Hidden in Plain Sight: Pesticide Contamination in Butterfly Host Plants

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Guest Information

Aaron Anderson is a pesticide specialist with the Xerces Society. He works with the public and Xerces staff to reduce pesticide use in residential landscapes, including promoting alternative pest control measures and pollinator-friendly gardening practices. 

Show Notes & Links

In this episode, we discuss a recent study examining pesticide contamination on butterfly host plants in urban areas. Detailed findings from Sacramento, CA, and Albuquerque, NM, reveal widespread pesticide presence on plants critical to butterfly lifecycles. The discussion highlights the implications of these findings, the potential sources of contamination, and offers practical advice for mitigating these risks, such as promoting pesticide-free gardening and planting native, butterfly-friendly flora.
 

Clare M Dittemore, Aaron Anderson, Aimee Code, Angie Lenard, Margaret R Douglas, Christopher A Halsch, Matthew L Forister, Pesticides detected in two urban areas have implications for local butterfly conservation, Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, 2025;, vgaf218, https://doi.org/10.1093/etojnl/vgaf218

Transcript

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

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

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

Matthew: The State of the Butterflies in the United States project demonstrated that butterfly populations across the U.S. are dramatically declining—they fell by more than 20% between the year 2000 and 2020. There are multiple causes, but one of them is the loss of caterpillar host plants. Getting more host plants into our neighborhoods and parks is essential—but what happens if those plants are contaminated by pesticides and they are toxic to the caterpillars that need them?

Matthew: To talk more about this conundrum is Aaron Anderson. Aaron is no stranger to Bug Banter listeners. He’s a member of Xerces’ pesticide reduction team, where his work focuses on reducing pesticide use in residential landscapes, including promoting alternative pest-control measures and pollinator-friendly gardening practices. More pertinently, he recently was a coauthor on a study of pesticide contamination of butterfly host plants.

Matthew: Welcome back to Bug Banter, Aaron!

Aaron: Hey, Matthew and Rachel. Thanks so much for having me back. It's always a pleasure to be here with you both on Bug Banter.

Rachel: It’s a pleasure to have you back. All right, so we're just gonna dive in today. You did a study, as Matthew said, sampling butterfly host plants for pesticides. What was the driving force behind the study, and what was the purpose?

Aaron: Yeah, that's a great question, Rachel. So listeners and Xerces Members might be familiar with some of our other pesticide sampling projects, where we sampled milkweed in the Central Valley of California, and also at nurseries across the country, for example. And we wanted to drill down a little bit more because there hasn't been a lot of work done looking at background pesticide contamination in urban areas. And as we keep encouraging people to create habitat in these residential, suburban, and urban landscapes, we thought it was really important to start getting a better sense of what the risks are from pesticide contamination that invertebrates might face in these areas. So our questions were basically: what pesticides are found on butterfly host plants in these urban landscapes? And in what amounts?

Rachel: And what were the locations for the study, and why were those locations chosen?

Aaron: Yeah. So we sampled in Sacramento, California, and then in Albuquerque, New Mexico for a few different reasons. First, they're both good sized cities, and good examples of urban habitat. And second, because we had staff in those locations who could help us with the actual sampling and the scouting for those butterfly host plants. Doing work in Sacramento was also a really great opportunity to build on our study from a few years back where we sampled milkweed up and down the Central Valley. In that study we kind of looked at all sorts of landscape types, but in this one, this was kind of an opportunity to look at more than just milkweed, and then also really drill down into that kind of urban-suburban landscape.

Rachel: Okay, so you mentioned milkweed. Were there other host plants that you were interested in?

Aaron: Yeah, that's a really good question. And actually, I want to note that that was really a huge issue that I ran into when planning this study. And I think it's kind of an anecdotal takeaway from doing this work. There really was a l ack of good butterfly and moth—Lepidoptera—host plants in Sacramento when I was trying to find places to sample. You find kind of green looking spaces pretty easily, but then you might find it's mostly invasive grasses, or turf, or ornamental plants like arborvitae, and hydrangeas, and things like that. So we had to be opportunistic and cast a pretty wide net and look for any plants that are host plants to butterflies or moths. And find populations of those kind of distributed throughout the city.

