A new native bee species with tiny devil-like “horns” named Megachile (Hackeriapis) lucifer has been discovered in Western Australia’s Goldfields, highlighting how much remains unknown about Australia’s native pollinators.
Dr Kit Prendergast
The striking new bee was found during surveys of a critically endangered wildflower Marianthus aquilonarius that grows only in the Bremer Range region, which is between the towns of Norseman and Hyden.
Lead author Curtin Adjunct Research Fellow Dr Kit Prendergast, from the Curtin School of Molecular and Life Sciences, said the female bee’s unusual horned face inspired its name lucifer – Latin for “light-bringer,” but also a playful nod to the devilish look.
A female Megachile Lucifer.
“I discovered the species while surveying a rare plant in the Goldfields and noticed this bee visiting both the endangered wildflower and a nearby mallee tree,” Dr Prendergast said.
The two plants visited by Megachile Lucifer. Left: Marianthus aquilonaris. Right: Eucalyptus livida.
“The female had these incredible little horns on her face. When writing up the new species description I was watching the Netflix show Lucifer at the time, and the name just fit perfectly. I am also a huge fan of the Netflix character Lucifer so it was a no-brainer.
A female Megachile Lucifer.
“DNA barcoding confirmed the male and female were the same species and that it didn’t match any known bees in DNA databases, nor did the specimens I had collected morphologically match any in museum collections.
“It’s the first new member of this bee group to be described in more than 20 years, which really shows how much life we still have to discover – including in areas that are at risk of mining, such as the Goldfields.”
Dr Prendergast said the discovery highlighted the importance of understanding native bees before their habitats are disturbed.
“Because the new species was found in the same small area as the endangered wildflower, both could be at risk from habitat disturbance and other threatening processes like climate change,” Dr Prendergast said.
“Many mining companies still don’t survey for native bees, so we may be missing undescribed species, including those that play crucial roles in supporting threatened plants and ecosystems.
“Without knowing which native bees exist and what plants they depend on, we risk losing both before we even realise they’re there.”
Dr Kit Prendergast
The publication of the research coincides with Australian Pollinator Week, an annual celebration of the crucial role bees, butterflies and other insects play in maintaining healthy ecosystems and food production.
The research was supported by the Atlas of Living Australia, the Goldfields Environmental Management Group and the USDA Agricultural Research Service.
Research article:
Prendergast KS, Campbell JW (2025) Megachile (Hackeriapis) lucifer (Hymenoptera, Megachilidae), a new megachilid with demon-like horns that visits the Critically Endangered Marianthus aquilonaris (Pittosporaceae). Journal of Hymenoptera Research 98: 1017-1030. https://doi.org/10.3897/jhr.98.166350
Oak gall wasps and their predators don’t have the panache of butterflies, but they’re attracting growing interest among both scientists and naturalists.
Only 1 to 8 millimeters long, these small insects create the tumor-like plant growths known as “galls.” Small as a pinhead or large as an apple, galls can take striking shapes, with some resembling sea urchins or saucers, explained Binghamton University Associate Professor of Biological Sciences Kirsten Prior, who also co-leads Binghamton’s Natural Global Environmental Change Center.
Binghamton University Associate Professor of Biological Sciences Kirsten Prior (center) and graduate students Rosebelle Ines (left) and Aly Milks (right) collect oak galls in the Binghamton University Nature Preserve. Image Credit: Jonathan Cohen.
And if these wasps are a mascot for anything, it’s biodiversity. North America has around 90 different species of oak trees, and around 800 species of oak gall wasps that live upon them. Parasitic wasps lay their eggs in the galls and go on to devour the entire oak gall wasp.
But how many species of parasitoid wasps are out there? That’s a question that scientists — both academic researchers traveling the globe and everyday citizens in their own backyard — are working to answer.
A recent article in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research, “Discovery of two Palearctic Bootanomyia Girault (Hymenoptera, Megastigmidae) parasitic wasp species introduced to North America,” gives insight into a previously unknown level of species diversity. In addition to Prior, co-authors include current graduate student Kathy Fridrich and former graduate student Dylan G. Jones, as well as Guerin Brown, Corey Lewis, Christian Weinrich, MaKella Steffensen and Andrew Forbes of the University of Iowa, and Elijah Goodwin of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Tarrytown, N.Y.
This discovery is part of a larger research effort. In 2024, the National Science Foundation awarded a $305,209 grant to Binghamton University for research into the diversity of oak gall wasps and parasitoids throughout North America. The project is a collaboration between Prior, Forbes at the University of Iowa, Glen Hood at Wayne State University and Adam Kranz, one of the creators behind the website Gallformers.org, which helps people learn about and identify galls on North American plants.
The NSF grant investigates a core question: How do gall-forming insects escape diverse and evolving clades of parasitic wasps — and how do parasites catch up? To answer that question, researchers are collecting oak gall wasps around North America and using genetic sequencing to determine which parasitic wasps emerge from the galls. Among them are Fridrich and fellow Binghamton graduate student Zachary Prete, who spent the summer on a gall- and parasitoid-collection trip from New York to Florida.
“We are interested in how oak gall characteristics act as defenses against parasites and affect the evolutionary trajectories of both oak gall wasps and the parasites they host. The scale of this study will make it the most extensive cophylogenetic study of its kind,” Prior said. “Only when we have a large, concerted effort to search for biodiversity can we uncover surprises — like new or introduced species.”
