Science and Technology for Canadians

Streaming Video - High resolution | Low resolution | RealPlayer Help

Teacher's Guide

Transcript of Video

Jill Deacon
Canada is a country that has traditionally opened its borders to the world. Immigration has been a major building block of our country. However, a team on the West Coast is now guarding our borders against an invasion of illegal aliens... these intruders are easily concealed and could alter our ecology forever. Considering the amount of traffic coming through British Columbia harbours, trying to stop the invasion is an overwhelming job, but success is absolutely crucial.

Jay Ingram
The port of Vancouver – Canada's busiest. Every year more than five-million tonnes of imported goods from around the world arrive at this facility and are unloaded. Three thousand ships from more than 90 countries bringing cars, bicycles, computers, television sets and video cameras.

But the port of Vancouver is also the point of entry for something more insidious: hordes of illegals. Every year, millions arrive here without proper documentation. Many make their way into Canada as stowaways. They cling to shipping containers and crates, they hide in cracks and creases. They're Canada's unwanted visitors.

This is a wood-boring Asian Long-horned Beetle; it's particularly fond of maple trees. Its presence has already taken a serious toll in parts of the United States, where trees threatened by infestation had to be destroyed. The Long-Horn poses a real danger to Canadian trees as well. Like many foreign pests, it arrived in North America on a ship.

Nancy Kumen is a program officer for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. The port of Vancouver is Nancy's beat... illegal insect invaders are at the top of Nancy's hit list.

Nancy Kumen
In the Port of Vancouver, our job is of utmost importance because we're the first people that actually see the commodity that could potentially bring in a pest... and the port of Vancouver is a container port as well as a lumber-exporting port, and containers, we have found, are an excellent mechanism for the insect - an exotic insect that could potentially pose a risk to our forestry.

Jay Ingram
Increased trade means Canada is importing new products and commodities we've never seen before. Many goods arrive in wood containers, and that increases the likelihood that we're bringing in new varieties of foreign pests.

Nancy Kumen
There's a risk that if an insect does come in or a pathogen does come in, it's gonna find a nice comfortable home in Canada, because the temperatures are the same, and the added bonus is that there may be no predator here that's going to attack that insect.

We're always surprised to see an insect, because it means that we have to do something and... there's always... if we find one insect, we know that there's probably more in that container. Insects are pretty hard to find - they can... especially wood-boring insects because they are right in the wood. And if there's enough activity that we can find one, we know there's a lot more.

Eric Allen
It's possible that large areas of land, large numbers of trees might have to be cut down - such as with Dutch Elm Disease. In the United States right now, there are established populations of the Asian Long-Horned Beetle in both Chicago and Brooklyn, New York, where they've removed more than 2000 trees from an urban community. That has had a very big impact on the homeowners and the people in that city... of those cities. When some of these problems get into our natural forests, we have an even greater problem that impacts a greater amount of society. People lose jobs - it has effects on community structure when we remove tree species from our environment. If we stop the major pathway through which pests are entering the country, we stop the problem. There are very few, if any, examples of eradication of pests that have arrived and established. We really want to put our efforts into stopping them from getting here.

Jay Ingram
As a research scientist with Natural Resources Canada, Dr. Allen keeps a close eye on insect aliens, especially those with an appetite for Canadian forests. If foreign pests are detected at port, they often end up here.

Eric Allen
One of the things that we at Natural Resources Canada do is take the material that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency intercepts, and we rear that material so that we get larvae-forming adult insects that we can identify better. Larvae are very difficult to identify in just their normal form - and we often need to have their adult forms to have a full identification. We also do research that helps us quantify how big a problem some of these exotic species are. These containers here, for example, have log bolts that were intercepted from Norwegian granite. And it's from these very specimens that we intercepted 1532 insects of more than 20 species that... all of which are not indigenous to Canada and pose a threat to our forests. If we run into something that we are not familiar with, then we either try to identify it ourselves, or barring that, we'll send it on to Ottawa to experts there - who have an even larger insect collection and resources to identify exotic specimens.

Jay Ingram
This Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada Research Centre in Ottawa houses the Canadian National Collection of insects. The collection plays a crucial role in heading off potentially dangerous insects that arrive at our shores.

Dr. Henri Goulet is one of 15 research scientists whose work at this facility make it one of the most important insect collections of its kind in the world.

Dr. Henri Goulet
It is like a library... it's a system of reference. It's not a place where we go and drool over, it's where we get information. Information that is often not published... that's right there: new species, known species, or species that appear from faraway places - like Europe or Asia. Well, we were well prepared, we have a specimen here and say Aha, this is not a new species, this is a species that came as an alien, and it's not welcome. This is what the collection offers.

Jay Ingram
The collection includes more than 15-million specimens. This vast resource makes the identification of foreign invaders an easier task.

Dr. Henri Goulet
People, in the West Coast especially, decided to do a detailed study... They bring these wood cases... these pallets, and whatever, and just see what's coming out of it. It's a zoo in there! And a zoo that we don't want! They are all tree eaters... they would kill our forests, destroy them. And this is marvelous that we can follow very closely a real source of introduction.

Jay Ingram
After being intercepted at Canadian ports of entry last year, more than 300 potentially dangerous insect pest species were identified in Canadian government labs.