Benjamin Thompson
speaker
746 appearances
10 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 2 Sep
Benjamin Thompson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 5.
Appearances
And that's key here.
Scientists can't go and sort of count these one by one.
They're collecting a large amount of these insects and then doing what's called DNA barcoding, which allows them to look at short fragments of DNA to work out whether a species is new to science or whether it's
already been established, this sort of thing.
Yeah, that's a great point.
And one that I wondered about too.
And to catch species that would otherwise have been missed by this sort of trap, the team organized a collecting blitz of sorts last November that used around fifty extra collecting methods.
And in one example, they used rotting meat to attract insects that feed on carrion, that sort of thing.
And they used light traps to sample
Nocturnal insects that may have been missed otherwise.
So they've done their best to try and run across the gamut.
And as I understand, they've been looking in a particular area of the central Amazon in northern Brazil, and they've been collecting insects for over a year, and the results are five and a half million specimens, of which six hundred thousand will ultimately have their DNA.
sequence.
And a huge network of taxonomists will combine this genetic data with looking at the insects' physical traits to identify like what are these species.
And of course, if it's a new species to science, they get to describe it and name it.
Yeah, I think that's the central thrust of this.
Now I've covered
The naming of species and why this is important in the past.
And we know that insects around the world are under threat.
Climate change, insecticide use, habitat loss, certainly in the Amazon, that's an issue.
Showing 421–440 of 746 · page 22 of 38
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