Discovering unknown species
Binghamton University Associate Professor of Biological Sciences Kirsten Prior (center) and graduate student Aly Milks (right) collect oak galls in the Binghamton University Nature Preserve. Image Credit: Jonathan Cohen.
Over the past several years, researchers with Prior’s lab traveled the West Coast from California to British Columbia, collecting approximately 25 oak gall wasp species and rearing tens of thousands of parasitic wasps, which were ultimately identified as more than 100 different species.
Some of the parasitoids, reared from oak gall wasp species from several locations, turned out to be the European species Bootanomyiadorsalis in the wasp family Megastigmidae. Researchers at the University of Iowa identified a similar wasp from collections they made in New York state.
Two species of Bootanomyia dorsalis wasps introduced to North America from Europe A, B variation in the extent of wing infumation from a single collection of B. dorsalis sp. 2 from Neuroterus washingtonensis in Metchosin, BC C a male B. dorsalis sp. 1 collected from New York D a female B. dorsalis sp. 2 from the Pacific coast of North America. Body coloration of both C and D wasps are representative of their respective species regardless of sex.
“Finding this putative European species on the two coasts of North America inspired our group to confirm this parasitic species’ identity and whether it was, in fact, an introduced parasite from Europe,” Prior explained.
Parasitic wasps are small and challenging to identify based on features alone. Because of this, researchers use genetic tools to confirm a species’ identity, sequencing “the universal barcoding gene,” Cytochrome Oxidase Subunit I (mtCOI), and comparing their results to reference libraries. What they discovered is that the European species B. dorsalis came in two separate varieties, or clades: the New York samples were related to species in Portugal, Iran and Italy, while the Pacific coast wasps were related to those from Spain, Hungary and Iran.
Pruned and stylized mtCOI maximum likelihood phylogenetic tree of Bootanomyia dorsalis and close relatives.
“The sequences from two clades were different enough from each other that they could be considered different species. This suggests that B. dorsalis was introduced at least twice, and that the New York and West Coast introductions were separate,” Prior said.
And while they were found in at least four different oak gall wasp species from Oregon to British Columbia, all the West Coast B. dorsalis wasps were genetically identical, which means that their introduction was small and localized. The East Coast wasps had slightly more genetic diversity, which could indicate that there was less of a population bottleneck, or that the species was introduced more than once.
How did the European species get here? One possibility is that non-native oak species were intentionally introduced to North America. English oak, or Quercus robur, was widely planted for wood since the 17th century, and is found in British Columbia as well as several northeastern states and provinces. Turkey oak, Q. cerris, is an ornamental tree now found along the East Coast — including a spot near where B. dorsalis was discovered in New York.
Quercus robur. Photo by Peter O’Connor aka anemoneprojectorsQuercus cerris. Photo by Prazak
There are other possibilities. Adult parasitic wasps can live for 27 days, so they could have hitchhiked on a plane, Prior said.
Researchers don’t yet know if these introduced species pose a hazard to native North American species. Other introduced parasite species are known to impact populations of native insects, she acknowledged.
“We did find that they can parasitize multiple oak gall wasp species and that they can spread, given that we know that the population in the west likely spread across regions and host species from a localized small introduction,” Prior said. “They could be affecting populations of native oak gall wasp species or other native parasites of oak gall wasps.”
Naturalists and citizen scientists play an important role in biodiversity research, such as the project that led to the discovery of the two B. dorsalis clades. Gall Week, a project hosted on the platform iNaturalist, encourages citizen scientists to collect galls during two seasons, and specimens from the NSF-funded study will be posted on the naturalist site Gallformers.org. Binghamton University ecology classes have participated in Gall Week, and also logged galls during University’s annual Ecoblitz biodiversity event.
Biodiversity is a key component to healthy and functioning ecosystems — and one that is increasingly under threat due to global change.
A myriad of species and genera new to science, including economically important wasps drawing immediate attention because of their amusing…
“Parasitic wasps are likely the most diverse group of animals on the planet and are extremely important in ecological systems, acting as biological control agents to keep insects in check, including those that are crop or forest pests,” Prior explained.
Research article:
Brown GE, Lewis CJ, Fridrich K, Jones DG, Goodwin EA, Weinrich CL, Steffensen MJ, Prior KM, Forbes AA (2025) Discovery of two Palearctic Bootanomyia Girault (Hymenoptera, Megastigmidae) parasitic wasp species introduced to North America. Journal of Hymenoptera Research 98: 653-665. https://doi.org/10.3897/jhr.98.152867
Original story by Jennifer Micale at Binghamton University, State University of New York. Republished with permission.
“During the Siang Expedition, funded by the National Geographic Society and Felis Creations, we arrived in the remote village of Yingku in Arunachal Pradesh, knowing we were stepping into one of the last frontiers of biodiversity in India. What we didn’t know was that tucked among the forests and farmlands was a tiny creature that had never been formally introduced to science until now,” say researchers Dr. A.P. Ranjith (Integrative Insect Ecology Research Unit, Department of Biology, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand) and Associate Professor Dr. Buntika A. Butcher (Integrative Insect Ecology Research Unit, Department of Biology, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand). “On the very first day, we collected a pair both male and female of this amazing, enchanting new species!”
Heinrichiellus natgeo. Photo credit Dr. A.P. Ranjith
Meet Heinrichiellus natgeo, a newly discovered species of parasitoid wasp. The species was described by Dr. Ranjith and Dr. Gavin R. Broad (The Natural History Museum, London, UK), under the supervision of Additionally, genetic data helped them determine the new species’ systematic placement, with the assistance of Dr. Bernardo F. Santos (Center for Integrative Biodiversity Discovery, Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, Germany).
