If you go into your backyard right now, you’ll be able to find a species of insect that is new to science. Tanya Latty guarantees it – even if you live in the inner city.
Tanya has loved creepy crawlies since she was little, and is now an entomologist at the University of Sydney. “You would be surprised how many things we don't know. There are all sorts of critters, most of which are probably unidentified.”
But around the world, insects are in trouble. “We’re almost certainly losing species faster than we’re naming them.”
The decline of pollinators such as bees, beetles, butterflies, and flies has enormous implications for people and the planet. One in every three mouthfuls of food you eat is thanks to a pollinator (and that includes chocolate!)
“I worry about that slow creep. How many can we lose before things just get crummy? We might be closer to that than we think,” Tanya warns.
Tanya sheds light on the challenges around insect conservation and explains how you can help pollinators.
You’ll also visit Whites Creek Community Garden with Professor Dieter Hochuli, and get to know some of his favourite pollinators. Dieter leads the Integrative Ecology group at The University of Sydney.
Mark Scott 00:01
This podcast is recorded at the University of Sydney's Camperdown campus on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. They've been discovering and sharing knowledge here for tens of thousands of years. I pay my respects to Elder's past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Dieter Hochuli 00:29
Now we're just looking at a bunch of absolutely gorgeous, deep, rich, blue flowers. And that's a weed called Morning Glory. And one of the things that's really fascinating is that, I look inside, there's a couple look, I've got one that I'm looking at now we've got a really deep flower and there's three tiny little leaf beetles that are in there, happily frolicking amongst the pollen. There's big chunks of pollen all over them, I look into another one. There's another beetle in there looking. All of these different flowers seem to have a whole bunch of these beetles visiting. I'm Dieter Hochuli from the University of Sydney. I'm an ecologist and entomologist and I study how nature survives and thrives in cities. Here's the beauty of actually stopping and looking you just don't realise how much is happening right beneath our noses all the time. We've walked past this a million times, we're just in the corner of the community garden. Most people wouldn't come here. It's an invasive plant. Most people wouldn't care about it. But biologically, it's really fascinating. And on cue, the cicadas started yelling even more.
Mark Scott 01:51
When I was growing up, insects were animals that would bite you, that would sting you. They would spread disease. One of our most famous advertising characters was Louis the fly and we were encouraged to buy Mortein to kill him off. But now we need to rethink our relationships with insects. They're central to the life we live, the food we eat, and the future of the planet. I'm Mark Scott, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Sydney and this is The Solutionists where you meet the people confronting the world's biggest challenges.
Tanya Latty 02:31
My name is Tanya Latty, I am an entomologist at the University of Sydney and I have never met an insect I didn't love.
Mark Scott 02:38
Tanya, this love affair began in Canada when you were a little girl.
Tanya Latty 02:42
So, I grew up in the suburbs, I wasn't near a big bushland area, you're not gonna see black bears and elk and things around my house. Everyone has insects in their backyard. If you like animals, insects are the perfect critter to start with because they're there. So, when I was a kid, I would catch slater's and mark them with nail polish so I could figure out where they were moving and where they were going because I wanted to know how far does this slater go? And then I would catch them and watch them for a little while and one day I was watching one and all of a sudden it kind of turned on its back, and all these little white things started running out of it and I went ‘Oh my gosh, what have I fed- it's like aliens - what is happening?” And ran back inside and got a little magnifying glass that I had and looked really closely and they were little baby slater's because it turns out that slater's are live bearers. They rear their young in kind of this little pouch on their underside and when they're ready to give birth, that just kind of opens and all these little babies poured out and I had no idea was how slater's reproduce until I was I was watching them and I saw happen.
Mark Scott 03:44
You made your way to Australia and you've got a particular interest in Australia's native bees. What's so fascinating about them?
Tanya Latty 03:51
Yeah, so, we have more than 2000 species of native bee in Australia, which is a huge number. So, we often think of bees as living in these big social colonies like honeybees. But in fact, the vast majority of our native bees are actually solitary. So, you get one bee living by herself with just her larvae, her young. Many of them are important crop pollinators. They're important pollinators have native plants. And we know very little about them. We know a fair amount about honeybees. We know next to nothing about the ecology of our native bees.
Mark Scott 04:21
Why do we know so much more about honeybees than other bees.
Tanya Latty 04:25
Honeybees in Australia are not native. So, they were brought here in the 1800s for honey production. And humans have had a relationship with honeybees for millennia. So, we have been working with honeybees for, originally for honey and then later on for pollination and agriculture. And, as a consequence, there's just been lots and lots and lots of research on honeybees because they are part of our agricultural systems. Native bees have only recently been recognised as being important for agriculture, and so we know less about them. And honeybees are also only one species like the, the European honeybee anyway is one species whereas native bees, in Australia alone, thousands.
