We think of ladybugs as cute red beetles associated with good luck and gardening. But the real ladybug story involves poaching, trafficking and a struggle for survival.

Guest

John Losey, director of the Lost Ladybug Project at Cornell University.

Also Featured

Matthew McKernan, consumer horticulture extension associate at Kansas State University.

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I

AMORY SIVERTSON: I’m Amory Sivertson, this is On Point, and today we’re digging into the spotted past and surprising present of ladybugs. And joining us to explain it all is John Losey. He’s an entomologist at Cornell University and director of the Lost Ladybug Project.

John Losey, welcome to On Point.

JOHN LOSEY: Thank you for having me in to talk about my very favorite insect.

SIVERTSON: Your very favorite insect. So I guess let’s just start right there. How did ladybugs become your very favorite insect?

LOSEY: I am in the College of Agriculture and one of my tasks is to look into how we can protect crops from being damaged by insect pests.

And one of the most important predators of those pests are ladybugs. And so ladybugs, there’s a wide variety of ladybugs, and there’s still a lot out there. But over time, the native species, including our New York state insect, the nine-spotted ladybug, has started to decline and we’re seeing a rise and a complete dominance of one single species.

And that often can be problematic for pest control or for any service that they can provide when you start having to rely on one, because then that one species can’t do the same job that many species do.

SIVERTSON: So what is it in particular about the ladybug that sort of hooked you, got you enamored with them from the beginning, agricultural impacts aside?

LOSEY: I think just the idea that certainly they’re beautiful creatures. With their sort of red and wings and black polka dots. They are considered good luck charms. And they just have a variety of behaviors in the way they can fly with only one set of wings and find their food in any kind of a habitat.

SIVERTSON: Okay, and so let’s talk about the name ladybug because I’ve seen ladybug, lady beetle, ladybird beetle, like you might hear in England. Can you explain the different names and maybe where the name comes from given that we’ve established that they’re not all ladies?

LOSEY: Yeah. They’re about half ladies and half  … males. And so the name actually comes from it back in ancient times when farmers would see that their fields were beset with pests. They stood the chance of losing everything and maybe starving because the insect pests would just eat everything that they had. But then if ladybugs came in, the farmers observed that the ladybugs would eat all the pests and they might still have a good harvest.

And so when they started seeing the pests come in, they would pray to the Virgin Mary to send these beetles to save them. And so they became the beetles of Our Lady, and that got shortened to lady beetles or ladybugs.

SIVERTSON: And we’ve been talking about them as predators. We don’t think predator when we think of ladybugs.

But they are. And in fact, they’re known to be quite voracious predators. So can you say more about what a thriving ladybug’s life looks like?

LOSEY: So the ladybugs, like a lot of insects, start out as eggs, and then they go into a larval stage. So think like the caterpillar of a butterfly.

And but most people recognize what a caterpillar is. Most people don’t recognize what a little ladybug looks like. It’s sort of an alligator-looking beast, doesn’t have the red and the black dots. And then it grows up to be an adult, which is the more familiar stage.

But the larva are actually even more voracious than the adults. And over their lifetime, they can eat thousands of pests.

SIVERTSON: Okay, so you mentioned that the nine-spotted ladybug is the state insect of New York. I’m based in Massachusetts, and our state insect is the seven-spotted ladybug. But do I understand correctly that there are thousands of species of ladybugs?

LOSEY: That’s right. There are about 5,000 worldwide and about 500 in North America.

SIVERTSON: Okay. 500 native to North America or present in North America?

LOSEY: There are about 450 that are native, and there are maybe 50 or so that are introduced. And so even though there are more native species, there are many more introduced individuals, if that makes sense. So if you encounter a ladybug, you are just as likely, probably more likely, that it will be a non-native species.

SIVERTSON: Yeah, so that, I was going to ask, like with the nine-spotted ladybug being the state insect of New York, you would think that it is prevalent in New York, but that’s not necessarily the case these days?

No it’s very difficult to find. And in fact, we went through from the time it was named, and when it was chosen by some middle school students, that was their idea of the state insect, it was very common. But then some species were introduced from other countries, and they really spread and took over, and the nine-spot really started to decline.

And there was a period up until 2011 when no nine-spot ladybugs were found in New York for almost 30 years. And eventually, when we started our citizen science project, some volunteers actually found it and now we know where there’s a stable population on Long Island near the Hamptons.

