Are we yes? Where are we here? Why are we here not entirely clear? We are misfits thrust into existence by random chance with no hints at all as to how we're supposed to make sense of it all. It's immensely bizarre. Here we are.

Hello everybody and welcome to the here we are podcast I I love this show because I get to turn people on to a bunch of of interest that you probably don't normally find yourself hearing tons about if you're

getting your information from like cable news or whatever you get it you don't get to hear that much about things like butterflies and insects on a regular basis and in traveling around and interviewing so many amazing academics through the eight years of doing this show I've met so many incredible researchers and I've got to have people like Barrett Klein on this show that

so many listeners have have found that they're way more interested in insects and things than they then they ever thought they would be and and so I always ask those people for other guest recommendations and that's how we continue to keep expanding our knowledge and the wonderful topics that we get to hear about on this show and with that we have a someone who comes highly recommended from our friend Barrett.

Emily still rude is joining us today thank you Emily thank you so much for having me it's pleasure to be here can you introduce yourself to the listeners tell people a little bit about your title background everything that you do yeah so I'm an associate professor at the University of Minnesota and ecology evolution and behavior originally from Virginia grad school in Arizona postdoc in Indiana and then came here in 2011.

And I work on insects mostly trying to understand how organisms deal with novel environments whether that's through learning or changing their their traits or other parts of their development and the various conservation applications of those questions trying to predict which species are going to thrive in cities or agricultural environments which ones won't what we can do about that from a conservation perspective.

It insects seem like such a wonderful way to kind of see evolution in real time because you you have you have these big mammals that have these kind of longer generations that's hard for us humans with a say 70 year lifespan to really see up close and personal then you have bacteria that are evolving so incredibly fast and you're kind of.

Of looking under a microscope or whatever but insect populations are are something where you can I feel like you can kind of see these examples up close and observe them yourself in in the span of a in a career quite well yeah exactly actually used to work on birds and since a kid was obsessed with birds really really wanted to do research on birds and then I started.

I started to do research on birds and I still love birds but they're really hard to work with from an experimental side so I designed grad school I started designing all these experiments that probably would have taken 15 years to do and then I was given the advice of you know maybe you should work on insects because they're a lot easier to work with experimentally and so I switched and tried a bunch of different insect systems and I still love birds but I don't think I'm ever going to go back.

From an experimental standpoint because they.

In one experiment you know we can pretty easily wear hundreds of thousands of butterflies and very controlled conditions in a very small space.

You know they take a month or so to grow up and then we can measure lots of different traits on the adult cut them open and look at their brains we can put them in a cage and look at how well they learn we can measure gene expression and.

They're got so there's so many things that we can do with them pretty easily but they're also really really diverse so there are thousands of species of butterflies I worked on Dung beetles for a while and there actually is many species of Dung beetles in the world as there are birds and so across and yeah.

There's just a lot of ways to exploit a exploit waste out there yeah and there are many different kinds of poop too so there I guess I'd never thought about that you think a you think of the archetype of poop in your mind and you don't think about all of them there's actually a lot of variation and different different beetles exploit different parts of that poop variation.

I love Dung beetles I've had I had a Dung beetle episode on like years ago and it stuck with me but anyway I won't get you stuck in in the markup Dung beetles that's fine I love Dung beetles too but yeah insects are they're so diverse you can basically come up with whatever question you want to answer and find an insect that's appropriate to to answer that question.

So yeah so so when you talk about say a thousand different species of of butterfly how how you're a Minneapolis right so in say and say a given region how much diversity is there is it is it like I know there's like some

bat populations for example you'll you'll see a few different species and if you live in Maine or something like that but not that much diversity how how many different kinds of butterfly are you I suppose it depends so much on the region that you're in and

Minnesota is not the most biodiverse state in the US for sure but but we still have pretty good representation for a lot of insects so of the insects we're currently working on

bees there are between five and six hundred species of bees in Minnesota and butterflies should know exactly how many there are here probably a hundred to 150 species

okay we did some butterfly surveys this summer on road sides and I think we had 40 to 50 species so but definitely it's definitely a subset of the population

um and well first of all where where and when is like butterfly heaven if you're if you're planning a trip for this coming summer spring or something like that and you just want it

uh you want to take in just the oasis of butterflies where would you go that's a good it's a great question it depends on what butterflies you want to see

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