Midnight Entomology: Unveiling the Secrets of Nocturnal Insects

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Guest Information

Emily May, pollinator conservation specialist at Xerces, will help us explore nocturnal creatures. She received a master's of science in entomology from Michigan State University, and has studied pollinator habitat restoration, bee nesting habits, and the effects of pest management practices on wild bee communities. Her work with Xerces since 2015 has focused on supporting crop pollinators through habitat creation and protecting bees and other beneficial insects from pesticides.

Show Notes & Links

In this episode, we explore the world of insects at night. We discuss why these animals have evolved to be active at night, what special adaptations allow them to be successful, and why these insects are important. Lastly. we talk about their threats and what we can do to help conserve these important invertebrates.

• The Night Shift: Moths As Nocturnal Pollinators
• Firefly Conservation

Transcript

Matthew: Welcome to Bug Banter with the Xerces society where we explore the world of invertebrates and how to help these extraordinary animals. If you want to support our work go to xerces.org/give.

Rachel: Hi, I'm Rachel Dunham in Missoula, Montana.

Matthew: And I'm Matthew Shepherd in Portland, Oregon.

Rachel: As humans, we often think of the world through the lens of daylight - when we are most active. But at night, an entire world of insects comes to life and we are missing out!

Rachel: To help us explore these nocturnal creatures is Emily May, pollinator conservation specialist on our pesticide team at Xerces. You might recognize Emily from our last episode, as a special guest co-host. Welcome back, Emily!

Emily: Thanks for having me back. I'm glad you didn't kick me off after the last one.

Rachel: Never.

Matthew: Of course not. No, no, thanks for sitting in and co-hosting with Rachel on that one. Today we swap places and you're our guest here to talk about insects who nocturnal or most active at night. And to start with, can you tell us what portion of insects are nocturnal?

Emily: So, I'm actually curious to know what you think it is. Can either of you hazard a guess of what portion of insects are nocturnal?

Rachel: I love this question.

Matthew: Hmm. I would say something close to half.

Emily: That's pretty close. That sounds like you might have talked to some other folks about nocturnal insects before.

Matthew: We did interview Avalon Owens. That's where I learned that and I was like, wow.

Emily: Yeah, you have a leg up on the average person, I think. So, it's more than I think most people would think. More than 60% of invertebrates are active at night.

Emily: And some groups of insects tend to be generally more active during the day, like bees and wasps, but then, you have some species that have adaptations that allow them to be active at night. And then, other insect groups are really diverse in their activity patterns.

Emily: You can have flies and beetles which have some day active families and species and then some night active species. And there was actually just a global meta-analysis that came out in Nature Communications in April that looked at 78 studies and 331 quantitative comparisons of the difference in abundance of insects during the day and at night and that found that on average insect activity is almost a third higher at night than it is during the day.

Emily: So, there were some studies that they looked at that found more insects during the day and others found more at night, but on average the activity of insects is higher at night.

Rachel: That's so interesting. I think it's the opposite of what we would probably think of, cause when we think about pollination and other ecosystem services provided by insects, those happen, you know, we think during the day.

Rachel: But it sounds like that might not actually be true. Can you tell us more about nocturnal pollinators? How does their contribution compare to that of day active pollinators?

Emily: Yeah, so when you think about pollination, you probably picture a bee or a butterfly or a hummingbird visiting flowers on a bright sunny day. And so, if you look on the internet for images of pollinators, you're mostly going to see these diurnal, these day active pollinators dominating the results, which makes a lot of sense because it's a lot easier to photograph pollinators during the day.

Emily: It's also easier to observe them in general. But, there's a growing body of research that's really changing perspectives on the importance of nocturnal pollinators. We're starting to see how important moths and other nighttime visitors are for pollinators, pollination and wild plant communities, and also in agricultural crops.

Emily: So, night time pollination has been observed in almost two thirds of orders of flowering plants. Which most orders of flowering plants have some night time visitation. And moths in particular are known to pollinate a diversity of different plant species and families. This makes plant pollinator networks a whole lot more complex than what they look like.

