E59 Matt Forister – Butterflies, Climate Change & the Hidden Crisis Facing Insects

Butterflies are beautiful. They are also disappearing.

In this episode of Naturally Scott, Scott Harris sits down with University of Nevada, Reno biology professor Matt Forister for a fascinating and surprisingly urgent conversation about butterflies, insect declines, climate change, pesticides, and why these tiny creatures may tell us more about the health of our planet than almost anything else.

Matt explains how a decades-long butterfly monitoring project in California revealed dramatic declines in both butterfly abundance and species diversity, and why modern pesticide use may be playing a major role. But this conversation is not all doom and gloom. It is also about wonder.

From tiny butterflies no larger than a fingernail to massive monarch migrations stretching across North America, Matt shares why butterflies captivate so many people and how anyone can begin exploring the incredible diversity of the insect world.

Topics include:

🦋 Why butterflies are declining across North America
 🌎 Climate change and shifting migration patterns
 ☠️ The hidden dangers of modern pesticides
 🐛 Why caterpillars and moths matter more than most people realize
 📚 The surprising book that led Matt into science
 🔬 How 53 years of butterfly data became one of the longest-running insect studies in America

This episode is dedicated to Scott’s mother — an incredible mind, an incredible woman, and a shatterer of many glass ceilings. She was a force, but never quiet.

👉 Stay up to date and get bonus content here: https://naturallyscott.kit.com/5fd12c6752

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello and welcome to this edition of Naturally Scott. I'm your host, Scott Harris, and today is our 59th podcast. Not a round number, but somehow seems significant to me because that's just a boatload of podcasts, and I've been thrilled to do all of them. Today's guest is Matt Forrester. He's with the University of Nevada in Reno. He is a foundation professor in the Department of Biology. He came to us recommended by a previous podcast guest, Scott Black of the Xerxes Society. And um, Matt's expertise is butterflies, the Great Basin area surrounding Reno, Nevada. He's got a bug lab. Uh it's called the Great Basin Bug Lab, or known as a forester lab to a lot of people. And he is focused, I'm going to read this, focused on the ecology and evolution of interactions, inter-specific interactions, long-term monitoring, and the conservation of insects. Bottom line is the man loves butterflies. He talks about other stuff, some moths and things, but butterflies are his fascination. If you don't know, there's about 700 species of butterflies in the country. So just about a little short, but just about the same number as there are birds. And he's got some great stories to tell about him, some of the challenges that butterflies are facing, and some of the things that we might be able to do to help them out. So welcome, Matt Forrester. Thanks so much for the time you spent with me. And I hope everybody enjoys learning just a little bit more about butterflies. Take care, stay safe, and stay curious. Welcome to this edition of Naturally Scott. I'm your host, Scott Harris, and uh we're gonna have some fun today. We're gonna learn, well, we're gonna learn about a lot of things, but one of the things we're gonna learn about is butterflies. And I was realizing when I was thinking about this conversation we're gonna have that I don't really know much about butterflies, so I'm excited to learn about that. My guest today is Matt Forrester of the University of Nevada Reno. Um, he is a foundation professor. We're gonna find out what that is in the Department of Biology. Matt, welcome to the show. Thanks. Happy to be here. I'm looking forward to it. Uh Scott Black of Xerxes is the one that recommended I talk to you. Um I'll ask you the same thing when we get off air, but I always ask my guests if they've got somebody to recommend. And um, Scott didn't hesitate in recommending you. So um Scott was a good guest on the podcast. And um, so hopefully you will uh you'll join him, have a good time on your end and bring some information to to our people. Great. So let's uh we're gonna get into into bugs and butterflies and and all of those good things, but Matt, give us some background. Where where were you born, where'd you come from, and how'd you get interested in these kind of things?

SPEAKER_03 2:39

Yep. So I'm uh grown up in Californian. I was born in Southern California, but then grew up in Roseville, which is near Sacramento, Northern California.

SPEAKER_01 2:49

Where were you born in Southern California?

SPEAKER_03 2:51

Ohi.

SPEAKER_01 2:52

Oh goodness, I spent until six years ago, I spent my whole life in Ventura County. Oh, crazy.

SPEAKER_02 2:58

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:59

So over over 60 years, spent a ton of time in Ohio, loved it up there.

SPEAKER_03 3:03

Yeah, lovely. I've never, you know, since being conscious, I've never spent more than a couple weeks there, but it seems pretty great. Uh it is pretty great. Uh so uh grew up in Roseville, which is near Sacramento. It's now just endless suburbs stretching from Sacramento to the foothills. But when I was growing up, Roseville was kind of on the edge of the sprawl, and so I was lucky to have a field to play in. Um, and it was a pretty nice place to grow up. Um as a kid, I I enjoyed being outside a lot, was lucky to have that. Wasn't really into science for much later in my education, uh, so I took a circuitous path to get to where I am, um, which I could talk about if that's of interest.

SPEAKER_01 3:44

It is of interest, yeah. What was the what was the pre-bug path?

SPEAKER_03 3:49

So high school into college, I was really interested in the arts. So wanted to either be a visual artist, a painter, or a writer in terms of fiction. Um and that lasted through through college, and then I joined the Peace Corps. Uh, and in the Peace Corps, having enough time and long winters, I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine, uh, which was back in the day when you know most Americans had not heard of Ukraine, so it was a very different scene. That has changed. Yeah, that has changed. Um, but anyway, a couple of very long winters in Ukraine, I had to fess up to myself that I was not going to write a book because that was apparently not actually in my skill set, it was only in my desires. Uh but I then had a lot of time to do a lot of reading, and I had brought random books with me, and also it was a kind of situation of Peace Corps chain exchange of books. Like you just read everything anybody can hand you. So Peace Corps volunteers would get together, you know, every few months and swap books, and I ended up with actually the book I was thinking about recommending at the end. So I'll spoil well, maybe I'll save it, but I ended up with a book that really changed how I thought about science and the fact that it is full of amazing big questions, which I think is what had been lacking to me in my early education. Science seemed pretty boring in my junior high through high school. I had the classic high school science teacher who was also the football coach. Um, and I had no interest in football, and he conveyed no interest in science. And he was like, you know, class would start, he would open to chapter three, and he would just start reading at the top. And I just like I could not believe that that was anything anyone would call an intellectual subject. It seemed like nothing to me. So that that bias persisted through, like I said, through college into um the Peace Corps. And there I had moments where I thought I was interested in archaeology because that kind of seemed like a cool bridge between the humanities and the sciences. Um, and then spent a couple summers volunteering on archaeological digs, um, which were super fun. Um, but also I realized there were parts of that science that didn't suit me very well. It's odd, it's odd that you to be successful, you sort of have to inherit a dig. It's like, you know, you you you were trained working on a particular excavation, and if you're lucky, you'll get to continue to work there. But then I realized ecology and evolution is pretty amazing in that you can do it absolutely anywhere in your backyard, and the amount that we don't know is just colossal. There's an irony to that in terms of what I've ended up doing in terms of inheriting a project. Um, but in any event, I also realized that archaeology, anthropology programs required a lot of language skills, which I am not blessed with. Um so I turn away from the.