So there’s not many of them left, but they like some pretty expensive real estate out there.

SIVERTSON: I was going to say, they’re hanging out in the Hamptons. We just didn’t get the memo that’s where they are.

LOSEY: That’s right. That’s right. In fact, just the latest sighting was at, near Sag Harbor.

So they do, they’re in some really cool places.

SIVERTSON: Okay. All right. So you’ve hinted at ladybugs being introduced to North America. And this I did not know much about this going in, and so I was just thinking the ladybugs that I see in my house. I have a lot of ladybugs in my house, particularly in the colder months.

But I have now learned that the ones in my house are likely not native to North America.

LOSEY: Correct.

SIVERTSON: So what are those?

LOSEY And the name sort of gives it away, we call those the multicolored Asian ladybug or lady beetle, and that’s Harmonia axyridis. And it is, it started out, as the name would imply, in Asia, in China and Japan, and it has now spread to every continent in the world, and it is the most common lady beetle anywhere.

In fact, we estimate that of all the ladybugs in the world, 50%, half of the individuals, are this one species. So it really dominates. And unfortunately, it is the one species that gets into people’s, like yours, it gets into people’s houses.

SIVERTSON: Yeah, why are they there, John?

LOSEY: Ah, yeah. So that’s a very good question.

And in its native range, so in our native range, the native species will overwinter at the base of trees, like among little bits of bark and leaves, and they’ll hibernate there, and they get protected under the snow. But in the native range of the multicolored Asian lady beetle, they go to cliff faces, and they look for big cracks in the rock.

And those big masses of rock sort of mediate the temperature, and they crawl in there, and they sleep away the winter. And so now that they’re so numerous and in so many places, there’s not nearly enough of those specific kinds of places to overwinter. And so they fly up to your house, and they see a vertical line, like you, where you have a door or a window, and they’re like, “Oh, here, this must be the kind of cliff face I need.”

And they’re very good at winding their way in, and then they’re actually spending the winter there in your house. And then people sometimes, so they’ll be alarmed, and they’ll say, “We’re getting invaded.” And then we also get a lot of calls in the spring. It’s oh, another invasion.

And really what’s happened is they’ve found a place to hide in your house, you forgot about them, and then in the spring they come back out, and they fly to the window so that they can get out.

Part II

SIVERTSON: Before the break, John, you were telling us about the Asian lady beetle, as it’s known, a foreign species of ladybug that now makes up, you said, half of all of the ladybugs in the world. So I’m curious for the history of how non-native ladybugs came to North America, when they got here, who brought them, and why.

LOSEY: Okay. So the main reason that we have non-native ladybugs, in fact, any sort of non-native biological control agent, starts with the idea that most of the crops that we grow here in America are not native to America, or certainly not native to the region in America where we try to grow them now.

And often when people first bring over those crops, or sometimes secondarily, there are insects that specialize in eating those crops. And so those insects come over maybe in a shipment of that crop from somewhere else, but there are many more of the herbivores, and often they come over without the natural enemies, like ladybugs, that keep them in check in their home range.

And so now they’re here. So you have a foreign crop, you’ve got a foreign pest, and there’s nothing to keep a lid on it, and they just go wild and they can have major outbreaks. So that’s the impetus on why we bring in ladybugs and other biological control agents. We call it the natural enemy release hypothesis and it’s about how they outbreak.

SIVERTSON: Yeah, we don’t often think about the crop itself that we’re trying to grow as being a foreign agent of a kind itself, and it makes sense that it would have foreign pests, and then we need foreign predators to deal with those foreign pests.

LOSEY: Absolutely.

SIVERTSON: So was there a precedent for this in the agriculture industry in America before these Asian lady beetles or foreign species of ladybugs were brought over?

Is this something we were already doing here? Yeah. So one of the first examples worldwide of classical biological control, which is the idea is you’re gonna go back to the home range of the pest, find what is keeping it under wraps there, and then bring that here, and reestablish this relationship that’s been broken by our sort of worldwide transport.

So back in 1888, which was also my first year here at Cornell. Albert Covell saw that the … He was working for USDA, and he found that the cottony cushion scale was just decimating the citrus industry in California as it was just burgeoning and just getting started. And so he went to Australia, which is where that pest is from, and he found a ladybug there, which is now known as the vedalia beetle, that was eating it and keeping it from having these terrible outbreaks.