Emily: During the day, there's actually this whole other set of interactions and functions added by nighttime visitation to these plants at night. Which is just interesting. You know, we come at it from this human perspective of being a day active animal and we don't see what's happening at night.

Emily: It's also not just wild plants, so nocturnal pollinators are actually likely quite important for some of our agricultural crops. There was a study done in Arkansas that found that nocturnal insect visitors, especially moths, contribute really significantly to the pollination of apples.

Emily: So, pollination during the night shift was almost equal to that of daytime pollinators in terms of what it contributed to the fruit set and apples. Which just blew my mind when I saw that.

Matthew: Yeah, because I was thinking because we interviewed Kass Urban-Mead and she was talking about the connection between forests and woodlands and the presence of supporting bees pollinating apples. I'm like, so all of that and that was only half of the pollination.

Emily: Right, exactly. And that's probably going to depend on which crop, how open it is at night, how accessible it is to nighttime visitors. And also region, because you know night time temperatures can be quite cool sometimes during pollination of different crops.

Emily: But there is experimental evidence showing contribution of nighttime pollinators to blueberries and other fruit crops, blackberries. And then observational evidence of visitation by to a wide range of other crops at night. So, there's really just not a lot of research in this area.

Emily: So similar to what Kass talked about where, you know, there's now been this explosion of interest and research into bees in the forest and what's happening at the tops of trees. There are some more interested researchers looking at nighttime pollination and night time insect activity in general.

Emily: It's just, interested researchers looking at night time pollination and night time insect activity in general. It's just difficult to convince researchers to get out there and do that work because it involves a lot of sacrifice of sleep to be able to do that.

Emily: So, I'm going to send a big kudos at this point to all these researchers who have been sacrificing their sleep to look at nocturnal insects because we learned so much from it.

Matthew: And you mentioned some of the insect groups that are active at night, could you tell us a bit more about who the nocturnal pollinators are?

Emily: Yeah, so I generally come at this from a little bit of a northeast bias because I'm in Vermont, but in general in the US, there's four main groups of nocturnal pollinators and by far the largest and most diverse group is moths.

Emily: Those are found all over the world where there are flowering plants. The rest of the nocturnal pollinators tend to be more concentrated at lower latitudes or closer to the equator.

Emily: So up here in the northeast we have moths and beetles and bees, which are some of our larger night active or evening active pollinators. And then in the southwest US, we also have bat pollinators at night. I know they are not insects, but they are nocturnal pollinators. And it might surprise you to learn that there are actually quite a few bees that are active at twilight or at night around the world.

Emily: So, around the world there are over 250 species of bees that are nocturnal or crepuscular. So crepuscular is a word meaning sort of the twilight zones. Those that come out towards the end of the evening, around dawn, or dusk. There are also some species of beetles that are night pollinators.

Emily: There's been documented pollination by flies and crickets, cockroaches, ants and thrips at night. And probably more that we haven't documented yet. I have a hard time with the daytime.

Matthew: I am impressed that anybody can see a thrip at night because that because they're so small.

Emily: I have a hard time in the daytime.

Matthew: Yeah, cause I, I mean, squash bees is the one in my mind, you mentioned crepuscular and the twilight zone because they're a bee that does become active just before dawn and probably does most of its pollination of pumpkins, for example.

Matthew: You know, Halloween, we can thank for these bees that are active in twilight, which somehow seems appropriate, doesn't it?

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. Squash bees, I actually tried to do my senior thesis in college on squash bees, but they come out one to two hours earlier than other squash pollinators like bumble bees, you know, a lot of this conversation around, why did these insects come out at night or why did they do what they do at the time that they do it?

Emily: And a lot of it has to do with this resource competition question. So, squash bees coming out one to two hours earlier, that other part of me being a senior in college, it really didn't match up.

Matthew: But I mean, I couldn't you just like move from the party to the field or something?

Emily: Right. Maybe, yeah, if I had planned ahead better, maybe I could have done it, but I was not an early morning riser. So that project didn't work well for me. But yeah, I mean, I think pollinators in general, you know, we can't always neatly divide them into diurnal or nocturnal because some of them are falling into this twilight, so in the crepuscular zone.

