(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) - Welcome to Women in Entomology.

Meet the superheroes of Insect Science.

I'm your host, Nancy Scales Coddington.

Tonight's talk features scientists who have helped to break glass ceilings, move science forward through their hard work and dedication and inspire our next generation of scientists.

Please take a moment to introduce yourself in the chat and tell us where you're tuning in from.

We'd love to know who's joining us this evening.

You can also use the chat feature to ask questions of our guests this evening.

We will collect those questions as you ask them and we will answer them as we are able to get to them.

We have some amazing role models and scientists joining us this evening and it is my great pleasure to introduce them.

Dr. Corrie Moreau is the Martha N. and John C. Moser Professor of Entomology and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in Ithaca, New York.

She's also the Director and Head Curator of the Cornell University Insect Collection with over 7 million specimens.

That's a lot to keep track of.

Dr. Moreau's research on the evolution and diversification of ants and their symbiotic bacteria couples field-based research with molecular and genomic tools to address the origin of species and how co-evolved systems benefit both partners.

In addition to her passion for scientific research, Dr. Moreau is also engaged with efforts to promote science communication and increased diversity in the sciences.

Welcome, Dr. Moreau.

- Great, thank you.

I'm so happy to be here.

- Megan Barkdull is a PhD candidate at the Cornell University in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology where her research focuses on the evolution and development of complex traits in social insects.

Broadly, she seeks to understand how ant's genes produce traits related to sociality like division of labor within the ant colonies.

Megan is also passionate about using natural history collections to advanced scientific research and to connect with the public.

Welcome, Megan.

- Hi, Nancy.

Happy to be here.

- Sylvana Ross is a new PhD student at Cornell University in the Department of Entomology where she focuses on how urban environments influence the dynamics of a species trait variation, selection, and species diversification.

Her research looks at variation between urban and natural ant populations to study the impact of human driven environmental change.

It is her goal to help spark empathy for the natural world and fight for racial and environmental justice within our urban communities.

Welcome, Sylvana.

- Hey, guys, thanks for having me.

- Well, we are really glad that you are all here with us this evening and we are gonna dive right into this.

My first question is for Dr. Moreau, and I wanna start with what exactly is entomology?

- That's a great question.

So entomology is the study of insects and other arthropods, and we can study them in a myriad of ways.

Of course, we can study them in their natural habitats, but also of course in managed systems.

So you might think about, you know, studying insects in the Amazon forest, but we also need to study the pests and pollinators in some of our crops.

So that's entomology is sort of studying insects in all the varied habitats in which they're found.

- So for many young women, your career isn't something that they've even considered.

So we are really excited to have all of you here with us tonight.

Dr. Moreau, how did you actually get into entomology?

Was this something that you always wanted to do?

- Yeah, that's a great question.

So I loved nature as a kid and I loved bugs, but I grew up in a city so there wasn't a lot of nature around, but there were always insects and so that's sort of where my passion was.

But ants were always my favorite because if you found one, you could find more.

And so, they were always like, I could put out breadcrumbs, and I could watch them have battles in the sidewalk.

But I didn't know any scientists growing up, so I didn't really know that this was a career option.

So I sort of thought, well, the people I know with careers that, you know, maybe can study entomology are maybe a high school biology teacher or maybe working for a pest control company.

It wasn't until I went away to college that I learned there were so many ways you could use a degree in entomology.

- Well, it sounds like that representation really is important to show what is available and out there.

So Dr. Moreau, why are bugs beneficial?

- Yeah, of course, everybody thinks of pollinators, I mean, that's a natural connection.

We use those out in the environment to pollinate the crops that we grow, but also they're pollinating many flowering plants.

But in addition to all of that, they're also important for things like nutrient cycling in the environment, aerating soil.

So really we wouldn't have a beneficial healthy, you know, human population without having a healthy resilient insect population.

They're really the sort of foundation of, you know, everything that happens on the planet.

- And so, can you talk a little bit about the work that you've done, your ant research?

- Sure.

So the work I do with ants is sort of twofold.

One, I try to understand why there's so many species of ants, why they're found where they are, and how long they've been there, and to do that we use a whole bunch of molecular tools.

And so, really what we're trying to understand is the sort of big ant family tree of life.

So there are more species of ants than all the birds and mammals added together.

So that's a lot of species to try to figure out who's related to who.

But once we have that family tree, we can ask questions like, how many times have spines evolved because those are great defenses against predators.

We can ask the question, how many times has vegetarianism or herbivory evolved?

And the second part of my research really ties in with that because when we realize that lots of species of ants were living on these nutrient poor diets, we ask the question, could bacteria in their gut help them sort of live on this nutrient poor diet?

And so, the other half of the work I do is on the microbes within the guts of ants.

- So what does that actually look like?

- Oh, wow, that's a lot of molecular biology, a lot of sitting at a microscope and carefully dissecting apart ants to get to each compartment of the digestive tract.

So just like we have a stomach and our large intestines and small intestines, so do ants, and we wanna know which microbes are found in each and every compartment.

So I spend a lot of time dissecting ants under our microscope and then use a whole bunch of biochemistry to sort of look at the bacteria and the host's DNA so that I can ask questions about how does that sort of genetic blueprint create the things we see?

- How exactly do you dissect something as small as an ant?

(both laughing) - You have to have very steady hands so no coffee those days, and you have to do everything under a microscope, and you have these little tiny watchmaker forceps, so special little tweezers that people who dissect apart watches use.

- And it sounds like you are sourcing a lot of data.

So can you talk a little bit about, you know, as you're gathering that data, how are you compiling all this information and how do you go back to source some of this information?

- That's a good question.

