Honey Locusts: Unraveling Ecological and Cultural Connections with Dr. Robert Warren

Dr. Robert Warren is a professor at SUNY Buffalo and heads the Warren lab. His research focuses on species interactions in a changing climate. That is, not only how habitat drives individual species distributions, but how habitat drives the interactions between species within and across these distributions. Such endeavors include niche theory, dispersal, community ecology, climate change and inferential statistics. Some of his interests include how the mutualism between plants and seed-dispersing ants changes with climate; how humans facilitate exotic invasive plants; how Native Americans dispersed trees; how habitat facilitates plant pathogens and how ants and termites interact and impact forest decomposition. Check out his research here.

Andy:

Hi Robert, Thanks so much for taking some time to chat with us. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work?

Dr. Robert Warren:

Sure, sure. So I am an associate professor at Buffalo State. In Buffalo, my area of research really falls under the heading of global change ecology. I'm very interested in habitat fragmentation, climate change, and species invasion and how those three things interact. Oftentimes that work involves plants and ants and mostly and it's not necessarily that I have an affinity for those but they are very useful for testing hypotheses and you usually don't need permits for either one, so I do a lot with those interesting the plants I thought was pretty obvious, at least to me, but the ants is kind of interesting.

Andy:

Can you explain a little bit deeper about that?

Dr. Robert Warren:

Sure. So for my dissertation work, I was trying to explain the distribution of these two plants using just tons of data. We had 10,000 plants, we had all the environmental data and I still couldn't explain why one was doing better than the other. And one day I was loading some equipment into my truck and they were a bunch of ants dispersed. But I thought, what if it's the ants? And along the shore, they drop seed at different times and they are south of the main and disperser, so probably post-glacial maximum, as warmed, the ants made it north faster than these plants, these very early seed-dropping plants. And really at that point, you could explain their disappearance from the south better by the fact that these ants had left than by their abiotic requirements. And I just was hooked.

And ants, oh geez, they. You know, in terms of looking at they're impacted by habitat fragmentation, they're ubiquitous, they're everywhere. They're ecosystem engineers, their thermal tolerance is not hard to measure, they're invasive, you know, I mean, they just are like my favorite guinea pigs ever. And now you're the ant guy. You know, I guess we all end up finding our favorite guinea pig. And for the ants, they're mine.

Andy:

So I guess we'll start with the ant. You know I was skimming through some of your papers. I'd found you and we talked a little bit about it earlier that you had written or done some research on honey locusts and the indigenous peoples of North America and how they had played into that dispersal of the seeds, which I'm assuming means ants didn't have much to do with those seeds. I guess, with all the work you've been doing with ants, what are some of the major findings you've been finding in your research?

Dr. Robert Warren:

Yeah, I think what I find fascinating is that, typically my research almost 99% would be on seed-dispersing ants, and so these are ants that have co-evolved, or probably the plants have co-evolved more than them. They trick or induce the ants to disperse their seeds, and this was discovered in 1906 in Germany. So it's a very old or well-known mutualism and I think sometimes when that happens we forget to keep looking for new things. And so two things I've been very interested in; One I don't think the ants need the plants, so to call it mutualism is a misnomer. I think the ants are being tricked by the plants, and you know to try and not go on to too many tangents, but you know, eusociality is so successful, or this adaptation by certain insects to have roles and to work together is so incredibly successful.

I think it's easy for them to be exploited because they have so much extra energy. You know, not that different than humans, people don't realize. The only reason that we have skyscrapers and can conduct war is because we have so much excess energy, because we work together so well. Even as much shitheals as we can be, we still are. You know, we work together, and the same with ants. They can be exploited, and it just doesn't cost them that much. The second thing is they don't move the seeds very far, so I've always been intrigued about what might be the stronger benefit, and I've more and more concluded it's fungal or pathogen protection. The ground living in moist conditions, they're very susceptible to pathogenic fungi, and so they constantly exude antimicrobial compounds, and it seems that a byproduct of that is that they accidentally protect the seeds from fungal pathogens. And so I have two students finishing up projects on this right now, and they both support the idea that these microbial soil effects are potentially huge. And so you know this is far afield from where I started with ants.

