Earlier this year, a billionaire investor and philanthropist named Tom Kaplan auctioned off a small Rembrandt drawing of a lion at Sotheby’s in New York City. It sold for nearly $18 million. A press release prior to the auction noted that Kaplan would donate the proceeds of the sale to an environmental organization that he co-founded, called Panthera, which conserves wild cats like lions and jaguars. 

At face value, Kaplan’s gift is extraordinarily generous. Kaplan, owner of the world’s largest private collection of Rembrandts, is redeploying wealth that could have stayed locked up in a private collection or bank account to support the conservation of threatened felines and their habitats across the globe — all at a time when environmental causes are facing a massive funding shortfall. This seemed like a feel-good story all around. And that’s how it was pitched to me by a PR agency. 

My colleague Sara Herschander and I went to the auction in early February, and I spoke one-on-one with Kaplan the following week. I was expecting a fairly straightforward conversation about philanthropy and what he sees as the responsibility of billionaires, told through the lens of his recent gift. But instead, our chat exposed a more complicated and sometimes troubling side of big-money environmental giving. 

Kaplan became a billionaire through exploring for, mining, and investing in natural resources, including silver, gold, and natural gas. He remains active in metals mining to this day. Kaplan is the founder and chair of The Electrum Group, an investment firm focused on mining precious metals, and the chair of the gold mining company NovaGold Resources, which is developing a mine in Alaska that it expects to be the largest single gold mine in the US. 

That work sits awkwardly next to what Kaplan told me is his primary passion: wildlife conservation, and in particular, the big cats that Panthera works to protect. Mining is, by any measure, an unusually destructive industry for the environment and for wildlife. So I asked Kaplan: Does he see, in any way, his environmental philanthropy as a counterweight to the impact of his industry? 

It seemed an obvious question to me, but not to Kaplan. “You know, people don’t ask me these questions,” he told me over Zoom from a car. “First of all, I’m not going to spend time on educating you about why mining has a very, very tiny footprint when you compare it to agriculture and climate change. Everyone knows that if it’s a choice between my business and Panthera, I’m always choosing Panthera. With all due respect, I’m busy, so do you have anything [else] that you’d like to discuss?” 

I pressed further, explaining that the public often sees a tension between mining and conserving wildlife. “You’re wrong,” Kaplan told Vox. “Please don’t make things up. When you say this is the public tension, with all due respect, it doesn’t exist. You’re making it up. It’s a very hack journalist thing to say, ‘How do you answer, you know, the criticism of X, Y, and Z.’ I’ve never faced it, ever, nor should I have.”

Kaplan went on to say that mining has no detrimental impact on wild cats — a claim disputed by four mining experts we later interviewed. Mining metals can destroy habitat, leach chemicals into the environment, and accelerate other threats, such as deforestation, that in turn impact wild animals, including big cats. Panthera itself, the group Kaplan cofounded, lists mining as a threat to at least two wild feline species: the flat-headed cat and the Andean cat. Meanwhile, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), the global authority on endangered species, lists “mining and quarrying” as a threat to 19 cat species including jaguars, Andean cats, and tigers.

After I pressed Kaplan about the impact of his mining work, he said we could talk more about it another time. But when I reached out a week later to set something up, he declined. Vox shared a detailed list of our reporting with Kaplan before publishing this, and he declined to comment further.

The point is not that Kaplan’s particular mines are uniquely harmful within the broader extractive industry. They’re not — Kaplan appears to now operate primarily in North America, which means his mines are under a comparatively strict environmental regulatory regime. But there is no denying the fact that mining of any kind at scale has real, documented environmental impacts. (And for metals that are key to renewable energy technologies, those costs may be well worth paying.)

The point is that a man who has spent decades profiting from an industry that experts say harms wild animals — and who has also spent decades now giving tens of millions of dollars to protect them — doesn’t see any connection between the two. 

And he is not alone.

What our conversation highlighted is a bigger problem with environmental philanthropy. For every dollar spent to protect nature, the UN recently reported, more than $30 goes toward destroying it, largely from private industries like energy, agriculture, and mining. The giving, as generous as it sometimes seems, isn’t close to enough on its own. And the people writing the checks are often the same people making business decisions across industries that cause environmental harm in the first place — whether they acknowledge that fact or not.

An open secret in environmental philanthropy

Kaplan, of course, is not the only billionaire in this category.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is, perhaps, the most well-known example. He’s committed $10 billion to fighting climate change and protecting nature through his Bezos Earth Fund, a foundation. (His net worth, as of this writing, is about $275 billion.) At the same time, his company produces an extraordinary amount of carbon and plastic pollution — which is fueling some of the same problems Earth Fund seeks to fix. 

