The tiny beetle could scarcely have picked a worse human to fly into. Amateur entomologist Andrew Short was sitting on a bench in downtown Vancouver in June 2023 when the unfamiliar metallic green beetle hit him and fell to the ground. He said he “needed to know what it was,” so he captured it, took it home to photograph, and later handed it over to authorities — who confirmed the insect to be the first emerald ash borer collected in Canada west of Manitoba. Short’s fortuitous encounter set in motion a chain reaction of research aimed at understanding and clamping down on the pest that has devastated ash forests across North America, killing millions of trees in Canada and the United States. …Short makes a hobby of searching for insects and plants, examining how they interact and photographing them. …The findings in Vancouver suggest there may be other undetected populations in western North America, the study says.