 Dr. Jessica Ware. She is an associate curator and the division chair for the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. We are excited to have Dr. Ware here to talk about the bio-diversity of insects. As an entomologist and evolutionary biologist, she documents diversity in insect populations and assesses how these populations vary over time and geographic location. Dr. Ware's research focuses on several different types of insects, from her self-proclaimed favorite, the majestic dragonfly, to those the general public is more likely to have negative connotations with, like termites and cockroaches. For her research, Dr. Ware was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers beginning their independent research careers. Dr. Ware is also a proponent of encouraging people from underrepresented groups to become entomologists and has co-founded the Organization Entomologists of Color and co-organized the hashtag Black in Ento Week. Please help me in welcoming Dr. Jessica Ware to the stage. Bring my water here in case I have a fit of the coughs, but hopefully I won't. I'd like to thank Lisa and Margaret for the invitation to speak here today. I'd like to thank Janie as my faculty host and the student host and super hosts who have made the last couple of days so wonderful. So as we've heard over the last two days, insects are a remarkably diverse group of animals. They're charismatic, beautiful, and perhaps facing peril. We talked yesterday about the proportion of insects that would make up the U.S. Senate. This is a pie chart showing just animals. When we look at just animals, almost all animals are insects. They're the kind of pink-colored part of this pie chart. Indeed, when we look at sheer species number, there's around the same number of species of mammals as there are dragonflies and damselflies. 1.5 million described insect species. But when people try and make estimates of how many species are yet to be discovered, we think maybe there's 5 million or 10 million. Or in the past, former colleagues used to say, perhaps even 30 million species of insects yet to be described. So perhaps because we're used to this message, there's so many insects. Perhaps because when we go fishing or canoeing or swimming, we see dragonflies landing all around us. And perhaps because we're sometimes surrounded by an abundance of insects that we don't really like, like cockroaches, that gives us this false impression that insects are doing OK. Maybe there's even too many of them. That's not true. Insects are in decline. We know that insects are disappearing. Certainly this isn't news. I mean, there are publications from the early 1920s that were asking the question, should we be looking at the impact of the Industrial Revolution on insects in the 30s, in the 40s, in the 50s? People were bringing up this question, what is the impact of human agriculture? What is the impact of the Industrial Revolution on insects? And it wasn't really kind of capturing human attention until perhaps around 2017 when there was a landmark study that had looked at the weight of insects, the total biomass of insects that had been collected over a 30-year period in Europe. And they showed that there was a remarkable decline, you know, up to 70% decline in total biomass of insects that were collected over a 30-year period. And that led to these big dramatic headlines, insect apocalypse, insect to get in, insects are disappearing. Even my Nana, who's 97, who lives in Northern Ontario, she heard about it. And that's saying something. So that leads us to this question of what life would be like without insects. And my colleague Doug Tallamy would say, it wouldn't exist. Life as we know it would cease to exist. He estimates that perhaps humans might last about three months in the absence of insects. So when we talk about insect decline, we're not just talking about an academic question, what would happen without insects. We're actually talking about our own fate, right? The fate of humanity. So before we talk about insect decline, it can be really helpful to kind of get to know the insects that we're about to talk about. So we've done a lot of work trying to understand the evolutionary history of insects. And in particular, I've been interested in finding out the when question. When did insects first evolve? So with colleagues, we sequenced a bunch of transcriptomes. Transcriptomes are the parts of your genome that are being transcribed at any moment in time. And I like to think of it like cooking supper. When you go to cook supper, you don't cook every single recipe that's in your cookbook, right? You just cook the one recipe you need for your one meal, right? And that's kind of what your genes are doing. Some of your genes are being expressed, and some of your genes are not being expressed. So when you sequence the genes that are being expressed at any moment in time, you're sequencing transcriptomes. And with transcriptomic data in 2014, we were able to show that the earliest flight, the earliest winged insects, were around 400 million years ago. This was during the early Devonian when the world looked something like what these kind of globe representations are here. Before birds, before bats, before pterosaurs, there was nothing in the