(theme song playing) ♪♪ - [Walt] Coming up on Mississippi Roads, we look at bugs.

We look into the migration of the monarch butterfly through Mississippi, go along with the research group as they survey bats, and visit the Mississippi Animalogical Museum.

All that coming up now on Mississippi Roads.

♪♪ Hi, I'm Walt Grayson.

Welcome to Mississippi Roads.

We're out taking a walk through nature this time.

We're at the Flowood Nature Park enjoying the trees and plants, the wildlife, (laughs) and the bugs Can't get away from bugs in Mississippi, especially this time of year.

Some people say we have our fair share of bugs here.

I'm beginning to think we have maybe more than our fair share.

But that's okay because we're doing this entire show about insects and we're going to start off with one that I wouldn't necessarily call it rare, but we only see it a couple of times a year here, and that's when it migrates through going from Mexico to Canada and then later in the year when it migrates back through going from Canada back to Mexico.

That's the monarch butterfly.

Now, the monarch has come up on some obstacles over the years.

In our first story, we're going to find out, among other things, how maybe we can help these little fellows along their way.

♪♪ ♪♪ - We have noticed that over the last 30 years, monarch butterflies have declined by between 90% and 95%.

Each individual species has its own niche in our world, and they all do something a little bit different.

Some things we deem as valuable, some things we don't.

But they all have a role to play.

Without insects, our plants can't reproduce, and without plants we can't live.

They contribute to our biodiversity, of which Mississippi has one of the highest levels of biodiversity on the planet.

The more species that you have and that are able to exist in your ecosystem, the healthier your ecosystem is.

What makes monarch butterflies unique is that, unlike any insect in the world, to our knowledge, they are the only insect that undergoes a cross-continental migration twice a year.

And they fly every year from southern Canada down to south central Mexico.

In the mountains there are these forests that are comprised of Oyamel fir trees, and the monarchs seek out those fir trees and they congregate as adults and spend the entire winter down there by the millions.

And so that occurs, and throughout the fall they are migrating from south-central Canada down through Mississippi.

We usually start to see them in Mississippi at the end of August, beginning of September.

By the end of October, they're out of here.

They're down on the Coast, or they've already made it to Mexico.

Monarch butterflies, like a lot of other insects, are connected to particular plant species.

They depend on a host plant in order to rear up their larvae as food.

That's what they use for food, and to provide that habitat for the caterpillar in order for them to reach adulthood.

So monarch butterflies seek out their host plant, which are members of the milkweed family.

They seek out milkweed plants to lay their eggs on.

And they seek out those plants because those are the only plants that the caterpillars can use as a food source.

So once that egg hatches into a caterpillar, think The Hungry, Hungry Caterpillar, they eat and eat and eat and eat that milkweed plant until they reach their full caterpillar size.

And at that point, they will pupate or form a chrysalis and then emerge into an adult monarch butterfly.

♪♪ ♪♪ So the primary reason for their decline is loss of habitat.

For the monarchs, they require their host plant, milkweeds, and they require nectar plants.

And because their migration occurs in the central United States, land use change from forests and prairies to agricultural landscapes has been the biggest reason for decline of the monarch butterflies.

The bulk of our crops are bioengineered to be able to withstand the application of herbicide.

So the widespread application of herbicide kills not only the weeds, but it also kills the host plants and the nectar plants for monarchs and a variety of other insects.

So one of the things that we can do is to create habitat for monarch butterflies.

And while we may never be able to restore the large-scale areas that monarchs depend on throughout the central United States, there is something that we can do that, if enough people do it, can make a significant difference, and that is planting native milkweeds to serve as host plants for monarch butterflies and to plant other native wildflowers that will fuel their migration.

♪♪ - I went to a presentation at a MEEA conference, Mississippi Environmental Educator Association, and there was a man talking about the monarchs and you feed them milkweed.

And I'm going, wait, I've got milkweed in my field.

