Episode 5: New Species-- actually, 403 (yes, 403!!) new species of braconid parasitoid wasps from Costa Rica!

Our guest for this episode, Dr. Michael Sharkey, is a Professor Emeritus. He talks to us about his paper published February 2nd in ZooKeys wherein he describes 403—yes, 403!!!—new species of braconid parasitoid wasps from Costa Rica! Dr. Sharkey explains to us what a braconid wasp is, what a parasitoid is, how he and his coauthors could find 403 new species for a single paper, how to come up with so many names for so many species, and why we all need to know more about these amazing little wasps!

The title of the paper is “Minimalist revision and description of 403 new species in 11 subfamilies of Costa Rican braconid parasitoid wasps, including host records for 219 species.” The paper is available free as Open Access: https://zookeys.pensoft.net/article/55600/element/8/2105//

To learn more about Dr. Sharkey, visit his webpage at http://www.sharkeylab.org/sharkeylab/MainPage.html.

Be sure to follow New Species on Twitter (@PodcastSpecies), like the podcast page on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/NewSpeciesPodcast), and music in this podcast is "No More (Instrumental)," by HaTom (https://fanlink.to/HaTom).

If you would like to support this podcast: https://www.patreon.com/NewSpeciesPodcast