So whenever we collect ants out in nature, we are very careful to always record all of the pertinent information.

So exactly what day, what time of day, where were we, what was the habitat like, what were the ants doing?

And that's sort of the first critical piece of data.

But then of course, as you've alluded to, we now take these into the lab, we may do manipulations with them, with their diet, so we have to record that.

Then now we're generating mega tons of DNA based data, so all these letters on a computer that we can then use to run statistical analyses to ask questions.

So it's a lot of computational biology, it's a lot of sitting at your computer.

But I think the thing I love is that the work we do sort of spans the entire gamut of science from being right out in nature, collecting the specimens ourselves, getting inspired with new questions based on what we're seeing.

Then we're bringing 'em back into the lab and we might do manipulations on those ants so that we can, you know, control for things experimentally.

Then we're sequencing DNA and genomics of these ants and then we're doing downstream analyses and presenting our results.

So it's really, we get to run the gamut of research.

- Well, that's really exciting 'cause it sounds like, you know, a field research right is always super fun, but you're having an opportunity to dive in to do chemistry and you're wrapping in the biology component of it, so you really are stretching yourself across many different disciplines.

- That's right.

It's really fun, though.

- Do you work with other scientists that are in those disciplines to look at the results that you get?

- Sometimes.

I mean, you know, my background is really in biology and so I have collaborated with chemists when I really need to understand chemically what's happening.

And of course sometimes I might need to collaborate with a different flavor of a biologist based on the questions I'm asking.

A lot of the questions that we ask about ants ends up being tied to plants because ants feed on plants, they build their homes in plants.

So I might partner with a botanist so that I can make sure I'm understanding what the implications are for the ants when they're feeding on plants or living in plants.

So there's a lot of collaboration which is really another aspect that's really fun.

- Yeah, I love to see that collaboration because it really gives you that big picture of what's happening and that's what, you know, ecology and looking at the environment really is all about.

- That's right.

- I'm gonna jump over to Megan, and Megan, I wanna ask you what first attracted you to studying ants?

I mean, when you look at all the different bugs you can choose, why ants?

- That is a fantastic question.

So when I started out in research as an undergraduate, I actually started out in a lab that looked at butterflies.

So we were doing conservation genetics of butterflies, looking at how we can use their DNA to understand how we can best protect these butterflies from going extinct.

And I really became interested in ants because unlike butterflies and unlike a lot of other insects, ants are social, and that just adds a really interesting additional layer of complexity to what's going on with ants.

Instead of sort of thinking about individual organisms and how they're evolving and how they're interacting with their environments, instead we're thinking about the ant colony.

And so, how are ants within a colony interacting with one another?

How are they, you know, doing different tasks within the colony?

The queens reproduce and the workers are foraging for food.

How does that sociality then impact both how they interact with the environment, but in my case particularly, how are they evolving throughout time?

So it's really the sociality of ants that got me super, super excited about them.

- So what are you finding so far with your research?

- Oh, great question.

So I'm kind of finding that these different aspects of sociality are really shaping the way that ant genomes evolve in different ways.

So some ants have just queens and workers, like I mentioned before, in other ant species you might have the queens and then you'll actually have different flavors of workers.

I think we just showed an image of that a second ago.

Minor workers, these smaller ants, and then the major workers, these larger ants.

And in these species with multiple worker sub casts, we actually see really distinct patterns of genome evolution and we can pick up on what might be some of the specific genes that are helping to create these really interesting traits.

- That's really fascinating.

So what are like the next steps that are happening with your research?

- Great question.

So I'm kind of working on two projects going forward, two sort of next steps to move this forward.

One is looking at this genus of the turtle ants, Cephalotes ants, which we just saw a picture of.

And so, like I alluded to, they have these two different worker sub casts, the minors and the soldiers.

And I'm really going to be doing a deep dive into that genus of ant to see what are the specific genes that are evolving to give us these different worker sub casts.

And then another project that I'm super excited about is I'll be going down to the Florida Keys to collect colonies, live colonies of these ants down there, then bring them back to the lab, and as Corrie mentioned, doing some manipulations with them, doing some hormone manipulations to further understand kind of what are the developmental mechanisms that let us go from an ant egg or an ant larva to these really different, both in terms of how they look and also how they behave, these really different adult ants.

- How do you collect a colony of ants?

- Fantastic question.

So that's really gonna depend on what the particular ant species is, and so in my case I'm looking at these turtle ants.

I'm really fortunate turtle ants live in the Florida Keys and then down in the Caribbean on some islands.

So I get to do field work in really, really beautiful places.

And I also think I'm kind of lucky because, you know, unlike a lot of ants that you might imagine living in these subterranean or underground nests, my turtle ants actually live above ground in hollowed out mangrove twigs.

And so, my field work basically consists of walking through mangrove forest in the Florida Keys and just snapping every dead twig that I see up in the trees, seeing if it's hollow inside and I'll snap one open and there's just an ant colony right in there waiting for me to collect them.

So it's really fun.

- Yeah, you certainly picked the right ant to be studied.

- Oh, yeah.

For sure.

(both laughing) Absolutely.

- Especially, a far cry from the bullet aunt.

(laughs) - Yes, and that's another great thing about these turtle ants is they do not bite or sting.

So thumbs up to that.

- That's great.

- Yeah.

- I've got some questions for Sylvana.

Is it true that you actually didn't like bugs when you were younger?

So how did you end up studying them?

- Yeah, I was so scared of insects growing up.

Not all of 'em, but like I wasn't like out in nature.

We didn't go camping or we weren't like a hiking family so I was really scared of a lot of different types of insects.

But it really took a class in my undergrad.

I actually was trying to get out of track practice and so I joined a lab that studied jumping spiders and their mate choice.