sky. The first thing to fly was insects. And probably it was something that looked a little bit like a dragonfly, maybe like a mayfly. To put this in the context of where we fit into this story, that means that for around 396 million years, insects existed in the absence of humans. We've never known life without insects. For as long as there have been humans, there have been insects. But for the majority of insect time on Earth, it was in the absence of humans. So we can look at these types of data, and we can reconstruct what's called a tree or a phylogeny. These are kind of maps that help us understand relationships of how close relatives certain groups are than others. This is kind of a cartoon. And in this cartoon, the camel and the bird are connected and join and share a recent common ancestor. And they're more distantly related to the fish, which is connected with a more distant common ancestor. So we can kind of look at phylogenies and understand that things that are closer together in a phylogeny share a more recent common ancestor and things that are further apart in a phylogeny or a tree have a more distant common ancestor. So we can make trees of life of anything. You can make a tree of chocolate. You can make a tree of sandwiches. You can make a tree of rock and roll music to figure out how language evolved. But you can also make trees for insects. And this is what we did using transcriptomes. So just to walk us through the tree of life of insects to figure out how they're related to each other, we have things like silverfish and firebrats, which are basal hexapods. Anyone who's ever lived in a dormitory, probably you've seen silverfish. And they're a sister to the winged insects or the terrygoda, which we divide into two groups, the non-holametabolous insects. These are things that have incomplete metamorphosis, a baby grasshopper looks kind of like an adult grasshopper. It molds to a larger and larger size until it's the adult stage. And this is in contrast to the holametabolous insects. These are insects that have complete metamorphosis. An egg becomes a caterpillar. The caterpillar goes into a pupa where there's a complete internal and external rearrangement of its morphological anatomy. And then it emerges at a butterfly. And what holametabila do very well is they've kind of compartmentalized their life strategies with a juvenile stage focused on growth. And the adult stage focused on dispersal and reproduction. There's more holametabila than there is anything else. So since we published this study in 2014, we've been steadily sequencing. And we have about 2,000 insect transcriptomes now. The tree that we get, the relative relationships of the different insect groups, largely hasn't changed. But I wanted to show it to you just to zoom in to this basal part of the tree, which is the part that I mostly focus on. And it gives me a good chance to do a segue into dragonflies. So dragonflies are striking. They're highly visual predators. I've heard my colleague once called them vicious. I think they meant to say voracious, but I like the word vicious because they are vicious predators, even though they are so beautiful. I study these in the tropics. I study these in deserts, in the Arctic. They're really found on every continent, except for Antarctica, although we have fossils from Antarctica. We know that they're diverse. Sure, there's not as many dragonflies as there are beetles, but there's about the same number as there are all of mammals. But we spend so much time focusing on mammals. Odinata, which is the order that comprises dragonflies and damselflies, include dragonflies, damselflies. And this third group that doesn't have a common name called an isopsychoptera that sort of looks like a dragonfly in its body and has wings like a damselfly. We know that dragonflies and their kin are quite old. There are these things called griffin flies, which we call proto-odinates or pre-dragonflies. And these flew in the Carboniferous period around 350 million years ago. If you've ever heard people say, oh, didn't insects used to be very large, often what they're talking about are these large dragonflies. They had about a two-foot wingspan, and they had a beak. And they probably were pretty poor flyers, so you wouldn't need to be afraid of them. You could swat them away fairly easily, I'm sure. Modern dragonflies we think are much younger and actually much better flyers. So we know that dragonflies are something that was dragonfly-like probably flew first. And in fact, we know an awful lot about dragonfly flight because we focus so heavily on perhaps one of their most remarkable characteristics, which is their wing venation. We focused a lot on wing venation, thinking it might be a clue to understanding the revolutionary history when actually it's correlated with flight. It actually tells us more about the style of flight that dragonflies have. So we developed AI. We developed an automatic feature extraction that allows us to, when we scan dragonfly's wings, extract the information about particular patterns of veins and how they may be correlated with long-distance flight, fast flight, maneuvering in and amongst vegetation, more dense wing venation in parts of stiffer wing, sparser wing venation, a more