Unexplainable - A new species in New York

Episode Date: June 10, 2026

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! ⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠ 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

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I don't know. Sorry, don't. Hey, Meredith. Hey, Benji. How's it going? It's going well. How's it going? Excellent. Excellent. Yeah, it's now a good time to talk. I know you're pretty busy with it. This is perfect. We just wrapped up. 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 field reporting trip. Where are you now?

I am right here in New York City. I'm in the middle of Prospect Park. Exotic. In Brooklyn. Exotic reaches of Brooklyn. Yeah, exactly. On a beautiful sunny day, I should add. Oh, yeah. Describe what you see and here around you.

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 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. Oh, nice. 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. 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. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So what are you up to in the wilds of Prospect Park? 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. 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 is it important to find a new species of buck? 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 four a day, which are known as the scuttle flies. And the reason we're focusing on those two insect groups is that 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. 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. 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? Well, because it's easy. Look, I love New York. It's right next door. It's right. It's literally my neighborhood. It's my community. 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. So this is like, look, there's still this incredible opportunity for discovery.

So are you right by your trap right now? Yeah. We're like a few feet away. Could you kind of walk around it and describe what it looks like? Okay, we're not that close actually. Not that close. The trap is behind a fence right now because we had to go in with this guy, Howard. Oh, hey. Yeah, hey, Howard. Hi. Hi, very nice to meet you. Howard is a forest ecologist with the Prospect Park Alliance, the nonprofit that manages the park. That's a leaf hopper. Oh, that's an interesting one, yeah. Wow, that's so cool.

To your knowledge, has anyone discovered a new species in Prospect Park? 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 dragon flies and damself flies, butterflies, and morphs, bees. No one's gone out looking for flies here yet? I don't want to say nobody, but we don't have a fly list. We have a list of some other insects. Yes. Yet.

We are in eyesight of the trap, and I can describe it if that's helpful. Perfect. Yeah, I'm really curious. 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 just like a sheet of black mesh that is supported by tent poles and some white mesh that drapes over it in an arc. 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 paracetoid wasp. Amazing. So basically we're going to 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. Got it. So how did you come up with this project? God, a few years ago, I ended up connecting with a fly researcher named Emily Hartop, who was at a Natural History Museum in Berlin. And within about 10 minutes in her office, she convinced me that flies are incredible. And she just ran through all these different species of forward flies, the scuttle flies, one of the types of flies that we're trying to collect here. Some of them like decapitate ants. some of them mimic ant larva.

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. Okay. In describing the scuttle flies. 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... 90%? Yeah, the majority of life on our earth.

That's like a majority, like more than just majority. The super majority of life on earth is still totally unknown. And that just like blows my mind. 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 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 40 new species of flies in the family four a day, those scuttle flies. And so I was like, all right, if people can do this in L.A., like, why don't we try doing this in New York?

And so over time that sort of-old East Coast, West Coast thing. Exactly. By coastal 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, as the people with me today can attest, It was not that easy to set up the strap, but mostly because I don't like camping at all. And it was basically like setting up a tent. And I sort of hated the whole process, and it's still a little janky.

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. There's no poison iv in here, right? I'm sure the flies won't fault you for it. Exactly. The bar is low for them. Maybe not.

Maybe they're judgy. So what is your biggest hope for what you'll discover with this project? A fly just landed on me. Also that Mississippi kite is in a tree right above us, which is very cool. That's very cool. I mean, yeah, so I don't think we're going to make a dent, any kind of meaningful dent in the pursuit of unknown life. We're not going to describe dozens of new species.

We're not going to 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 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. Support for this show comes from Fetch Pet Insurance.

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Choose Activia. Feel good from the inside out. Visit Activia.ca for more details. 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? Surprisingly not at all a basic question. Okay. 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 a 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 like 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.

But when that comes to like fruit flies, that's probably a little different. 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 time. Oh, kids seem to have fallen so long. What are you doing? We're sampling insects. Very sweet. 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. And at that point, it is like officially a new species.

Got it. But it's like surprisingly complicated. Yeah, yeah. So you have like, there's the like, oh, I think we've seen something new. Exactly. But that's a very different, or just like the start of a very long process. Yeah, it's a ton of work. Finding a fly in a haystack.

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. A lab in Canada is doing it called the Center for Biodiversity Genomics. Okay. But we'll sequence a portion of the genome from.

for each specimen, and that portion of the genome 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 people's fingerprints, and then if there's a match or 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 the species. And that's only the first step because it only matches what's in the database.

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. 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 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. Often they were, usually they were white scientists who would go to foreign countries, collect a bunch of stuff, and just take it from that country. And so it was very much like a Western... Extractive practice of describing new species. But it was, I mean, back in the 14,500s, 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. I'm thinking giraffe has a good buzz to it. Exactly. So 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. Yeah. Do you think there'll ever be a point when we'll know all the species on Earth? I don't know because, I mean, part of it is that even the term species is squishy. Like, no, because 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? 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, less likely when we go into even smaller animal groups. So it's sort of like, where is that line for it to be worth trying?

Yeah. Yeah. I think for bacteria and fungi, like, it just seems hard. 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. Yeah, I mean, I think that if you are, like, to me, to me, discovery is one of the most

exciting aspects of science, of biology. So, yes, like the excitement around discovering a fly is probably less than something big charismatic, but because even individual fly species have some function in their ecosystem, whether they're pollinators, their food for other insects, which are food for birds, which are food for mammals, or whatever it is, getting to, I think, like, revealing some of the hidden diversity, revealing the hidden roles they're playing. Like, there's so much excitement in that. 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 clear picture of just how this machine is working, especially when it's 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, there is so much value in, in just like,

each individual animal in the ecosystem. I guess I'm struck by just the wonder in these teeny creatures. Yeah. For listeners at home that might find themselves wandering through Prospect Park or Central Park or somewhere in L.A. 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? 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 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, the community is bigger. Yeah. So, if you do, you do find something that is totally new, what are you thinking about naming it? You got, like, the Benjifling. or something in your back pocket.

Apparently very much not cool to name something after yourself. It's like loser behavior. A faux pa. Got it. But I think, I don't know, I also kind of want 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 this new, let us know. Excellent. Awesome. Well, I'll let you guys, I know you have more traps to set up throughout the day. So thank you so much for your time. And good luck. Oh my God. Thank you so much. Yeah, absolutely. And I'll keep you posted. Hopefully it will have news to share soon. Yeah. I'll talk to you later. Cheers.

Bye. This episode was produced by Meredith Hoddnott and me, Christian Ayala. We had editing from Lisa Soap and fact-checking from Melissa Hirsch. I did the mixing and sound design with music from Noam Haskell. Sally Helm has her own flight dilemma. 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 birds standing in front of her. Are you, she said? The bird nodded. It was Flapton. 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 Unexplanable at Vox.com.

If you'd like to support the show and the journalism that Vox does, you should become a member. It's really easy to do. Just go to Vox.com slash members. And for those of you who have emailed us to let us know you signed up because of Unexplainable, thank you. It really means a lot. Thanks also to those of you who left us a nice review on your podcast platform,

or just told somebody in your life about the show. You're the best. Unexplanable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back very soon with another episode about everything that we do not yet know.