Quick Dips

Electronic Bugs

Bordered by boxes of bugs below is Landcare Research scientist Marie-Claude Lariviere. A $20,000 Lottery Science Research grant will assist her to catalogue her specialty, the insect group Hemiptera, and eventually produce a computer database to help identify insects.

The money will be spent on equipment to allow data and images to be entered electronically, direct from her microscope, avoiding the current process of painstaking measurements and drawing. It will be possible to share the images with researchers all over the globe via electronic mail and produce high-quality images for scientific publications.