But as it tends to work in science, as you peel that onion you just keep getting more. And I'll finish as part of all of that, I've fallen into a discovery that there are quite a few. We're finding oak gall species that have convergenously evolved. Sorry, I don't know if that can be used as a verb, so let me back up. There's a convergent evolution. Whereas gulls, which are a growth induced by insects on plants to protect their eggs and oftentimes feed their larvae, these wasps induce oaks to produce galls that drop from the tree with a second organ on that gall to attract ants, to retrieve them back to the nest, exactly like seeds. So this appears to be a much wider phenomenon than we've ever known and that's actually a very new discovery. That paper is in review right now, but it just speaks to this magic of ecology, this complexity, and the fact that we can still find new stuff. It's just yeah, that's why I get up in the morning.

Andy:

I feel like ecology somehow, despite it being the most natural thing that we could have researched for the longest amount of time, also seems to be the one that there's the most opportunity for research, and in some cases, you don't even necessarily need to be an expert to dig into that kind of stuff. Like I said before we were recording, I have sheep, and one of the things I do is I do a lot of tree hay and that's kind of a lost art of harvesting branches and all of that that goes into making it palatable for the sheep throughout the year.

So much of that information about what's edible, and what isn't is lost, and so much of the things about like acorns and all these other nuts and what we can utilize them for has been largely lost because of, probably and it's probably just been like the last hundred years or so. As you know, industrial agriculture has kind of taken off and everyone was told to scale up or don't farm anymore within just a couple of generations. So much has been lost.

Dr. Robert Warren:

Yeah, it's a great Well, and of course, they package it and deliver it in barrels. You know whatever energy you need. I found a reference in the early 1900s that apparently folks used to gather these galls, these oak galls, and they were so nutritious they would get a bucket full and feed it to livestock.

Andy:

Huh, yeah, that makes sense. I mean, there's so much nutrient in the oak, the acorn. Rather, all you're doing is essentially the equivalent of like, almost like a black soldier fly bucket. If you're familiar with those? They essentially feed black soldier flies and the larvae fall out the bottom and then the chickens can eat them.

Dr. Robert Warren:

It's like the same concept very much, except with acorns. Insects are so incredibly abundant and so full of nutrition that you know I've eaten some insects. It was fine, I don't, you know, I can't see ever changing my diet too much.

Andy:

Maybe I'm too old, but you know there's a lot of potential energy in insects and insects, and if we can use that or utilize it in a way to feed livestock if we don't want to eat it, that's equally as good. But to get back to this idea of seed dispersal, I want to talk a little bit about the research that you did with the honey locusts because they're one of my favorite trees and I could talk about them all day because I think they are the untapped potential tree. I think there's a reason why your research pointed to what you found and I want to talk about it more. So could you tell us a little bit about that paper you did on the indigenous people of North America and the honey locusts?

Dr. Robert Warren:

Yeah, absolutely. So this one came about and again, I think you know natural history has been kind of stripped from ecology and I would argue we need to bring it back. You know, maybe we're not going to publish papers on descriptions, but I think that field observation is crucial to being a good ecologist and so you know I'm a nerd and I'm always watching if I'm out in the wild area. You know, you know I'm always watching. And so growing up in the Midwest, mainly Indiana, you know I was trying to think about this today. When did honey locusts hit my radar, I really couldn't tell. I can remember being a kid and breaking off the thorny bunches and chasing my buddies around and then chasing my sister around and having to sit at the bad boy picnic table, things like this. Because when you're a young boy, what could be more fascinating than those gnarly bunches of super sharp thorns?