So he brought back that ladybug, and he established it, and it worked so well that growers from around California back in that time, they allowed them to come collect their own. They would release them in their citrus orchards, and it cost a few thousand dollars back in 1888.

Obviously, that’d be worth more now, but a few thousand dollars, and it has saved that industry millions of dollars every year since then. So that’s the dream of how things should work in classical biological control.

SIVERTSON: Huh. Okay. So when was the Asian lady beetle brought to North America, and what was the problem that they were trying to address?

There were several pest problems of aphids especially that they were trying to wipe out.

SIVERTSON: And I guess I should say, who is they in this instance?

LOSEY: That’s a really good point, because this is not something that a citizen, a farmer, or even just a group of growers could get together and do.

This is all done and regulated by the USDA. And so they have labs all over the world, and they have specialists that will go out and look for the predators that are gonna attack these pests. And so it can be things like the Russian wheat aphid that was a big problem back then.

And so in the ’70s they brought over thousands of this Asian lady beetle. And it wasn’t the first. The first was actually your state insect, the seven-spot, was one of the first, that was a major spread of ladybugs in the … I’m not blaming you.

SIVERTSON: I didn’t personally do it. So I feel no offense. But yes, I had heard that our state insect here is one of these foreign ladybugs. You’ve got the native one, we’ve got a foreign one.

LOSEY: Yeah, we gotta work on that. But so they brought in the Asian ladybug, and at first, even though thousands were released, it really didn’t take very well.

It did not establish well. And there are many instances of attempted biological control programs that at first just don’t work very well. But when they do work, they’re so successful it still makes sense to keep trying. And so eventually, though, the Asian lady beetle really took off and became to where it is now.

That started in the late ’70s and into the ’80s.

SIVERTSON: I was just going to say and this is, we should say, is an alternative to pesticides, right? We are bringing in living predators as opposed to spraying these crops with something that might wipe out the pests.

Why take that approach?

LOSEY: So you’re absolutely right. And the key is that lady beetles and other predators are keeping most outbreaks of pests at bay. And so most outbreaks that could happen never happen because the predators are enough to keep them in under wraps, keep them in check.

Occasionally, you do get outbreaks of herbivorous insects that eat crops because there’s just not enough predators or not enough at the right time, and then we try to spray pesticides. The problem with spraying pesticides is, besides the idea that it might get on your food or in the water, which are real concerns, but the other problem is that once you spray the pest insects, you’re also killing off whatever predators are there, and then herbivores are really good at recolonizing, and then your predators are gone.

And so the idea is that the more that we can work with the predators and not use pesticides, then we can minimize the outbreaks. But there is always going to be a place where, for some reason the pest insects outstrip the predators, and then sometimes we have to come in, and it’s a balance of how we try to do those things.

SIVERTSON: So if these non-native species of ladybugs hadn’t been brought over to North America, what would have happened to the agriculture industry in the U.S.?

LOSEY: It probably would have, in many cases, at the very least would have been spraying a lot more often. So there would have been a higher pesticide load, and for some crops, there really aren’t good pesticide alternatives.

And so it’s not clear. It can happen that in some regions you just have to say we can’t really grow that here because this pest is too much of a problem, and there’s no real good way to control it.” And you still see that sometimes, which is a whole, could be a whole another show, but where the pest populations get resistant to whatever pesticide, and then you just can’t grow that crop anymore until either a new pesticide comes along or maybe a plant that’s resistant to that pest or maybe a new kind of predator.

SIVERTSON: So there’s no resistance to just being eaten?

LOSEY: No. Sometimes they do evolve defenses, but mostly that’s right. There’s no resistance to being eaten. And the more we can foster that, then the better off we are.

SIVERTSON: So these non-native species clearly took off in North America.

What happened to the native ladybug species as a result of that?

LOSEY: So a lot of the native species sharply declined. And they have declined to the point where there are three species that have been declared as endangered up in Canada, just across the border. And even in New York, there are species of ladybugs that are special conservation concern because they have declined so much.

And at some point they may be declared endangered or threatened here as well. And so not all the native species, but many of the native species have greatly declined. And to the point where they make up a really small part of the whole family of ladybugs that’s at the composition of ladybugs that’s there.

