CENTRAL PARK, NEW YORK CITY — On a hot June day in Manhattan, a few minutes away from the sea lion pool in Central Park Zoo, up a hill and through a patch of shoulder-height shrubs, Benji Jones peered into a bottle filled with ethanol and dead bugs.
“Oh, there’s some big guys in here,” he said.
We were standing in front of a Malaise trap, a tent-like structure of cloth and mesh that is in essence a funnel of doom. Flying insects — along with the occasional suicidal and/or unfortunate wingless crawler — are herded into the top of the trap and then into a bottle of ethanol, which quickly kills and preserves them. Every couple of weeks, Jones, a senior environmental correspondent at Vox who focuses on biodiversity (disclosure: Jones is my former colleague, close friend, and a 2027 Nieman Fellow), visits the trap to collect the bugs and swap in new bottles, all in service of a lofty goal: to discover a new species.
Benji Jones examines a Malaise trap in Prospect Park.
New York City may seem like a counterintuitive place to try to find a new creature; it is, after all, a heavily built-up urban environment and not, say, the rainforests of Costa Rica. But that’s kind of the point.
“It’s an inversion of my usual work, because often I’m trying to go to these remote places and take stock of the last vestiges of some species that researchers are trying to save,” Jones told me. “Here, we’re finding new things in the most ecologically disrupted place on Earth. It’s not something that Vox has ever done before. I’m not sure any newsroom has tried to discover a species like this. Which is exciting, but also makes it a little bit daunting.”
It’s also a reminder that, even in our densest cities, we remain part of an ecosystem. For an insect, New York City — and particularly Central Park and Prospect Park, where Jones set up a second trap — is full of potential habitats. The bugs were there: all Jones had to do was find them.
“It’s an indication of how unexplored our world is,” Jones said. “If you can find a new species in New York City, think how many more there must be out there.”
Back in Central Park, Jones unscrewed the cap on a bottle of fresh, clear ethanol, attached it to the trap along with an excluder — a device to keep large insects like butterflies out — and screwed the cap onto the bottle filled with bugs and brown liquid that had previously occupied its place. This was his second time resetting the traps, which he checks every two weeks.
“I must have gotten a thousand insects in my first round,” he said as he slipped the bottle into a ziplock bag and then into his backpack. “I just have these bottles of bugs sitting in my freezer now.”
Half the work of finding a new species comes down to logistics.
The idea came to Jones when he reported a story on dark taxa, or groups of organisms that are estimated to contain more species than have been discovered or described by scientists. These organisms tend to be small, like insects and crustaceans that we can barely see with the naked eye (although a few years ago I wrote about the discovery of a new hummingbird in Ecuador), and often look so similar to other species that the only way to tell them apart easily is by examining their DNA. A recent paper in PNAS estimates that there are at least 14 to 20 million insect species on our planet — two to three times higher than previous estimates, and we have discovered only a fraction of them.
A fly from the Phoridae family, which Hartop studies. Photo by Steve Marshall, courtesy of Emily Hartop.
Jones wanted a firsthand look at what it takes to discover a species in 2026. So he reached out to Emily Hartop, a taxonomist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who studies dark taxa and had conducted a similar study using Malaise traps in Los Angeles that resulted in the discovery of nearly 50 new species more than a decade ago. Hartop connected Jones to Paul Hebert, an evolutionary biologist and founder and CEO of the Center for Biodiversity Genomics at the University of Guelph, in Canada. In 2003, Hebert and his team at Guelph invented a technique called “DNA barcoding” that allows researchers to identify new species using a short sequence of DNA. Every known species on Earth is given an identification number, and if a search through the database doesn’t turn up a match, it’s possible the person running the search has found a new species.
“I know we’ll find something new,” Hebert told me when I asked him about Jones’ chances of success (Hartop agrees with his assessment). “That’s not a question. We will certainly find many new things.”
Together with Hartop and Hebert, Jones came up with a plan: He’d need to apply for a research permit with the New York City Parks Department and talk to the Central Park Conservancy and the Prospect Park Alliance, the nonprofits that manage the two parks, to get permission to set up the traps. Hebert’s team at Guelph would send Jones the supplies he needed; Jones would collect the samples on a regular schedule and ship them to Canada, where they’d be barcoded.
Bottles full of insect samples, bagged and ready to be frozen.
The most likely species to be discovered from this project are small flies and parasitoid wasps, which lay their eggs inside other insects’ bodies. That’s where the taxonomists come in: after they’re barcoded, any potential new species will be sent to Hartop, who specializes in flies, as well as another taxonomist who specializes in parasitoid wasps. Jones also wanted to get a research organization based in New York City on board, so he reached out to the American Museum of Natural History. We were joined in Central Park by Sarah Kornbluth, a field biologist who’s an expert on bees.
