We Are Nature

The Institute of Insect Technology

• Carnegie Museum of Natural History • Season 2 • Episode 3

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What surprising biodiversity lives alongside us here in Pittsburgh? How can we befriend bugs? What could be awesome about having humans as neighbors? Featuring Ainsley Seago, Associate Curator of Invertebrate Zoology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and Kevin Keegan, Collection Manager of Invertebrate Zoology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

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Michael Pisano:

You're listening to the Anthropocene Archives, a presentation of We Are Nature. In this special series of stories, we're delving deep into Carnegie Museum of Natural History's 22 million collection items: raiding cabinets and cases, sifting through objects and organisms in search of stories of stewardship, solutions, and scientific wonder. On today's episode, old arthropods of Appalachia, newcomers to North America, and how to bring bug biodiversity into our hearts. Bug friends assemble. Let's go.

Michael Pisano:

Welcome to We Are Nature. I'm your host, lifelong enthusiastic bug friend Michael Pisano. Today I'm joined by two professional bug enthusiasts. Bug friends, will you please introduce yourselves?

Ainsley Seago:

My name is Dr. Ainsley Seago. I'm the Associate Curator of Invertebrate Zoology, or bugs, here at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and my favorite kind of bugs is beetles.

Michael Pisano:

Beetles, a classic. You really can't go wrong.

Ainsley Seago:

That's true.

Kevin Keegan:

And I'm Dr. Kevin Keegan. I'm one of the insect collection managers in the section of invertebrate zoology, and my specialty is moths.

Michael Pisano:

Moths. Any particular type of moths, there's a lot of moths.

Kevin Keegan:

There are a lot of moths in the world. I study a large chunk of that chunk, which is the Owlet moths. There's about 40,000 species, depending on who you ask, all around the world.

Michael Pisano:

A lot of people are squeamish about bugs. I wonder just personally what the appeal is for you.

Ainsley Seago:

Insects are fantastic, and I love them. I always knew I wanted to work on something pertaining to nature, natural history, maybe birds or mammals or something. And I realized early on that as an undergraduate in college, actually, that you can make lots of new discoveries and not have to do a whole lot of like permits and stuff for your experiments if you work on insects, because people don't care about insects. And when you are studying things, like, say, insect specimens, uh, they hold really still and they don't run away and they don't bite you, and they don't sting and they don't die unexpectedly. And so it turns out that this is actually a great way to study the incredible diversity of the natural world. And it just holds still and you can categorize them and give them names, and that's really fun to me.

Michael Pisano:

That all sounds really fun to me too. That's excellent. Kevin, what do you think?

Kevin Keegan:

Yeah, I mean, most of the species on the planet are insects. So if you're studying insects, you have a pretty good idea of what's going on in terms of life on the planet. So it's just a really wonderful window into what is happening in the world and understanding these things that are going on all around us and govern all these things that you know we live with and depend on.

Michael Pisano:

Yeah, well, we are gonna talk about diversity, we're gonna talk about interdependence. Um, I really appreciate you both joining me and taking us behind the scenes of the invertebrate zoology collection. Um, I guess to start, could you just tell us a little bit about the collection? Kind of the scope, the history, any sort of top line?

Kevin Keegan:

So the collection itself was founded with the inception of the museum in the late 1800s, and actually the first director of the museum was the first curator of the section of insects. And he was a moth person, just like me. Um and he was there for many years and uh encouraged Carnegie, who was Carnegie, who was one of his friends, to acquire many really important insect collections from people around the world. So now we have over 16 million pinned specimens. That's just the things that are pinned, not counting all the things that are folded up in envelopes or pieces of paper or in jars of alcohol.

Michael Pisano:

Incredible. That's quite a scale.

Ainsley Seago:

Yeah, the person that uh Kevin is talking about is William Jacob Holland. I'll just say his name because that's the guy, and we just got a big grant to digitize all of his papers and archive. But the special thing about Holland is that he was again, he was the first head of the, there's technically the second director of the museum, but he was for the director for a very long time at its inception. And Andrew Carnegie would have him be in charge of acquiring dinosaur specimens. So I want the best T. rex, I want the best Diplodocus -

Michael Pisano:

Only the best for Carnegie. Yeah.

Ainsley Seago:

Holland would make it happen, but what Holland was really interested in was insects. And so um the mandate of this museum from its very early days has always been bugs and bones. And there's some other topics in here too, but um, this is the important stuff. Yeah.

Michael Pisano:

Bugs and bones. I am so excited by that, and it's quite a quantity of uh samples, 16 million, you said. That's pretty incredible. But I think when you stack it up against the diversity and number of bugs out in the world, it's actually kind of paltry. Can one of you speak to you know, the big picture?