Aaron: So we mostly did native plants, but we did do a non-native plant, some plantains and turf because they're heavily used by common buckeyes as a host plant. And my colleague, Kevin Burls, who’s a butterfly expert and was helping us out was saying we definitely need to do this one because it's really important. So what we ended up doing was looking at iNaturalist to find where people were observing plants that fit the bill. Some of them were herbaceous, some of them were woody. And tried to find plants that were growing also when butterflies would actually be caterpillars, and actively feeding on them. So cast a pretty wide net. And I should note, too, that we sampled in public parks that were manicured, like near playing fields, or the edges of golf courses. But then also in some more natural area-type parks. And we also sampled some private pollinator gardens in front of places like nonprofits. And then also a few yards from volunteers, who volunteered and claimed that they didn't use pesticides in their yards. And then my colleague at the time, Emily Spindler, organized our work in Albuquerque, and she did a really similar process.

Rachel: So what were your sampling methods?

Aaron: Yeah, so once we identified location throughout the cities, and the plants that we were trying to sample, we then went from site to site throughout the city. And we sampled plants from each of these locations. So for some of these sites we had just one species that was at a site. Other times we had multiple suitable species at a site. But we tried to do 10 samples of each plant species per site. And we used clippers to cut five to 10 grams of leaves from each of those plants.
We'd wrap them up in foil, put them in bags, and then pack them in coolers.

Aaron: So when we were at each of those sites, what we did was kind of sample haphazardly across the site, but we still tried to get a range of the feature of the full site. So one example in Sacramento was this little park that was a drainage basin. And we sampled across the edges, kind of through the middle of the park, and then over by the edge of the water, as well, because you can imagine there might be different pesticide exposure across this entire site. And then once we sampled all of our plants—we sampled 181 different plants in Sacramento, and 151, I believe, in Albuquerque—we packed them into coolers with ice packs, and then overnight shipped them to the lab that did pesticide analysis for us.

Rachel: Did you limit the chemicals that the lab tested?

Aaron: That's a really good question. So we didn't limit it. They ran a panel for 94 different pesticide compounds that they could identify. But unfortunately, we were somewhat limited by what the lab could actually test for. At the time, they didn't have the capacity to test for some common pesticides like pyrethroid insecticides, and the herbicide, glyphosate, for example. So this isn't a fully representative look at the pesticides that are out in these two landscapes, and the risks. But it's still a good first start. And yeah, like I said, we got almost a hundred different compounds that we screened for.

Rachel: Did you have any partners that you worked with in this study?

Aaron: Yeah, we did. We had wonderful partners at the University of Nevada, Reno—Dr. Matt Forister and his lab. He's been a really wonderful partner in all of our pesticide sampling studies over the past years, and was really extra helpful on this one because of his butterfly expertise. So yeah, thank you so much to Matt. And then in particular, too, to his graduate student, Clare Dittemore, who was the one who actually wrote up the manuscript and was the first author. And they did a lot of the analysis for this, too. So, yeah, really, really lucky to have some great partners to help us do this work.

Matthew: Yeah, so much work that we do—partners are a really, really important element of it. Sometimes bringing in knowledge, sometimes just bringing in enough hands to be able to do the work, so.

Aaron: Exactly.

Matthew: Yeah. That's great. So you said 151 plants from Albuquerque, 181 from Sacramento. What did you discover from all of that work?

Aaron: Yeah, so that's the big question. So, when I give you the results here, I'm gonna break them out into the two cities, if that works for you all. So in Sacramento, we found that 94% of the plants we sampled had pesticide residue on them, which was pretty surprising to me. We had an average of five and a half compounds per plant sample. And overall, we detected 37 different pesticides in Sacramento. And there was a few pesticides that were really pretty ubiquitous across all of these samples. We found the fungicide, azoxystrobin, in 84% of the samples. We found that insecticide, methoxyfenozide, in 78% of the samples. So these were just widespread throughout Sacramento.

Aaron: We also combed the literature for data on pesticide impacts to butterflies and moths. And as another quick aside—this is really a huge knowledge gap, and really a challenge when we're doing this type of work. Most pesticides aren't tested on our native butterfly and moth species, so we don't actually have much data on their impacts. But we did find some studies that had been done by different independent research labs. And in Sacramento we found 51 samples that had azoxystrobin, that fungicide, at levels that are known to reduce the wing size of monarch butterflies. And this might not seem like a big deal, but pesticides can cause harm at levels that might not kill an individual insect. And these subtle impacts, like reducing wing size, for example, can still be really harmful. And since the monarch is famously migratory—it flies great distances—you can imagine that having smaller wings might impact their ability to fly as well. There's other potential impacts that we know that are these kind of less than lethal impacts like impaired navigation, reduced ability to reproduce, things like that.

