Insects in the Balance: Why Monitoring Matters

Bees, butterflies, beetles — populations of almost any group of insects you can name seem to be falling. But how do we know they are falling, how can we find out how well insects are doing? Monitoring is an essential tool for understanding the abundance and distribution of species, as well as how they respond to conservation efforts.

To explore this further, we are talking with Matt Forister, professor of biology and insect ecology in the Biology Department at the University of Nevada, Reno. He has studied butterflies and other insects in the western US for the last 20 years, and has published more than 100 journal articles and book chapters on issues that include insects adapting to exotic plants and butterflies responding to a changing climate. Matt is also a long-time scientific advisor to the Xerces Society and our staff have undertaken several research projects with his lab.

Thank you for listening! For more information go to xerces.org/bugbanter.

Transcript

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

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

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

Matthew: Bees, butterflies, beetles—populations of almost any group of insects you can name seem to be falling. But how do we know they are falling, how can we find out how well insects are doing? Monitoring is an essential tool for understanding the abundance and distribution of species, as well as how they respond to conservation efforts.

Matthew: To explore this further, we are talking with Matt Forister, professor of biology and insect ecology in the biology department at the University of Nevada, Reno. He has studied butterflies and other insects in the Western United States for the last 20 years, and has published more than 100 journal articles and book chapters on issues that include insects adapting to exotic plants, and butterflies responding to a changing climate. Matt is also a long-time scientific advisor to the Xerces Society and our staff have undertaken several research projects with his lab.

Matthew: Welcome, Matt! Thank you so much for finding the time to sit down with us today

Matt: Thanks. Super nice to be here. Happy to talk.

Rachel: Yeah, thanks for joining us. So let's start with the what and the why—kind of the basic questions. What are the different ways that we can monitor insects? And why is it important to monitor them?

Matt: Yep. If you look up monitoring on the internet, you do get lots of definitions and people quibbling a bit over what we should consider monitoring. For me, it's any system of repeated observations that happen year after year, with some sort of—with different kinds of standardization. So returning to the same place, walking the same routes, walking at a certain time of day, and taking the same types of observations. So for butterflies, we often talk about Pollard walks, which goes back to Ernie Pollard in the UK in the 1970s who came up with this idea for butterflies. You walk a fixed route and you count and identify the butterflies that fly within a certain distance of you on either side. And then we've modified that in various ways.

Matt: And butterfly monitoring happens in different ways, too, these days. But the essence of it is repeated observations that happen in the same place, year after year. And usually with some fixed repetition within a year or two. And there's lots of interesting complexity around that, too, that we might or might not want to talk to. There's issues about how you schedule around weather, for example. I also think crowdsourced observations these days—for example, things that people post to iNaturalist—not at all traditional monitoring, but they're kind of serving that purpose in an interesting way.

Matt: And you also asked why it's important. Monitoring is important because it's really the only way we know what the natural world is doing and how it's changing. And it's more important than ever these days as we see the impacts of climate change and other stressors of the modern era affecting plants and animals. And it really takes years and years of work recording observations from nature to even know what's happening before we can figure out what to do about it.

Rachel: Mhmm. Thank you.

Matt: Yeah.

Matthew: Yeah, we know that monitoring programs provide us with critical information about the distribution  and abundance of species—information and knowledge that's so important to making decisions about how we can help them. You mentioned some of the challenges, some of the issues around, you know, time of day, or weather, etc. So, I mean could you tell us more about some of the challenges that scientists have faced? Because I'm thinking, like, insects are such tiny animals in really big landscapes.

Matt: Yeah, that's right. If you think about a different kind of challenge first. Imagine keeping track of the number of deer, for example, in a large herd that's known to inhabit an area. It has its own challenges. But it's sort of conceptually more straightforward—is that you probably know where a herd is and you're going to, you know, set up some monitoring stations, or, let's say, camera traps to take pictures. And you probably can count all individuals in that group, or pretty close.