Ainsley Seago:

Um well, in terms of the big picture with bugs, um, there's two ways to count if you can count by species, by number of species. So that's a measure of biodiversity. Some would say the most fundamental measure of biodiversity, but then also by biomass. And those are two different things. So if you count by biomass, the things you're gonna have the most of will be spiders and ants. If you count by number of species, the things you're gonna have the most of are gonna be beetles, then maybe also some wasps and flies. Beetles are doing great. There's approximately one described species of beetle for every five described species on earth. So um there's a lot of them. Um, some say God has an inordinate fondness for beetles, but in fact, um, a bunch of deranged gentleman naturalists in the 1800s had an inordinate fondness for beetles. And so beetles are great, there's tons of them, and it's just like this huge, massive, wonderful natural experiment. So, if you want to ask, what are the ways to evolve uh transition from being terrestrial to being aquatic? Well, beetles have done that six or seven or eight times. What are what's a great way to evolve how to sequester toxins from the plants that you eat and store them in your body? Um Beetles have done that many times. How can you shoot explosive chemicals out of your butt? How can you -

Michael Pisano:

A question I often ask.

Ainsley Seago:

Exactly. How can you make an incredible shield out of your own poop or perhaps even build a house out of it? Um Beetles did that. So you'll if you talk to me for too long, I'll just refer to it as the Institute of Beetle Technology, which means that we've had hundreds and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of chances to evolve something. So if there's something a bug can do, a beetle has probably done it.

Michael Pisano:

Incredible, incredible. I can see why they excite you. Um and anything to add? Like, does anyone can anyone give me a number? I know this is uh almost a silly number to even attempt, but like how many insects do we think are on Earth to not even worry about arachnids and...

Ainsley Seago:

Individual insects?

Michael Pisano:

Just a couple.

Kevin Keegan:

We have so we think there are about one million estimates or one million described species on the planet is our best estimate or count of it, but then we think that there's probably around 10 million in total that haven't been described.

Michael Pisano:

Incredible.

Ainsley Seago:

For number of species, certainly in the millions of insects, number of individuals that is so hard.

Michael Pisano:

Yes, no, sorry, species.

Ainsley Seago:

That is a cockamamie uh number that would in under any circumstances, um yeah.

Michael Pisano:

It would destroy our ears to hear it, no problem. I I am getting it. But the number of species is itself incredible and almost, you know, is crushing in a beautiful way to me. Um, and just to kind of zero in around our region, right? We live or we're talking from Pittsburgh. What's the kind of biodiversity of this region?

Ainsley Seago:

In terms of um diversity, one thing that we're really lucky to have here is the uh the Appalachians, which we're kind of attached to. I mean, they say we're the Paris of Appalachia here in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but um, that really is that's a fascinating um region of the world all by itself. You know, it starts here in America and it terminates over in what I think like Ireland or Scotland, geologically speaking. Some of the oldest mountains in the world. And we have some really special habitat because of that. So we have things that, you know, are a product of glacial refugia. We have things that are a product of um sort of cold habitats that left with the last ice age, that there's still little pockets of things sort of lurking here in the Appalachians that have just been here for a super long time. That's why we have hellbenders and other sort of treasures like that. Um, some of these beetles right here are Appalachians.

Michael Pisano:

Let's get in here.

MacKenzie Kimmel:

Collection item one is contained in two small white boxes, each six inches by eight inches. Within each box is a grid of 50 pinned specimens, each measuring between 12 and 15 millimeters in length. The specimens in the first box shine like polished metal, some blue, some green, all with approximately six white dots. They have six long legs and two slender antennae, two large protuberant eyes, and two curved, formidable mandibles. The specimens in the second box are very similar. The key difference is coloration. In place of gleaming blues and greens, these organisms appear brown. Can you identify collection item one?

Ainsley Seago:

So this is uh this is Cicindela ancocisconensis, and these guys are all throughout Appalachia. Um, this is a little tiger beetle. Tiger beetles are called tiger beetles because if you look at them, you'll see they have huge eyes and they have big, pointy, bitey mandibles. And so they are like a tiger, a fearsome predator. They're very fast runners. They have these long skinny legs, so they're very, very, very fast. There was some research done at the end of the 90s suggesting that some species of tiger beetles run so fast that their tiny brains can't process the input from their eyes. And so they will run, then they have to stop and look around and figure out where their prey went, and then they turn in that direction and run as fast as they can again.

Michael Pisano:

Oh, that's incredible.

Ainsley Seago:

This is also tiger beetles are also the only group of insects where the larvae have evolved wheel-like locomotion. Um, they often live on beaches, and the larvae prefer to be in a little burrow underground. But when they have to move, say the tide is coming in on the beach or they've been their habitat's been disturbed, they have to move from one burrow and make a new one. And so when they're moving across the sand, they're very, very vulnerable. And so what they actually do is they curl up tip of the abdomen to uh mandibles, and they form a wheel and they blow away, and the wind just carries them away. And there's a beautiful scientific research paper on this demonstrating that they only do that when the wind is blowing fast enough that they can curl up and roll away. If the wind's not blowing, they won't even try it. So-

Michael Pisano:

What kind of sense? I mean, maybe this is too granular, but like what kind of sensory organ do they have to say the wind's blowing?