Emily: A lot of pollinators are most active around dusk or dawn, especially in warmer regions when it becomes easier for them to come out after, you know, they're not fighting with the heat. So not all moths are nocturnal, not all these are diurnal. There's this resource competition that's happening all the way around the clock and so these insects are trying to find ways that work for them to get the resources that they need and maybe also escape predators.

Matthew: Yeah, that makes sense that with a huge diversity of insects that there isn't a really simple straightforward kind of division. Like, oh! Insect! You do daytime. As people we do tend to try and categorize and as we said a lot of it is by what we see but what we don't see we're just less aware of.

Emily: Absolutely. That's what's so interesting to me about these nighttime pollinators and night active insects in general is that there's so much more that we can be learning about them.

Rachel: So, Emily, you sort of hinted at this a little bit already in terms of resource competition, but what are the advantages and the disadvantages of being nocturnal?

Emily: Yeah, that's a great question. So, this comes back to those resource competition questions. So, there's a few main benefits to nocturnal behavior, which includes less competition when foraging, and then also lower risk of predation.

Emily: So, this is insects trying to find their niche in the world. So, there's a lot of diurnal daytime active predators that are less active at night that allow these insects to come out and forage and mate with a lower chance of being seen and eaten by those predators.

Emily: There's also avoiding the heat of the day. So, we talked a little bit about that, but crepuscular bees are more common in warmer environments where dusk isn't bringing this threat of cold temperatures, but also, they're in these hot areas hot and arid environments.

Emily: There’re more nocturnal insects because they're avoiding that heat of the day. Thermo regulation in and of itself is energy intensive. So, they're trying to find the time of day when they can come out and expend the least amount of energy. That's part of it. That, on the other hand, could pose some challenges for these insects with climate change.

Emily: Thinking about, as nocturnal temperatures increase. Often nocturnal insects tend to have a lower sort of envelope of temperatures that they can be active in. They have a lower tolerance for high temperatures.So, I think they're going to be facing some challenges from increasing nocturnal temperatures. Reaching the high ceiling of what they can really persist in.

Emily: Some things that I would say are probably disadvantages or at least a wash for nocturnal insects.

Emily: Limited light availability is obviously a huge challenge to being active at night. So, until, or unless you have some kind of adaptation for that, part of being active at night can make navigation, finding mates, finding food, a challenge. And there's also predation that happens at night. It's not like you escape all predators by being active at night. There are echolocating bats active at night. Specializing in hunting nocturnal insects.

Matthew: Yeah, because presumably the insects must have a lot of adaptations to survive. They might be at night because there's fewer predators but it's not an entirely safe time of the, let's say, day, but you know what I mean, the 24 hour day.

Matthew: And, also just going about your normal business of pollinating or finding a mate. I mean, how, how do the insects do that? Do they have adaptations? I mean, have big eyes or different use of different, you know, smell or sound or you know, how did they navigate and avoid hazards?

Emily: Yeah, for sure. So, insects have evolved a variety of different kinds of adaptations to thrive in nocturnal environments, including enhanced sensory structures, like you hinted at. So bigger eyes, highly developed antennae, other structures to detect pheromones and sounds and vibrations in low light conditions.

Emily: So, I'll give you an example. There's a nocturnal sweat bee that lives in the tropical rainforest. It's Megalopta genalis. It's one of the most well known nocturnal bees. And it nests in tunnels and dead wood, comes out at twilight, navigates through this dense rainforest understory, collecting pollen from trees.

Emily: So, going back to Kass's talking about the bees in the forest, it's collecting pollen from kapok trees and the chote trees, acacia trees, and understory shrubs. And this species has one of the best studied visual systems of any nocturnal insect. So, it has eyes that are extremely well adapted for light sensitivity.

Emily: And their eyes are 27 times more sensitive to light than day active bees. And the other thing that it has, which is true for a lot of nocturnal insects, is they have specialized neurons that help its brain process low light.

Emily: So, its eyes are only receiving a few photons at a time down there in the dense rainforest understory where we would just be stumbling around. It's a really tiny amount of visual input. But its brain is compensating for that tiny amount of input with processing power, basically.