bendy or flexible wing. And we can look across species of dragonflies and look for patterns. And of course, these patterns are beautiful in and of themselves, and we've used them in beautiful things like Tiffany. You know, Tiffany really made very biologically realistic dragonflies in some of their Tiffany lamps. I mean, you could almost get this to species, not quite, but pretty close, so kudos to Tiffany. When we look across these wing-veined patterns, we can actually kind of come up with a gestalt, right? A certain style that a certain wing shape might have that's associated with a style of flight that allows us to make predictions and retradictions of the way ancient dragonflies may have flown and look for some of the stressors that we might predict to find in dragonflies flying in certain areas. We know that dragonflies can be great models for flight. I think yesterday, I mean, even earlier today, people talked about insects being used for bioinspiration. And dragonflies are no different. There have been dragonfly-like robots that have been made that fly like dragonflies, dragonfly-like robots that have wings like dragonflies. They're very agile, and some of them can fly up to 30 miles per hour. Some of them never leave the pond from which they emerge, maybe traveling 11 meters their entire life. And others like pentelophilovessons, which is this one that's shown on the screen, they travel 11,000 kilometers. They travel across oceans, across the Indian Ocean, and our data seems to suggest actually across the entire globe. So I noticed that when I talked to the student host, there's a lot of biochemists, students that I have met. We can actually use biochemistry. The biochemistry of insect wings, the molecules that make up insect wings actually come into the wings during the juvenile stage when they're in fresh water. The hydrogen, H2O, comes from the water, and the weight of hydrogen actually varies as you move around the globe. So you can look at the biochemistry of wings, and it tells you whether the dragonfly that you collected in Guyana came from water in Guyana or whether it maybe emerged in Japan or Australia or in equatorial Guinea. And when we look at cross migratory dragonflies, we find that most of them that we collected actually were born on different continents from where we found them. So they're traveling really vast, huge distances. One thing that might make us want to love dragonflies even more is that they eat the things that we don't like. They eat flies. They love horseflies, blackflies, mosquitoes, noceums, midges. All the things that we tend to think of as nuisances, they consume both in juvenile stages because many flies have aquatic juvenile stages and in their adult stage. There's a story from the Kojiken ancient Japanese text that talks about an emperor that was bit by a horsefly and a dragonfly came and ate that horsefly and the emperor was so pleased that one of the names that he gave for the islands of Japan was Islands of Dragonflies. And many ancient Japanese armor actually was kind of etched with metalworking of dragonflies because they were a symbol of power and of agility and of precision because they have a very good, very high catch rate when they're hunting their prey. We know from the literature, my colleague Olafink and others have shown that they do an excellent job at controlling anopheles and 80s Egypti. Why can't we just use those to control malaria, dengue, yellow fever? Well, dragonflies are very picky. It's been rare that people have been able to rear dragonflies in large enough numbers that you could actually deploy them for integrated pest management. They don't like to breed on command and they don't like to breed in large numbers. They tend to just stay as juvenile stages forever, never emerging as adults. So this pickiness is something that we can actually use when we study dragonflies. This is what a female dragonfly, I don't know if I can go back, that was a quick snapshot of what a female dragonfly looks like when they're laying their eggs. Females lay their eggs either in still water or in fast moving water. And females are somehow able to distinguish between water that has high turbidity, low turbidity, high oxygen levels, low oxygen levels. Some dragonflies are very picky. They require very specific requirements and others, I've seen this, are able to over-posit and develop in a puddle in Newark, New Jersey, in a parking lot at Rutgers. So there's a huge variety in the tolerance to water quality. So that makes them great biomonitors. Fresh water is a resource that is limited on our planet and this is a free tool that allows us to kind of assess the water quality in our area. Dragonflies are a great biomonitor. This is what the juvenile stage looks like. Not only can they take aquatic insects, but I just wanted to mention they can also take vertebrates. Like, they're no slouch. They can take small minnows. They can take tadpoles in their juvenile stage. Of course, they're food for us. We've talked about this earlier today. Dragonflies do make great food. I've eaten dragonfly food. All that flight muscle is basically pure muscle. Just break off the wings and the abdomen. That flight muscle would be a really good sustainer, I think, if I was ever lost in