SPEAKER_01 6:41

Why would archaeology require a lot of language skills?

SPEAKER_03 6:43

Well, you know, anthropology just has a the graduate programs that I looked at had requirements like you have to, you know, be fluent in at least one other language because it's fundamentally about other cultures. So you you need to have some proficiency there. In the Peace Corps, I picked up a weird mix of uh Ukrainian and Russian, which was where I lived. Um, and that fortuitously got me into grad school for a completely different reason. But when I was looking at grad requirements and anthropology, I realized like I'm I'm just not going to convince anybody I'm actually proficient in any other language. So I turned away from that. Um it all worked out. And then so and then I got interested in ecology and evolution while doing random reading, got back to the States, realized I needed a couple of years of background um science classes, so hopped around Northern California from UC Davis to Sierra College to American River College and just picked up background, really fabulous science teachers at community colleges. Like that was the first time I had encountered really passionate science teachers, and it was pretty fabulous. They didn't just read the books out loud. Yeah. They didn't read the books out loud. And they either and I didn't, you know, now I know how academia works. I didn't know at the time who ends up at a community college and why. And now I know it's often people that they might have a PhD and they did research, but they really love to teach. So um that's what they do full time. So it can be really great places to take to take classes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:09

So did that or I was gonna say, I've often thought, and I've I when I was when I had a syndicated column for a while, I would write about this as one of the things. It's the most undervalued gem in all of the state of California, I think, is our community college network. Um, it is a spectacular thing. And I can't tell you how many how many kids I can't. I taught at community colleges, you know, part-time. I had my I owned my company, and um, and I loved them. I and I still do. I think I think they are so undervalued. A dear friend of mine, Luis Sanchez, was president of Moore Park Community College and then at Oxnard Community College. Um they were junior colleges when you and I were kids. Um I found that most of the professors were spectacular. The many, if not most of them, worked in the field that they were teaching in, unlike at UCs, where you often ran into professors that in my I don't mean to to diminish teaching, but in my opinion, they'd never had a job. They went from high school to college, the doctoral program to teaching, and never once were they out in the field. Um it would be like if if the only thing you knew about butterflies was what you had read. You know, if you had never been in the field. I mean, it's great, but I can read. I won't I want someone that's done it, that's been an accountant or been in the field with butterflies. So just my pitch. I just love community colleges so much. I think they're one, you learn more, two, they're more flexible. And three, for most families, it dramatically eases the financial burden of uh of pain for four years, the first two years of which you're in classes with 200 other people in English 101. So that's right. And yeah. Go ahead. It's a positive trigger for me. When someone says community college, I always like to just if I can't, it is such a great option. And I'm sorry I interrupted you, but so we'll let you get back to your stuff.

SPEAKER_03 10:01

No, that's totally good. I totally agree. And and then if you go the four-year route at a university, the pro is, I mean, I do believe in the four years living away from home and having your own sort of growing up time, but then in the sciences, you got to get through those, like you said, those first couple of years of just the giant classes, um, which turns the which turns a bunch of people off in the same way the college coach, high school teacher turns people off. So it's it it's hard in sciences to get to get to the the good stuff. Um, yeah. It's a it's a rare thing.

SPEAKER_01 10:32

But when you do, um I started off studying marine biology, and I was blessed with a marine biology professor um who was just spectacular. And he was that guy you wanted as a professor. I wasn't smart enough to recognize it then. Um I was fairly full of myself, and uh but looking back, I wish I had taken more advantage of what he was offering. But he was that guy that took this class out to weekends at the beach and you know did those kind of things for you and trusted that we could actually read the book on our own, I guess, uh unlike your high school um football coach. So anyway, continue please. So you're in college now, your your science has suddenly become something that you can see a value in. Where do you go from there?

SPEAKER_03 11:19

So this is back to college, because I had gotten an English degree. So I completed an English degree, then went to the Peace Corps, then came back to the States, two years of undergrad miscellaneous science and math to be able to apply to an ecology graduate program, applied all over the place, got into exactly one fabulous program at UC Davis, really on the strength, the nice sort of irony of life's paths, on the strength of having picked up Russian in the Peace Corps, because the guy that hired me into his lab was looking to start up a field project in sort of far Siberia somewhere. Um and so it was going to be handy to speak Russian, but then after I was accepted to the program and getting ready to start, something happened to the logistics of that project. Um my memory is him telling me that some kind of small civil war had broken out. It's possible, however, that I've invented that memory because it seems improbable in retrospect. Um, but in any event, so that that project was off. Then I went with his lab for a couple of field seasons to Chile, and that was a small mammal lab. So it was community ecology of rodents, basically, putting out these lines of traps, checking them during the night, seeing what's there, asking questions about the factors that determine community structure, which is who lives where. Um that was super cool. I loved going to Chile, and then I really had the revelation that small mammal biology wasn't for me. Um and then I met I met a couple of people who were in this butterfly lab, which is where I ended up transferring to, and I just it was it was obvious to me when I met them that the insect world was just like full of mysteries and things we don't know, and so much stuff to be done, and also just so much easier to get stuff done. Whereas mammals is you know, it's paperwork and they're vertebrates and they're hard to deal with, and they bite you in the middle of the night, and it's just they're they're horrible in all kinds of ways. In contrast to butterflies that you know get up at a very reasonable hour, um, and yeah, all kinds of things.

SPEAKER_01 13:24

And you haven't suffered a lot of butterfly attacks yet?

SPEAKER_03 13:26

No, no butterfly attacks. You do sometimes meet people, maybe you have encountered this on your podcast, who claim to be afraid of butterflies, which is a fascinating quirky phobia in the angel. I gotta tell you, I've not met that. Okay, yeah. I I I you know I give a couple of public talks a year, and I would say every second to third talk I give, if it's a large enough audience, someone will walk up to me afterwards and confess to being afraid of butterflies. And I'm always like, God, can you tell me more? Because that's so interesting.

SPEAKER_01 13:55

They'll often say people, what is it they're afraid of?