And that’s a concern.

SIVERTSON: So I want to understand a little more. When you say that the native species have declined, the populations have declined, were they displaced? Did they go somewhere or did the non-native species eat all of their aphids and they died out? Or are they mating with non-native species and forming, do we have a ladybug melting pot now?

What is causing the populations to decline?

LOSEY: The answer to all those questions is yes. And the non-native species are, they can be more voracious. And your seven-spot, again, not accusing you, but your seven-spot ladybug grows just a little bit faster than the nine-spot, and they’re in the same genus.

They’re both, there’s Coccinella septempunctata is the seven, and Coccinella novemnotata is the nine. And so since they can grow just a little bit faster, they have an advantage over the seven-spot. And we’ve done some work recently that shows that where the nine-spot still is, where it hasn’t been displaced by the foreign seven-spot, it tends to be in a little bit less optimal habitat.

And so they’re not going to prosper as much as the seven-spot. And so the seven-spot keeps getting more common and the nine-spot gets less common. You asked about mating, and they will, I had a grad student who worked on this, and he found they will mate with each other. So you have cross-species mating.

None of those eggs ever hatch, so you don’t get hybrids like you can see even in some butterflies. But what happens is that if a Female nine-spot ladybug gets mated by a seven-spot male, then she won’t ever mate again. And so if the population is declining anyway and they have less offspring, it just starts this sort of cycle where they start, we call it circling the drain.

And so they’re displaced out of the good habitats. They don’t grow quite as fast. There’s at low densities, this mating … can have a big impact, and they start, they can start circling the drain.

SIVERTSON: John, the word invasive gets thrown around a lot with regards to the Asian lady beetle in particular and that term, of course, has a negative connotation.

It seems to suggest that they’re causing harm by being here. Is that true?

LOSEY: Yes. So it’s a two-sided coin. They’re very effective predators. The Asian ladybug is a voracious predator, and one pest that you may have heard of in Massachusetts, the soybean aphid came in the early 2000s and really was the first major insect pest that farmers had to spray for was the soybean aphid.

One of its main predators that often keeps it in check is the Asian ladybug. So you’ve got a Asian plant, you’ve got an Asian pest, the soybean aphid, and you’ve got this Asian ladybug, and there’s that sort of combination that can be effective.

But it also causes, it causes, I can go into the problems it causes as well.

SIVERTSON: Sure, please do.

LOSEY: Oh so it, when it gets into your house, for most people that’s not a huge problem.

SIVERTSON: I don’t really think about them, but I’ve wondered if I should be thinking about them. What if they’re doing any damage to me that I don’t even know?

LOSEY: Probably not if you haven’t felt any symptoms, I’ll say. But what we found is that the Asian ladybug, a lot of ladybugs, is it’s one of the few that gets into people’s houses. And it has this behavior called reflex bleeding. And so if it gets bumped or it feels threatened, it oozes out some yellow liquid from its joints, and some people actually develop an allergy to that.

And the estimate is that about the same proportion of people that are allergic to cats are allergic to this substance that the Asian lady beetle puts out. So for most people, it’s not a problem. For some people, either because it’s just they’re unsightly, or they can stain drapes or carpets, or because they develop this allergy, it can be problematic.

The other thing that the Asian ladybug does is it loves grapes. And especially grapes that get that are gonna get turned into wine. And so at the end of the season, right about harvest time when the grapes are nice and sweet, it gets on them and it can dis-flavor the wine when that gets harvested.

Part III

SIVERTSON: Matthew McKernan is with the Department of Horticulture and Natural Resources at Kansas State University.

Aphids are one of ladybugs’ favorite foods, along with other pests like mealybugs and scale insects. And even a single tiny ladybug can make a big difference, especially in a home garden.

MATTHEW McKERNAN: Typically, an adult ladybug is going to eat over 5,000 aphids during its lifespan. And so one ladybug can really have a huge positive impact on the health of our plants by helping to control a lot of these insects that may be more damaging to the overall health and performance of our plants.

SIVERTSON: Matthew’s department at Kansas State gets a lot of gardening questions from the public, and he says one of the most common sources of confusion for people is that ladybugs don’t always look like ladybugs.

McKERNAN: Typically, it’s the larva stage of the ladybug that really provides the most shock and awe for most homeowners.

