What's That Six-Legged Critter?

Entomologist expects new book will be key tool for coming swarms of insect lovers

BY ANDREW VOWLES

Call it an “insect collection between covers.” More than that, Prof. Steve Marshall, Environmental Biology, expects his new 700-page guide to the six-legged creatures of eastern North America will become an indispensable reference tool for what he sees as a growing wave of two-legged backyard naturalists.

Move over, birders. Insect enthusiasts are on your tails. Or so says Marshall, whose new volume, called Insects: Their Natural History and Diversity, arrived on bookstore shelves in April.

As an entomologist at U of G since 1982, Marshall has logged enough hours hunting down bugs to know he's not alone in the field anymore.

“I see a shift in the naturalist community from birds to butterflies and dragonflies, and an absolute boom of interest in other naturalist-friendly insects,” he says, referring to growing numbers of amateur naturalists toting not the butterfly nets and alcohol-filled vials of their Victorian forebears but the digital cameras of the electronic age.

And far from snapping only the most flashy and colourful insects, more of those collectors are turning over stones and logs to add many of the other thousands of species of six-legged critters out there from stink bugs to flies to their photographic collections. “Every naturalist I know is out there snapping digital images.”

Enter Marshall's new volume, the first species-level guide to a vast array of insects beyond the standards of butterflies and dragonflies. He agrees that its weight and full-size format will deter most readers from lugging the book into the field. But he expects it'll be used much as he and other scientists employ the two-million-specimen U of G insect collection housed in his Bovey Building lab.

By consulting more than 28 picture keys with hundreds of illustrations, readers will be guided to the most likely candidates among the book's 4,000 colour photos displaying insects' typical behaviours and key characteristics.

Compare your digital image to the picture in the book and you can tick off another of the roughly 4,000 most commonly encountered insects in this part of the world.

Marshall's book includes insects found east of the Mississippi River and north of Georgia, including the six provinces east of Manitoba. That area is home to an estimated 100,000 insect species, including about 25,000 in eastern Canada alone. That number also includes related terrestrial arthropods — spiders, mites, millipedes — which are covered in the book.

Most of those species are obscure or supremely difficult to identify unless you're an entomologist intimately acquainted with signature identifying genitalia, he says.

“There's a photograph of almost every family any naturalist will ever see, as well as many genera encountered in northeastern North America and a significant number of common and conspicuous species. It's almost like an insect collection between covers.”

He adds that the book will also allow readers anywhere in the continent to identify most insect families. “For the naturalist-accessible insects, it's pretty comprehensive.”

The book includes the first known photos of some insect species to be published anywhere, such as a species of bee fly that lays its eggs in bee wasp nests.

“A significant proportion of the images are the first published photos of the species or genera and, in some cases, even the families. The bee fly is one of several species discovered for the first time in Canada in the course of this project.”

The book credits many Guelph students, graduates and colleagues for their role in illustration and design of the picture keys. Many were based on drawings for earlier course manuals done by Ian Smith, scientific illustrator in the College of Biological Science, and fine art student Monika Musial. (Other figures were drawn by Marshall and Christine Schisler, an instructor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology.)

The book publisher hired current undergraduate Dave Cheung to help design the identification keys. Other contributors include Matthias Buck, curator of the insect collection, and Steven Paiero, a 2004 M.Sc. graduate of Guelph.

Marshall, whose research focuses on phylogenetic systematics of fly families, says the book began as an after-hours sideline that became a central pursuit.

“Although many new discoveries were made while writing the book, I initiated this project to provide something badly needed by naturalists and students, and I never really thought of it as part of my research program.”

He'd like to write a companion volume for western North America and has much of the material in hand for a book on the insects of Central America, where he has worked on a major biodiversity project in Costa Rica funded by the World Bank.