Music. Hello welcome to another episode of hidden wings and bloodlust a podcast about ladybirds and lady bugs around the world i'm rachel and today i've got with me um joe gray who is going to tell me about um compassionate entomology so joe do you want to tell me a bit about yourself and um.
So all my involvement in conservation and natural history and especially to do with insects where my real passion lies is is all on an amateur basis um so it's not not something i do through my my role but it's some but it's an interest i've been cultivating and enjoying for many years now um yeah i i do i do really really um enjoy encountering ladybirds um although i must say shield bugs are my absolute most treasured uh insect but i think uh like myself and a lot of other people who tend
to who who enjoy um finding.
Ladybirds also enjoy finding shield bugs because they have a lot of a lot in common in terms of their ease of being photographed um they're sort of the seeming contentness to sort of not have to move away and get out of our way when we're having a little a little nosy so yeah there's there's i do love ladybirds but i think i've got to say my absolute favorite i saw a shield bug yesterday i'm not sure what type it was but i think it might have been one of the uh um it was green and brown
and um kind of like quite quite long um it could be it could be a hawthorn shield bug yeah it looked like it yeah yeah which is one of our largest shield bugs i should have a picture of it actually hold on one second uh yeah um. Yeah, I don't know if you can see that properly. No. No, it's a bit blurred. Face recognition only is refusing to... Yeah, it doesn't like it.
You do have to be slightly careful at this time of year. I don't think with ladybirds the same thing happens, but there are some species of shield bug who will undergo a temporary colour change over winter.
They do like many ladybirds. I don't know all ladybirds at least many ladybirds they overwinter as adults but they'll greens will become browns over winter when they go into, their sort of diapause and then they'll go back to their original colour scheme in the spring so you have to be slightly careful not to get caught out on undying them in the winter there are a couple of ladybirds that do that the water ladybird does that I can't yeah I can't remember whether it whether
it changes back or not and I can't remember but off the top of my head, what colour it changes to. I think it changes to brown in the winter and red or so in the summer. Have you seen many lady bears or shield bugs recently? I've had a good year, or actually one really good day, where I spent quite a lot of the year up in Scotland. And there were two species I've been looking for for some time without success, both of which are associated with sort of heathery habitat.
One is the hieroglyphic ladybirds and one is the happy shield bug.
Oh, right, yeah. Within a sort of very happy hour, I found two hieroglyphic ladybirds, different um patternings and then finally uh heather shield bug um which is a species i've been looking for for over 10 years without finding a single one wow yeah yeah so i'm very i'm very content with with this year um so it's just just a wonderful afternoon of surprising um discoveries and and lots of invested time paying paying dividends you know yeah the time was well spent anyway but you know what
I mean oh yeah whereabouts, roughly in Scotland was it because in the Cairngorms in Strath, Spain okay yeah, Because I went up near, kind of near there last year with a friend and I found a couple of hieroglyphic ladybirds. Different patternings and stuff again, but I also found a five spot and that was pretty amazing. Now, I'm going to say there are certain creatures on this planet who I'm not prepared to believe they actually exist until I see them with my own eyes.
I just can't believe that there's a ladybird whose niche is this sort of river shingle and um and i've been spending quite a bit of time on river shingle haven't found a um five spot ladybird yet but i will continue to look yeah i really honestly i think it's a big conspiracy i think and i don't think this species exists and it's too like it just is so i know what you mean i need to see one with my own eyes it is a really weird place to a ladybird it's a really weird place to look for
a ladybird but it i promise you yeah i know i was i was i wasn't expecting i wasn't expecting to find it but i found it um yeah so i was gonna ask you um oh first of all yeah what's your favorite ladybird i would say now hieroglyphic because yeah. The habitat they're in is like a beautiful place to be. Yeah. A definite soft spot for the 22-spot lady. Oh, yeah. Yeah, same. Same. Really cool. Yeah. Yeah, I like the 22-spot. I like 16-spot as well.
Like I found loads of – I like the different – sometimes I found on fence posts like 16-spot aggregations and that's pretty cool. Wow. You find like thousands of them.
