 It is my honor and pleasure to introduce Dr. Ann Sferde-Tegessen, Professor of Conservation Biology at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. She is also a scientific advisor to the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research. Dr. Sferde-Tegessen's research and teaching are rooted in the fields of nature management, insect ecology, and forest biodiversity. Dr. Sferde-Tegessen's work illuminates the ways insects sustain the planet and sustain our capacity to live upon it. She studies how insects shape every aspect of forest life, from pollination to decomposition. Her research has been read and cited thousands of times and contributes to what we know about the unsung heroes of our ecosystems, insects. In addition to her research, Dr. Sferde-Tegessen is a gifted communicator of science. She educates audiences of all ages about the wonders of the insect world and what we need to do to preserve their place on Earth. Her best-selling book, Extraordinary Insects, has been translated into 25 languages, and named by Smithsonian Magazine as one of the 10 best science books of 2019. Dr. Sferde-Tegessen's ability to make complex scientific concepts accessible and engaging to her readers earned her the 2018 Bonneville Award for Communication of Biology and the 2020 Award for Excellence in Communication of Science from the Research Council of Norway. In the words of Anna Orhanen, Dr. Sferde-Tegessen's work enlightens us to quote, the countless ways nature cares for us, inspires us, and simply enables us to exist. Please join welcoming Dr. Ann Sferde-Tegessen. Is it? Now it is. Thank you so much for that wonderful introduction. I am so happy to be here. I'm so happy to see so many people gathered to talk about the most fun and fascinating organisms I know of, insects. For two full days of talks, discussions, and conversations, it really makes me so thrilled. Because I've named this talk, Why We Should All Love Insects. And I intend to spend my 35 minutes giving you a number of reasons to love, or at least respect, and maybe admire our tiny six-legged companions on this planet. Because I really do want people to understand the incredible importance of these small and silent and anonymous species around us, this hidden biodiversity of which insects make up a large proportion. So, when I tell people that I work with insects, they often ask me, what good are wasps, and why do we even need mosquitoes? Because some insects are, of course, a nuisance, and some insects are indeed vectors of diseases, and they compete with us for our food, some of them. But still, these bothersome insects are a small minority compared to the teeming myriads of insects that all do their little bit to keep our ecosystems running. So really, if you value life as we know it, you should rejoice in the omnipresence of insects. We often hear this phrase saying that we are standing on the shoulders of giants, a metaphor hinting to the importance of the understanding gained by major thinkers and scientists who went before us in order to gain new knowledge and have intellectual progress. And yes, that is true. I can mention myself a number of such giants in the field of entomology, scientists and communicators that have inspired me with their scientific work or their outreach, like Mae Beerenbaum or Edward O. Wilson. So yes, we are standing on the shoulders of giants, but also, still metaphorically, we humans are standing on the exoskeletons of myriads of insects. Not for intellectual knowledge exactly, but rather for life support, because we humans really rely on insects to run our world. And there are so many. Whether we opt to count them by individuals or species, they are here in huge, huge numbers as individuals. They outnumber the number of grains of sand on all the world's beaches. We don't know exactly how many they are, but for each of us, there is at least 200 millions of them and maybe more than one billion of them. I mean, for each of you, one billion insect individuals? Wow! Shuffling and crawling and flapping around on the planet. That is surely a lot. So, I'd like to take you along on a quick thought experiment to give you an impression of how numerous insects are. Imagine if all the 200,000 known species in the US, big and small alike, were to be represented in the US Senate. Let's say we distributed the seats and the voting rights, according to not individuals this time, but number of species in the different groups, in the different species groups, because that would throw up some rather new and unusual patterns. Insects alone would dominate with 47% of all the votes. Known species of fungi and lichens would command around a fifth of the votes. Planned species of different kinds would make up another 9%, while other small species, spiders, that are not insects, of course, snails, etc., would account for almost one-quarter of the votes. So, where do we fit into this picture? When we look at species diversity from this perspective, humans doesn't really count too much. Even if we are counted along with all the rest of the US vertebrates, mammals, fish, birds, snakes, frogs, we would still end up with a tiny share of power, constituting a mere 2% of known US species diversity. So, in other words, we humans are totally dependent on a host of tiny species, and the majority of these are insects. They just have to join forces with the spiders, for instance, you know, to rule this biodiversity senate. So, while it is easy to overlook this smallest among us, we should not do that. Because, yes, insects may be tiny, but their achievements are far from trifling. Long before human beings set foot on this planet, insects had already taken up agriculture and animal husbandry