Heinrichiellus natgeo. Photo credit Dr. A.P. Ranjith
“The name natgeo isn’t a coincidence – we chose it in honor of the National Geographic Society, whose legacy of exploration, conservation, and storytelling has inspired thousands of people. This discovery is our way of saying thank you for their outstanding commitment to the environment,” Dr. Butcher says.
Despite its small size, this insect plays an outsized role in keeping ecosystems balanced. It is a natural enemy of several pest species, ensuring that nature’s checks and balances continue working quietly in the background.
In the field, the wasp didn’t shout for attention no bright colors or loud buzzing. Instead, it was a patient hunter, seeking out the eggs or larvae of its host species. “It’s a reminder that some of nature’s most important work happens in complete silence,” says Dr. Ranjith Even though the researchers do not yet have biological data, they assume that this remarkable species will play a significant role in the forest ecosystem by helping to regulate insect pest populations.
Heinrichiellus natgeo. Photo credit Dr. A.P. Ranjith
“And here’s a fun twist in the story: we collected both the male and female specimens using a yellow pan trap a deceptively simple tool that works by tapping into parasitoid wasps’ irresistible attraction to the color yellow. It’s fieldwork science at its most charming: a splash of color in the forest that quietly lures in tiny wonders,” Dr. Butcher says.
“Discoveries like this matter not just for the sake of science, but for the health of ecosystems and the future of conservation, particularly in the world’s biodiversity hotspots,” the researchers say in conclusion. ”In a time when species are disappearing faster than we can document them, every new find is both a small victory for biodiversity and an encouragement for more young talents to engage in biodiversity research.”
Landscape view of Yingku village in Arunachal Pradesh. Photo credit Sandesh Kadur/Felis Images.
Alongside this, the researchers also uncovered two more new species, Heinrichiellus brevispinus from Thailand and Heinrichiellus vedani from South India. These exciting finds remind us that India and Thailand still hold countless hidden treasures of biodiversity, waiting to be discovered. They published their study in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research.
Research article:
Ranjith AP, Broad GR, Santos BF, Butcher BA (2025) First report of the genus Heinrichiellus Tereshkin, 2009 (Hymenoptera, Ichneumonidae) from the Oriental region with the description of three new species. Journal of Hymenoptera Research 98: 757-778. https://doi.org/10.3897/jhr.98.158760
About the Research team:
Dr. A.P. Ranjith, a post-doctoral fellow at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, is an expert taxonomist specializing in hymenopteran parasitoids, with more than ten years of experience in taxonomy and systematics. He has described over 100 species and 11 genera new to science.
Dr. Gavin R. Broad, based at the Natural History Museum, UK, has several decades of experience in the phylogeny and systematics of ichneumonid parasitoid wasps. He has described several hundred new species and numerous new genera.
Dr. Bernardo F. Santos, from the Museum für Naturkunde, Germany, possesses extensive knowledge of the evolution and phylogeny of parasitoid wasps, with a strong background in parasitoid taxonomy.
Dr. Buntika A. Butcher, who supervised the study, is an Associate Professor at Chulalongkorn University. She is an experienced researcher with strong expertise in the taxonomy and systematics of braconid parasitoid wasps and their biology.
The team focuses primarily on documenting biodiversity in understudied countries such as India and Thailand, while raising awareness of the ecological importance of insect diversity.
Content from more than 30 biodiversity journals published on the ARPHA Platform will now be archived in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), the world’s largest open-access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives.
A global consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries, BHL digitises and freely shares essential biodiversity materials. A critical resource for researchers, it provides vital access to material that might otherwise be difficult to obtain.
Under the agreement, over 16,000 articles published on Pensoft’s self-developed ARPHA Platform are now available on BHL. Both legacy content and new articles are made available on the platform, complete with full-text PDFs and all relevant metadata.
Thanks to this integration, content in our journals will become even more accessible and readily discoverable, helping researchers find the biodiversity information they need.
Prof. Lyubomir Penev
More content published on ARPHA will gradually be added to the BHL archive.
The publications will be included in the Library’s full-text search, allowing researchers to easily locate relevant biodiversity literature. Crucially, the scientific names within the articles will be indexed using the Global Names Architecture, enabling seamless discovery of information about specific taxa across the BHL collection.
“Pensoft is pleased to collaborate with BHL in our joint mission to support global biodiversity research through free access to knowledge. Thanks to this integration, content in our journals will become even more accessible and readily discoverable, helping researchers find the biodiversity information they need,” said Prof. Lyubomir Penev, CEO and founder of Pensoft and ARPHA.
The news comes soon after BHL announced it is about to face a major shift in its operation. From 2026, the Smithsonian Institution – one of BHL’s 10 founding members – will cease to host the administrative and technical components of BHL. As the consortium explores a range of options, the BHL team is confident that “the transition opens the door to a reimagined and more sustainable future for BHL.”
The initiative aims to make it easier to access and use biodiversity data associated with published research, aligning with principles of Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) data.
The data portals offer seamless integration of published articles and associated data elements with GBIF-mediated records. Now, researchers, educators, and conservation practitioners can discover and use the extensive species occurrence and other data associated with the papers published in each journal.
A video displaying an interactive map with occurrence data on the BDJ portal.
The collaboration between Pensoft and GBIF was recently piloted with the Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ). Today, the BDJ hosted portal provides seamless access and exploration for nearly 300,000 occurrences of biological organisms from all over the world that have been extracted from the journal’s all-time publications. In addition, the portal provides direct access to more than 800 datasets published alongside papers in BDJ, as well as to almost 1,000 citations of the journal articles associated with those publications.
