Bug Quest: Saint Mary’s students share sightings of diverse insects on campus

 

[1] Left- Person using the iNaturalist app on their phone

[2] Right- Example of iNaturalist research grade observation of an eastern carpenter bee

I will always remember the moment when I first discovered that I had a computer vision model and an army of expert taxonomists in my pocket, ready to help me identify the great diversity of life around me. I was a graduate student at that time, on a visit to Arizona State University, and a friend was showing me around the ASU Bee Lab. We noticed bees visiting some pretty yellow aster flowers, which I found especially striking because I had just traveled from snow-covered Minnesota. I asked her if she knew what kind of flowers they were, and she responded by pulling out her phone and taking a photo. “Let’s see what iNaturalist says,” she told me. A minute later she had the iNaturalist app’s best guess based on the photo she had uploaded: a desert marigold (Baileya multiradiata). The example photos of that species fit the flowers that we were looking at perfectly, and I immediately fell in love with this new tool.


Years later, when I accepted a job at Saint Mary’s College and proposed a biology course on insects for non-majors called Insects and Society, I knew that I wanted my students to get a sense of the amazing diversity of insects around them. When I had taken Intro to Entomology as a graduate student, we had to create an insect collection, finding insects, killing and pinning them, and identifying the order that they belonged to using microscopes and dichotomous keys. The thing I liked about this assignment was that it pushed me to pay attention to the insects around me and seek them out in various habitats, observing their many behaviors and ecological roles. I didn’t want to require my students to kill insects, and the course didn’t have a lab where students could spend lots of time identifying them. So how could I design a course project that would give them the same sort of learning opportunity?

This fall, 30 Saint Mary’s students and I set about using iNaturalist to document insects (and other arthropods like spiders and millipedes) around campus and wherever we found them as we traveled. iNaturalist was created by researchers at UC Berkeley, primarily to help people connect with nature, and has become a large source of data for biologists. The platform accepts observations of any sort of multicellular organism, including plants, fungi, and animals. Photos of species with enough “research grade” observations are added to a huge collection of images that is used to train a model to automatically identify new images. When a student in Insects and Society uploads a photo, this model provides both a list of the most likely species and a group of organisms that the model is fairly confident about (often a larger grouping like a genus or a family). Then, the social network takes over. Experts on iNaturalist review the tentative identification and either confirm it or correct it. When enough users agree on what species is shown in the uploaded photo, it becomes a new “research grade” observation. Fortunately for me and my students, iNaturalist is known for having one of the most courteous and supportive online social networks.

[3] Left- Locations of the 189 research grade insect (or other arthropod) observations on Saint Mary’s campus, at the sustainable farm, and in the Bick Nature Area during fall semester, 2023. Each blue marker represents the approximate location of one observation uploaded to iNaturalist. Map data © 2023 Imagery © CNES / Airbus, IndianaMap Framework Data, Maxar Technologies, USDA/FPAC/GEO

[4] Top, right- Observation of a sycamore tussock moth caterpillar on a Bick Nature Area trail by Makayla Hernandez ‘24

[5] Bottom, right- chart showing the number of research-grade observations across different insect orders and non-insect arthropod groups.

Just around campus, we’ve uploaded 521 observations from 15 different insect orders. Of these, 189 observations, representing 69 different species, have been confirmed by multiple iNaturalist users as “research grade.” Although this is only a tiny sliver of the 91,000+ insect species found in North America, it is still an impressive sample. We found them in all sorts of habitats: bees on flower plantings, earwigs under tree tree bark, crickets in prairie grass, wasps patrolling lawns, water striders skimming across Lake Marion, dragonflies resting in the Bick Nature Area, butterflies at the sustainable farm, walking sticks climbing on trees, leaf-footed bugs wandering on windows, and the list goes on.