the woods, that's what I would eat. And of course, they're great food for birds, reptiles. I've seen fish jumping out of the water, frogs jumping out of the water. In fact, these predators, we think, are what maybe led dragonflies on this path to being excellent and very agile flyers. So what that means is that if dragonflies, like other insects, are declining, that means this really vital food source for migratory birds, for reptiles, for mammals is also declining, which leads us to this question that if dragonflies, like other insects, are disappearing, what does that mean for life on Earth? We know a little bit about what the dragonfly tree of life looks like. Again, we can sequence different parts of the genome. We sequence thousands of genes for dragonflies and damselflies. Our goal is to sequence all of the 6,400 or 500 species of dragonflies so that we can understand their relationships. And we think, using molecular data and fossils together, that perhaps damselflies first arose around 225 million years ago. And dragonflies similarly arose around 225 million years ago. Again, around 220 million years before humans really came on the scene before we started changing water flow, damning rivers, and polluting water sources. How do we know all of these data? How do we know about the biochemistry of wings? How do we know about the genomes of dragonflies? How do we know about flight? We know because we have specimens. This is a photo of where I work, the American Museum of Natural History. And it's just one of many natural history museums that exists around the world. We have large collections of different animals. Often, the majority of them are insects because there are more insects than there are other animals on this planet. And they really are invaluable resources. But they come with a dark history. Collections, like the collections at the museum where I work, were largely acquired during a time of colonialism. We know that many of the collections that we have were actually collected because there was wealth in the global north that allowed folks to go to different parts of South America and Africa, harvest as many species as possible, and bring them to be housed in the global north. Brandon Kilbourne, who's a friend and colleague, has written several poems about this kind of unnatural institution of natural history, talking about how the very transatlantic slave ships that moved enslaved people back and forth across the Atlantic were often used to transport natural history specimens from South America, from Africa, back to Europe, back to North America. He talks about this idea that you could have something so beautiful as a jeweled beetle existing on a ship that was carrying enslaved people to horror, right? Which was a slave labor camp, which was a plantation. That's how my father's family first came to the United States. So we have this complicated history when we talk about colonialism in entomology when we talk about natural history collections, when we talk about access and who has access to the specimens that we've collected. So take, for example, this beautiful Laria Themas. This is a dragonfly that was collected in 1939, and most of our insect specimens have information about where they were collected and when they were collected. This was collected as part of the Archibald expedition. And Archibald was a philanthropist who in the 1920s and the 1930s used his funds, which were largely gained by his grandfather, who was one of the first oil refiners in the United States, to fund expeditions to Madagascar and to New Guinea. It's wonderful that we have these specimens. They're largely housed in the American Museum of Natural History and in the Leiden Museum and Naturalis in the Netherlands. But many of my colleagues who live in Madagascar, who are Malagasy or who live in New Guinea, have never had access to these specimens. It might be cost prohibitive for them to come to the United States. And certainly with huge collections like what we have, we certainly haven't even begun to scratch the surface of digitizing the collections that we have. We don't always lend out specimens and we certainly don't lend out what we call types or the specimen that we use when we're describing a new species. But nonetheless, we have these specimens and we wanna try and use them to use this invaluable resource and this knowledge. So one thing we can do with natural history collections is we can use the information from these cards or from the labels that insects have and we can use them to create ecological niche models to predict where species should be found and predict where species might be found in the future. And here's a couple of maps that we've made using natural history collections and other digital collections for dragonflies and in the Arctic. And these ecological niche maps are kind of color coded by richness where yellow means that there's high species number and dark purple means low species number, lower species number as you go towards the Arctic with a concentration of diversity very high in the Northeast. I gotta say, New Jersey, people never think of New Jersey. We have 188 species of dragonflies in New Jersey alone. Very impressive. We can use these models under different climate scenarios to actually