Ainsley Seago:

That's a wonderful idea. Insects are covered with all kinds of wonderful receptors. There's proprioreceptors, there's chemo receptors, there's there's, you know, there's the fire beetle that has an infrared heat receptor that can detect the heat of a forest fire from miles and miles away. But with these guys, it's probably just little seedy little hairs on their body that can detect something like that. But what I want to show you with these guys, it's sort of special about them, is that your typical tiger beetle has these crazy iridescent, bright, metallic, gorgeous colors, right? This is Cicindela sexguttata. Um it's a six-spotted tiger beetle, that's where the sex is from. And this is one you'll often see if you're out um biking on a dusty trail around here in Pennsylvania. Um they're pretty widespread, they're not in any way threatened, but they are just a wonderful little kind of living jewel. And you when you see it, it really catches your eye. It's very conspicuous. But their relatives over here, this Appalachian tiger beetle, you look at them and you say, Oh, those guys are brown.

Michael Pisano:

Right.

Ainsley Seago:

One, they're brown so that they blend into the substrate that they're hanging out on. And they may not be as they may not be as ready to fly as the sex guttata one is. So it may be something that's sort of a defense. But what's great is that if you look at them under a microscope, they're not really brown. They have pointalistic color mixing, just like a Seurat painting. And so what they've done is their ancestral condition is to be super iridescent, to be red and green and blue. And what they do is they mix little tiny individual sculpt cells of red and green and blue to make an exquisite brown that helps them blend in against the mud that they're running around on.

Michael Pisano:

That's incredible. Talk to me about insect evolution, speciation. Like when you go to a different place, do you expect to find this kind of slight variation on a gradient or pockets?

Ainsley Seago:

Absolutely. 100%. Kevin, do you want to talk to that a little bit?

Kevin Keegan:

Well, in terms of being able to spot evolution in you know a modern sort of time frame, one of the biggest or most famous examples is the pepper moth from England. So, this is an example of what was called industrial melanism. So in England, as they're going through the Industrial Revolution, these trees in the forest were originally kind of light-colored with a light gray bark, but then you know, coal started to be burned, and coal soot was pumped into the air and it started to settle on these tree trunks, turning them black. And there's this moth, the pepper moth out there that naturally has two different forms. There's a gray form and a black form, and they naturally coexist, and they tend to rest on tree bark when they're just hanging out. And birds are always flying around, you know, looking for an insect. And right, and so you know, before this coal was pumped into the air, the gray form would be totally camouflaged on a gray tree trunk. But then the gray form started to stick out like a sore thumb because these trees were now black, and the black form was then camouflaged. So in collections around the world, in natural history collections with peppermoth specimens, you can see this slow transition from gray to black specimens over time.

Ainsley Seago:

But then you should see the transition back away from black.

Kevin Keegan:

Yes, as clean air legislation was passed.

Ainsley Seago:

Some people like to hold that up as an example of evolution. It's an example of an evolutionary mechanism. But it's not, it's it's a change in the frequency of a gene or of an allele in the population over time. It's not actual evolution, like you know, the giraffe, it's not like the giraffe's neck is growing longer because it's stretching to green and get the leaves. It's not like the moths were like, oh nuts, there's coal dust everywhere, better turn black. It was more like one morph had a favorable, you know, sort of selection.

Michael Pisano:

Got it.

Ainsley Seago:

Essentially, essentially, yeah. And so that's a great, great little snapshot of evolution, you know, a mechanism of evolution in action that you can actually see by looking at, say, I don't know, a really amazingly well-provisioned natural history museum that spans from the late 1800s to today.

Michael Pisano:

Excellent. Thank you. That's such a cool example. Um, and I think to me, it also points at, you know, the the moth and the tree without this, you know, air pollution part of it and the selection part of it. Um those are things that's a relationship between them that developed over a very long time, right? That that color became a good color to be in that environment. And I think it points to the fact that there's so many, so many, so many, so many examples. Like insects are so deeply ingrained into every ecosystem I can imagine.

Ainsley Seago:

Oh, yeah, insects are absolutely necessary for a lot of ecosystems. They help to not just pollinate flowers, and of course, Kevin can speak about uh the important role of pollinators besides the honeybee at some point, but I will show off some of these guys right here if I may.

Michael Pisano:

Let's get in there.

MacKenzie Kimmel:

Collection item two is contained in a single six-inch by four-inch white box. Within are four pinned specimens representing two very distinct arthropod species. The first organism is comparatively streamlined, measuring 12 millimeters in length and just four millimeters wide when at rest. When in flight, its orange, black, and cream wings extend out to 30 millimeters in width. This organism will be described in greater depth very soon. The second organism in the box measures 25 millimeters in length and 12 millimeters in width. Its head is black and wedge-like. Two bulbous bright orange organs sit beneath black eyes. A flash of bright crimson underwings are slightly visible beneath muted gray-brown forewings, which are covered in bold black dots. What is collection item two?

Ainsley Seago:

Perhaps you've seen this insect before.

Michael Pisano:

I'm familiar.