SPEAKER_03 13:58

It's there's a classic thing, because I've Googled this, of course. People are afraid of the scales. They feel like they're gonna inhale them or they're gonna become airborne. And gosh, it's just really hard. You know, like all phobias, I think if you it's irrational, right? If you don't have it, you can't sympathize with it. And then a lot of people feel very creeped out about uh legs. Um, and and that then translates to a general insect phobia, but I think they just don't encounter other insects, so they narrow it onto butterflies. Like at some point, someone handed them a swallowtail or a monarch, and those legs are pretty powerful, right? So when they grab your finger, you feel it, and that that is objectionable to some people. But it also makes me a little sad because it's like, gosh, that's just the tiniest bit of contact with the living world, and it leaves people with a phobia.

SPEAKER_01 14:44

It's like, yeah, that's uh, and I gotta tell you, I did not know that. Um, I mean, from the somebody's afraid of everything category, if you had asked, I would have assumed there were people, but I've never I've never had that conversation. But you would kind of think that butterflies and ladybugs would be about as close to immune as you could get from people having a phobia.

SPEAKER_03 15:05

Yeah, nothing's immune. That's right. And so it is interesting. But most people love butterflies, of course, so they're an easy sell that way for the most part.

SPEAKER_01 15:11

Well, so let's start talking about that. Let's let's have a butterfly conversation. Tell me about the Great Basin Bug Lab, or, or I guess it's also the Forester Lab. I imagine that has to do with the founding professor. Um tell tell us about that, and then let's let's get into it.

SPEAKER_03 15:29

So I've been uh in this job since 2008. So after a PhD at Davis, um, my wife is also a professor now, and we met in grad school. We moved to Stonybrook, Long Island for a couple of years for postdocs. Um, and then we're very happy to get back to the West. Um, Beth actually landed a job before I did in Reno. I hung out for a while in a soft money position and then was hired in the biology department in 2008. Um and originally the stuff that I had imagined doing was pretty different than what we do now. I my dissertation was on speciation, which is where new species come from, right? Diversification, how does one butterfly become two, that kind of thing. Um, and as I was finishing my dissertation, I had the realization that I feel like we all we know a ton about that. Like it's actually pretty remarkable. And I find that the general public or undergrads are often surprised to know that. Like, we know where new species come from. Um it's not to say there isn't a lot to learn there, but holy cow, evolutionary biologists have done a good job at nailing that down. So I was sort of shifting, trying to figure out what would have more unknowns, places that I could contribute. I shifted toward trying to figure out specialization, which is why most insects attack a very few number of plants. So if you're outside anywhere you are and there's butterflies around you or other insects that eat plants, the vast majority of them will only be eating one or two kinds of plants. So most herbivorous insects are pretty specialized. And that's just because it's hard to eat. Plants are hard things to eat, right? Which we forget as omnivores. There are a lot of plants that we can eat. Our guts are pretty generalized that way. But for most of the animal kingdom, if you eat plants, you're going to be picky about it because plants are full of chemicals that you need to have a specialized gut chemistry to deal with. So that's a fascinating question. That was a fascinating question for me. It involved learning a lot of chemistry, which was not my strong point. Um, did that for many years, I think made some progress. And then my former advisor, and then this is where sort of the current story starts, is Art Shapiro, UC Davis, who's the old butterfly guy of really of Northern California. And he had started this project in the 1970s, visiting 10 sites from the Bay Area through the Central Valley, over the Sierra Nevada, visiting these 10 sites every two weeks. Um he has now done that for 53 years without stopping. It's it's um they'll just barely beating the British butterfly monitoring program for length of time. But it's, as far as I know, fairly without precedent in science for amount of data collected by a single human being in terms of observational work. Uh and he continues that work at 53 years of having walked the same trails every two weeks at the low elevations. But around 2018, his knees started to not want to do the high elevation sites anymore. So, and there were a couple of years where he was, he would like email me as spring was approaching, like sort of right now, and say, Matt, I didn't I don't know if I can do Castle Peak again this year. You should be prepared. Um, and to which I'm like, it's not what I do. Okay. Um, and then a few weeks would go by, and then he'd send me an email saying, forget it. I'm good. I'm doing Castle Peak again and the other mountainsides. And that happened for a few years, and then in 2018, he sent an email and said, I'm serious this time, that's it. I've been there the last time, I cannot hike those trails anymore. So just all of a sudden, um, I sort of reconfigured what I did and realized it was an opportunity to shift subjects again, which I guess I like doing is doing new stuff and take on this long-term ecological monitoring, which felt good to me, not just to do something different, but because I had already worked with Art on his data and shown that the butterflies in the Central Valley in particular were declining rapidly. Um so there were things to be done there that felt important and relevant to the place where I grew up. So it seemed like too too much, too many fortuitous connections to turn away from the opportunity to continue to follow these butterflies and figure out what's going to happen to them in the modern era of pesticides development and climate change. So since 2018, yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 19:52

Well, I was gonna say, and I and I want to talk to you, of course, about what it is you're doing now, but I I did want to comment. I love the fact that there's been uh you know that effort for 53 years, and and there's a lot to be said for the value of that. I was just up last month or two months ago, I guess, in um in Montana working with a gentleman named Denver Holt, who has I want to say it's a 37-year project with long-eared owls, where he's done, I assume basically the same thing your mentor did, and he's still doing that, and you know, he's got this massive amount of data, and he calls it boots on the ground, you know, and he said, Yeah, you can I know now, I mean we'll talk about it, but you know, you can tag butterflies, obviously, and and you can tag owls and different things, and and um he's just fascinated by that. But he says, you know, the data that I collect is different than tagging something and seeing where it flies. Um and then there's and he's been on the podcast and and um uh you know is is uh is has become a friend. And then there's a gentleman named Scott Rashid who does the same thing with the small mountain owls outside of or inside of Rocky Mountain National Park. And he's done 27 straight years of actual data collection full-time. That's what he does. And so he's got this massive amount of of data. And um you know, you combine that with these new citizen science efforts uh that are you know taking ground, like with eBird and and equivalents of that, but I think eBird is really the the benchmark for citizen science. And um and it's you know, I think what he's doing is just spectacular. Um and you know, for you to continue that uh you know, this data is important now, but it'll become even more important as time passes. Because you can't go back and recollect it. You can't recreate it. So tell me, are you now are you now doing the ten locations uh every two weeks, part?

SPEAKER_03 21:56

So we do the five mountain locations and we add. A sixth mountain location. So we do six, and our continues to do four of the original five. One of the valley sites near Gates Canyon in the north inner north coast range burned a few years ago. And it could have been followed after the burn. It would have been interesting, but you know, for various logistical constraints, that ended up being a reason to not continue that one. So art continues four sites, but you know, especially given the warming winters that we've had, it's essentially nonstop work for Art. He's at four sites every two weeks, basically all year round. Um, and he's been doing it for a very long time. And that goes through the heat of the Central Valley summer, which is just a hot and sweaty place in the middle of July, and it's got a lot of ticks, and I swear there's more ticks than when I was growing up there, that's for sure. Um, so yeah, so we do the mountain sites, we added a sixth, and art does four sites.

