A Massive Collection of Dead Insects Lives Inside Filing Cabinets in a Canadian Office

This piece was originally published in National Observer and appears here as part of our Climate Desk collaboration. Hidden in anodyne filing cabinets scattered across the federal government’s Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa is a library of 17 million dead bugs. The Canadian National Collection of Insects, Arachnids and Nematodes is one of the world’s largest, and it’s essential to Canadian agriculture. Managing bugs is a key part of agriculture, whether it is combating pests and invasive species or trying to prevent the loss of pollinator populations. And taxonomy, or…

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