Meanwhile, the billionaire owners of MSC, the world’s largest shipping company, use philanthropy to help restore coral reefs. And yet MSC produces more carbon emissions each year than a small European country, and carbon emissions are a leading threat to reefs globally.

Kjell Inge Røkke, the billionaire chair behind Aker ASA, an investment firm focused in part on oil and gas exploration, has donated some of his wealth to clean the ocean of plastic. Plastic is, of course, made from oil. 

It’s not exactly surprising that these sorts of big-money philanthropists might insulate themselves from uncomfortable contradictions, whether they do so purposefully or not, said Stephen Prince, a multimillionaire who made his fortune from a gift-card printing company. As the wealthy get wealthier, he told Vox, they become “increasingly enshrouded in a bubble of protection that allows them to ignore reality.” Prince, who’s vice-chair of Patriotic Millionaires, a group of wealthy people calling for higher taxes on themselves, ditched his private jet in 2023 because of its enormous environmental footprint. 

A number of philanthropy experts we spoke to echoed this view — that philanthropists tend to avoid addressing the tensions between their source of wealth and their charitable giving. “What you’re describing is very, very common,” said Glen Galaich, author of the recent book Control: Why Big Giving Falls Short, and CEO of the Stupski Foundation. (The foundation is rooted in the wealth of Larry Stupski, the former president and chief operating officer of Charles Schwab Corp.)

But among the financial elite, ignoring reality has far-reaching consequences. When billionaires fail to reckon with this contradiction — between their source of wealth and the target of their donations — they can indulge in a kind of feel-good eco-savior complex while attention is diverted from the much bigger environmental problems that they perpetuate. 

Truly fixing those problems, such as rising temperatures and rates of extinction, requires enormous reforms in industries like agriculture, energy, and mining. It’s hard to see that happening if industry leaders who care about nature don’t acknowledge their own culpability, no matter how much money they donate to charity. 

“The philanthropy world is quite keen to put so much weight on what they’re giving, but they minimize what they’re taking,” said Jessie Bluedorn, a young philanthropist and environmental organizer, referring to the environmental exploits of philanthropists. 

Rich by inheritance from a family fortune made largely in the HVAC industry, Bluedorn funds climate justice organizations through her foundation, the Carmack Collective. She sees her philanthropy as a form of wealth redistribution. “People need to be a bit more honest about the balance sheet of their contribution to our society,” she said.

It should be said that billionaires don’t have to donate anything. A mining mogul could just mine and mine and not support philanthropic causes, whether environmental or not. Many of them do. From one perspective — long the dominant one in philanthropy — choosing to support a cause like wildlife conservation instead of making oneself that much richer is generous. Donating the proceeds from a beloved $18 million drawing is generous. 

It’s also true that choosing to be a philanthropist can open up a billionaire to criticism that their less generous peers don’t face. There are dozens of billionaires on the Forbes Billionaires List whom you’ve probably never heard of, perhaps because they’re not giving money away publicly. And sure, billionaires may donate, in part, because they’re chasing positive attention. But those who privately hoard wealth do less good in the world while more easily avoiding accusations of hypocrisy.

Put another way, “the folks who are super interested in destroying everything aren’t philanthropists,” said Tamara Toles O’Laughlin, CEO of the Environmental Grantmakers Association. EGA is a network of over 200 private foundations, most of which are funded by wealthy families, that support environmental causes. 

Meanwhile, many philanthropists are “breaking their backs to figure out how they can change their relationship to the money they got and what that money is going to do,” O’Laughlin said. 

And there’s another important point: Environmental groups could really use the cash. In 2023, less than 2 percent of global philanthropy — a high-end estimate of $15.8 billion — went toward mitigating climate change, according to the ClimateWorks Foundation. That’s compared to the $78 billion that US higher education reeled in last year. At the same time, the Trump administration has yanked loads of federal funds for conservation and climate groups. (Government grants, however, typically make up a smaller share of an environmental nonprofit’s budget, relative to philanthropy.) 

Senowa Mize-Fox, a climate justice organizer at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, is a sharp critic of the kind of donors who give to climate-related causes without addressing their own, sometimes troubling environmental records. “These billionaires are so self-absorbed, and so far removed from the reality of the majority of people on this planet, that they think that…giving that money away is going to solve everything,” she said. “It’s not. It will not. It never will.” 

But even Mize-Fox has at times opted to accept money from imperfect donors. In a previous job, the organizations she worked with got a big grant opportunity from Bezos Earth Fund. 