Matt: Whereas for insects, we often don't even know what fraction of a population we're counting. So if you're out in an area and you see eight, nine, 10, 12 individuals of a particular species, it's really hard to know is that 10% of the individuals of that species that live in that area? Or is it 90%? Or is it somewhere in between? And we often can't know. Which means monitoring insects right from the start is just so tricky. We have to approach it with different expectations. So for example, with what we do walking Pollard walks, we have an idea of sort of the number of butterflies going up and down for particular species from year to year. And we treat that as kind of an index of how the population is doing, but we don't really know the total number of a species that lives in an area.

Matt: So that's a problem, just sort of that extent to which observations reflect population density. It's also the case that detection varies among species. So some—again, just sticking to butterflies—are really easy to see from a distance. Monarchs, for example, are relatively easy to spot and identify from a distance. But then we have small blues, or coppers, or skippers, little orange grass skippers—much lower detection. And we often—sometimes we'll try to quantify detection, the extent to which we succeed at seeing what's in an area, which is a whole other issue. But the point is it varies, it differs among species. We do various things statistically with the data to try to account for that.

Matt: And that's just butterflies. When you get to other insects, the problems are then far greater. Other insects that you just don't see as you're walking down the trail, for which people need to do often lethal monitoring—you know, putting out traps. For example, pan traps are used to monitor flying bees or flies. And there's a lot of effort these days being put into non-lethal methods. For example, collecting DNA from the environment. Folks are collecting DNA from flowers as a—you know, DNA left behind by insects that visit flowers—as a method to monitor flying insects that are not butterflies, that aren't easily counted. Totally fascinating and all in development. There are also people that are invested in camera situations, where you can monitor cameras, for example near patches of flowers, and attempt to monitor flying insects.

Matt: None of that is what I do, per se. I'm sort of lucky to work with butterflies that are relatively easy, and all those things. But yeah, the challenges that are just like logistical, and statistical, and conceptual with monitoring insects are pretty large.

Rachel: So for many years, you've actually co-managed North America's longest running butterfly monitoring project, which I think is so interesting. Can you tell us a bit about it? When did it start? Who started it?

Matt: Yep. So Art Shapiro, professor at UC Davis, started this program in the early 1970s. And he had moved from the East Coast, was a new professor at University of California, Davis. And he started visiting, at first just a couple of sites, every other week during the warm months and counting butterflies. And his initial interest was in phenology, or the timing of when butterflies fly. And as I understand it, he initially imagined having a couple of years of data with the idea that the variability of the California climate—the Mediterranean climate there, where there's just a lot of swings from season to season and year to year—would give him data about the extent to which different butterfly species co-vary, and how they respond to a warm spring or a cold spring, and when they emerge.

Matt: And then—. And then he just kind of never stopped. And then he kept adding more sites until he had 10 sites that go from the Bay Area through the Central Valley over the Sierra Nevada to the other side of the mountains. So the earliest site was 1972, and then sites were added in consecutive years. Which is to say, we're now at 53 years of data for the oldest sites. And Art, remarkably, continues to collect data at the five low-elevation sites. Which is to say, every other week for more than 50 years, essentially without missing a day, which as far as I know, has pretty much no precedent in the natural sciences in terms of a data set created by one person. It's pretty wild.

Matt: And in some ways, not easy to sort of—to understand. Like, how you would get in the mindset of doing something that regularly until actually you start doing it. And maybe listeners have even had this experience. You know, once you sort of appreciate the benefits of going back to someplace in nature on a regular basis, there is kind of an addiction to it. And you want to not stop.

Matt: So that was the early 1970s. Art did it up through the 2010s. And then in 2018, we—from my lab at UNR in Reno, Nevada—we started taking over the mountain sites. So now we do the mountain sites in the exact same time frame that Art did them—every two weeks. We actually added a mountain site. So we do six mountain sites. Art continues to do the valley sites. And it's more than one of us. So I do it with grad students from my lab. And we divide up the effort because it is really—it is a monumental effort to get to many sites every two weeks. And we have to do it through a more narrow season than Art does in the valley. Because the valley essentially never stops, especially with warming winters. It's always, “Go.” We at least still have a snow season in the Sierra.

Rachel: Wow, that is incredible. So in terms of how the data was collected, has that changed over time?