Um i think that's and if you look closely there's you could see like different different patterns and stuff that they've got but yeah so i was gonna say i read your article recently i put a link in the show notes um about yeah i thought it was really good and it's like really thought provoking and um i just wondered if you could explain um what you sort of understand by uh compassionate entomology then yeah so i was i was looking for a term that would encapsulate some
ideas that have been tumbling around in my head for years as my own approach to entomology has slowly been shifting away from the approach i was taught by the experts you know who i was lucky enough to spend time with as i was starting out um as i've sort of grown more confident and more independent in what i've been doing um but it's a term that i've coined to encapsulate the idea of um studying insects but we may as well say um other arthropods as well because
there's so much similarity in the way that we might study midipedes for instance non-insect invertebrates so the way to study um.
Arthropods including insects and that might be in as an amateur that might be in some kind of research capacity the way to do it without killing um or causing significant harm because killing is a massive part of of what entomology does at present um and there are as i discuss in the article that's linked to there are obviously some you know some some reasons uh given for doing this and it is very very um ethically complex this area yeah yeah because we want to do what's best
for you know for conservation obviously but i just the more i've thought about it the more i've become convinced that we can still have very effective conservation practices and planning being run without the need to sort of intentionally kill any insect yeah or cause them undue harm um and i think oddly that is quite a radical idea yeah yeah yeah yeah and to me it shouldn't be because i've spoken with many people people i've spent time in the field
with who who share the same thoughts if you speak with people who are less close to um the study of insects members of the public, I'll call them for want of a better term. They're sort of, instinctively, they kind of see something amiss. I know what you mean, like yeah, members of the public don't necessarily want.
Insects to to be killed yeah in the name of science yeah exactly yeah so maybe maybe they're onto something i thought yeah maybe yeah for me the big piece was just thinking actually what would the implications for conservation be if we said let's practice entomology without killing um and i honestly don't think it would undermine it wouldn't sweep the carpet away from the practice of conservation uh it wouldn't be doing the insects a disservice at the speak the insects
and other arthropods a disservice at the species level and it would be respecting them as individual living beings who we are learning more and more from research are capable of sorts of sentience um there's a potential um sort of landslide moment um right now as we're learning about sentience in so much non-human life that yeah yeah it would be it would be yeah brilliant if these learnings could translate greater care for insects and
other arthropods as individuals i'm not doubting anyone's caring about them as species um and populations but um it's uh respect and reverence for the individual but that's yeah yeah i found it i found it quite interesting the bit where you were saying that. Sometimes it might be necessary to tell.
Different different type different species of insects apart through i don't know like dissection for instance but you're making the point that that might not always be necessary in every single case exactly we can live we can learn to live without that information if we are prepared to sort of make that bold step which is a step away from seeing the need for complete knowledge as like the overriding goal of science or scientific inquiry or natural history if we can make that
bold step there's still so much more we can do without um without having to kill and i think there's plenty of people in the field who are uncomfortable with the idea but maybe don't feel confident enough to express their doubts or to present another way and feel because the accepted wisdom what we're told by the leading experts is you have to kill um yeah to be a proper.
Entomologist if i can get my time around that today um they're learning maybe maybe it's time to start questioning that that wisdom yeah and i'm sure like you know as the um technology progresses there will be ways of telling them apart that don't you know like with either like sampling or like or like just like better mics and stuff that can tell them apart better improvements in like um photographic equipment so like the sort of the introduction of of stacking as a method of having yeah a
greater depth of focus on an individual image is actually goes perfectly hand in hand with the idea of compassionate entomology um for exactly the reasons you're saying technology is advancing and not all of that's good I would say but that's another matter but in this case I think we could embrace many of the positive things that are going on there with, photography and other other techniques yeah absolutely so this that in itself is not a you know a static thing that should only get easier
as you rightly say over time yeah i found it quite interesting you know you were saying about the um the beating tray technique where like people would because i don't know that i've done this myself like yeah like.
Because the things i i actually i actually like to just stop doing it because it was a bit of a hassle like trying to carry it around with me but like i've done it where you hit the branch and then the insects fall onto the tray and then you just like you just like tip them out onto the ground and you're right i mean i do when i have done it i have tried to put the back in the in the tree but it probably isn't very pleasant for them i mean yeah it's a best a minor interruption to their lives.
And for caterpillars and the larvae, it could mean death for them. It's better to put them back as close to where it was as you could. Exactly. If you do need to find insects on a tree or in a bush or whatever, what would you suggest as an alternative?
Very careful observation. yeah you know if you want to get into a canopy um yeah you you know maybe that can be done with um the ladder cherry picker something if that you know there'll be ways to to do that that um don't require more um sort of damaging techniques um but just um.