“It is all blood money, and the faster that we can divest from the billionaires and reinvest that money into frontline solutions is what matters to me,” Mize-Fox said, noting that most wealth is tied to some kind of exploitation, whether it was last year or 100 years ago.

So then, does it really matter where the money came from if it’s put to good use? 

A new generation of climate advocates — and some philanthropists themselves — are starting to think so. 

A slow reckoning is underway

In the last decade or so, some billionaire donors and their foundations have finally begun to grapple more explicitly with the source of their wealth and the harm it’s caused, often with the help of donor advocacy groups like Patriotic Millionaires and Resource Generation. 

Perhaps the clearest example is the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. It’s one of several foundations started by heirs to John D. Rockefeller’s gigantic Standard Oil fortune. In 2014, the fund pledged to divest its endowment from fossil fuels like coal and tar sands. Its aim was to align its investment practices with the climate justice efforts it has supported since the 1990s. 

In 2020, the much larger Rockefeller Foundation similarly decided to untangle its endowment from fossil fuels. It was a remarkable statement from an organization founded from a $100 million cut — worth about $3.3 billion in today’s dollars — of one of history’s largest oil fortunes.

“The weight of this legacy is not lost on us,” Chan Lai, the Rockefeller Foundation’s chief investment officer, told Vox in a statement. The divestment was “in part a form of accountability,” he said, for the source of the Rockefellers’ fortune.

A number of other major foundations have similarly decided to divest from fossil fuels, spurred in part by the murder of George Floyd. Protests in 2020 pushed grantmakers to more publicly acknowledge the damaging roots of their riches, fund more climate justice work led by people of color, and align their endowments — the investment funds they use to grow their wealth — with their charitable missions.

Some living billionaires have made similar moves. California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer has spoken publicly about his pivot from investing in fossil fuels to funding climate solutions. 

“I went from being somebody who was blithely investing in everything in the economy to, ‘No, no, no, no, that’s not okay,’” he said in a recent interview on the podcast Heated. “And I need to leave billions of dollars on the table to make sure that I’m actually doing the right thing.”

More than a decade ago, Nicky Oppenheimer, Africa’s fourth-richest person and heir to the massive De Beers diamond fortune, sold his family’s $5.1 billion stake. Since then, he’s invested heavily in wildlife conservation.

Is giving enough?

Given the sheer scale of environmental problems — and the gaping hole in funding to fix them — it is, perhaps, a terrible idea to criticize any environmental philanthropist. Vox, itself, relies on grant funding for some of our environmental coverage, including this very piece. Implying that a philanthropist could do more for the planet when they’re already donating a lot is, as Kaplan put it in our call, “an unusual take on things.” 

Yet that response, again, belies a more fundamental issue. The economic system we live in today, which billionaires help perpetuate, is not working. For the roughly $220 billion spent to save nature in 2023, more than $7 trillion went to activities that destroy it, such as subsidies for fossil fuels, according to a recent UN report.  

Environmental philanthropy comes nowhere close to balancing the scales — especially if it does nothing to shrink the larger half of that equation. To borrow an analogy from groups fighting plastic waste, it’s like trying to mop up from an overflowing bathtub without turning off the faucet.  

To truly solve the world’s big environmental problems, harmful industries need to change the way they do business. They need to redirect financial flows that dwarf philanthropy toward less harmful activities — from mining coal to building solar panels, from cutting trees for cattle to investing in plant-based protein. 

“Foundations in the US give away a grand total of $100 billion a year,” Galaich, the Stupski Foundation executive director, told Vox. “[But we] are talking about multitrillion-dollar problems.”

Just ask Bezos, who told CNBC in an interview this month: “If I do my job right, the value to society and civilization from my for-profit companies will be much, much larger than the good that I do with my charitable giving.” Bezos was referring to the value he sees generated by companies like Amazon and his space tech company Blue Origin, which may be debatable, but the point is that the scale of for-profit industry is so great that what is done there matters more than what can be done in philanthropy.

Maybe the companies that Kaplan has invested in are leading the way in sustainability — in making the metal mining industry less harmful to ecosystems and the cats that he adores. The gold company he chairs has a whole page dedicated to its environmental efforts. That’s a question we planned to ask him in a follow-up conversation, though answering it would have required being open to the contradictions at the heart of so much environmental philanthropy. 

Ultimately, it’s hard to understand how an industry will stop creating environmental problems if even its leaders who are most passionate about the environment — so much so that they are giving away their prized possessions for it — don’t first acknowledge that they exist.