And so, we studied like male jumping spiders, this really cool like back and forth dance to try and impress the females.

So we were trying to look at where the females were looking and what was the most important part of the males dance that females really found sexy.

And I was just blown away by how much fun it was and how many cool questions you could ask.

And I was in a little lab room with like 800 jumping spiders in little dixie cups and I was like, I'm not scared of this, like I can do anything.

So that really like snowballed into like, wow, like nature's cool, science is cool, like I wanna be a part of this.

So really like that got me real jazzed about it.

- I am just stunned...

So what is the dance that finds them sexy?

(laughs) - Oh my gosh, yes.

So the males, once they see a female they kind of just like, "Oh, whoa, a female," and then they raise up their front legs.

And so, the species we were studying, they have green front legs and they kinda just wave 'em back and forth, and if the female's still interested then they'll like raise their back legs, and they have little white dots on their orange legs and they kinda like vibrate them.

And so, they're moving back and forth, like moving all their legs and then if the female's still interested, which didn't happen a lot, they'll raise their abdomen and kind of wave it back and forth.

And then if she's really still intrigued, then they'll like tap on her head and then that's like go time.

So it was just like, it was so much fun to try and get them.

They'll be like, notice each other, felt like I was playing like the bachelorette or something.

(both laughing) - That's really cool.

That's really neat to see how they expressed that.

- Oh, yeah, yeah, it was so much fun.

But of course all good things must come to an end.

So I had to graduate and I was like, alright, I need to find a way back to nature, especially living like in a city, it felt kind of hard to do that.

But really nature is like in the city we tend not to think of it like that.

We usually think of like the Amazon Rainforest or like the African Savanna, but really like if you go to the sidewalk, a dandelion growing through the cracks is gonna have pollinators, it's gonna have ants, and flies, and moths, and butterflies, and that's just like right outside.

So it's awesome.

- Yeah, so Sylvana, what are you gonna start to focus on your research in the Moreau Lab?

- Yeah, so I am a fresh PhD student, so hopefully I'll be studying how urban heat islands affect ants and how they're adapting to cities.

And so, we typically, a lot of cities have really high warm temperatures and so because of all the asphalt and concrete, our cities are a lot warmer than the rural areas around them that have a lot of shade, that have a lot of tall trees.

And so, there's still ants that are surviving in the cities and they're actually doing really well.

Again, a lot of other insect species are not doing very well in cities.

And so, my goal is to kind of understand if these ants are doing really well, what about their genome, what about their physical appearance and the way that they do their society, how is that helping them survive in cities.

And that can kind of help us understand why other insects probably aren't doing so well in cities.

- Yeah, that's incredibly fascinating.

Do you have a hypothesis of what you think that you're gonna find?

- Yeah, so I'm really curious.

I think that they're kind of expressing something called the heat shock protein and so they're kind of upping that protein that helps them survive in these really warm climates.

Cities are really cool, and the fact that they're all over the world, and so a lot of cities have different environmental policies, they're along different latitudes, they are different elevations, they have different climates, different weather patterns, and so we can really study different types of cities and how their inner workings affect all these ants.

And so, I kinda wanna get down to like the nitty gritty of how a city actually supports some species and how being a city doesn't support these species.

- I am really excited about your research and I cannot wait to hear more as you move through and study these cities.

Especially looking at the different climates within those cities, and the different heat sinks within them.

- Oh, yeah.

- It's gonna be exciting.

- I'm so excited.

- Thank you.

- Yeah.

- I'm going to swing back to Corrie, and Corrie, obviously all three of you have a deep love and passion for insects and for bugs, but there's many people who view these critters as pests and would be happy if they never showed their faces or wings or legs in their homes.

So can you talk a little bit about the pests and also, you know, the importance of those bugs?

- Absolutely.

You know, I'm just like everyone else, I don't love to have lots of bugs living in my home.

I'm much more tolerant of some than others.

So like spiders and house centipedes and even ants are welcome in my home.

I don't love having cockroaches in my home.

I'm sympathetic to that but I wanna remind people that all of these animals sort of have their place in the ecosystem, and they're critically important in all of those habitats.

And, you know, although we might think of them in many positive ways, like pollinators and aerating soil, many of them are pests and for a myriad of reasons, sometimes it's because they're pest to crops.

Because to support a human population the size we have, we have to have these massive uni species farmlands.

And so, of course, a pest if they figure out how to overcome, essentially, the way that a plant can keep an herbivore off if they sort of get past that, then suddenly they have the capacity to wipe out an entire crop and that's very concerning.

So of course the one whole field of entomology is called integrative pest management.

So it's trying to figure out what are all the steps we can do to control pests and making pesticide the last choice.

So can we grow our plants in different ways?

Can we introduce natural enemies?

So we're doing everything we can, so that we can sort of keep the food production high while controlling those crop pests.

Another type of pests are things that transmit human disease and that I think is unfortunate because it's not the insect that's causing the problem, it's the pathogen that's residing inside the insect sort of hitchhiking its way around.

So many people will make the statement that mosquitoes kill more humans than anything else, that's absolutely not true.

It's the parasites within the mosquitoes.

The mosquitoes just have the unfortunate job of transmitting them.

And so, of course, we have whole wings of entomology called Medical entomology specifically for trying to to stop the spread of those diseases that are caused by insect dispersal.

But, of course, then there's also ways in which we're trying to make sure that the beneficial insects have their way as well.

Well, there's a lot of conversation about making habitats that are suitable for native pollinators.

There's lots of crops where, even if pesticides need to be used at some stage, they'll wait until after the blooming season.

So after all the pollinators have visited and pollinated the flowers before they'll even consider using pesticides.