“The release of the BDJ portal and subsequent ones planned for other Pensoft journals should inspire other publishers to follow suit in advancing a more interconnected, open and accessible ecosystem for biodiversity research,” said Dr. Vince Smith, Editor-in-Chief of BDJ and head of digital, data and informatics at the Natural History Museum, London.
— GBIF @biodiversity.social/@gbif (@GBIF) March 10, 2025
“The programme will provide a scalable solution for more than thirty of the journals we publish thanks to our partnership with Plazi, and will foster greater connectivity between scientific research and the evidence that supports it,” said Prof. Lyubomir Penev, founder and chief executive officer of Pensoft.
On the new portals, users can search data, refining their queries based on various criteria such as taxonomic classification, and conservation status. They also have access to statistical information about the hosted data.
Together, the hosted portals provide data on almost 325,000 occurrence records, as well as over 1,000 datasets published across the journals.
It is estimated that only around 20% of the world’s insects are formally described. A formal description is the foundational understanding of a species, including a scientific name, information on how to identify the species, its biology, and where it can be found. With such a large proportion of our insects lacking this foundational information, we are left viewing the insect world through a very small window. This has major implications for conservation of insects and the ecosystems in which they play integral roles. It also limits our understanding of our natural resources, with the study of insects being valuable in a variety of fields, from healthcare and biochemistry, to biological pest control, to insect-inspired engineering.
Unfortunately, with a worldwide lack of taxonomic experts, limited funding, and the immense scale of describing the world’s insects, documenting our insect diversity before it’s lost to extinction is a considerable challenge. But this is where community engagement and citizen science can shine.
The Insect Investigators citizen science project, which ran in Australia in 2022, aimed to involve schools throughout the taxonomic process, to contribute to large-scale collection and documentation of Australian insects, while fostering an appreciation for insect diversity and the role of taxonomy. Fifty rural schools from Queensland, South Australia, and Western Australia participated by setting up Malaise traps (tent-like passive insect traps) to sample local invertebrates near their schools over four weeks. This project resulted in over 60 thousand insect specimens being collected from often under-sampled, more remote parts of Australia. The resulting specimens are preserved and deposited in Australian museums for future research, including taxonomic work.
Malaise traps set up at Kwoorabup Nature School (left) and Beerwah State High School (right) to sample insects as part of the Insect Investigators project.
Through this project, several schools were involved in collecting a rarely collected group of parasitoid wasps belonging to the subfamily Miracinae (aka miracine wasps). These tiny wasps (typically 1-2mm in length) are very difficult to collect using traditional methods, though they appear to be quite diverse in Australia. As parasitoids, miracine wasps require an invertebrate host to complete their lifecycle. For miracine wasps, this host is a leaf-mining caterpillar – the kind that eats small twisting tunnels on the inside of leaves. The wasps lay their eggs inside these caterpillars, and the wasp larvae hatch and eat the caterpillar from the inside out!
‘Insect soup’ – specimens collected via Malaise Trap at Kwoorabup Nature School.
Due to their caterpillar-eating biology, and the fact that they are picky eaters, usually targeting a specific species, these wasps can be used to control pests. For example, the miracine wasp species Mirax insularis in Puerto Rico, and Centistidea striata in Brazil, are known to attack coffee leaf-miners, a major pest of coffee plantations – so you may have one of these wasps to thank for your morning coffee!
As part of this project, we engaged with schools to involve them throughout the process of describing the miracine wasps they had collected. First, we ran in-person and online or hybrid workshops with the students to teach them about the new wasp they had discovered, and the taxonomic process involved in describing and naming it. The students then brainstormed a variety of creative names for the new species, which were collaboratively curated and voted upon to arrive at the final species names.
From Queensland, we have Mirax supremus, meaning ‘highest’ in Latin, named after the Pinnacle program at Beerwah State High School, which the students were a part of.
Mirax supremus.
From South Australia, comes Ceduna Area School’s species, Mirax ceduna, named after the school and town the wasp was collected from (colloquially known as the ‘golden bum wasp’).
Mirax ceduna.
And from Kwoorabup Nature School in Western Australia (WA), Mirax kaatijan, meaning knowledge/learning in the Noongar language of the south-west region of WA, to represent the new knowledge the students had learnt about insect diversity, and the importance of knowledge about our insects.
Mirax kaatijan.
Though the descriptions themselves are a small step towards the immense task of describing Australia’s insects, it was inspiring to see the students and their communities really engage with the process and build a connection with their local insects, and an appreciation for these tiny, often-overlooked wasps. We hope this project plays a role in inspiring the next generation of budding entomologists and taxonomists in Australia.
References
1. Stork, N.E., How Many Species of Insects and Other Terrestrial Arthropods Are There on Earth? Annual Review of Entomology, 2018. 63(1): p. 31-45.
2. Song, C., et al., Bee Sting-Inspired Inflammation-Responsive Microneedles for Periodontal Disease Treatment. Research (Wash D C), 2023. 6: p. 0119.
3. Mika, N., H. Zorn, and M. Rühl, Insect-derived enzymes: a treasure for industrial biotechnology and food biotechnology. Adv Biochem Eng Biotechnol, 2013. 136: p. 1-17.
4. Galli, M., et al., Can biocontrol be the game-changer in integrated pest management? A review of definitions, methods and strategies. Journal of Plant Diseases and Protection, 2024. 131(2): p. 265-291.