“As a journalist, I felt sorely unequipped to put this project together,” Jones, who dropped out of an ecology Ph.D to pursue journalism, told me. He had to learn how to submit permit requests to the Parks Department, talk to the researchers to understand the sampling protocol, and fill out forms with the US Fish and Wildlife Service so that he could send the samples to Canada. “Shipping a bunch of dead insects in bags of ethanol is not like shipping a box of chocolates. It’s much more involved.”
Jones worked with Vox’s graphics teams to design signs with the names of the involved organizations as well as QR codes that would take passersby to a landing page Vox set up for the project. Signage was an important part of making sure people wouldn’t disturb Hartop’s project in LA, and Jones knew his traps in New York, even though they were set back from the trail, would draw many curious eyes.
One of the signs near the Malaise trap in Prospect Park.
Jones has received multiple emails from curious New Yorkers thanks to the signs, including a few science educators. At Prospect Park, where the trap sits in a patch of sunflowers by a busy path, a group of teenagers on a nearby path yelled out to ask Jones what he was trying to find. A few minutes later, a man pushing a stroller asked the same question. He stopped to listen, nodding along.
“Can’t wait to hear more about it!” he said, before continuing on his way.
Science and journalism are driven by the same central motive: to better understand the world. But they have vastly different processes and timelines. Science is often painstakingly slow and deliberate, with processes like peer review designed to ensure any new claims have been thoroughly investigated. Breakthroughs can take years, if not decades. That doesn’t generally work with the pace of journalism, particularly in 2026.
“There’s definitely a disconnect,” Hartop told me. “If I told a journalist ‘let’s go discover a new species, I’ll have an answer for you in a decade,’ that would not be such a compelling story.”
To try to close the gap, Hebert’s team will work quickly once they receive the samples; he told me he’ll know within weeks whether the bottles contain a species without a barcode. That will allow Jones to publish an update informing readers of the potential discovery at the end of the summer. During the time he’s at Harvard for his Nieman Fellowship, the taxonomists will be able to take a closer look at the samples, make sure they haven’t been sitting in a collection somewhere or mentioned in the scientific literature before, describe the details of any truly new species, and give them a name. (Vox is currently soliciting suggestions for potential names from the public.) The results will be published both as a story in Vox and as scientific papers — which, Hebert told me, could include Jones as a co-author.
Benji Jones checks a Malaise trap from the inside.
“Some scientists might shy away from collaborating with journalists, because if it’s done improperly I think that it could come across as very performative science,” Hartop said. “It’s important to me that it’s not. It’s important to me that this process is real. But if I can do my science and be able to show people the reality and the complexity of it, that’s the most powerful thing that I can probably do as a scientist.”
Jones has been clear with the scientists that Vox will retain full editorial control over the stories that come out of the project. Vox is also paying for the project materials, the shipping and handling, and the costs of processing the samples in Hebert’s lab.
“I see one of my missions as a journalist as informing people about what’s going on on our planet,” Jones told me as we walked past a couple taking their wedding photos on a bridge over the Prospect Park lake. “I think we have to find more and better ways to tell people about biodiversity loss, because that message is not breaking through right now. And I think that means that we need to get more creative in how we’re telling these stories. We’re always talking about how we can reach new audiences, and something like this provides a direct outlet to people who are just walking through New York City. That, to me, is reason enough for this to be worth it.”
And, Jones said, he hopes it opens audiences up to “the wonder of insects.” Insects are essential to life on Earth, including ours: they pollinate our plants, clean up our messes, and keep ecosystems ticking along. Flies in particular, Hartop told me, get a bad rap. They’re associated with decay and uncleanliness, but that’s because they’re essentially nature’s sanitation workers — they’re there to clean those things up. A project like this has the potential to get people to consider their place in the world, and to reassess their assumptions about insects, cities, and the limits of our knowledge.
There’s an urgency to the project, too. As climate change intensifies, insects are being threatened just as all other creatures (including humans) are. Because there are so many left undiscovered, it’s possible we will lose an important species before we even find it.
“Every piece of DNA extracted puts a title on a book of life, and every one of these books is the largest book by a very big magnitude than the longest book ever written by a human,” Hebert told me. “I’m depressed to think about burning the books of life without ever reading them.”
The New York trapping project, then, fills out some of the gaps in the library.
“This project makes the city feel so much more vibrant and full of life,” Jones told me as we picked our way through some bushes in Prospect Park, making a detour so we didn’t disturb a pristine spiderweb. “I’m now seeing stuff I didn’t know existed. I’m taking more time to observe the insects when I’m walking to the park. [Once] you think insects are cool, you can do wildlife watching even in the middle of New York.”
That doesn’t mean he now loves all bugs.
“I hate mosquitoes,” Jones said, swatting at one. “I hate all the things that bit me today.”
