Our quest for a new species
· Vox
Vox is setting out to discover a new animal species in the heart of New York City.
In collaboration with several research and nonprofit groups — including the Central Park Conservancy and Prospect Park Alliance in NYC, NTNU University Museum in Norway, and the Center for Biodiversity Genomics in Canada — we’re sampling flying insects in Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park this summer. The goal is to find something that’s never been documented before.
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Questions about the project?
Please email us at [email protected].
We’d like to give a special thanks to Emily Hartop, an entomologist at NTNU University Museum, for helping lead this project, and to Paul Hebert, CEO of the Center for Biodiversity Genomics, for offering his time, expertise, and resources to help us sequence our samples.
To this day, the bulk of animal life on Earth remains unknown, especially in the insect world. That fact — along with the advance of genetic sequencing tools — is motivating our NYC bug hunt.
We’ll focus our search on insects that are both incredibly diverse and poorly understood, including parasitoid wasps (which lay their eggs in other insects) and flies in the family Phoridae (known as the scuttle flies). These animal groups fall into a category called “dark taxa” because most of their species — of which there are tens of thousands — are still undescribed by science and thus “in the dark.”
We’ll wrap up the collection process at the end of August, and then work with scientists to see if we might have discovered something new. We’ll post any project updates here.
For more information about the project and related stories, please see below.