Mark Scott 05:01
And what are the other pollinators that are vital to shaping the food that we eat?
Tanya Latty 05:07
Yeah, I'm glad you asked that because I think the flies, in particular, are like the unsung heroes of pollination. Lots of things are pollinated by flies, but they tend to get a bit of a bad wrap. So, for example, chocolate, I love chocolate. Chocolate is only pollinated by a teeny tiny little biting midge. It's not a bee, bees can't fit inside that flower. It's only the small midge that can do it. So, if you love chocolate, you kinda have to love flies as well. Of our agricultural crops, around a third of them are insect pollinated, and includes all the delicious things like berries and almonds, you know, some of our really delicious things that provide a lot of our micronutrients, a lot of our vitamins, are insect pollinated crops. When we look at the bigger picture, around 80, possibly up to 90% of angiosperms, so flowering plants, are pollinated by insects as well. So, there's this huge group of plants and biodiversity that rely on insects in order to reproduce. And again, it's not just bees, it's flies, it can be beetles, it can be butterflies and moths, it can even be vertebrates. So, there are plants that are pollinated by bats and birds as well.
Mark Scott 06:13
Why is the United Nations sounded the alarm about the decline of pollinators globally? Why are insects, in particular, at risk? And how challenging is that decline?
Tanya Latty 06:24
I think for a long time, we had this idea, both in conservation biology as well, that insects were kind of bulletproof. There's lots of them, they're going to be around forever. That's not the case. And it's becoming increasingly obvious that that's not the case. study after study is finding declines of particular insects. Why this is a huge challenge is for one thing, insects make up 70% of animals. So, again, if you like animals, you kind of have to love insects, because this is an insect planet. they are the vast majority of animal life. Unfortunately, because we don't have as much research on insects, it's really hard to document species that are in decline. So, even when we know our own personal memories make us think that a species is in decline, even when we're almost sure that something is in decline, we often can't get the data to prove it. And that makes it really difficult to access conservation funding, it makes it difficult to even start thinking about how we stop this. You would be surprised how many things we don't know, I guarantee you, if you went into your backyard, you could find a species that was new to science.
Mark Scott 7:30
You guarantee it in my backyard?
Tanya Latty 7:32
Guarantee it. Even if you live in the inner city, we know very little about soil insects and soil invertebrates more generally, and your soil is just teeming with life. There are mites, there are worms, there are all sorts of critters, most of which are probably unidentified, you could probably find one if you knew what to look for.
Mark Scott 07:52
Is it reasonable to assume that some insects are becoming extinct that haven't even been discovered yet?
Tanya Latty 07:59
Oh, absolutely. I mean, we're almost certainly losing species faster than we're naming them, which is, to me, just such a tragedy. You know, the idea that, you know, we didn't even give them that very basic level of understanding to give them a name before we drove them off the cliff of extinction is just, yeah, it's tragic. It's horrible. It's a horrible thing to be doing.
Mark Scott 08:21
If we woke up tomorrow, and pollinators had gone extinct, what would our world be like? Can you paint a picture of that bleak reality?
Tanya Latty 08:30
Yeah, so that that's grim. It’s not a world I want to live in. So, if pollinators all of a sudden went extinct tomorrow, the problem would be that at least a third of our agricultural crops would not be able to set fruit in sufficient amounts. So, we would see pretty much straight away we would lose a third of our fruits, which means a lot of our micronutrients and those things that we get from fruit, we're not going to be able to get access to as easily. At the same time, ecologically, there's a bigger disaster unfolding. Because the vast majority of our flowering plants are the angiosperms, is the biggest group of plants, they're not going to be able to reproduce. And we might not see that straight away, because it takes time to notice that those seeds are not being set. But we will start to see that. And then of course, once we lose all of those plants, the rest of the ecosystems just start to topple. So, all the herbivores, the plant eaters that depend on those plants are gone, and the predators that need those things are gone. And so, everything kind of collapses in the long run. Is that a likely scenario? No, you know, it's very unlikely that we're going to lose all of our pollinators without us also being gone. But what I worry about is that slow creep, you know, of slowly losing more and more and more and more and more, without knowing where that tipping point is. You know, how many can we lose before things collapse? You know, how many can we lose before things just get kind of crummy and not really very nice place to live? I mean, we might be closer to that than we think.