Ainsley Seago:

This is a spotted lantern fly. This is our little um little buddy that likes to hang out in horrifyingly dense numbers around this part of Pittsburgh right now. They were introduced to Pittsburgh around 2020, and their numbers have just been increasing and increasing and increasing every year. But they are linked to this beautiful little moth. How would you describe that absolutely gorgeous moth?

Michael Pisano:

It's incredible. I think uh it's long uh and kind of at rest. It's a little tubular, I would say.

Ainsley Seago:

It's totally tubular.

Michael Pisano:

Uh it's totally tubular, and its colorways, I would say, are orange, white, and kind of a stained glass black.

Ainsley Seago:

And it's a very, it's very bold, boldly graphic. It's a bold graphic moth. I think they're very they're uh they're one of our classier moths. They're very flamboyant.

Michael Pisano:

The Museum of Art uh here could take a note or two. Maybe, you know, this looks like maybe Mondrian, maybe that kind of like

Ainsley Seago:

Yeah, sure, a little Klimt, a little Mondrian, absolutely.

Michael Pisano:

I see it. 

Ainsley Seago:

So um, whereas, you know, this guy just has the sort of the little kind of curvy dots, like one of those. Who is the who is the artist who was always ripping off all the comic books?

Michael Pisano:

Oh, the pop art guy.

Ainsley Seago:

Yeah, Roy Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein.

Michael Pisano:

Yeah, you got that.

Ainsley Seago:

So um this so you see some sort of Roy Lichtenstein style dots on this lantern fly, but the Atteva has an even more beautiful array of colors. And what's cool about this moth, this is Atteva orrata, and they are also known as the Alanthus webworm moth. And they have been hanging out in southern, the far southern U.S., Florida, and points south in Central America, um, feeding on host plants in the family Cimarubaceae.

Michael Pisano:

Okay.

Ainsley Seago:

And their larvae need the plants, need the leaves of those plants to live. That's their food as larvae. As adults, they'll they'll flutter around and drink nectar from any old flower. But as larvae, they need to have that kind of leaf.

Michael Pisano:

And they're diurnal, right? That's kind of, I think most people think of moths as nocturnal. Is this a daytime moth or am I crazy?

Kevin Keegan:

I think it can be found during the day. We've also caught it in nighttime traps.

Ainsley Seago:

The more extra the colors, the higher the probability that it's a day-flying moth.

Michael Pisano:

Gotcha.

Ainsley Seago:

So um, so these guys are just hanging out, and then in the very late 1700s, early 1800s, some genius thinks it's a great idea to bring a tree called the Tree of Heaven or Alanthus altissima and introduce that into the United States as a landscape tree because it grows real fast and it really doesn't care how bad the habitat is. It will grow in garbage, it will grow in cities, it will grow in rail yards. And so they think, wow, what a great tree this is. Let's plant it everywhere. Unfortunately, it turns out that the tree of heaven spreads like wildfire. It literally sends out suckers and puts up new shoots. It reproduces clonally when it wants to, and you can't kill it by cutting it down. So it's an unkillable invasive species that's now basically everywhere in the United States. Incredible. So that happens again by the late, sort of sort of the late 1800s, early or late 1700s, early 1800s. And so the alanthus webworm figures out at some point, once the a lanthus sort of spread everywhere: Hey, wait a second, here's this, here's this tree that's in our favorite, our family of absolutely favorite, most delicious larval host food plants. And we can use that as a stepping stone to spread across the United States. They don't do great in super icy, freezing cold conditions, but thanks to climate change, that's not a problem for them in much of the U.S. anymore. And so they are very broad, they're very widespread. Um they'll often kind of come up from the south throughout the year and then, you know, sort of die back a little and then come up again. Um, these were collected in right here in Allegheny County in Nine Mile Run in Pittsburgh. And um, they're called a webworm because their larvae like to take a bunch of leaves at the apex of an Alanthus branch, and they use their silk webbing, which I think it's um oral glands, right? It's not on the butt like a spider, it's on the mouth. And they use their little silk glands. They use their little, they use their little silk glands to weave the um the leaves together to make a little domicile. So they're an architect. So they're making, they make this little house that's where they hang out eating the delicious um poisonous leaves of Alanthus. Alanthus also has a lot of nasty poisonous chemicals. It does something called allelopathy, where it sort of poisons the ground around it and makes it more hospitable for itself and less hospitable for any other plant. So it's really, it's really the ideal invasive species. And we we need to find out who the wise guy was that introduced it in the first place. But the alanthus webworm loves that, and they only their larvae only set up camp in that particular tree. So the tree of heaven, this nuisance invasive species, is also the host of this absolutely beautiful moth. And the moth doesn't threaten any other plants, it's just doing its thing on Alanthus. Unfortunately, uh, a couple hundred years later, we have again this guy, spotted lantern fly, shows up. Its favorite plant is also a lanthus, the tree of heaven, and so it goes, hot diggity dog, this tree is everywhere, and just starts explosively spreading out.

Michael Pisano:

Who rolled out this welcome mat?

