Global biodiversity is rapidly declining, leading inevitably to a loss of ecosystem functionality when species and their associated life-history traits vanish. Unfortunately, even in the 21st century, a large proportion of Earth’s species are yet unknown and also for most described species science lacks a deeper understanding of the functional role of species and thus of ecosystems. In this Addendum we use the recent discovery of a new spider wasp with a unique natural history to illustrate the importance to conduct basic natural history and taxonomy research. We want to encourage such ‘old-fashioned’ research and also want to encourage biologists to report the many fascinating phenomena holding valuable natural history information they may encounter. Such detailed knowledge on species, their life-history traits, and their trophic interactions will be crucial to reliably address the challenges global change will bring. 2014-08-14 10:51:44 UTC final SP09e Aboveground multi-trophic plant-insect interactions in a Chinese subtropical forest Michael Staab michael.staab@nature.uni-freiburg.de Alexandra-Maria Klein alexandra.klein@nature.uni-freiburg.de Chao_Dong ZHU, Prof. zhucd@ioz.ac.cn Communicative & Integrative Biology 2014-09-24 accepted