Aaron: So, sorry—getting back to the study here. We also found seven samples with the insecticide, chlorantraniliprole, at levels that were at or above the monarch what is called LC50. So this is the concentration that would kill 50% of a test population in the lab. And then 33 samples had chlorantraniliprole at concentrations that would kill 10% of a monarch population.

Aaron: Okay, deep breath. Moving on to Albuquerque. 92% of the plants that we sampled in Albuquerque had one or more pesticide residues on them, so a pretty similar level of near ubiquitous contamination. We found fewer compounds on average in Albuquerque with 2.6 samples per compound. And we detected 31 pesticides overall in New Mexico, in Albuquerque. And in these samples, we found the herbicide, atrazine, and 70% of the samples and the herbicide, prometon, in 28% of them, and the fungicide, azoxystrobin, was also pretty present in 26% of the samples. And we did find a little bit of chlorantraniliprole, as well, in some of the samples. And eight of the plants had levels that would, kill 10% of a monarch caterpillar population.

Aaron: And I should also note that atrazine being found in 70% of samples is notable because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently found that it harms about one third of protected land invertebrates. So finding it so widespread is something that's pretty notable.

Matthew: One thing you said, like 92 and 95%, I think it was, of the samples had at least one chemical in them. Those few percent which didn't have chemicals in them—and it was just something that came to me as I was listening—were there any patterns of where you found those? Did you just pinpoint areas that seem to be safer from chemicals?

Aaron: You know, Matthew, that's actually a really good question, and offhand I don't know exactly where all of the non-detect samples were found. We did do some kind of casual comparisons looking at these private yards versus public parks, natural areas versus more manicured areas, and there wasn't any really detectable pattern between those. So it's not as simple as saying, “Oh, if it's a private yard there's a much—much less of a chance of finding these pesticides contaminating host plants.” And similarly, I do remember, we sampled pretty much right along the edge of a golf course fairway in Sacramento, and I was assuming that these plants were going to be really contaminated. And they weren't the most contaminated. There were some in more natural areas that had higher levels of contamination. Yeah, so there isn't an easily detectable pattern—that we found, at least—with some of these results.

Matthew: Yeah, okay. But, one thing I remember that came out from this study is that some of the chemicals didn't seem to come from a local source. It seemed like the chemicals must have come from quite a long way away.

Aaron: That's a really good point and I should take a step back and add this other layer of detail that we had in Sacramento. California actually has really good tracking of pesticide use, all things considered, called Pesticide Use Reporting. So we were able to request this data from the state and we looked at pesticide use patterns the months before our sampling in both Sacramento County, and then nearby Yolo County in California. And unfortunately these reports don't capture private pesticide use. But we did get a general sense of what pesticides had been applied in the area. I could compare this to what we found. I mentioned we found that insecticide, methoxyfenozide, in 78% of Sacramento samples—its only reported use was agricultural. And then we also found an herbicide called thiobencarb in 47 samples. And this herbicide is only registered to be applied on rice in California. So again, presumably this also came from agricultural sources. So this really is fascinating to me and it really highlights—and also concerning, I should add—and it highlights how pesticide contamination in urban areas might not just be from things that were applied in your neighbor's yard, or the golf course nearby, but pesticides can really move great distances and can come from sources that you don't expect.

Matthew: Yeah. Because I know, we talk a lot about bee-safe nursery plants. So we encourage people to go out and find plants, that are not contaminated when you bring them into a yard. But this raises the possibility that you might do all of that and then bring these plants in and plant them, and then they get contaminated by something that happened half a mile away.

Aaron: Exactly. Yeah. I think that's a really great thing to think about when you think about our landscapes and how pesticides can move, and where they move it. It depends on how the pesticides applied, and also the characteristics of that particular pesticide. But yeah, there's lots that can wash off into our waterways and then contaminate plants farther downstream. As well as, of course, aquatic invertebrates that are in that water, aquatic plants. One of the things we were curious about—and we don't necessarily have the answer to this question because we weren't sampling water—but some of the plants we sampled were willows, which are notorious for taking up lots of water. So if they're along the banks of some of these rivers, or irrigation canals, places like that, like you were saying, Matthew, what offsite pesticides are being uptaken by some of these plants? But, of course, pesticides can also drift. They can move in dust. There's so many different ways that these pesticides can move in the landscape. And I think that's just something that's really important to keep in mind that when pesticides are used, it's not just the site that's impacted. It has implications for the broader landscape.