Emily: So, it's almost like those TV shows, you know, where the FBI is like, looking at a visual image that's really pixelated and then they go enhance. And somehow their algorithm is able to fill in the blanks of all that image. So that's what the sweat bees are doing with their minimal amount of photons. They're saying enhance, see more, fly in the dark.

Emily: So that's one example of a bee that evolved really great senses for foraging and low light. And then there's other kinds of insects that have other adaptations. So, an example would be crickets.

Emily: So high auditory sensitivity, really great hearing, mostly to avoid bats. So, crickets have structural adaptations. So, if you don't know, crickets have tempanel membranes or eardrums that are similar in structure to humans.

Emily: So, it's an example of evolution that happened at different times but towards the same end so high sensitivity hearing. And they are especially sensitive to the high frequencies that echo locating bats use to locate their prey at night.

Emily: So, like the sweat bee, enhancing visual imagery with processing in the brain, crickets have these specialized neurons that take that auditory input and enhance the high frequencies that bats are using. So, there's all of these systems coordinating to help them escape from those hungry bats at night.

Emily: Then there's lots of other things. We could talk so much more about night active insects. There’re communication strategies, navigation strategies, camouflage. You know, coloration or patterns that help them blend into the nighttime environment and that sort of thing.

Matthew: You know, because one of my own personal kind of entomological heroes is John Ray, who was a British naturalist from I guess the late 1600s, early 1700s and I discovered him because he lived near to where I used to live in Britain. But way back then, he was gathering caterpillars and rearing them to see what they turned into.

Matthew: And so, he had this room in his house where he we had rearing cages and it was a moth and the female moth emerged from the caterpillar and he came into the room one morning and was like “why is the room full of big moths?”

Matthew: And it turned out that the female had emerged, released the pheromone, and that had drawn the males in through the open window at night.

Emily: Oh wow.

Matthew: And it was like this total chance discovery of chemical attractions. That people just weren't aware of until then.

Emily: That's amazing. I hadn't heard that story.

Matthew: So, he was one of one of the early naturalists who was there classifying and also one of the first people to really study insects. That's why he's a personal hero of mine. But it's that kind of communication and adaptation that is so unlike people.

Emily: Right. We also don't light up at night thinking about your whole podcast episode about fireflies. Fireflies use bioluminescence for communication purposes. You know, the glow worms and what not. So we don't light up at night. Maybe we’d be up more.

Matthew: No, and those are some of the things that I've read about like tiger moths that confuse bat sonar by clicking back at the bats so that it's like this auditory warfare up there. And it can be enough that the bats miss. And lunar moths with beautiful fluttery tails that apparently it seems like the only real benefit of that is it does confuse bats. And so that is this all these adaptations that they have to live and survive in a totally different environment from ours.

Rachel: Emily, you have me thinking about bioluminescence now. I wish that we could light up. I think it'd be really cool. No more need for flashlights.

Emily: It would be amazing if we just had that chemical reaction.

Rachel: So, we've talked a lot about, nocturnal pollinators and sort of their adaptations and their structures. What about plants that are pollinated at night? Are they different in any way? Do they have any special adaptations?

Emily: Sometimes. Yeah. So, there are a lot of pollinators that are visiting flowers during the day and we know there are all kinds of adaptations that plants have, you know, co-evolved with pollinators and like an arms race for getting the right pollinator for the best seed set.

Emily: But they're also flowers that are open at night that have nectar available for a late-night snack for nighttime pollinators. And some flowers actually open exclusively at night or have evolved to really attract those night time pollinators.

Emily: So, if you like fun specific words like crepuscular, there's another one for an adaptation for flowers that open or close petals at dusk in response to the onset of darkness, which is called floral nyctinasty.

Emily: So, when I was a kid, we would walk up the street and my up the street neighbor had this huge patch of evening primrose, which is a flower that experiences floral nyctinasty. And so, we would just wait there at dusk to watch this spectacle of these flowers opening up in the evening.

Emily: And that is what I think about when I think about, you know, attracting night time pollinators. Those plants are really going for crepuscular bees in terms of their pollination. And so, I think adaptations for nighttime pollinators tend to be more common in plants that are living in arid and dry conditions because of how much water is lost when they're open during the daytime.

