View video in MPG format

Transcript

[Parks Canada beaver logo]
[title: parkscanada.gc.ca]

[text on screen: Jason Straka is a student at the University of Victoria studying the interactions between insects and their environment in Ivvavik National Park]

[Jason Straka in open valley in Ivvavik]
Jason Straka: I think insects do interest me because of their diversity; they just do so much that is so cool. I think it’s the sense that there’s a lot to be discovered still and that’s part of what brings me to the arctic.

[Jason and other students walking along gravel path, filing cups, taking notes]
Jason: So every seven days I go out to all these plots and I set up these little cups full of water and dish soap and so the cup sits there for a 48 hour period and then whatever happens to be passing by, presumably a standard amount of it, will fly into the cup and then I come back after the 48 hours is done and pick up whatever’s in the cup.

[Jason in valley]
Jason: And then later back in the lab with a really nice ‘scope I’ll put it all in a Petri dish, sort it out to species, and figure out what the diversity is like in each of these sites, how many insects there are, what type of insects they are.

[mountain vista, bees in flowers, insects on and around flowers]
Jason: Part of what I’m interested in is how many are actual pollinators or leaf eaters, herbivores versus parasites, and one of the things they predict is that if an ecosystem starts to degrade, the parasites will be what disappear first, and that’s because they rely on these higher food groups.

[Jason in valley, sheep]
Jason: Insects as indicators are extremely useful actually because they’re so closely tied to things like climate, things like plant communities, things like mammal hosts, bird hosts. The question of how many types of insects there are is actually something that we’ve been working on for quite a while, and there are various guesses as to how many there are in the world, I think it ranges between something like 20 and 120 million different species of insects. So, actually we as scientists don’t have a really good handle on how many insects are out there.

[dip to black, the students get geared up and spray each other with bug spray]
Jason: insect is something with three body parts and usually six legs, well; if they’ve lost legs they have fewer than six, but usually six legs.

[students hike off towards horizon]

[text on screen To learn more about Parks Canada visit www.pc.gc.ca]

[title: Created for Parks Canada by HyperfocalFilms www.hyperfocalfilms.com]
[title: Parks Canada/Parcs Canada government logo]
[title: Copyright - Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada, represented by Parks Canada, 2010]
[title: Government of Canada logo]
[end]