Matthew: Yeah. And it also underscores the importance of considering the wider landscape—.

Aaron: Exactly.

Matthew: —when thinking about conservation. Yeah, it's really important what we do in our—in the land, the garden, the community garden, the parks, whatever—that we have more direct say and control over. But it's also important to take on these broader issues, too.

Aaron: Yeah, I think that's such a good point. It's important to work at all of these different levels.

Matthew: Yeah. You already touched on a little bit on something that I was gonna ask you. I was wondering what questions are left unanswered from this study? Are there any knowledge gaps that particularly concern you?

Aaron: Yeah, there's a few. I wish we could do just lots of studies all the time, and everybody was doing studies to answer all the questions. But, you know, I think I briefly touched on this earlier—one knowledge gap is that we simply don't have butterfly toxicity data for most of these pesticides. Both lethality, but then in particular, those subtle yet harmful impacts that I was mentioning. There's all of these different chemical compounds that we weren't able to assign an impact to when we were analyzing our data because that data just simply isn't available. So it would be wonderful to get more pesticide screening done on our native butterfly species so we have a better understanding of what these impacts might be when we find these pesticides in the landscape.

Aaron: I think something else is that this study was just a snapshot in time. We went out, we collected these leaves, and we saw what was there on that date in—or the different dates, I guess—in Sacramento and Albuquerque. So another question is how are these pesticides impacting these butterflies and other invertebrates across the season. Butterflies, when they're caterpillars are sitting there happily munching the leaves for a while before they pupate and develop into butterflies. So they're getting what's called chronic, or this kind of time over time impact of some of these pesticides. [A] question I would have is: how do these pesticide levels on these plants vary across the year, across the season?

Aaron: And then we're talking about these pesticides being found an average of five and a half per plant in Sacramento. An average of about two and a half in Albuquerque. We almost never know how these pesticides are interacting together, and what their impact might be on butterflies or other invertebrates. And we know sometimes in combination there can be synergy where the toxicity actually increases when these pesticides are found together. So yeah, lots of questions that we don't know the answer to. But I think this was a good kind of first glance at what are the levels of contamination in these two cities, at least. And trying to get a better sense of, yeah, when we're creating habitat in these areas, what are the potential risks from pesticides?

Matthew: Yeah, totally. No, it's always sad when you know how much we don't know. And some of that just seems like fundamental, because these are products that have gone through registration processes—.

Aaron: Yeah.

Matthew: —and have been approved for use and application. And then you are telling us that we don't know how harmful they are to something like a butterfly. And that's the stuff where you just realize what yawning gaps there are, and the kind of failure—it's almost systemic failure—of the system that has allowed us to contaminate our landscapes the way we do.

Rachel: So what are the implications of the results of this study, or the major takeaways?

Aaron: I think, what we were just discussing is one of the really major takeaways. It adds to this body of evidence that really shows there is background contamination of pesticides in our landscapes. We only found 22 plants that didn't have any pesticide residues on them. Pesticides don't stay put. They wash off sidewalks, and driveways, and lawns into waterways. They drift into neighboring properties. And as we discovered from finding some of these agricultural sources, they come from places that we don't expect. So the choices that we make in these spaces, and managing habitats in urban and suburban areas really do matter. And protecting these spaces from pesticides is such an important aspect of creating healthy pollinator habitat. So we can all be—I think something that's positive is—we can all be part of reversing this trend of pesticide contamination across landscapes from making changes in how we deal with pests at home, supporting sustainable agriculture, encouraging your city or your campus to become a Bee City USA affiliate, and doing your best to try to find bee-safe plants when you plant them into your yard.

Aaron: I think something else that's really positive that people can do is plant butterfly host plants in your landscape, wherever you're making your pollinator habitat. Because it was surprisingly hard to find host plants when we were looking for them across these cities. And it's so important for so many of our butterfly and moth species to have the correct host plants. That's another, I think, really important takeaway from this is that adding more host plants to the landscape can only help conserve these butterfly and moth species that are imperiled.

Rachel: So you had mentioned purchasing plants that haven't been contaminated. How do people know when they go to the stores that the plants they're buying don't already have pesticides on them?