And so when I came back from that conference, I walked out in the field and started looking at my milkweed and I found eggs.

And I probably had 30 or 40 milkweed plants in my field.

And they will gradually spread, but they mostly spread through the pods.

You think they're going to take over your yard.

They are not, and you don't want them all over your yard, you just don't let them go into the seed pod.

Okay, these are the seed pods of the milkweed plant.

They will get bigger, they will turn brown.

And as they start splitting open, I'll come out and gather them and then get the seeds out.

And each of these pods will contain about 100 seeds.

And I save these seeds to plant and give away to people.

They only lay eggs on milkweed, so if we don't have the milkweed, we don't have the monarchs.

- [Kids] Wow!

There they are.

- Miss Kay came and she taught the kids where the butterflies migrate to, how they die, how only so many of them, you know, end up alive.

Only, I think, two or three of them ended up living.

- So along with protecting our own-- our own personal property, our yards, we can also protect our public land.

And one of the places that native plants have been able to exist is our roadsides.

And Mississippi's roadsides host a diversity of different plant species, including milkweeds.

And if we manage those properly to accommodate the monarch migration, those can be very fruitful habitats.

And you can find monarch caterpillars by the hundreds, if not thousands, on a single Mississippi road.

The fact that we can take whatever landscape we have, whether it's acreage, whether it's our roadsides, our neighborhoods, our apartment terraces, and create a space that is beneficial to something so unique as the monarch migration.

And I think it's something that we should not take for granted.

- Well, as we just saw in that last story, one of the barriers that monarch butterflies face are its predators.

And although the predator that we're featuring in this next story doesn't necessarily eat butterflies, they do eat moths and other insects, lots of other insects.

And yet the bat is not always a welcome sight.

And they should be.

We're about to join up with the Mississippi Bat Working Group.

They show us how they study and appreciate bats in Mississippi.

♪♪ ♪♪ - I started working with bats about 20 years ago.

And, you know, it's one of those things.

I always knew I wanted to be a wildlife biologist.

From the time I was 14, I wanted to be a wildlife biologist, and my interest was mammals.

And I've never really thought that much about bats.

I'd see them once in a while flying around, but I never really thought too much about them.

But once I saw them up close and I started catching them for research purposes and taking measurements, it just changed everything.

I'm just fascinated with them now.

- They're fascinating animals.

They're not really like any other mammals we have.

Just in the fact that they can fly, for one.

And so if you ever just sit and watch a bat fly, they're not just straight out flying.

They're aerial acrobats.

Just pursuing insects and just watching them fly is amazing that they can move that quickly and turn that quickly.

And the fact that they're using echolocation.

- It's commonly thought that bats are blind.

Well, that's not true.

All bats can see.

However, when they feed at night, they use echolocation to find their prey.

And this works a lot like sonar.

Pulses are emitted, bounce off of the object, in this case, the insect, relay that information back to the bat.

And the bat knows that there's an insect, and it goes after that insect.

(bats squeaking) - There's so many benefits that bats can provide.

We have 15 bat species here in Mississippi, and they're all insectivores.

So they all eat insects and they eat a huge number of insects every single night, including mosquitoes.

Little brown bats, for example.

They've been known to eat up to a thousand mosquitoes in one hour.

So it's just amazing the amount that they eat.

They can eat half of their body weight in a night.

And actually, pregnant females and nursing moms can eat up to 100% of their body weight in one night.

So if you can imagine where we would be right now if we didn't have bats, I mean, the mosquitoes-- the mosquitoes can already feel kind of bad.

So if we didn't have bats, I mean, we'd just be inhaling mosquitoes, I think.

So that's a huge benefit that they provide.

There's organic farmers that are also using bats to eat pests on their farms so that they don't have to use pesticides.

- Bats are extremely important ecologically.

So they're very important to farmers and very important to foresters because they eat a lot of forest insects.

Some bats eat large beetles.

Some bats eat mostly moths.