I think there's so much of the enjoyment for me of natural history comes from that yeah the um the challenge and the rewarding challenge of finding a creature in their habitat in their micro habitat because you've done the you've done the research you've you've learned where it is yeah ecology and distribution um and i'm not gonna you know i'm not gonna try and claim you could get as many records in a day um yeah because you could you know beating and sweeping are
incredibly efficient oh yeah yeah um but there's there's there's plenty of other entomological techniques that don't require uh those methods or or you know all those or the much worse methods which i also discussed in the article like spraying insecticides and just sort of to kill every living thing in the dream to people to people actually do that that just comes across as as crazy it happened in a yeah in a in for in a research context it's still
why why would you but why would you do like because you're so that it's crazy yeah, because especially especially in a in a habitat that you're trying to protect and also you know birds and things that might need to to eat something like what why would you do that just seems completely. Illogical like is it just is it just so they can literally just find everything even if it's dead and then just.
I think one of the things that would appeal to a researcher is that it makes it quite easy to standardise the amount of effort that's been put into searching. So if you find X number of insects in plot A and X number of insects in plot B, and you've applied a standard amount of effort, you know if you've sprayed the same volume of insecticide for the same time, you've got standard effort.
So it's alluring to a researcher because you can get that sort of greater confidence in the comparison but there are alternatives to that um i was i was doing a phd in insect um conservation um which i stopped doing for another reason but my one of my goals was to not kill or significantly harm a single insect specifically through through the research i was doing um so i was using um you know a stopwatch to control the amount of time I was spending looking in plot
A and then the amount of time I was looking in plot B, I used the same amount of time. And that was certainly deemed acceptable by my PhD supervisor as a scientifically robust method for analysis. But yeah, I think those techniques, it's about efficiency, obviously, but there is something in it about that ability to compare apples and apples.
But yeah it's frightening because I don't even in one of the papers I cite where there's tens of thousands of beetles who are killed and counted there's no numerical data is given for all the other because beetles were probably made up the minority of the arthropod community so I don't even want to think that many hundreds of thousands or millions of insects Because I thought that usually...
Like sampling was done by like beating it into a beating tray or like doing like trapping or like you know trapping them or whatever i didn't i i actually did not know that people were doing this it just seems completely crazy um especially yeah i wanted to share to share you know to make sure that people were aware that research like that is has taken place and i mean is this in is this in the uk or is it i mean it must be so that that that paper um was um was was funded by the
by what was then called the forestry commission okay yeah um and not only was in the uk but they're chosen um although they were working in plantations of non-native conifers oh yeah yeah these were within some of the most nature rich parts of the um of the country straths bay which we've already mentioned there were there were there was a research site the new forest yeah um no it wasn't like they were going out into a into a sort of bleak lifeless um you know
desolate place they were they were doing this research in some because i would have thought there would have to be a law against it if it was well exactly exactly but there isn't like it's it surprised it surprised me that there's not that there's not a law about that because you know there's lots of.
Laws protecting other habitats i mean and i think you know like there's stuff about um certain species that you have to declare like newts or something if you want to build a house and you know not that that's a bad thing at all but it just surprised me that people are allowed to do this.
But yeah other aspects of the law are quite stringent yeah i think the law needs to catch up with um with you know kindness to yeah and insects yeah definitely uh things are changing rapidly but in many areas but um welfare of um.
Insects is really sort of dragging its heels in comparison but also i mean if you if you spray a whole lot of things with insecticide presumably it has knock-on effects for all of the other animals further up the food chain like birds and hedgehogs yeah very dramatic effect knock-on effect exactly uh yeah it seems because i mean they eat there's so many things eat insects like um all sorts of of like sort of amphibian snakes like loads of things eat insects like and
and the animals who eat the animals who eat insects yeah yeah well all owls and stuff yeah um yeah so i also just wondered why do you think the um attitude to insects is so is so um lagging behind um you know what what it should be why do you think there's this like resistance to changing anything i think they're more they're more different from.
