The Big Fight Over 403 Very Small Wasps

Earth is teeming with unknown species, and they're dying off faster than ever. Now biologists are in an urgent battle over an old question: how should humanity catalog life?

- By Brooke Jarvis. Photographs by Damien Maloney

The bottle held a thin broth, light brown, with some uncertain chunks of dark matter bobbing on top-a soup, maybe, but one that you'd never want to eat. Once it was poured into a white plastic tray, the chunks resolved into insects. Here were butterflies and moths, the delicate patterns of their wings dimmed after a week or two in ethanol. Here were beetles and bumblebees and lots of burly-looking flies, all heaped together, plus a bevy of large wasps, their stripes and stingers still bright.

Michael Sharkey took out a pair of thin forceps and began examining his catch. It included anything small and winged that lived in the meadows and forests around his house, high in the Colorado Rockies, and that had suffered the misfortune, in the previous two weeks, of flying into the tent-shaped malaise trap he had erected in front of his home and we had emptied earlier that morning.