Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County is trying to collect and inventory all of the region’s urban wildlife, some of which hitched a ride to the metropolis

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Los Angeles – synonymous with cars, concrete and urban sprawl – turns out to possess a secret, thriving underworld: nature.



A host of mammal, reptile, spider and insect species has hitched a ride to the metropolis on planes and ships and flourished in the balmy climate alongside native species, helping to turn LA into one of the world’s most diverse ecosystems.

This little-known fact prompted the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County on Thursday to launch an attempt to collect and inventory all of the region’s urban wildlife – the world’s biggest urban biodiversity study.

“We are truly surrounded by nature at all times,” Lori Bettison-Varga, the museum’s president and director, told a press conference ringed with scientists and jars containing slithering, crawling examples.

“There’s often a misconception that Los Angeles is a concrete jungle, when in reality the city is home to one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world,” said Brian Brown, the museum’s curator of entomology.

The museum is extending scientific research and investigation beyond its 3.5-acre site by mobilising “citizen scientists” who document and photograph wildlife in their homes, yards and streets.

Their submissions will feed data to a new urban nature research center at the museum, which is tasked with compiling the inventory, dubbed the SuperProject.

Bettison-Varga called it a one-of-a-kind initiative that could break new ground for urban nature research in other biodiversity hotspots. “It’s a new approach to science.”

Researchers unveiled recent discoveries made mostly in back yards, including 12 news species of flies belonging to a single genus, Megaselia, of the fly family Phoridae, demonstrating what they said was an extraordinary level of undocumented biodiversity in areas heavily populated by humans.

“There is no magic boundary that nature does not come across,” said Greg Pauly, the new centre’s co-director. “And the reality is we don’t know a lot about the nature here in LA.”

Glen Yoshida, one of hundreds of citizen scientists trained to collect and submit data over the past year, discovered an Indo-Pacific gecko on his porch in Torrance, a residential and industrial neighbourhood. The species, from southern Asia, had previously been spotted in Hawaii and Florida but not California.

Residents in Beverly Hills recently encountered – or at least heard – another example in the form of exceptionally loud croaking. It was so loud some thought it was a broken alarm. Summoned, Pauly tracked it to a bush hosting a coqui frog native to Puerto Rico. “This tells us how dynamic nature is in LA,” Pauly said.

Alien species find their way to the city in multiple ways, including under shipping container pallets – LA has the US’s busiest port – and in the hair, clothes and luggage of people passing through LAX, which on a single day can host more than 200,000 travellers.

Many adapt to and thrive in the city’s sun-kissed, moderate climate – kinder to more species than, say, San Francisco’s rain or New York’s cold.

Some alien species are brought in on purpose, such as the French snails attributed to a French immigrant in the 1850s. He apparently imported some as escargot – and managed to lose them. “From those French escapee snails they’re now everywhere,” said Jann Vendetti, a malacologist who works for the centre’s Snails and Slugs Living in Metropolitan Environments (Slime) project.

One citizen scientist volunteer, Cedric Lee, an undergraduate who scours the UCLA campus for snails and slugs, found a tiny snail that turned out to be the European Lauria cylindracea, never before spotted in California.

A city buzzing with paparazzi and other species of Hollywood hustler arguably could do without Conicera tibialis, also known as the coffin fly for its ability to dig six feet to find corpses, but according to Brown, the co-director, the discovery of this and other fly species in LA is a good thing: “People associated with areas of greater biodiversity have lower blood pressure.”

Invasive alien species, however, can spread disease and disrupt other species. Competition from the eastern fox squirrel, which has adapted better to the city, is banishing the western gray squirrel.

One reason to create the inventory, said Brown, is to better understand ways to aid native species against interlopers. “We want to invite more of the native species into urban areas where they can have protection against invasive species.”

Jesse Rorabaugh, 33, a power utility engineer, was among the citizen scientist volunteers who attended the launch. Having documented more than a hundred species of bugs and birds around his home in La Habra he now scrutinises hiking trails and has documented more than a thousand species. “Yes, I’m a little obsessive,” he smiled.