So there's this dance between, you know, really trying to protect the insects themselves but also making sure that, you know, our homes and our health and our crops are safe as well.

- Especially thinking about all those different evasive species that are creeping in and causing some issues.

Actually we did have a question come from the audience specifically talking about lantern flies and this is something that we are watching creep up from Pennsylvania.

What are your thoughts about the spotted lantern fly?

- That's a great question.

So of course this is an emerging pest that we're seeing explode in numbers and people are really, of course, concerned about this because we know that it can be a real pest to many crops, apple, grapes, things that we eat a lot of and make a lot of drinks from.

And, you know, there's a sort of this public campaign about stepping on them anytime you see them and of course that helps but it's not gonna completely control them.

So of course there's a whole bunch of entomologists that are pursuing ways, so trying to see if we can find the parasitoids or the natural enemies of them so that we can release them.

But before we do that we have to make sure that those natural enemies would not attack any of our native species.

We're also looking at fungal pathogens.

Some fungi are actually parasitic and will kill an insect host.

Those are being experimented with in real time right now, and I think they're starting to see some success with that.

But this is an example of something that's going on all the time.

It's just usually the pest isn't so obvious and also isn't so beautiful.

I mean that's what makes it really hard to step on them 'cause they are actually beautiful insects, but they're real cause for concern.

And so, I think, you know, a lot of people are acting very quickly to try to figure out how to control them.

- Yeah, I think it's more so because of the economic impact that it's going to have versus something that's been around for a while like the woolly adelgid, and there's been a little bit more of a slow process on trying to mitigate that.

What are your thoughts on the woolly adelgid?

- Well, I mean, you know, all of these pests are problematic and depending on the pests, sometimes they're very specific in what they attack.

So that actually in some ways is helpful to us because if they only attack one species of tree or maybe a handful of species of tree, we know where to sort of look for them first versus things that can sort of feed on almost anything and potentially transmit diseases among plants.

Those are much more problematic.

And so, one of the things that we see is that we see through time that these are sort of spreading around.

Now the other component of it that we haven't touched on is the impact that climate change is having.

So for many of these things a really hard freeze, especially over extended winters would really knock back populations.

But even in places like Ithaca, New York, we're not getting the deep freezes we used to have before.

And so many of these species are sort of advancing northward in finding suitable habitat in ways that they wouldn't if we didn't have ongoing climate change.

- Very true.

I think we see that right with the tick populations is that we don't have those hard freezes to help knock down that population.

I'd like to switch gears and talk a little bit more about pollinators.

We do hear quite a bit about putting in pollinator gardens.

Can you talk about their importance and their job in the ecosystem?

- I absolutely can but I'm gonna deflect this one to Sylvana 'cause she's done a lot of this work right in urban environments.

- Okay, yeah.

So yeah, pollinators, all the things that we can do to protect them because they are so important, span a wide variety of things that you can do.

And so, a lot of times when we think of a pollinator, we think of bees but we really forget sometimes butterflies and moths and flies and ants.

And although a bunch of different insects depend on nectar, and when they're visiting a flower for nectar they'll get pollen all over their body, and as they travel from flower to flower they'll help deposit their pollen.

So some things that you can do for pollinators, if you happen to own land or you have a front yard and a backyard that you're allowed to control, I like to say think of your yard kind of as like a mullet.

So like if you really need to have like a clean front yard, you have a business in the front, party in the back.

And so, you can keep your lawn all nice in the front, and in the backyard, definitely plant native pollinator plants, go to your native nurseries or even just check online, there's a lot of like great resources for figuring out what grows really well in your area and what's native, and then also planting things that span across all growing seasons.

So having something that blooms in the early spring for our early pollinators and then all the way to like fall.

So even now if the weather hits warm enough, I see some like honey bees sometimes some bumble bees out, wasps are still hitting the golden rod.

So making sure you have things that bloom throughout the season.

Please don't spray your yard if you can, eliminate pesticides, mosquito spray, and kind of creating like a really healthy habitat for pollinators.

Another really good one that you can do right now is leave all the leaves.

Oh my god, Ithaca has like amazing fall foliage and there's so many leaves on the ground but there are so many insects that over winter in leaf litter and so you've got moths and butterflies and all these different types of insects that need that leaf litter as kind of like an insulation for when they're over wintering so they can emerge again in the spring.

So when you collect all your leaves and throw 'em away, you're throwing away so many different types of insects.

And then some things for...

I had to learn how to like protect our environment when I didn't have a yard.

So I lived in an apartment, I still live in an apartment.

And so, some things you can do is like get curious and so just like going outside, learning what's in your ecosystem, contributing to people that do have access to lawns and yards.

So like community gardens, school gardens, sometimes churches have land that they need to be able to mediate and help with their type of gardening and stuff like that.

And so kind of getting involved with your community as well.

Some really cool ones, you can even leave like a little pollinator water dish so you just like a little tiny shallow dish, you can put some like corks and some rocks in it so other insects don't drown.

But like our honey bees will go visit the little water dish, sit on a rock and drink up the water.

So just like humans, a lot of insects love and need water.

And yeah, so just like get involved, get curious and just like see what's out there, kind of like, "Horton Hears a Who!"

You know, if you see a spec, once you understand what's on the spec, you wanna protect it and you feel like responsible for it because they're so interesting and so cool.

- Those are- - That's a Lot.

(chuckles) - Yeah, no, that's wonderful, that's a lot of great resources.

I especially like looking at what your native plants are and making space for those and thinking about your lawn, like that part business in the front and party in the back, and making space for those native pollinators and bugs that we have out there because they do need space to winter over.

