A new paper to be published in the journal Zootaxa (April 6, 2015) describes 30 new insect species in a single genus, Megaselia, of the fly family Phoridae. Describing 30 species in a single paper is rare, but what's especially striking is that all these come from urban Los Angeles. 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 investigation¹ of patterns of biodiversity in and around urban Los Angeles, based on sampling the world's most diverse fauna²: 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 project is yielding an unprecedented³ biodiversity collection, consistently accumulated across space and through time, curated for permanent research availability at NHM. Lead author Emily Hartop, an entomologist at NHM, examined over 10,000 specimens⁵ of phorid flies from three months of the samples to find these 30 new species. This result clearly demonstrates the extraordinary level of biodiversity that remains⁶ to be discovered even in heavily human-influenced areas.

 

Most people in the world now live in cities, and the ecology of those cities is an increasingly important focus for academic and museum researchers. Urban biodiversity is immediately important to humans -- urban ecosystems⁸ deliver ecosystem⁷ services critical for human survival right where people live. The public and, it must be admitted, the research community, have long assumed that biodiversity discoveries happen only in exotic, undisturbed locales. That turns out not to be the case.

 

Dr. Brian Brown, Curator of Entomology at NHM and principal investigator⁹ of BioSCAN, has extensive experience exploring and discovering insect biodiversity in tropical areas like Costa Rica. Goaded¹⁰ 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 specimen⁴ 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.

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