Emily: So, a review of plant species and families found that nocturnal pollination really tends to be associated with species that are looking to reduce their water loss. So, flowering at night can be a response to water stress. Because flowering is really this water-intensive process.

Emily: We haven't really talked about this, but there's really a difference in light intensity, a huge difference in light intensity between a sunny day and a night with a full moon. So, the light intensity between a sunny day and a full moon night is a factor of about a million.

Emily: So, there's really a decrease in light intensity. And that means higher humidity, lower temperatures, typically lower wind speed, all of which mean for flowers, less loss of water. So, plants facing water stress could gain an advantage by flowering at night, when they're less likely to lose that water and then they can also potentially produce even more attractive flowers.

Emily: You know, larger rewarding flowers to attract those nighttime pollinators. Thinking here about things like cactuses in the desert that have these showy flowers that open up at night. But they might not be able to do that during the daytime, when they would face water loss.

Emily: Another one. Thinking about for nighttime flowers is, that they're trying to attract these animals in low light. So, light is limited when the sun goes down. Color might not be something that attracts a nighttime pollinator and actually it's more amount of light, so things like light coloring, pale colored flowers, are more typical of night pollinated flowers.

Emily: And then, there’s also strong fragrance. So, there are some flowering species, that release fragrance in the evening to try and attract those pollinators that have sort of adapted to have more sensitivity to fragrance and will follow the fragrance to the flower.

Matthew: That’s just amazing.

Rachel: Okay, cool.

Emily: Yeah, so, so much that we're not looking for, there's all this communication happening between these insects and their plants that we are not seeing and we're not feeling because we don't communicate chemically in that way.

Matthew: Yeah, definitely. I mean, we've talked about the problems with the impacts of artificial light in previous podcasts. But do other things that we do that impact nocturnal insects? I mean, what kind of threats do they face?

Emily: Absolutely.

Matthew: I guess it's the doom and gloom question, isn't it?

Emily: Yeah, well, I work on our pesticide reduction team. So, my life is often thinking about doom and gloom.

Matthew: Yeah. Oh, sad.

Emily: But also, what we can be doing to help. So, light pollution is a big one. And as you've said, you've covered this in previous podcasts, but it is a big factor in disruption of mating and foraging, communication, navigation, all these processes of night flying insects.

Emily: These insects have really evolved to be incredibly sensitive to light. So, they are disrupted at levels that we can barely detect ourselves. The other big drivers, I think, of disruptions or declines in nocturnal insects are the same things that day active insects face.

Emily: So, loss of habitat. All insects, no matter when they're most active, need food and shelter. And many insects have very specific habitat needs. Maybe they need dead wood to nest in. Maybe they need a specific host plant or a specific prey species.

Emily: So habitat loss also looks like a lack of diversity or removal of leaves and standings. And dead wood from the landscape or excessive deer browse like Kass was talking about or a fragmentation of patches. It's habitat loss and degradation. 

Emily: And then pesticide use of course we are using massive quantities of highly insect toxic chemicals in agriculture but also around our homes. So, we need to be rethinking our approach to how we manage insects in our world.

Emily: And then climate change is also likely having major impacts on night active insects. Many of these insects have, as we talked about, more limited thermal tolerances, so they're adapted for cooler temperatures at night. Daytime active species often have wider thermal limits, so they have more room for adapting to changing temperatures.

Emily: But, with increasing night time temperatures, some of these insects might not have much ceiling left in the range of temperatures where they can tolerate and reproduce, and are able to adapt to those higher temperatures.

Rachel: So that's the doom and gloom. But the good news is that there are things that we can do to help nocturnal insects. What are those things?

Emily: Yes, thank you for following up with that part of the question.

Rachel: You’re welcome.

Emily: So, I think we need to start gardening for nocturnal insects. You know, if you're listening to this podcast, you're a wildlife gardener, you're thinking about pollinators. But what does gardening for nocturnal insects look like? I think it means reducing artificial lighting, providing habitat in dark zones in your garden, and avoiding pesticides. So, for light pollution, I've really liked the suggestion that Richard had on your Firefly podcast.