Dieter Hochuli 10:01
So, we’re looking around at the moment. And I'm just seeing this mess of butterflies and bees, and dragonflies and wasps all visiting these areas. And that's simply because instead of walking through this area like I had previously, I've just stopped and watched. And I've seen more species I think in the, the minute that I've been standing here just staring than I did in the 10 minutes I did walking around previously. The one that I'm really sort of excited about is, if you're interested in native bees, you see these salvias, and you go “Oh, I reckon there might be blue banded bees here.” And sure enough, there's a whole bunch of them that are visiting these here. It's one of their favourites. They're often around blue flowers. Well, these are bright red, but there's so many of them can sort of see the really distinctive blue. And it's just a really fun thing to see. They're such an exciting animal to see. And when you see them up close, when you really just take the time to get close and look at them, you just realise how stunning they are. What it does, when it visits these flowers, it gets in there and does something called ‘buzz pollination’, it actually goes and hangs around and really vibrates madly and shakes pollen off the flower and shakes pollen off itself. And in doing that starts to distribute the pollen. So, the, one of the beauties of those is that, they're not only locals they're not is they're pretty resilient bees that managed to live in these urban environments, but they're also stunning. And we're really lucky enough in this kind of weather, when the sun's come out, you really get to see these beautiful blue bands that give them their name.
Mark Scott 11:31
Every insect is different. But if we look across the board, we see a crisis around pollinators, what are the major overarching drivers of the loss of pollinators?
Tanya Latty 11:42
Pollinator declines are one of these, kind of, complex problems where there's not a single driver, there's a whole bunch of things interacting and so habitat loss is a big one. Whenever we lose native bushland, and turn that into cities or agriculture, we are losing those species that depend on particular habitats. So, they're gone. And we get left with just sort of the generalists that can live with us. You know, things like monoculture agriculture is a problem because now we have only one thing growing. And that thing is only blooming for one part of the year and then it's gone. And there's no foods. We have this food desert situation. And that can cause nutritional problems for insects, which in turn can make them more susceptible to diseases. And then agro-chemical use as well. So, insecticides kill insects. So that's kind of a no brainer. If we're mass spraying insecticides, when we're going to have issues, at least in an agricultural environment, I often think of insecticides a little bit like we think of antibiotics. They are powerful tools that we can use, if we use them correctly and in moderation, and only as a last resort. When we use them all the time, we cause enormous problems. And that's kind of where we're at now, we're often overusing most of our chemical insecticides to the point that we're destroying huge amounts of pollinators at the same time. You throw climate change and extreme weather events on top of that, bush fires. And you can see we're in kind of this really twisty, complicated situation.
Mark Scott 13:05
So, it's clear we need to protect the pollinators. But you know, when we think of flies and other flying insects in particular, we think that they're annoying. We want to swat them away we buy fly spray, to get rid of them. So, how big a challenge is that in the conservation of insects, our mindset around insects?
Tanya Latty 13:23
Yeah, it's a huge problem. So, with pollinators in some ways, it's a little bit easier. I like to think of bees is like the gateway insect. Most people kinda like bees. Because we can put a number on pollination that also really helps. For me, the problem is all the other insects, you know, imagine trying to launch a conservation programme to save a particular species of cockroach. You know, there are species of mealy bugs, for instance, that may have been wiped out by the bushfires. It's really hard to rally the public around preserving the species that don't necessarily have a clear tie in. And so, you know, the question I get all the time is like, “How important are insects for us?” Nobody asked that question about koalas, right? When we think about koala conservation, we want to preserve koalas because they're part of our natural heritage. They’re, they’re uniquely Australian. They're intrinsically valuable. We don't often put that same sort of grace on insects. We expect that for an insect to be worth saving, it has to have a dollar value attached to it. And so, changing that mindset to be, you know, it's not just about the pollinators. Pollinators are super important, but it's really about preserving that greater biodiversity. We need to stop thinking of insects as either being friends or enemies, and only saving the friends and kind of forgetting everybody else. We need to think of it as a system that insects are a part of, and if we want to conserve biodiversity, if we want to conserve koalas and flowers, and the things people typically think of, we need to conserve insects, because all of that is connected, it's all part of one system.
Dieter Hochuli 15:02
I'm really lucky enough in this kind of weather when the sun's coming up, you'll often see the butterfly starting to do stuff too. So, you'll often see, the butterflies that we typically see visiting, kind of flit around from flower to flower in various ways. The other thing that's fun with them is they'll often, in forests, in particular, spend a bit of time actually fighting for decent bits of light, the male's will dominate large chunks of light to try and attract the females to come to them. So, sometimes when you see groups of butterflies flying around nicely with each other people like to refer to them as ‘sky dancers’, they're actually, you know, you don't think of butterflies fighting, but that's what they're trying to do. They're trying to monopolise the space, and be the dominant one that gets the space there.
