The Brief

Officially, Earth boasts roughly 2 million species. Unofficially, scientists suspect there could be millions — perhaps over 100 million — more.

Each year, scientists add thousands of new species to the scientific record in an attempt to get a better count. Some discoveries stem from intrepid adventures deep into the jungle, while others come from reanalyzing old specimens stored in dusty museum collections.

Each new plant, fish, beetle or bird is a unique and irreplaceable answer to the question of how to make a living on Earth, and scientists are racing to describe them. Climate change and the ongoing biodiversity crisis add extra urgency to these efforts, since many of these new species risk going extinct just as soon as they're discovered.

Here are five species that struck NPR as especially wonderful, both because of the biology of the species, as well as the stories behind their discovery.

Clouded tiger-cat

Biologist Tadeu de Oliveira remembers well the email that sparked his decade-and-a-half effort to propose a new species of tiger-cat.

"Knowing them so deeply as I do, I knew this was not just some sort of variation," he said. "I knew it would go deeper, way deeper."

De Oliveira, a tiger-cat expert at Maranhão State University in Brazil, has spent many hours looking at the two described tiger-cats that prowl South America. But the photos in that email, from camera traps in the Andes mountains, struck him as different. The house-cat-sized creature in these photos had more irregular spots, seemingly thicker fur, and just moved differently than the known species, he told NPR.

He teamed up with over 40 other scientists to formally describe the clouded tiger-cat (Leopardis pardinoides) as a new species. The investigation revealed the clouded tiger-cat as genetically and geographically distinct from the other two species, the northern tiger-cat and southern tiger-cat. While those species stick to the lowlands of savannahs and coastal forests, the clouded-tiger cat is only found in the mountains of Central and South America.

They also discovered some unusual physical differences.

"Females have only one pair of nipples, not two, as in the other tiger-cats," de Oliveira says. "That's totally different."

However, the researchers estimate that the current range of all three tiger-cats is likely about half of what it once was, putting them at risk of extinction, de Oliveira says.

Fluffy longhorn beetle

Fluffy longhorn beetle on a leaf.

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James Tweed

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Sometimes, new species are discovered entirely by chance.

Entomologist James Tweed, a Ph.D. student at the University of Queensland in Australia, was camping south of Brisbane when he was walking to brush his teeth one morning and a flash of white on the ground made him do a double take.

"Initially, I just thought it was a bird dropping. But the fact it was bright white, which is not something you'd normally see on a leaf in the forest understory, made me think I should look closer," he said. "I'm glad I did, because it turned out to be this spectacular beetle."

Tweed had never seen a longhorn beetle like this one before, with spindly white hairs sprouting from all over its body. He snapped some photos and sent them to local beetle experts, who confirmed they'd never seen such a bug either.

"For it to be as striking as this one and not to have been found previously was really surprising," Tweed says, especially since researchers are often out studying the area.

The beetle was so different that it turned out to be a whole new genus, which is a broader taxonomic classification than species. Tweed and his colleagues named it Excastra albopilosa—Excastra being Latin for "from the camp" and albopilosa for "white and hairy."

Its flashy appearance may have evolved to resemble a beetle infected with an insect-killing fungus, Tweed says, which could deter predators. "But it's guesswork at this point," he says.

Tweed's campground find is the only reported sighting and specimen to date, he says. "I'm waiting for that day when another observation pops up on our nature list and we can kind of piece together a bit more information about the species."

Superstar of an orchid

S. impraedicta is a newly described orchid in Madagascar.

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Marie Savignac

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Orchids are prized for their elaborate, ostentatious flowers, but a new species from Madagascar described this year is notable because of a really long tube. Technically called a nectar spur, the tube funnels sugary liquid to pollinators who can reach it, and this new species has one that's over a foot long.

Considering the tens of thousands of species of flowering plants, "this is the longest nectar spur of any, relative to flower size," says João Farminhão, a botanist at the University of Coimbra Botanic Garden in Portugal. "In absolute terms, it's the third longest ever."