Correction, May 26, 12:15 pm: A previous version of this story misstated Glen Galaich’s title. He is the CEO of the Stupski Foundation.

There’s no such thing as a truly pristine landscape — humans have, over millennia, shaped every environment on Earth — but the Boundary Waters wilderness of northeastern Minnesota comes pretty darn close. 

Stretching across more than a million acres near the Canadian border, about four hours north of Minneapolis, the Boundary Waters is a messy patchwork of lakes, streams, and islands with hardly any human infrastructure. At dawn, loons slice through the placid water and, come nightfall, bright stars splatter the dark sky. 

The natural beauty of the Boundary Waters — a federally protected wilderness area — is a magnet for tourism, an enormous economic engine for the region. The Boundary Waters is not only the most visited wilderness area in the country, but also home to federally threatened species like the gray wolf and the Canada lynx.

It’s for this reason that many environmental advocates are worried about a proposed mine just outside the southern edge of the Boundary Waters. A company called Twin Metals Minnesota — a subsidiary of the Chilean copper giant Antofagasta — wants to mine copper, nickel, and other metals deep underneath the wet Earth. And earlier this year, Congress and President Donald Trump removed a major obstacle that had stood in its way: The House and Senate overturned a Biden-era mining ban in the region, allowing Twin Metals to revive its mining push within the watershed.

Environmental advocates warn that a metals mine could be disastrous for the unique Boundary Waters ecosystem. Though mining and other extractive industries are prohibited inside the Boundary Waters, the region’s hydrology is such that any pollution from the mine would likely flow into the wilderness area, potentially harming its forests, wildlife, and the livelihoods of Native Americans, who use the area to fish, hunt, and harvest wild rice. 

And the thing about mines, critics say, is that they nearly always pollute. 

“It’s not a matter of if this mine is going to pollute, it’s a matter of when,” said Ingrid Lyons, executive director of the advocacy group Northeastern Minnesotans for Wilderness, which leads a campaign called Save the Boundary Waters. 

Twin Metals says these concerns are largely rooted in misinformation and it can mine in an environmentally safe way. Like other mining projects seeking approval, this one would have to meet both federal and state environmental safeguards before opening — and Minnesota’s are particularly strong. The company also defends the project on a different kind of environmental grounds, pointing out that the world needs more metals like copper, nickel, and cobalt to build clean energy technologies, such as batteries for electric cars — which is true. If those metals don’t come from Minnesota, they might just come from other countries with less rigorous environmental regulations. 

The upshot is that what may sound like a simple narrative — environmentalists versus a mine — highlights a more complex reality. Mining isn’t inherently bad; yet, it always comes with trade-offs. The question facing Minnesota, where there’s still a path to ban copper mining near the Boundary Waters, is whether the costs will be worth it. 

The proposed Twin Metals mine, briefly explained

While the Boundary Waters is famous for its surface lakes, streams, and forests, it sits atop one of the world’s largest unexploited deposits of copper and nickel, known as the Duluth Complex. It’s these materials that Twin Metals is after. 

According to Twin Metals, miners would excavate and crush ore — metal-rich rock — as far as 4,500 feet down and, then, send it up to the surface. There, they’d remove compounds containing copper, nickel, and other minerals, which they’d ship elsewhere to be refined into usable metals. The company said it would put some of the leftover rock, known as tailings, back underground. The rest would go into a pile on land nearby. 

Twin Metals has been pursuing this planned mine for more than a decade, and it said it’s plowed some $650 million into it. In recent years, however, the project has hit a number of roadblocks. 

In 2022, the Biden administration canceled Twin Metals’s two mineral leases (which had given the company a right to explore and mine in certain areas but not approval for specific projects). And, in early 2023, the administration put a 20-year pause on approving new leases near the Boundary Waters in the region where Twin Metals had been planning to mine. “With an eye toward protecting this special place for future generations, I have made this decision using the best-available science and extensive public input,” then-Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement announcing the decision. 

It was that temporary ban that was recently overturned. Congressional Republicans — led by Minnesota Rep. Pete Stauber — found what is essentially a loophole, through an obscure law called the Congressional Review Act, to not only undo the ban but also to prevent future administrations from issuing similar protections without an act of Congress. 

This move does not reinstate Twin Metals’s two federal mining leases. The company had previously challenged the lease cancellations, back in 2022, and it’s still waiting on a decision from the courts. Congress is also considering a bill that would re-issue those leases to Twin Metals. Should the company acquire leases to mine, the project would then be subject to a review by federal and state agencies, both of which have the authority to block the project. Even with federal approval, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, a state agency, could decide not to grant the company a permit to mine.

