An exciting new initiative out of the University of Guelph’s Centre for Biodiversity Genomics is calling on the public to assist with a massive study aiming to improve data on insect biodiversity in Canada.
The program, called BugQuest, plans to do this by supplying schools and other community groups with the materials necessary to capture thousands of insects, which will then be collected by the research team and sequenced using DNA barcoding—a technique that allows scientists to identify species by scanning their DNA.
The impetus, says postdoctoral scholar and BugQuest team lead Ross Stewart, is to better comprehend the state of Canada’s insect populations. “We can understand what’s happening with climate change because we’re constantly checking the temperature. But we cannot, at the moment, do that with insects,” he says. “Are they increasing? Are they decreasing? Where are they distributed?”
To answer these questions, his team needs a large amount of data, a.k.a. bugs. The initiative, which launched in late March and will run until 2027, is based on a similar smaller-scale project from several years ago called the School Malaise Trap Program (SMTP). Stewart says BugQuest aims to build upon SMTP, which put up around 300 traps during its run. “We’re aiming for about a thousand traps throughout the country,” he says.
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Crucial to the program’s success will be the participation of schools, Indigenous communities, botanical gardens, agritourist areas, zoos, museums, and more. So far, the interest has been strong. “Our goal this year was to hit about 500 participants wanting to sign up, and I think we are four away from that,” says Stewart. “It’s a lot more popular than we thought, which is good.”
Participants will receive a BugQuest Kit, including a malaise trap and assembly instructions. The trap is a tent-like structure with a bottle filled with salt water that traps insects when placed outside. After a week, the bug-filled bottles would be replaced and stored in the freezer, and two months later, participants ship the insects free of cost to the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics. The whole operation is free for participants, thanks to funding from the Government of Canada’s New Frontiers in Research Fund.
At the lab, Stewart and his team will record their data and share it with participants, including what kind of bugs live in their area and how their site compares to other sites. The data would then be published in a scientific journal, and Stewart hopes the program would be extended over several years to better understand how insect populations and biodiversity changes over time and across regions.
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His other hope is that BugQuest is a fun and effective educational experience for participants, and that people become more aware of the different species that live in their area and how they shape their ecosystems.
“We’re doing high-level science, but we’re also trying to teach why insects matter,” says Stewart. “Insects are faceless. They pollinate sometimes, they’re pests on crops, or they bite you, but they’re so much more than that. We’re really trying to show that insects are more than meets the eye. That they’re important.”
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