CNC Diptera Unit
Jukka Salmela
The following is an “Open Letter” that will be presented to the Canadian press by a Member of Parliament, Ms. Elizabeth May. If you can support this petition, please send your name, full affiliation and address (including country) to Art Borkent’s email: artbo...@telus.net
Your name will be added to a supporting list that will likely never be seen publicly but needs to be noted by our member of parliament. Please consider helping to stop the removal of the Diptera Unit in Ottawa, Canada.
Please remember that we are writing this for the press – someone gave advice that it should be written at about the level of an intelligent 14 year old.
If any of you are members of another society of specialized Dipterists or otherwise, please feel free to send this on to your other colleagues.
I am hoping to have this submitted to Elizabeth May with all the signatures by Friday, Feb. 13, the end of this week. Time is of the essence.
best wishes, Art Borkent and David Grimaldi
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A Decision at Agriculture Canada that Flies in the Face of Science
Reducing bureaucracy in the federal government should not result in a loss of vital scientific capacity. One of the many mistakes being made we describe here.
The Canadian National Collection of Insects, Arachnids and Nematodes (CNC) is a world-famous collection of insects and mites that includes more than 18 million specimens. It includes specimens from the early 1900s till the present and represents most of the biodiversity found in Canada. The scientists working there describe species and identify thousands of specimens every year for other biologists. It is their unique skill.
There are more than 80,000 named species in Canada, excluding viruses and bacteria. The insects make up the bulk of those species and most are in four major groups: butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera), wasps (Hymenoptera), beetles (Coleoptera) and flies (Diptera). The 9,777 named species of flies represent 12% of all species of Canada, including such flies as mosquitoes, blackflies, no-see-ums, horseflies, flies parasitic on other insects and many more unknown to the public.
DNA barcoding, however, suggests that there are more than 34,000 species of flies in Canada, and that only about 28% of Canadian flies are named. Much work remains to be done.
Insects are the movers and shakers of ecosystems and understanding them provides vital information on biodiversity and how best to conserve and manage our biological heritage. They are most often the first evidence of environmental change, making them critically important in understanding the impact of climate change. In the 1960s on the bequest of the Dept. of Defense, entomologists collected broadly throughout the north. Recent collections show species moving north, with the first biting blackflies and more mosquito species now in the Arctic. We know this by comparing specimens in our national collection. When the Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus) was first detected in Texas in 1985, entomologists never dreamed that it would expand as far north as New York. Unfortunately, it is an efficient vector of various viruses, including Chikunguya, dengue, eastern equine encephalitis, West Nile, and Zika. When will it get to Canada? There are many similar examples.
Canadian courts have recently issued landmark rulings affirming that climate inaction threatens our national welfare. The Supreme Court of Canada confirmed that the federal government has the authority and obligation to address the climate emergency nationwide. Our prime minister has written eloquently about the importance of addressing climate change.
Flies are also the most important insects in the transmission of human and animal diseases, as well as having species that are among the most destructive agricultural pests. They are also critical to the health of natural areas, from decomposition to pollination (especially in tundra and taiga). Bristle flies, for which one of the targeted CNC entomologists is a world expert, parasitize caterpillars and other insects that can defoliate whole forests; they keep populations in check. Even the scientific fight against cancer and other diseases -- and virtually every aspect of biological research -- depends on studies of a little fly, Drosophila melanogaster.
This all makes it particularly shocking that the recent cuts to staffing within Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada include the entire Diptera Unit, the scientists and their support staff working on flies. This will leave a substantial gap in our capacity to monitor species that threaten and sustain Canadians. The Canadian collection houses about 30,000 identified fly species, from around the world, which has directly benefitted the research of everyone signed below (and many more). Research on flies at the CNC has been globally renowned and transformative.
Those being terminated now are in the later stages of their careers, and in reality, there is a need to hire MORE scientists to fill the need to study the fly diversity of Canada and to support a science vital to Canadian society.
What is at stake here is the continued existence of a core scientific capability: the ability to document, identify and interpret insect biodiversity in support of agriculture, biosecurity, conservation, and environmental policy. At the same time, biodiversity loss is consistently ranked among the top global risks for the coming decade, making the erosion of this capacity particularly difficult to justify. At a time of accelerating global change, the institutional expertise and collections infrastructure required to identify and contextualize these organisms is being removed (here and elsewhere over the past several decades). This is not an abstract academic concern, but a matter of national preparedness.
We can do much better with our limited government resources. Yes, government can be trimmed, but this should primarily be through reducing the bureaucrat/worker ratio and other cost-cutting measures. The future will be challenging, for which we need evidence-based information to guide us; firing scientists and their support staff is NOT the way to proceed. Canadians need those scientists working on flies at the Canadian National Collection. We hope the recent decisions around this can be reversed.
Dr. Art Borkent
Salmon Arm, British Columbia,
V1E 2C2, Canada.
Phone: (250) 833-0931
Email: artbo...@telus.net
Webpage: https://artborkent.com
Research Associate of the American Museum of Natural History