Kid Scientists Track Lost Ladybugs

July 13, 2013

Seven-year-old Tess Foster isn’t really a bug person.

"I don’t know, since I was a little kid I was kind of scared  of them," she says.

But she is one of a handful of kids participating in a citizen science workshop put on by the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania. "We’re doing a ladybug project, where you have to find ladybugs," says Foster.

In recent decades the distribution of ladybug species across North America has been changing dramatically and scientists are trying to figure out why. They’re doing so by compiling one of the largest and most geographically widespread ladybug databases in existence, and they’re using  citizens to help them build it.

The group spans out across the lawn of the Beaver Area Memorial Library, northwest of Pittsburgh. The kids, all under age 8, and their parents, peer through the library’s manicured gardens and the scraggly brush of a nearby park. They have bug boxes, magnifying glasses, and photos to help them ID different species of ladybugs by their spots.

But before unleashing the kids outside into bug-hunting mode, Audubon Society environmental educator Ryan Stauffer gave a short presentation on the goals of the project.

"We want to give the scientists mountains of data. From a scientist’s perspective, it’s like heaven," Stauffer tells the room of six participants. Getting those "mountains of data," he says, is where citizen scientists come in.

This workshop and a couple others put on by the Audubon Society throughout the Pittsburgh area this summer are part of a much larger data-gathering effort called the Lost Ladybug Project.

The project was started at Cornell University 13 years ago by a couple of researchers who wanted to understand how and why the numbers and locations of ladybugs across the U.S. were changing. In recent decades, for example, the native nine-spotted ladybug, or C-9, has gone from being one of the most common to an incredibly rare species.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the decline in the C-9 coincided with the population growth of another ladybug species, known as the seven-spotted ladybug. "This a close cousin of the 9-spotted, but this one was introduced from Europe, so it is not a native one," says Stauffer.

The seven-spotted ladybug was repeatedly introduced in the U.S. to control crop-eating aphids that were big pests to agriculture, and it's now one of the most common species here. Scientists fear that losing diversity of native species might compromise how well ladybugs overall can do their job—eating about 5,000 aphids each during their one-year lifespan. The notion the C-7’s are overtaking the C-9’s, though, is only a theory. Stauffer says scientists have yet to prove it.

"You can’t just say, 'Oh, I’ve noticed that this bug has been decreased.' We can’t just go on someone’s opinion. Whenever you go out and take pictures of them, that’s the facts," he says.

Getting the facts involves finding ladybugs, taking photos, and uploading the findings to the Lost Ladybug Project website. It’s an ideal project for kids, Stauffer says, because it’s so simple and it gets them out exploring. For the under-10 crowd, he says, science should be more Indiana Jones than Albert Einstein.

Back outside the library, Stauffer and the kids find just one specimen. They gather around to discuss.

"You see any spots on that one?" Stauffer asks as the group peers into the bug box.

"Not really, no," says Tess Foster, positioning the ladybug so she can get a better look.

"I don’t see any spots either," Stauffer says. "This is an Asian ladybug."

It is an example of a non-native species and a tiny new piece of data to add to the mix. With knowledge like this, the Lost Ladybug Project is creating one of largest and most geographically diverse ladybug databases in existence.  As of July 11, there were 21,707 ladybugs accounted for.