and be able to show people the reality and the complexity of it, that’s the most powerful thing that I can probably do as a scientist,” Hartop said.
Vox is open to suggestions on the name of this new species, if one is discovered.
“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,” read the article on the website.
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