I think a lot of people like chop up their leaves but I think what even just, can we just move the leaves into a different space gently?

Would that be something that we can do?

- Oh, yeah.

Create like a little insect Airbnb in your backyard, like even just a pile of leaves, things that are over wintering there, even like dead sticks especially over the summer, spring and summer, leaving like a pile of dead sticks as a little insect hotel.

Just like Megan said, her ants live in like those hollow tubes of like dead mangroves.

And so, just a lot of other insects need those hollow sticks to lay their eggs for them to pupate.

So yeah, leaving all those dead things and even just putting 'em in a little pile, you're just like, you can stay over there in the corner, is perfect.

- Well, that's great.

I think that's something that a lot of us can do and can live with.

Sylvana, you've done a lot of outreach, you know, helping to share your passion and your love of bugs.

Do you wanna talk a little bit about some of the work that you've done?

- Yeah, so what really got me jazzed about urban ecology was working in schools that were in the inner city.

And so, a lot of the nature programming that happens in schools, if you were able to get there, usually you can take like a field trip to a nature center or even go to the zoo and get that nature programming.

But for a lot of schools that's like impossible.

It's expensive, you got a lot of kids, you're underfunded and they're in the middle of the city and a lot of students don't have access to a yard or access to green spaces, and so their nature and environmental education is pretty much non-existent.

And so, I got really into after school and during school programming, and so we were studying what was growing in their school bounds and just like I said, like a dandelion coming through the sidewalk is going to have pollinators.

Same with like their school green spaces.

If they have like a little lawn, anytime they didn't mow, I was so excited.

I was like, "Look at all the clover, we're gonna find wasps, we're gonna find bees, we're gonna like overturn logs."

Like, it was incredible.

And so, it's really easy to kind of pass by all the insects and nature that's happening in the city just because we're hustling and bustling, we hear the traffic noises we're just like always so going.

But if you can like really focus in on what's growing in the sidewalk, what bird is visiting the tree.

Nature is out there and it's in the city and it's adapting and it's living and they're thriving.

So being able to like give that to kids and be able to like walk outside their cafeteria door and be like, look you have nature, and then just watch them like so excited.

I had kids catching little wasps in cups and like, "I got a yellow jacket," and just like the fear just kind of eliminates from their face when they see like how cool they are and they can see them up close just right outside.

So it was just like one of the best experiences just being able to share that with students that typically don't get access to any of that kind of nature programming.

- How surprised were the kids that you worked with that there were so much around them that they hadn't even realized?

- Oh, yeah.

I think when there's a turning point in a lot of kids lives where, you know, bugs are really cool, and I think a lot of kids do think bugs are cool, and then there's some point where they're like, "Ew, no, like bugs are gross."

Especially if we do like programming and we'd have talk about bugs and there's the teachers like, "Oh, no," like there's some point where it turns.

But I think when they actually get to see them up close and they get to feel the bumblebee buzzing in the little catch cup, and they can feel the vibrations and see them with their own eyes, I think they get so shocked that they're out there and then they wanna look for them again.

So then they go out and they come back to class the next week and like, "Oh, I saw a butterfly like flying past my house," or, you know, "I saw some bees on some clover."

And so, like once you know about it and once you're familiar with it then you start seeing it everywhere.

So I think they just needed someone to just tell them that it's out there, and then kids are so great at being so observant, and they'll find the nature once you point them in the right direction.

- That is so true.

Kids are so naturally curious and to help build that confidence while they are curious and excite them is so important.

So I love the work that you're doing.

I'm gonna switch over to Megan.

Megan, insects are vanishing at pretty quick rates, and can you talk a little bit about the reasons for insect decline and why should we care about that?

- Yep, that's a great question.

So we actually estimate that about one third of the 900,000 insect species on our planet are currently endangered, and that means that we could lose those species over the coming years and decades.

That's a huge, huge loss for biodiversity, and it's a complicated issue.

But a lot of the reasons why we are losing our insect species have to do with human impacts on ecosystems.

So one big thing which Corrie alluded to earlier is how we farm.

We tend to grow our crops and other plants in huge fields of monocultures, just a single kind of crop that we treat pretty heavily with pesticides and herbicides and fertilizers, and that creates a pretty inhospitable environment for insects.

So if we've converted, you know, huge percentages of the earth's surface into these monoculture crop fields, that's a huge loss of habitat for insects and contributes pretty significantly to their decline.

And I actually wanna mention too that this isn't just food crops that are contributing to this problem.

You might think of corn or soy fields.

But actually some of the biggest impacts that can happen, some of the most heavily pesticide treated crops that we grow are things like cotton that we use for our clothing.

And so, actually being really thoughtful about the clothing that you purchase could make a big impact in how we farm cotton and how that impacts insects going forward.

Another issue is gonna be climate change.

So as the earth generally warms and as patterns of rainfall change, the areas where hospitable habitats for insects are found are gonna be moving, and those insects aren't necessarily always able to move to keep up with the changing location of their suitable habitat, which is a huge problem.

So those are kind of two big issues.

- Yeah, they definitely are.

So have you noticed with the research that you're doing with ants, have you noticed the impacts of climate change with that work that you're doing?

- Fantastic question.

So that's not something that I'm directly looking at with my research, but like I said, the ants that I'm studying they live in the Florida Keys, they live in mangroves in the Florida Keys which are a coastal habitat.

And so, two things that are related to climate change are gonna have really big impacts on my ants and probably negative impacts on my ants unfortunately.

One is that with climate change we get a lot more hurricanes, they're more frequent and they're more destructive when they do happen.

And the Keys aren't very big, so it only takes a couple of really big hurricanes to hit the Keys to lose a ton of critical habitat for these ants.