predict what might happen in a future that is ex-warm, this much warmer, that much warmer or with different values of precipitation. We can do this for dragonflies because people often like to collect beautiful things. We have far fewer collections of maggots. We have far fewer collections of earwigs. We know a lot about some insects and very little about others. So take, for example, this beautiful bug. It's called Nazachonia Ellenfutteri. We just described it this year. It's a tree-sucking bug. It's a bug that has a mouth part. It's actually very beautiful because the mouth part is gold. Gold, and I'm not sure if you can see it kind of pointing downwards. And it actually feeds on xylem. This was collected in 1985 by Terry Irwin, who's a colleague, a late colleague who had this method. He wanted to try and sample canopy insects. It's very hard to reach the insects in the canopy. Our nets aren't large enough to go all the way up into the canopy. And so he designed this method where he would fog the, you know, with insecticides, the canopy insects would die and then fall to the ground and he would gather them all up and then they would sit on the shelf for someone to eventually look at them. And we did eventually look at some of these bugs and we found that this is indeed a new species. As far as we know, the only individual of Nazachonia Ellenfutteri that's ever been collected. Where do we describe this as a new species? And we chose to have this species, the Holotype, go to Ecuador, go to the home country from which the specimen was collected so that that way Ecuadorian researchers would be able to work and study on it. And we got some pushback from our colleagues in the States. Why would you send this only representative of this species? There's no paratypes. Why would you send it to somewhere other than the American Museum or the Smithsonian if people clutch their pearls? But it's because we can make decisions as collection people. We can make decisions as economists to really include our colleagues from the places where we're collecting these insects as part of the conversation as decision makers in systematics and in taxonomy. Termites are another group that we know a lot about a few termites and we know almost nothing about populations of the non-pest termites. There's over 3,000 species of termites and termites are actually just social cockroaches or just kind of fancy cockroaches that happen to be social. And cockroaches in general, very small percentage of them are pests. The rest of them live outside of the human condition. Detritivors, ecosystem engineers shaping our planet. Our planet would look very different in the absence of these social insects. We don't know very much about what a population is. Is a colony of termites a population? Are multiple colonies of termites a population? How are termites doing in terms of climate change? We really don't know. I just came back from Guyana where we have been sampling termites in the Amazon for some time. And some of the termite mounds that we have sampled over a series of years because it's been a particularly hot time in Guyana because there's been an unusual amount of kind of dehydration. There's a dry season that normally starts in December. It's already begun. There was things that were a flame, termite mounds that were burnt to a crisp. We really don't know the impact of climate change on social insects. And then of course there's things that fly at night. So I am an early riser, which means I go to bed very early, which means I often don't study things like what's shown in this photo. You can probably barely see them, but there are dragonflies that are flying here over this lake in Ontario. They're these dragonflies, shadow dragons, which fly when it's too dark to read a newspaper. Much like many of the insects that are nocturnal, we know very little about their populations. We don't know how they're faring because entomologists, we go to bed at 9 p.m. We don't like to be out late, so we have far fewer samples in our collections and far fewer information about their behavior just because we are diurnal. So these are tough questions that we as systematists, as collections people, and I hope we'll discuss on the panel today, these are tough questions that we have to face. Who has access to museum specimens? Where should specimens from the global South be housed? If there's DNA in there, who's DNA, who has rights to that DNA? Should we be digitizing everything? Who's going to do that? We have 23 million insect specimens in the American Museum of Natural History. Even if I was to devote my entire life to doing this, I would never finish, I would die. Why isn't everything database? How can we increase access to collections? These are questions that are tough questions that we don't have answers to yet. This is morally complicated in the topic of insect decline, of course, because we need answers for this really, really fast. We want to start using these specimens right now so that we can come up with a solution for insect decline. And indeed, the questions that people have about insect decline are global questions. These aren't questions just for someone from Toronto. These are questions no matter where you are on earth because this actually affects