Hong Kong has a large biodiversity, with insects comprising a large part of the biodiversity. Yet most people in Hong Kong are disconnected to nature and even have an aversion of insects. We want to encourage people to take ownership of nature and to enhance the public’s knowledge and understanding of insects while contributing to the Biodiversity knowledge of Hong Kong’s insects.

The goals of the project are to build a public accessible collection of insects in Hong Kong that can be used to educate the public about Hong Kong’s insect biodiversity. This collection can be exhibited at public events such as the Hong Kong Biodiversity Week. We also want to generate DNA barcodes of the different insects in the collection in order to build a DNA barcode library of Hong Kong insects and to contribute to the international barcode of life initiative.

 

But who said serious science can’t be fun? We want to invite the general public as well as students from secondary schools to participate in this project. We would like to run the project in the form of a game, almost like ‘Pokemon Go’, where participants must register to participate and will receive points for contributing to the insect collection, with higher points awarded for collecting insects that are not currently in the collection. We want to try “To Catch Them All”, by trying to collect a specimen of every insect species in Hong Kong!