SPEAKER_01 22:49

Now, and is this all butterfly-based?

SPEAKER_03 22:52

Yep. Yeah, so it's it's just butterflies, and you know, sometimes I have well, we we've expanded it just recently, but the the core is just butterflies, and it's just walking along a trail noting um the species of butterfly, and then in certain categories. We note if we see a single one, we see two, or we see three or more. So we have these sort of abundance categories. You can't do full counts of butterflies in the mountains because in the middle of July there's too many species and too many individuals, and too many of them are challenging to identify. So we have to spend some time making sure we've got the right fritillary, for example. Um, and you can't do that and have absolute counts. So it's it's tricky, it's got some uniqueness for monitoring programs. Um, yeah, but but we're proud of it. And so we have added things. We had funding, we're in our fifth year now of an NSF um uh grant, which I hope gets renewed. There's all kinds of national challenges there. Um but we continued the core butterfly monitoring and then we added caterpillars and flowering plants. Uh so we we have flowering stations at all of the sites in the mountains, we monitor those every two weeks. And we the really crazy thing is we go out roughly every two to three weeks to all those sites and we collect caterpillars in these standardized plots, which of course are mostly moths, because most lepidopter are moths. We bring those back to the lab, we rear them so that we can not only identify them, but we can figure out what host plant they're eating. Because if you just collect moths at a sheet at night, you don't know ecologically what they were doing. So we get the ecological connection from plant to caterpillar, and if a parasitoid, a fly or a wasp has attacked the caterpillar, we get that having emerged from the caterpillar. So we recover these tritrophic interactions in the lab, and it's it's monitoring data in the same way the butterflies is. It's just much, much harder, um, much, much harder work. In the height of summer, the lab is just like a colossal mess of these little plastic cups that we rear caterpillars in just everywhere, thousands of caterpillars, and then trying to keep them supplied with plants. So we're constantly running back to the mountains, getting more plants to keep them. It's it's it's complete madness. We've done that for a few years now, and we actually now need to figure out how to scale it back a little bit to a manageable level, but that's also dependent on a grant that's pending.

SPEAKER_01 25:12

Okay. All right. So going back to when to when your mentor started this over 50 years ago, what are the trends? What are the patterns? What have you and he seen uh that's taken place?

SPEAKER_03 25:25

Yeah, and it it is interesting to note that he started it before ecologists were talking about climate change or declines or any of those things. I mean, this the 1970s was even a time when we didn't really have the expectation that nature would necessarily be shifting that much in terms of geographic ranges changing. Um, so he started the program really because he was interested in phenology, the timing of when butterflies emerge as adults and fly. So, how does phenology change from year to year? And he imagined doing it for four or five years and then stopping, but then he never stopped. Okay, so then I joined the lab in um the very early 2000s, and I had, as mentioned, I had my core project about speciation, but at that point, Art had 30 years of data that were mostly untouched. Uh and I guess just being ambitious and wanting to work on challenging things, I got interested in playing with that. And the first pattern we discovered was butterflies flying earlier in spring, which is, as you probably know, one of the most sort of you know repeatable temperate zone effects of climate change, that as the climate has warmed, plants are flowering earlier, butterflies flying earlier, birds are migrating earlier. So we we documented that. It was it was pretty dramatic, the shifts in phenology. Um, and then some years go by, figuring out other questions to ask with the data. And I had visions of asking very classic ecological questions like how does weather affect the ups and downs of an animal population? But what we couldn't get away from was the fact that diversity was going down, especially at low elevations. So just dramatic reductions in the number of butterflies seen per year. So some of those valley sites are sites where in the 70s art might have seen uh maybe in the 40s in terms of number of species. And then by the early 2000s, it was in the 30s. Uh so really dramatic reductions in terms of number of species, dramatic reductions in density, so the probability of observing any one butterfly had gone down a fair bit. And what was most striking was that those declines were widespread across species. So we have some expectations that we know who's going to solve.

SPEAKER_01 27:40

There was a decline in the quantity of individual species, then there was also a decline in the number of species.

SPEAKER_03 27:48

Number of individual butterflies.

SPEAKER_01 27:50

But didn't you say that the number of species seen dropped from 40 to 30s?

SPEAKER_03 27:55

Yeah, yeah. So decline in in diversity and decline in abundance.

SPEAKER_01 27:59

Okay. And you is there something that you've attributed that to?

SPEAKER_03 28:05

So then basically the next 10 or 12 years was doing the detective work. And so the detective work is historical inferential statistics where we look at the historical ups and downs and we take potential causes and we do some work to figure out what might have been the most likely cause. In the Central Valley, I think it is development, which is really pavement, almost remarkably tied with changes in pesticides applications. So increases in pesticide use, shift to neonicotinoids. The shift to neonex was really timed remarkably with a downturn. Yeah, so neonicotinoids is currently the world's most popular class of pesticides. So plants, of course, naturally make nicotine, which is a naturally occurring neurotoxin to protect plants from uh insects. It only happens to be the case that humans discovered they like to smoke it. Uh, clever chemists in the late 20th century took that toxin from plants and made hundreds of subtle variants of it that are really amazing uh pesticides that farmers can put on plants. Nothing particularly strange about that. We have always been we've been inventing new pesticides since World War II. The dramatic shift for neonics, and we say that because it's hard to repeatedly say neonicotinoid, um, the dramatic shift for neonics is they're all systemic. And that means the farmer can spray the plants at any one time or plant seeds that are coated with a dust. And as the plant grows, it absorbs the neonic and then it goes systemic through the whole plant. So the whole plant essentially becomes toxic to insects for a long time. And that's remarkable. I mean, you can just then immediately start to think of all the problems. Um, it to the extent that the neonics go off-site and a lot of that dust from the seeds blows off-site, it gets taken up by other vegetation that insects depend on. That's bad. And also from just a farm management perspective, prior to neonics, farmers wanted to be very careful about the timing of application because pesticides are expensive. And if you're gonna apply an aphid pesticide, you're gonna be out there monitoring and you're gonna spray it exactly when you need it for maximum effect. Well, with neonics, you can shift to more of a prophylactic approach. So you can just make your plants toxic to insects from the word go, which has really shifted the landscape for insects. And I should say, um, yeah, no, that is what I want to say. And that the those the neonics, this is what I was gonna say, the neonics were introduced to Northern California in the mid-1990s, and that is just very coincidence with when we see this sort of hockey stick downturn in the butterflies for that area. And development had been changing gradually. You know, the Central Valley has been gradually swallowed up by asphalt spreading out of urban centers, but then those neonics are introduced and we see this downturn. Um and then coming a close third after that are the is the warming, the warming nights in particular, and the dry overall drying conditions.

