New York is mapped. Traversed. Breathed by billions.
The Dutch built the skeleton nearly four centuries ago. Now it holds more than eight million people in a density that boggles the mind—28,000 per square mile. That is roughly one human for every thousand square feet. We are everywhere.
Yet here is the twist. The real story isn’t us.
Scientists suspect that hundreds, maybe thousands, of animal species live right among the concrete and parkland, completely unknown to science. Not the big obvious things. Not pigeons or rats or frogs. But the small stuff. Flies. Wasps. Things that live in the dust of the streets and the soil of the gardens.
Is this a global bug hotspot? No. Don’t get it twisted. NYC doesn’t have unique evolutionary superpowers.
The problem is general ignorance. In many insect groups, we simply don’t know what we’re looking at. Take gall midges (family Cecidomyiidae). There might be 1.8 million of these tiny flies on Earth. We have described only about 7,000. Nine hundred percent of all animal species are still unnamed. Unnamed is a polite way of saying ghost.
This summer Vox is going to hunt ghosts.
We plan to find a new species. Right here in the city. It feels achievable. It also matters. Documenting life is the baseline for protecting it. Protecting insects isn’t altruism, it’s survival. They pollinate food. They clean up our waste. They feed everything else. If you kill the bottom, the whole tower collapses.
We are partnering with the Central Park Conservancy. The Prospect Park Alliance. The University Museum at NTNU in Norway. And the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics in Canada.
Here is how we dig for the unknown.
The Trap
We set up tents. Well, specific tents. They’re called Malaise traps. They look like weird, netted shrines standing in the middle of Central Park and Prospect Park.
They catch small flyers. Flies and parasitoid wasps mostly. Bugs drift into the netting. They get funneled up into a jar of ethanol. Pop. Dead. Preserved.
Does it hurt? Yes. The small ones—less than the size of a nickel—don’t make it. Larger critters like dragonflies or spiders slip through.
Is it unethical? Entomologists argue the sample size is negligible against the massive populations already existing. Emily Hartop, who runs this project with us, notes that Malaise trapping actually helped us realize insects were declining globally. If we didn’t trap them, we wouldn’t know they were dying.
We monitor them. We watch. We collect for June, July, and August the heat of summer.
The Code
The jars go to Canada.
Scientists at the CBG lab pull fragments of DNA from the corpses. They create a genetic barcode for every single specimen. A unique ID card for each bug.
Then comes the check. They compare our barcodes against a database containing millions of animal IDs from around the world.
It is forensic science applied to flies. You take a fingerprint from a crime scene. You run it against the FBI database. No match?
“That will indicate that what we find may be new.”
No record. No previous owner. A genetic orphan.
The Experts
If the DNA says new, we hand the body over to a human who knows the body better than anyone.
Hartop takes the scuttle flies. She is the global authority. If they are wasps? Ranjith AP at CBG handles the Braconidae and Ichneumidae families. If we find bees, they go to the American Museum of Natural history.
These taxonomists look closer. At the anatomy. At the microscopic hairs. They check the old records. They comb through papers published a century ago.
If they cannot place it. If it doesn’t fit the box. Then it is real.
The Name
Finally. The paperwork.
We publish. A formal description in a journal like Zootaxa. Evidence. Photos. And a name. We are open to suggestions on the name. You tell us.
Will this save the world? No. We will barely scratch the surface of what is unknown.
But here is the rub. Species are disappearing. Pollinators are fading. Bees, wasps, butterflies. Their numbers are dropping fast.
If we do not find them first. If we do not name them. They will go extinct without anyone knowing they ever existed. Without knowing what they did. What they provided.
We race the clock. We look into the traps.
And we wonder who else is watching.