Us than say another mammal or a bird from us i would say that is my answer but that's only part of the answer because i think if you i don't know if you if you've sort of seen the the books that have come out you know fairly recently yeah sort of um championing tree sentience or sentience in the plant kingdom and all these incredible relationships that are going on yeah so there seems to be um an increasing um appreciation of the complexity of plant life and relations
between plants and other organisms and a need to a greater need to protect and respect plants as a result of that but insects and other arthropods and invertebrates in the middle seem to be getting left behind so i'd like to say it's simply that they're more different from us but that doesn't explain it entirely because if we can love a tree, then surely we could love a beetle we could love ladybirds but.
So, I hope it is a lag and not like an indefinite barrier to such a change in human society. And there are obviously, some people have strong feelings against insects. Yeah, yeah. But that doesn't necessarily need to translate into, you know, rational decisions made at a societal level to permit things to happen like spraying insecticide or fog across forests in rather nature-rich parts of the United Kingdom. In order to research, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I suppose also it depends on the insects.
I mean, if there are things like mosquitoes and things that can be dangerous to people's health, then that's one thing. But like um but if it's just if you're literally just doing these very destructive methods just to like for scientific research i mean that can't really be it can't really be justified really can it i don't i don't think it can either um yeah it will continue for at least a while until.
Research ethics catches up let's let's hope it does because it's still possible for many entomologists to have brilliant research careers without having to you know unload a can or a massive vat of insecticide in in lovely forests i mean they could the people who are involved can Surely they couldn't have felt good about doing it. To see all this death, to see all these dead beetles and other arthropods dropping into their fun. That couldn't have made them feel good. No, surely it can't.
I suppose also we do know, I mean, for a long time, I always heard that insects can't really feel pain, but we kind of know now that that's not really the case. I mean, there have been some studies showing that it probably can. And we just haven't understood it well. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. This is huge. This is like a huge shift in our understanding of, you know.
Yeah, because... The entire pilot. Yeah. Also, I suppose... I was having this discussion recently with somebody asking what the, you know, um because obviously things things like museum collections and stuff are extremely important in order to study um in order to study insects and you know categorize them and all the rest of it but then there are some people who do um you know it sometimes comes across like they're doing it almost as a kind of a trophy um especially with butterflies and sort
of unusual ones like that, there is that danger and certainly we've come like a massive way in the last 100, 150 years in moving against. Against that um yeah where at one point yeah as i understand it victorian naturalists were basically cleaning entire hillsides of butterflies just so they could not just have a a collected specimen of.
Of every species they wanted a collected specimen of every sort of perceived aberration and yeah different patterns yeah different patterning of every species um so they wanted everything yeah of course yeah so we've come a long way from that um um the museum collections will still be valuable as i think i've hopefully said in that article yeah definitely the.
Level of the individual you know compassionate entomology doesn't really um doesn't really you know hold the idea of building up a massive personal reference collection as a as a primary goal um it might be possible to do it through more creative means um so as i mentioned in the article or just like by find by finding by finding dead ones absolutely i mean yeah let's um let's honor them um if yeah we can do that by preserving them that that's wonderful and if that can be useful
brilliant uh i've also sort of spoken to a couple of other people about this um and there's one person i came across recently and i i can't decide if i think this is a good idea or not but they um they want to find um for a photographic project um they wanted to find some dead insects and how they were going about that they were watching ants bringing food back yeah so ants have scoured the forest floor for dead insects that are humanized with perhaps miss. Or they'll take longer blinds.
And this person sort of wrestles these dead insects away from the ants to use them. Now, whether that's depriving of an ant colony of food is one thing to consider. But I certainly have said that would be a lot more compassionate than going out and just... I think that... Yeah, I think... Oh, yeah, I mean, I think... And also, presumably, if the ants have taken it back to the nest, a lot of the soft bits they will have already eaten, won't they?
A lot of the juicy bits that they want will have already been eaten and then. The wings or whatever that they don't really need will be discarded. I like that we're having this discussion. It's a great thing to be talking about. The ethics of wrestling dead insects away from live ants is quite a... Well, they can always... I mean, I think ants are not...
I mean, I suppose it depends... Well, I think it probably depends on the type of ant, but if it was ants in the garden, I wouldn't be too worried. But if it was like a special species of ant that wasn't found anywhere else, then that's probably not okay. There are good places to look. I find bus shelters seem to have the highest number of dead insects of any places going.
Yes. But also, for example, what sometimes happens is a spider will wrap a ladybird up, let's say, and then just leave it in its web because they realise that it can't eat it because it's bitter or whatever. And they'll just like, so you could maybe get that. I mean, sometimes also windowsills, I suppose. Yeah, definitely, definitely. I know there's been at least one art project involving drawing butterflies and moths who've been found dead on windowsills.
