New Yorker does LA's backyard entomologists

In March I posted about an interesting discovery by Emily Hartop, an entomologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. She had identified 30 new species of fly in the genus Megaselia, in and around the Los Angeles area, using traps placed mostly in yards. The revelation came with this pretty cool photo of flies from the museum. Now the New Yorker has picked up the story, with the same lead photo, in a piece the magazine calls LA's back-yard entomologists.

A sample:

It started with a bet. In 2013, Brian Brown, the curator of entomology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, told one of the museum’s trustees that he could find a new species of insect practically anywhere he looked. Her cynical response was, “Can you find one in my back yard?” Brown accepted the challenge, setting up a large, tent-like Malaise trap—named not for the emotion on which certain bugs seem to thrive but for the Swede who invented it—in the trustee’s Brentwood garden. After a few weeks, he brought his haul back to the museum, where he began by examining the phorids, a large family of tiny, humpbacked flies that he has spent much of his career studying. The very first one that Brown put under a microscope turned out to be previously unknown to science.

Flushed with such an easy victory, Brown persuaded the museum to launch a three-year research initiative called Biodiversity Science: City and Nature (BioSCAN). One acronym later and the Brentwood Malaise trap had been joined by twenty-nine more, pitched in back yards across the city. The hosts, who were found through word of mouth, include the museum’s president, an animator, several teachers, and a map librarian. “It’s a really fun crowd,” Emily Hartop, an assistant entomologist in Brown’s department, told me. More to the point, the hosts’ properties are dotted throughout the city, exhibiting the full range of Angeleno yardscapes, from a patio and some poorly maintained lawn to a lush tropical oasis with swimming pool.

The traps were left in place for a calendar year, until late 2014. Within the first three months, Brown and Hartop began to realize that they had hit the phorid jackpot, with a suspected thirty new species of the genus Megaselia. Proving that a fly the size of a sesame seed is sufficiently different from every other fly ever recorded to qualify for species status is no small task. “You have to look through all of the literature for the entire world, because these flies travel everywhere,” Hartop said. “L.A. has two of the largest container ports in the world, and it could be that one of the flies that you are looking at actually was previously described in China.”

Previously on LA Observed:
30 new species of flies discovered buzzing Los Angeles

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