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March/April 2007 issue	IN THIS ISSUE: Table of Contents Feature: Barcoding life Feature: Haida Gwaii Feature: Cold War cleanup Feature: Shipwreck gold rush The Inside Story Editor's Notebook Reverberations Explorer À la carte Mosaic

Next time you spot a caterpillar in your garden, nudge it with a twig. If it curls up, it's likely a cutworm, a member of the moth family Noctuidae. Roughly 4,000 species of cutworm moths are found in North America, including this one, Ascalapha odorata, which, with a wingspan of 20 centimetres, is the largest on the continent. Some are friendly to homeowners and farmers; others are pests that will chew you out of garden and crop. If you want to know the subtle difference or want, say, an illuminating little off-the-cuff meditation on the feeding habits of bedbugs, the man to talk to is an unpretentious, easygoing, bug-obsessed insect taxonomist named Don Lafontaine.

Lafontaine's life is insects, and his work is identifying and classifying them. He's based in Ottawa at the Canadian National Collection (CNC) of Insects, Arachnids and Nematodes, the third largest such assemblage in the world (after The British Museum and the Smithsonian). The CNC holds some 16 million specimens stored in cabinets lining the high-ceilinged hallways of the K. W. Neatby Building at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's Central Experimental Farm.

With a staff of about 30, including Lafontaine and 14 other insect taxonomists who conduct research and classify new species, the CNC receives around 200,000 specimen queries a year from people seeking assistance in identifying unknown bugs. If that seems an astonishing number, I'm astounded it isn't thrice that, given the bugs that bedevil our lives.

It's estimated that science has identified, at most, 10 percent of the globe's insect population, so Lafontaine and his colleagues aren't likely to run out of work any time soon. Which is where University of Guelph scientist Paul Hebert comes in. In this issue, science writer Siobhan Roberts profiles Hebert and his ambitious plan to identify and classify every living thing on the planet by reading a small portion of each organism's DNA and entering it into a searchable database. A zoologist and population geneticist interested in biodiversity, Hebert developed his plan to create a genetic barcode of all living things in order to understand just how biologically diverse different ecosystems are.

Lafontaine has worked with Hebert and continues to do so — he's currently using the barcode database to revise the classification of a group of pest cutworms that occurs throughout North America and includes the fearsomely named Devastator species. He says Hebert's system is an “extremely useful tool for identification when employed with understanding and caution. It is immensely helpful, but in difficult species complexes, it can be unhelpful at the same time.”

Two snippets of DNA that are 99.75 percent identical are likely the same species. Snippets that are less than 97.5 percent identical are usually different species. But those between 97.5 and 99.75 percent, who knows? says Lafontaine. And this tiny margin matters. Taxonomists classify species by considering a suite of characteristics, examining everything from colouring, reproduction and genitalia (Lafontaine kindly illustrates this point by showing me the penis shapes of different moths and indicating how they are designed for very specific partners) to behaviour and diet. Some bird species, for example, can be distinguished only by their songs. Knowing the difference means deepening human understanding of how ecosystems work and why they break down.

Within Lafontaine's field, cutworm moths, he offers the example of a species that attacks crops. How to control it? It overwinters as an egg. A related but non-pest species of cutworm that feeds on the weeds on the margins of fields overwinters as a caterpillar. In doing so, it becomes a host for a parasite that, the following summer, attacks the pest cutworm. Farmers often employ pesticides to control pest cutworms, but they might not need to if they cultivate the presence of the non-pest species.

Lafontaine's patient, careful labours are of incalculable importance. The federal government has, in its wisdom, long supported the work of the CNC, which has made Canada a world leader in entomological research. More than 80 percent of the national collection was assembled after the Second World War by scientists hired to support the Arctic Insect Survey, which later became the Northern Insect Survey. That work was funded because the government feared challenges to its ownership of the Arctic islands. Investing in Northern science was a means of demonstrating Canada's interest in, and knowledge of, its Arctic territories.

In the last issue, we reported on the mountain pine beetle's destruction of British Columbia forests. Climate change will unleash other insect outbreaks. We should take some comfort, then, in knowing that the country continues to support a core group of scientists whose expertise can help us manage such infestations. Lafontaine represents the historic investment we have made in entomological research; Hebert, the new money we are devoting to the development of a powerful tool that will help us understand the role insects and other organisms play in ecosystems.

— Rick Boychuk

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