Will this mine pollute the wilderness?

Twin Metals says, perhaps unsurprisingly, that its mine will be exceptionally clean. The mine would be underground, the company said, so it would have only a small surface footprint, including a processing facility about the size of a Super Target.

The company also claims that its modern approach won’t produce a water pollutant — common among mines — called acid rock drainage. Metal in the ore is bound to compounds called sulfides. When sulfides react with air and water, they can produce sulfuric acid, which is toxic to plants and animals and can leach heavy metals, such as arsenic, out of rock.

“Twin Metals Minnesota is focused on responsibly developing the minerals in the Duluth Complex,” Kathy Graul, a spokesperson for Twin Metals, told Vox. “Any proposed project in this region, including Twin Metals, must undergo a yearslong, multi-agency regulatory review before earning permits to begin construction of a mine.”

Environmental advocates and the academic researchers I spoke to are not convinced. 

“If the mine is built, there would be runoff, there would be mine discharge, and that discharge would contain sulfate,” said Lyons, of Northeastern Minnesotans for Wilderness. “Because [Twin Metals] can’t present a credible argument otherwise, they attempt to distract from this main point by saying the drainage would not be acidic.” 

Lee Frelich, a forest ecologist at the University of Minnesota who has studied the impacts of sulfide mining, shared similar concerns. Harmful chemicals released from the mined rock are likely to reach the Boundary Waters, where they can damage trees and aquatic animals, through complex, cascading effects. Sulfate pollution can also impair the growth of wild rice, a critical and sacred food resource for Indigenous peoples in the region, according to Emily Onello, a physician and medical researcher at the University of Minnesota Medical School Duluth.

Twin Metals, and those who support this mining project, recognize that mining in the past has created substantial environmental problems. But modern mines are cleaner and safer, they say. This one, they say, would be cleaner and safer. 

That is almost certainly true. Environmental regulations are much stronger now than they were decades ago, when companies would often abandon unprofitable mines without cleaning them up. And if firms like Twin Metals want permits to mine, they’ll need to abide by them. “Projects must prove they can meet the stringent environmental standards that have long been in place in Minnesota before moving forward,” Graul told Vox.

But what no one can really guarantee is that there would be no pollution. 

“New mines are going to be cleaner, they’re going to be better, they’re going to be better permitted — but they also are going to have impacts,” said Dustin Mulvaney, a researcher at San José State University who studies the impacts of resource use. 

That much was made clear in a 2022 report by the Interior Department: “Hardrock minerals mining of sulfide-bearing rock, no matter how it is conducted, poses a risk of environmental contamination due to the potential failure over time of engineered mitigation technology.” In other words, even mining companies that are thoughtful about their footprint run the risk of polluting the environment. (Many of the report authors are still government employees.)

So, it seems fair to say that there is indeed some risk of pollution, especially considering the rise in extreme floods and other weather events that put infrastructure at risk. Mine drainage is also a problem that can last for decades or even centuries, long after the companies that create the problems leave. 

The question, then, becomes: Is that risk worth it? 

The right and wrong place to mine

Proponents of the mine say they have to mine here — that this is where the minerals are, and those minerals are critical to our essential technologies. “We are blessed with these minerals right under our feet,” Rep. Stauber told me, adding that he’s confident that the mine won’t pollute should it get approved by the state.

Julie Lucas, executive director of mining advocacy group MiningMinnesota, has repeatedly made the important point that we’ll need to produce more minerals for the energy transition. “Mining is fundamental to our lives today and more important than ever for our future,” Lucas, the former water resources director for Twin Metals, said in a 2024 commentary in the Minnesota Star Tribune. “We aren’t doing the Earth any favors by declaring a definitive ‘no’ against potential mining projects.”

What mining companies often don’t talk about, however, is whether there are less risky alternatives. “There is almost always a better place to build that infrastructure,” said Grace Wu, who studies the trade-offs of clean-energy technologies at University of California Santa Barbara.  

Certainly, there are other places to mine copper in the US, Mulvaney said, most of which currently comes from Arizona. There’s also already an active nickel mine in Michigan. What’s more is that the US throws out a lot of copper each year; in 2023, for example, only about a third of post-consumer copper was recycled. The same politicians who are pushing for more mining, citing urgent supply needs, haven’t been addressing the lack of metals recycling, Mulvaney said. 

“There’s no place that has to inherently be mined,” Mulvaney said. 