5. Gorb, S.N. and E.V. Gorb, Insect-inspired architecture to build sustainable cities. Current Opinion in Insect Science, 2020. 40: p. 62-70.
6. Zhang, Y., A. Reid, and J.F.C. Windmill, Insect-inspired acoustic micro-sensors. Current Opinion in Insect Science, 2018. 30: p. 33-38.
7. Suzuki, K., et al., Development of water surface mobile robot inspired by water striders. Micro & Nano Letters, 2017. 12(8): p. 575-579.
8. Engel, M.S., et al., The taxonomic impediment: a shortage of taxonomists, not the lack of technical approaches. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2021. 193(2): p. 381-387.
9. Slater‐Baker, M.R., et al., First record of miracine parasitoid wasps (Hymenoptera: Braconidae) from Australia: molecular phylogenetics and morphology reveal multiple new species. Austral Entomology, 2022. 61(1): p. 49-67.
10. Navarro, P. and F. Gallardo, Host instar preference of Mirax insularis (Muesebeck) (Hymenoptera: Braconidae), a koinobiont parasitoid of Leucoptera coffeella Guerin-Meneville (Lepidoptera: Lyonetiidae). Journal of Agriculture- University of Puerto Rico, 2009. 93: p. 139-142.
11. Penteado-Dias, A.M., New species of parasitoids on Perileucoptera coffeella ( Guérin-Menèville) (Lepidoptera, Lyonetiidae) from Brazil. Zoologische Mededelingen, 1999. 73: p. 189-197.
12. Slater-Baker M-R, Guzik M, Rodriguez J, Howe A, Woodward A, Ducker N, Fagan-Jeffries E (2025) Three new species of Australian miracine parasitoid wasps collected by regional schools as part of the Insect Investigators citizen science project (Hymenoptera, Braconidae, Miracinae). Journal of Hymenoptera Research 98: 19-45. https://doi.org/10.3897/jhr.98.137806
Yet another hectic year has passed for our team at Pensoft, so it feels right to look back at the highlights from the last 12 months, as we buckle up for the leaps and strides in 2025.
In the past, we have used the occasion to take you back to the best moments of our most popular journals (see this list of 2023 highlights from ZooKeys, MycoKeys, PhytoKeys and more!); share milestones related to our ARPHA publishing platform (see the new journals, integrations and features from 2023); or let you reminisce about the coolest research published across our journals during the year(check out our Top 10 new species from 2021).
In 2022, when we celebrated our 30th anniversary on the academic scene, we extended our festive spirit throughout the year as we dived deep into those fantastic three decades. We put up Pensoft’s timeline and finished the year with a New Species Showdown tournament, where our followers on (what was back then) Twitter voted twice a week for their favourite species EVER described on the pages of our taxonomic journals.
Spoiler alert: we will be releasing our 2024 Top 10 New Species on Monday, 23 December, so you’d better go to the right of this screen and subscribe to our blog!
As we realised we might’ve been a bit biased towards our publishing activities over the years, this time, hereby, we chose to present you a retrospection that captures our best 2024 moments from across the departments, and shed light on how the publishing, technology and project communication endeavours fit together to make Pensoft what it is.
In truth, we take pride in being an exponentially growing family of multiple departments that currently comprises over 60 full-time employees and about a dozen freelancers working from all corners of the world, including Australia, Canada, Belgium and the United Kingdom. Together, we are all determined to make sure we continuously improve our service to all who have trusted us: authors, reviewers, editors, client journals, learned societies, research institutions, project consortia and other external collaborators.
After all, great deeds are only possible when you team up with great like-minded people!
In 2024, at Pensoft, we were hugely pleased to see a significant growth in the published output at almost all our journals, including record-breaking numbers in both submissions and publications at flagship titles of ours, including the Biodiversity Data Journal, PhytoKeys and MycoKeys.
Later in 2024, our colleagues, who work together with our clients to ensure their journals comply with the requirements of the top scholarly databases before they apply for indexation, informed us that another two journals in our portfolio have had their applications to Clarivate’s Web of Science successfully accepted. These are the newest journal of the International Association of Vegetation Science: Vegetation and Classification, and Metabarcoding and Metagenomics: a journal we launched in 2017 in collaboration with a team of brilliant scientists working together at the time within the DNAquaNet COST Action.
In 2024, we also joined the celebrations of our long-time partners at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, whose three journals: Zoosystematics and Evolution, Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift and Fossil Record are all part of our journal portfolio. This year marked the 10th Open Access anniversary of the three journals.
In the meantime, we also registered a record in new titles either joining the Pensoft portfolio or opting for ARPHA Platform’s white-label publishing solution, where journal owners retain exclusivity for the publication of their titles, yet use ARPHA’s end-to-end technology and as many human-provided services as necessary.
Pensoft’s CEO and founder Prof. Dr. Lyubomir Penev with Prof. Dr. Marc Stadler, Editor-in-Chief of IMA Fungus and President of the International Mycological Association at the Pensoft booth at the 12th International Mycological Congress (August, the Netherlands).
Amongst our new partners are the International Mycological Association who moved their official journal IMA Fungus to ARPHA Platform. As part of Pensoft’s scholarly portfolio, the renowned journal joins another well-known academic title in the field of mycology: MycoKeys, which was launched by Pensoft in 2011. The big announcement was aptly made public at this year’s 12th International Mycological Congress where visitors of the Pensoft stand could often spot newly elected IMA President and IMA Fungus Chief editor: Marc Stadler chatting with our founder and CEO Lyubomir Penev by the Pensoft/MycoKeys booth.
