We study gardens: the plants, insects, animals, people, decisions and management practices that either improve or degrade a garden’s ability to promote environmental and human health. An underlying premise of our work is that gardens are important and understudied systems, that are key to building more sustainable, healthy and just communities. Our work is supported by Generous donations from theGarden Ecology league.
Part of the joy of gardening is seeing the beautiful birds, butterflies, and other charismatic fauna that come to visit your space. With careful thought about the elements that draw them into your garden, you can make relatively minor adjustments that help promote their survival and conservation.
Many features of garden spaces are attractive to insects, birds, and other types of urban wildlife. For example, as the profusion of flowers increases in garden spaces, beneficial insect species also increase. Birdfeeders provide ample and easy-to-access forage for a variety of wildlife, including birds and squirrels. Water features such as ponds or fountains are exploited by honey bees and other garden wildlife, particularly on hot days.
For many animals, these features of gardens represent relatively novel cues that they use to assess the overall quality of foraging or nesting sites. Sometimes animals make bad decisions on novel cues encountered in human-dominated landscapes. Because of the way that light reflects off of and is polarized by shiny, dark objects, mayflies and dragonflies are more attracted to oil spills, asphalt roads, and dark green automobiles than to water.1 These insects often become trapped in oil puddles or stuck to the road, and any eggs laid on these surfaces will obviously not survive.
When organisms choose to nest, feed, or reproduce in a highly attractive but low-quality habitat, that habitat is known as an “ecological trap.” Two criteria determine an ecological trap: First, an individual prefers a poorer habitat over a better habitat; and second, the individual’s survival or reproduction is lower in the preferred habitat. Intuitively, it is easy to understand why gardeners who use pesticides on flowering plants that are highly attractive to insects are at high risk of creating ecological traps. But there are other, less obvious, ways that well-meaning gardeners may attract beneficial species into garden spaces only to ultimately harm the chances of survival and successful reproduction. In this article, I review what we do know about ecological traps in garden spaces, and share ideas for how to reduce or eliminate them.
Sometimes innocuous and every day actions conspire to create an ecological trap. For example, porch or other outdoor lights act as an ecological trap for many night-flying insects. These will continuously turn their bodies so sources of light shine on their backs. Scientists think this is an adaptation to help them maintain a constant flight path that is oriented to the horizon.2 However, the prevalence of artificial lights makes this a maladaptive behavior that causes them to fly erratically and also makes them more prone to being eaten by spiders that build webs near night lights.3 One relatively easy way to limit the negative effects of artificial light on night-flying moths and other insects is to switch to yellow-colored light bulbs. Flight behavior is suppressed in moths when exposed to yellow light, making them less likely to gather at your porch light than if it were a white bulb.4
Rooftop gardens are wonderful amenities for people, but on the fifth floor or higher, you may want to avoid plants that are highly attractive to pollinators. Photo source: Greg P Griffin on Flickr (CC BY 2.0). Image URL https://www.flickr.com/photos/17530093@N08/9316854571/
A second item to consider is where your flowering plants are located, particularly those that are highly attractive to insects. There is some evidence that pollinator gardens on rooftops or high balconies (fifth floor or higher) might function as ecological traps by drawing insects in with flowers to a largely isolated habitat subject to environmental conditions harsher than those at ground level.5 This suggests that gardeners should avoid planting highly attractive flowers on high balconies or rooftop gardens of mid- and high-rise buildings. Recent evidence also suggests that high floral abundance adjacent to streets with heavy traffic increases mortality of butterflies and dragonflies.6 This study was conducted near high-speed freeways but nonetheless provides a cautionary note to gardeners with landscaped areas adjacent to heavy traffic.
Most research on ecological traps in urban spaces has focused on birds7and has found that the propensity of a garden to act as an ecological trap is variable across different contexts. For example, gardeners who live adjacent to woodland habitat have greater on-site bird mortality due to domestic cats.8 This suggests that if you live near forest land or another wooded site, you may want to think twice before putting out bird feeders. Even if you don’t have an outdoor cat, they’re such ubiquitous characters in urban areas that drawing birds in with a bird feeder may be doing more harm than good. Similarly, bird feeders concentrate foraging birds at a specific site, which also attracts predators looking for prey. Although squirrels are the most common non-target animal seen at bird feeders, carnivorous foxes, skunks, racoons, and coyotes increase locally when bird feeders are present.9 This is why it is important to place feeders in a spot that provides birds with easy retreat to a nearby tree or tall shrub, where they can escape potential predators.