Mark Scott 15:43
Okay, so maybe we shouldn't be looking to butterflies for life lessons, but Tanya, you say other insects have a lot to teach us.
Tanya Latty 15:52
I work also in collective behaviour. So, thinking about how things like honeybee colonies are able to achieve all of these really clever things, despite having teeny tiny little individual brains. We can learn from those systems. Even something like the spread of misinformation, which we're really grappling with now, because of social media and the rapidity with with which we can pass information between each other. Again, social insect colonies have had to deal with those sorts of problems for ages, maybe not misinformation, like with elections, per se. But you know, maybe one bee thinks there's one flower over there is really good, and it's really not that good, or there's a predator over there that that bee has missed. Social insect systems have to have ways of preventing that information from spreading to the whole colony. By looking at them, we can take some of those mechanisms and principles and perhaps apply them to our own systems to prevent those sorts of misinformation cascades.
Dieter Hochuli 16:48
One of the great things about it is that this is a real reflection of the community we live in. Some people have gone and put up some sunflowers, there's some ornamental things like salvias, and borage through here that are attracting enormous numbers of pollinators. There's some gorgeous looking baby eggplants I just walked past. The cherry tomatoes, I'm staring at a bright red and I think there's gonna be a bunch of birds that might be eyeing those off if people aren't quick enough to, to get them. There's butterflies now emerging as I get close. But what's really interesting to me is there's a whole bunch of small flowering shrubs here and they are going absolutely nuts with a whole lot of animals visiting to pollinate them. There's some dragonflies looking for something to eat. So, we've got a whole lot of honeybees, in this case they're visiting, but just visiting around it. There's a whole bunch of flower wasps. These are these bright, big, almost three-centimetre-long metallic wasps that are visiting. So, they were really common sight in some of these urban areas. But I guess the, the story is basically we're in a really diverse part of the city in terms of its this, it's a very small green space, but it's just got something for everyone here, there's a basketball court and a skate park, just off to my left, there's a whole lot of things here. There's something for everyone, which is really nice. And I think it's a real vision for how we ought to be looking at green space in cities.
Mark Scott 18:08
I was interested in what you were saying, because we don't have these great data sets, we really don't know the scale of population impact. Can you think of examples of where there is a, an insect that all of a sudden, we've suddenly become aware of that there might be a population crisis event?
Tanya Latty 18:26
Yeah, so Christmas beetles in Australia, like this iconic beetle that used to arrive en masse right around the Christmas holidays in the early summer. And people talk about there being just enormous numbers of these beetles. Everyone I talked to over the age of say, 30 tells me about how when they were kids, Christmas beetles everywhere. We don't see that anymore. And every year for about the last five or six years, I get contacted by the media saying “Hey, can you talk to us about where the Christmas beetles have gone?” The problem is that we have no long-term data sets about Christmas beetle numbers. And so even though again, this is almost a universal memory, we don't have the data to actually be able to demonstrate that these species have declined. So, for example, I have been running a Christmas beetle project where we're trying to collect data from the community about where Christmas beetles are found. And as part of that project, I did it a big literature search and everything that we know about Christmas beetle ecology, so I could give people recommendations about what to plant to support Christmas beetle larvae. Turns out for almost all of the 36 species of Christmas beetles. We don't know what they eat. We don't know what the larvae eat. We know they're in the soil. What did they eat? We don't know. And again, that's a group of beetles that people really like. You would think we had that basic information, but we don't.
Mark Scott 19:43
So, how do I help the pollinators in my backyard whether they have a name or not?
Tanya Latty 19:47
I think probably the most important is to start caring about them. Honestly caring about them is so important because that will make you get out there and look and think about what you can do to support them.
Just don't hesitate to get outside, pull up a chair, and stop and stare at flowers. There's so much going on there. Some of us are a little bit brutal in terms of predators and parasitoids. Some of it's really lovely with the gentle butterflies visiting your flowers, but it's just a lot happening. And the more you the watch, the more you see. And it really generates this desire just to learn more about the animals and plants who share the world with.