Aaron: Yeah, that's such a good question, and something that my colleague Sharon Selvaggio on the pesticide team has been working on a lot. And she's come out with some great resources so I really encourage you to check out our website and look at the Buying Bee-Safe Plants fact sheet that she put together. But it can be really tricky because lots of times when you go to a nursery, they might not have actually been the grower of that plant, and they might not even know the practices of the grower. But I think the best things to do are to go and to ask questions. Ask them for bee-safe plants that haven't been grown using these long-lived, highly toxic, systemic insecticides. And hopefully they can provide you some plants that have been grown in a bee-safe way. They might then start asking questions of their grower. Hopefully it will show consumer demand that people are interested in this. So I think the more people you can recruit to ask those questions, the better.

Aaron: Lots of times smaller, kind of, native plant growers. They're the ones who are actually propagating them, so they might have a better sense, obviously, and grow in a more bee-friendly way because they're growing these native plants, maybe for pollinator plantings. But in some places, it might be hard to find one of those small, independent native plant growers. So you're stuck with maybe a larger nursery. But I think asking those questions is a really great way to go. And if you do think that a plant that you have may have been contaminated, there are things you can do. You don't have to necessarily just rip it out. You can net it for the first growing season so that pollinators can't actually access it while those pesticides break down inside the plant and become then less toxic, and in subsequent years where you can remove that net, and let it be a habitat plant in your yard.

Rachel: That's a great idea. I had not heard that before. It's a really good tip.

Aaron: Yeah, a little bit more involved. But if you are into that plant, you know, that's definitely a solution.

Matthew: Is there like an optimum mesh size for that net?

Aaron: That's a great question. So I would probably use something like a mosquito mesh that would exclude most insects. Because plants are being used by all sorts of insects. From really tiny bees going in—little, tiny carpenter bees, little Ceratina. All sorts of small herbivores—lots of times people don't want anything eating their plants, but plants that are habitat plantings are going to support populations of herbivores, which are part of the food chain, and are going to help support the predators, and parasitoids, and other natural enemies that you'll want in your yard. And then when you think about a caterpillar—a butterfly caterpillar—that's an herbivore that's munching down on your plants. A healthy habitat plant is gonna be helping support all sorts of different insects of all different sizes. So having one of those kind of pretty fine mesh kind of bags, or something to exclude it would be the best way to keep a lot of those different insects out. So that would be my recommendation.

Matthew: Thank you. I'm just thinking, because I've seen some people, they put a fairly large mesh over, say a blueberry bush, to stop birds from eating the fruit.

Aaron: Right.

Matthew: But that kind of mesh just wouldn't help.

Aaron: Wide mesh for birds [is] not gonna help keep bees and butterflies from visiting. Yeah.

Matthew: Yeah, no, great. Thank you. Well, Aaron, thank you so much for this conversation. As a Bug Banter regular, we have our two questions at the end. But because you've been on a number of times, we had to come up with fresh ones. So here we go. You have a local bug club in your neighborhood, don't you?

Aaron: Yeah.

Matthew: Can you tell us about that? I mean you saying that because I think it's such a cool thing.

Aaron: Yeah. It's really fun. It's been a really great way to connect with a lot of my neighbors. So when my wife, Maura, and I moved into to our current place. The gentleman who's our neighbor across the back fence was walking his dog, and he stopped and introduced himself, and he just started talking. And he was like, “Do you know what I really wanna do? I wanna set up a bug club to save bugs in the neighborhood.” And he was like, “Maybe we could try to save the monarch. We could save bees.” And I didn't want to jump in and be like, “Let me tell you…,” I wanted to let him finish his thought. And Maura is just staring at me like, “Are you gonna say something?” And find that with him, and he was like, “Maybe we could even have an entomologist come talk.” And then Maura was like, “Lucky—he's an entomologist.” Haha.

Aaron: So then it was really great because my neighbor is just full of amazing ideas, and really an action-oriented person. So he was the one who was able to recruit volunteers from the neighborhood and people who wanted to be part of this. And we've been meeting every month or so to talk about things that we can do in our yards, and in our neighborhood to try to conserve pollinators. And it's been really great because people are so excited, and so engaged, and as I mentioned, it's been a really great way to build community, as well, in the neighborhood. I've gotten to know a lot of my neighbors really well, and we've been swapping plant starts, and dividing pearly everlasting, and goldenrod and things like that.