It's topped by Darwin's Orchid, which is also endemic to Madagascar. Upon inspecting the 17-inch-long spur of that specimen in the 1860s, the famed biologist wrote to a friend, "Good Heavens what insect can suck it." Later, he predicted there must be a moth on the island with an equally long proboscis, a prediction of how species can co-evolve. Sure enough, two decades later scientists identified an African hawkmoth that pollinated the orchid.

S. impraedicta is only distantly related to Darwin's orchid, but it, too, relies on a similarly long-tongued hawkmoth to pollinate its ivory-white flowers. While the orchid was first collected in 2009, it was officially described just this year by Farminhão and his colleagues.

Despite its fresh debut, the plant is already endangered by mining projects in Madagascar, which clear the trees it lives on. To protect it from orchid hunters, Farminhão and his colleagues are withholding its exact location.

Malagasy frogs

Guibemantis ambakoana, Ambakoana means 'living within Pandanus' in Malagasy.

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Miguel Vences

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There are frogs that live their entire lives in the tiny pools of water that collect on the leaves of a pandan tree in Madagascar.

"When I was doing an independent research project in the rainforest, I noticed these frogs that looked really different from anything I was seeing in the guidebook," said Hugh Gabriel, who now works at the Bell Museum of Natural History at the University of Minnesota.

The frogs were hidden within the palm-like leaves of a pandan tree, and they struck Gabriel as somewhat smaller and differently colored than the species he'd been seeing in his research. He reached out to the author of his guidebook, who confirmed Gabriel's hunch, and they collaborated to describe three new species.

The frogs spend their entire lives in pandans, which resemble yucca or aloe plants, but can grow much taller. The water that pools at the base of the leaves supports veritable mini-ecosystems, and these frogs likely munch on the invertebrates that also call the pandans home. The frogs' calls sound like "rain dropping onto leaves," Gabriel says, but not much else is known about how they make a living.

"I was really under no impression that this was a discovery in the total sense of the word," says Gabriel. "The Malagasy people have been living there for a few thousand years and certainly knew these frogs existed." In acknowledgement of that, he and his colleagues named the new species Guibemantis ambakoana, G. vakoa and G. rianasoa after the Malagasy words for pandan and a nearby waterfall. These three species add to the more than 400 species of amphibians on the island.

Skeleton panda sea squirts

Skeleton panda sea squirts

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Naohiro Hasegawa

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Catch a quick glimpse of this photo and you might mistake the group of new sea squirt species for a gaggle of underwater trick-or-treaters dressed like panda bear skeletons.

Photos of the spooky sea squirts were circulating online among diving enthusiasts in Japan before Naohiro Hasegawa, a biologist at the University of Hokkaido, saw a tweet with the critters. He knew of no sea squirts with that striking coloration, and he and his colleagues set off to Kumejima, a tiny island west of Okinawa, to collect specimens. Sure enough, morphological and genetic analyses confirmed it was a new species, which they dubbed Clavelina ossipandae.

Sea squirts live their lives fixed to the ground, filtering out phytoplankton as they suck water through their mouths. The skeleton-like lines of this new sea squirt are actually blood vessels that run through the sea squirt's gills, the researchers say. It's unclear why the sea squirts have their black-and-white markings, but it's almost certainly not a tactic to score more Halloween candy.

It's not everyday you can credit one of the world's biggest pop stars for rekindling your memories of a place.

So, thank you, Harry Styles, for reminding us of the mesmerizing, confounding, iconic and the brashly weird wonders of the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown L.A.

Last week, the singer returned to pop music after a four-year respite with the surprise release of a new album. Along came the first music video for “Aperture,” a breezy electronic number that unfolds as a non-sequitur romp through a sleek hotel — beginning as an inexplicable chase, then breaks into a long, nifty dance sequence, and crescendos in a hat tip to Dirty Dancing.

The absurdity makes for a nice fit.

In the video, when Styles steps onto the escalator before realizing he is being followed, a distant recognition went off in my head.

The escalator at the Bonaventure.

