Greta Thunberg did not win the Nobel Peace Prize (this year, anyways) but this week she received perhaps the highest honor that scientists on the front lines of the battle to preserve biodiversity can bestow.
Just under a millimeter long, this little beauty lives in soil, feeding on fungi. The family to which it belongs — Ptiliidae — is represented by some 600 known species worldwide, but due to their small size they are unfamiliar to most of us (even most of us entomologists). As is the case with many groups of small insects, new species are frequently discovered by those who bother to look.
The specimens of N. gretae were found in soil samples collected in Kenya in the mid 1960s, which were donated to the Natural History Museum in 1978 and held in storage ever since. When he sifted through the samples with a microscope, museum scientist Michael Darby discovered a new genus and eight new species of Ptiliidae.
Are there still living N. gretae in Africa? Probably, but no one knows.
And so it is with so many of the “little creatures who run the world,” as E.O Wilson described his favorite insects, the ants — which describes as well the many millions of insects and other life forms that biologists have yet to discover. We’ve scarcely begun to catalog, much less understand, the biological diversity that we’re destroying.
The species naming is a perfect tribute to one who has done so much to preserve all of that wonderful life.