When you look at the larva stage, it almost resembles like a tiny alligator. They have a black and orange to yellow markings on their body. They’re typically flattened and tapering to a point, kind of triangular in shape, and they have short little bristles that cover the body.

SIVERTSON: Those larvae might give you the heebie-jeebies, but they are actually doing some of the same important work as the more aesthetically pleasing adult ladybugs, voraciously eating pests.

Matthew says gardeners sometimes kill them because they don’t even recognize what they’re looking at. Another thing people ask about is buying containers of ladybugs online and releasing them in your yard. Matthew says creating the right habitat is usually a better strategy.

McKERNAN: When we talk about having ladybugs in the garden and landscape, it’s really gonna be more effective and less expensive if we try to create an environment that attracts lady beetles rather than purchasing them and introducing them ourselves.

One of the most important things we can do as gardeners is to tolerate insect activity and provide food sources for these ladybugs to feed on, and that means some of our damaging insect pests that we might normally not want to tolerate in the landscape. We also need to educate ourselves on how to identify ladybugs in all of their four unique life stages and appreciate the insects themselves, as well as the insects that they feed on in order to survive.

SIVERTSON: That was Matthew McKernan, a horticulture associate at Kansas State University. And I’m joined today by John Losey, an entomologist at Cornell University and director of the Lost Ladybug Project. And John, I wanna pick up right where Matthew McKernan was right there because I had a friend who recently had a houseplant that was in a losing battle with aphids.

And he did something that I had never heard of before, which is buying live ladybugs. He got 500 live ladybugs in the mail online and he would just release them a little bit at a time. So I was not aware of this market. How did this start?

LOSEY: So this is, you can buy ladybugs online.

They’re actually incredibly cheap for large volumes of ladybugs that you can purchase and release. And this has been going on since the late 1800s, and the thing to know is that they all come from really the same place. They are not reared, so somebody’s not raising up populations of ladybugs.

They’re all collected from the mountains in the Sierra Nevadas up above the Central Valley in California. So they grow up in the Central Valley, all that great agriculture that’s there, and then they move up into these mountains, and collectors will just come and just scoop them up because they’re hibernating in huge populations, millions.

And the estimate is that billions of ladybugs are shipped all over the U.S., and it’s a $3 million a year industry. And the bottom line is that just as you were talking about, they don’t really work that well. What happens is they’ve been collected in the mountains, usually kept refrigerated, and then sent to you in Massachusetts.

And it’s a little bit different if you’re releasing them inside, but still probably not effective. But if you release those in your garden, the ladybugs think, “Oh, it’s time to wake up from my nap in the mountains. I’m gonna disperse.” And that’s exactly what they do. Those ladybugs are really not going to give you much, if any, management of your pests.

They’re not gonna eat many of your pests. And not only are they not effective, but by collecting them we’re tromping through their habitat, we’re collecting billions of these ladybugs and shipping them out, and there’s no evidence that they’re shoring up populations of that convergent lady beetle here in the East.

Throughout our whole program, we don’t pick up that many for the amount that’s being shipped. So I totally agree that the optimal strategy is not this augmentation, we call it. It’s we’re much better off with conservation, which is you can work to attract and to foster, take good care of the ladybugs that come to your garden.

SIVERTSON: Now, what kind of ladybugs are these up in the mountains in California?

LOSEY: Yeah, so they’re all one species. It’s called Hippodamia convergens, and they’re called that because they have two lines on sort of what people think it’s the head, but it’s really the neck shield, and they point towards each other, so they converge.

And they are the one species that has this habit of hanging out in the mountains for a good part of the year. So they can grow up to big populations in the Central Valley, and then they go up there. And there’s other problems associated with always collecting them. We might over-collect and just start to reduce their populations. The other problem is that like any group of organisms, they have pathogens. And so it’s possible that not only are you going to ship these ineffective ladybugs to people’s gardens, you may be spreading ladybug pathogens. And at the very least, they’re not very well adapted to live in Massachusetts.

They’re adapted to live in California with this really unique behavior. And that’s why it’s not a great idea, and I would never recommend buying and releasing these ladybugs. At least your friend putting it in the house, not sure how. I’ve not actually heard of that either.

