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A world under our feet

Lifelong study of beetles leads to highly specialized knowledge

There’s a whole wide world underneath our feet and hidden in the underbrush of our forests that for most people is never thought of or even realized. For others it’s a lifelong calling.

Georges Coulon studies bugs. More specifically, he studies beetles. Even more specifically than that, he studies a particular family of beetles and the close to 10,000 species of beetles that belong to that family around the world, most of which are smaller than an average-sized ant.

Coulon is an entomologist of world renown who works out of a dark, cluttered lab in the basement of his Powell River home. The room is filled with bottles of various liquids and hundreds of beetles stuck through with pins. Using high-tech microscopes Coulon spends much of his time inspecting beetle samples from various places in the world, looking for the minute differences that can identify the insects as either a previously catalogued species or a new species altogether.

There are 5,500 species of known mammals in the world, from rats to humans. In the single family of beetles that Coulon specializes in, there are 9,500 known species in 1,200 genera. In Canada alone there are around 100 families of beetles, each with thousands of species within them. There are an estimated 10 to 50 million species of insects in the world, making our current knowledge of around one million species of insects only two to 10 per cent of the total.

Studying insects allows an insight into genetics and evolution that can be very difficult to achieve when studying mammals. While most mammals have selective mating habits and a limited number of offspring, often with long gestation periods, that is not the case with insects. Two beetles put together will mate without hesitation and within two weeks have 200 offspring, making the study of genetic patterns far more convenient.

“Entomologists have another perspective of life,” said Coulon, “than people who like birds and mammals.”

Every year dozens of new species of beetles in Coulon’s particular genus of study are being catalogued. Coulon’s work consists of gathering the samples from museums around the world and restudying them to determine if they have been categorized correctly or if they are a new, uncatalogued species. Given the number of undiscovered species of beetles in the world, a researcher is more likely to find a new species in Coulon’s particular genus than a sample of a species already catalogued.

“If you bring me a specimen of an already described species, I offer you a bottle of champagne,” said Coulon.

Growing up in Belgium, Coulon led a young life quite unique from most. At age 13 Coulon began to ask himself what an insect is exactly. He met a schoolmate with a similar interest and together they began to collect insects in the forest to study. One day a PhD student from the local university saw the two collecting insects and asked why. The student told them about an entomological society in Belgium, where Coulon, by this time 16, met a professional entomologist working at a museum. The entomologist offered to teach Coulon how to dissect beetles.

From that point on Coulon spent every free moment he had at the museum learning about beetles. One day his mentor put Coulon in a room with two boxes, each with a different specimen of beetle, and told him to study the beetles and come to him with any conclusions. Coulon determined that despite the different names the two species were in fact the same. This discovery would result in Coulon’s first published academic paper. He was 18.

“So I had no experience with modern music when I was 16, 18. I didn’t go to the ball running after girls. Or play soccer,” said Coulon. “And I was happy.”

Working from published catalogues from such places as China, Japan, Italy and others around the world, and dating from as far back as the 19th century, Coulon is revising the cataloguing to put together a comprehensive catalogue of his family of beetles. This is the second family of beetles for which he has done this.

The only way to determine, without doubt, the uniqueness of a species of beetle is to remove and dissect the male genitalia of the insect and inspect it under the microscope. Two beetles that may be imperceptibly different on the surface become obviously unique when using this method of identification.

Coulon said his interest in beetles is the same as one person liking the colour red over the colour green, it just appeals to him. He said rather than the results of research, it is the process that draws him to it. He feels he is still looking for the answer to the basic question he had at age 13: what is an insect? His research has all been directed toward figuring this out.

“I would say it’s curiosity,” said Coulon. “The pleasure is to search, not to find. Because when you’ve found, it’s finished. So it’s the process.”

Beetles are important in the biosphere because they are predators. Beetles feed on the microorganisms and microscopic animals that feed on the decomposing organic matter on the forest floor.

Beetles can also be seen as an indicator of environmental problems. While most consider pine beetles, that have ravaged the forests of British Columbia, as a problem in and of itself, Coulon sees the issue in a different light. From Coulon’s point of view the problem isn’t the beetles but the loss of ecological diversity in the province’s forests that have allowed the insects to thrive. Forestry practices have left only patches of old growth forests and many forests that are all the same species of trees and all the same age of trees because of replanting. This leaves a paradise for pine beetles that allows them to proliferate.

While not his primary area of focus, Coulon has spent some time looking at beetles around Powell River and Texada Island since moving here just over two years ago. He estimates there are probably between three to five thousand species of beetles in this area alone. He has a modest collection of local beetles that now sit alongside the hundreds of beetles he has in his lab from all over the world, many of which are ready to be studied, named and catalogued as new species in the ongoing process of uncovering the world under our feet.