Emily: Just go out at night and observe from an insect perspective. What lights do you see when you're standing out there at night? Do you see the splash of light coming out of the windows of your house onto your garden? Do your neighbors have patio lighting, you know, for a party?

Emily: Do they have vanity lighting on the exterior of their house? Is there an obvious street light or flood light that you can see? And what about things like sky glow from your city or from a nearby town? So, for all of these things, I think there are some steps that we can take for our own house or our apartment to reduce light pollution and really light pollution is like wasted light. It's light that doesn't have a clear purpose.

Emily: It's just pollution in the same way that, you know, we talk about pesticide pollution. It's like drift of light out into these spaces where it's not useful. So, ways we can reduce that would be things like, easy steps, putting up curtains that you can keep closed at night in your house, remembering to do that.

Emily: Putting motion detectors or timers on outdoor lighting. So, we're wanting to produce light basically in both space and time. So, turning them off is best. In my experience, I think there are many lights that you can keep off most of the time using a motion detector for when you when you do want light.

Emily: So, whether that's being able to move from your driveway into your house or for that feeling of safety from lights turning on when there's some kind of motion outside. If turning off lights isn't an option, I would say dimming and hooding and shielding outdoor lighting would be the second-best step to take.

Emily: And then there's lots of lighting that we can't control, right? When we're trying to garden for wildlife in places that have a lot of outdoor lighting, whether it's from our neighbors or from street lights in the city, you can also work on gardening for dark zones. So, thinking about light as a pollutant.

Emily: How could you protect your garden? Just like you might plant a dense set of trees, or dead vegetation as a drift barrier to try and protect your pollinator garden from your neighbor's pesticide applications.

Emily: You could also plant trees and shrubs to try and block or absorb artificial lighting from your neighbors or from city street lights. Thinking about how can we create these darker spaces with vegetation to create some zones that are hopefully dark enough for nocturnal insects to navigate through.

Emily: So that's something to think about from a wildlife gardening perspective. And then there's steps we can take at the community level or the state level. I think there's really important work to be done to reduce lighting impacts on insects and other wildlife, including migratory birds, who are migrating at night and running into problems with, you know, commercial buildings that are lit up at night.

Emily: So, this would mean things like better lighting standards for street lighting, requirements for commercial buildings to keep their indoor lighting on a timer, restrictions on vanity outdoor lighting. So basically, doing the quality control on lighting, turning it off if it's not necessary or if it doesn't have a clear purpose.

Emily: Put necessary lighting on timers or motion sensors, making sure it's down shielded for outdoor lighting and then dimming and turning off lobbies and atriums and that kind of lighting. Most of these measures also have the added benefit of reducing energy usage and saving money. So, there's a stacking benefits approach here.

Emily: And this can actually happen at the state level. Connecticut last year passed legislation to turn off non-essential outdoor lighting for state-owned buildings between 11 PM and 6 AM to protect migratory birds during their migration. But that has stacking benefits for insects that are active at night.

Emily: I have a couple more points I think here on what we can do to help. Just like with daytime pollinators, we also want to avoid pesticides in our yards and gardens. Many pesticides available for home and garden use are harmful to moths and fireflies and other nocturnal insects.

Emily: So, I hope we'll do another podcast specifically about that topic. At some point. I also wanted to specifically mention bug zappers, which honestly, I can't believe are still sold in stores. So, bug zappers are those, you know, electronic bug zappers, I hope you're familiar with them, are still manufactured and widely available.

Emily: Despite this overwhelming amount of research that they are useless for controlling pests like mosquitoes. There's research done in Florida. Out of the 10,000 insects killed by one bug zapper in one night, eight were mosquitoes. And the rest were all kinds of different insects. Many beneficial insects.

Emily: So, in the 1990’s, and I don't know if there's been any update to this research since then, but there was an estimate that there were about 4 million bugs zappers in use across the US, operating for about 40 nights a year, each killing an estimated 71 billion harmless or beneficial insects like moths.