And we've actually seen that happen with other species, with butterfly species that live in the Florida Keys where they've suffered huge, huge population declines in large part because of hurricanes which are getting worse with climate change.

And another issue is just simple sea level rise.

So these mangroves are growing right on the coast, right at the edge of the ocean, as sea level rises we might lose mangrove habitats and that means that we're gonna lose important habitat for my ants too.

- Yeah, that's really concerning.

So we've had some great questions come in from our audience and I'd like to ask some of those.

So I'm just gonna put this one out, I'm not sure who wants to answer it.

But why are there so many types of different ants?

- Well, Corrie.

That's a Corey question.

(all laughing) - Yeah, that's a good question.

So ants have been evolving on the planet for about 150 million years and they're really effective at invading new habitats.

And so, that might sound kind of terrible in some ways, but what that means is that when there's a new open niche, an ant can move in and if it has enough time, sort of through evolutionary time separated from its relatives, it'll diverge enough that it becomes a different species.

Now interestingly, ants found on all continents except Antarctica, which is kind of sad because of the name.

But they even probably historically were there because Antarctica, when the continents were in different configurations was actually a bridge between Africa and South America, and we know that there are ants that are closely related that are on both of those continents.

So they clearly were sort of transitioning through that habitat.

Now the other things that make ants so diverse is that they have so many different kinds of diets.

So some are predators and only eat other animals, some are herbivores or vegetarians and only eat plants, some eat everything, so that sort of allows them to not compete with each other.

In addition, they live in all kinds of habitats.

You heard from Megan that some of hers live in these tops of these mangrove trees, some live only in the tops of the Amazonian forests, some only live in the savannas of Africa, some live only right here in Ithaca, New York.

And so, that sort of ability to have disperse far, take advantage of whatever resources, whether it's where you're living in habitat or food, has allowed them to just sort of, you know, change into all the forms we see today.

Now I wanna point out that even though there are so many species of just ants, that's a tiny little corner of insect diversity.

So there are more species of insects than any other kind of organism on the planet.

And so, you know, you might think of humans as having this huge massive impact and it's true, but if we were to disappear tomorrow, probably the planet would be in better shape than it is now.

If all the insects were to disappear tomorrow, then we wouldn't be able to live on the planet within about three months, that's how important they are to every aspect of the ecosystem.

- Wow, that's impressive.

This actually segues right into another question that we had.

You had mentioned earlier, Dr. Moreau, about Medical entomology, you know, what other wings of entomology are out there?

- Wow, that's a great way to pose the question.

Of course, there's Medical entomology.

There's, you know, things like pest management.

So there's all kinds of ways in which people do that.

There are soil scientists who study just the insects in soil.

There are even people who study nothing but the insects in grass.

So it's actually one of the largest crops in the world.

And, of course, then we also have people who study just basic biodiversity, they might study things like genetics to try and understand human disease.

So insects are a great model to ask almost any question you can think of in biology and even in chemistry or even in material science.

So we have this really great situation that happened where at Cornell, somebody who's a material scientist, so what they study is the materials that make things.

So like, whether you wanna have, you know, water beat off of your windshield, they'll try to figure out what are the properties of glass that make that happen.

Well, one of them had come to the Cornell University Insect Collection and talked to the collection manager, Jason Dombroskie, and said, "Hey, how come when insects are flying through the air and the raindrops hit 'em, it doesn't shatter the insect?"

And so, Jason's like, "I don't know."

So they partnered together and spent a lot of time just dropping raindrops off of different insect wings.

And what they found is that the insect's wing, all of them have this really fine micro structure that shatters the raindrop before it even fully impacts the wing so that's why they're not destroyed.

So now this material scientist is trying to use that to build better materials so that we can have things like, you know, airplane wings that are more resilient to things like storms.

And so, you might sort of just think of it as a cicada on a tree outside making noise, but there's all kinds of things that we can learn from them from almost every field of science.

- Yeah, when you think about the size of a raindrop compared to the size of an insect, you know, I would not want that falling on my head.

- Exactly.

(all laughing) - So we have another question about carpenter ants.

Someone has them, they have come into their house in mass, but they have one particular that just stands in one spot for hours.

What might they be doing?

(laughs) - Well, that's a great question.

Hard to know without seeing it, it makes me think sometimes ants get a little thrown off of the pheromone trail.

So usually the way that they follow each other and communicate are through these, you know, little chemical compounds, and so many ants will lay a trail so that it tells them where to go.

Well, sometimes if an ant gets bumped off that trail, sometimes they'll run around like crazy just trying to refind it.

But if they don't, sometimes they'll just sit still.

So maybe this ant is just a little lost, hard to say for sure.

But if you have carpenter ants in your home, it's one of the few times I would recommend considering calling an exterminator only because the carpenter ants, not intentionally, but they can cause structural damage on your home.

- Do they have guards?

Do carpenter ants have guard ants?

- Not carpenter ants but other species do, of course, things like army ants.

And even Megan's turtle ants, those soldiers with the big heads are guards.

- Megan, you had made a comment about spraying and to be thoughtful of that when you're thinking about, you know, knocking back insects and mosquitoes, specifically talk about no mosquito spray, does that include personal spray on yourself when you're out?

- Well, that's a good question.

So I think that those personal sprays, one, you need to balance, what's the impact on the insects?

But then also what's the impact on your own health?

So you're wearing things to deter insects and other arthropods like ticks and mosquitoes in some places of the world that can harbor really dangerous diseases, that trade off might make it worthwhile to use those sprays.

And also in general those sprays are gonna have a pretty limited rain range of action.

It's not like you're spraying them out across an entire yard or an entire cornfield or something like that.