I'm always amazed, um, and then at some point, you know, becoming aware of the fact that those trees are, were probably adapted to, uh, megafauna, great plains kind of thing, something that would, would, um, you know, bark scrapers like maybe some sort of rhinoceros, and then those pods clearly are geared towards some large megafauna that would swallow and hold. And so, you know, honey locusts were on my radar, kind of like your favorite tree, I would notice them.

And there was one day a lot of my research was in the southern Appalachian mountains, mostly North Carolina, and one day it just hit me that every you know, they're not a common tree in the mountains, they're a plains tree. And one day it hit me that every time I saw a honey locust I could throw a rock and hit an archaeological site. And I thought is there a connection between Cherokee and honey locusts? And I actually went and talked to somebody at Western Carolina University that knows a little bit more and they were like, oh, absolutely, they use the pods for sugar. And so I started to do some research. And sure enough, you know it's pretty well documented that, you know, the pods were boiled, that sugary substance between the outside and the actual seeds embedded within which is sticky I mean, just to get on your hands is sticky. That was, that was sugar.

And you know, I think for us modern folks we don't remember the fact that honeybees are a non-native invasive species and so they would not have been available for honey back pre-contact. So you know, honey locusts would have been a major source of contact. So you know, honey locusts would have been a major source. And so at that point, I became very fascinated with the idea that these trees could be a legacy of the Cherokee that this could be.

You know, and you know, there's always so many little tangents. You could go on, but I think as North Americans, we forget, or we think of in terms of archaeology, that we're going to see a stone pyramid. And if you don't see a stone pyramid, then nobody was really here. But of course, the indigenous people of North America used a lot of wood that doesn't last and of course a lot of things that might persist, such as roads we've paved over. So you know, we just sort of glommed on to what was here. So the fact that this was this legacy that I might be able to decipher the pattern of hooked me like a fish. I was like, yeah, this is worth investigating, and um and so yeah, that's a long answer, but that's what got me into it.

Andy:

So what? What exactly did you find? I know you were talking a little bit earlier before we recorded about, um, the process of trying to prove and disprove some of the stuff that people had assumed about how the honey locusts had traveled and what your research found yeah, okay, how do you link these two?

Dr. Robert Warren:

That was a little bit difficult because archaeology, archaeological sites, are secret for good reason, because of people stealing things and so I couldn't just get a map of where the Cherokee were. I also didn't want to know too much before I surveyed the honey locusts because I didn't want to be biased towards finding them where the Native Americans were. So it kind of went an iterative process. But the long and the short of it is, honey locusts only occur where there were Native Americans, and of course, native Americans, just like modern, were clustered around water and flat places, clustered around water and flat places. Again, we tend to think, or at least a lot of folks tend to think, of Native Americans as being these lone hunters in the woods, these nomadic, and that's just not the case. They were farming, they were settled and honey locusts were a crop.

Three major honey locust orchards were known, one in what's now Franklin, North Carolina, one in South Carolina, and one in Georgia. And the one in Franklin was right where the Little Tennessee and the Coliseja River came together there was sort of an island created by the two rivers, and the Coliseja is the Cherokee word for honey locust. Interestingly enough, the colonists thought it meant sugar or sweet. So a lot of places where there were honey locusts are now called Sugar Cove, sugar Lane and things like that, which is again another legacy of the planting of these honey locust trees. So I mean it's the pattern is just strikingly clear. And what I did as sort of a control is I also looked at honey locust association with post-Cherokee settlements, colonial settlements, which tend to be further from the water, because then you have piping and things like that and still flat or relatively flat in the mountains, and there's just no association whatsoever. These were clearly linked to Cherokee and Cherokee planting.

