NEW YORK, June 4 — Wildlife experts found eight new species of dragonfly, ‌three unknown grasshoppers and some 60 new butterflies and moths in vivid hues during a trip to Angola's Lisima plateau in February, ‌a conservation group said yesterday.

The Wilderness Project visited the waters that flow through the plateau and which feed four of Africa's major rivers: the Congo, Okavango, Zambezi and Cuanza.

New species included an armoured, predatory cricket, a previously undescribed species of copper caterpillar and its adult butterfly, and a crowned crab spider that fluoresces under ultraviolet light.

Experts also found a new blood orange-hued species of ladybird orb-web spider ‌which mimics ladybirds in signaling to predators with a ⁠bright colour - normally a darker ⁠red - that it is too bitter or ⁠toxic.

"The armoured crickets are ⁠very cool ... ⁠very fierce-looking," expedition leader Rob Taylor told Reuters. "As a defense mechanism, they can actually squirt fluid onto whoever's trying to attack ⁠them." Scientists the world over are frantically trying to record species as they reckon with a global ecological crisis that has put a million plant and animal species on the brink of extinction. They estimate there are 8.7 ⁠million species in the world, of which science has identified only 1.5 million.

Many are fast disappearing because of ⁠human activity, with more than 800 animal species going extinct since ⁠around ⁠1500.

Taylor said wildlife in the Lisima plateau was threatened by "tree-felling, deforestation and ... the artisanal diamond mining industry," as well as by slash-and-burn ‌agriculture, which razes natural forests to use the soil for planting, only to see the nutrients wash away. — Reuters