The Earth's multitude of insects sport flashy colors, vicious choppers, fuzzy antennae, and glistening wings, but identifying those champions of animal diversity, as they creep into dark corners and lurk under leaves, can often be tricky, requiring a magnifying glass and bulky taxonomic keys. That’s exactly what French high school student Pierre Estienne hopes to change. In fact, he has an app for it.
The problem first bugged Estienne a few years back when the then ambitious 14-year-old spent years doing painstaking research to ID a new beetle (now known as Coenochilus hervillardi Estienne.) “It takes a lot of time, and nothing is on the Internet,” Estienne, now 17, says. “I thought that we could accelerate that.”
This year, the entrepreneur and amateur entomologist, along with a group of teenaged colleagues, formed the non-profit Biodiversity Software, and have worked up a prototype of Insecta, an open-source, image-rich "encyclopedia of bugs" ...
