This website is an invitation to share in an awesome scientific adventure - where we go to a cloudforest in Costa Rica to discover, for the first time, how many flies live at one small spot in a tropical country.

It is amazing, in a time of space travel and knowing the details of human genes, that we know so little about most other species on our planet. To combat our poor knowledge of insects, those small but super diverse organisms that are so important to our survival, our expedition plans to study all the species of flies in a small 100 x 200 meter patch of tropical forest at a place call Zurquí. Amazingly, we estimate that we won't be finding just hundreds of different species, but likely thousands of different kinds, many and perhaps most of them, new to science. We already know that there are predators, parasites, herbivores and a host of other life styles among different flies - and we expect to find many more.

Our website will show you how scientists go about finding new species of insects, how we plan our study and then how we go about gathering up many thousands of specimens, study them, discover what species are present, and then how we gather our results. You can see how at least this group of scientists gets down and gets dirty and, to tell the truth, how much fun it is to explore the wonders of nature.

photo by S. A. Marshall

We will also give information on what we discover as we explore the tropical forest at Zurquí. There are probably at least 94 different families of flies that we expect to run into. Some of these will have hundreds of species. You can click on a picture of one of these fly families (like mosquitoes) and find not only something about the scientist who is studying the group but also information about how members of that family live, what they look like and how diverse they are. There will be a list of all the genera in that family and by clicking on any one, you can see what that genus looks like and learn more about the species in that group. There will be increasing levels of scientific information and we hope to tell you as much as we can about each species that we find at Zurquí.

So come and have a look at what we're doing. We hope that you will become as enamored with flies as we are - it truly is a great adventure!

The Organizers: