A new species in New York

Around 90% of life on Earth is unknown. Can Benji find a new species in his backyard? Guests: Benji Jones, Vox senior correspondent, and the NYC species project. For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 0:37Speaker 01

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• 1:19Speaker 02

  Which way to Neverme? Excuse me? Neverme? I don't know, sorry.

• 1:35Noam Hassenfeld?

  Hey, Meredith.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  Hey, Benji, how's it going?

• 1:38Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's going well. How's it going?

• 1:40Speaker 02

  Excellent, excellent. Yeah, is now a good time to talk? I know you're pretty busy today.

• 1:43Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, this is perfect. We just wrapped up.

• 1:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So Benji Jones, senior correspondent here at Vox, covering the biodiversity, the environment. I mean, usually I feel like I'm catching you between reporting trips to, you know, bat hospitals in Australia or chasing cougars in Mexico. So I'm glad that I caught you on this, on this field reporting trip. Where are you now?

• 2:09Noam Hassenfeld?

  I am right here in New York City. I'm in the middle of Prospect Park.

• 2:13Speaker 02

  Exotic.

• 2:14Noam Hassenfeld?

  In Brooklyn.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  Exotic reaches of Brooklyn.

• 2:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. On a beautiful sunny day, I should add.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Describe what you see and hear around you.

• 2:23Speaker 03

  Yes. So I'm like 20 minutes from my house in the middle of Prospect Park. It's one of my favorite places in New York. It feels like more, a little more rustic than Central Park, for example, because there's like scruffy forests and ponds and turtles. We saw like a bunch of turtles and swans today.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Oh, nice.

• 2:43Speaker 03

  And I'm listening to the sound of children in the distance. When we got here, there were dogs running everywhere. So it was a little bit chaotic, but just like very New York in every way. And we actually just ran into a large birding group and they were like freaking out because they had just seen a Mississippi kite.

• 3:05Speaker 03

  A Mississippi kite in the sky that was like hovering around us while we were here. So there's just like all walks of life in the park and that's why I love Prospect Park and New York, obviously.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So what are you up to in the wilds of Prospect Park?

• 3:20Speaker 03

  So while most people probably try to avoid bugs in the park, I just set up a giant bug trap to try to find a new species of insect and hoping that we will find a species that is new to science that no one has discovered before right in the middle of New York City.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  I mean, I guess if I think about a new species in Prospect Park, what comes to mind is like a Great Dane and a pug mix at the dog field or something wild. So why, why is it important to find a new species of bug?

• 3:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. So what's so incredible about insects in general is that there are so many unknown species still. So we're looking specifically for a new species of what's called a parasitoid wasp, which is a wasp that lays its eggs and other insects and also flies in the family for a day, which are known as the scuttleflies. And the reason we're focusing on those two insect groups is that they're, they're famous for having so many unknown species, tens of thousands that have yet to be described. And when we're talking about the value of maintaining something like parasitoid wasps or flies, it may not seem that important, but insects run the world. They're so important for pollination. They clean up our poo. They do all these sort of hidden tasks all around us.

• 4:34Speaker 03

  And so there's a really strong argument, even if you're just thinking about selfishly thinking about humans, to protect them. But first you need to know what actually exists.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  Right, so I guess why have this quest in the middle of New York City? Like, why not look for a new species in some remote jungle?

• 4:52Speaker 03

  Well, because it's easy. Look, I love New York.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  It's right next door.

• 4:56Speaker 03

  It's right, it's literally my neighborhood, it's my community. I, I want to know what animals I share my home with. But I also just think that doing this project in the middle of New York helps show just how unknown the world is. If you can find something new to science in the middle of the largest city in the country and the most densely populated metropolis, you can find a new species anywhere. And so I think if we do find something new, and the scientists that I've talked to say that it's very likely that we will, I think it will just really highlight the fact that our world is still so unknown. And that to me is like both exciting, but also just inspiring in the face of the larger story that I often tell and hear about, about the decline of insects, the decline of biodiversity.

• 5:39Speaker 03

  So this is like, look, there's still this incredible opportunity for discovery.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  So are you right by your trap right now?

• 5:45Speaker 03

  Mm hmm, yeah.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, could you?

• 5:48Speaker 03

  A few feet away.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Could you kind of walk around it and describe what it looks like?

• 5:52Speaker 03

  Okay, we're not that close, actually.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Not that close, okay.

• 5:55Speaker 03

  The trap is behind a fence right now because we had to go in with this guy Howard. Oh, hey, yeah, hey, Howard.

• 6:01Speaker 04

  Hi, very nice to meet you.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  Howard is a forest ecologist with the Prospect Park Alliance, the nonprofit that manages the park.