On our end, we did not stop supporting enthusiastic and proactive scientists in their attempt to bridge gaps in scientific knowledge. In January, we launched the Estuarine Management and Technologies journal together with Dr. Soufiane Haddout of the Ibn Tofail University, Morocco.
Later on, Dr. Franco Andreone (Museo Regionale di Scienze Naturali, Italy) sought us with the idea to launch a journal addressing the role of natural history museums and herbaria collections in scientific progress. This collaboration resulted in the Natural History Collections and Museomics journal, officially announced at the joint TDWG-SPNHC conference in Okinawa, Japan in August.
Around this time, we finalised our similarly exciting journal project in partnership with Prof. Dr. Volker Grimm (UFZ, Germany), Prof. Dr. Karin Frank (UFZ, Germany), Prof. Dr. Mark E. Hauber (City University of New York) and Prof. Dr. Florian Jeltsch (University of Potsdam, Germany). The outcome of this collaboration is called Individual-based Ecology: a journal that aims to promote an individual-based perspective in ecology, as it closes the knowledge gap between individual-level responses and broader ecological patterns.
The three newly-launched journals are all published under the Diamond Open Access model, where neither access, nor publication is subject to charges.
As you can see, we have a lot to be proud of in terms of our journals. This is also why in 2024 our team took a record number of trips to attend major scientific events, where we got the chance to meet face-to-face with long-time editors, authors, reviewers and readers of our journals. Even more exciting was meeting the new faces of scientific research and learning about their own take on scholarship and academic journals.
Pensoft’s CEO and founder Prof. Dr. Lyubomir Penev welcomed editors at PhytoKeys to the Pensoft-PhytoKeys-branded booth at the XX International Botanical Congress in July 2024 (Spain).
We cannot possibly comment on Pensoft’s tech progress in 2024 without mentioning the EU-funded project BiCIKL (acronym for Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library) that we coordinated for three years ending up last April.
This 36-month endeavour saw 14 member institutions and 15 research infrastructures representing diverse actors from the biodiversity data realm come together to improve bi-directional links between different platforms, standards, formats and scientific fields.
Following these three years of collaborative work, we reported a great many notable research outputs from our consortium (find about them in the open-science project collection in the Research Ideas and Outcomes journal, titled “Towards interlinked FAIR biodiversity knowledge: The BiCIKL perspective”) that culminated in the Biodiversity Knowledge Hub: a one-stop portal that allows users to access FAIR and interlinked biodiversity data and services in a few clicks; and also a set of policy recommendations addressing key policy makers, research institutions and funders who deal with various types of data about the world’s biodiversity, and are thereby responsible to ensuring there findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability (FAIR-ness).
Apart from coordinating BiCIKL, we also worked side-by-side with our partners to develop, refine and test each other’s tools and services, in order to make sure that they communicate efficiently with each other, thereby aligning with the principles of FAIR data and the needs of the scientific community in the long run.
During those three years we made a lot of refinements to our OpenBiodiv: a biodiversity database containing knowledge extracted from scientific literature, built as an Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management System, and our ARPHA Writing Tool. The latter is an XML-based online authoring environment using a large set of pre-formatted templates, where manuscripts are collaboratively written, edited and submitted to participating journals published on ARPHA Platform. What makes the tool particularly special is its multiple features that streamline and FAIRify data publishing as part of a scientific publication, especially in the field of biodiversity knowledge. In fact, we made enough improvements to the ARPHA Writing Tool that we will be soon officially releasing its 2.0 version!
OpenBiodiv – The Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management System
ARPHA Writing Tool 2.0
Amongst our collaborative projects are the Nanopublications for Biodiversity workflow that we co-developed with KnowledgePixels to allow researchers to ‘fragment’ their most important scientific findings into machine-actionable and machine-interpretable statements. Being the smallest units of publishable information, these ‘pixels of knowledge’ present an assertion about anything that can be uniquely identified and attributed to its author and serve to communicate a single statement, its original source (provenance) and citation record (publication info).
Nanopublications for Biodiversity
In partnership with the Swiss-based Text Mining group of Patrick Ruch at SIB and the text- and data-mining association Plazi, we brought the SIB Literature Services (SIBiLS) database one step closer to solidifying its “Biodiversity PMC” portal and working title.
Understandably, we spent a lot of effort, time and enthusiasm in raising awareness about our most recent innovations, in addition to our long-standing workflows, formats and tools developed with the aim to facilitate open and efficient access to scientific data; and their integration into published scholarly work, as well as receiving well-deserved recognition for their collection.
We just can’t stress it enough how important and beneficial it is for everyone to have high-quality FAIR data, ideally made available within a formal scientific publication!
🗨️Imagine if ALL these links were provided as hyperlinks within a #scholarly publication!
Pensoft’s CTO Teodor Georgiev talks about innovative methods and good practices in the publication of biodiversity data in scholarly papers at the First national meeting of the Bulgarian Barcode of Life (BgBOL) consortium (December, Bulgaria).
🤔What is a Data Paper?
👍 A means to describe a #dataset – like the ones on @GBIF – in a standardised, widely accepted #scientific article format.
👇🧵Highlights from @LyuboPenev's talk at the int'l symposium "#BiodiversityData in montane & arid Eurasia" in Kazakhstan 🇰🇿
Pensoft’s CEO and founder Prof. Dr. Lyubomir Penev presenting his “Data papers on biodiversity” talk at the “Biodiversity data in montane and arid Eurasia” symposium jointly organized by GBIF and by the Institute of Zoology of Republic of Kazakhstan (November, Kazakhstan).