And so, when we balance those risks and benefits, I think that's kind of in a different calculus than pesticides that we use more broadly in the environment.

- Thank you.

So we actually have another question right along the same lines, people have used borax or a borax sugar water solution to get rid of ants in the house.

Is that effective?

- Yeah, it sure is.

Sylvana, you were shaking your head.

Did you wanna answer that?

- Oh, no, I thought it was gonna be about mosquitoes for a second.

I was like I got a couple tricks.

But no- (indistinct chatter) - So borax sprayed with water, so part of the thing that's problematic with ants if you're trying to control them, if they get in your home, is that most insecticides kill an insect pretty quickly.

But because ants live in these massive colonies and the queen's just constantly pumping out eggs, if you don't kill the queen, you're gonna just keep having workers.

So spraying Raid on a bunch of insects in your home means it's gonna kill the ones that are out forging, but the nest is still healthy.

So the reason that the borax is such a great control agent is that the ants drink it up, they bring it back to the nest and then they start sharing that with all the members of the nest, including the queen, which is why it's more effective 'cause it doesn't kill right away and then they bring it back and share it and then through time, it just needs a little time before it becomes active, then it starts to kill all of the individuals.

So it's still a great way to control insects in your home.

And before we go to Sylvana's tips on mosquitoes, the other thing I wanna say is that sometimes you don't need to kill the colony, you kind of just wanna deter them from coming to your house.

So there's a lot of tricks to sort of encourage them to go to your neighbor's house or go live back outside instead of your own home.

So if you see where they're coming in your home, instead of putting out sprays or borax, you can use any kind of a fine silty material.

So things like cinnamon, nutmeg, diatomaceous earth is a really great one, and you spread it around anywhere you see the ants coming in and what happens is it doesn't kill the ants but it sticks in all of their little hairs.

Ants like to be clean, so they're constantly looking at, they just get annoyed.

So then they're like, I don't wanna go there anymore, it's so much work every time I go, I'm gonna go somewhere else.

And the beauty of that is not just that you're not using a pesticide, it's also that those things are not noxious to things like babies or dogs.

They may not like the taste of 'em, but, you know, it's not gonna actually harm them.

And so, now I can't wait until Sylvana's recommendations for mosquitoes.

- Oh, yeah, I got a few.

So like if you're a stationary outside, so like you're having like a backyard dinner or something, if you have a fan like just a little box stand that's blowing air like away from you, mosquitoes can't fly in that intense wind so they won't fight you.

If you really wanna get rid of them, one way is to get like a five gallon bucket and put some hay and some water to cover the hay and let it like ferment outside for a few days and then get a mosquito dunk.

And so, those you can get at like hardware stores, gardening stores, and then you put it in the bucket with the fermented hay and it actually attracts mosquitoes to lay their eggs in that bucket.

And so, when you spray like Mosquito Joe in your yard and you spray those like pesticides to kill mosquitoes, you're killing the adults.

But if they've already laid their eggs, you're just gonna get another round of mosquitoes.

So if you attract them to lay their eggs within that bucket, then you're killing the larva that aren't going to turn into adults.

And that way you kind of you don't affect any of the other pollinators or any other insects in your backyard ecosystem.

And another like really cool favorite...

So a lot of mosquitoes are pollinators, males are the ones that are like visiting flowers, they need nectar to keep them flying, and a few species of females are the ones that are biting us that are really annoying.

So trying to like attack the larva is the best way to do it, also clean your gutters.

If you got gutters, clean them.

If you've got like a bunch of leaves, it creates standing water and a mosquito can fly up there and they'll lay their eggs in your gutters.

So that's a really common place that mosquitoes lay the eggs.

- Well, that was a wealth of information.

Thank you.

- Thanks.

- I think everyone's taking notes at home furiously.

We'll be archived so you can come back and watch it.

Megan, I have a question for you.

We heard about how Sylvana got interested in entomology, but what was it for you?

You know, was there a teacher or someone that kind of sparked that interest for you?

- Sure, that's a great question.

So I was actually thinking about this earlier today and I was thinking about the fact that this is a PBS event.

And I was thinking back, I think in some ways my very earliest interest in biology has to do with watching, I don't know if you guys remember in the late 90s and early 2000s, but Kratts' Creatures on PBS.

I loved Kratts' Creatures, we would watch it every day before bed.

And I think that that at a really, really early age, PBS kind of planted that seed of being really interested in nature in my mind.

Then as I grew up and as I went along, you know, in high school and in college, I loved biology, I loved all my biology classes, but in my mind what you did with a biology degree was like Corrie said, you could become a science teacher or you could become a doctor, and I enjoyed helping people.

So for the majority of my college career, I was planning on going to medical school.

I actually took the MCAT and got into a medical school.

I could have graduated last year theoretically, but it was in my third year of college where I took an ecology class to meet a requirement, loved the class, loved the professor, Emily Heffernan.

And at the end of the semester she pulled me aside and she asked if I'd ever thought about doing any research, and I really hadn't because that's not something you need to do to go to medical school.

But she convinced me to do an independent project in her lab, this was some of the butterfly conservation work that I talked about earlier.

And that was just such an eye opening experience of how I could take these genetic tools that I had learned about in my biochemistry class that, you know, I got why they were important, but it seemed kind of dry, it was all in lectures and on paper.

But I could take those tools and actually apply them to understanding the insects that I saw out in nature all around me.

And not just to understand them, but to help understand how we could protect them from going extinct.

And so, that was just a life-changing experience to do that research with Emily Heffernan and it led me to where I am now in graduate school.

- I love how your story is, you know, it wasn't a straight path to entomology.