By thinking carefully about the cues in your garden that attract birds, butterflies, and other welcome fauna, you can avoid dangers to them, encourage their survival, and add to the joy your garden brings you.
Gail Langellotto is a professor of horticulture at Oregon State University and Principal Investigator of the Oregon State University Garden Ecology Lab. She holds a B.S. in biology and an M.S. and Ph.D. in entomology, all from the University of Maryland. She is a regular contributor to theHPSO Quarterly.
The Garden Ecology Lab was founded in 2017 to advance an understanding of how to plan, plant, and manage garden systems to promote environmental and human health. It is one of two labs in the United States, and the only one in the Western US, to specifically focus on studies of garden ecology.
In this article, I provide an update on our native plant studies, with a focus on results that may be of particular interest to nursery owners. Brief summaries of many of our lab’s studies can be found on the ‘For Gardeners’ page of our lab website. Some nurseries have printed out copies of these lab briefs, so that their customers can see the ecological benefits of various plants. More briefs are planned for this year. Periodically visit our website for updates.
Native Plants in Garden Retail Centers
Interest in native plant gardening has drastically grown in recent years, but many native plants remain difficult to find for purchase. In the April 2019 issue of The Digger, Dr. Aaron Anderson highlighted three barriers that gardeners face, when trying to purchase native plants: 1) lack of advertising by native plant nurseries or gardeners’ lack of familiarity with these nurseries, 2) variation in nursery stock among native plant growers, and 3) geographic distance that gardeners might have to travel to find the plants they are looking for. These specific barriers were ones that Aaron faced when he was setting up his field study of insect communities associated with 23 species of Pacific Northwest Native plants.
Aaron used the Oregon Flora’s gardening resource page to locate where he could buy his study plants. He ultimately ended up purchasing plants from two retail nurseries (one in Corvallis and the other in Forest Grove) and two pop up native plant sales (one in Corvallis and one in Portland). He also worked with two wholesale nurseries that were generous enough to sell or donate study plants or seed in the small quantities he was seeking (one in Salem and one in Silverton). Because he has been asked this question, often, Aaron also wrote a blog post on ‘Where to Buy Native Plants in Oregon‘.
After a three-year field study, Aaron was able to identify 10 native plants which support a diversity of bee species. We developed an infographic to share this information with gardeners, and include lavender in the image, since many gardeners perceive lavender to be a pollinator-friendly plant (Bennett 2019).
Image 1: The number of estimated bee species associated with PNW native plants is shown in a yellow circle, above each bar. Lavender is shown as a comparison, since it is recognized as a pollinator-friendly plant by many gardeners.
Today, Oregon Flora’s garden resource page lists 10 nurseries where gardeners can find and purchase native plants (Oregon Flora 2025). I used their plant-finding tool, to see whether I could find the 10 native plants that we recommend to gardeners. None of the nurseries were listed as carrying all of these recommended plants: two nurseries were listed as carrying 6 species, three nurseries carried 5, two nurseries carried 4, and three nurseries carried 2. All of the 10 nurseries were listed as carrying Oregon sunshine (Eriophyllum lanatum). None were listed as carrying Farewell-to-spring (Clarkia amoena), varileaf phacelia (Phacelia heterophylla), or common madia (Madia elegans).
Farewell-to-Spring, a promising native nursery plant
The absence of farewell-to-spring from nursery shelves is particularly disappointing, because it has become a favorite in our lab group. Its native range spans the Bay Area of California, north through Oregon and Washington and into British Columbia. In Oregon, it grows west of the Cascades to the coast and is found in a variety of habitats including coastal prairie, grasslands and forested areas. It is an easy-to-grow annual plant with erect stems (5.4” maximum height), thin, green leaves and bright pink flowers. In our study plots, first bloom occurred anywhere between early June and early July and lasting through early August through late October, depending upon seasonal weather patterns and supplemental irrigation.