Aaron: And there's some planters in the neighborhood that somebody had put in place, like those big metal watering troughs, but the plants in them had died, and nobody was looking after them. As I mentioned, my neighbor is a real go-getter, so he was able to get permission from the person whose property they were on for us to do pollinator plantings on. So I went to a native plant swap Google group and got a lot of native plants from people who were donating them. And we planted these, I think it was five different planters with pollinator-friendly plants. We even drilled some stumps with holes of different sizes for cavity nesting bees. And so it's been really fun to kind of yeah engage with the neighborhood on pollinator conservation.

Rachel: I love that. I love this story. I talked to you about it, but I had no idea that that's how it started, and it's just, yeah, it's amazing. Well, Aaron, our last question is one that I came up with especially for you, and I'm very intrigued to hear the answer. What has been the most rewarding part of your career and why?

Aaron: Yeah, that's a really great question, Rachel. And I kind of gave it some thought before this. And initially I was kind of struggling because there's so many different aspects of this career that I feel have been incredibly rewarding, and I feel really lucky to be able to be working on conserving invertebrates, working for the Xerces Society, thankful for the experiences, and work experiences I've had before this. But I think if I had to pick something, I—this kind of relates to my last answer—it's been working with the public. Because there's just something so rewarding when you see community members, people who are attending talks, people who are attending tabling events get just genuinely excited. And you see that light bulb moment sometimes when people put the pieces together, realize how important pollinators are, other invertebrates, become really interested in actually doing some of this conservation at home. I think that it's so important, the work that we do—doing research, creating materials, doing outreach—but it's really these people who are on the ground in their communities, in their yards, who are making this on-the-ground effort, and without them our impact would be so much less.

Aaron: So I think that—. You know, I remember one of my first tabling events when I was in graduate school, I brought this big box of bees to a grocery store where there was this event. We had, you know, all of these different pinned bees—we had, you know, a couple honey bees, but then there was all these different bumble bees. We had metallic green sweat bees, really tiny carpenter bees, Megachilids, all sorts of different native bees to the kind of Portland region. And people would stop by, and they were like, “Oh, cool, you've got pinned bugs.” And they were like, “Okay, I see bees,” and they'd point at the honey bees. And they're like, “What are the rest of these?” And then I'd say, “They're all bees.” And then people, their eyes would open, they’d be like, “These are all bees?!” So just moments like that, even though they're simple, I think is incredibly rewarding. Because I think, yeah, just being able to interact with people, and yeah, get them to learn more about the natural world is so important.

Matthew: Yeah, I totally agree. When I was reading that, I was like, “Oh, what would my answer to be?” And it's exactly the same. It's the—.

Aaron: Yeah.

Matthew: —connect—those moments of connection with people.

Aaron: Totally.

Matthew: And understanding how they relate to their environment around them, and the place they live.

Rachel: That's really wonderful. I love that answer. I just think about all our listeners. I wish that we could all be in [a] room together because it would be a lot of people—gratefully, we have a lot of people listening to Bug Banter—but I wanna get to know who's listening, and ask them what they're doing, because I have a feeling they're all doing on-the-ground work.

Aaron: Yeah.

Rachel: Planting native plants, and telling other people about the work that they're doing. And it is really inspiring. And that's something I love about Xerces is that we always say like, “We're not just doing this work in a silo.” We have partners that we work with, and it really takes everybody to move the needle forward in invertebrate conservation. And yeah, I'm just grateful for people such as yourself, and your bug club, and the people in your neighborhood doing that work. And I think sometimes it feels so small, like, “I'm just one person,” and, “this is just my neighborhood,” but if everybody did it, I mean, that's a huge impact, right?

Aaron: Exactly. Right? Totally.

Matthew: Yeah. And, Rachel, of course, if people want to tell us what they're doing, we do have an email address, yeah?

Rachel: Yes, we do! At bugbanter@xerces.org. Yeah, so if you wanna tell us what you're doing maybe we'll share it on the podcast. I was actually gonna mention that, Matthew. Haha. I'm glad that you did.

Aaron: That would be cool—I like it.

Rachel: Yeah! We love to hear from you. Well, thank you so much, Aaron, for joining us today. This has been a pleasure.

Aaron: Yes, it's always a lot of fun. Thank you, both.

Matthew: Yeah. And thank you, Aaron.

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

Matthew: If you are already a donor, thank you so much. If you want to support our work, go to xerces.org/donate. For information about this podcast or for show notes, go to xerces.org/bugbanter.