Matt: It has not. And sometimes people are sort of surprised to know that we're not taking data in more, let's say, modern methods. We still are out there with paper and notebook, which I like and it has some real advantages in that it's not subject to backing up problems, or syncing problems or, you know, dropping your iPad and hitting a rock and losing data. And the fact is the volume of data on a per-day basis is low enough that we can do it with pencil and paper. Like, it just, it works. Different kinds of data collection—people move to digitized collection and it makes a lot of sense. But, actually, frankly, there's sort of a pleasure of being outside writing things down with pen and paper that, you know, we don't do that much anymore because everything is digitized.

Matt: So I had a—. Rick Karban is still a professor at UC Davis. He was teaching grad classes when I was a grad student there. And I remember him once saying—I think pretty seriously—that his favorite part of science was being outside writing things down in a little notebook. And I remember I sort of laughed about it at the time, but then now I appreciate it. It is actually kind of a pleasure.

Rachel: Yeah, I imagine it just connects you more to nature than being on an iPad—and, like, kind of disconnecting from technology, and just being out and sort of making it as simple as possible. I love the consistency. I actually think that that's like a really beautiful part of the story that that hasn't changed for so many years.

Matt: I think so, too. And there actually are real advantages to paper because you can write notes to yourself in the margins in ways that aren't as easy if you're constrained to a, you know, a digital format.

Rachel: Mhmm.

Matthew: Yeah. Yeah, I knew that Art had been working on this for a long time. And I'm not sure if I'm right, but I heard that his transects—. Because he has to get there by public transit. And so      that was another thing that helped define the locations of this, you know, incredible long-term project—where he could get by bus.

Matt: That's right. Art grew up on, in the East Coast where public transportation was different. And then coming to California, he restricted his field work basically to the I-80 corridor where it was possible to take buses, or to hitchhike. And, you know, sometimes he paid students to drive him around. But yeah that's the extra element that's kind of shocking—to do 50 years of field work on the road, but Art doesn't drive.

Matthew: Yeah. No, I think it's great. It's so exciting that—not only that Art was able to start it and continue it, but it's, you know, become such an incredible project that's delivered such an amazing data set. I mean, the follow-up from that is: okay, we've got lots of data but what have we learned from all of those—half a century of monitoring? Do we know more about the status of butterflies now?

Matt: Yeah, when I first started looking at the data was in the early 2000s when I was a graduate student. And at that time we had time to ask very basic questions. And I mean basic in terms of just sort of curiosity-driven about how the world works. Questions about how fluctuations in weather affect insect populations. And we very instantly got derailed from those basic questions into questions about dramatic change. So the butterflies in the Central Valley, for example, had gone into a really severe decline in the late 90s into early 2000s. And figuring out what was happening there then took up the next decade of investigation with the data.

Matt: And then as soon as we thought we understood what was happening in the valley in terms of a combination of pesticide impacts, habitat loss, and climate change—as soon as that sort of seemed like it was making sense, then we got the megadrought years that impacted the entire Western U.S. from roughly 2011 to 2015, when the Western U.S. was hotter and drier than it had been in a thousand years.

Matt: And at that point, the mountains became severely impacted. It was obvious there were fewer butterflies. And so then we turned to the next puzzle of trying to figure out how the mountains are responding to climate change. And     that has been a puzzle that we're still unraveling, and it's been full of all kinds of surprises. For example, in 2011, when the megadrought was impending, we thought to ourselves—well, I should just blame myself for this because I end up being wrong. I thought, “Well, the valley populations are done for. Like, they are going to be pushed over the edge by this because they're already stressed by decades of habitat loss, and pesticides, and climate change. And so like population’s on the edge. Then it's going to be hotter and drier than it's been in a thousand years. We're going to just start losing things.”