with termites growing food, fungus for food, and ants keeping aphids as dairy cattle. Wasps were indeed the first creatures to make paper from cellulose. And caddysfly larvae were catching other creatures in nets, in rivers, millions of years before we humans managed to weave our first fishing nets. And, as we've already heard today, insects also learned if not how to tame fire, then at least how to tame light, even within their own bodies. So, insects are beautiful, fascinating, fun, and fabulous. And, in addition, they save your life, a little, every single day. Let's have a look at some of the ways these tiny ones keep the US and the rest of the world churning. First of all, insects are vital in planetary maintenance and recycling of dead organic matter. Second, insects connect other species in different ways, as pollinators or predators, for instance, so we could say they're sort of a glue in nature. And third, insects provide us humans with useful products and they inspire technology with implications that go far beyond their own place in the world. So, let's start with this one. Like janitors in offices or apartment buildings, insects are an important part of cleaning, taking out the trash, so to say. And in this little video, you see 15 weeks of recycling and decomposition condensed into one minute. The left side is without insects and other small critters. So, here fungi and bacteria have to work alone, while the right side, on the other hand, shows how much faster this process goes when insects and other invertebrates take part. Because herbivores just eat about a tenth of all plants that sprout and grow. So, the rest, 90% of all plant production ends up lying at the ground. And as a result, there is an enormous amount of protein and carbohydrates that needs to be recycled. And it might not be a hotshot job, but these processes of decay and returning of the nutrients to the soil are critical to life on earth. And without it, no new plant life would be able to grow. We humans tend to think of dead trees like this in the forest, for instance, as mess. Seeing the decomposition as something gloomy and unpleasant, redolent of decay and death, how very wrong we are then. Because dead wood is alive. Inside a fallen tree trunk, there are now more living cells than when the tree stood green and sturdy. In the boreal forest, a full third of the species that lives or found in this forest live right here, in and on the dead trees. I just wish we could see it better, like if we had this virtual reality app on our mobile phones that could make this teeming life visible to us. And maybe then it would be easier to appreciate it too. And realize that many of these janitor insects have a hard time surviving in plantation-like forests that we have so many of today. Not only the dead trees, but also old hollow trees are super important for insects. And I know of few things as beautiful as mighty ancient oaks. They stand probably a legacy from a bygone age, oaks that sprouted in Norway in the time of the Vikings. Such old trees represent a world of their own for insects. Inside them, hollows form where the wood slowly rots. And inside these trees, you will discover another world, a world where the meaning of time and space is altered. Time goes in a way faster because a beetle lives out its entire life over a single summer and just one fistful of reddish-brown wood mold is an entire world for a millimeter-long beetle larva. Inside an ancient oak, there is life and death. Life and death, dreams and drama, and all this on a millimetric scale. And although these ancient oaks often stand solitary in the landscape like this one, they are never alone because more individuals may live in one single old oak tree than there are people, human inhabitants, in the twin cities. There are so many individuals gathered in this tiny one tree. So often I think we don't realize the importance of processes as long as they work smoothly. But imagine, for instance, if all garbage removal was closed down on campus, no one would empty the bins. They would just be left there overflowing inside and outside. That would really make us appreciate the recycling business and the work that is being done here. There is a sort of similar example. Illustrating the huge but hidden importance of decomposition by insects. From Australia, where the first British colonizers also brought cattle with them. The cattle multiplied, and the cattle produced an enormous amount of manure. And the dung, I mind you, of a single cow, covers an area the size of five tennis courts in a year. But who were going to clean up all this crap? Because, of course, there were native dung beetles, but they were used to the hard and dry marsupial dung, very, very different from this strange kusin in the form of the cow's mushy manure. So the dung was just left there. It dried into a crust that could not be penetrated by as much as a blade of grass. And in this way, hundreds of square miles of grazing land became unusable every year. By the mid-1900s, large areas in Australia lay fallow because of dung that had not been decomposed. So it wasn't until a large-scale research project in the 1960s when scientists managed to introduce dung beetles from other countries that the problem was solved and the dung disappeared and the grazing land was restored. And this illustrates, I think, the huge importance of the insects' part in the decomposition business. So let's move to the next way insects help us. Like I say, we could consider insects sort of a glue in nature, connecting other species, weaving them together in different ways. Like pollination, we all know that insects visit to flowers, contribute to seed production in more than eight