Cabras takes great care when she thinks she’s found something new. She signals to her teammates to stop moving. She doesn’t want any sudden movements to scare off a beetle. Then she tries to take a photograph of the scene. “I usually take photos of their food plant and habitat,” she says. This gives information to taxonomists as well as ecologists and conservationists.

Many jewel weevils, for example, have ranges as tiny as one patch of forest. They eat only certain plants. It is vital, then, to conserve the plant if you hope to conserve the beetle.

There’s another reason why Cabras tries to record the scene: “For some of my colleagues, this is the first time they are seeing the species alive,” she says. They have never seen their habitats or host plants.

If possible, Cabras then collects a beetle as a sample so that it can be looked at more closely in the lab. “When you are in the laboratory, it’s the same thing—you have to photograph them and examine their anatomy,” she says. But the beetles may be as small as 5 millimeters (less than a quarter of an inch). It requires a lot of patience.

That’s not all. “It also requires special skills and years of training to do the lab work. You have to train your eyes to look into the microscope, but you also have to train your hands,” Cabras says. Beetles must be dissected, or cut apart, to see their internal structures. That requires good eyes and steady hands. Still, Cabras can’t always trust what she sees.