Losgna: The Lost Wasp That Rewrote a Genus

16 July 2025

In the autumn of 2023, I found myself knee-deep in a bird survey at London’s Walthamstow Wetlands, counting Teal and Tufted Ducks with the help of a fellow naturalist, Sophia Reinsich. Between counts, I mentioned my summer spent studying aquatic beetles in India. Sophia’s eyes lit up hearing about insects. “I’m obsessed with parasitic wasps,” she said, describing their intricate lives as nature’s tiny assassins. Her enthusiasm was contagious. A few weeks later, she introduced me to the Natural History Museum’s (NHM) insect collection, a labyrinth of cabinets housing millions of specimens. There, senior curator Max Barclay showed me historical Indian specimens and provided me with access to study them. I’d grown up in Punjab, on a farmhouse surrounded by scrubland and foothills—habitats untouched by scientists. What if there are species that no one has ever seen?

 

I hatched a plan to bring insect specimens from Punjab to the NHM. My mother, ever supportive, became my eyes and ears back home. “Just save anything dead you find around the house,” I told her. She started collecting bugs trapped in windowsills, storing them in matchboxes like tiny treasures. That winter, I returned to India, sweeping nets through the Shivalik Hills near Chandigarh. I found water beetles, but I also gathered every wasp I spotted to surprise Sophia. I went back to London in early 2024 and marched into the museum with a box full of insects. The beetles were quickly sorted, but the wasps puzzled me, and I didn’t know where to begin. 

I carefully pinned them and brought the box to Dr Gavin Broad, the museum’s parasitic wasp expert. One specimen intrigued him greatly—a wasp striped in ivory and burnt orange, unlike anything he’d seen. He vanished into the collection and returned with an old box labelled Losgna, a genus nobody had touched since the 1960s. Inside lay a near-identical specimen tagged Losgna quintaxa. But here’s the catch: quintaxa had never been formally described. It was a scientific ghost—a name without a proper identity. 

We dug deeper. Buried in the museum’s archives was a thin book from 1965 with a paper on oriental ichneumons by German entomologist G.H. Heinrich, written in dense German. Translating it, we ran our specimen through Heinrich’s key and discovered it matched none of the listed species—and there was no mention of Losgna quintaxa whatsoever. We realised we held a brand-new species, the very first formally described insect from the city of Chandigarh. That evening I Googled “Losgna,” only to be bombarded with recipes for lasagna. The genus had no digital footprint, no photos, no ecological studies. It was as if science had forgotten it existed. 

The specimen—a female parasitic wasp belonging to the family Ichneumonidae—had been collected from a windowsill in my family home in Chandigarh in winter 2023–24. This unassuming location would become the type locality for Losgna occidentalis, the species we would later describe. Prior to our discovery, Losgna had not been recorded in India since Heinrich’s 1965 monograph. We visited all the major entomological institutions in India—Zoological Survey of India, Wildlife Institute of India (WII), the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment—and none had ever heard of Losgna, nor held a single specimen. The genus seemed to have vanished from its previously documented range in northeast India.

Still, I returned to India that summer, determined to learn more. For months I surveyed the same hills. My mother kept her windowsill vigil, but we found nothing. I also searched through large and historical insect collections across India. Again, not a single Losgna appeared. Meanwhile, the only other known specimens of the genus remained locked away in old British-era cabinets in three global institutions: the NHM in London, the Hope Collection in Oxford, and the Zoologische Staatssammlung München in Munich. 

After a summer of searching, I returned to London, where we faced a dilemma. We had only one modern specimen from Chandigarh and two unnamed relics from the 1960s. Naming a species from a single individual is risky. Still, Dr Broad urged, “If we don’t document this, who will?” 

We named it Losgna occidentalis, meaning “western”, to reflect the fact that it marked the westernmost known occurrence of the genus. Prior records came exclusively from tropical forests in eastern India and Southeast Asia—this was a westward range extension of over 2,000 kilometres, into India’s drier lower Himalayan scrublands.

To trace the genus's history, I joined my friends Halimah and Lauryn on a journey to Oxford’s Hope Collection to examine Losgna forticeps, the genus’s type species described by Cameron in 1903. In a dusty cabinet, we found it—a solitary, hundred-year-old wasp with a curved ovipositor and banded abdomen. Holding that century-old wasp felt like shaking hands with a ghost. After meticulously observing each wing vein and dorsal ridge, I prepared the formal species description. 

Our manuscript, titled “A Revision of the Genus Losgna (Hymenoptera: Ichneumonidae), with Description of Losgna occidentalis sp. nov.”, was peer-reviewed and published in early 2025 in Zootaxa. We formally described L. occidentalis based on diagnostic characters like its unique body sculpture, colouration, ovipositor morphology, and wing venation. We also provided the first comprehensive identification key for the genus, integrating Cameron’s 1903 description, Heinrich’s unpublished German notes from 1965, and our new diagnosis. We re-examined and illustrated every extant historic specimen to revive this forgotten genus and make future recognition possible.

This work reinstates Losgna into active taxonomy and highlights just how easily biodiversity can be overlooked. As Ritesh Kumar Gautam, Scientist-C at the Wildlife Institute of India, put it: 

“This discovery highlights the importance of solid taxonomic work and shows how young people, and even citizens, can find new species in their own backyards. Hymenoptera are crucial as pollinators and biological control agents, so identifying and describing new species is essential for understanding and conserving our ecosystems.” 

Yet much about Losgna occidentalis remains unknown—its host, life cycle, and ecological role are all mysteries. The absence of records in Indian archives and museums underscores how underfunded and poorly coordinated taxonomy has become, especially in the Global South. Without publication of our key and description, the entire genus risked remaining lost, its ecological story untold. 

This story isn’t just about naming a species—it’s about rescuing a lineage from the brink of obscurity. A wasp on a windowsill, a name nearly lost to history, and a genus restored to the scientific record all serve as a reminder that even the tiniest creatures can reveal vast, untapped worlds. In the yellowed labels of old drawers and the foam boards of modern cabinets, the natural world is still speaking. All we have to do is listen.

Read the full Zootaxa article