You didn't know there were this many types of flies, did you?
On April 15, 2015, researchers from the first-ever
urban biodiversity survey will publish a paper describing 30 new species of insect found in the wilds of Los Angeles, California.
The discoveries come from researchers in the BioSCAN project (Biodiversity Science: City and Nature) at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM). The BioSCAN project is a three year investigation of patterns of biodiversity in and around urban Los Angeles, based on sampling the world's most diverse fauna: insects. Local residents participate in the study by hosting one of the 30 sampling sites, each of which has a continuously operating insect trap and a microclimate weather station. Every household's set of samples yielded at least one of the 30 new species, prompting the researchers to name each species after the resident in whose back yard the species was found.
The urban biodiversity project is unique and new. This research into Los Angeles's backyards began as a bet.
Dr. Brian Brown, Curator of Entomology at NHM and principal investigator of BioSCAN, has extensive experience exploring and discovering insect biodiversity in tropical areas like Costa Rica. Goaded by a bet with an NHM trustee, he set out to prove that he could discover a new species in a Los Angeles backyard. When the very first specimen he examined from a trap in that urban backyard turned out to be a new species, Dr. Brown was inspired to pursue a deeper investigation of Los Angeles urban biodiversity, leading to the BioSCAN project. "I always thought we had the potential to discover new species wherever we sample -- urban, tropical, anywhere. But 30 new species from a heavily urbanized area is really astounding," Dr. Brown said.
The author of the report, Emily Hartop, writes about the whole experience joining the BIOscan project over at the
BIOscan project's site. She joined the project and needed to quickly learn how to distinguish Los Angeles's fly species, in the hopes of identifying the many unique species in the genus,
Megaselia. The idea was to quickly identify and then match them up with other North American
Megaselia.
Megaselia is a huge swatch (almost half) of the
phorid family—I looked it up: kind of like fruit flies, slightly humpbacked, prettier to look at from afar. Ms. Hartop began detailing the many differences between specimens.
I started to see the same species over and over, I started to notice small differences between the flies when I would sort samples. I started to make little sketches and write notes. Gradually, I started giving these flies funny names: this one’s genitalia look like bunny ears, I’ll name it “Bunny”, this one has setae (socketed hairs or bristles) that remind me of a 1980s troll doll, I’ll name it “Troll”. I even had a species nicknamed “Hokusai” after the famous painter because its extruded genitalia looked just like details found in The Great Wave off Kanagawa. My colleague, Lisa Gonzalez, contributed by naming one I showed her “Sharkfin” because of its uniquely shaped midfemur. Slowly, the list of “species” I was able to separate grew. I started reading literature on the genus, and then I started working with the keys (identification tools) for the group. To my surprise, I couldn’t get most of my nicknamed flies to come out in the keys we had for the North American fauna. These keys were written back in the 1960s (the last time someone seriously took a look at the genus on this continent), and just a smattering of publications on the group in this region have been published since. I couldn’t really believe it, but it didn’t seem that most of my flies had been studied before.
Why should we care how many different kinds of
annoying insects there are?
To plan for an urban future that incorporates a fully functioning support ecosystem, we need to know how to manage urban biodiversity. To do that, we need studies like BioSCAN to help us understand just how urbanization a?ects biodiversity. Emily Hartop, lead author on the paper describing the new species, is excited by the implications of this seemingly simple result: "Right now we're finding out what's here -- and it's more than we ever expected. By linking these biodiversity results with the physical data we're collecting at these sites, we'll be able to contribute directly to the policy discussion of how best to plan and manage urban biodiversity."
Read about Emily Hartop's research
here.
There's a video short below the fold about the BIOscan urban bioversity project.