• 6:07Speaker 04

  That's a leafhopper. Oh, that's a, that's an interesting one, yeah.

• 6:11Speaker 03

  Wow, that's so cool. To your knowledge, has anyone discovered a new species in Prospect Park?

• 6:16Speaker 04

  To my knowledge, no, but again, most of the wildlife studies that have been done in Prospect Park are the usual suspects. You know, the dragonflies and damselflies, butterflies and moths, bees.

• 6:28Speaker 03

  No one's gone out looking for flies here yet?

• 6:30Speaker 04

  I don't want to say nobody, but we don't have a fly list. We have a list of some other insects.

• 6:35Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 6:36Speaker 04

  We don't have a fly list, yet.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  We are in eyesight of the trap, and I can describe it if that's helpful.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Perfect, yeah, I'm really curious.

• 6:44Speaker 03

  Okay, so part of the reason why signage was very important to say what we're doing is that it does just look like a tent from the distance. But if you can imagine...

• 6:56Speaker 03

  Just like a sheet of black mesh that is supported by tent poles and some white mesh that drapes over it in an arc.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 7:06Speaker 03

  And the trap is designed in such a way that as insects fly upwards, they get funneled into a bottle that is attached to the trap and full of ethanol. Oh, look, we already have a wasp. Yeah, I think that's a parasitoid wasp. Amazing. So basically, we're gonna have bottles and bottles of dead bugs with DNA intact that we can then send to a lab for analysis. So we're really looking for tiny little wasps and tiny little flies. Those are where a lot of the unknown species are, and we're trying not to capture big butterflies, dragonflies, bumblebees, things like that. And so the opening for the bottle of ethanol where they're getting trapped is very small and too small to capture something like a monarch.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  Got it. So how did you come up with this project?

• 7:53Speaker 03

  God, a few years ago, I ended up connecting with a fly researcher named Emily Hartop, who is at a natural history museum in Berlin. And within about 10 minutes in her office, she convinced me that flies are incredible.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 8:09Speaker 03

  And she just ran through all these different species of forward flies, the scuttleflies, one of the types of flies that we're trying to collect here. Some of them like decapitate ants, some of them mimic ant larvae, like they have all these crazy behaviors. And I was like, okay, there is this whole unknown world of flies. And when I was with her, she mentioned this term called dark taxa.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 8:31Speaker 03

  In describing the scuttleflies. And as she explained to me at the time, dark taxa are animal groups in which the majority of their species are still undescribed, still unknown to science. And so that really just sparked curiosity for me to be like, okay, there is so much that we don't know. I realize just so much of our insect diversity and really of most invertebrates, so like crustaceans, a lot of stuff in the ocean, totally unknown, like about 90% of life, big plus or minus there because no one really knows, but about 90% of life is still. Undescribed, which is just like

• 9:07Speaker 02

  What, ninety percent?

• 9:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, the majority of life on our earth.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  That's like a majority, like more than just majority.

• 9:14Speaker 03

  Super majority. The super majority of life on earth is still totally unknown. And that just like blows my mind. And like, yes, we're not talking about lions and tigers and all the other big things out there that are super charismatic that like Darwin or whatever found. We're talking about stuff that you really need to carefully look for. One of the things that I learned from from this fly researcher Emily is that she has done trapping using similar traps that we're putting up in New York in Los Angeles. And she discovered over forty new species of flies in the family four day, those scuttleflies. And so I was like, all right, if people can do this in LA, like, why not? Why don't we try doing this in New York? Um, and so over time.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  East coast, west coast thing.

• 9:55Speaker 03

  Exactly. Bicoastal flies. So I was just like, dude, let's try to do this in New York, especially because I'm sorry, but New York is better and bigger. And I think it's even more exciting to find something new in the middle of New York. And also like, it's just not very hard. Like literally, I mean, well,

• 10:15Speaker 03

  as the people with me today can attest, it was not that easy to set up this trap, but mostly because I don't like camping at all. And it was basically like setting up a tent and I I sort of hated the whole process and it's it's still a little janky.

• 10:28Speaker 03

  There is another steak and I'm not sure why. Everyone is like, you have to be an idiot not to know how to set it up. So I'm sure I'll like somehow fail.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  There's no poison ivy in here, right?

• 10:40Speaker 02

  I'm sure the flies won't fault you for it.

• 10:42Speaker 03

  Exactly. The the bar is low for them. Maybe not. Maybe they're judgy.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  So what is your biggest hope for what you'll discover with this project?

• 10:51Speaker 03

  A fly just landed on me. Um, also that Mississippi kite is in a tree right above us, which is very cool.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  That's very cool.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  I mean.