SPEAKER_01 31:15

So the neonics made it so the butterflies didn't have anything to eat, or they were poisoned.

SPEAKER_03 31:21

You know, they still eat it, but they are sorry, what was your question?

SPEAKER_01 31:25

Or or or are they poisoned when they do eat it?

SPEAKER_03 31:28

That's it, yeah. Um there is some indication that some insects can avoid plants that have pesticides in them, but for the most part we think the effect is as simple as mom lays eggs on a plant and then the caterpillars are eating um toxic plants. Uh we did a survey in partnership with the Xerce Society um a few years ago now, focusing on milkweeds as hosts of the monarch butterfly, because of course that generates a lot of interest. We went around the North Central Valley, and really Xerxes did most of the work, collected a couple of hundred individual leaves of milkweed plants growing in agricultural margins, wildlife refuges, and other places. There was not a single plant that did not have pesticides in it. A single leaf, couldn't find a single clean leaf. Now, that wasn't all neonics, and which is another issue that the pesticide landscape is super complicated and diverse. Um, but this is relevant because when we tr when we think about the monarch and we're just jumping around now, there's often a debate about whether or not we even need to plant milkweeds. And I will talk to field biologists who drive through the Central Valley, which is an important early spring breeding area for monarchs, and they'll say, I see all kinds of milkweeds. That's they're not limiting. Like, yeah, but we went around, we couldn't find a single milkweed leaf that didn't have pesticides in it. So they're there. That's almost worst. They're there. It looks like a lot of food to mom laying eggs, um, but there's it's an awfully toxic landscape.

SPEAKER_01 32:49

What do we do?

SPEAKER_03 32:51

Yeah, sorry. When I give a public talk, I always warn people that there's a moment at the middle of the talk where it gets really dark and get even darker for a second. So the follow-up to that study, when we did that landscape study and collected all the wild leaves, we threw in just a handful of plants from nurseries just to find out like, you know, are those, do those have pesticides too? Holy cow, they came back loaded. So then we had a follow-up study, and again, Xerxes did most of the work. They had their folks go to nurseries across the country, just walk in there, buy whatever milkweeds they could buy, bring them home, cut off the leaves, package them up, ship them off for chemistry. So a good coverage of the country, completely toxic, these leaves, with just an amazing diversity of compounds, you know, fungicides, pesticides, herbicides in the leaves of plants you're buying. And this jives with anecdotes that partly motivated the study of people saying, I bought this milkweed at a nursery and I put it in my yard, and then I found caterpillars on it, and they were dead in a couple days. So they're they're fairly toxic, the stuff you buy. This is the darkest point we're approaching right here. Um, it's pretty bad. The levels of toxicity in the nursery plants were not as severe as the agricultural landscapes, but they were very often severe enough to uh cause developmental defects or slowing development, smaller development. And then the very worst part, and this will be the darkest point, and then we can come up. You know, those you're in the nursery, and if you like to garden, you see those tags that say, you know, pollinator-friendly or good for butterflies. Those plants were twice as likely to have a compound above a level that causes developmental defects in monarch caterpillars. And we don't know why. Um, there's something different about the supply chain that was feeding those plants to the nurseries that was making them that way. Um and you call nurseries and you say, hey, we found this. I didn't do this, but my colleague at Xerce did this. You call nurseries, you say, hey, we found this. Can you tell us about the supply chain? We're just trying to figure this out. And they often don't know because of the world we live in, right? These plants travel incredibly complicated routes to get to the shelf. And this is not just a big box phenomenon, unfortunately. It was even true of smaller nurseries. And then I learned, and I sort of feel naive for having not thought about this ahead of time, but sometimes you buy a plant in a nursery, it might have started life in another country and then been a seedling in the hold of a ship, and then gone here and here. And you know, imagine what happens if you ship a plant around like that. You've got to load it up with fungicides, if nothing else, right? Because just like our apples, we want it to look beautiful by the time it gets to the shelf. So of course they're loaded with pesticides. Oh, that's the darkest point. Now we should talk about something better.

SPEAKER_01 35:31

We really should. Or yeah, so and is there an upside? Is there an answer to this? Are there something?

SPEAKER_03 35:38

Right, because you ask you you asked, what do we do, right? Yeah. Um, so specifically, what do we do about nursery plants? People should not stop gardening. Um, there are some things I've been told from toxicologists, of which I am not one. For example, um, perennials are always going to be better. Because if something grows one year and then grows back the next year, those leaves are not going to have the same toxins they had when you bought them. So that's great. Have perennials, bring them back. If you can grow from seed, that's amazing. Um, even an interesting tip, you know how you buy a, if you if you splurge and buy like a five-gallon pot and it's a big plant in there? Um, I was always, as a gardener, using that soil that comes in the pot. If you throw a bunch of that soil away, literally put it in the trash, that's probably good because a lot of the pesticides that get applied to plants in the nursery supply chain apparently are injected into the soil. So ditch the soil. Okay, so those are practical tips. Bigger question what do we do? I I like talking about pesticides because I do feel like it's a place where every person can make an impact. Um, just don't use them in your backyard. Don't use cosmetic pesticides.

unknown 36:46

Right?

SPEAKER_03 36:46

I know I know things happen. What's a cosmetic meaning to um applications just because you don't like the way something looks, right? So roses get, you know, they get skeletonized, skeletonized by leaf cutter bees that take bits of them. They get goofy because there's or goopy because there's aphids there. But roses, that's actually kind of an amazing food chain. You got the aphids, they get eaten by other things, birds come and eat that stuff. So just like live with some mess, pay attention to the ecology, don't spray that stuff in your backyard. And I know other things happen and people have termites and they need to deal with things. And I also know in the East Coast it's challenging because you got ticks and people got kids, and there are other challenges, but just as a first pass, don't go to Home Depot for pesticides when you think something looks bad in your yard.

SPEAKER_01 37:35

All right, that makes sense. All right, let's talk about the beautiful side of butterflies. Um rather than rather than people with phobias and being killed off. So tell me tell me some of the butterflies that uh that are popular and why they are. I know there's um you know there are there are large collections, massive collections of I think monarchs are the most common, but tell us about those. Uh get us fascinated by butterflies.

