Environment
A New Species Is Found in New Jersey (and It May Already Be in Trouble)
The F. whitcombi leafhopper depends upon a type of grass that’s endangered.
The New Jersey Pine Barrens lies next to one of the busiest places in the country—the Interstate 95 corridor—but that doesn’t mean its mysteries are exhausted. Just this week, researchers announced the discovery of a new species of insect living in its grasses. It’s called the F. whitcombi leafhopper, and it looks kind of like a cockroach that grew a pointy rhinoceros head.
Andrew Hicks from the University of Colorado and others found 35 of the hopping, sap-sapping bugs chilling on some pinebarren smokegrass, which itself was a surprise. Flexamia is more commonly known to associate with prairie and desert grasses in America’s more-remote regions, not in scrubland in the “most densely populated state” in the U.S., Hicks writes in ZooKeys.