Species identified on Saint Mary’s campus in fall 2023 that were represented in “research grade” observations. Photos show the 4 of the species we most commonly documented. Credits: [6], [7], [8], [9]

Here are a few fun examples of insects we found on campus:

Clockwise starting from top left:

[10] Green lacewing on some books by Paige Fuelling ‘24

[11] Mantis on a car windshield by Molly Witkop ‘24

[12] Geometer moth on window by Ja’Leah Walker ‘23

[13] Robber fly eating another fly near Lake Marion by Rebecca Holm ‘24

[14] Monarch butterfly near sustainable farm by Annie Adams ‘24

[15] Wheel bug on a window in Spes Unica Hall by Bridget Walicki ‘24

[16] Water strider on leaf in pond near Lake Marion by Hannah Cox ‘25

This project benefited greatly from the diverse habitats maintained on and around campus. We made trips as a class to Lake Marion and the Sustainable Farm to learn about insects, and had a few optional weekend photography outings. For example, we used pitfall traps to look at arthropods on the ground at the Sustainable Farm, surveyed the Nature Area, and used a blacklight to look at nocturnal insects near the gate to the Nature Area. The blacklight attracted fewer moths and lacewings than I expected, but an impressive number of mayflies. Mayflies spend most of their lives as nymphs living in shallow water and generally spend only a few days as adults. The scientific name for that order of insects, Ephemeroptera, comes from the greek roots ephēmeros and pterón roughly translated as “only having wings for a day.” They tend to emerge from the water all at about the same time so that they can mate and lay eggs.

Photographing nocturnal insects:

[17] Left- (not in order) Amanda Massa ‘24, Amanda Miloserny ‘23, Anne Howard ‘23, Bridget Walicki ‘24, Rebecca Holm ‘24, preparing to photograph insects at night (exposure was increased here to see the people on the left as well as the light on the sheet that I draped over my car)

[18] Right- sheet with black light attracting moth and many mayflies

[19] Top/Center- Close-up of a mayfly on the instruction sheet for our safety glasses (to protect our eyes from UV)

Through this assignment, students contributed to research on insect diversity and conservation, and they learned in a hands-on way about how we humans interact with the organisms around us. For each observation, they looked up one fact about how humans might interact with that species. Two surprising things that I learned from reading the projects were: 1) that compounds in mayfly exoskeletons can be used to kill cancer cells and 2) that the Soviet Union released propaganda in the 1950s accusing the United States of intentionally spreading the invasive potato beetle to devastate crops. Students also found many facts about how insects provide us with ecosystem services by pollinating flowers, burying dung, mixing soil, controlling pest species, and more.

This project was a great opportunity for me to share my love of nature photography and of iNaturalist with my students. Although they aren’t planning to become entomologists, I hope that they still had some fun with it and gained an appreciation for the diverse six-legged creatures all around us. If you haven’t tried out iNaturalist yet, I highly recommend it!



Further Reading

To learn more about iNaturalist:
Simmons, E. (July 17, 2017) Identify anything, anywhere, instantly (well, almost) with the newest iNaturalist release. Bay Nature. Link: https://baynature.org/article/identify-anything-anywhere-instantly-well-almost-newest-inaturalist-release/

To learn more about the importance of insects:
The Nature Conservancy (Sept. 10, 2021) Insect conservation protects biodiversity.
Link: https://www.nature.org/en-us/about-us/where-we-work/united-states/ohio/stories-in-ohio/insect-conservation/

To learn more about insect diversity and abundance:
Smithsonian (2022). Numbers of Insects (Species and Individuals). BugInfo. Link: https://www.si.edu/spotlight/buginfo/bugnos.


Media credits

[1] Public domain photo by NPS Photo/M.Reed
[2] Photo by Morgan Carr-Markell. License: CC-BY-NC
[3] Screenshot of iNaturalist map. Map data © 2023 Imagery © CNES / Airbus, IndianaMap Framework Data, Maxar Technologies, USDA/FPAC/GEO
[4] Observation by Makayla Hernandez. License: CC-BY-NC
[5] Chart created by Morgan Carr-Markell
[6] Photo by Cameron Eckert. License: CC-BY-NC
[7] Photo by Wildlife in Dorset Garden. License: CC-BY-NC-SA
[8] Photo by Zachary Dankowicz. License: CC-BY-NC
[9] Photo by Paolo Mazzei. License: CC-BY-NC
[10] Photo by Paige Fuelling. License: CC-BY-NC
[11] Photo by Molly Witkop. License: CC-BY-NC
[12] Photo by Ja’Leah Walker. License: CC-BY-NC
[13] Photo by Rebecca Holm. License: CC-BY-NC
[14] Photo by Annie Adams. License: CC-BY-NC
[15] Photo by Bridget Walicki. License: CC-BY-NC
[16] Photo by Hannah Cox. License: CC-BY-NC
[17, 18, 19] Photos by Morgan Carr-Markell