SPEAKER_03 38:06

Yep. Um they're kind of unique among insects in being a a lineage, a group that we know a lot about, uh, but there's a lot of them. So globally, there's probably somewhere between 18 and 19,000 species of butterflies. Um North America has somewhere in the realm of 700, depending on how you count sort of the where what happens at the borders. Um we have a lot. Nevada has a couple of hundred. On our transect, our monitoring sites, we can see 160. That's sort of our total. So it's an amazing diversity. There's a ton to learn. I feel like they're, you know, people people often get started on birds in terms of going outside to pay attention to things, but to me, they're they're easier and more approachable than birds. Because birds, you you always have to be looking at something far away, and you have to be good at the hearing and whatnot. Butterflies, you can get so close to them, and they mostly don't care you're there. So you can get very close. Um, you can get them in a net, you can handle them, you can release them again. We have amazing field guides these days for butterflies. I mean, heck, the visual recognition on eye naturalists these days for not all butterflies, but it's getting better. It's pretty amazing. So you take a picture with your phone, you can learn what it is, you can read about it. Butterflies are just amazing. I sort of feel like we're in a a goal, well, we're in a, you know, not a golden age for many things these days, but in terms of public interest in butterflies, concern for the monarch seems to have really opened people's eyes to just butterflies in general. And I when I give talk to you.

SPEAKER_01 39:34

If we go back a few years to the to the loss of the bald eagles and the osprey and whatnot to DDT, you know, that that opened up a lot of eyes. And um, I'm a relatively new birder. I started birding when we retired to South Carolina, so about six years ago. Um but one of the things I've learned as I'm paying attention, following birders, is there are a large number of birders who are either switching to or adding moths and butterflies. Um I was just talking to my son last night. We were talking about, you know, birders keep a life list. I imagine butterfly people do too. And and in the in the ABA in the lower 48 states basically, um, I've seen all of the easy birds, all the birds. I just did a five-state swing through Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and Cal and Northern California. I was on the road for a little over two weeks, and you know, through eBird, you can check and say, okay, what what birds are around that I haven't seen that aren't on my life list, you know, within 30 miles and blah, blah, blah. Not a single one for more than two weeks on the road. Now, I'm not a great birder, it's just I I get out a lot, and so I've seen all the all the easy ones. And a number of the people I've talked to, that's why they're switching to moths and and butterflies, so that they have another list they can start to um accumulate. Um roughly the same number of species. You mentioned 700 species, you know, and and birders, the the number vacillates, but it's in that area, it's under a thousand and more than six hundred. Um so I can see the attraction, and to your point, you can hold them, you can walk right up to them. They're not skit, they're I guess in a way they're skittish, but they don't take off at 50 miles an hour never to be seen again. They just go two bushes away.

SPEAKER_03 41:15

So and and and with your average phone, you can get really good pictures, which isn't always true with birds.

SPEAKER_01 41:21

No. Yeah, no, it's not.

SPEAKER_03 41:23

Like you see, birders have the massive lenses and things. You don't need that in the same way with butterflies.

SPEAKER_01 41:29

No. So what are the popular butterflies for the for the for the common folk that are what are the butterflies that draw people into that? Let's call it I realize it's a science and I understand that, but if we if we take it down to the hobby level, what are the butterflies and the and the events or the spectacles that attract people to say, I want to be a part of this, and then hopefully lead them into something else?

SPEAKER_03 41:52

Well, I think it people are really just expanding out from monarchs now. You know, all the attention that monarchs had, um that people just realize they like to go out and look for butterflies, and most other butterflies these days are easier to find because monarchs have declined. Your Eastern migration has not declined as severely as ours, but in the West, it's really dramatic. Like I've talked to um grade school teachers here that 30 years ago used to go out um in town and just collect monarch caterpillars in buckets um to bring into the classroom, and now I see two monarchs a year. That's another story. But so the but so there's this interesting transition. People realize they really like monarchs, they want to go look for them, but then there's these other butterflies, so they can figure them out. And they it kind of goes by size, I think. We have swallow tails, right? So big, big yellow and black sort of striped animals. There's other colors. Those are relatively easy to identify, so you move to those, and then you have some slightly smaller but still big butterflies in the nymphalid family. So um Painted Ladies, for example, is our other famous migrant, and it's explosive migrant from the U.S.-Mexico border, covers the whole country. People love that. Um, around here, we've got a few other things that are noteworthy because they migrate. The California tortoiseshell is one of my favorite. It does sort of an upslope-downslope migration that in big years everybody pays attention to and they're really lovely. Um, and I think people are I it's see, when I started here in 2008, I always commented that every summer people would walk into my office with some dead butterfly they found on the road and say something like, Wow, I didn't know monarchs could be this small. Right? And it's like, oh, because that's not a monarch, right? See how it's not orange and black. Um, and now people are more like walking into the office and be like, eh, what is this a California tortoise shell? And I think, wow, that's amazing progress. And it may be as simple as they point eye naturalists at it, but fabulous, you know? And then so you go and then you go down in size, and then people will get to the lysinids, which are the blues, coppers, and hair streaks, which are all sort of like thumbnail size or a little bit bigger, and they're because. All of a sudden much more challenging. And you have to really study the field guides, and there's sort of different sort of arrays of dots and pat and patterns that you've got to study, and that's super rewarding once you nail it down. And then going even farther, then you get to the skippers, which some of them are like the um what do the burgers say, the little brown jobs, right? Yeah, LBJs. Yeah. So they're the LBJs of the butterfly world, and we have a whole bunch of them that are orange with some faint white patterns. And those are really hard. And for me, I know the ones in our area, but last summer I went to um to the southwest just to see some butterflies I hadn't seen before, and they're super intimidating. I get out of the car and it's like, oh geez, I got this is humbling again, right? Um, so that's a nice size progression from monarchs down to small things, and there's particular rewards at every step. And people are generating really good data these days because that's the great INAT thing, is you post that stuff and we've analyzed that data. It's fabulous. Um, and so that's and that's just like a surprising place that the natural sciences have gotten to. Individual people, and I tell people when I give talks, even if you take a picture of a single cabbage white, which is of course our weedy common butterfly, a single cabbage white in your backyard, that becomes data that somebody will analyze.

SPEAKER_01 45:09

So I'm curious now, you know, in the the the birding world is very formalized. You've got your list, and you've got Ebert, and you've got Merlin, you've got Audubon clubs, and you've got all of those things. Um is the butterfly world paralleling that? Are there butterfly groups at Davis and in the Bay Area and you know, down in San Juan Capistrano? And, you know, I mean, and they get together once a month and chat about butterflies and whatnot. And so is it is that a and are they keeping lists?

