Another new wasp species discovered by researchers
phys.org
phys.org
A nice illustration of how much we still don't know about insects. There are around 7 000 new insect species found every year. Entomologists estimate that there are around 10 000 000 undiscovered insect species.
I read a great popular science book on insects [1] (well, I listened to the audiobook edition...does that count as reading it?), and the author said that every summer he put traps to catch flying insects outside his New England house, and nearly every summer he would find insects that were not yet known to science. He'd even find parasitic wasps, the type of insect he was one of the world's foremost experts on, that were not yet known to science.
When it comes to discovering new insect species it seems the hard part is not actually finding them. To do that you just have to regularly capture insects. You don't even have to go to some exotic place that humans have rarely visited--your backyard is probably good enough.
The hard part is recognizing that one of the ones you captured is not one of the 1 000 000 species already known.
[1] "Life on a Little Known Planet: A Biologist's View of Insects and Their World" by parasitic wasp expert Howard Ensign Evans. https://www.amazon.com/Life-Little-Known-Planet-Biologists/d...
So how is that done?
Parasitic wasps are gross, but fascinating. If I recall correctly there is a parasitic wasp that parasitizes a parasitic wasp that parasitizes a parasitic wasp that parasitizes some kind of caterpillar.
I was on a bird walk yesterday morning and one of the participants pointed out a brightly colored black and yellow millipede that had climbed up a tree trunk. What was it doing there? I can't be sure, but that species is subject to attack by a fungus that takes control and makes it climb up tree trunks, walls, fenceposts, etc. so that as it expires it discharges spores well above the ground.
A relevant SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2331
Parasitic wasp interactions are also where nature is truly vicious. A predator like a big cat will hunt many times over its life. It cannot risk too much in each encounter, so the interactions are to some extent subdued, the prey often escaping. But with parasitic wasps, it may succeed just once in its life. The stakes are as high as they can be, and the wasp can risk all to succeed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthrophaga_myriapodina
The millipede species: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apheloria_virginiensis
The caterpillar: Often a pest species like the tomato leafminer
Primary parasitoid: Cotesia glomerata
Secondary parasitoid: Lysibia nana and some species from the genus Gelis like agilis
Tertiary parasitoid: Certain species within the Trichogramma or Eulophidae families."Yo Dawg, we heard you like parasites, so we put a parasite INSIDE your parasite INSIDE ..."
They're wild. They're born inside the eggs of barklice, and mate there. Males are ~186 micrometer, smaller than some single celled organisms like amoeba!
Is there a way to tell?
Examining old hosts that have died and been preserved and seeing if the 'new species' exists there maybe?
That's exactly it, these wasps existed previously and were just discovered to be distinct from other wasps. Speciation tends to take a very long time (on the order of hundreds of thousands to millions of years) or much shorter if there's a strong enough pressure (e.g. something drastically alters an ecosystem and opens up a lot of new niches for a species to radiate into) but still on the order of tens of thousands of years, see [1] for a great example. This of course depends on generation time (evolution only happens to populations, not individuals), so we see quite rapid evolution in things with short generation times like bacteria.
For invetebrates like small wasps like this one, it's typically taking the time to sit down and actually identifying them, some species are quite cryptic and it's only obscure or small morphological features that can be used to separate them by eye, and requires genetic analysis to compare and confirm that it's a new species.
> Examining old hosts that have died and been preserved and seeing if the 'new species' exists there maybe?
I have an entomologist friend and yes, that does happen. There are probably countless new species that have specimens in museums and universities right now that just haven't been properly analysed
1: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-extraordinary...