A Simple Plan to ID Every Creature on Earth

The utopian lepidopterist holds a pin in each hand. His style is ambidextrous and probably unique. He catches two forewings of a dead moth simultaneously and pins them to his drying board, and then, in a continuous sweep, he does the same with the hind wings. He repeats these motions again and again, like a conductor with tiny batons. Outside, it is hot and bright. Inside, it is hot and dark. The lepidopterist, whose name is Dan Janzen, has been working here in this Costa Rican forest for more than 40 years. He is married to his research partner, Winnie Hallwachs, and the two of them occupy a small house with a roof of corrugated metal whose eaves cast deep shade. During the day they work under artificial light. At night bats flit through the gaps at the top of the wall, do hairpin turns in the air, and exit again without slowing. The utopian lepidopterist's aim is to put names on all the moths and butterflies in the forest. He wants to know more than just the names, of course; he wants to know who lives where and who eats whom and to unravel the mysteries of the ecosystem. But his first question is always the most basic one. This moth, here on the drying board: What is it called?

All over the world, farmers, port inspectors, game wardens, exterminators, building contractors, and, of course, professional biologists are staring at some form of plant or animal life and wondering helplessly what it is. Matching living things to their names is so notoriously difficult that the problem itself has been given a name: the taxonomic impediment. With insects, the taxonomic impediment is severe. Insects are the glue that holds the web of land-based life together; they are pollinators, soil aerators, and a major source of food. Most of them are as mysterious as extraterrestrials. More than 90 percent of insects, tens of millions of species, have never been described. As every type of information in the world is being encoded into standard formats, accessible on the Web and searchable from anywhere, plant and animal names stand out as a stubborn exception. That's because the quest for a name begins with a specimen, and a specimen is made of atoms, not bits. There is no hole in a computer into which you can drop a bug.

The utopian lepidopterist moves his hands in little semicircles, and another dust-colored insect lies flat, positioned for eternity. All around him are dead moths, wings folded softly on thorax. More will arrive tomorrow; and the next day, more still. He eats at his desk, oblivious to the food in front of him. His needles flash again. He thinks mainly about his project. There may be no person in the world faster at spreading moths. Nonetheless, at this rate, his project will fail.

On the campus of the University of Guelph, in Canada, surrounded by neat embankments of snow, is a two-story building that contains an automatic animal-identifying machine. Its inventor, Paul Hebert, is 61 years old, strongly built, with blue eyes and white hair. He says he came up with the idea for the machine in a grocery store. Walking down an aisle of packaged goods in 1998, he indulged in a moment of awe: Here, in a short row of numerals, was the entire retail universe, billions of individual products, identifiable by a tiny machine-readable barcode. If it works for cans of food, Hebert thought, why not for bugs? Why not for everything?

Hebert is an evolutionary biologist and an expert on water fleas. He has been obsessed with insects since childhood. On his left hand is a scar he got running with a glass bug jar as a toddler. At 12, he began performing operations on caterpillars, experimenting with their endocrine system in a quest to produce dwarfs and giants. He won a scholarship to study at University of Cambridge, and in 1974 he began making collecting expeditions to New Guinea. He went up into the cloud forest and caught 50,000 moths and butterflies, and neatly tagged each one with date and elevation. By his count, there were 4,100 different species.

Except that they weren't really species. "They were operational taxonomic units," he says. "You aren't allowed to call them species until you know what they are." Hebert went to the Natural History Museum in London and began to check his specimens against its large reference collection. He naively thought he knew something about moths. He understood their anatomy, he possessed a microscope, he could speed through the professional literature. He was almost never stumped by anything he found in Canada. He had studied at Cambridge for three years and had quickly found his bearings among the moths of the British Isles. But the tropical moths were different. There was too much diversity, too many dead insects in the drawers. After several years, he admitted defeat. He had failed to identify two-thirds of his specimens. "It was like forgetting how to read," Hebert says. "It was like being struck dumb. I had to face how far I was from attaining what I wanted, how inadequate my ability was."