Ainsley Seago:

Exactly. And so these two species, neither of them is supposed to be here in Pennsylvania, but they are tied together in the great and elegant ballet of invasive species in this country. One is a nuisance that can potentially threaten um vineyards and other sort of agricultural industries and gets everywhere and poops out sugar water by the ton, which causes sooty mold to grow, which again could perhaps in future lead to another selection event on moths that are resting on foliage. But um then the other species is just this relatively harmless species that is just piggybacking on the fact that it's one of its favorite host plants happened to become a widespread invasive here.

Michael Pisano:

What do we learn from the predicament of the spotted lanternfly and the tree of heaven being here? What can we actually take away from that besides, ew, it's gross, let's kill it?

Kevin Keegan:

Um I mean, the reason why they're here is because of humans. You know, we have this global system of trade where we're like moving plants around and moving construction materials around and like wood, and you get little hitchhikers that go along with them, like the spotted lanternfly or other species like the tiger mosquito that is everywhere in Pittsburgh that probably came over with old used tires that had some water in them at some point. You know, it's just uh a product of our own.

Michael Pisano:

We do have enough old used tires here.

Kevin Keegan:

Yeah, exactly.

Michael Pisano:

Yeah, thank you.

Ainsley Seago:

Pittsburgh needs tires.

Michael Pisano:

Excellently put. Do you have anything to add?

Ainsley Seago:

Um, yeah, I'd like to ask many of the summer camp kids come through for the tour sometimes. They'll they had they'll have a I think they had one, they had a summer camp this year called like the the good, the bad, and the creepy or something like that. And um, and so I would show them a bug and say, okay, is this bug good or bad?

Michael Pisano:

Yeah.

Ainsley Seago:

And bugs, there is no inherent morality in bugs. A bug is a bug. I've had people ask me, point to a beetle and say, what is it for? Well, that's interesting, but what's it for? And I think the answer they wanted to hear is it's for birds to eat, it's for lizards to eat, it's to be pretty and for us to look at, it's for uh deranged Victorian gentleman naturalists to inflate lovingly and put it in a pan so we can admire it forever. In my personal philosophy, each and every bug is wonderful and gorgeous and beautiful to look at, and they are completely deserving of life and existence in their own way, except for earwigs. Um but however, the spotted, the spotted lanternfly um is a special case, I think. This bug is big, conspicuous, it could not be more easy to see. Their hindwings are bright red. If you catch one of these and you're holding it by the legs and you tap it gently on the back, it'll do what's called a dymatic display, where they're gonna flare out their wings and they're gonna flare out the bright red, those bright red and white and black hindwings that say, Hey, don't eat me. So it's supposed to both startle you, but it also advertises that when they grow on Tree of Heaven, they sequester a chemical that makes them taste really awful. And so they're very conspicuous. And so having a conspicuous pest like this is something where we can get people's attention and teach them what an invasive species is. Here is the concept of this, here is why you should care about it. Everyone can look around here in Pittsburgh and see and see, oh my god, we are beset by lantern flies. This is a plague of Old Testament proportions. Maybe I should be more careful when I move firewood from place to place or check my vehicle or um shipping container for egg masses of insects that maybe I don't want to help spread. Again, I don't think anything is inherently good or bad, but this is a great poster child for invasive species that everybody has noticed. It is the phenomenon that's happened in their lifetime and it's right in their face.

Michael Pisano:

Humans have a long history of intentionally and unintentionally shipping non-humans around the globe. Species living outside their original range is a defining element of anthropocene ecology, and we'll revisit the concept of invasiveness again during this series of collection stories. When considering the chaotic ways we've changed the distribution of other species, we can slow down, observe, and try to learn from each organism that finds itself deposited somewhere new. I think what Spotted Lanternfly's presence here in America points out about the existing landscape is extremely valuable for humans hoping to cultivate a more livable future. Invasive species are a subset of broader category of displaced organisms, often called introduced or alien or non-native species. Personally, I like the term neobiota. It's jaunty. All these words more or less mean species that establish wild populations outside their expected range. Other subcategories of neobiota include the naturalized, the cryptogenic, the archaeophytes. There's a lot of vocab in invasion ecology, and the boundaries between groups can be murky. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's formal definition of an invasive species is, quote, an alien species whose introduction does or is likely to cause economic or environmental harm or harm to human health. End quote. Spotted lanternflies are invasive not only because they're from elsewhere, but also because they slurp phloem from plants of economic importance, like apples, grapes, and hops. Here in Pittsburgh, I see spotted lanternflies lining the ground alongside buildings, especially tall ones. Lanternflies are compelled to climb, to seek a safe tree canopy, a place to congregate, feed, and chill overnight. So they end up trying to scale human structures and clumped in great groups on the sidewalks below. You'll also see them on city trees, and of course, Tree of Heaven, which is prevalent in Pittsburgh's vacant lots and along its highways. In agricultural settings, lanternflies congregate in staggering numbers on grapevines, apple trees, and more. If you think the density you see in cities is a lot, go ahead and do an image search for apple orchard spotted lanternfly. I dare ya. What do American cities and farms have in common that makes them especially livable for lanternflies? What strikes me is that these are both deeply human spaces. I can think of two types of insect that thrive in these human-dominated systems. Generalists who like human vibes, like cockroaches, houseflies, and lanternflies, and then monoculture specialists who live off one of our industrially farmed staples, like the soybean aphid, the European corn borer, and the cabbage butterfly. Let's say that second category also includes animals that perceive humans as a tasty monoculture, like mosquitoes, lice, and bedbugs. The spotted lanternfly is a gifted generalist. While Tree of Heaven is their preferred host, they are associated with over 170 plant species. They're scrappy. Lanternflies are well suited to city living. But also when they find a big farm field of food, enormous populations can rise up to exploit the feast. So, observation number one, spotted lanternflies seem to thrive especially well in the anthropogenic landscape. When I look at that human-dominated landscape and how invasive arthropods interact with it, I see a pre-existing biodiversity crisis. Regardless of invasives, we don't have enough healthy habitat to support the biodiversity that we need. Biodiverse places are more resilient to the potential destructive impact of any single pest, introduced or native. They're also more resilient to the changing climate. By contrast, our lack of biodiversity leaves human habitats and food systems vulnerable to pests, pathogens, flooding, drought, global supply chain disruptions, climate change, and so on. Thankfully, this is an eminently solvable problem for smart and powerful apes such as we. The food system pit is big but simple. We rely too much on huge monocultures, and they're messing up the soil, the climate, and our health. By contrast, smaller polyculture systems have great potential to enrich soil, sequester carbon, and produce the diverse food humans need to be healthy. Polyculture invites in a diversity of plants and arthropods and fungi and microbes, which all improves crop yields without a flood of synthetic fertilizer, herbicide, and pesticide. Big monocultures take up lots of space, meaning they destroy habitat and have to be far away from most consumers. Small, non-toxic farms can be embedded in communities, and proximity means fresher food and closer connection to nature. Hey, look, just like that, we've made space in our food system for the native insects that the plants need to bear fruit and reproduce, and which the birds and mammals need to eat and the soil needs for their help with cycling nutrients, and which we need because without bugs the rest of the ecosystem would kind of break. Anyway, the places where humans live, particularly dense cities, are full of potential welcome for our insectoid neighbors. Thinking of Pittsburgh, non-human life clusters in three places: city parks and greenways, in landscaping, and in the no-man's lands, that is, blighted zones of delayed construction, littered sides of highways, and vacant lots. Our parks and greenways provide excellent habitat for local populations, but they're isolated oases. Connecting the parks with plant-filled corridors would help immensely. This might be achieved by amending the ways we landscape. As you'll hear Kevin and Ainsley bemoan in just a bit, grass lawns can be really hostile wasteland. Adding a few pesticide-free native flowers sets out much-needed food and shelter for non-human neighbors. No man's lands are where I expect the most direct engagement of invasive species. Many of the most notorious neobiota grow conspicuously well in these disturbed habitats. That setting is key to how we see introduced species. Eyesores between destinations. Sad organims in sad places. This is an exciting opportunity to come together with community and work towards transformation of space and self and perception. Over the two decades I've lived here in Pittsburgh, I've seen so many vacant lots blossom into urban polyculture farms, community gardens, or pollinator mini meadows. The invasive species in our cities do not call us just to despair and destruction, but rather towards constructive conservation. With all that said, there's still one last question. What do you do when you come upon a gaggle of lanternflies? As Ainsley said, it's an opportunity to educate yourself and others, it's a reminder to do something helpful for your local biodiversity. But then there's still the reality of mitigating lanternfly spread. Experts are testing different types of traps, fungal pathogens, and parasites that might help. When spotted lanternflies don't have Tree of Heaven to feed on, they miss out on some bad-tasting phytochemicals and thus are more readily edible. Preying mantises, birds, wasps, spiders, ants, squirrels, bats, fish, frogs, and snakes have all been documented munching lanternflies. They apparently can make a favorite chicken snack. So mitigating the spread of Tree of Heaven is important to make lanternflies more palatable to predation. If you, like me, aren't ready to try eating lanternfly yourself, well, it's complicated. Here's Ainsley's personal perspective.

Ainsley Seago:

I don't believe in stomping insects. I think that every insect should be turned into a beautiful museum specimen or just left to be alive and live its own life, except for spotted lantern flies. I say if it makes you feel good, stomp them. There's a real Starship Troopers vibe that we get with this species. And I like I like that people are really getting into it and paying attention.

Michael Pisano:

Excellent. I think uh that's wonderful. I appreciate you heard it here, stomp them. Um this clarity there that is really cool. I think I do want to point out uh just because bugs have the bad rap that they do, um, like what percentage of you know insects or arthropods or however you want to take it are pests versus-

Kevin Keegan:

Well that's a human determination.

Ainsley Seago:

It's so relative.