Really? Yeah. Again, to kind of the artist felt a desire a lovely desire to honour the dead insects so yeah, windowsills bus stops, polytunnels oh yeah it would be very easy to build up quite a sizeable reference collection if that was the person's from dead, insects alone naturally dead insects alone yeah of course, so when you talking about the respecting like the individual species does that the individual does that mean kind of like um.
Respect like respecting the um like basically not causing unnecessary suffering i suppose or do you mean anything else well for me it stems from um an idea that you can find value you know what we do in our lives we can find value in um you know if i eat a mushroom i've found value um for me um by eating the mushroom that's something that i would call um instrumental value i think that would be the sort of term to use but the mushroom itself
also would have had an intrinsic value that's the the value yeah of being a being in itself and going about I see the same, I see every organism on the planet has intrinsic value and being respectful of that is a key driver for the idea of compassionate entomology and other sort of compassionate aspects of conservation.
Yeah it occurred to me um when i was uh when i was reading your your piece some a uh photographer who photographed ladybirds and things quite a while ago um on instagram she was saying that sometimes she she saw some watched some larvae and stuff hatch out um and kind of go around on the plants and stuff and she she thought because obviously you could tell them apart from the different spots and things like that yeah and the um
she thought that she thought they had slightly different personalities um like she said one of one of like she said some of them she kind of got to know would always, avoid the camera and just run off whenever and just drop off the plant or whatever and some of them were quite happy to run around on her hand and stuff like that and I found that quite interesting because there's not really been apart from, eating and I suppose like reproduction there's not really been that many.
Studies of, what insects do all day like their their behavior and like how they yeah we still know so little yeah very true yeah and yeah i think if we you know let's say 100 years 50 years 100 years in the future yeah some arbitrary number of decades um if people then look back at what we know now and kind of consider to be a really rich body of knowledge they're going to be like wow they didn't know anything if if if the sort of the discoveries in the area that you're um referring to
there continue at a pace um we're going to know an extraordinary amount in 50 or 100 years um yeah it's uh it's a huge a hugely important field of um part of biology of from the number of species the number of organisms involved how crucial these organisms are to equal interactions and food chains as you as you rightly mentioned earlier it's such a such a massively important part of what is living what is the living earth
it's interesting because like i've heard lots people actually say that most of the a lot of what we know about insects doesn't actually come from experts, it comes from people just watching them in their garden.
And like amateurs and stuff, like that's why like citizen science and things like that are really important because actually most, a lot of the main discoveries haven't actually come from people looking at it in a lab they've come from someone looking at it in their garden and, saying what's this which is really exciting too as well isn't it and it's something that everyone can get involved in.
Um i completely agree yeah you don't need to be able to walk 20 miles you know there are amazing discoveries to be made in your own garden yeah or in the local park or in the facility yeah yeah green space or yeah uh yeah it's very plain i found that like sometimes if i go to a nature reserve i don't see very much in way of insects and then and then like i can just go in the street and find a shield bug or something on a wall and i could be looking like the
other day i was walking around a nature reserve and i hardly saw i mean i saw lots of birds but i hardly saw any insects and i i kind of wonder like what is they don't always know where they need to be yeah and i i don't know like it's um it's quite it's so i suppose obviously there's probably going to be reasons for that but i mean it it does mean that it's quite a lot of the time depending on where you live it's quite it's a really accessible thing to to find definitely
yeah yeah you could walk one minute from your front door and find a hundred different species yeah yeah yeah yeah before you've heard two species of birds you know and birds are urban obviously oh yeah yeah urban um as much as they are a part of the wider countryside.
Okay so is there anything else you want to talk about, i think i've spoken quite a lot yeah i'll ask you a couple of questions yeah yeah sure go ahead so what what was it about ladybirds in particular that have um drawn you in um well i've always like them since i was a kid and i think one of the main things about ladybirds is they're very as you said they're very they're very easy to find and also i i think also they're kind of like the variety of ladybirds that you can get there's so
many different ones to discover and they're such a you know they're quite you know you can have it on your hand and it crawls around and stuff um and um and um i think that's really quite that's quite nice because especially with some with some insects less so when you've got like a butterfly or something that's flying around it's not necessarily going to be what wanting to uh wanting to be particularly um.