Matt: Whereas the mountains—there was a pretty clear theoretical expectation from ecology and global change biology that if you're an insect, an ectotherm, right? An animal that depends on the external environment for your body temperature, and you live in a mountainous environment with lots of topographic complexity, as the climate shifts, you should be able to move up slope a little bit. Or if you used to live on a south facing slope, maybe you're going to shift to a north facing slope. They have all kinds of microclimatic choices that you don't have if you live in the valley. So we thought, “Well, now we're going to see the resilience of montane insects. They're going to do this shifting around and they're going to be at least better off than the valley.” And we were 100% wrong.

Matt: So the valley—which it's always good to be wrong in science because it means you're going to learn something—the valley populations had some actually pretty good years in the mega     drought. So it turns out that the valley populations were able to take advantage of the earlier, hotter, drier springs in order to have more population growth. Whereas in the mountains, they didn't enjoy that benefit, specifically because most of the mountain populations have a single generation per year, whereas most of the valley populations have multiple generations per year.

Matt: So if you've got multiple generations per year, and it's a really hot and dry spring, you get going a month earlier. You have a month more time for population growth as those generations accumulate. Even though they're stressed by other things—that was a temporary advantage they had. Whereas in the mountains, if you have one generation per year and it's a really hot and dry spring—let's say you emerge three weeks or a month earlier—well, you're just flying earlier in a hotter and drier landscape where the plants are more stressed, the nectar is more stressed, less available, and you're going to suffer. And you suffered apparently without enjoying any benefit of shifting around.

Matt: And we have seen some upslope shifting, but its importance seems to just pale in comparison to everything else going on, namely the warming and drying climate. In particular, the warming and drying winters seem very bad for mountain butterflies. We're still working to understand that. For example, we really want to know if the warming and drying winters are bad for butterflies because they stress plants that the butterflies depend on. Or they could impact the activity time of natural enemies. Or they could have direct physiological effects on, for example, overwintering stages of butterflies. And the answer is almost certainly all of the above, but we're working to understand sort of the balance of those things. So that was a long way of saying, you know, we started out with one set of sort of simple question-driven inquiries, and then we've basically been in response mode trying to understand what the world is throwing at these butterflies.

Matthew: Yeah, and with some of that—as you're trying to work out these details—that's involving more research than—I imagine, than just the, you know, every other week going out with your notebook. So presuming this is also driving additional studies and so on.

Matt: Yep. We always try to let the long-term data inspire other studies, for example, lab experiments and rearing experiments. But there's also an extent to which the data you have from the field—certain things can't be replicated in experiments. Like you—in some ways you can't do the right experiment to recreate the complex combination of hot and dry conditions that were felt during the drought years. You can get at bits of it, and it's important to do experiments. But really so much of what we learn still comes from the long-term observations, that just get better every year the more data we have.

Matthew: Interesting. And through all of this—. I mean, you were explaining these differences between the lowland and the mountains and so on. I mean, overall, are they like—. With this 50 years of shifting conditions, and shifting climate, have you like seen species appear—you know, more recently being recorded that weren't recorded earlier? Or have you seen species disappear from the record?

Matt: Mostly, unfortunately, we've seen disappearances.

Matthew: Hmm.

Matt: Which really doesn't seem fair because there are species that are moving north latitudinally. There are species that, for example, maybe normally are limited somewhere in, let's say, you know, Southern New Mexico, or Southern Arizona, U.S.–Mexico border. And as conditions have warmed, they are able to send migrants sort of farther north every year. I want to see those at our sites.

Matt: Mostly we've started to fail to detect things that used to be there. So we have a number of examples of extirpations, which is what we call a loss of a population, not the loss of a species. So we are accumulating extirpations, especially at low elevations. For example, the large marble is one, Euchloe ausonides, and the common sootywing, Pholisora catullus. These are two butterflies that used to be relatively easy to see at low elevations in California, and now are showing repeated extirpations—places we used to be able to see them and we just don't see them anymore now. And those are also turning up a bit in the mountains and not being replaced by new things. So that is a general degradation of the butterfly fauna that we're used to.

Matthew: That's kind of sad. But then that’s—it seems like the inevitable outcome of monitoring took over long period of time. There's going to be some bad news from it.

