New Species

You’ve probably seen these organisms before. They’re green, shiny, and “quite nervous” according to Dr. Marc Pollet, who has been studying Dolichopodidae, long-legged flies, for decades. But there’s so much more to this group than what meets the eye. Take a deep dive into the fascinating world of flies with Marc, and learn a secret or two about the beauty of taxonomy, the importance of names, and...

Many parts of the world are celebrating all things spooky this time of year, and spiders are getting their time to shine. Whether you’re a spider lover or not, you have to admit that spiders have some stunning diversity and fascinating natural history. To celebrate that, this is a re-release of an episode we originally published on February 9th of 2021. It’s a wonderful interview with Dr. Rosemary...

Mud snakes may not look as exciting as some of their other snake relatives, but in this episode Dr. Justin Bernstein tells us just a few of the fascinating details he and his team have uncovered while studying them. How do you compare the genetic makeup of snake populations? Why should you turn off your headlamp while collecting in Mangrove forests? Learn all of this and more as Justin tells us st...

Have you heard of snakes in the genus Atractus ? They’re the largest snake genus in the world, and recently they received three new members found in an unexpected place. In this episode, Alejandro Arteaga shares the story of how he and his team found three new species of fossorial snakes in the Andes mountains of Ecuador, and what this discovery has to say about the conservation of biodiversity in...

New Species: Jakapil kaniukura Did you know that there are still new dinosaurs being identified? In this episode, hear from Facundo Riguetti, a PhD student of the Universidad Maimónides-CONICET and a fellow of the Fundación de Historia Natural Félix de Azara, both in Buenos Aires. He'll tell us how his new species of dinosaur was collected, what makes it different from others of its clade, and eve...

  What's an ambrosia beetle? How do you go about finding one? Learn all of this and more as we interview Dr. Rachel Osborn of the A.J. Cook Arthropod Research Collection at Michigan State University. She'll take us on an adventure with a tribe of beetles about the size of a grain of rice, and reveal a newly-discovered clue to their evolutionary history. Dr. Rachel Osborn’s paper “New Xylebori...

Dilian Georgiev is an Associate Professor in the department of Ecology and Environmental Protection at The Paisii Hilendarski University of Plovdiv. In this episode, he tells Zoe about his recent paper in volume 44 of Historia naturalis bulgarica, in which he and his coauthors describe a new species of spring-snail from the Belasitsa Mountains in South-West Bulgaria. He describes spring-snail evol...

Dr. Derek Hennen works for the Virginia Department of Agriculture as the Slow the Spread Coordinator monitoring the spongy moth populations in the state. He talks to co-host Brian Patrick about his paper inthe April 15th issue of ZooKeys in which he and his coauthors describe 17 new species of millipedes from the eastern United States. We discuss this massive work on millipedes from eastern US, an...

Kaila Pearson just graduated with her Master’s from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. She’s here today to talk to me about her paper in the April 22nd issue of Zootaxa in which she and her coauthor describe three new species of deep sea vampire worms. We discuss how life exists without any sunlight, how to collect worms that are a mile (or two!) dee...

Brogan Pett is our guests and he talks about his recent paper in which he and his coauthor describe a new species of spider from Madagascar in the March 14th issue of Zootaxa . Brogan is a doctoral researcher in the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter in the UK. Additionally, Brogan serves as the research director of SpiDervERse, a workgroup of the Belgian nonprofit org...

In this episode, Zoe interviews Germán Chávez, Associate Researcher at the Instituto Peruano de Herpetologia and the Centro de Ornitología y Biodiversidad in Lima, Peru. His newly described frog is in the paper “A needle in a haystack: Integrative taxonomy reveals the existence of a new small species of fossorial frog (Anura, Microhylidae, Synapturanus) from the vast lower Putumayo basin, Peru” in...

Zoe interviews Kris Helgen, Chief Scientist and Director of the Australian Museum Research Institute. They discuss how one species became three, what makes these animals unique, and what other questions scientists could ask about them in the future. This paper is in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society ’s February 2022 issue, “Across the great divide: revision of the genus Eupetaurus (Sci...