Wanting to get particularly close um i i like the as i've researched the show i've kind of realized that there's so many different um the cult this sort of significance of lady bears in culture is really quite incredible so there's so many different folk tales and stuff all about them and it goes back such a long way across like all of the different religions and countries and stuff there's there's like tales about ladybirds um and i like
the i like the variety i like the fact that you can find them in most places like even in that river shingle they're still you know you can still find a ladybird there that's quite incredible and also I think.
The fact that they, are usually quite beneficial and also just the way that they look as well they're very sweet most of the time yeah I would say, One other question if the world had to or the English speaking world I should clarify had to agree on a unanimous term for them would you prefer ladybugs or ladybirds because I kind of have a soft spot for ladybugs even though it's not what we'd say in Britain it's difficult to say because I think, I don't really I don't really know because I also.
What I found when I'm doing the show and I'm talking about an A, a a one from america i usually just call it a ladybug because that's what people would call it there but i don't really know that's a good question i actually haven't really thought about about it i can give you my answer if you ask me the same question for the shield bug stink bug oh yeah i would say definitely shield bugs i think um stink bugs got too negative a connotation but ladybugs is a really sweet term yeah well well
stink bugs does have a negative qualification but i don't think all of them do all of them smell i don't think all of them do do they potentially but no there's a there's a couple who may be um particularly to to blame if that's a yeah that's the right word to use in the context but um yeah it's uh i do like that I think shield bugs is a great name. Yeah. I mean, when I was a kid, I always called them stink bugs.
Um but um but i think that's probably not the best the best term to use if you want to. Destigmatize insects no i think it might what might give stink bug a bit more life in the uk is the recent arrival and establishment of a species known as. The marmorated stink bug only because.
It got its it arrived in north america before it arrived in yeah written so it got its english name from the north american english speakers first so it's called marmorated stink bug although i'd still call the species the marmorated shield bug but i think there's certain parallels with the um harlequin ladybird and oh yeah yeah these will these will sometimes form aggregations in people's houses over winter um really i haven't heard
of a shield I haven't heard of shield bugs doing that yeah it's a particular um habit of this species and if you see what happened with the harlequin ladybird and the news coverage that's happened as a result of that um because that might be the you know someone's most um memorable perhaps memorable experience of an insect that year might have been encountering an aggregation of harlequin ladybirds in their house so we'll see then stink bug
might get a bit more life in the uk as a result of this but we'll see yeah is that is that a dolly chorus backroom um no but it perhaps could be um that perhaps could perhaps be mistaken um there are there are closer um there's a that the what the the species that um you've given the scientific name for there is also known it was the hairy shield bug or the slow shield bug. Slow as in the plant, slow blackthorn, or whatever it was in the Eglot Association.
There is another species called the mottled shield bug, which has also become recently established as a sort of natural immigrant from France. Okay, yeah. But there's a much more possibility for confusion there between the mottled shield bug and the marmorated shield bug. Okay. So, yeah, it's not going to be dead set identification. But coming back to the overarching theme for this, one can certainly tell the difference with the naked eye and off a photo.
There's no need to kill these to separate the mottled shield bug from the mottled shield bug or the hairy shield bug. No. Also, I kind of think, like... Um... I think there was a period of time where people thought they could stop the spread of the Harlequin ladybird by killing a whole lot of them. But what's actually happened is that people in general are not that good at telling the difference between all of the different ones.
And so a lot of people will think, oh, well, that's a weird, that's not one of the ladybirds that I'm used to seeing, so I'm just going to kill it. Particularly with all the colour forms, yeah. And it might be really rare. And, you know, so in general, it's not a good idea to encourage people to kill things. That's pretty tragic, yeah. Yeah. How would you, like, how would you necessarily, How would you encourage kids to get interested in entomology and things like that?
I suppose that's, I would say, the message of not to kill things is probably a pretty good one to say to kids. I think what you described, the ladybird crawling on your hand, I think that's fantastic.
That type of thing for a kid as well is brilliant. but I've done like a couple of um led a couple of sort of I guess they're called mini beast safaris yeah yeah that's um where a group of scouts or school children or something comes to the meadow and you have a have a look around the meadow um and they have you know they'll be um given little collecting pots and they'll um see.