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Fiona Ng

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LAist

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The Bonaventure has no bad angles.

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Fiona Ng

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LAist

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That hunch grew more certain when he and his pursuer tumbled down a spiral of staircases that's almost Hitchcockian in its composition.

Spiraling staircase inside the Bonaventure.

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Fiona Ng

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LAist

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The Bonaventure's curved skylight.

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Fiona Ng

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LAist

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And later, when the two somersault through a cocktail lounge with Los Angeles twinkling in the backdrop, the setting could only have been The BonaVista, the revolving restaurant (yes, it really spins) on the 34th floor of the Bonaventure.

Making a cameo

Styles is the latest among a long list of artists and moviemakers to make use of the location. In 1993's In the Line of Fire, Clint Eastwood and John Malkovich had their big shoot-out finale there, and managed to squeeze in a little repartee inside one of its famous capsule elevators. More recently, Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s "Luther" and Maroon 5 and LISA's "Priceless" prominently featured the hotel.

Bonaventure under construction in the mid-1970s.

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Los Angeles Public Library Institutional Collection / LAPL

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The Bonaventure in 1987.

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James Ruebsamen

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Los Angeles Herald Examiner Photo Collection / LAPL

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Since it opened in January 1977, the behemoth — towering hundreds of feet over Figueroa Street with some 1,400 rooms and the reigning title as Los Angeles's largest hotel — all but demanded the attention.

The Bonaventure was built between 1974 and 1976 in the midst of Bunker Hill's redevelopment that started two decades back with land seizures through eminent domain and the evictions of thousands of low-income Angelenos.

The ambition was to remake the urban core into a world-class arts and cultural destination.

The atrium of the Bonaventure.

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Fiona Ng

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LAist

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Architect and real estate developer John C. Portman brought his signature vaulting atrium to the task. For the Hyatt in his hometown of Atlanta, that feature was 22 stories high. For the Bonaventure, the atrium was seven.

The Bonaventure’s interior has been described as Brutalist in style, a raw concrete maze of dangling lounges, shooting columns, swirling staircases, curved walkways, glass elevators and seemingly dead ends. Its mirrored and cylindrical exterior has been called postmodern and futuristic.

Raw concrete of the Bonaventure.

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Fiona Ng

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LAist

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The staircases.

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Fiona Ng

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LAist

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Portman's idea was to create a city within its walls, and populated his creation with shops, restaurants and other amenities so people simply wouldn’t have to leave.

A returned visit

I have always thought of it looking a little dated, like a sad disco ball.

A few days ago, I went to the Bonaventure again for old times’ sake. I took this same walk several times a week for six years, when I worked downtown in the mid-aughts. Back then, this network of pedways was really our only way to get to any place for coffee or lunch.

View of the Bonaventure taken from the 3rd and Fig. pedway.

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Fiona Ng

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LAist

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The Bonaventure was one of our options, with its food court on the fourth floor. Sometimes, I spent my lunch simply walking its various floors, entranced by the vast, hushed space that felt somehow endless and somewhat abandoned. I have always thought it was the perfect setting for a chase scene.

On my latest visit, the lines and curves were clashing and crisscrossing in ways that I hadn't before noticed. Cultural theorists have famously written about the disorientation the building is said to inspire — how easily you can feel lost.

And what a privilege it is.

Thanks, Harry, for the nudge to go and spend a couple leisurely hours getting lost in a quintessentially Los Angeles riddle.

Everyone should do it.

Oliver Mayer is an award-winning playwright and professor of dramatic writing at USC. But recently he found out his students love him for yet another talent: the "most calming professor."

“Are my students falling asleep in my class?" he said, joking.

Mayer won a competition at the university set up by the Trojan Health Club and mental health company Calm to find the most tranquil teacher. Students voted him most calming professor and he was awarded the opportunity to record a Sleep Story for Calm app users.

The professor said, for him, it means more than ever to be considered a voice of calm, especially in what he calls the “upside down days” we’re living through. And Mayer also enjoyed being a twilight tour guide for his city.

