LETHBRIDGE, Alta. – A decision to drop Latin in school may have changed the course of Peter Harris’s life.
It was a course requirement that kept the Agriculture Canada researcher out of Oxford University and sent him to the forestry program at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver. Born in Reading, England, he returned to the University of London for his doctoral studies and then came back to Canada.
A recent recipient of the Order of Canada, Harris has achieved international recognition for his work in the biological control of weeds using insects.
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Harris is a retired scientist emeritus at Agriculture Canada’s Lethbridge Research Centre, where he works every day rewriting a field guide that identifies weeds and predator insects.
He began his career at the Belleville, Ont., research institute in 1959 just as Australian scientists were doing landmark work on biocontrol of weeds using predator insects. He later worked in Regina for 20 years and then came to Lethbridge five years ago where he has since retired.
Harris has devoted his life to the study of weeds and the insects that eat them.
“I’ve always worked on weeds. It’s always the same program. I just do it from different places,” he said.
His work involves combatting weeds that were introduced to Canada. Plants like St. John’s wort, spotted knapweed, tansy ragwort and leafy spurge have taken over some areas of native rangeland across the West. Harris wanted to release insects that would take back the prairie.
A long wait
This is the work of a lifetime. It takes as long as 20 years before scientists know whether their experiments worked.
When he first started working with insects, many people were repelled by them. But that changed after he showed farmers and ranchers how bugs can benefit farms and cattle operations.
Government advertising programs aren’t that effective in teaching people about the value of insects, said Harris. A better way to promote biocontrol is in coffee shops where farmers brag to their neighbors about how well the insects did the job.
“Jealousy is a much better thing than a government leaflet,” said Harris.
Farmers’ educations started with tours of fields during the day and night.
“We’ve had lovely field nights in B.C. with the knapweed insect. The ranchers and their wives run around the range at night with their flashlights and their neighbors wonder what is going on,” he said.
Since Harris’s work was based on imported weeds, he and his fellow researchers brought insects to Canada from the weed’s home country. It takes about two years to get approval to release these insects from quarantine. Scientists must also prove the insects will not hurt desirable plants or native plants.
There is free trade in insects. Harris and fellow researchers have collected insects all over the world and Canada is able to give those countries something in return.
Using insects is not a silver bullet, said Harris. It often takes the insects a few years to acclimatize before any tangible results show up in weed-choked fields. When the weeds are gone, the insects tend to die off because their food source is gone.
Noxious weeds like knapweed probably arrived many years ago in shipments of grain from Europe. There was no grain inspection in the early days.
“Even now you can’t stop one or two little weed seeds coming in with a ship full of wheat or going out with a ship full of wheat. Weeds get around the world extremely well,” said Harris.
Today, scientists are under more pressure to find fast solutions because most funding comes from commodity groups who received matching funds from government.
“User groups are always impatient. They want results quick.”
To speed up projects they may release fewer insects per weed. A number of different kinds of insects will feed on a problem plant but to be most effective for biocontrol, scientists need to find out which insect is doing the most damage and release that one rather than taking a shotgun approach.
People have documented biocontrol for more than 200 years but it was only this century that it was actively pursued.
