There are more than 40,000 different species of predatory ground-beetles (also known as carabid beetles). These beetles can be found in every habitat on the planet. Scientists estimate there are thousands of additional carabid species yet to be discovered.

Although their large numbers make them easy to find, ground-beetles have a powerful defense to keep predators (and sometimes scientists) at bay. They employ chemical warfare by spraying noxious chemicals from their abdomens.

For more than two decades, Dr. Wojciech Pulawski, a curator in the Academy’s department of entomology, has conducted field research in Mexico, Peru, South Africa, Kazakhstan, and Papua New Guinea to observe the behavior of solitary wasps. They’re not easy to study, however. Solitary wasps are just that—solitary. They don’t swarm as a group or build hives. As their name implies, they rest, hunt, and eat alone.

Despite this challenge, Pulawski’s persistent work has led to a number of interesting observations about wasp behavior.

For example, a female wasp, in order to reproduce, will hunt down other insects or spiders and, rather than killing her prey, will inject them with paralyzing venom. She carries the immobile prey back to her nest, where she inserts her eggs into its body. The venom keeps the insect from rotting, ensuring fresh food for her larvae when they finally hatch. Upon hatching, the larvae burrow into the host and slowly eat it alive as they develop into adults.

Pulawski has described hundreds of species of solitary wasps including 239 previously unknown to science. He has compiled an online catalog that describes four families of solitary wasps—Heterogynaidae, Ampulicidae, Sphecidae, and Crabronida. 

Only five other orders of animals on the planet contain more species than the spider, Araneae. Spiders are present on every major land mass (except, perhaps, Antarctica), and play a crucial role in most terrestrial ecosystems.

Academy scientist Dr. Charles Griswold has spent the last 30 years studying the classification and evolution of spiders. He is currently participating in a major research effort sponsored by the National Science Foundation to create an “Encyclopedia of Life.” This is an unprecedented global effort to document all 1.8 million named species of animals and plants on Earth. As the expert on spiders, Griswold is currently collecting DNA samples, anatomical data, and behavioral observations from all 110 recognized families of spiders.

It once took scientists months, if not years, to identify new ant species. Field guides were scarce and original species descriptions were buried in obscure journals. However Academy entomologist Dr. Brian Fisher has moved ant identification onto the fast track with the help of mapping technology from Google. Fisher has assembled data and descriptions for thousands of ant species from around the world and posted this information on a public website, www.antweb.org.

From the website, scientists and ant fans, alike, can download the Google Earth program and plot the geographic location of different ant species on a three-dimensional, interactive globe. This technology enables people to look up ants by location rather than by name. For example, if scientists collect an ant specimen in Argentina, they can pull up the South American map from Google Earth and quickly determine if an identical specimen has already been collected from that region.

Fisher was so impressed with the support he received from the Google Earth team that he named a new species of ant in their honor. The ant, which he discovered during a trip to Madagascar, is called Proceratium google.