And sometimes they're opportunistic.

It depends on what kind of animals are out to be eaten.

- The Mississippi Bat Working Group started about 20 years ago, and it's comprised of a lot of different folks from federal agencies, state agencies, private nonprofits and students, and then people just interested in bats.

- And our primary mission is to support bats through conservation education and also to support the efforts of the state in bat conservation.

- We have several events that are held annually.

We have our annual meeting, which takes place in January or February of each year.

We also have an annual mist net event.

Each year we go to a different area of the state to survey and put up mist nets, which is a common survey method for studying bats.

- During our mist net event, we pick an area of the state and try to sample the bat species in that area over a two-night period where we'll actually go out and hang up nets, typically over streams or in trail corridors and catch bats as they're flying.

Bats as a group have been very under-surveyed, and so the overall purpose of the mist net event is just to kind of confirm the distribution of bats throughout the state.

- It's a great opportunity, not only to find out what bats are using that area, but it's also a chance for people that don't have a lot of bat experience to come out and see what a mist net survey is, how you do it, and get a close up look of bats.

We also have an annual culvert survey which happens every winter, and that's when usually teams of 2 to 3 people, we split up all over the state and survey different culvert routes for bats.

Bats a lot of times in the winter will use culverts.

- These culverts are being used by bats as hibernacula.

And so it's a way that we can monitor the bat population, or certain species of bats, during the winter in their hibernacula.

- Most species of bats will roost in large colonies, and they're always going to come back those colonies.

So there's something very human-like among bats.

- The females will come back to that same roost with their female offspring, a lot of times, from the previous year.

So the colony just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

The culvert blitz happens in the winter and then the bridge blitz happens in the summer.

And we just had our first annual bridge blitz.

We all split up into teams of 2 to 3 people all across the state.

We had nine different routes this year and we surveyed different bridges.

We surveyed a total of 71 bridges.

You simply go under the bridge, you use spotlights and headlamps and look in crevices and underneath the bridge and everywhere you can, really, to either find bats or find evidence of bats like guano.

You listen for them, sometimes they're in tiny cracks that you can't see.

So you listen to them.

And actually, people that do a lot of bat work, you can get to where you can smell them, actually, especially if it's a big group of bats.

There's kind of an ammonia smell to the roost.

We found some great sites with bats in it that we didn't previously know was there, including a couple of bridges that were housing bats that are species of greatest conservation needs.

So there were some rare species that we found as well during the Blitz.

- We tend to think a bat is a bat, and that's really not true because there's just so much diversity there.

There's over 1,400 species of bats worldwide.

And they're an incredibly diverse group.

I mean, our North American bats are insectivores.

But if you look at other parts of the world, they fill different niches.

There are components in vampire bat saliva that prevent clotting.

And researchers have taken that saliva and analyzed it and looked at those components and can use it now in the treatment of strokes and treatment of clots in humans.

And that's one of the reasons that biodiversity itself is important, is because there's so much we don't know.

If vampire bats had become extinct 100 years ago, we would never have found that.

Everything is interrelated on this planet.

We may not know those relationships, but different species are dependent on each other.

There's so much that we don't know about how natural systems work and there's so little we understand.

And if we lose species, we'll never understand them.

You also may never find out what that species currently contributes or could contribute.

- Well, in that previous story, we found out you can learn a lot about nature if you just look close.

Well, in this final story, we go to an institution where they spend a lot of time looking very close at a lot of bugs.

We're visiting the Mississippi Entomological Museum at Mississippi State University, where they show us their impressive collection of insects from not only Mississippi, but all over the Southeast.

Well, actually, from all over the world in some instances.

And some of these specimens date back to the 1800s.

Let's creep in and take a look.

♪♪ ♪♪ - We're in the Mississippi Entomological Museum on the campus of Mississippi State University in Starkville, Mississippi.

Today we're having our annual insect fair, Mississippi State Insect Fair.