Emily: So, I can't emphasize enough, how much I would like bugs zappers taken off the market. Yeah. And then we've also talked about just better habitat in general for nocturnal insects and other wildlife. Because you could easily have dozens of night-active insects in your yard already. Especially if you're already planting for diversity, if you're planting native plants for diversity, if you're leaving the leaves and saving the stems, you probably have a lot of nocturnal insects active around your property.

Emily: So, here's where I put in my two cents for doing more by doing less. So, less tidy yards are generally better for insects. And we can stop working so hard and give us all a pat on the back for gardening for wildlife.

Rachel: Thank you for all those suggestions that is really shocking about the bug zappers. I had no idea how harmful they were.

Emily: Yeah, yeah, and for so little evidence of benefit.

Matthew: Yeah. No, I'm still processing that. 71 billion.

Matthew: Okay. Our last question, Emily. Always one of our favorites. What inspired you to become an entomologist?

Emily: I love this question too. I love hearing how people answer this question at the end of your podcast too. And I was trying to think about it because I knew you were probably going to ask me this question.

Matthew: Yes, you can't escape this one.

Emily: I've always loved plants and nature, and I was trying to think about what actually inspired a love of bugs. And I tried to figure out what was my earliest memory of insects. And I realized that my earliest memory of being fascinated with an insect involved eastern tent caterpillars, which I know you're both out west, but I grew up in Maryland and we have eastern tent caterpillars, which are a native species that can sometimes lead, you know, to outbreaks and defoliation of trees and that kind of thing.

Emily: But what I remember about them is that in elementary school, we would go out for recess. And the slides on the playground at my elementary school were metal and very sizzling hots and so I avoided the playground.

Emily: And I would go off to the edges of the field where there was shade and I would play in the dirt. And so, I distinctly remember a couple of years where a couple of those trees at the edge of the playground had eastern tent caterpillars.

Emily: And so, there were just dozens of these caterpillars on the ground and so I thought they were beautiful. I thought they were so cool looking. They had this white stripe running down the back and then they're a little bit furry and so sometimes we would pick them up with a stick and like watch them walk up the stick.

Emily: Sometimes I would pick them up in my hands, which I know this now, it's probably best not to pick up caterpillars that have defensive hairs, but it was a good lesson in handling things carefully because you can pick up a tent caterpillar if you're careful. And sometimes we just like line them up like little rows of school buses and see how they moved.

Emily: So that, I realized, was my first memory of being really obsessed with an insect. And I feel like it makes a lot of sense because the first insect that I loved was a pest species and now I work on trying to educate others that we can love pests too and eastern tent caterpillars you know are eaten by over 60 different kinds of birds and the trees usually recover after they've been munched on by a bunch of little school bus caterpillars. 

Emily: And then after that I eventually got into bees. So much later, I guess not much later, I was in college. I got into honeybees because I thought I wanted to be a farmer, and they were important for agriculture. And then I got into wild bees because they're amazing and diverse and important insects and they do pollination too.

Emily: So that was how I actually ended up becoming an entomologist, but the tent caterpillars have this special place in my recess memories from elementary school.

Rachel: I love that so much. The school bus caterpillar. I don’t think I will ever forget that.

Emily: Yeah, I just love them.

Rachel: Well, thank you so much, Emily, for just such an interesting podcast. It was so fun to hear about these insects we don't hear a lot about. And I look forward to hopefully future research and episodes on more of this and we do have a podcast coming up on mosquito management so really timely that that was brought up here.

Rachel: But thank you for coming back, and it was just so nice to spend time with you.

Emily: Yeah, it was great to be back. I hope that folks will end up looking into nocturnal pollinators and gardening for night active insects a little bit more. I hope that you've walked away with a taste for why they are so cool and maybe you'll get outside at night a little bit more to look at them. And the stars.

Matthew: Okay, that's awesome. Thank you.

Rachel: Bug Banter is brought to you by the Xerces Society, a donor supported non-profit that works to protect insects and other invertebrates – the life that sustains us. 

Rachel: If you’re already a donor, thank you so much. If you want to support our work go to xerces.org/donate. For information about this podcast and show notes go to xerces.org/bugbanter.