“I do love the idea that not only might I be calming someone with a route through Los Angeles, but I’m also hopefully inspiring students and everyone else to explore their cities, Los Angeles and otherwise,” he said.

Mayer's sunset trek includes an audio journey to the Griffith Observatory:
 
“Our climb ends. Here we are: The perfect place to fall asleep under the stars," he says on the recording.

"And we easily find a spot to park.”

Maybe the most calming words an Angeleno can hear.

Hear for yourself

Mayer’s Sleep Story is available on the Calm app. You can check out a preview here.

Big Bear’s famous bald eagle nest has taken a turn — both of Jackie and Shadow’s eggs have been attacked by ravens.

In the nest overlooking Big Bear Lake, a raven could be seen poking a large hole into, and potentially eating, one of the eagle eggs. The intrusion was noticed on a popular YouTube livestream run by the nonprofit Friends of Big Bear Valley.

Jenny Voisard, the organization’s media and website manager, confirmed the crack in Friends of Big Bear Valley’s official Facebook group, which has nearly 400,000 members, after Jackie and Shadow were away from the nest, and eggs, for several hours Friday.

Voisard told LAist one of the eggs may still be partly intact, but both eggs are believed to be breached. Jackie returned to their nest shortly after the raven left to lay on the remaining egg, according to organization records.

“Our hearts are with Jackie and Shadow always and we wrap our arms around them,” Voisard wrote. “Our hearts are also with you eagle fam, we know how you are feeling now."

“Step away from the screen when needed,” she continued in the post. “Try and rest tonight.”

How we got here

Jackie laid the first egg of the season around 4:30 p.m. last Friday and the second egg around 5:10 p.m. Monday as thousands of eager fans watched online.

It was almost exactly a year after the feathered duo welcomed the first egg of the 2025 season.

Bald eagles generally have one clutch per season, according to Friends of Big Bear Valley. A second clutch is possible if the eggs don’t make it through the early incubation process.

For example, Jackie laid a second clutch in February 2021 after the first round of eggs was broken or destroyed by ravens the month before.

Jackie and Shadow may have the left the nest unattended Friday because they knew on some level "that not everything was right," Voisard wrote.

"We are hopeful however, because bald eagles can lay replacement clutches if something happens early enough in the season," she continued. "The fact that the raven came to do its job so quickly may be just what Jackie and Shadow needed."

A raven is believed to have breached both eggs in Big Bear's famous nest.

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Friends of Big Bear Valley

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YouTube

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Watch the nest

This is a developing story and will be updated.

The Meta researcher’s tone was alarmed.

“oh my gosh yall IG is a drug,” the user experience specialist allegedly wrote to a colleague, referring to the social media platform Instagram. “We’re basically pushers... We are causing Reward Deficit Disorder bc people are binging on IG so much they can’t feel reward anymore.”

The researcher concluded that users’ addiction was “biological and psychological” and that company management was keen to exploit the dynamic. “The top down directives drive it all towards making sure people keep coming back for more,” the researcher added.

The conversation was included recently as part of a long-simmering lawsuit in a California-based federal court. Condensing complaints from hundreds of school districts and state attorneys general, including California’s, the suit alleges that social media companies knew about risks to children and teens but pushed ahead with marketing their products to them, putting profits above kids’ mental health. The suit seeks monetary damages and changes to companies’ business practices.

The suit, and a similar one filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, targets Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Snap. The cases are exposing embarrassing internal conversations and findings at the companies, particularly Facebook and Instagram owner Meta, further tarnishing their brands in the public eye. They are also testing a particular vector of attack against the platforms, one that targets not so much alarming content as design and marketing decisions that accelerated harms. The upshot, some believe, could be new forms of regulation, including at the federal level.

One document discussed during a hearing this week included a 2016 email from Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook’s live videos feature. In the email, the Meta chief wrote, “we’ll need to be very good about not notifying parents / teachers” about teens’ videos.

“If we tell teens’ parents about their live videos, that will probably ruin the product from the start,” he wrote, according to the email.