Matt: Yeah, it's funny. I think about that often. It's like, I think if you look at the natural world for long enough, you're just sort of destined to see changes that aren't great. It's not a very eloquent way to say it, but yeah. I mean, the best we could hope for is colonizations from animals that are taking advantage of the warmer climate. We just don't have much of that—t     iniest bits. For example, the gulf fritillary is a species that historically has moved up the California coast, and now it is doing a better job at persisting inland, including along the I-80 corridor, for example, the Sacramento area. Because the warmer—the winters are milder than they used to be, so it can survive winters that it didn't used to. It would be great to see most of that, but it's just, like, trivial in comparison to the losses.

Matthew: The gulf fritillary—my in-laws live in the Bay Area. And so I—over the last 25 years, I've been traveling down there fairly frequently. And that's one butterfly that I realized in like maybe the last eight or 10 years I see every time I go. But I don't really remember seeing it prior to that, so.

Matt: Yep. And what a fabulous animal, right? A great addition to the fauna, for sure.

Matthew: Yeah. Yeah, no, it's certainly a beauty.

Rachel: So your work expands beyond just this one monitoring project that we've been talking about kind of across the Western U.S. And you've talked about some patterns you've seen throughout California. Do you see those same patterns across the Western U.S.? How are butterflies doing within this larger landscape and this larger region?

Matt: Yep, unfortunately not very well. I'm not full of very much good news, I'm afraid.

Rachel: Hmm.

Matt: So it was our pandemic era project to work with data from the North American Butterfly Association monitoring program. That's a program that organizes enthusiasts and experts to go out at least once a summer and count butterflies in a certain area. And they have this program all across North America. It's a great thing for people to get involved in. I hadn't worked with the data before we got it around the start of the pandemic. Simply asking the question: are the declines that we see in our long-term data happening across the West? And they are. But it was surprising to see declines happening out in the wildlands. Because even our most pristine sites in the Sierra Nevada are impacted by proximity to the developed Central Valley. Because we have a lot of butterflies that seasonally fly up from the Central Valley, and that has suffered as the Central Valley has suffered.

Matt: But a lot of the NABA monitoring happens out in the just amazing, you know, remote natural areas of the Western U.S. And there we saw somewhere between 1% to 2% annual compounding loss, which is pretty dramatic. That's like, if you imagine going to some mountain meadow 20 years ago and seeing a thousand individual butterflies flying around. Now we estimate that if you go back to that meadow today on a given day, you'd see somewhere in the neighborhood of 720, 725 individual butterflies flying around. So pretty dramatic loss.

Matt: And that was a few years ago now that we found that and it makes sense to me now—now that I've sort of more internalized the climate change impacts that are happening in natural areas. But it was a surprise at first. And I expected to see more of an impact of proximity to development. That butterflies would still be suffering more severely near human habitation. But really there are these impacts out in the natural areas, which is daunting and frustrating.

Rachel: Yeah, definitely. So do you think that climate change then is, like, one of—probably the top driver of decline for butterflies?

Matt: Yeah. Let’s, let's be careful about saying the top driver, because it really does matter where you are. So if you're in a low elevation area anywhere near human development—whether it's suburban, urban, or agriculture—then the top driver has always been habitat loss, and habitat degradation through pesticides, and other issues. But it is remarkably the case that out in natural areas—depending, in particular, on elevation, for the reason I mentioned earlier—that when you go to higher elevations, you're more likely to have one-generation-per-year species, and those species seem to respond especially negatively to climate change. So under certain circumstances, the effects of climate change can be comparable to the effects of those other stressors.

Matt: Which still feels weird to say, right? Because those other stressors—compounding pesticides, habitat loss—feel like it should always be greater than climate change. But it's different species that live in those different places and they're responding in different ways.

Rachel: Yeah, that makes sense. I think we often think of—like, we watch, you know, Planet Earth and these nature documentaries where you go out into these super wild places. And I think there's some sort of like comfort of knowing they still exist. But then seeing that there are still major impacts happening, and species are still being impacted, even though humans don't really have like a physical footprint in that place—I think it's just so alarming to me to know that we are having an impact beyond just like our physical place or space that we live in.