How many insects different insects they can find and keep alive and not harm yeah have a look and then for me the most valuable lesson of all has come at the end of those sessions where um the kids can develop like a real fondness for the the individual insects they've got in their um container um that explains them that they'll need to be released here you can't take them home with you no this is their home this is the habitat they need
yeah exactly yeah and that is like a another really valuable lesson yeah that's a good lesson yeah time outdoors finding insects and just um it's a subject of the cells itself kids have this brilliant fascination uh and fondness, curiosity for insect life and i don't know what goes wrong when we become teenagers yeah, i don't know kids have got it right and you know if if more adults saw you know saw insect life the way that kids saw it um
yeah yeah yeah this would be a compassionate entomology would be an easier sound yeah so you said that people that quite a lot of people you know who are doing research agree with you on more more in the amateur i'd say more in the amateur entomology community it's.
I haven't encountered that i don't know as many researchers and i haven't encountered that same feeling but certainly from yeah yeah just the people who enjoy going going out on a sunday having the look trying to take some photos of some sex um make some biological records submit their data yeah yeah um and kind of feel exactly the same way i mean we start there were a few of us um this was when i spent more time in in east of england in in hertfordshire i was for,
quite a while and there were a few of us getting into it at the same time and we sort of followed the advice we got our sweet nets out um and then we started looking well this hang on we um, this this grasshopper doesn't have six legs um oh we do that, um oh we've done that oh right oh we need to think about this we need to stop because yeah that's actually you know if you the way i look at it now if you
accidentally um knock the antennae off an insect it's worse than pulling out a human's eyes because.
The antennae are so important they're so complex they're so important um it's worse than blinding them if you damage their antennae they're so important they're not gonna they're not they're not gonna they're not they're not gonna grow back as well yeah yeah that's that yeah that's a myth that's an unfortunate myth that exists that um yeah so we i kind of learned a little bit in the um doing it with with other people at the same time we're getting into it at the same time
and we're making the same discoveries that actually yeah this doesn't actually seem although it's what you're told you you should or you have to do it's it's told that yeah you get told that you should do it or that it's like harmless or whatever but yeah i know what you mean because sometimes it's like it doesn't really feel right a lot of the time does it it's like you just you yeah if it doesn't feel right you've got to listen to that that's yeah yeah yeah yeah Yeah, it's interesting.
Yeah, I definitely agree. But there are... What do you think about things like moth traps and stuff, if you're going to let the moths go? There's certainly more scope for something like moth trapping in compassionate entomology. Yeah. I still do think we need to be mindful it is interfering with their lives. Yeah, yeah. It's distracting them from doing something that they wanted to do instead. Yeah, yeah. And I, yeah, I'm personally not, wouldn't want to be someone putting a moth
trap out, but I wouldn't want to be saying you shouldn't do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they can, moths obviously are mostly going to fly at night.
Yeah, yeah. they're going to therefore be particularly hard to find um yeah yeah if you're just trying to find moths using um yeah going out and observing so it might be a special case but i think we still should be just at least mindful that oh yeah of course that it is interfering with like whether that constitutes significant harm which yeah that would be um something to debate but um Yeah, it's a very, very good question.
Not clear-cut at all, whereas some other activities would, for me, be clear if that knows. But that one probably would also depend what the data were being used for. Oh, yeah, yeah. You would hope at least that those data were going to be submitted to national databases. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Um yeah that's what what are you hoping is there any species you're hoping to find next year have you got a wish list of ladybirds yeah so i'd really like to find um i'd like to find a heather ladybird because i've i've only seen it once and never seen it again and it was on completely the wrong plant and in the wrong habitat um like it was on it was on like a, um a laurel or something on the side of the road and i've never never found
it again i'd like to find an 18 spot an 11 spot oh yeah because i've never i've never um found those um uh Water ladybird as well, that would be quite nice because I've never seen that either. But basically, any of the ones that I've never seen would be great. And apart from that, I do like, well, basically anything else that turns up. Do you get eyed ladybirds around your way? Yes, yes. I actually found an eyed ladybird on a...
Gravestone near my house about a year ago and not seen one since again it wasn't in the habitat that you'd expect to find it but it was there it's right there um i'd love to see an eyed ladybird again they're really they're really special have you found them um i i think like you it's been by been by chance um i've yeah saw one in scotland this year um and, It was funny because we were right by some pine woods, which makes sense for the habitat.