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📸Today, at the @EASEeditors symposium, our @teodorpensoft gave a sneak peek into the AI-assisted tools at @ARPHAplatform we have been working on (e.g. Word -> JATS XML conversion) and the #ARPHA Writing Tool 2.0 (coming up in early 2025)!🎉
Pensoft’s CTO Teodor Georgiev presents new features and workflows currently in testing at the ARPHA Writing Tool 2.0 at the EASE Autumn Symposium 2024 (online event).Pensoft’s Head of Journal development, Marketing and PR Iva Boyadzhieva talks about Pensoft’s data publishing approach and innovations at the German Ecological Society 53rd Annual Conference (September, Germany).
Pensoft as a science communicator
At our Project team, which is undoubtedly the fastest developing department at Pensoft, science communicators are working closely with technology and publishing teams to help consortia bring their scientific results closer to policy actors, decision-makers and the society at large.
Ultimately, bridging the notorious chasm between researchers and global politics boils down to mutual understanding and dialogue.
Pensoft’s communication team attended COP16 (November 2024, Colombia) along with partners at the consortia of CO-OP4CBD, BioAgora and RESPIN: three Horizon Europe projects, whose communication and dissemination is led by Pensoft.
Throughout 2024, the team, comprising 20 science communicators and project managers, has been working as part of 27 EU-funded project consortia, including nine that have only started this year (check out all partnering projects on the Pensoft website, ordered from most recently started to oldest). Apart from communicating key outcomes and activities during the duration of the projects, at many of the projects, our team has also been actively involved in their grant proposal drafting, coordination, administration, platform development, graphic and web design and others (see all project services offered by Pensoft to consortia).
📸As leaders of the “Stakeholder engagement, comms & dissemination” WP at @BCubedProject, we joined the annual meeting to report on project branding, #scicomm & #DataManagement.
Naturally, we had a seat on the front row during many milestones achieved by our partners at all those 27 ongoing projects, and communicated to the public by our communicators.
Amongst those are the release of the InsectsCount web application developed within the Horizon 2020 project SHOWCASE. Through innovative gamification elements, the app encourages users to share valuable data about flower-visiting insects, which in turn help researchers gain new knowledge about the relationship between observed species and the region’s land use and management practices (learn more about InsectsCount on the SHOWCASE prroject website).
Another fantastic project output was the long-awaited dataset of maps of annual forest disturbances across 38 European countries derived from the Landsat satellite data archive published by the Horizon Europe project ForestPaths in April (find more about the European Forest Disturbance Atlas on the ForestPaths project website).
In a major company highlight, last month, our project team participated in COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan with a side event dedicated to the role of open science and science communication in climate- and biodiversity-friendly policy.
Pensoft’s participation at COP29 – as well as our perspective on FAIR data and open science – were recently covered in an interview by Exposed by CMD (a US-based news media accredited to cover the event) with our science communicator Alexandra Korcheva and project manager Boris Barov.
You see, A LOT of great things worth celebrating happened during the year for us at Pensoft: all thanks to ceaselessly flourishing collaboration based on transparency, trust and integrity. Huge ‘THANK YOU!’ goes to everyone who has joined us in our endeavours!
Here’s to many more shared achievements coming up in 2025!
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The thin, flexible, and mobile ovipositor of some female insects, perfected over thousands of years of evolution, can carry substances and drill into various substrates. Although its structure is well studied, many of its functions remain a mystery.
Researchers from Saratov State University and Moscow State University spotted interesting, unusual oviposition behaviour in the parasitoid wasp Eupelmus messene: it used its ovipositor to drill through the wall of a polystyrene Petri dish and lay an egg outside the dish.
Drilling with the ovipositor through a plastic wall of a Petri dish by Eupelmus messene (A), a newly laid egg into the external environment (B), and UV fluorescent biological substance inside the perforations (C). ov – ovipositor, per – perforation, egg – egg.
This is the first time such behaviour has been observed and recorded.
E.messene is a parasitoid of the gall wasp Aulacidea hieracii, which forms a gall on the stems of the hawkweed Hieracium×robustum. The female of E.messene then drills the walls of the gall with its ovipositor in search of a gall wasp larva and, upon finding it, lays an egg next to it.
The researchers reared 56 females from galls of H.×robustum collected near Saratov, Russia. Of them, they placed 18 in Petri dishes without host galls, and later observed five of those wasps drilling into the walls of the Petri dishes.
The team followed the behaviour of one wasp: drilling each perforation in the polystyrene wall took more than two hours, during which the insect often paused to eat, drink water, or wash. In the end, it managed to completely pierce the plastic wall and lay an egg on the outside of the Petri dish. It drilled multiple holes, even after being transferred to a different Petri dish.
Eupelmus messene drilling the wall of the polystyrene Petri dish. Video by Matvey I. Nikelshparg, Evelina I. Nikelshparg, Vasily V. Anikin, Alexey A. Polilov
“We distinguished four steps of drilling: pushing movements, rotational movements, ejection movements, as well as the cementing step. However, in natural gall, we never observed ejection movements. We suppose that such a type of movement is required to rake out plastic particles, which is unnecessary for more elastic plant gall substrate,” write the authors in their study, which was published in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research.
After laying the egg, the female carefully cemented the drilled perforation with an unknown biological substance, likely to keep it safe from the impacts of changing temperatures, water, and microorganisms.