The opponents I spoke to weren’t arguing that the US should export mining — and related ecological problems — to other countries, which often have less stringent health and environmental safeguards and law enforcement. But there are more acceptable places to mine in Minnesota, such as in watersheds that are already industrialized, they said.

There are only so many intact expanses of wilderness like the Boundary Waters left in the country, said Frelich of University of Minnesota. The value they provide to future generations is infinite, he said, and dwarfs what we can gain from one mine. 

Put another way: It’s not mining that’s the problem; it’s mining precisely here. 

“It’s just the wrong place for this type of mine,” said Alex Falconer, a Democratic state representative in Minnesota who also works for the Save the Boundary Waters Campaign. “Society can pick and choose where mining should happen.” 

Under the first Trump administration, for example, then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke announced a 20-year ban on hard-rock mining near Yellowstone National Park. At the time, Zinke, now a Montana representative and whose state includes a sliver of Yellowstone, said “there are places where it is appropriate to mine and places where it is not.” 

A state bill seeks to ban copper mining near the Boundary Waters

What happens now is murky, though, it’s unlikely that the Trump administration will stand in the way of Twin Metals. (What might be helping their cause: A lobbying firm hired by the company was founded and chaired by Trump’s other former Interior secretary, David Bernhardt.) That means they could get federal mining leases soon. 

The fight then turns to the state, where Rep. Falconer is pushing a state bill that would prevent Minnesota regulators from issuing permits for copper mining in the Boundary Waters and its headwaters. Falconer says he hopes it will come to a vote early next year and — pending the results of the midterm elections — become law. “The watershed of the Boundary Waters is sacred to me,” he said. “It’s off limits.”

If efforts like this to block mining in the watershed fail, and Twin Metals starts digging up metals, Lyons says it will be a warning for other natural treasures across the US. “If something bad can happen in the Boundary Waters,” she says, “it can happen anywhere.”

Vox is setting out to discover a new animal species in the heart of New York City.

In collaboration with several research and nonprofit groups — including the Central Park Conservancy and Prospect Park Alliance in NYC, NTNU University Museum in Norway, and the Center for Biodiversity Genomics in Canada — we’re sampling flying insects in Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park this summer. The goal is to find something that’s never been documented before. 

To this day, the bulk of animal life on Earth remains unknown, especially in the insect world. That fact — along with the advance of genetic sequencing tools — is motivating our NYC bug hunt.

We’ll focus our search on insects that are both incredibly diverse and poorly understood, including parasitoid wasps (which lay their eggs in other insects) and flies in the family Phoridae (known as the scuttle flies). These animal groups fall into a category called “dark taxa” because most of their species — of which there are tens of thousands — are still undescribed by science and thus “in the dark.” 

We’ll wrap up the collection process at the end of August, and then work with scientists to see if we might have discovered something new. We’ll post any project updates here.

For more information about the project and related stories, please see below.

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NYC is full of undiscovered species — and we’ve hatched a plan to find one

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The search for Earth’s most mysterious creatures is turning up extraordinary results

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Photos reveal strange sea creatures that scientists have never seen before

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DNA from wild organisms could save your life — but there’s a catch

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In defense of flies. Yes, really.

It lives in a glass castle deep under the sea. 

It’s not a character from The Little Mermaid but a very real, very mysterious marine worm. Known as Dalhousiella yabukii, the worm resides inside a glass sea sponge — a simple marine animal that forms a glass-like skeleton — in the cold, dark waters off the coast of Japan. And it’s just one of a massive trove of marine animal species that scientists say they recently discovered. 

This week, the Ocean Census — a project that has set out to accelerate the discovery of sea life — announced that it has found 1,121 previously unknown ocean species since last April. That marks a massive jump in the number of newly discovered marine species in a single year, according to Oliver Steeds, director of the Ocean Census, a joint mission of the UK-based nonprofit Nekton and Japan’s largest philanthropic organization, the Nippon Foundation. Some of the other newly found creatures include fish, rays, sponges, and soft corals (you can see more of them below). 

Though it may seem that Earth is already largely explored, the vast majority of animal species on Earth — perhaps as many as 90 percent of them — remain undescribed. “This is really a planetary blindspot,” said Steeds, who’s also the founder and chief executive of Nekton.

The Ocean Census, which launched three years ago, is trying to close the gap in the marine realm by exploring remote ocean regions with the help of high-tech submersibles and taxonomists. And to that end, this large batch of species is an important step forward — with one major caveat.

Meet some of the weird creatures they found 

While the search for life beyond Earth has been a magnet for public attention, missions like the Ocean Census reveal that there is a lot we still don’t know about life on our home planet — much of which looks pretty darn alien. 