But I was involved in this activity, this spider workshop. Yeah, yeah. We were set up in this sort of tent on a playing field. Yeah. Spent some time in the woods, came back, and it was actually while we were in the tent talking about spiders. Sorry, it wasn't spiders. It was ants. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Ant activity. while we're talking about ants I suddenly oh there's an eyed ladybird in the tent that's amazing.
That's part of the extraordinary thing about when you're sort of really fascinated by insects they can just surprise you and they can just turn up, they do just turn up they do just turn up like last year, I had there was a 14 spot in the in the kitchen and then we put it outside and then like a couple of hours later it turned up again so obviously liked it for some reason like very good yeah no i'd love to see five five spot of any incident or any animal or any species on the planet
i'd love to see a five spot ladybird and i'm not next year and i'm not just saying that because i'm i'm talking to you and we're on a. Podcast theory that genuinely because I still need to see one to believe they exist, yeah well it's really the thing is they're really small like they're similar size to a two spot and you know you try to think because they look the pattern looks very similar to a seven spot so you would think that,
You would think that it would resemble a seven spot, but it's much smaller and it's kind of easy to miss. I mean, I just only sort of saw it by chance, but yeah, it's definitely worth looking. And if not next year, the following month. I'll definitely be investing time. Oh, absolutely. I'll be brilliant. Well, I hope you do find one. Yeah, me too. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So have you got any sort of social media or things that you want to plug?
One project I'm involved in is a journal called The Ecological Citizen. Okay, yeah. So this piece appears on the blog that's been set up as part of this. There's also a journal. And earlier in the conversation, I was talking about respecting and acknowledging and honouring the intrinsic value of different organisms. Yeah, yeah. That's very much sort of a part of what the ecological citizen is trying to promote. Yeah, yeah, that's cool. So anything that helps promote that would make me happy.
Oh, right. Awesome. Yeah, yeah. Oh, cool. I've put a few pieces up about insects on there. In the journal, I wrote a meeting report on this online meeting that took place a couple of years ago about sentience in vertebrate. Yeah, yeah. I've written something about the conservation of saproxilic insects. Oh, right, yeah, yeah. And on deadwood in some aspects of their life. Well, some of those are very sentient, aren't they?
I mean, the burying beetles are, you know, they're caring for their grubs and stuff. Those insects are absolutely, their life cycles are absolutely, absolutely fascinating. They're fantastic creatures. Some of those are very sentient, aren't they? Yeah, and they work in mating pairs or even in teams. Yeah, yeah. Another example, sorry, keep on talking about, you want to talk about beetles, I want to talk about shield bugs.
The parent bug is one of a number of shield bug species with parental care maternal care in this case guarding the the mother guards the eggs and even the sort of the young nymphs after they've hatched from the eggs she will stand over them to guard them she will even move her body.
In response to direction of a perceived threat because she's so determined to protect them um that's another example another brilliant example yeah it might surprise people who don't know um you know about the the complexities and the richness yeah that's really that's that's really fascinating yeah because you wouldn't necessarily people wouldn't necessarily imagine that the insects would do that no exactly they wouldn't but yeah the same with the
um with the the sexton beetles or the burying beetles um who you were talking about yeah the the the way that they work in um in it's really fascinating isn't it just it's just so marvelous i just love i just love inspects so much yeah i know but it's so there's there's also there's just so much to discover about it because i um i mean during during lockdown i was like um had some seven spots on the sage plant, and they were first laid as eggs and then hatched into larvae and stuff.
And some of them, I kind of like, at one point, I was quite... I wanted to actually know what they did all day. I'd be tempted to get a camera or something and stick it on, not stick it on the lady bear, but just stick it somewhere in the plant so you could just see what they were doing all day. Some of it is like, what were they doing? You just don't know. They certainly weren't wasting their time. No, no. But what it was they were doing and why is fascinating. yeah exactly.
Okay is there anything else you want us to talk about no this has been so lovely to chat really really nice to talk to you as well, even we've never spoken before or we've just interacted slightly by email I thought that was really lovely just to have that dialogue yeah really really cool, well I wish you all the best with your continuing interest in ladybirds and other insects yeah same with you I hope you find I hope you manage to find a
Heather shield bug as well I do really like shield bugs they are really cool yeah, that's brilliant thank you very much for letting me talk to you no not at all it's been really good thank you very much for coming on the show my pleasure.