Tanya Latty 20:24
The next thing you want to do is plant flowers, lots of flowers. When we're thinking about which flowers to plant for pollinators, we want to aim for a variety of different types of flowers. And we want to make sure there's something flowering all year round. Because in the wintertime, there's a whole group of fly pollinators in particular hoverflies, which are probably my favourite fly, that become more abundant in the winter. If we don't have winter things flowering for them, we won't get them. But then on the bigger level, I would love to find a way to start to close these knowledge gaps in a bigger way. Like we're not discovering things quick enough. So, what can we do? And community sciences and science I think is one of those potentially the answers to that question. Getting people to go out there and take pictures of insects and submit them to global databases, like iNaturalist is incredibly helpful. And it's a way for people to connect with insects as well, because you can discover things, again, in your backyard. I was on vacation one, so not even working. And I came out of my Airbnb and I took a picture of this weird little fly that was sitting on a flower and submitted it to iNaturalist. And within about an hour or two, somebody from the Australian Museum who studies those flies came on said “Oh, that's this fly.” That is the first live fly we've ever seen. They only knew this fly from one dead specimen. So, it's this cool way to be able to make these really interesting discoveries just by taking a picture of an insect. And that can really help us to start to close those gaps. So, I'm really optimistic that one of the answers to that data problem may be getting people to help us -
Mark Scott 21:59
In their own backyard.
Tanya Latty 22:00
- in their own backyards, anywhere. Backyards, balconies, local parks…
Mark Scott 22:03
How much should we prioritise planting natives?
Tanya Latty 22:07
Ooh, that's a controversial question. Um, my opinion when especially if you're living in an urban environment, a city, is that plant what the insects will visit. In my own personal garden, I try to go for a mix. So, I have some native flowers so that I can cater to those native insects that will only visit natives. Some of our bee species are very specific. And so, our having native flowers is good for them. But then I also have those things that are good for the generalist native insects. So, lots of daisies, lots of salvias. Lots of borage. So, go for a mix. And I'd always say don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough. Like it's a great idea that if you can get an all-native garden, awesome. If that's going to be a challenge for you, and then by all means throw in those nonnatives that attract lots of insects. That's fine.
Mark Scott 22:54
Are you optimistic that there's now engagement around the fight for pollinators?
Tanya Latty 23:01
Yeah, it depends on the day in general, by nature. I'm an optimist. I think that once, I hope that once people start to look at pollinators and care, that we will start to see this turning around. I'm starting to see a lot more recognition from governments about native pollinators, which is really important, more funding of native pollinators. And that's good. And ultimately, the nice thing about pollinators is that saving them is win-win, you know, we get better food, we get cheaper food, farmers get more money, that's great. And we improve our biodiversity. But we have to care. If we don't take action, if we don't take action now. It's not going to be enough in 20 years to look back and say, “Oh geez, I wish we'd saved all those native bees.” We need to do things now.
Mark Scott 23:49
Mark Scott, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Sydney and that's Associate Professor Tanya Latty, an entomologist at the University of Sydney School of Life and Environmental Sciences. Thanks also to Professor Dieter Hochuli for taking us outside and introducing us to some of the pollinators he loves. Dieter leads the Integrative Ecology Group at the University of Sydney.
Dieter Hochuli 24:14
I told everyone the Tanya was a serious scientist now as a comic relief.
Mark Scott 24:20
Did you know that spending time outside has been linked to longevity? That isn't just about living longer. It's also about being happy and healthy as you age. Andrew Scott, a world leading expert on longevity from London Business School says there are things we should be doing now to set ourselves up for the best possible future.
Professor Andrew John Scott 24:43
So, for the first time in history, the young can expect to become the very old. We worry about getting old, we worry about outliving our health, outliving our finances, outliving our skills, our purpose, our relationships. And if you put those two things together, you then get the longevity imperative, which is, what do you do now to make sure that you don't outlive those things?
Mark Scott 25:06
So, if you missed my interview with Andrew Scott, go back into your podcast feed for The Solutionists to find it so much good advice about living longer living well having multiple careers. Even if you're old like me, there's good advice there. The Solutionists is a podcast from the University of Sydney produced by Deadset Studios. This episode was recorded at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences media room. And our thanks to the technical staff here.
The Solutionists is podcast from the University of Sydney, produced by Deadset Studios. Keep up to date with The Solutionists by following @sydney_uni on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
This episode was produced by Monique Ross, with field recordings by Harry Hughes and sound design by Jeremy Wilmot. The executive producer is Kellie Riordan. Executive editors are Kellie Riordan, Jen Peterson-Ward, and Mark Scott. Thanks to the technical staff at the at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Media Room.
This podcast was recorded on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. For thousands of years, across innumerable generations, knowledge has been taught, shared and exchanged here. We pay respect to elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.e.