In slides summarizing internal tech company documents, released this week as part of the litigation, an internal YouTube discussion suggested that accounts from minors in violation of YouTube policies were actively on the platform for years, producing content an average of “938 days before detection – giving them plenty of time to create content and continue putting themselves and the platform at risk.”

A spokesperson for Meta didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

A YouTube spokesperson, José Castañeda, described the slide released this week as “a cherry-picked view of a much larger safety framework” and said the company uses more than one tool to detect underage accounts, while taking action every time it finds an underage account.

In court, the companies have argued that they are making editorial decisions permitted by the First Amendment,. That trial is set for June.

The state court litigation moved into jury selection this week, increasing the pressure on social media companies.

While the state and federal cases differ slightly, the core argument is the same: that social media companies deliberately designed their products to hook young people, leading to disastrous but foreseeable consequences.

“It's led to mental health issues, serious anxiety, depression, for many. For some, eating disorders, suicidality,” said Previn Warren, co-lead counsel on the case in federal court. “For the schools, it’s been lost control over the educational environment, inability of teachers to really control their classrooms and teach.”

A federal suit

Meta and other companies have faced backlash for years over their treatment of kids on their platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. Parents, lawmakers and privacy advocates have argued that social media contributed to a mental health crisis among young people and that tech companies failed to act when that fact became clear.

Those allegations gained new scrutiny last month when a brief citing still-sealed documents in the federal suit became public.

While the suit also names TikTok, Snap, and Google as defendants, the filing includes allegations against Meta that are especially detailed.

In the more than 200-page filing, for example, the plaintiffs argue that Meta deliberately misled the public about how damaging their platforms were.

Warren pointed to claims in the brief that Meta researchers found that 55% of Facebook users had “mild” problematic use of the platform, while 3.1 percent had “severe” problems. Zuckerberg, according to the brief, pointed out that 3% of billions would still be millions of people.

But the brief claims the company published research noting only that "we estimate (as an upper bound) that 3.1% of Facebook users in the US experience problematic use.”

“That’s a lie,” Warren said.

In response to recent interest in the suits, Meta published a blog post this month arguing that the litigation “oversimplifies” the issue of youth mental health, and pointed to past instances where it has worked with parents and families with features to protect kids.

The federal case faced a key hearing this week, as the defendants argued that a judge should summarily dismiss the case. A decision on that motion is likely coming in the next few weeks, Warren said.

Social media companies, like other web-based services, receive protection from some legal claims under a part of federal law. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act gives legal immunity to website operators for potentially illegal content on their platforms.

Mary Anne Franks, a legal scholar in First Amendment issues at George Washington University who has long studied Section 230, said rather than online content in and of itself, the recent social media cases are focusing on the design of the platforms and their marketing.

“The litigation strategy is saying it's the way that you're providing that space and you're pushing this toward individuals that are vulnerable that is really an issue here,” she said. “It's your own conduct, not somebody else's.”

The companies are making key decisions behind the scenes, she said, and could be held responsible for them.

“You were manipulating things,” she said the plaintiffs are arguing. “You were deliberately making choices about what comes to the top or what is directly accessible or may be tempting to vulnerable users.”

A California state trial begins

Meanwhile, the related state lawsuit went to jury selection this week.

The case, which makes similar claims about personal injury caused by the social media companies, has also drawn nationwide attention, and major industry figures like Zuckerberg are expected to appear on the stand.

The personal injury case focuses on an unnamed plaintiff who claims to have had her mental health damaged by an addiction to social media.

In a last-minute development this week, TikTok and Snap reportedly reached undisclosed settlements in the case. Meta and Google are continuing as defendants.

Franks said these trials could be a tipping point in regulating how tech companies design and market their products. While the companies have faced scrutiny in the past, she said, the glare of examination at trial could be especially bright.

“There's always been talk of it and the members of Congress have kind of said, ‘maybe we'll regulate you,’” she said. “I think now the platforms are really getting nervous about what this is going to mean if they look really bad on the stand.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.