Bug expert puts quick-to-squish humans in their place with lesson about respecting little critters
CBC
Iain Phillips almost didn't make it to our interview. He was heading back to his home in Saskatoon when a "beautiful caddisfly" — a moth-like insect often used to model fishing flies — flew past his car window.
"I nearly had a car accident," he said. "There was no opportunity to stop ... but I regret it, and I probably will regret it through to going to bed this evening."
Phillips is Saskatchewan's senior ecologist for aquatic macroinvertebrates: insects in their early stages of life that spend at least part of their time in water. He finds them in the province's rivers and lakes, brings them back to a lab in Saskatoon and studies them to figure out the impacts of pollution, construction projects and other stresses.
Right now, a lot of Phillips's work relates to climate change and environmental degradation, which he said is causing "chaos" for the insects he studies.
"This is unprecedented — the way everything is changing," he said. "Never in recorded time in this region have we experienced such changes in temperature, so what will happen next is really a 'best guess' scenario.
"The temperature might be advantageous for one bug or disadvantageous for another. But as the temperature changes, all of that will interact. Everything is connected like a three-dimensional spiderweb, and as one thing gets touched or pushed, it will affect everything around it."
And what happens to the insets he studies can be a valuable early warning sign of environmental problems.