out of ten wild flowers in the world. We also know that insect pollination increases fruit or seed quantity in a large proportion of our global food crops. And as some of you are aware of, this isn't just fruits and veggies, even chocolate depends on insects. Because a pinhead-sized biting-midge, a tropical relative of the despised noceums, are almost single-handedly responsible for pollinating the cocoa flowers in the tropics. In the rainforest, this chocolate-midge, as we could call it, has foregone blood in favor of a lifetime spent crawling in and out of cocoa flowers. So no midge, no cocoa, no chocolate. This is something to think about next time a midge or a mosquito annoys you. But insect pollination doesn't only make a difference in the quantity of crops, it upgrades the quality as well. Take strawberries, for instance. Insect-pollinated strawberries are redder, sweeter, more firm than strawberries that are pollinated by self-pollination or by wind. So, firmer berries cope better with transport and storage, and they have a longer self-life. So, therefore, a German study indicates that the market value of these nicely-shaped firmer, sweeter insect-pollinated strawberries is 50% higher than that of strawberries produced without insects. An insect or pollination is a high-level teamwork involving many players, many thousands of different species of flies, beetles, ants, wasps, butterflies, and other insects. And it's important to always emphasize that the diversity of wild pollinating insects contributes a lot that the domesticated honeybees cannot deliver. So, really, we do need the wild pollinators to safeguard our food crops and wild plants as well. But insects are not only here to help the plants making babies if we could use such a term for pollination. They also come to help when the kids are growing up and ready to move out in other words, seed dispersal. Several thousand different plants depend on different sorts of insects to disperse their seeds, especially ants. So, why do the ants care to help? Because there's a reward involved. The plant, through evolution, includes a valuable supplement to its seeds. A packed lunch for the ant, or a goodie bag, if you like. An addon full of nutrients for the ant. So, the ant comes, picks up the seed, carries the whole thing back to the ant hill, and while the packed lunch is being served up to the hungry ant babies, the seed is thrown away, and in this way, the plants of spring has been nicely transported to a new place. So, insects also glue together other species by eating plants and then themselves being eaten by carnivorous meat-eating larger animals. And because the insects are so incredibly abundant, they are of irreplaceable value as staple food for a number of larger animals. Freshwater fish live largely of insects. Birds enjoy independent insects. More than 60% of the world's bird species are insect eaters. And also, bats and some mammals are dependent on insects. And spiders. Spiders also enjoy eating insects, and they eat a lot. Spiders gobble down between 400 and 800 million tons of insects each year. That's more than the weight of the entire human population. So, to put it another way, the spiders of the planet could, theoretically, eat up every human being on Earth in a single year and still have room for dessert. So, it's good for us that they rather eat insects. So, for the more brutal parts of eating, like I mentioned, many insects also eat each other, and many of them are what we call parasituates, parasites that ultimately will kill their host. And let's have a look at an example. This is a parasitic wasp. Its offspring can only live inside a cockroach. So, when wasp mama finds a suitable cockroach prey, she stings the cockroach in the head. And with extreme precision, she injects a dose of nerve poison in specific points in the cockroach's brain. This blocks the mechanism that would normally trigger flight in the cockroach. It would trigger it to flee. So, this is blocked, but the cockroach can still move. And that is good, because as the cockroach is far too big for this parasitic wasp to carry, it's really handy that it is still able to walk, because this allows the parasitic wasp to simply bite into the antenna of the cockroach and lead her prey like you can walk a dog on a leash along, into a hole in the ground. The cockroach can't really do anything, it's just a biddable prey allowing itself to be led to its death, because here the wasp will lay an egg on the cockroach's leg and vanish while her little larva will bore into the cockroach's insides and eat up its intestines. From the inside and leave the vital organs to the end so that the food is fresh. When the larva is full, it forms a pupa inside the cockroach, which is then mercifully dead, finally. But from the exoskeleton of the dead cockroach, rises a sort of a crazy version of the bird phoenix, a newborn parasitic wasp to start this all over again. Not exactly nice, but then again nature is often brutal, and I think we need to know that and deal with that. And evolution is definitely not driven by compassion. And the good thing for us humans is that we can use such parasitic insects in different kinds of biological pest control as an alternative to using chemicals. So, insects are not only important in the web of nature. They have contributed to human civilization and progress too, both by their products and their example. The making of honey and the spinning of silk are well known, so I won't talk about that, because there are so many more examples. For example, did you know that insects are responsible for the original declaration of independence? At least for the ink used to write it down, because up until the mid-1800s, the