Unlike galls, which usually have an opaque and dense structure, the transparent Petri dish provided a clear view of the whole drilling and oviposition process, allowing the researchers to study it closely.
It is still unknown why the wasp behaved this way, but the scientists believe we can learn a lot from this observation: “Studying in detail the drilling behavior of parasitic mycrohymenopterans can be useful in medicine for the creation of minimally invasive guided probes in neurosurgery, the development of orthopedic surgical instruments, needle biopsies using functionally graded tools,” they write in their paper.
Research article:
Nikelshparg MI, Nikelshparg EI, Anikin VV, Polilov AA (2023) Extraordinary drilling capabilities of the tiny parasitoid Eupelmus messene Walker (Hymenoptera, Eupelmidae). Journal of Hymenoptera Research 96: 715-722. https://doi.org/10.3897/jhr.96.107786
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The International Congress of Entomology 2024 (ICE2024), which took place on August 25-30 2024 in Kyoto, Japan, was arguably the biggest entomology event of the year. For the Pensoft team, it was an excellent chance to catch up with our authors and editors and discuss new partnerships.
At the Kyoto International Conference Center, entomologists visited lectures, symposia, and poster presentations, but they also enjoyed insect-themed haikus, origami, and artworks, and got to sample some edible insects.
— International Congress of Entomology 2024 Kyoto JP (@ice2024kyoto_jp) August 27, 2024
Meeting our authors in person was a chance for us to gather valuable feedback and make sure we are doing our best to provide entomologists with a frictionless process that makes their published research shine.
Robin Kundrata, author in ZooKeys
Deepa Pureswaran, author and editor in NeoBiota
Alain Roques, author and editor in NeoBiota
Jessica Gillung, author in ZooKeys
Ranjith AP, editor in Check List and author in ZooKeys and Journal of Hymenoptera Research
Scientific illustrator Denitsa Peneva’s beautiful works adorned Pensoft’s stand; Mostafa Ghafouri Moghaddam, subject editor at ZooKeys and Biodiversity Data Journal and author at a number of Pensoft-published journals even got to take one of her prints home after winning a raffle that Pensoft organised. He won a beautiful illustration of Bombus fragrans on Trifolium pratense.
Pensoft’s founder and CEO and one of the founding editors of the company’s flagship journal ZooKeys, Prof. Lyubomir Penev, was there representing the company and meeting with fellow entomologists.
Prof. Penev with Evgeny Zakharov of the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics
Prof. Penev with researchers Jadranka Rota, Niklas Wahlberg, Alexander Konstantinov, and Michael Schmidt
Prof. Penev with researcher Caroline S. Chaboo
They also got the chance to learn about the ARPHA Platform, a next-generation publishing solution that offers a streamlined and efficient workflow for authors, reviewers, and editors.
At ICE2024, Pensoft also presented its newest open-access jorunal, Natural History Collections and Museomics. A peer-reviewed journal for research, discussion and innovation of natural history collections, NHCM will publish under a diamond open access model, allowing free access to published content without any fees for authors or readers.
In addition to its publishing endeavors, Pensoft also presented some of the EU-funded pollinator projects that it takes part in such as Safeguard, PollinERA, and WildPosh.
ICE2024 was a chance to advance entomological science and foster collaboration within the global scientific community. For those who missed the chance to connect with Pensoft in Kyoto, the company’s journals and platforms remain accessible online, offering opportunities to read and produce groundbreaking research in insect diversity and ecology.
Leading scholarly publisher Pensoft has announced a strategic collaboration with R Discovery, the AI-powered research discovery platform by Cactus Communications, a renowned science communications and technology company. This partnership aims to revolutionize the accessibility and discoverability of research articles published by Pensoft, making them more readily available on R Discovery to its over three million researchers across the globe.
R Discovery, acclaimed for its advanced algorithms and an extensive database boasting over 120 million scholarly articles, empowers researchers with intelligent search capabilities and personalized recommendations. Through its innovative Reading Feed feature, R Discovery delivers tailored suggestions in a format reminiscent of social media, identifying articles based on individual research interests. This not only saves time but also keeps researchers updated with the latest and most relevant studies in their field.
Open Science is much more than cost-free access to research output.
Lyubomir Penev
One of R Discovery’s standout features is its ability to provide paper summaries, audio readings, and language translation, enabling users to quickly assess a paper’s relevance and enhance their research reading experience significantly.
With over 2.5 million app downloads and upwards of 80 million journal articles featured, the R Discovery database is one of the largest scholarly content repositories.
“At Pensoft, we do realise that Open Science is much more than cost-free access to research outputs. It is also about easier discoverability and reusability, or, in other words, how likely it is for the reader to come across a particular scientific publication and, as a result, cite and build on those findings in his/her own studies. By feeding the content of our journals into R Discovery, we’re further facilitating the discoverability of the research done and shared by the authors who trust us with their work,” said ARPHA’s and Pensoft’s founder and CEO Prof. Lyubomir Penev.
Abhishek Goel, Co-Founder and CEO of Cactus Communications, commented on the collaboration, “We are delighted to work with Pensoft and offer researchers easy access to the publisher’s high-quality research articles on R Discovery. This is a milestone in our quest to support academia in advancing open science that can help researchers improve the world.”
So far, R Discovery has successfully established partnership with over 20 publishers, enhancing the platform’s extensive repository of scholarly content. By joining forces with R Discovery, Pensoft solidifies its dedication to making scholarly publications from its open-access, peer-reviewed journal portfolio easily discoverable and accessible.
