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One thing that unravelling the genetic code of an organism allows us to do is to look at similarities and differences between populations of the same species. This can give us an insight into the history of the populations and where they originally came from. In the case of the scaly cricket, research on the life cycle revealed that eggs are often laid in driftwood. This raises the intriguing possibility that the eggs, which take a year to hatch, might actually survive winter storms by “rafting” in chunks of driftwood and, importantly, might be able to colonise new areas by this method. If so, it is possible that our populations of scaly crickets (some of which were discovered as recently as 1999) might not have colonised the UK when we were still joined to the continent at the end of the last ice age (like most other British insects), but might instead have “rafted” over much more recently from populations on the French coast.

If our populations are genetically isolated from those in France, they will be much more vulnerable to extinction than if there is gene flow between the populations. Revealing the genetic code of the scaly cricket will provide the basis to test the “rafting” idea, and allow us determine if individuals from French populations are able to come over to Britain. This will also be an important step in examining whether population crashes, such as those caused by recent storms, have had impacts on the genetic diversity of our scaly cricket populations.

Sequencing the genome of a species also allows us to examine genetic differences between closely related species. Until quite recently (only a decade or so ago), the scaly cricket populations in the UK and France were considered to belong to the same species as those found in the Mediterranean (Pseudomogoplistes squamiger). These populations, and those along the Atlantic coast of Europe, the Canary Islands and Morocco, are now considered to belong to a separate species (P. vicentae), based on very small anatomical differences. But how genetically different are the two “species”; should they really be considered as separate species? It has also been proposed that populations in France, the Channel Islands and the UK belong to a distinct sub-species (septentrionalis), but how valid is this claim? Again, having a reference genome for the scaly cricket will allow us to go on to answer such questions. In order to assess the conservation status of a species, it is vital to know whether you are dealing with a single species with a large range, or several different species with smaller ranges.

By comparing the genomes of different species, we can also learn how the genome itself evolves. So far only a few insects have had their entire genomes sequenced, and this list is also dominated by the so called “advanced” insects such as flies, bees and wasps, moths and beetles, which have a complete metamorphosis (including a grub or caterpillar-like larval stage and a resting pupal stage). Crickets, on the other hand, belong to a much more ancient branch of insects, which do not have a pupal stage, but instead hatch out of the egg looking like miniature adults. Looking at more “primitive” insects will help us understand the origin of the adaptations that make insects so successful.

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