predominant ink used in the US was oak gall ink made from the larval homes of tiny gall wasps that lives on oak leaves. This ink, as opposed to previously used lampsoot ink, was non-soluble, and this means we can thank a tiny little wasp for preserving the original text of the Declaration of Independence or the place of Shakespeare or Satishit music of Abitavan for that sake. And that is quite a big feat for a tiny little gall wasp. And speaking of music, did you know that shellac, a sort of resin-like substance made by insects, was the main ingredients in the first gramophone records? Record production was actually at such high levels spending so much of the shellac production in the early 1900s that the US authorities started to get worried because shellac has a lot of uses. It was also important in the military industry. So in 1942, after the US entered World War II, the authorities therefore ordered the record industry to slash its use of shellac consumption. And this, again, spurred the development of the vinyl records for those of you old enough to remember them. Insects are still helping us out today, inspiring us with their smart solutions. Termite mounds, for instance, have been copied for cooling principles that spell and spend less energy than our air conditioning systems. And for all of you having a mobile phone, which I guess is pretty much all of you, did you know that Moth's Eyes, the surface of Moth's Eyes, have inspired better screens on your cell phones with less sun glare? And insects can also be important and help us in medical research. Leafcutter ants and other insects are being scanned for new forms of antibiotics and the fruit fly that we will hear a lot more about later in the conference is essential in lab experiments and has earned all these noble prizes. And so we could go on and on. But how are there faring these wonderful little helpers of ours? Insects have a 400 million-year track record of success. Going back to way before the dinosaurs. But now there's struggle. There is a growing pile of reports describing the rapid decline of insects in different parts of the world, as we also will come back to later in the conference. But I'd just like to point to one important thing. It's too late to worry when a species is on the brink of extinction, because species cease to function in the ecosystem long before the last individual dies out. And that is why it is vital not to focus exclusively on species extinction, but also on the decline in the number of individuals. Because many specialized insects cannot survive in our transformed modern landscapes. This we know. We also know that the drastic changes in insect communities can have domino effects with consequences nobody can predict. We risk living in a world where we humans face a much tougher existence. Because the challenges of ensuring clean water, sufficient food, and good health for everyone becomes even greater than they are today. So, to sum up, we humans have long taken the free services of insects for granted. But through intensive land use, insecticides, and climate change, we now risk altering conditions so quickly that insects will have difficulty delivering as they have done to date, despite nature's adaptability. These two girls are my daughters some years ago. Together with your kids and all other kids, they are the ones who will inherit our planet. And I think we have a duty to pass on a planet that will enable the next generations to also live good lives on planet Earth. Then taking care of insects is absolutely necessary. It's a life insurance for our children and grandchildren. Let me put it this way. You might think of the world as a hammock made of woven fabric. All the species on the planet and their lives form parts of the weaving, and all of them combined create the hammock we humans are resting in. Insects are so numerous that they account for a large share of the hammock's fabric. If we reduce insect populations and wipe out insect species, it is as if we are pulling threads out of this weave. That might be okay as long as there are only a few small holes and loose threads here and there, but if we pull out too many, the whole hammock will eventually unravel and our welfare and well-being along with it. But also, this is about more than mere utility value and egoistic values for us. And I think if we can sort of stop naval gazing for a second and lift our gaze, as far as we know, our planet is the only place in the universe where there is life. And I would say that we humans have a moral duty to rein in our dominance on the earth and give our fellow creatures a chance to live out their little lives too, to fulfill their life potential, even if we don't think they're beautiful or can point to their usefulness for us. So, insects are strange, intricate, bizarre, fun, charming, unique, and they never cease to amaze you. And there is no doubt we need them for pollination, decomposition and soil formation, to serve us food for other animals, to keep harmful organisms in check, to disperse seeds, to help us in our research and inspire us with our smart solutions. Insects are nature's little cogs that make the world go round. The late Canadian entomologist Glenn Wiggins once said this, the world is rich in small wonders, but so poor in eyes that see them. I love that quote. And my hope is that this conference will give us all more insight into the weird and wonderful world of insects. That we will all love insects a little bit more before this conference is over. That we, through listening and engaging, disagreeing, exploring new thoughts, will become better at seeing the extraordinary little lives insects live alongside us on our shared planet Earth. Thank you.