Farewell-to-spring attracts a diversity of beneficial insects. Aaron collected 14 bee species, 15 predatory insect taxa, and 12 parasitoid taxa from this wildflower (Anderson 2022, Anderson et al. 2022) documenting its ecological value for attracting pollinators, as well as natural enemies that promote the biological control of insect pests. In a separate, but related field study, Jen Hayes looked at the pollinator assemblages on eight species of wild-type native plants and 1-3 of their cultivars. Jen provided an overview of this study in the October 2020 issue of The Digger (Hayes and Langellotto 2020), and the full report of this study was recently published (Hayes et al. 2025) for folks wanting more detailed information.
Farewell-to-spring was one of the native plants in her field study of pollinators on native plants and native cultivars. The cultivars she used were ‘Aurora’ (dark pink blossoms with a cream center), ‘Dwarf White’ (white blossoms), and ‘Scarlet’ (red blossoms with a light pink center). She documented 32 total pollinator species from the wild-type plant (with an estimated 104 total pollinator species), 17 pollinators on ‘Aurora’ (28 species estimated), 23 pollinators on ‘Dwarf White’ (24 species estimated), and 9 pollinators on ‘Scarlet’ (13 species estimated). Furthermore, she found that specialist bees, which are picky about where they collect pollen, were either exclusively found on wild-type native plants (two species, Megachile gravita and Melissodes microstictus), or were found in higher abundance on wild-type plants compared to cultivars (two species, Melissodes lupinus and Melissodes clarkiae). Because specialist bees have relatively narrow diet preferences, including their preferred forage plants is an easy way to attract these unique bees into a garden, and to locally increase pollinator biodiversity.
In addition to the importance of wild-type Farewell-to-spring as a forage plant, Jen worked with Mallory Mead (a former undergraduate student in our lab) to document its importance for bee nest material. Many leafcutter bee species use leaves, mud, resin, sticks, pebbles, or petals when they build their nests. Jen documented two species of petal-cutting bees in her study plot, each of which had a significant association with Farewell-to-spring and its cultivars. Megachile montivaga had significant associations with the wild type native and ‘Dwarf White’. Megachile brevis was significantly associated with the wild type native, ‘Dwarf White’, and ‘Aurora’.
Although Jen found evidence that the leafcutting bees were significantly associated with two of the three cultivars she included in her study, Mallory documented a very strong preference for the wild-type native over the cultivars, when she documented foraging for nesting material. Because leafcutting bees leave a characteristic crescent cut in petals, Mallory could document foraging for nesting material by counting the number of petal cuts from each plant. Wild type native plants had 3-4X as many petal cuts than cultivars. Even when we controlled for bloom count per plant, the wild type native was significantly preferred over the cultivars.
Image 3: Number of petal cuts by bees on wild-type Farewell-to-spring, and 3 cultivars.
Native Cultivars Are Often Easier to Find and Buy
Given the high abundance and diversity of beneficial insects associated with Farewell-to-spring, as well as its unique association with specialist foragers and petal-cutting bees, we enthusiastically recommend this plant to ecologically-minded gardeners. However, the average gardener shopping for this species is more likely to encounter cultivars than wild-type plants. This is partly because the plethora of Farewell-to-spring cultivars are on the market. In addition to the three included in Jen’s study, gardeners can find ‘Double Azalea’ (pink, purple, red, white flowers), ‘Lilac’ (pink petals with dark red center spots), ‘Pink to Red’ (red petals with light pink edges), ‘White’ (white flowers), ‘Pink’ (light pink flowers with no other markings); and ‘Sugarplum’ (semi-double flowers, light pink with rose-colored center markings, dwarf, somewhat bushy).
As noted earlier, native plants can be difficult to source in the retail marketplace. Offerings may not reflect the regional species pool of plants (Zinnen and Matthews 2022), and in some areas, 77% of the native plants on market shelves are actually hybrids or cultivars (Coombs et al. 2020). However, multiple studies have found that gardeners are willing to pay higher prices for native plants and locally sourced plant materials.
