What is a bioblitz? Put simply, it’s a biodiversity survey with a time limit. From spiny lumpsuckers to western toads, bougainvillia jellyfish to goblin’s gold moss, the Hakai Institute’s bioblitzes have helped researchers catalog thousands of organisms—and in many cases, added their DNA to global libraries of life, like the Barcode of Life Data System (BOLD) and iNaturalist.
In the words of Emmett Duffy, the director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Marine Global Earth Observatory (MarineGEO) program, “A bioblitz is a very intense effort to characterize all of the organisms that live in an area.”
One of the key words there is “intense.” In 2017, Duffy and MarineGEO partnered with Hakai on the Institute’s first bioblitz, a three-week event focused on marine organisms. Two dozen veteran marine biologists and taxonomists put in marathon days in the field and in the lab—examining samples from 255 different sites around Calvert Island, British Columbia, and identifying specimens that represented over 1,000 species.
Since then, Hakai has hosted several terrestrial and marine bioblitzes on and around Calvert Island, and in the urban marine environment of Vancouver’s False Creek. Hakai researchers also participated in a 2019 bioblitz in San Pedro, California, around the Port of Los Angeles.
The next big event is coming up in late April 2024: a back-to-back series of three week-long bioblitzes that will see approximately 60 scientists from across Canada and the United States descend on Quadra Island, British Columbia, to catalog life across its habitats. The event is a collaboration with over a dozen partners, including the Florida Museum of Natural History, the University of British Columbia, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and the Institute for Comparative Genomics at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia.
The first week focuses on terrestrial organisms, from insects and mosses to double-crested cormorants and black-tailed deer. The second week will be subtidal, with researchers collecting samples on dives and deploying an ROV outfitted with video cameras. And the third week will focus on the rocky and muddy habitats of the intertidal zone.
Of these, the week of underwater surveys offers the most opportunities for turning up something novel. “The deeper you get, the more unexpected and new species that you find,” says Hakai Institute research scientist Matt Lemay. “People are really good at finding things in the intertidal zone or on land, where people more commonly spend time. But as soon as you start diving and getting deeper, there's a lot of unexpected diversity down there.”
All three bioblitz surveys are important and exciting, says Lemay. Together they create an all-species biodiversity survey, something that’s never been done on Quadra Island before. “The idea is really just to answer the question, ‘What lives on Quadra, across all domains of life, from protists all the way up to large mammals?’”
Researchers will observe and catalog what they find, but they’ll also selectively capture specimens to be sent to the Royal BC Museum, the Canadian Museum of Nature, and the Los Angeles Natural History Museum.
“What makes our bioblitzes really unique is that we’ll be doing molecular genetic work on all of the specimens, too,” says Lemay. “So not only are we counting what’s there and putting research-grade specimens in a museum, but we’re also sequencing DNA to help fill out global genetic reference databases like BOLD, which is hugely important these days.”
