New Species

On this podcast we talk a lot about natural history collections. In fact, a spot (or more) of collections work is pretty much required to describe a new species. But what actually counts as a natural ...

19 Sep 202331min

You’ve got to hand it to leaf insects; their camouflage is so well-refined that studying them is difficult and collecting them is near-impossible. A sub-group of stick insects, members of the family P...

5 Sep 202329min

Mysmenopsis is a tiny spider genus that has been shaped by women; women have collected, identified, and described the majority of members of the genus. In fact, Dr. Nadine Dupérré alone described 25 s...

22 Aug 202324min

Grab your parkas, we’re going to Antarctica! Or at least some researchers did in the 1960s, but it took starfish expert Dr. Chris Mah until the past few years to take a look at their samples and find ...

8 Aug 202333min

Cedric Lee was collecting slugs with another diplopodologist James Bailey when they stumbled upon a very odd creature; thin and string-like with lots of fine legs and a long body. “We recognized that ...

11 Jul 202328min

“I always say that insect taxonomists will never get really rich but you will see parts of the world where nobody else gets a chance to go to. It’s a great chance to explore the world” This special ep...

27 Jun 202348min

“Here in the South, our grasslands are where most of our, a huge part of our biodiversity are. And most people don't even know that we have natural grasslands in the Southeast…but they were some of th...

13 Jun 202340min

Have you ever seen a series of fine squiggles in a leaf? Those might be leaf-mining moths in the genus Argyresthia. These tiny moths are closely linked with many agricultural crops, but factors includ...

30 Mai 202337min