Somewhat unexpectedly, in a recent survey of 719 gardeners (Hayes et al. in preparation), 81% report that they buy their native plants at pop-up plant sales hosted by Soil and Water Conservation Districts, Master Gardener groups, or other non-profits. A comparable percentage of gardeners (78%) said that they buy their native plants at retail plant nurseries. However, given the transient nature of pop-up plant sales, it was surprising to us that they were as or more popular than brick-and-mortar stores for native plant purchases. I think this speaks to the difficulty many gardeners have finding the plants they are seeking, and how non-profit plant sales are filling a market void. It also points to a market opportunity for the nursery industry, in general.
References:
Anderson, A. 2019. Native plant production and marketing. The Digger, April Issue, pp 33-36.
Anderson, A. (2022). Evaluating the Attractiveness of Pacific Northwest Native Plants to Insects and Gardeners [Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of Ph.D.] Oregon State University.
Anderson, A. G., Costner, L., Best, L., & Langellotto, G. A. (2022). The bee fauna associated with Pacific Northwest (USA) native plants for gardens. Conservation Science and Practice, 4(10), e12801.
Bennett L. 2019. Examining the gap between interest and understanding of provisioning for bees: A capstone project to support urban bee conservation [Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of M.N.R.]. Oregon State University.
Coombs, G., Gilchrist, D., & Watson, P. (2020). An assessment of the native and invasive horticultural plants sold in the mid-Atlantic region. Native Plants Journal, 21(1), 74-82.
Hayes, J., Langellotto, G. 2020. Pollinator plant trials: researchers test the value of Willamette Valley natives and nativars. The Digger, October Issue, pp 33-37.
Hayes JJ-M, Bell NCS, Best LR, et al. 2025. Pacific Northwest native plants and native cultivars Part I: Pollinator visitation. Environ. Entomol. https://doi.org/10.1093/ee/nvae126.
Zinnen, J., Matthews, J. W. 2022. Native species richness of commercial plant vendors in the Midwestern United States. Native Plants Journal, 23 (1) 4-15.
I had been to my mom’s hometown of Bagamanoc many times, but never before as a budding entomologist. In 1993, I packed my bags with the many tools used to collect and curate insects: glassine envelopes to store and sort butterflies, insect pins and boxes, a pinning block, and nets. Once on the ground in this rural region of the tropics, I set out to catch and kill new specimens for my personal insect collection. My prized find was a large birdwing butterfly, with black and red markings and wingspan of more than 6 inches: Atrophaneura semperi. I nearly vibrated with excitement as I caught her in my net. I carefully pulled her out and held her between my thumb and forefinger, so that I could pinch her thorax and break her flight muscles; a trick that was passed down to me by more experienced entomologists. This would ensure that she could no longer move, an activity that might scrape off scales or tear her wings. Pristine specimens are the standard for insect collections.
By the time I boarded a plane to return home, my prized find had been decimated. Ants had found her, and eaten her abdomen. I was crestfallen and ashamed that I had killed her. Since that time, I largely stopped collecting insects for my personal collection. I limit my collection to two taxa (longhorned beetles and metallic wood boring beetles), to keep from killing and pinning every insect that I see. But I have been involved in the lethal collection of many insect specimens for my work, and it is not without the occasional pangs of guilt.
A recent news story profiled Master Gardener volunteers who had collected 25,000 bees in Pennsylvania to further scientific understanding of wild bee abundance and diversity in the state.1 As the story was shared on social media, the comments and concerns related to lethal sampling accumulated: why was it necessary to kill the bees we are supposed to be helping?
In this article, I briefly examine the science, politics, and ethics of lethal sampling.
The Science
I know of only one study that has directly examined the impact of repeated, lethal sampling on insect communities.2 In this study, the authors sampled wild bees every two weeks throughout a season, or once per season. They found no effect of repeated sampling on any of the response variables they measured, including bee abundance, species richness, or community composition. They suggest that density-dependent competitive release may explain their results: decreased survivorship by some is compensated by increased fecundity from others. In essence, as you remove bees from the community, it reduces the intensity of competition and allows surviving bees to produce more offspring than they would have been able to if they had to compete with other bees for resources.