Matt: Yep, I'm glad you said that because I was actually pausing and trying to decide if I wanted to say that, too, but—. We feel this especially in the Mountain West, where sometimes I've given talks to the general public and if we're at an outside venue, I'll be talking about the importance of, you know, stopping pesticide use in their backyards because it's bad for butterflies and other insects. And I can see people looking at the mountains in the distance. And there's just this feeling like, “Eh, come on, you know. There's all of that land out there. Does it really matter what I do in my backyard?” And the message is: it does matter. Because they're suffering out there for other reasons. And so it does matter what you do in your backyard.

Matt: But yeah, you're right. We just like desperately want the nature special, right? We want there to be this untouched nature out there, and there just isn't anymore. Which is pretty—. I think we can't absorb it really mentally. And we have to just keep reminding ourselves of that. Honestly, I think it's why people believe in things like Bigfoot.

Rachel: Haha.

Matt: It's like we want there to be a nature that's so untouched that something like Bigfoot is still running around out there. But I'm afraid it's not. Haha. Nature is not untouched.

Rachel: Mhmm. Yeah.

Matthew: Yeah, I know we're mostly talking about monitoring. And, you know, it's great to do and knowing the state of the species doesn’t directly help insects. Knowing what's happening doesn't mean that we know—haven't moved to that next step of just like reducing pesticides or doing something positive in our own gardens. So, I mean, are there ways in which that monitoring information that you and others are gathering, you know, can be shared, can be used to shape or direct conservation protection efforts?

Matt: Yeah, that's a hard question, of course. Up until now, from my perspective, our monitoring results have really served motivation, I think. You know, like I said, motivating people to take better—to have better management of the lands that are within their control. Because our monitoring suggests that insects are suffering everywhere, so you should be motivated to, you know, take action and to fight climate change and all that. But the harder question is the extent to which monitoring more directly informs conservation.

Matt: And there are things that we're working on. For example, we have a puzzle of widely distributed declining species. The monarch is one. But let’s—we can talk about others, too. The West Coast lady, Vanessa annabella, is a large species that—its range really encompasses the entire Western U.S. It's a large animal. It's in the family Nymphalidae. It's dispersive. It has a number of hosts, both exotic and native hosts. It's not an animal that you would have thought would have been suffering 20 years ago. But it's actually one of our most severely declining species, that everywhere we look for it, there are fewer of them. At the sites we know in the mountains, it's a species that the data tells us 20 years ago Art would see on 60%, 70% of the days that he's out there—which to me is like inconceivable because now I see a couple of them over the entire year.

Matt: Okay, so, but the puzzle is how can something so dispersive, able to move around, and so widespread be suffering? The answer is probably that just because something encompasses the entire Western U.S. doesn't mean that all areas are equally as important. There may be some parts of that range that are important sources. That, for example, are very productive and they send out individuals to sort of fill up other parts of the range. We need to figure out where those are and that can help perhaps direct conservation and restoration, right? So figuring out where within a range a species is suffering more than somewhere else can help.

Matt: But actually, to be honest, that question of to what extent monitoring informs conservation is something that I have gone to my friends at the Xerces Society and asked. Because I expect you folks to figure out what the conservation needs are. And, you know, I'm really a basic scientist at heart, right? Curiosity-driven questions and interactions with Xerces has let us, I hope, provide information that's useful to conservation. But I do ask for help in figuring that out.

Matthew: From what I've seen and the projects that we've done with your lab, it certainly has. I also understand that you're involved with creating a new academic journal devoted to recording the loss of species. I know you were saying it's a bit depressing, but I'm sure that must be like a bit of a downer to have a whole journal on it. Haha.

Matt: Well, yeah, happy to tell you about it because there actually is a bit of hope in this, I think, even though it doesn't sound like it. And the backstory here is reviewing a student grant application from another university that—we don't need the details here. And part of the motivation for the grant application was mentioning a species of butterfly. It was a subspecies actually, that is probably gone in the wild. And then there were other parts to the proposal, and I went on with the review process—I was reading many proposals. But something kept nagging me about that particular thing. And it wasn't just that a particular subspecies of butterfly might be gone, because, I mean, we're kind of prepared for that these days because we've seen our own taxa, you know, approaching that cliff.