Kevin Keegan:

Yeah, it's subjective. I mean, to me, there really aren't that many pests except for the spotted lanternfly and the tiger mosquito. Um but to other people, any insect is a pest. So, you know, there's a there's a scale.

Michael Pisano:

Yeah, yeah. What about okay, how about that's a very good answer, but um like pest of economic importance, right? Like something that you might find in a field of grain that's hurting exports.

Ainsley Seago:

It's a vanishingly small proportion of insect biodiversity. Most of them are because of the way that the evolution of diversity happens, the way that new species evolve, um, groups that will have the greatest number of species, the most species-rich groups, are those that are that have either either what we call short-range endemics, like they live only in this one cave or this one waterhole, or things that have a very narrow food plant that they can get onto. Things like, for example, in our case, weevils and leaf beetles tend to be very specific on certain species of host plants. And every time this you know, beetle lineage jumps to a new species of host plant, that's gonna become a new species of beetle. And so it's sort of an co-evolutionary arms race that leads to diversification. Um, and so that's why most bugs are just gonna eat their one thing. They're gonna show up at the buffet, they're gonna eat the green jello and absolutely nothing else, and they're not gonna compete with you for food. So um, yeah, it's and again, with entomology, it's a real balancing act because the money in entomology is in dealing with the pest species, identifying pest species before they become a problem, trying to figure out how you can protect your crops or your home against pest species without poisoning everything. You can get a Home Depot and get a big bag of insect killer or spider murderer, and you just spray it around your house or your yard, and that makes me cry on the inside every single time because most of the insects in your house are helping you out. They're eating, they're eating any pests that do get in, they're helping clean up your little flakes of skin or whatever on the floor. They're not the centipedes in your house are not there to bother you. They are staying out of your way, they're doing their own thing.

Michael Pisano:

And they're incredible to look at if you can, you know.

Ainsley Seago:

If you can get them to hold still for one second.

Michael Pisano:

Well, sure, that's rare. But you know, if you can find the courage to stoop down, maybe catch it in a tupperware. I always have a tupperware in the nail piece just to just to look. I show the cats and you know, in the back of the basement, no problem. Yeah. Um so I think another thing that I will add about fields of grain is that maybe the problem is like a huge monoculture system attracting an overabundance of a single pest species.

Ainsley Seago:

There is so much, yes, that's absolutely the case. There is so much research finding that just having a little strip, a little refugium of normal plants that are supposed to be there, or even a diversity of weeds will support having more predatory insects like tiger beetles that will be eating the fat, juicy caterpillars that are trying to destroy your crop.

Kevin Keegan:

Yeah, and I'm sure a lot of people have had a garden where they've had tomatoes grown, and there's this really big fat, juicy caterpillar, Manduca that's the tomato hornworm or tobacco hornworm, which can feed on your tomato plants, and you may have seen one that has just become kind of lethargic and has not moved in a long time. And then you look at it the next day, and there are these like little white cones on their back, and those are the cocoons of little parasitic wasps, which are native to the area. So these are things that if you you know foster them, they can help you care for your crops. So, yeah, having little rows of native vegetation in between your crops can really help to prevent your actual crops that you're trying to grow.

Ainsley Seago:

Yeah, like encouraging insect biodiversity, like encouraging the plant biodiversity encourages the insect biodiversity, and that has a measurable impact on the output of your agricultural system or your backyard garden.

Kevin Keegan:

Every time I see a lawn of fresh cut grass, I cry on the inside. It's like, yeah, it's difficult for a single person to affect, you know, our biodiversity loss in the face of climate change and habitat loss, but if you can convert part of your lawn to actual just wildflowers that are native to the area and not cut them down whenever you see them, you can you know play a big role in maintaining the biodiversity of insects and all these other things that depend on insects, birds and little rodents and everything else that live in your area. Yeah.

Michael Pisano:

And us I would extend.

Ainsley Seago:

People talk about seeing us seeing a perfectly green, freshly cut lawn that's been sprayed with bug killer. And the term I think they use is ecocide, like you're just indiscriminately killing everything. You're killing every plant that's not this invasive grass, you're killing all the bugs that could be living there. And then that same person will go outside the next week and then say, How come I don't see fireflies anymore? That's weird. There's no fireflies around here. You can even neglect your yard into success, um, depending on the HOA that governs your neighborhood. But there's something, um, there's a practice, a conservation practice called a beetle bank where you just build up um a pile of logs and sticks and just let it decay as that wood decays. Like we don't really leave a lot of wood lying around on the ground to rot. And when we do, that's where the fungus is, that's where the fungus beetles are. There's so much cool diversity. Some of the biggest, most interesting, beautiful groups with the most undescribed species, that's where they're hanging out is under the bark and a decaying log, underneath a decaying log, that's where you're gonna find salamanders and rolly pollys and all kinds of good stuff. And so wildflowers for pollinators, sure. Wood, logs, rocks, even just weeds. Like weeds is probably not the ideal situation, but I'd rather see a vacant lot full of weeds than a mowed lawn full of poison.

