Scientists hunt for undiscovered species in NYC parks using DNA barcoding

Emily Hartop, an entomologist at Norway's NTNU University Museum, is convinced that New York City's most famous parks are hiding animals that science has never formally described. She's not looking for anything large or obvious. Instead, she and a team spanning Vox, the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics in Canada, and the stewards of Central Park and Prospect Park are hunting for insects—the kind most people never notice, the kind that might be common enough to encounter in a backyard but remain entirely unknown to the scientific record.

The premise sounds unlikely, but Hartop's confidence rests on a stark fact: the vast majority of Earth's animals remain unnamed. Scientists have formally catalogued roughly two million species. The actual number is thought to be ten times higher. That gap isn't filled with exotic creatures in distant places. It's filled with small things—insects, mites, and other organisms so overlooked that they've earned a name in the scientific literature: "dark taxa." These groups are species-rich and ecologically vital, yet they receive a fraction of the attention lavished on mammals, birds, or bees. The specialists who study them are few, and the work of simply knowing what exists has barely begun.

The hunt in New York follows a methodical four-step process. First, two tent-like traps called Malaise traps have been installed in Central Park and Prospect Park. These devices funnel insects into containers of ethanol, preserving them for analysis. Once a month, the collected specimens travel to Canada, where researchers use DNA barcoding to identify them. The technique works like a genetic fingerprint: a short, standardized segment of an organism's DNA serves as a unique identifier, comparable to a barcode on a store item. Each specimen is checked against a reference library of known species. If no match appears, the insect may be something new.

When a potential discovery emerges, it moves to the third stage: expert examination. Hartop herself specializes in humpbacked flies, a family so diverse that new species within it are regularly found. These specialists conduct detailed investigations to confirm whether they're looking at something genuinely undescribed. If the answer is yes, the fourth step begins—a formal scientific description and naming process that typically takes years to complete.

What makes this project notable is not the method but the location. The assumption that new species discoveries happen only in remote rainforests or deep ocean trenches has shaped how we think about biodiversity. Hartop challenges that directly. "Unknown species can be discovered in parks and gardens too," she says. She believes the same systematic approach applied to Trondheim, her home city, or almost any urban area would yield similar results. The implication is unsettling and clarifying at once: the living world around us is far stranger and more populated than we typically imagine.

The insects themselves matter more than their obscurity might suggest. Flies alone represent some of the planet's most diverse organisms, having evolved into countless ecological roles and forms. Many are genuinely beautiful when examined closely. More importantly, they and the countless other unnamed species maintain the ecological balance that keeps the planet functioning. We simply don't know how many species we depend on, or what happens when we lose them without ever knowing they existed. The project in New York's parks is not just a hunt for novelty. It's an attempt to map the actual living world—the one that exists whether or not we've named it.