Matt: But what I realized bothered me about it was that I was learning about that loss from an unpublished student grant application. And it occurred to me that there's really no place for scientists to publish a record of losses—which is kind of ironic because the idea that we are in a mass extinction event that is human-driven is really, one could say, the dominant ecological pattern of the age. And it is a really important prediction from ecologists that all of these stressors and changes are going to lead to extinction, but we're not explicitly recording the extinctions.

Matt: You do see data from extinctions make its way into publications and into the press, but it's often in a very abstracted way. So for example, you know, you might see a headline in the press that says, “Declines in the Number of Species Observed in a Costa Rican Forest,” right? And regardless of what species we're talking about. And then if you go to the paper, you'll see a trend line that's going down over time, which is fewer species seen per year in some, you know, protected area. But the actual identity of those species is not part of what's being reported. It's essentially their data—really important data, right? And the trend line going down is super important, but yet we're not formally keeping a record of the losses.

Matt: Another irony is that our sciences are built—the natural sciences are really underpinned by formal documentation of the discovery of species. Scientific publications that say, “Here's a new species, this is where it lives, etc.” But we're not formally documenting the loss. In any event—so that was the idea that we need to have a journal to record these losses. I'm working on it. In the last few months, I've been learning a lot about the publishing industry. Because I think it is important that it's a formal publication because that then becomes part of the formal scientific record that hopefully someone can read in 100 years or 200 years. But the publishing industry is a complicated beast. And it's full of a lot of profit-driven motives and other complicated things. And one wants to have a journal like this be readily accessible to anybody in the world, which means it's not going to make money. And so—in conversations with people trying to figure out how to do that. So I can't say anything concrete yet, but hopefully over the course of the next year, we'll know something more.

Matthew: Yeah, no, I don't know anything about what's behind trying to launch a new journal, but it—I'm sure it is more complicated than people will imagine. It's like anything. Scratch under the surface and you find all sorts of things that need to be dealt with.

Matt: Yep. And part of the history of my career is naively jumping into things that I don't know much about. So I've just done it again.

Rachel: I used to work as a naturalist in Hawaii. And I found this book and it was all about the extinct birds of Hawaii that were endemic to the islands. And I just thought it was—. I mean, it's so hard because it's so sad to look through this book and see all these—specifically birds that had been lost. But I also just thought what a cool idea because I think as humans, we have short memories. And we forget things, especially our history. And to be able to look back and use that looking forward of like, “Well, I don't want these species to be lost for future generations.” I just think it's, in general, a good reminder for us going forward and understanding the importance of conservation.

Matt: But you just reminded me of something. When I started that story, I mentioned that it has a bit of hope in it. And the hopeful bit is that: it has been found that if you publicize the loss of a species, or a subspecies, that people are very excited to go look for it. We can rediscover things at the point that we make it clear that they're lost. And by lost here, we mean something like a species that hasn't been found in the last 10 years, right? And so if we make that known, everyone is interested to go out and look for it. And mainly that has been done with vertebrates—with birds and mammals, for example—which is super important. But obviously, we need to be doing it for all of life. So that's part of our mission.

Matthew: It also harks back to that issue of shifting baselines. As Rachel said, we only remember what we remember. And so, “Okay, so there's been this loss and this decline, but it's not so bad because it's only based upon what we know, and not what the data tells us from 50, a hundred years ago.”

Matt: That's right. Which is another importance of monitoring, which we talked about before, right?

Matthew: Yeah.

Matt: And it's really important to have new monitoring efforts, but we also really need to value and support our longest running monitoring efforts because those give us the baselines.

Matthew: Mhmm. Yeah, I'd imagine that we need to have monitoring in more places. I definitely don't want to lose what we've got. And one thing that I was pondering—. You do that baseline monitoring, and you have the data. And it launches someone searching for a species. And then they refind it. And then they want to do conservation work. Does at that point—I'm sure monitoring helps inform what's going on—but does the monitoring change in any way? Are there different techniques that you might need once you start in the kind of management, the protection phase?