I think, each one of you kind of took this different career path, which is mostly true for, I think, a lot of people, they don't really necessarily know that this is going to be the spark that they love.

So with that in mind, with young people thinking about what they wanna do, and you have showed so much passion tonight for the topics of entomology, but what words of inspiration do you have for the scientists that are coming up behind you?

Why don't we start with Sylvana?

- Yeah.

Oh my gosh, this is crazy, 'cause I was not in the bugs until like a few years ago and now it's just like, whoa.

But honestly like figure out what makes you smile.

Like, if it gives you joy and brings you happiness, pursue it.

I think we kind of get caught in this like, oh, I'm supposed to do this or, you know, this is the path I chose so I have to do it this way.

But if something brings you joy and something's interesting, like go for it, and it's never too late, you can have joy in different things throughout your entire life.

So just like stick with happiness and stick with things that make you smile and communities that make you happy and to feel supported.

- I think, support is such a key component to that.

You know, you find your tribe, you find the people that really keep you going and keep that passion going.

Megan, how about for you?

- I would absolutely piggyback off of what Sylvana said, it's never too late, as my story illustrates.

It's never too late to change your mind.

You can take the MCAT and then decide you don't wanna go to medical school.

So keep your options open, it's never too late to change your mind.

And then also look for your role models, look for your mentors and look for the people who are gonna be cheering you on, that might be your family, that might be teachers and professors, it might be people in your community.

But look to those people to help you kind of get through when things are difficult 'cause things are gonna be difficult.

Anything worth doing in life is gonna have its difficult moments.

But look for the people who believe in you and keep pushing on through.

- That is great advice.

Dr. Moreau?

- Gosh, how can I even possibly follow after those two.

I completely agree with everything they've said, and I really do think it's about passion.

You know, if you have something you're passionate about and can't imagine how it could be used for a career, I suspect that it still exists.

And so, no matter how weird you think it is, or how maybe no one around you is doing it, just don't give up.

I mean, there's many ways to follow your passions and turn it into a lifetime of joy.

I mean, I remember my mom, my mom didn't go to college and so she told me, "You have to go to college so you don't have to work as hard as me."

That was the only reason I knew to go to college.

I knew I liked bugs and I knew I loved science, but I didn't know what I was gonna do with it, and once I got there, I saw all the options.

And now I had the best job in the world and I get to work with the best people in the world.

And now, work isn't a job, it's just joy.

- I love that.

Yeah, that makes a huge, huge difference.

We do have a couple more questions I wanna sprinkle in here before we wrap up at the top of the hour, we have a question about ants.

Are they considered pollinators?

- Oh, that's a really good question.

Do you wanna take it, Corrie?

- I was gonna say it's a tough one because, you know, they're not very good pollinators, they're great nectar thieves.

And sometimes if they just happen to visit the same flower over and over again, they can be.

There are some questions about whether some ants are actually critical to plants in other ways.

So many of 'em are responsible for dispersing seeds.

Many plants need ants to pick at them in very specific ways to be able to then be reproductive.

So although they may not pollinate in the typical ways that most pollinators do, they're still really beneficial to most plants.

- It sounds like there's a really strong symbiotic relationship between plants and ants.

We also had another question about insects providing an important source of protein for humans in all parts of the world.

What are your thoughts about that?

- I think, yeah, I mean, if we could get over the hump of being like, "Ew, I'm eating bugs," I think that'd be really cool.

They use less water to like farm a bunch of insects, they do have protein.

It's not as icky icky as like, "Oh, killing a cow."

But like, you know, killing crickets is not as intense.

So yeah, I think if we can kind of get over the social hump, I think it's a good environmental practice to use to be able to like help sustain our population and also save other species.

- Totally agree.

- That's great.

Thank you.

So what are some of the best resources for someone who wants to learn more about ecology, nature, entomology?

Where can they go?

- Well, I would say that one of the best places always is your local public library.

Those have great resources.

They're sort of pre-curated books.

Of course, the internet is a amazing resource for those kinds of things.

And also, if you have a local natural history museum, see if you can stop by there.

Many of them want to engage with the public and they want you to ask questions and they want to share resources with you.

So that's a great way to sort of find information on nature and science.

- Yeah, I kinda wanna plug some like podcasts too.

There's some really good ecology and nature podcasts out there, and there's a lot of like niches for them too.

So like hump on Spotify and look up some nature podcasts, they're really good.

- I would also put in a word for TikTok and Twitter.

So there are some really cool TikTok accounts out there like Black Forager, or even the Cornell University Insect Collection has a really great TikTok page.

And then Twitter, you can follow scientists, you can follow Corrie, Sylvana or myself on Twitter.

And I think it's a really great way to kind of see the person behind the science and see people talking about their science like human beings and get a really cool sort of behind the scenes look at what's going on that way.

- Oh, absolutely agree.

And Dr. Moreau's, Megan's, Sylvana's Twitter handles are being put into the chat so you can keep the conversation going with them online as well as some of the resources that we've been talking about tonight.

Well, I would like to thank our guests, Dr. Corrie Moreau, Megan Barkdull, and Sylvana Ross.

You have been just a joy, and the passion for what you do is very evident, so thank you so much.

- Thank you so much, Nancy.

It's been a pleasure to be here and we hope that we have sparked a whole new generation of superheroes for insect science.

- Absolutely.

Thank you so much, this was so much fun.

- It was incredible, best thing tonight.

(chuckles) - So for more information on the Cornell Insect Collection and the Moreau Lab, follow the links that are in the chat, I would like to thank our WSKG team tonight, our Director, Alyssa Micha, and our chat moderator from Museum of the Earth, Areya Muraca.

I'm your host, Nancy Scales-Coddington.

Thank you for joining us.

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