• 11:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, so like, I don't think we're going to make a dent, any kind of meaningful dent, in the like, pursuit of unknown life. We're not gonna describe dozens of new species. We're not gonna help close these giant gaps in the tree of life. But each insect has its own role in the ecosystem. That's how it evolved. And so my hope is that we find something new, a new animal species that has not been described before. It's unknown to science. And, and we can also, and with that information, help tell the world, educate folks just about how much there is still to discover, and how important discovery is when we think about trying to reverse some of these pretty horrible trends in terms of what's happening to biodiversity.

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• 14:37Speaker 01

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• 15:09Speaker 06

  Fly. Got into the transmitter pod with me that first time when I was alone.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  So this might be kind of a basic question, but what exactly is a new species? Like, what do you mean by that? What level of animal are we talking about here?

• 15:32Speaker 03

  Okay. Surprisingly, not at all a basic question.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  Very complicated. Because taxonomy is quite complicated, the system that we use to catalog life on Earth. So I guess the first thing I'll say is that there's an important distinction between discovery and description. So discovery is like, okay, we find something, we being usually scientists, taxonomists, find something that we don't think anyone has found before. There was recently, for example, a big announcement of expeditions across the oceans to try to discover new species, and they found like 1,100 newly discovered species. So things that taxonomists thought have not been found before.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  Okay. But when that comes to like fruit flies?

• 16:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, so when it comes to fruit flies...

• 16:22Speaker 02

  That's probably a little different.

• 16:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, so like you and me walking around pretty much anywhere, we're encountering flies all the time. Also, we have a bunch of kids here. Hold on. Okay, hold on one second. Oh, kids seem to have fallen so...

• 16:37Speaker 07

  What are you doing?

• 16:40Speaker 03

  We're sampling insects.

• 16:41Speaker 07

  Oh, great, okay.

• 16:43Speaker 03

  Very sweet.

• 16:49Speaker 03

  Okay, so your question about like, how do we know if something is new? What it means to discover a new species? So description is the formal process for actually determining that something is a new species. That's when you name it. And that basically means you have to publish a record of the specimen that you found with evidence that they're unique among all the other flies or wasps that are out there. And then you also have to comb through different museum collections, all these old academic articles, to make sure that no one has described the species before. So it's this whole sort of due diligence process to prove that this is actually new.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 17:34Speaker 03

  And at that point, it is like officially a new species.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 17:38Speaker 03

  But it's like surprisingly complicated.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So you have like, there's the like, oh, I think we've seen something new.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  But that's a very different, or just like the start of a very long process.

• 17:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a ton of work.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  Finding a fly in a haystack.

• 17:54Speaker 03

  Literally. And like, just for, like, if it's helpful for this project, so we are going to, the first step after we collect all these insects through our trap is to barcode them. And that basically means we will sequence a portion, and by we, I mean, I'm not doing this. Some, a lab in Canada is doing it called the Center for Biodiversity Genomics.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 18:13Speaker 03

  We'll sequence a portion of the genome for each specimen. And that portion of the genome is, is called a barcode. And they basically have databases of genetic barcodes of all these species that scientists have collected. And so when we start sequencing our specimens, they can compare the barcode of our specimens to databases of barcodes to see if there's a match. And it's kind of like collecting fingerprints at a crime scene and then running it through like an FBI database of, of people's fingerprints. And then if there's a match, you're like, oh, this might be a suspect. It's very similar, except for the fingerprint in this case is a section of the DNA of, of the species.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  And that's only the first step because

• 18:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  it only matches what's in the database.

• 18:57Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  But that doesn't mean that it couldn't be a match to something else that's been described in some back corner of a natural history museum.

• 19:05Speaker 03

  That's exactly right. So it's those kinds of experts who will make the final determination that, look, we think that this is actually totally new, undescribed. And then that's when we would get to name something new, which is obviously the best part of this whole process. In some ways, it's actually easier to discover something new now because of advances in genetic sequencing. Like, we can sequence enormous quantities of specimens pretty quickly and cheaply now. And so you can do what we did, which is set up a trap. It passively is collecting stuff and then run it through sequencing and databases. Like, that's fairly Fairly easy in the past. It was all kind of these big expeditions.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  Often they were, usually they were white scientists who would go to to foreign countries, collect a bunch of stuff and and just take it from that country. And so it was very much like a Western.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  Extractive.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  Extractive practice of of describing new species. But it was, it was, I mean, back in the fourteen, fifteen hundreds, whatever. So much had been undescribed. I mean, there was a point in history where like Western scientists were like, look, a giraffe, let's name that.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  I'm thinking giraffe has a good buzz to it.