We bring in third graders from around the state to learn about insects.

They get exposed to our museum here.

They learn about honeybees and insect rearing, aquatic insects, all different manner of things.

- So how many people are used to eating these things?

- [Kids] Me!

- Well, they're not just for eating.

They also live their own lives.

They can live up to, like, ten years.

Snappy, here, may be as old as you guys.

- Insects are a huge part of our biodiversity, big part of our ecosystems.

And as a college instructor, I get a lot of students in my classes that take my Intro to Insects class.

And it's always they're blown away by the impact that insects have and their different varied roles in the world.

And so it's somewhat of a shame that they don't learn that from an earlier age.

- (teacher speaking indistinctly) They do not bite.

They do not fly or sting.

You can touch them.

- [Kids] Oh!

Oh my goodness!

- So entomology is a huge field of study and it is really indicative of understanding the biodiversity of a habitat.

The museum, we can think of, has three separate branches.

We have the collection here, which is what I focus on, is in curating and specimen identification.

We also have an outreach portion called Mississippi Bug Blues, and that is specifically outreach through K through 12 students in order to get them interested in science and entomology as a whole.

We also have the lab, which is the research field team.

They're more in the fieldwork portion of the museum.

They will actually go out and collect insects through various grant projects that we have.

- So our collections are largely from the Southeast.

A lot of scientists, entomologist, they want to travel to the tropics, remote areas, you know, the tropics, that's where you always hear a lot of the biodiversity is.

But that being said, there's still a lot to be found here in the Southeast.

In the last 6 years, I've described 25 new species of grasshopper from the Southeast alone.

So there's still a lot to be found right here in our own backyard.

And that's the real strength of our collection.

How big is your collection?

So that's the question we get asked a lot and we are approaching 2 million specimens, which puts us in a pretty good category for a university collection.

And we add about 30,000 to 40,000 specimens a year.

We have a really active field program, so we are actively growing and expanding the collection.

We have specimens going back to the late 1800s from Mississippi.

Some of those came out of the historic teaching collection or some research material from the University collection.

Most of those are from, actually they're labeled as AG College, Mississippi.

That was the previous name of Mississippi State University.

We house, also, extinct or endangered species.

The Prairie Mole Cricket is the largest cricket in Mississippi.

Its main distribution is the Great Plains.

Though there are two specimens, one from the late 1800s and one from the early 1900s from Mississippi.

We have one of them here in our collection.

The other one is in the Smithsonian in Washington.

And, you know, those are the only known records of that species, I think, east of the Mississippi River.

And those records come from areas that historically had prairie here in Mississippi, something that I have gone out and searched for a lot in our prairies and have not found.

So it may actually be extrapated or extinct in Mississippi now.

We also have, that we acquired from another collection, and I was thinking it was primarily going to be a grasshopper collection, but it turned out there were a lot of butterflies in there.

And then when I started looking through, they were 12 specimens of the Xerces Blue in that collection.

And the Xerces Blue is the first insect known to go extinct due to human activities.

In fact, there's a conservation organism that focuses on butterflies and pollinators called The Xerces Society that takes its name from that butterfly.

And lo and behold, in that collection, there were 12 specimens of it.

So that was a really neat find.

And we house them here now.

Collections are basically the physical record of life on earth.

The specimens in this museum, they're not just dead insects on pins.

They have a label under them that tells you when, where, who, how that insect was collected.

We have specimens in our collection that go back to the 1800s.

You can get pollen, pesticide residue, DNA, all of that out of the specimens.

Gut conent, see what those insects were eating, all these things.

So there's just all kinds of data that you can get out of these insect specimens here.

- Well, that's all the time we have for this show.

If you'd like information about anything you've seen, contact us at: And while you're at it, check out the Mississippi Public Broadcasting Facebook page and check out our Mississippi Roads Facebook page, too.

Till next time, I'm Walt Grayson.

I'll be seeing you on Mississippi Roads.

♪♪