- It was a mix of emotions.
Bad because it's an invasive species.
Good because I was the one who discovered it.
And then it was like, "oh, cool!"
- It's just something simple, that's what I think is funny.
Nobody realizes how important all these little things are.
(gentle music)
(siren wails in the distance)
- Make sure I have my vials.
Got my vials!
All right.
If you're an entomologist,
especially if you're working in Los Angeles,
you're working in a major port city,
there are new insects that are constantly coming in.
So I wasn't necessarily shocked
hearing that there was a new species
of any type of insect in LA.
It's the sort of thing that happens all the time,
but it's pretty unusual
for it to be a new species of praying mantis.
My name is Lisa Gonzalez.
I'm an Assistant Collections Manager
in the Entomology Department
at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles County.
We have a lot of different community science projects
that we run at the museum.
Hey, Anna!
A lot of our urban biology projects
require people submit to iNaturalist.
iNaturalist is this really exciting website.
People can upload data that they collect themselves.
They snap a photo on their phone
and then they submit their observation.
It can be of an animal.
It could be of a plant.
All the data that is collected on iNaturalist
can then be used for a variety of research projects.
- It's an ootheca, the mantis's egg case.
This will hatch hundreds of baby mantises.
- Well, things are looking a little rough out there.
The reality is that we're in a mass extinction event.
How do we deal with this global biodiversity crisis?
Well, we increase the amount of data that's out there
to address these questions.
As we think about trying to conserve species,
the first thing you need to understand
is where did these things occur now
and where did they occur in the past?
We have literally millions of specimens
that document where species were found.
And what we now need is lots of data that tell us
where species are found today
so we can look at how ranges are shifting through time.
The question is how do you go about getting tons of data
on where species are found today?
And one of the exciting things that's really happened
in sort of the last 10 to 15 years
is that the opportunity to get those sorts of data
has changed dramatically
as a result of what people often call community science
or call citizen science.
There are currently tens of thousands of people
all around the world on iNaturalist
contributing observations, making identifications,
something on the order
of 85 million species occurrence records.
Huge data set that's allowing us to do statistical analyses
that no individual researcher would've ever even been able
to come close to creating a data set like this.
- When people take a photo
and they submit it to iNaturalist,
they don't know if it's something
that is gonna be a brand new species.
They are like, "okay, here's a cool insect.
We know it's a praying mantis.
Let's find out what it is."
Since I've been working in entomology,
projects that I've worked on have discovered
I think we're at 70 or 80 new species of insects
that are living in Los Angeles.
And then on top of that,
there are species that come from all over the world.
Oftentimes we're finding out
about those recent introductions
via people taking a photo and uploading it to iNaturalist.
You see those four spots right there?
Sometimes when you're identifying an insect,
you just look for something as simple as that.
- Oh!
And you can actually see that's the monarch's body,
that's fat that's getting consumed right there.
Such a cool observation!
One of the non-native species we've recently detected
through iNaturalist is this mantis.
It's originally from Southern Africa
and what's really exciting is that the earliest observations
were not by professional scientists.
They were actually made by kids.
One kid in particular is now 13.
At the time she first started making observations,
I think was nine or ten.
Documenting what they're eating.
Documenting the different kinds of plants that they're on.
Documenting the times of the year
that we see increasing numbers of them.
She at this point probably knows more
about the South African Mantis than I do.
- Knock, knock!
Hey, Anna!
Hello! Hi!
- I never thought of myself as a professional entomologist.
I know some things, but there's lot of things I don't know.
You have to just look at stuff a lot.
This grass probably has lots and lots of bugs in it.
You couldn't see them
unless you really got down to the grass
and stared at it for a while.
(dramatic, building orchestral music)
Oh, there's a grub.
(shutter clicks)
(wings buzz)
- [Lisa] Oftentimes people get started
looking at things that are larger
and things that are easier to spot,
and then they slowly start to notice
all of the little smaller stuff
kind of in the cracks and in the bushes
and their whole perspective just gets blown open
that there's this little miniature safari going on
in even just a tiny space in their yard.
(music continues)
- The praying mantis can turn its head very well.
They do it when they're gonna catch their food.
(buzzing)
(shutter clicks)
(music continues)
At first, before we went iNaturalist,
we didn't know anything,
but we came back out knowing most things in our backyard.
(shutter clicks)
- What we're seeing with iNaturalist is actually a return
to the way science was done historically.
Historically, science was a hobby.
Being a naturalist was a hobby.
These community science approaches,
individuals are increasingly able
to make important scientific observations.
- Wait! Wait, wait!
I think I see one.
There you go.
- It's really democratizing the science.
Let's see that one.
So has that one opened up yet?
- Uh-uh.
- [Greg] It's allowing just about anybody to participate.
- Being an entomologist, I think it's so cool.
That was the first job I ever wanted.
- So Anna, you've done so much to our understanding
of this species in Southern California,
so we were hoping that you would want to join us
as a co-author on that paper
that we'll publish in the peer-reviewed literature.
- (gasps) Yes!
- Yeah? - Yes!
- That'd be great!
- Why'd it have to be COVID?
I wanna hug you.
It's not fair that it's COVID!
(laughter)
- [Greg] We have another.
I can hug you, yes.
We can hug each other.
That's awesome, kid.
- Not with this hand because-
- I won't hurt her.
- One of the things that I love the most
when I'm talking to people about insects
and I see a little bit of a light in their eyes
as I'm talking to them,
if you can get people to look at a little insect
which people just want to swat away or step on,
if you can get them to appreciate something
that may seem insignificant, that just works its way up
through the rest of the natural world.
We have so many distractions, phones being one thing,
but here's one way where we could actually use something
that normally is distracting us from the natural world
and get us to go back outside,
go outdoors, and engage with it.
- It's a reason to be optimistic.
You can amass thousands of observations
of where species are found in the present
and those observations are gonna outlive us.
As long as there's an internet,
a digital framework out there,
those observations are gonna continue on
and scientists of the future,
conservation biologists of the future,
they're all gonna be able to use those observations
for questions that we today probably can't even imagine.