• 20:21Speaker 03

  Exactly. So it it was easier to visibly see new stuff hundreds of years ago, obviously. But in some ways, I think we're actually in sort of like a golden age of discovery now because of these new sampling techniques and because of the simple fact, as I mentioned, that just still so much of these smaller animal groups are totally unknown.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. Do you think there'll ever be a point when we'll know all the species on Earth?

• 20:54Speaker 03

  I. I don't know because, I mean, part of it is that even the term species is is squishy. Hmm. Like, no, because I I think there's a point where we will know all vertebrates. So stuff with backbones, birds, fish, mammals. I think for insects, it's possible. When we get into smaller stuff like nematodes, bacteria, fungi, like that stuff is just so hard to discover, so hard to find. And at that point, we're like talking about such enormous quantities of species that it's like, does it make sense to find every species of nematode?

• 21:37Speaker 03

  Maybe, but I think as you get into smaller and smaller organisms, it is much harder. And so I think we could discover at least most animal species if we see investments in discovery taxonomy.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  Less likely when we go into even smaller animal groups.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  So it's sort of like, where is that line for it to be worth trying?

• 21:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I think for bacteria and fungi, like, it just seems hard.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  Right. What does it mean to sign up for just like this kind of impossible project then? In terms of like, the quest of finding, cataloging, understanding a whole family of flies that could have millions of potential unknown dark species?

• 22:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think that if you are, like, to me, to me, discovery is one of the most exciting aspects of of science, of biology. So, yes, like, the the excitement around discovering a fly is probably less than something big and charismatic, but because even individual fly species have some function in their ecosystem, whether they're pollinators, they're food for for for other insects, which are food for birds, which are food for for mammals or whatever it is, getting to, I think, like, revealing some of the the hidden diversity, revealing the hidden roles they're playing, like, there's so much excitement in that.

• 23:08Speaker 03

  And I think also just, like, helps us better understand, like, the ecosystems around us as, and like, I guess I think about them sort of like machines, like, really complicated machines that have, like, big gears, but also like tiny little nuts and bolts. And each fly is maybe like one of those tiny little bolts that plays some role in keeping that machine alive. And so I think there is real value in just getting a little bit of a clear, a little bit of a clearer picture of just how this machine is working, especially when its ecosystems that are what give us drinking water, they're what clean the air, they're what provide food. Our food is pollinated by all sorts of insects. Like, it's just,

• 23:51Speaker 03

  there is so much value in in just like each individual animal in the ecosystem.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  I guess I'm struck by just the the wonder in these teeny creatures.

• 24:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  For listeners at home that might find themselves wandering through Prospect Park or Central Park or somewhere in LA or anywhere in between, like, what what do you want people to see when they think about this tiny mysterious world of flies that we know so little about?

• 24:22Speaker 03

  I mean, I guess for me and I hope for other people, learning about this hidden diversity in our backyards has like really opened my world up. And as soon as you start to shift your gaze towards like the smaller stuff and you just like pause for a moment on a walk and you just see little tiny creatures like buzzing all around you, like each one has its own life, its own purpose. And as as you start to pay attention to those smaller things, I think it just makes the world feel like much fuller and more exciting. And like, like, the community is bigger.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. So if you do, you do find something that is totally new, what are you thinking about naming it? You got like the Benja Fly or something in your back pocket?

• 25:14Speaker 03

  Apparently, very much not cool to name something after yourself. It's like loser behavior.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  A faux pas. Got it.

• 25:23Speaker 03

  But I think, I don't know, I also kind of want like, like, this is such a public facing project, like, anyone walking through the park gets to see this happening. So I sort of want input from folks. So if you have an idea of what we should name, a new fly, or a new wasp, or anything else that we discover that's new, let us know.

• 25:41Speaker 02

  Excellent. Awesome. Well, I'll let you guys, I know you have more more traps to set up.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  Throughout the day. So thank you so much for your time and.

• 25:51Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. Thank you so much.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 25:53Speaker 03

  And I'll keep you posted. Hopefully, we'll, it will have news to share soon.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:57Speaker 03

  I'll talk to you later.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  All right. Cheers.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  Bye.

• 26:07Speaker 03

  This episode was produced by Meredith Hoddinott and me, Krishnayala. We had editing from Lissa Soeb and fact checking from Melissa Hirsch. I did the mixing and sound design with music from Noam Hassenfeld. Sally Helm has her own fly dilemma.

• 26:23Speaker 05

  Joanna Salataroff is on TV, and Bird Pinkerton got yanked through the opening in the wall before it slammed shut. She looked at the talon holding her arm, and then she looked at the rest of the bird standing in front of her. "Are you?" she said. The bird nodded. It was Flaptin. Thanks, as always, to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show with Bird and Noam. And if you have thoughts about the show, we'd love to hear from you. Please email us at [email protected].

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