A citizen scientist and professional taxonomists have jointly discovered an unusual new species of green lacewing.

Green lacewings are delicate green insects with large, lace-like wings that live in a wide variety of habitats, especially tropical forests. Adults mostly feed on flowers, but the larvae are ferocious predators of other insects, frequently carrying the dead carcasses of their prey on their backs after killing them using their enormous, sucking tube-like jaws.

In the study, published in the journal ZooKeys, a beautiful new species of green lacewing in the genus Semachrysa is described from the Malaysian rainforest. The wing pattern is its most distinctive feature.

Yet, this discovery could have been missed by scientists, as the only documented evidence that the new species existed was an exquisite series of images posted online in Flickr® after the insect was released.

Only after scientists came across the images online by chance, efforts were made to capture more specimens so that this species could be formally described as new to science.

Without an actual specimen to place in a museum as a reference, a formal description is not possible.

One year later another, individual was collected at the same locality. The scientists from the California State Collection of Arthropods and the Natural History Museum in London, and a professional photographer joined forces to collaborate on the description of the new species, named Semachrysa jade.

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Bibliographic information: Winterton et al. 2012. A charismatic new species of green lacewing discovered in Malaysia (Neuroptera, Chrysopidae): the confluence of citizen scientist, online image database and cybertaxonomy. ZooKeys 214: 1–11; doi: 10.3897/zookeys.214.3220