Well, the first couple of months of the lockdown, I was just kind of bummed out.

It was like, Mara, Chapero.

I wasn't sleeping that well.

You know, there are so many places I need to go and I couldn't go anywhere.

This is National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore.

And like so many people across the world in spring 2020, he found himself stuck at home because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This situation was really frustrating because Joel is in a race against time.

For the past 15 years, Joel has been working on photographing every animal species living in captivity all over the world.

The project is called the PhotoArc.

And before COVID hit, he had photographed more than 10,000 animals.

Some of these species are rare, some are endangered, and some are on the cusp of vanishing.

So being grounded by the pandemic brought the photoarct to a halt until one morning.

And I went out to get my newspaper. It was in the dark.

And the newspaper comes early here and I turned around and was walking back to my porch and I had these porch lights.

And there were just hundreds of insects swarming around my porch lights one night.

In those dark hours before dawn, Joel could see mocks, another bug zooming around that light.

And I thought, you know, here's a lot of biodiversity right here. Why don't I document this?

So Joel adjusted the parameters for the photoarct and widened his scope to include some creatures in the wild.

Instead of visiting animals around the world, he'd get familiar with the ones right in his backyard, the bugs.

Though we often take them for granted, insects run our world.

We depend on them to pollinate our food. You might not know it, but they're responsible for one in three bites.

And that's not the only way they keep our world running.

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