SPEAKER_03 45:45

Is there a so there are all kinds of local regional groups? If you go online and just Google your state or county, you'll you could find something. There's also the North American Butterfly Association, which is a national group. And a cool way to get into butterflies is to Google NABA, so North American Butterfly Association, um, monitoring circle or count circle. I think those are the keywords that will figure out where a summer count happens near you. And so NABA organizes community scientists to just go to a single spot in the middle of summer. You have a certain area you're going to cover, and you just count and identify all the butterflies. And you're releasing everything. You're they don't even necessarily use nets because there'll be a couple experts with you. That's a super way to meet your local butterfly folks and find out local clubs and whatnot. And NABA is generating great data. So the butterfly world is organized that way. We are not as well organized taxonomically as the bird world, where the bird world has been very organized about scientific names and common names. Butterflies are in a bit of a complete upheaval with respect to that, which is a whole other story. Um tell it but yeah, so um it's really the modern genomic era coming to butterflies, which offers it's like new perspectives on who's related to who, and that leads to name shifts. And we have we have some folks in the butterfly world well-meaning that are moving very rapidly to sort of reanalyze butterflies and shuffle names around. And because also of the internet, so we got the genomic era and the internet era, those names are being made publicly available really rapidly, which means just overnight you can get an email from somebody saying, Hey, I see you published on this butterfly. Did you know that it's really supposed to be called this? And it's like, oh wow, I had not even heard of that name. So like things are changing that fast, it's a little wild. Um, it's kind of exciting to, you know, learning new things, learning about the evolutionary relationships is cool. The name changes per se cause problems for conservation in particular. Because agency biologists are, you know, trying to figure out which lists of species they need to worry about for protections, and if those names are shifting rapidly, that causes headaches for them. Um so there's there's opportunities, there's a lot of challenges, it's total upheaval taxonomically, which birds do not have as far as I know.

SPEAKER_01 48:08

So it's a bit of the wild, wild west compared to the birding world.

SPEAKER_03 48:12

Yep, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 48:14

The birding world does a little bit of lumping and splitting every year. You know, these two birds used to this was a subspecies, now it's a standalone and it goes back and forth. And there are some name changes thing going on in the birding world. Um Audubon is no longer spoken of by everybody with reverence. And um and the same thing with some of the people that birds were named after, who had nothing to do with birds and the whole political thing, which I don't want to get into, does that spill over into the butterfly world? That is a good question.

SPEAKER_03 48:47

The that particular issue, sort of the patronymics, right? Do you name species after people issue? Right. In general, in um in the sciences that I'm involved in, there's there's emphasis about not doing that moving forward because people are just sort of saying we've gotten into enough trouble in the past, we should maybe not do that as much. Um we have not in the butterfly world been as aggressive at reversing previous names for that reason. Um I don't mind. I mean, at this point we have so much taxonomic upheaval that if you want to throw that on top of it, it's it's it's hardly much. We also don't, we historically have not even had very good agreement on common names for butterflies to begin with, as opposed to birds, where like birds have had common names pretty well locked, is my understanding. And so the upheaval, I think, is bigger from that perspective. Well, as butterflies, we hardly had that lock to begin with. We have taxonomic upheaval. If you want to change common names at the same time, uh just like join the club, it's fine.

SPEAKER_01 49:46

Now, do you have favorite butterflies?

SPEAKER_03 49:49

Um so I always get asked that if I give a public talk. I mean, I like them all for their diversity, of course, um, but I will often say the Western pygmy blue, just because it's fun in all kinds of ways. It's North America's smallest butterfly. The small males can be as small as the fingernail on your little finger. So just ridiculously small things, and then they have other weird traits too. They they don't have a diapause stage. So, unlike most temperate zone butterflies, they don't have a way to become dormant in the winter, which means they rely on continuous lifestyle life cycles in the warmer deserts. So in the west here, they are always breeding, always having the next generation down like towards the Mojave where it stays warm enough. But then every summer, when it gets warmer and the populations expand down there, they make their way all the way up to the latitude of where I am or even farther north, which is a heck of a journey for something that small. So that's a fun journey. And then it's it's essentially a mistake. Uh they have a generation up here, maybe two, and I'm talking about in the Great Basin, and then they die back because they can't spend the winter over here, but they don't have a reverse migration, as far as we know. Um, so it's a fun example of something that makes a remarkable journey because it's small, it's it's a it's evolution not being perfect, which it is not, right? It's always sort of making experiments and mistakes. It's also a fun butterfly because it tends to go unnoticed by people until they realize it and then they see it everywhere because it flies really close to the ground, and it'll be in weed lots in my part of the world in the middle of an urban area, and there can be thousands of them flying close to the ground, and they're so darn small that you can be standing with somebody and say, look at all the butterflies, and they'll be like, What are you talking about, butterflies? And then it's like, no, look down, and then oh my god, and they're very charming, they've got little bits of silver on them, so they're they're pretty great in all kinds of ways. I also like to talk about them for the public because you know, if I talk to school kids or whatnot, they can look for them in town without having to get up to the mountains.

SPEAKER_01 51:49

That's a nice benefit. So as we're getting close to the end of our hour, walk me through the life cycle of a monarch, since they're the best known of the butterflies. So, I mean, where are they born? Do they migrate? How long do they live? Just give us the the overview.

SPEAKER_03 52:09

Yep, so for in both the east and the west, so we have two migrations, which is a key thing to know. In the west we have we have overwintering, spending the winter on trees along the California coast, whereas for the eastern migration it's in Mexico, and then the western migration basically moves inland during the summer, and the eastern migration moves north. But the spending the winter is as adults, and then the adults sort of come out of a winter sort of dormancy in the spring, fly north. You have multiple. Well, that's something that we're still learning a lot about because people are trying to figure out the extent to which warming winter temperatures are causing them to come out of that dormancy maybe quicker than they should have, maybe coming out and going back. There's there's a lot being learned there. And I'm not a monarch expert. I often tell, I often say I'm like all the other butterfly guy because we have so many monarch butterfly, monarch uh biologists in the world. Um, but come out um in spring and then multiple generations, which at some point get the cue to reverse and go back. So the individuals that get back to those overwintering grounds are not the individuals that left. In fact, they're a couple of generations removed, which is really sort of the wonder of that whole migration is this little insect having it in its, you know, in its genes to know where to get back home. And we also are learning things about the extent to which those eastern and western migrations mix. There's some possibility that in Arizona, for example, there's some sort of crossing of migration boundaries that happens. Um that's the monarch, and then from there, so that's the basic life cycle, it's like adult, multiple generations, and then generations are always mom lays eggs, uh, eggs, caterpillars, pupy adults, etc. The fun, the interesting axis of diversity, I think, for the tempered zone is that the life stage that spends the winter is different for different butterflies. So we have butterflies that spend the winter as eggs, as caterpillars, as pupae, and as adults. And all of those strategies are complicated and different, and they all seem to be affected by climate change in different ways.