Andy:

From my own research, one of the things I've found on this subject is that there seems to be a lot of evidence that the honey locusts that were planted around Cherokee sites also generally had higher sugar production. J Russell Smith and John Hershey in Pennsylvania had done these big, essentially campaigns to try to get the honey locusts with the highest sugar content, persimmons, and so on. A lot of these American indigenous trees and all the ones that came with the highest sugar content were, from what I had read, near Native American sites. So, the Big Fatty sugar honey locust which I think has about 37, 38% sugar in the pods, was directly from a Cherokee site. Which I thought was interesting, that they were not only taking them but also selectively breeding them.

Dr. Robert Warren:

Not surprising, they weren't dumb.

I always want to be careful. The science suggests that the Cherokee came from maybe the Delaware area, so they were in Iroquois, and you can see that a lot in the language and in the way they built palisades for the towns, the way they built palisades for the towns. The Cherokee themselves believe they rose in place, and so I don't want to question their religion, but generally, I go with the science, whatever the culture is. So you know, and so this pattern should hold true in the northeast as well, and that hasn't been investigated, but it does look like the technology of using honey locusts for sugar was an Iroquois invention, which is really fascinating too.

Andy:

Yeah, one of the things I've noticed is I've tried looking online for some academic evidence of how it was utilized, like how they harvested the sugar. I know that in a lot of cases, they just scooped it out, but I'm assuming that there was some processing method to store it. But, I've never been able to find any research or academic anything on it, so I wasn't sure if maybe you've heard or read anything about it.

Dr. Robert Warren:

It was either lost, I think, they may have boiled it. If I remember correctly, they boiled the sugar, which would have made it into a liquid. But how they stored it, that's a great question.

There's some great publications, but things such as if lightning ever struck a honey locust, that was super important and so all of the fragments of the tree would be planted with crops because it was believed that would help your crops. There's also a story of a chief who wanted to test the character of someone who was visiting. So he put honey locust under the seat and if you were not poked by the honey locust you were of good character. So it had some mystical properties as well. And it was important. Because there's another case of a chief whose sons had gotten into a wrestling match and he was letting it go because he wanted to sort of, I guess, assess which of his sons was stronger. In the course of their wrestling match, they bumped into his honey locust and he ended it right there because damaging the honey locust was not allowed. So they were an important tree yeah.

Andy:

I mean, you know it's one of those trees. You think about it from all the different perspectives. You have a leaf that is, you know, 20% protein, which is pretty rare. It's fast-growing dense wood, which is pretty rare. You've got the sugar pods, which it's one of the only perennials that I know of that can provide sugar and lots of it. It sends up suckers, so if you need to chop it down because you're getting firewood, it'll come right back up from the same roots. I mean, it's hard to beat a tree that can do all those things.

Dr. Robert Warren:

It's a great tree. I know it's, you know, and it's always sad to me. Well, it's fascinating. So if you think about the fact that it was co-evolved and, you know, interacted with megafauna that is now extinct was sort of you know. So, essentially, that baton was dropped, was picked up by Indigenous people who again dispersed it everywhere. It came to the mountains of North Carolina through folk people, not megafauna. And then now you know the variety without thorns is one of the most common street trees, it's everywhere. I'm always a little sad. I would rather have the thorns. It seems a little emasculated without them, but it's still a great tree.

Andy:

Yeah, yeah, it is. I mean the thorns, and that's the other thing. You can use them for hedgerows if you're trying to keep animals in with the thorns.

Dr. Robert Warren:

They are. I remember when I was working on this project I also worked with the Cherokee Nation to get permission to get on certain properties and they thought it was funny that I wanted to study the tree because they just see it as a nuisance. After all, the thorns can go through a tractor tire. But they also knew that it was sweet. And it was the only folks, other than maybe yourself and a couple of others, that I've ever met that were aware of that property, which to me shows still some sort of legacy of connection with the land or the plants.

Andy:

You know, we get these glimpses, like the osage orange, the locusts. There's this handful of trees that somehow, for whatever reason, just refuse to go extinct, and it seems like they're kind of on their last you know last breath at this point. But they shouldn't be, because they have so much utilization and we just have to rethink about how we can utilize them.

