So You Think You Don’t Like Bugs (transcript)

By Jen Bayer 

Bugs!? They sting and bite! They eat our food, our forests, and even our sweaters! At one time or anoth­er, almost all of us just want them to go away. 

As it turns out, they are going away. World­wide insect pop­u­la­tions have declined by near­ly half over the past forty years. Here in the East­ern Sier­ra, many of us see the evi­dence of this on our windshields. 

But wait, once insects are gone what will pol­li­nate our apples and apri­cots, our Sier­ra asters, mon­keyflow­ers, and shoot­ing stars? What will break down dead­wood, fall­en leaves, and ani­mal waste? What will trout and song­birds eat? Edward Wil­son, an ecol­o­gist who devot­ed a life­time to study­ing these ques­tions, has warned, “If all mankind were to dis­ap­pear the world would regen­er­ate back into the rich state of equi­lib­ri­um that exist­ed ten thou­sand years ago. If insects were to van­ish the world would col­lapse into chaos.” 

Insects are 80% of all known species of ani­mals and rep­re­sent about half of all ani­mal bio­mass on earth. Insects are foun­da­tion­al to the ecosys­tem, though only one mil­lion of an esti­mat­ed five mil­lion species have been identified.
My twin sis­ter Hilary and I found­ed Sil­i­con Val­ley Bar­code of Life to address bio­di­ver­si­ty loss. We were raised in the Sil­i­con Val­ley sur­round­ed by tech­nol­o­gy and sci­ence, and always appre­ci­at­ing nature.

Over time, we learned that a mass extinc­tion, only the sev­enth in the mul­ti-bil­lion-year his­to­ry of life on Earth, was under­way and that recov­ery of the diver­si­ty of life lost in pri­or events of this kind has tak­en tens of mil­lions of years. We want­ed to do some­thing. Inspired — by emi­nent con­ser­va­tion biol­o­gists Dan Janzen and Win­nie Hallwachs, we real­ized we had an oppor­tu­ni­ty to use tech­nol­o­gy for bio­di­ver­si­ty, and found­ed SVBOL. Hilary is cur­rent­ly over­see­ing the Sil­i­con Val­ley por­tion of the project, and I’m liv­ing here in the Mono Basin full time. 

We’re DNA bar­cod­ing arthro­pods to cre­ate a com­pre­hen­sive cat­a­logue of Mono Basin and Sil­i­con Val­ley arthro­pod bio­di­ver­si­ty, and to engage vol­un­teers in learn­ing about the impor­tance of it. DNA bar­codes can be thought of like fin­ger­prints for each species, and are a more effi­cient way than mor­pho­log­i­cal tax­on­o­my to iden­ti­fy pre­vi­ous­ly unknown species. 

We’re using Malaise traps (tent-like tools for bulk col­lec­tion of fly­ing insects), aer­i­al and aquat­ic nets, light traps (for night­time col­lect­ing), and Berlese fun­nels (devices to extract ground dwelling insects from soil and lit­ter) to sam­ple diverse ecosys­tems in each of the ecore­gions in our locales rec­og­nized by the Unit­ed States Geo­log­i­cal Survey. 

In the six years since our found­ing we’ve col­lect­ed more than 70,000 sam­ples, and con­tributed 1,000+ unique records to the BOLD Sys­tems data­base, a glob­al­ly acces­si­ble open access cat­a­log of mul­ti­cel­lu­lar life. We’ve also direct­ly reached one thou­sand peo­ple through in-per­son pre­sen­ta­tions and many more through our web­site. If you’re inter­est­ed in learn­ing more about SVBOL or par­tic­i­pat­ing in this work, please let us know! We’re look­ing for landown­ers, macro pho­tog­ra­phers, nat­u­ral­ists, edu­ca­tion­al group direc­tors, and more. You can reach us at svbarcodeoflife@gmail.com.