Would you Study the Hairs on a Fly? WRITTEN BY RIO CONSTANTINO GRAPHICS BY JON BONIFACIO
HOW MANY CHILDREN grow up wanting to be entomologists? If I were to narrow the survey down to only kids interested in being scientists, I think most of them would want to study something like black holes, or dinosaurs, or the cure for cancer. But what about insects? Would anyone want to study the hairs on a fly?
Or so the report said. The authors proclaimed an ominous trend, yet most of their data came from Western sources.
FEATURE
The problem is the lack of basic research. There’s no foundation of taxonomic work to base robust generalizations on. There are descriptions of insect species going back to the 1940s, but what’s there is patchy, and definitely incomplete. That a lot is missing can be inferred simply by comparing what we have with those of other countries who have already done the work. According to Mr. Pedales, databases in Europe list over 11,000 named insect species, while in the Philippines, there are only around 2,800. Alarming, considering how renowned the country is for biodiversity around the globe.
FEATURE
Last April, I had an interview with Ronniel Pedales, a young entomologist currently teaching at the Institute of Biology in the University of the Philippines – Diliman. Initially, I wanted to ask him about an article published by The Guardian, titled “Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature’.” The article summarized the findings of a scientific report which collated worldwide data on insect populations, and which found an alarming trend: insects were disappearing at calamitous rates. The most affected were the Lepidopterans, Hymenopterans, and Coleopterans. In other words, butterflies moths, wasps, bees, ants, and humble beetles, were dying in droves.
They cited not one study from the Philippines. Not a single one, despite our country being a foremost of biodiversity in the world, as well as being a center of rapacious ecological destruction. So I wrote Mr. Pedales an email asking if he knew of any study monitoring insect populations in the Philippines, and his reply was: “There aren’t any, at least not that I’m aware of.”
It’s a problem because taxonomy is the science of naming, of giving species an identity. How can you study the
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