Dr. Robert Warren:

So yesterday, no day before yesterday, I was hiking in the Niagara Gorge, which for those that aren't familiar would be the Niagara River, just below Niagara Falls, and it gets very narrow and fast and it's a really neat little area. And at the end of the trail, right before there's a dam, there's this huge Osage Orange, gorgeous Osage Orange, and I'm like how the hell did it get here? This is not where I would have ever expected an Osage Orange. But again, you know, indigenous folks moved it around because you know the wood is so good for bows. I mean, is there better wood for bows? I've never heard of it. And of course, then the colonists liked it for hedgerows because the livestock would eat those big fruits. And so you know, again, it's fascinating that we've sort of picked up the baton after the extinction of their dispersers.

Andy:

You know, there's just something to be said about it A tree that has lived for that many millions of years and to be like we're not going to we're just going to let it go extinct on its own or not going to do anything about it, Just seems. Seems unethical.

Dr. Robert Warren:

I agree, I agree, I'm fascinated with all those megafaunals, you know, that are still putting out fruit for extinct animals. I mean, I guess maybe they're more optimistic than we are. We'll keep putting it out, you're coming back right?

Andy:

It's like Waiting for Godot.

One of the really interesting things about the osage orange and the honey locust, uh, and even the black locust, is that even though they're primarily you could call them southern trees, um, southern central trees, whatever, their hardiness range is very extreme. I think all of them can make it to about zone five, four, somewhere around there, which seems way out of place, especially based on what we were just talking about, that they, you know that that natural range, even with indigenous people, their range wasn't very far. And that probably speaks to the fact that these species survived the Ice Age.

And you know, you think about where glaciation went down. They were right on the edge, if they could travel quickly, they'd probably be sharing the forest with, like the alpine forests, just because that's the climate they had originally evolved from. So, as we think about climate change and I know you've done a lot of research on this subject area, is there anything we can learn from or any way we can utilize or think about these species as ways to move forward and deal with the ecological damages that are coming from climate change in terms of, like, how we can adapt species for the or ecologies for that future.

Dr. Robert Warren:

Yeah, that's a great question and it's so, you know. Another thing that I'm very fascinated with that you've touched upon is, maybe when you're a young ecologist or naturalist, you tend to think of things as right now. And I think even if you look at the history of ecology or plant biology, you know the original theories, things like climax, forest, and succession, were based on a single point in time, a very short period, like space, mattered more than time change. We've all become aware that this is just a moment and that really to say that there's a fixed plant community is pretty much folly. I didn't get hired for a job because I said in the job interview that I think that all plant communities are transient for a long time and they didn't care for that. They wanted a traditional but anyway.

So those things had to have moved south during the glacial maximum and then have to get back Right. And I think that that's where things got very interesting. And when you look at something like the Torreya Pine or Franklinia, these things that are disappearing in Florida or disappeared from Alabama completely, you know I think they lost their disperser, they couldn't get back, and you know you take Franklinia, which Bartram found in the 1700s in, uh, you know um, in alpine, um, I'm sorry, in Alabama river valley. It can survive negative 60 yeah, what's it doing there? What are you doing in Alabama?

And so you know that was a northern species that, for whatever reason, couldn't make it back. Torreya, you know, probably lost a large tortoise as a disperser. You know, with all of our forest fragmentation and highways and urbanization, it's just that much harder to adjust to climate shifts. And so, you know, I always tell my students this is like a boxing match.

Forest fragmentation is like, you know, a hit to one side of your gut, and then non-native species, a hit to the other side of your gut and you drop your arms and climate change is the upper cup to the jaw that knocks you out. You know, I think that our systems could handle one of these, maybe two, but all three together, maybe two but not all three together. You know, these are human-made problems and I just don't buy that we can get through them without human-made solutions, that we can. Just, you know, people say this to me all the time. You know, leave the non-natives alone. God put them here, they have a purpose. It was like, well, yeah, but if we just walk away and say we created this mess, but we're going to let nature clean it up. It isn't going to get cleaned up.