SPEAKER_01 54:13

And what's the life expectancy of a monarch?

SPEAKER_03 54:17

A monarch can live months, which is certainly on the extreme end for temperate zone butterflies. The other end, yeah. So that's very long-lived. Um you gotta live that long as an adult to spend the winter, many months. Uh and then the other end is the littler butterflies, like lysinids that I've worked with more, the little blues, for example. Some of those adults, we don't know for sure, but might live as as short as a couple of weeks.

SPEAKER_01 54:43

Really? They've got to run a whole life cycle through in a couple of weeks.

SPEAKER_03 54:49

No, they're adults, so adults adults as a couple of weeks, right? Okay. So adults as a couple of weeks, lay eggs, eggs might take a couple of days to hatch, caterpillars might take a few weeks to become an adult again. And then and then that's often the kind of animal that will spend the winter as an egg. So then the egg is sort of the long-lived stage as opposed to the adults in monarchs. And we think sorry, I feel like I'm I'm just rambling now, but we think that the species that spend the winter as eggs are being the most affected by climate change. Especially in mountains in the west, because they're adapted for the last, you know, 50,000 to 2 million years to spend the winter under a blanket of snow. And now we have this intermittent snowpack that we didn't used to have, and so large spans of time in the winter they can be exposed both to freezing conditions and to conditions that are too warm, and that's just messing everything up. It's causing them to come out of dormancy sooner. By the time spring comes, they don't have any energy left. It's a mess.

SPEAKER_01 55:52

Yeah. It's uh I don't think I talk to anybody um on the conservation side, whether it's you know, megafauna down to mycelium, um, that uh climate change is not impacting whatever it is they're studying. Setting aside the politics of whose fault and how do we fix it, um you just simply can't deny that it's there and that it's having a massive impact. So um I got a million other questions and I don't have enough time for them. What what predates butterflies? What what is it that Yeah, good question.

SPEAKER_03 56:27

So and there's actually kind of a fun bit of um evolutionary history to remind people of that that we try to keep in mind these days now that we have a better picture of the d the history of Lepidoptera. So Lepidoptera are the butterflies and the maws, but really that phrase butterflies and maws does not make much sense. That that phrase is like saying cars and Toyotas. Because really Toyotas are cars and butterflies actually are maws. So maws is this big evolutionary radiation, it's huge. There's at least 10 species of maws for every one butterfly, and the butterflies are just sort of one little branch out of the maws. Um, you know, they're a branch that we love a lot, and they're one that's been well studied, but we should remember that. And there's all these other branches of maws, and some of them are day flying, many of them are beautiful and large too.

SPEAKER_01 57:18

So all bourbons are whiskies, but not all whiskeys are bourbons. Yeah, exactly. So all butterflies are moths, but not all moths are butterflies.

SPEAKER_03 57:25

That's exactly it. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 57:26

Okay. All right. On that note, um, if you've got questions for me or questions for Matt that you'd like me to pass on to him, my email is scott at naturaliscott.com. I'll throw that up on the screen, along with Matt was kind enough to send me um a number of uh pictures of butterflies. So I'll be scattering those throughout as well for people to take a look at. Um, if you are watching us on YouTube, do me a giant favor, reach over and hit subscribe. Every time you do that, YouTube pushes our um episodes out to more people. And the more people I think they get the message, the better it is for all of us. It allows me to bring in more guests. Um, you know, we're not selling ads on the show. This is just a hobby of mine, but I love it and I want to share it with more people. And Matt, uh, as I do this every time wrapping up, uh wrapping up the show, I'm gonna ask you to recommend a book, something nature-based you think the audience will enjoy and learn from. Yep.

SPEAKER_03 58:25

So I was trying to think of something that might be just sort of outside the box a little bit, and then I realized you were gonna ask me about my sort of career trajectory. And the key book there that I read in the Peace Corps was A Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould. Uh, so Stephen Jay Gould is a paleontologist, not an ecologist. That book specifically describes the Cambrian explosion, which is this 540 million-year-old event when a lot of animal life originated. But he asks this amazing question of if you replayed the tape of life, would you get the same outcome? And he thought not, because he thought mass extinction events caused a lot of randomness in terms of who survives. In other words, natural selection happens and maybe we can predict what's going to happen in normal times, but when the asteroid hits, all bets are off, and it was just an accident that the non-avian dinosaurs got whacked, which is relevant to us because we are, of course, you know, approaching another mass extinction event, this time caused by humans. And so it's a good time to think about what is the impact of that and is it going to be random or is it going to be predictable? But any event, it's both a wonderful book for thinking about the predictability of evolution and just like the weirdness of life, because he describes all these ancient forms that people couldn't even figure out which side was up when they first found the fossils. They're so weird.

SPEAKER_01 59:46

Well, uh, well, uh there'll be a picture of it up on the screen now. If you're watching, if you're listening and you get out there, you know, this is the the only downside to my hosting this show is um the stack of books on my nightstand is growing at a pace that I can't keep up with. Um it seems like every time I finish one, I've got two more because I I love these recommended books. That's why I ask. Um so, Matt, I want to say thank you. Thank you for the work that you're doing. Thank you for being a guest today. I really do appreciate it. And um I hope that we can have you back on the show again and and update this stuff and have some fun with it. Um any final thoughts from you?

SPEAKER_03 1:00:24

No, thanks, Scott, for all you do. I appreciate you sort of getting the word out and getting people interested in all this stuff. It's really important.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:31

Well, thank you. We're having some fun with it. And actually, I'll be out your way. I'll be in Reno in May. I'm working on another book that is mammal-based, and I'm gonna come up and do some studies on the wild horses that live in that the Virginia range and whatnot. So maybe we can get together and have a beer or something when I'm up there.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:47

Yeah, 100%. And if the butterflies are flying, happy to go look at something too if you want. That'd be fine.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:51

That would be really cool. I I I'm afraid of getting addicted to yet another hobby, but I'm gonna go ahead and risk it. So, with that, I say thank you, Matt. Um, and as I do every time when I wrap this show up, I encourage people to get outside. I mean, outside can be your back porch, your front yard, your local park, or the Galapagos, wherever you're going. And when you're out there, stay safe and stay curious. Matt, thank you for being with us today. Great, thanks.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:18

You've been listening to Naturally Scott with Scott Harris. Naturally Scott is hosted by Scott Harris, produced by Justin Harris, directed and edited by Frank Sierra. Follow us on our YouTube channel at Naturally Scott and Instagram at Naturally Scott Harris. If this conversation resonated with you, please follow the show, leave a review, and share it with someone who needs to hear it. Naturally Scott thanks you for viewing and listening to this podcast.