the survival of homo sapiens sapiens, the survival of our species. These are universal global questions that will require all of us to participate, to answer them. So my colleagues made this paper called Death by a Thousand Cuts. It's a really good read, and I would cut out this and put it on your fridge and use it as a checklist. It talks about the main drivers of insect decline, and you can go through one by one and think about how the things that you do in your day to day might be impacting some of these drivers. And I found this to be a really good conversation starter at the separate table with my teens sometimes. They don't always want to talk at the separate table. With Dave, with Christy, with Chris, with Eliza, we actually have a grant where we're studying kind of synthesizing the data that's out there for insect decline, trying to understand and pull together resources in different languages from across the globe. The majority of studies that are often cited and quoted are actually from the global north when, as was spoken about earlier, the majority of insect species are around the equator, right? So we actually need to prioritize, because of these historical equities, the voices of indigenous people and the voices of people in the global south. So what can we do as individuals just here sitting in Gustavus? Well, first thing I would always say to people is we gotta kick our addiction to lawns and cars. We can do simple things like be compassionate and plant gardens that have insects in mind. We can have habitat that has heterogeneity. We can have food for pollinators. It's great that people care about pollinators because it actually impacts even the lowly cockroaches, because some cockroaches are pollinators as well. I do a lot of work in the Arctic, and we know that there's impacts due to global warming in the Arctic. Many of the dragonflies that we study actually live in lakes that are called permafrost bottom lakes. Permafrost is kind of a fancy word for the mixture of ice and dirt. Part of it stays permanently frozen. And part of it kind of melts and freezes in this active layer every year. As permafrost melts, then often these lakes completely disappear. It has this added negative bonus or deficit, I guess, that permafrost actually stores a lot of carbon. So as the permafrost melts, it releases this greenhouse gas into the air which further exacerbates the problem of climate change. So for Arctic dragonflies, when we go to the Arctic and we've been sampling in Scandinavia, Alaska, Yukon for many years, we see that the Arctic is changing rapidly, and dragonflies like Sematoclora Selbergi, this dragonfly that's shown here, is doing fairly poorly. We see dragonflies that used to only be found further south, moving into the Arctic, and oftentimes out-competing native species. So we know what some of the causes are of greenhouse gas. We've known this actually for a very long time, but it's very hard for us to make decisions because some things are out of our hands. As was mentioned earlier today, we need to put pressure on those that have decision-making powers. We need to put pressure on industry. And there's a small little part at the bottom, residential buildings. That's where my teenagers and I fight every year when I have the heat on them, they open the windows because it's a little hot, or when they want to have the lights on in every single room. Those are types of decisions that I myself can make, but that's a very small part of the energy use. We actually need to hold those accountable who are kind of causing some of these or exacerbating some of these problems. We can also do a better job at getting to know the insects that are in our neighborhood so that when we have invasive species, we know that invasive species are one of the drivers of insect decline, but we often don't find out that they're here until it's too late, until they've already started to establish, take for example, the spotted lanternfly, the scourge of New York this summer, they were kind of everywhere. And since they've arrived in the United States, people have tried to eradicate them, but perhaps by the time we found out they were there, it was too late, and I think one major part is that we're disconnected from what we expect to find. When we go for a walk to work, when we go for a walk to the park, we don't know what insects are supposed to be there. So if there is an invasive species, which are inevitable, because we have trans-oceanic commerce and we're in a port in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, gets a lot of shipments, when we see something new that's not supposed to be there, we don't even recognize that it's not supposed to be there because we don't know what our neighborhood insects are. So my kids were little, these are some photos of them when they were younger. I used to take them out and kind of force, have fun with them to collect insects, and really tried to encourage them to get to know their backyard fauna. And when I took them with me to Chagayana to South America, we didn't have a fancy insect collection. We had an old bingo box and some upholstery foam and some sewing pins that they used to make an insect collection, and that allowed them to really get to know the insects that