Finding New Species Near the Nation's Capital: The GWMP All-Taxa Biodiversity Inventory

By Brent W. Steury, Natural Resources Program Manager, George Washington Memorial Parkway. From Park Science 31(1), Special Issue 2014.

A caddisfly hiding in plain sight

Smithsonian entomologist Dr. Oliver S. Flint Jr., curator emeritus of net-winged insects at the National Museum of Natural History, had described more than 1,000 caddisfly species from 32 countries. Caddisflies (order Trichoptera) have aquatic larvae that hide in tubes of sand or debris; the adults look mothlike, with hairy wings and slow flight.

Flint suspected a new species lived just miles from his office. In the Smithsonian collections he had found a single female he couldn't identify, collected in 1921 by W.L. McAtee of the Bureau of Biological Survey (now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) near "Turkey Run" — now Turkey Run Park, part of the George Washington Memorial Parkway.

At about that time, parkway staff running an All-Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (ATBI) asked Flint to help identify caddisflies. On a dark, drizzly October night at Turkey Run, they hung a white sheet lit by UV light; among hundreds of caddisflies, a male and four females — and four more at the lights of the resource management building weeks later — proved to be new: Neophylax virginica, described in 2011. Four years of collecting, extended to Great Falls Park, documented 111 caddisfly species. Nearby, Smithsonian colleague Dr. Wayne Mathis, an expert on shore flies, found four new shore fly species and a new snail-killing fly in three years.

Millions still unnamed

• Described: 1.4–1.9 million species worldwide, with about 15,000 added each year.
• Undescribed: an estimated 86% of living species. Estimates of the total range from 8.74 million eukaryotes to as many as 30 million tropical arthropods, with 3 to 100 million called defensible.

Most undiscovered species are in the tropics — the naturalist H.W. Bates found 700 butterfly species within an hour's walk of his Brazilian home, while the parkway's 76 have held steady since 2004. But temperate urban areas can shelter new species too, especially smaller life. Should it surprise anyone that new amphipods, beetles and caddisflies turn up beside a capital packed with museums, universities and research institutions?

Ten years of the inventory

The parkway's ATBI has documented 4,976 species, including 58 new to science, 3 new to North America, 83 new to Virginia, 7 new to D.C., and 49 listed as rare in Virginia or Maryland — with 50 peer-reviewed articles since 2004. Highlights:

Biologist Erik Oberg and Natural Resources Program Manager Brent Steury check under a cover board for ground beetles in Turkey Run Park. NPS / Emily Zivot.

Racing extinction

The biggest challenge may be finding species before they vanish: extinction rates are 100 to 1,000 times prehuman levels, and trained taxonomists are growing scarcer.

The parkway expected to pass 5,000 species in 2014, with seven inventory projects under way and four more funded through 2018. Surpassing 10,000 species and another 50 articles within a decade is not unreasonable: a recent survey of springtails alone reported 37 species new to science, still unpublished. There is a long way to go.

Sources

Based on "The GWMP All-Taxa Biodiversity Inventory: Finding new species near the nation's capital," by Brent W. Steury, Park Science 31(1), National Park Service, citing Flint (2011), Flint and Kjer (2011), Mathis and others (2009, 2010), Mora and others (2011), May (2010), Erwin (1982), Bates (1892), Pimm and others (1995) and the parkway's inventory studies; a work of the United States government in the public domain. A photograph of the new caddisfly, credited to an individual, is left out.