Andy:

Yeah, and I think that points to the general understanding or thought process that we don't exist as a part of nature, and that is equally as damaging as the people who only want to go back to pure native species. And then you know.

The question is okay, when, if you on a long enough timeline, you know this was all ice, should this be Alpine for us? Is it when white people showed up? You know, when do you want to draw that line?

That's why I personally like I said I was talking about the honey locusts I have those on my property. I have osage oranges on my property because they'll thrive in this climate and in reality, if those seed dispersals were around dispersers were around they probably would be considered native here, but that you know. Those megafauna are gone, so now they're not traveling. So the best or at least my personal opinion is the best we can do is utilize our knowledge and try to acclimate species as quickly as possible to create diverse, native-based communities that can sustain climate change.

Dr. Robert Warren:

Absolutely, and you know, for me the criteria always is not necessarily what's your origin but what's your place. So you know, if you're familiar with, I think Doug Tallamy did just this fantastic paper where he showed that when you look at native versus non-native trees, you get 900 species of lepidopterans or caterpillars on oak trees and 700 on cherry. And then you look at the non-natives and you get maybe one, maybe two. We just published a paper that showed the same thing for galls and on oak trees, you get like 900 species of galls. On the non-natives you get one, two, zero, and so you know.

But then you get things like crab apples that pretty much hold their own. You know a lot of native things use crab apples and a lot of those are not native. So to me, it's much more. If you fragment the landscape, so you lose. Let's say you've lost 30 to 60% of the habitat and so in that remaining 40% let's say 20% of that is non-native plants, then you're only 20% left. Because you know, a buckthorn-knotweed dominated landscape supports almost nothing, right, and so you know, whereas crab apple would do pretty well support a lot of stuff, stuff. But you see what I mean. It's that combination that's the disaster yeah, yeah, that's interesting.

Andy:

Have you been doing any further research on oaks? They're, um, I have a little pet project with some burr oaks if you're familiar with them. They're low, with almost no tannin oaks. They're like these giant three-inch acorns. So I've been trying to grow some out because that's I think they were probably something that Indigenous people were selectively breeding before they'd ever really got it to full fruition.

So have have you done any more research on oaks, or are you planning to?

Dr. Robert Warren:

Well, yeah, I mean. So apparently Doug Talmadge has put out a book on oaks and that's going to be more about the natural. You know the the interaction with native things. But, um, in, in looking at the honey locust kind of things, several papers definitely show a bias of oak groves near native american um sites as well. So, and you know from what I've read, a lot of the fall fires were set to clear leaves off so they could find acorns.

Andy:

Yeah, and I've heard that also wiped out a lot of the weevils.

Dr. Robert Warren:

There we go yeah, yeah, I mean they set a lot of fires, but a lot of that, or a good amount of that, was for acorns. You just can't beat oaks in terms of supporting people and and Lepidoptera and galls and every other thing. I mean they've been around for an incredibly long time, so everything's had time to evolve with and to them, right?

Andy:

It's so unfortunate that we never got to see, at least in the modern era, that the oak-hickory or oak chestnut forest that had littered the entire landscape, to understand, kind of, what kind of capacity the ecology could provide in terms of local food from perennial crops.

Dr. Robert Warren:

Absolutely. And you know it's funny you say that because as an ecologist I always take it for granted. But you know, really that's what it’s about. You know you could hold your breath all you want, you can't photosynthesize, you cannot generate your own energy, it just isn't going to happen. And when you talk about a system, you know how much solar energy a patch can convert to carbon is everything. And so again, when you put non-native things that nothing can eat in there, well, yeah, they're converting it to energy, but it's energy that nobody can use. You know the local critters, but you get things like oaks and chestnuts and hickories in there and you're maximizing your punch.