Most critters that the expeditions revealed are pretty small, like this striking ribbon worm. Found in the waters near Timor-Leste in Southeast Asia, the worm’s bright colors may be a signal to predators that it produces defensive toxins, according to a press release announcing the new findings. Such toxins may be useful in drug development; scientists have previously investigated chemicals produced by similar worms to treat cognitive disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Remarkably, the discovery effort also uncovered larger animals, which have likely managed to evade detection because they live at such great depths and in less-explored regions. 

The most charismatic among them is, perhaps, this new species of “ghost shark” that scientists found off the coast of Australia. Though distantly related to sharks and rays, ghost sharks are not actually sharks at all but chimaeras, a deep-sea fish with a skeleton made of cartilage instead of bone.

In the same region, scientists also found an unknown species of ray… 

…and an unfamiliar example of what’s known as a catshark. They’re bottom dwellers with slender bodies, and some of them apparently have a feline appearance (I’m not seeing it in this particular fish, which was found deep underwater in Australia.)  

Then there are animals that don’t look like animals at all. Like this unfamiliar sea sponge found in the South Atlantic, not far from Antarctica. Belonging to a group of animals known as the ping-pong ball sponges (for obvious reasons), this animal is carnivorous and uses those balls — which are covered in tiny Velcro-like hooks — to entrap unsuspecting prey drifting by, such as small crustaceans. 

Also in the South Atlantic, scientists found an unknown variety of “sea pen,” a kind of soft coral, more than 2,600 feet below the surface. It’s not one individual animal but a colony of thousands of genetically identical polyps, soft-bodied creatures with tentacles. 

(You can see more of the alien-like species found through the Ocean Census here.) 

Are these species actually new? 

The announcement from the Ocean Census says that scientists “discovered” more than 1,100 “new” species in a single year. Those words must be taken with a grain of salt. 

Proving that a species is new to science is difficult. It typically requires that taxonomists comb through existing museum collections and academic literature to demonstrate that, based on anatomical, genetic, or other traits, what they have has not been documented before. They can then submit their evidence for peer review and publication — the typical process through which a species is formally described and officially named, thus becoming a new species.

Many of the discoveries announced by the Ocean Census, however, have not yet gone through that level of due diligence and have not been formally described, according to Greg Rouse, a marine taxonomist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. That means it’s not clear that all of those species are, in fact, new to science. 

As the Ocean Census points out in its announcement, the time between collecting a species and formally describing it as new takes about 13 years on average. That means some animals could go extinct before they’re even described in the scientific literature, the group says. “But that 13 years is there for a reason,” said Rouse, who isn’t involved in the Ocean Census project.

Formally describing and naming a species not only confirms that it’s new, but it also makes the species easier to study and conserve, such as through laws that protect named endangered species. 

“The formal description process carries out the actual work to confirm novelty and provides the ‘passport’ for that new species — its official record,” said Tammy Horton, a research scientist at the UK’s National Oceanography Centre. “Without this, the formally recognized name, the species effectively does not exist for science, and therefore also for policy — unnamed species cannot be protected.”

Karen Osborn, a taxonomist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, similarly expressed skepticism about the announcement. Discovery alone is not enough, said Osborn, who’s not directly involved in the Ocean Census. “I don’t feel like saying, ‘Oh, look, we discovered something new’ should be given the status of something being described — until you’ve actually done the work to show that it’s something unique,” Osborn said. But, she said, “it’s a step in the right direction.”

A significant number of species uncovered by the Ocean Census and its partners are, in fact, already described in the scientific literature, Steeds, of Ocean Census, told me. He didn’t know how many. “It is not for us to do that,” he said of formally describing the species. (In many cases, taxonomists involved in the discoveries will later put in the time to formally describe them.) “Our job is discovery and to accelerate discovery,” Steeds said, which is the first step toward the formal new species description. 

Horton, who’s also not directly affiliated with the Ocean Census, emphasized this point, too: “It is important to recognise that the identification or ‘discovery’ process is a fundamental part of the pipeline towards the ultimate goal of description of a species as new to science,” she told Vox. “You cannot have one without the other.”

Might some of these species not, in fact, be new? “It is something that we all need to be aware of,” Steeds told me. “Species discovery, species description are always a hypothesis — that’s the nature of it. And things do change.” (Horton suspects it’s not very common for taxonomists to believe something is new to science and later find out that it’s an individual of an already described species.)

If there’s one thing that the Ocean Census’s findings are helping reveal with absolute certainty, it’s that so much of the planet’s biodiversity remains a mystery. That’s exciting and hopeful. 

