A Community’s Quest to Document Every Species on Their Island Home

“Can I tell you about something else?” Through the phone, I could already sense Andrew Simon’s voice waver with excitement. It was 2017, and I was an intern at Canadian Geographic writing a story on iNaturalist, the AI-powered species identification platform. I had found Simon through the app, and, as an avid user, I wanted to know his experience and opinion. After chatting about iNaturalist, he indulged me on BioGaliano, his community science mission to document every last species on Galiano Island, British Columbia.

I walked away thinking, Wow, that was a great interview. He was strikingly articulate and patient with my questions, and as one BioGaliano participant I would later speak to put it, “he has this childlike enthusiasm that is just contagious.” Since the Canadian Geographic article focused on iNaturalist, BioGaliano got only a brief mention, and I recall thinking his wildly ambitious project deserved more spotlight—perhaps even a whopping 5,000-word feature. The opportunity presented itself last year when I was asked to write a feature for Hakai Magazine as an editorial fellow. The result was this week’s feature story.

Following Simon and his fellow naturalists around Galiano Island, I was awestruck by his seemingly eidetic memory for the names of everything around us. Symplocarpus foetidus, Verbascum thapsus, Cytisus scoparius—he can rattle names off without pause. I am illiterate by comparison. But as I delved deeper into the subjects of natural history and naming, I realized that nearly everyone has some sort of proclivity for noticing and developing a fondness for nature. Projects like BioGaliano serve to foster that innate predilection for the natural world. If the reader of my feature comes away with one thing, I would like it to be the enormity in the minute action of stopping to notice the life around you.

Marina Wang
Associate editor

This Week’s Stories

Naming leads to knowing, which leads to understanding. Residents of a small British Columbia island take to the forests and beaches to connect with their nonhuman neighbors.

by Marina Wang • 5,000 words / 25 mins

130-Year-Old Menus Show How Climate Change Is Already Affecting What We Eat

By studying the so-called mean temperature of restaurant seafood, scientists have shown how the species that grace our plates have changed with time.

by Ian Rose • 950 words / 4 mins

Facial Recognition—Now for Seals

A neural network, trained using thousands of photos of harbor seals, offers a noninvasive way of telling seals apart.

by Sean Mowbray • 600 words / 3 mins

Turning the Tide: 13 New Books to Get Kids Reading and Exploring Nature

From solo sojourns to the seashore to family expeditions out at sea, this season’s selections will inspire you and the little ones in your life to embark on coastal adventures.

by Raina Delisle • 2,400 words / 12 mins

It’s Taken More than 20 Years and Is Full of Holes, but a New International Agreement Targets Fishing Subsidies

For many in the conservation community, the long-awaited deal doesn’t go far enough to curb overfishing.

by Karen McVeigh • 850 words / 4 mins

What We’re Reading

This week, thousands of activists, scientists, and world leaders gathered in the hilly coastal city of Lisbon, Portugal, as the United Nations Ocean Conference kicked off. In his address, Secretary-General António Guterres warned the world of an “ocean emergency,” and urged the participants to take action and turn the tide to restore the health of the ailing seas. Some activists, however, protested that the conference so far has been too much talk and too little action. (Al Jazeera, Reuters)

This week’s feature on BioGaliano tells us how a community on British Columbia’s Galiano Island blended Indigenous knowledge with taxonomy to connect with nature. This Mongabay podcast interviews two scientists on similar endeavors: an ethnobotanist in Mexico trying to make eelgrass, traditionally used by the Comcaac people in their cuisine, a sustainable food source for the future; and a biologist using the traditional knowledge of the Mi’kmaq people to understand how some lobsters, eels, and tomcods move. (Hakai Magazine, Mongabay)

Flat plains, rugged mountains, and chasmic canyons are some of the features found on the ocean bottom, and we barely know about them. But, Seabed 2030, a collaborative project, plans to change that. With roughly 25 percent of the ocean floor mapped already, the project is well on its way to map the entire ocean floor by 2030. (BBC)

Speaking of bottoms, and of naming creatures, how about learning a thing or two about Bryozoa—a group of microscopic aquatic animals that have been categorized by the location of their anus? This fascinating video takes a deeper look at the enchanting lives of these tiny plantlike animals. Although their name translates to “moss animals” in Greek, they neither look like animals nor are they mosses, but they are definitely fun to watch! (Journey to the Microcosmos)

’Tis the season of ... beach holidays! Yay or nay? After two years of stay-at-home summers, a tropical beach holiday in a luxury resort, sipping piña coladas and watching the sun go down, sounds appealing. But, there’s a dark side to such lavish holidays: environmental degradation and the classist and racist issues of displacement. A beach bummer, perhaps? (The Atlantic)

What about a swim at a local beach, you ask? Maybe it’s a good idea to skip that, too. As we fill oceans and rivers with plastic, scientists have now found that infectious viruses can hitchhike on microplastics, surviving as long as three days and posing a risk to beachgoers. (The Telegraph)

But, fret not! There’s still hope for a virtual diving holiday. Drew Beattie, a diver and photographer from Vancouver, British Columbia, takes you to a world-class diving site in the Salish Sea, giving a glimpse into the world of nudibranchs and revealing some tricks of his trade. (The Tyee)

The shipping industry (namely its major delays, ugh) has been a popular topic of conversation over the past two years. But for many port city residents, vessel traffic and stacks of containers are nothing new. Since the 1970s, container traffic has shifted from US and European cities to other ports around the globe, and now, seven of the 10 largest terminals in the world are in China—in 2020, Shanghai alone handled enough shipping containers to circle the planet nearly seven times. (“In Graphic Detail: The Rise of the Shipping Container”)

Since 1988, the five salmon-producing countries around the Pacific Rim have released more than five billion hatchery salmon into the ocean annually. (“Too Many Pinks in the Pacific”)

Ever heard of a milky sea? Few people have, and even fewer have seen one—but our writer Sam Keck Scott has. He sailed through a milky sea on a dark night in 2010 somewhere between Oman and India. He remembers the sails suddenly glowing from below as the water glimmered glow-stick green. (“And Then the Sea Glowed a Magnificent Milky Green”)

Microscopic creatures living at the bottom of the Mariana Trench have an ability so curious that a young scientist gave up his search for meteorite dust on the seafloor to study them. Resigella bilocularis are magnetic microbes! The question is, How and why do they have this peculiar ability? (“Magnetic Microbes Are Thriving in the Mariana Trench”)

Hidden far below the Earth’s crust is an ocean—perhaps, the largest in the world—but its water isn’t sloshing around; it’s chemically bound to the surrounding rock and only seeps out as the mantle melts. If this deep water system is disrupted, it could affect sea levels on the surface and our planet could transform into anything from one huge ocean expanse to a dried-out landscape. (“How the Ocean Inside the Mantle Affects the Habitability of the Earth”)

It’s a game of survival with no place to hide. How do plankton defend themselves when getting caught means they pay the ultimate price? Find out in the latest episode of the Hakai Institute’s Microworlds series. (Video length: 3 min 30 sec)

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