Matt: Yeah, there are. This is not something that we've explicitly done, but we are getting to the point of thinking about it with some species—where you need to move from having an index of how populations change over time, to having an idea of the actual number of individuals that are living in an area. And to do that, you can do things like mark and recapture,  where researchers will catch individuals over the course of many days and, for example, put a tiny mark on their wings and then let them go. And then you come back after a certain amount of time and you catch again. And the fraction of individuals that you catch that has the marking versus not having the marking, there's some simple math that lets you estimate the total size of the population based on that.

Matt: So there are tools that you can sort of, like, elaborate on monitoring that gives you extra bits of information that you need to know. Another thing you always want to know with—when it comes to sort of conserving individual species in individual spots—is the extent to which they're reproducing locally, versus coming in from other areas. And we have done a bit of this now, in that we've added caterpillar monitoring to our long-term sites. So we go out now with some regularity and we look for caterpillars in sort of plots that we put out in the forest. And that tells us about who's reproducing locally versus who's moving in. So that's another layer of information that's useful for conservation.

Matthew: Yeah, I was just thinking, I'm sure you can't do mark-recapture on the caterpillars because you put a mark on it and then they lose their skin so—. Haha.

Matt: That's right.

Matthew: Yeah, well, thank you so much, Matt. This has been a really great conversation. And that does bring us to our last question. And it's always the one that we ask and love the responses to but: what inspired you to start studying butterflies?

Matt: A long series of accidents. And a long winding road. I was an English major as an undergraduate. And really only knew that I loved the scholarship and the intellectual challenge. And then—and it took me a while—years to go from English literature to ecology and evolution. And then even once I got to ecology and evolution, I actually started as a graduate student in a small mammal lab. And it was wonderful in some ways, but it wasn't a perfect fit. And then I met folks in Art Shapiro's lab, and it was really the—. Like, butterflies are kind of this amazing combination of wonderful diversity—there's so many of them—but because they're easily observed, we have this tradition of knowledge about them. So we just know enough that you can ask great questions in ecology and evolutionary biology, and you can motivate conservation with them. So they're just like an amazing sweet spot in terms of massive diversity, but we know a lot. So there's a lot to build on. There's a lot of shoulders to stand on. Although I am often jealous of colleagues who work on more obscure groups of insects. I mean, there's something wonderful about having the opportunities for really basic species discovery. And I've had a chance to do just a bit of that with Lepidoptera in general—moths. But really, I'm a butterfly ecologist.

Matt: When I was trying to figure out the transition out of a small mammal lab in grad school, I had the idea at one point that I wanted to work on microleps—so really small moths. And there's a zillion of them and they're wonderful and we don't know much about them. And I spent a day with a moth taxonomist in the museum at Davis, just like trying to get a feeling for what this was about. And I was enthusiastic. And after some hours of this guy showing me these very hard to identify little things, he started asking me questions about what I was interested in. And they were questions about ecology and evolution. At some point he just said, “Nope. This is not the group for you. You're not a taxonomist. You need to go be an ecologist, and go back to butterflies, and leave this to me.” Which I think was very wise, although sometimes I do think back at that and think, “You know, how would I have been different if I'd really devoted myself to microleps?” They're pretty great, but harder. Butterflies are just so useful and wonderful in all these ways. And they're just fabulous, of course, right? I mean, all cultures have loved butterflies. We can't not. So it was a long road, but happy to be here.

Matthew: But at the end of that, you ended up in the right place, so—.

Matt: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's okay to take a winding road.

Matthew: Yeah, definitely.

Rachel: Well, and just from working at Xerces for a few years, I think the world of butterfly conservation in the West would not look the same without you. So I'm glad that you chose that path and that we get to work with you. Thank you for joining us here. And we hope to have you back again.

Matt: Great. Thanks. It was a real pleasure.

Matthew: Yeah, thank you.

Matthew: Bug Banter is brought to you by the Xerces Society, a donor-supported nonprofit that is working to protect insects and other invertebrates—the life that sustains us.

Matthew: 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.