Kevin Keegan:

Yeah.

Ainsley Seago:

Um, and if you have uh a tree of heaven growing in your yard, Kevin, what would you do about that?

Kevin Keegan:

So I made the mistake of chopping it down, which is what you're not supposed to do, which will cause it to re-sprout everywhere its root system exists. Um, really, the best way to get rid of it, the you know, most effective way to get rid of it, is to use highly uh specific poison in very targeted spots on the tree so you're not affecting any vegetation around it, um, and then you can do a good job of getting rid of it from your property for good. But it it will take a couple years at least to make sure that it's gone.

Michael Pisano:

What motivates you to put that effort in, right? Like I will say that some people put a I almost said a bad word, a lot of effort into uh their lawn care, right? And like they expend there's a lot of money and time and product, you know. Um what what is personally important to you about putting a similar amount of effort into creating habitat for non-humans in your space?

Kevin Keegan:

I just feel a moral obligation to do it, and it's on top of that just something that I really enjoy, not just because I'm helping out all these other organisms to exist, but I just enjoy the process. You know, it's it's really enjoyable to get your hands dirty and you know see something grow in front of you, you know, when you just had a vision of it before.

Ainsley Seago:

Yeah, yeah, it's good for your mental health, but also when you're a bug person, it what you learn about bugs, it feels really good to go outside and recognize something and know Kevin and I, no matter where we go in the world, we're gonna see something that we recognize and know about. And that's a really good feeling. Um, I remember going for a hike once with one of my college boyfriends who was an engineer, and I was saying, Oh, hey, check this out. There's a carabid beetle, it does this, and here's a poisonous millipede. Let me tell you about the toxins it sequesters. And he said, Man, I wish there was little transistors or something running around out here so I could know about stuff too. And it's just you see a familiar face. There was some famous quote about seeing a seeing a familiar face in every flower or something like that. Like if you if you get to know nature even a tiny little bit, like just the difference between different orders of insects, you'll see all of this diversity that you'd never noticed before. And I love that, and that makes me happy. But also, I think that the great thing about trying to encourage um wildlife, even on the scale of bug-style wildlife, is that you really can make a big difference with your yard. You might have a tiny little urban yard, but you can plant pollinator-friendly stuff, you can plant native species, you can just pile up a bunch of sticks and just let the fungus take over. But um, you can make a difference for hundreds and thousands of individual organisms. And it's harder to do that for whales or birds when you're one person who lives in a city. But even you can even put some pollinator plants in um, you know, window boxes or put them out in planters on your balcony if you don't have a yard, and that will make a difference to some of these little organisms. So it's something direct action by consumers, you know, by the individual, is actually something that is feasible, both feasible and meaningful at the individual level when it comes to supporting insect biodiversity.

Michael Pisano:

Beautiful.

Kevin Keegan:

And as you were mentioning, it's really not action, it's really inaction. You don't have to do anything, and you let flowers grow, you leave your leaves in the yard, pile up sticks and logs, and you can do a great thing for biodiversity around you.

Michael Pisano:

Wonderful. I'm curious where you hope to see us go in in the quest to become a little bit more comfortable, maybe, with something that seems foreign or strange or makes us squeamish.

Ainsley Seago:

Um, it's hard for me to say because almost no insects make me squeamish, but like once you look at them under a microscope, it's just they're so wonderful and incredible and beautiful. So look at it close up if you can get a little, you know, $20 digital scope off of um the internet that you can hook up to your camera or to your um to your computer. That's a great way to appreciate bugs. You can come into our awesome exhibits that we have here in this museum that have lots of great examples of insects that you can see close up and really get to appreciate their cool little alien robot bodies. Um they're just there's no bug that you can look at close up and not go, wow, that is absolutely amazing how that fits together. The stuff that bugs can do is just phenomenal. And we think of them like some people grow up thinking of them as just this little gross pest that you should squish. But when you look at them up close, that's where the that's where the excitement is.

Kevin Keegan:

Yeah, I would just hope that people would take insects as this incredible resource and opportunity just to practice a little bit of curiosity about the things around them and to just like cultivate that sort of uh practice of being curious about things, trying to learn a little bit and not just immediately recoil in disgust or something. And you know, you can really cultivate that tendency to be curious and apply that to all other facets of your life.

Michael Pisano:

Beautiful. Well, thank you both for helping us take a closer look through audio mostly today. Um, I really appreciate both of your time.

Ainsley Seago:

My pleasure. Thanks for uh having us.

Kevin Keegan:

 Thank you.

Michael Pisano:

Many thanks to Ainsley and Kevin for inviting us into the Carnegie's Invertebrate Zoology Collection, and to the 16 million invertebrates therein for inspiring curiosity, humility, and wonder. We Are Nature is produced by Nicole Heller and Sloan MacRae. It's recorded at Carnegie Museum of Natural History by Matt Unger and Garrick Schmidt. DJ Thermos makes the music, Mackenzie Kimmel describes the collection items, and Michael Pisano, that's me, edits the podcast. Thanks for listening.