Word: insection
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...collections manager at London's Natural History Museum, Max Barclay has traveled the world in search of rare and previously undiscovered insects. So when his 5-year-old son took a break from a picnic lunch last March in the museum's garden and returned with an insect in his hand, Barclay could not have guessed that his question--"Daddy, what's this?"--would lead to a global detective hunt that has so far stumped Barclay and the world's other entomologists...
Despite working with an insect collection of more than 28 million specimens, Barclay and his colleagues have been unable to identify the almond-shaped critter, about the size of a grain of rice, which has in the past year made itself at home in the sycamore trees on the 19th century museum's grounds in central London. "My field work has taken me all over the world--to Thailand, Bolivia, Peru. So I was surprised to be confronted by an unidentifiable species while having a sandwich in the museum's garden," Barclay says...
...There are two possible explanations," says Barclay. "One is that the bug is roeselii and by switching to feed on the [sycamores] it has suddenly become more abundant, successful and invasive. The other possibility is that the insect in our grounds may not be roeselii...
...Barclay is not convinced that climate change is responsible for these new inhabitants. "It's very difficult to judge because the period of time we have seen global warming potentially influencing the insect fauna is almost exactly the same period of time since the [European Union] opened up its trade barriers between member states. So in the last decade and a half we've been importing a lot more from Italy and Spain and Southern France and we've had this climatic change - so we have two potential causes...
...struggle to identify the critter displays not only the mystery of nature, but also the fickleness of the science of taxonomy. Identifying insect species can be extremely difficult; some scientists estimate we have managed to identify only 10% of the insect world so far. The rest, like Barclays' almond-shaped mystery bug, are perfectly happy to crawl along without any christening or approval from their relatively gargantuan cohabitants. But that won't stop scientists like Barclay from trying. For him, the question asked by his five-year old son last March is a calling he still feels compelled to answer...