furcula_it

Important question. They took some liberties with their illustrations, but in general the bright beetles are called Pleasing Fungus Beetles, Erotylidae and many of the wormy looking things are either worms, or scarab beetle larvae -Phil

It happens surprisingly often if you look for the right group. There are ~1 million known species of insects, and by some estimates another ~29 million left to go! So if you're in the tropics and looking for an obscure group that not a lot of people have studied (ants, beetles, flies, parasitoids, etc) you actually have a pretty high chance of finding a new species in a single day out there.

But finding them is one thing, naming them is where the real expertise comes in. You have to do genetic work, dissect and draw male genitalia, and compare to other known species. Then do a big write up. This takes most people 1-3 years to do, but the average shelf-life for a new species being found is 21 years, so that's 21 years of sitting in a museum collection before someone gives it a name. We need more taxonomists and systematists! -P

We recently ate huge beetle grubs in Ecuador http://i.imgur.com/xMnJJEg.png - long story short, they weren't as tasty as Lion King made them look. -A

That is a FANTASTIC question! Typically it takes a highly specialized expert for a particular group (i.e. a taxonomist) to immediately recognize if something is new. To answer your question, a lot of times I don't really know if what I'm looking at is just new to me, or if it is actually new to science. So I take a lot of high quality photos and video, and collect samples in the field so I can do my homework when I return to the states and get opinions from other experts in the field. For instance, when I found this new butterfly/parasitic plant relationship (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/12/151203-caterpillar-ant-parasitic-plant-Peru-science-evolution/), I did not know if it was new at the time, it was only until after I got back and spoke with other butterfly professionals and botanists that we found it was a new discovery. Additionally, I use genetics to help us determine if something is new or not, and molecular tools are showing us that some of these critters could indeed be new species (more to come on that soon). -A

Our recent discovery involves a very interesting group of caterpillars in the family Riodinidae. A scientist found that these caterpillars can "sing" to attract ants - the ants hear them and rush to protect them from predators, which is a fascinating symbiosis called myrmecophily. So there are probably many more examples of insect "senses" that we have yet to uncover. -A