were around the field station where we were collecting. Now, not everybody's gonna wanna make an insect collection, perhaps after our discussion yesterday, maybe we shouldn't be pinning insects, but we can still make digital collections. There are apps like iNaturalist that will allow you with your phone to kind of, as you walk into your regular coffee shop, snap photos of insects along the way, so you get to know what you should be expecting to see on your coffee walk. So if you see something that's not supposed to be there, or if the app says nobody else has found this, you can alert your local entomologists and say, I found something that I don't think is my neighborhood entomology fauna, and that can help us prevent things from establishing. And perhaps most importantly, of course, we can vote, right? Our vote actually matters. We should hold all of our elected officials, whether it's my school board representative, whether it's my town mayor, or whether it's my president. I should be expecting them to vote with insects in mind, because insects matter to me, and I think insects matter to the fate of all of humanity. This is really an all hands on deck situation. It means that I need to be involved, we all need to be involved. My nana in Northern Ontario needs to be involved, even though she's 97. There should be no barriers to participation, and yet there are. So my kids would say, oh, that was terrible, man, you used to make us go and do all those collections, and what was the point? Those are data, right? I remind my kids, those are data. I now have these data of what was existing in Cranberry, New Jersey in 2008, thanks to you kids, right? We can actually, everything that we do can have consequence. We really need everybody. We need my kids' insect collection. We need the grade two monarchs that we were talking about at Lenge. We need all of these data, because they actually are gonna help us kind of understand this bigger picture of what's happening to insects worldwide. And this is not the time for there to be barriers to participation, and yet there are. So we've worked with colleagues to create this foundation called entomologists of color, and our goal is to try and diversify the field of entomology. In a time when we're facing the crisis of humanity, perhaps our biggest crisis, why would we have barriers to participation for pertinent people to participate in entomology? So as part of this group, we do recruitment, retention, and advocacy to try and change the system, to make things less toxic, and to kind of address some of the historical inequities that go along with a long history of colonialism in entomology. And importantly, we need to listen. We need to listen to our colleagues from the global south. My colleagues from Jamaica, from Barbados, from Guyana, from Nigeria, they've written articles, they've had webinars in series talking about colonialism in entomology, neo-colonialism in entomology, helicopter science, it's happening right now. And we need to listen. We need to listen. We really just need to listen. We can also look even to my own discipline of systematics, and look at who's in systematics and natural history museums. Damia Fleming, who's a graduate student at the University of Florida, she kind of got a bunch of us together and we formed the Black in Natural History Museums Group, which now includes the president of the American Museum of Natural History, Sean Decatur. And as a group, we kind of have been talking about who has been doing natural history. And it's always been everyone, right? There have been natural historians who have existed for as long as there have been humans, but who has been a TM natural historian at the Natural History Museum hasn't always looked like people that look like the people on the slide here. We have a new exhibit. It's opening at the University of Florida Natural History Museum, where we're kind of highlighting people who you may not have heard of who are kind of greats in natural history, including John Edmundston, who was an enslaved person from Guyana, who when he was brought to England by the person who controlled his fate, he actually taught Charles Darwin how to do taxidermy. You know, there are many stories of people who have been doing natural history since time, since human time began, and we want to try and highlight those folks so that people realize this is a job for everybody. We need systematists and taxonomists now more than ever. Why would we ever put barriers to participation? Insects are essential. And I think what we've learned over the last couple of days is that it's an all hands on deck situation. Museums are essential. And I think what we learn when we look at kind of peel back the veneer of museums is that they're also very complicated. They have complicated histories that we haven't begun to really address or discuss. As we've talked about, what we need are global solutions. This is a problem that faces every human on earth. The decisions that we all are making are actually global decisions, so we really need global solutions. I'm so grateful to Nobel 59 for highlighting insects for two full days, because hopefully that inspires all of us to kind of join in this fight to save insects. So with that, I'll say thank you.