Not sure how that would work. Sometimes they call them tunnel or hoop house production, there’s some evidence they could have an impact there. But in a open garden really not much data that would point to them being effective.

SIVERTSON: Okay, so this is a legal market, though? Okay.

LOSEY: So wildlife capture and sales is a really murky area.

And so it’s not completely clear that who’s regulating it, and there’s been, I know a lot of discussion within California whether this is technically legal or not. And I’m not a expert on California wildlife law, but my sense is that this may still be unresolved. It’s not illegal in the sense that if you buy it that you’re breaking the law, certainly not you as the customer.

And even the people, the companies that are shipping it, that’s not illegal. What’s less clear is about collecting wildlife for sale.

SIVERTSON: Yeah. Yeah, it sounds like it’s not, it might be legal, but it’s not regulated in the way that at least maybe you might want to see it regulated to make sure that we’re not over-harvesting.

LOSEY: I would say that’s right, yeah.

SIVERTSON: Okay. Yeah. And I’m thinking back to this point about ladybugs in lieu of pesticides. It sounds like maybe a more environmentally friendly option to have to bring in ladybugs instead of spraying your plants. But if we’re removing this convergent ladybug from its natural environment up in the mountains of California, are we potentially screwing up that ecosystem, or are we harming the ladybug itself?

LOSEY: So it’s not clear that we’re harming this huge population of Hippodamia convergens in California. And it’s also not completely clear that the ones that you release are having a big negative impact on your garden. It’s possible in the sense that you’re releasing, you maybe had dozens of ones that are normally in Massachusetts in your garden, and then you’re releasing 10,000 of these, these ones from California, so they could displace them.

And then there’s also concerns about are they going to bring pathogens with them? There’s not a lot of evidence that’s very common but it’s a concern. So I think, yes it’s a concern. More, I think it’s a waste of money and because they’re not very effective, and you would be better off spending that money planting some plants that they might like.

And if I could just, one group of plants that ladybugs are especially enamored of is plants in the carrot family. And the reason, and here’s where it gets a little weird. The reason is ladybugs don’t have tongues. And you’re thinking no insect has a tongue, and technically that’s true.

But if you think about things like butterflies, they have like a tongue-like structure that they can unfold like a party favor, right? And it can go deep into flowers. Bees have structures that can go into the bloom. Ladybugs don’t have anything like that. They just have teeth for catching prey.

And so plants in the carrot family, think dill, coriander they have very shallow flowers that are more like dishes as opposed to long-stem champagne glasses. And so ladybugs then get attracted to those plants. They can have a sip of nectar, and just like us when we’re hyped up on donuts, they get hyped up on this sugary nectar, and they’re even more effective predators.

So there are things that we can do to attract and nurture these ladybugs in our gardens.

SIVERTSON: Yeah, create that environment as Matthew McKernan from Kansas State was saying. So how do we conserve native species of ladybugs? Separate from attracting them to our particular garden, what can we do for native ladybugs?

LOSEY: One thing that I like to say is it’s a common phrase, that rising tide raises all beetles. And so the things that you could do in your garden, like putting in some of these flowering plants, especially for ladybugs in the carrot family, and maybe not using pesticides or using them very judiciously and learning what all the stages look like and not squishing them because they look like scary monsters.

All those things are gonna help all lady beetles, and then some are gonna be native, some are gonna be foreign, but they’re all gonna benefit And so that’s one way, general. The other thing that we can do and we’ve done as part of The Lost Ladybug Project is we can keep a colony of the nine-spot  in our lab that we’re rearing, and we can, as opposed to sending in ladybugs from far off in California, we can actually rear and put out for school groups or through the county extension, they can do releases of these ladybugs in public gardens.

So maybe we can help the native ladybugs reestablish in various places and then they can get a … hold and they can come back and be more important part of the ladybug family.

SIVERTSON: John Losey we’re running out of time here, but because you mentioned The Lost Ladybug Project, this is a citizen science project where you’re asking people to go out and collect pictures of ladybugs.

Since that’s founding, since the founding of that project, what picture have you been able to capture about the, the native ladybug in North America today?

LOSEY: So what the not so good news is that native ladybug populations have greatly declined over time from before we had the releases of the ones from other countries.

The good news is that for essentially all of those native species that are declined, we still find pockets where they’re hanging on and they’re thriving. So there’s hope.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.