From ants in Mada­gas­car to sharks in the North Pacific, bee­tles in Mex­ico to frogs in South East Asia, researchers from the Cal­i­for­nia Acad­emy of Sci­ences add new strings to the web of life.

In 2013, researchers at the Cal­i­for­nia Acad­emy of Sci­ences dis­cov­ered 91 new plant and ani­mal species and two new gen­era, enrich­ing our under­stand­ing of the com­plex web of life on Earth and strength­en­ing our abil­ity to make informed con­ser­va­tion deci­sions. The new species, pre­vi­ously unknown to sci­ence, include 38 dif­fer­ent ants, 12 fishes, 14 plants, eight bee­tles, two spi­ders, one rep­tile, and one amphib­ian. In addi­tion, Acad­emy sci­en­tists dis­cov­ered a new genus of bee­tle and a pre­vi­ously uniden­ti­fied genus of sea fan. More than a dozen Acad­emy sci­en­tists along with sev­eral dozen inter­na­tional col­lab­o­ra­tors described the newly dis­cov­ered plants and animals.

Prov­ing that there are still plenty of places to explore and things to dis­cover on Earth, the sci­en­tists ven­tured into remote jun­gles and descended to the bot­tom of the sea, looked in their own back­yards (Cal­i­for­nia) and explored the other side of the world (Africa). Their results, pub­lished in more than 30 sci­en­tific papers, help advance the Academy’s research into two of the most impor­tant sci­en­tific ques­tions of our time: “How did life evolve?” and “How will it persist?”

“Our best esti­mates are that we have dis­cov­ered and described less than 10 per­cent of the life forms on Earth,” says Dr. Terry Gosliner, Dean of Sci­ence and Research Col­lec­tions at the Acad­emy. “As we race to dis­cover the other 90 per­cent of the species that make up the tapes­try of life, we are focus­ing our efforts on global bio­di­ver­sity hotspots — places that are both unusu­ally diverse and highly threat­ened, includ­ing many trop­i­cal forests, coral reef com­mu­ni­ties, and our own back­yard, California.”

Below are a few high­lights among the 91 species described by the Acad­emy this year.