You know, for that patch they are taking a lot of solar energy and making it available to the next level. And you know I think a lot of folks miss that part that their lawn just aren't cutting it. You know, if you want to bring back some megafaunal grazers, maybe, and you know, let your lawn grow, it might be useful. But otherwise, right, we're just not. You know I said this before but it's funny, because you look at Florida after a hurricane comes and or Katrina, and you see these devastated neighborhoods and nobody ever asks at a suburb and people are asking why do we have nine billion fewer birds? Why do we have an insect apocalypse? Well, it's not rocket science, there's nothing for them to eat.

Andy:

Yeah, I was just thinking about that. This year around here at least, mosquitoes did not show up until probably like three weeks ago. I hadn't had like a single mosquito bite and I was starting to freak out a little bit. Fortunately, it seems like they finally came around. But you know even just basic things like traveling. You don't see bugs on your front glass or lights or anything, and uh, it's frightening when you start to think about it.

Dr. Robert Warren:

Yeah, I remember. I mean, you know as much of a nuisance as they are. We need them for the system, certainly, you know, you know. And it goes back to pollinator gardens. It never ceases to amaze me that folks want now, some folks even want bees, which is great, and I mean all bees, not just honeybees, and certainly they want butterflies, but then they spray pesticides when the babies eat the leaves, like you can't have the butterfly without the caterpillar yeah you're not really supporting pollinators if you're killing the babies yeah, right, it's wild.

Andy:

This all ties together because, like, all this is tied to climate change and how things fall are falling apart. So I guess my last question for you, is there anything people, individuals, can do that are researchers that are just concerned about making sure species can survive climate change and ecologies can survive? Is there anything that we can do?

Dr. Robert Warren:

Yeah, well, I mean I hate to just beat a dead horse, but plant native things and I think it's cool. You know we're doing some stuff at Buffalo State, I know Syracuse did, is we're going to plant genetic stock from the North and South. You know, in a sense build resilience gardens right, because you know I think it'd be in, like your burr oaks, it'd be fascinating If you could get some, you know, southern stock in there too, because it might be for the next 10, 20 years, your northern, the native animals and so forth, and after that we will need that southern stock.

You know I'm not a purist that says you know you have to plant all native stuff, but certainly I think 75% of whatever you have on your property should be native, so that you're sharing the space with. You know, and for a nerd like me, the more I put out native stuff, I'm just gobsmacked by the cool bugs and birds that show up, and I live in a village, I don't live in the wilderness, and I'm endlessly fascinated and so you know, I think it can be a lot of fun. You just don't spray them.

Andy:

Yeah, we had. We've been on this property for three years and we, you know, we don't rake leaves or anything and this is the first year that we've had fireflies. And I was like, well, it takes them a few years of that, you know, larval stage and all that to get to a point where you'll start seeing them. And this year we're finally seeing them. Despite not having a lot of mosquitoes at all, we do have those fireflies, which is cool.

So for folks that are interested in this kind of stuff, or you in particular, is there anywhere you would recommend sending them to go check out more of either your work or something you think is really meaningful?

Dr. Robert Warren:

Yeah, if they put in Robert Warren, Buffalo State. I have a website if they want to read it. You know, my papers are for non-scientists. They're probably mostly boring, you know, I think Doug Tallamy's done a nice job in communicating a lot of these things better for the general public, and, I know he's, he's like a super rock star now in the conservation areas but think of the books called Bringing Nature Home, and then he has a new one on Oaks. I have to say I haven't read it yet, but I think he does a really nice job of communicating the science in a more palatable way. Here's something you can do and then, yeah, I think those are good, awesome.

Andy:

Well, Robert, I appreciate your time. This was really interesting.

Dr. Robert Warren:

Well, interesting talking with you. I always love when I'm supposedly being interviewed, but I'm actually learning stuff. That's always great.