“I would love people to know how much we don’t know about how much is out there,” Osborn said. “We’ve barely scratched the surface on understanding our world.”

New York City is one of the most well-explored places on Earth. 

Established nearly four centuries ago by an influential Dutchman, the city has since grown into the largest and most densely populated metropolis in the country, with no fewer than 28,000 people per square mile, or about one person per 1,000 square feet. People are everywhere.

That’s what makes this so astonishing: Scientists believe there are almost certainly hundreds, if not thousands, of undiscovered animal species living in the middle of New York, among the city’s parks, gardens, and streets. I’m not talking about the big stuff — birds, frogs, and so on — but small critters, including flies, wasps, and other insects. 

It’s not that NYC is some sort of global bug hot spot. (Despite what it might feel like in the summer, it is not.) Rather, the bulk of species in many insect groups, wherever they’re found, remains unknown. As one example, there may be as many as 1.8 million species globally in a single fly family called Cecidomyiidae, known as the gall midges. Yet only about 7,000 of them have been described in the scientific record and are thus known species. Broadly speaking, taxonomists estimate that as much as 90 percent of all animal species on Earth are still unknown. That is, of course, nearly all of them. 

This summer, Vox is setting out to play a small role in filling these giant gaps in the global tree of life — by trying to discover a new species, right here in New York. It’s a goal we understand to be both attainable and useful: Documenting the world’s biodiversity is essential to any argument and effort to protect it. And to be clear, protecting insects is among the most self-serving acts humans can partake in, given the role bugs play in pollinating our foods, cleaning up our feces, and feeding other wildlife.  

Our approach to this project relies on insect sampling in Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, in collaboration with the Central Park Conservancy, Prospect Park Alliance, Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s University Museum, and University of Guelph’s Centre for Biodiversity Genomics. 

Here’s how the process will work. 

Step 1: Collect insects

In both Central Park and Prospect Park, we’ve deployed a tent-like structure called a Malaise trap to capture small flying insects, including flies and parasitoid wasps — the latter a vastly understudied group of wasps that lay their eggs in other insects. Bugs that fly into the trap are funneled into a jar of ethanol, where they’re killed and preserved. The traps are designed to capture only small flying critters, and usually do not entrap things like dragonflies, butterflies, and spiders. 

The traps will be open and collecting insects for three summer months: June, July, and August. 

Step 2: Sequence their DNA

Every month or so, we’ll send the insects we collect in the city to a lab in Canada called the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics (CBG). There, scientists will begin to sequence small fragments of their genomes, producing distinct, genetic “barcodes” for each of them. These barcodes are unique genetic IDs that help differentiate one species from another.

Once CBG scientists have barcodes for our NYC insects, they can then compare those IDs to the millions of barcodes for animals in North America and around the world that researchers have already sequenced. It’s sort of like running fingerprints from a crime scene through an FBI database to identify a suspect. If there’s no match — meaning, there’s no record for animals with those same genetic IDs — that will indicate that what we found may be new.  

Step 3: Bring in the expert taxonomists

If genetic sequencing turns up bugs with unique, matchless codes, CBG will send those specimens to the entomologists who know them best, for a more thorough analysis. For example, Emily Hartop, a taxonomist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who’s helping lead the project, is a global expert in scuttle flies; we’ll send potentially new scuttle flies to her. Meanwhile, Ranjith AP, a taxonomist at CBG, will review any potentially new wasps in the families Braconidae and Ichneumonidae. Should genetic sequencing turn up any potentially new bees, we’ll send those to the American Museum of Natural History for examination. 

The job of Hartop, AP, and other taxonomists is to take a closer look at the specimens’ genetic codes and anatomies, and review records for similar species that have already been described (those that are named in the scientific literature). Should that process also fail to surface a match — with any already-described species — that means what we have is new. 

Step 4: Give the species a name

The next and final (and admittedly most exciting) step is to publish a description of the species, including evidence of its novelty, along with a name, in an academic journal, such as Zootaxa. That will make the new species official by adding it to the formal scientific record.

What will we name a new species, should we be lucky enough to discover one? We remain open to suggestions.

Ultimately, a project of this size is not going to make a noticeable dent in describing life on Earth, perhaps not even life in NYC. What we hope it will do is reveal the scale of the unknown and at a time when the planet is losing so much. Many insect groups are declining, including important pollinators like bees, wasps, and butterflies. And that means that unless we ramp up the rate of discovery, we will almost certainly lose species to extinction before we even know they exist, let alone what they do and why they’re important.

For more information, please visit the project homepage.