Two interviews in this episode! First, Agata Szwarc from the University of Gdansk in Poland talks about her recent paper in the December 9th(2021) issue of Zookeys in which she and her coauthors describe two new species of ostracod crustaceans from Africa! She talks with cohost Zoe Albion about these unusual crustaceans that live in temporary pools of water (very fast lives!), why they’re importan...

Dr. Kris White and Sally Sir are our guests as they talk about their paper in which they describe a new species of amphipod from Japan in the February 1st issue of Zootaxa . Ms. Sir is an undergraduate at Georgia College and State University, and Dr. White is an Assistant Professor of Biology in the Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences at GCSU.  We discuss what an amphipod is (...

Dr. Juan Reyes-Puig is a Coordinator of Ecological Reserves with the Fundacion EcoMinga Red de Protection des Bosques Amenazados in Ecuador. He talks to me about his paper published in the January 10th issue of the ZooKeys in which he and his coauthors describe two new species of frogs! We discuss where these frogs live, how they were found, the importance of ecological reserves in Ecuador, and fr...

Dr. Brian Bahder is an Assistant Professor at the University of Florida’s Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center. He talks to me about his paper published in the September 6 issue of the Zootaxa in which he and his coauthors describe a new species of planthopper! We discuss what planthoppers are, how they can spread plant diseases, planthoppers as the mosquitoes of the plant world, how easy...

Dr. Elsa Panciroli, a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in England, and associate researcher at National Museums Scotland, is my guest this week. She’s also the author of a new book called Beasts Before Us: the Untold Story of Mammal Origins and Evolution , which is coming out in the US on September 7th, 2021. She talks to me about her paper...

Alireza Zamani is a Ph. D. candidate at the University of Turku in Finland. He talks to me about his paper published in ZooKeys on August 3 in which he and his coauthor describe a new genus and ten new species of spiders from Iran! We talk about his “habit” of describing new species, why so many undescribed species sit on museum shelves for decades before they’re described, how to assemble a speci...

Dr. Thiago da Silva Moreira is an Adjunct Faculty at George Washington University in Washington, DC. He talks to me about his recent paper published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society and his descriptions of six new species from Central America and the Caribbean. We discuss common names for linyphiid spiders, web structure, sexual selection of the genitals of these spiders, spider po...

Dr. Lyubomir Penev is the Managing Director and Founder of Pensoft Publishing and a Professor of Ecology at the Bulgaria Academy of Sciences in Sofia, Bulgaria. He talks to me about the founding of Pensoft Publishing and the books and journals published by Pensoft, like ZooKeys , a journal often cited in this podcast! We discuss the importance of biodiversity discovery, the causes of and possible...

Dr. Scott Schneider is a Research Entomologist in the Systematic Entomology Lab at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service in Beltsville, MD, USA. He talks to me about his paper published in the June 24 issue of the ZooKeys in which he and his coauthors describe a four new species of armored scale insects! We discuss how these insects can be legless, their economic importance, the possibility tha...

Dr. Peter Jaeger is the Head of Arachnology at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, Germany. He talks to me about his paper published in the June 10 issue of the Zootaxa in which he describes two new genera and two new species of huntsman spiders! We discuss the large amount of size variation in these spiders, a species named after David Bowie, a specimen col...

Dr. Graham Oliver is an Honorary Research Fellow at the National Museum of Wales in the UK. He talks to me about his paper published in the June 15 issue of the ZooKeys in which he and his coauthors describe a new species of reef-building oyster! We discuss oyster-built versus coral=built reefs, cementing bivalves (true oysters), oyster clumps that look like cows, whether this new species is invas...

Dr. Adam Brunke is a Research Scientist with Agriculture and Agri-food Canada and the Canadian National Collection of Insects, Arachnids, and Nematodes. He talks to me about his paper published in the June 3 issue of the ZooKeys in which he and his coauthors describe four new species of aleocharine staphylinid rove beetles! We discuss what a rove beetle is, the hyper diversity of rove beetles, the...

Dr. Jason Bond is the Schlinger Chair in Insect Systematics at the University of California - Davis. He talks to me about a special topic of concern—something called the taxonomic impediment, which is the shortage of trained taxonomists and curators needed to identify, describe, catalog, curate, and organize species and species collections around the world. We talk about why there’s an impediment,...