Should we help maggots and caterpillars?

CrowdScience

BBC

Science

4.8 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 24 October 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We all know insects are important, but one CrowdScience listener worries that they don’t seem to have equal billing when it comes to human love and attention.

In Scotland’s capital Edinburgh, listener Ruth loves to sit and listen to the birds, the bees and the hoverflies as they go about their daily chores. And it’s got her wondering why bees and butterflies seem to get all the conservation efforts. What do we need to do to protect butterflies as less beautiful caterpillars, and ladybirds as less glamorous larvae? Are people even aware that insects exist in multiple stages of a lifecycle, and that around the world, insect populations are facing perilous levels of decline.

Presenter Alex Lathbridge is on a mission to identify the other unsung insect heroes. Along the way we meet Dr Caitlin Johnstone and Dr Nick Balfour at the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh, who help listener Ruth find out about the lifestyles and lifecycles of hoverflies.

We meet the midge that pollinates cocoa crops in Ghana, as well as Dr Tonya Lander from Oxford University and Dr Acheampong Atta-Boateng from the University of Arizona who have been studying them. And Marc Vaez-Olivera from the company Polyfly introduces us to the billions of hoverflies helping to double avocado yields in Spain.

We also learn what we can all do to help keep insects in our gardens… even if that may involve sacrificing a cabbage or two.

Presenter: Alex Lathbridge

Producer: Marnie Chesterton

Editor: Ben Motley

(Photo: Caterpillar eating flowering plant with pink background - stock photo Credit: Raquel Lomas via Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts.
0:07.3	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron.
0:10.5	Evil genius.
0:11.6	He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it.
0:15.5	That's like hiding at your own funeral.
0:17.1	Yeah, a bit great gig.
0:18.6	I'm Russell Kane.
0:19.6	Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. Because you're a good presenter. Yeah, what do I get? I've got your present. Okay. Open it up. Oh, I should open it. I'm glad to open it. We've got a bit of paper. We can tip. Okay. Presumably we can tip it out. All right. It looks like tiny leaves. What's that there?
0:54.9	They're crawling everywhere.
0:57.8	What it looks like is some sort of mini alligator ant hybrid.
1:03.1	If you imagine some sort of transforming robot that you'd see in a movie, it would be like that, but a few millimeters in length.
1:13.5	Definitely nothing like a ladybird,
1:19.0	even though that's what's written on the jar that they come in. You know, we have to count every single one we find, because if we leave even one here... Actually, that's a really good point.
1:23.8	They are crawling off in different directions. Yeah, we should probably get them. There's one there. It's making a break for freedom and we cannot have that. I'm Alex
1:33.1	Lathbridge. Welcome to the chaos of crowd science from the BBC World Service as we inspect
1:39.8	producer Marnie's latest acquisition.
1:44.9	How many are there?
1:47.6	It's 250.
1:50.0	I couldn't buy fewer than 200.
1:52.4	Oh, there's another one on my heart.
1:54.2	Right.
1:54.7	They are, okay.
	...

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