In May of 2011, Hock Ping Guek, a
Malaysian photographer was hiking in
Selangor State Park near
Kuala Lumpur taking
macrophotographs of the insects in the woods. He was focusing on somewhat rare
lacewings as they perched on branches and leaves. On that trip, he was able to get a picture of a yellowish-green one with a black spot on its wing resembling another insect. He had seen it before, but it had flown away before he had been able to photograph it. When he returned, he posted the images to
Flickr, with a comment about how lucky he felt to finally get the image in four years of macro photography. Shaun Winterton, a senior
entomologist at the
California Department of Food and Agriculture, happened across the image shortly afterward. He was struck by the black marks on the wing, which he had never seen on a lacewing before. Despite his extensive field experience, he was unable to identify the species. Colleagues he emailed the link to were also baffled. He emailed Guek and asked him if he had a specimen, as it was possibly an undiscovered species. Guek told him that the lacewing had flown off shortly after he took the picture, so he did not have one. A year later, Guek emailed Winterton and said he had seen the lacewing again and this time he had captured it. Winterton told him to send it to Steven J. Brooks at the
Natural History Museum in London. Brooks not only confirmed that it was a previously unknown species, he found a specimen that had been sent to the museum many years earlier from the Malaysian province of
Sabah, on the island of
Borneo, but had never been classified or studied. The three collaborated on a paper describing the new species with
Google Docs. Winterton named the species not after its color but his daughter. He said there were likely to be more such discoveries. "There's thousands of images a minute uploaded on Flickr," he told
National Public Radio. In the
abstract of the paper, published in
ZooKeys in August 2012, the authors called the find "a joint discovery by [a] citizen scientist and professional taxonomists." They elaborated on this in the paper itself: == Images==