Lethal sampling has long been the rule in studies of insect biodiversity. In homage to the “lock and key hypothesis,” which suggests that genital morphology acts as a reproductive barrier that ultimately defines a species, identifying an insect to species may mean dissecting out genitalia for microscopic examination. In fact, there is a piece of equipment that some entomologists use, that is designed to inflate and harden insect genitalia, called a phalloblaster or vesica everter. This penis pump for insects cost $2,727 in 1997.
A shift away from lethal sampling has been happening for quite some time, particularly for butterflies and other large insects that can be identified by sight. On iNaturalist, many insects are identified to species by combining advances in machine learning and computer vision with crowd-sourced verifications from the iNaturalist community. The platform has led to the discovery and rediscovery of multiple insect species.3, 4
A few of the 2,691 specimens collected for a recent study of garden bee biodiversity. Photo credit: Gail Langellotto.
The Politics
Insects are generally exempt from regulatory oversight. But recent stories of insect declines and the emergence and growth of the insect farming industry has led at least one law school to teach a course on insect law. Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees (IACUC) govern the ethical care of animals used in research studies, but exempts invertebrates from oversight, except for cephalopods (octopus, squid and cuttlefish).
Few laws govern the collection of insect specimens. However, in the state of Washington, insects are classified as wildlife. Permits are required to collect insects for scientific study. This has complicated the launch of the Washington Bee Atlas, run by the Washington Department of Agriculture, which must secure permits from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife for every bee collected.
The Ethics
The cephalopod exemption to IACUC oversight is notable, and is based on the recognition that cephalopods are sentient, self-aware, and capable of feeling or fearing pain. Insects don’t have a brain, per se. Instead, they have three clusters of nerve fibers, which form the supraesophageal ganglion. This fact has sometimes been used to argue that insects can’t feel pain, but reviews of recent studies suggest that there is evidence that some insect adults may feel pain,5 and that some may feel emotional states such as stress.6
Another high-profile study found evidence that bumblebees play.7 Play is classified as an activity that does not result in an obvious reward or adaptive outcome, among other criteria. In this study, researchers documented bumblebees interacting with balls in ways that satisfy the criteria for play. The bees received no reward for this behavior. As in many other animals, younger bees played more often than older bees. If insects are sentient, the field of entomology would undergo a revolution of practice.
But scientists are increasingly using and improving nonlethal methods in entomology,9 including the use of DNA barcoding, catch and release, and camera traps. Because the study of insects has largely been exempt from regulatory oversight, most entomologists have yet to reflect on the moral considerations of catching and killing insects. However, as we learn more about insect cognition, the time may be coming to carefully weigh the costs and benefits of lethal collection methods and to invest in technologies that advance the use of non-lethal options.
An example of a solar-powered and open sourced camera trap, to study insect visits to an artificial flower platform. Photo by Maximilian Sittinger. (CC-BY-SA-4.0).
1Stimpston, Ashley. 2024. Twenty master gardeners have collected 25,000 bees. Here’s why. The Washington Post (October 24, 2024).
2Gezon, Zachariah J. et al. 2015. The effect of repeated, lethal sampling on wild bee abundance and diversity. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 6(9): 1044-1054.
3Tugwell, James, Masashi and Gaston, Kevin J. 2024. Sixteen insect species photographed for the first time by citizen scientist. ABC News, Australia (October 19, 2024).
4Mesaglio, Thomas. 2021. First known photographs of living specimens: the power of iNaturalist for recording rare tropical butterflies. Journal of Insect Conservation, 25: 905-911.
5Gibbons, M. et al. 2022. Can insects feel pain? A review of the neural and behavioral evidence. Advances in Insect Physiology, 63: 155-229.
6Lambert, H. et al. 2021. Wouldn’t hurt a fly? A review of insect cognition and sentience in relation to their use as food and feed. Applied Animal Behavior Science, 243: 105432.
7Galpayage Dona, Hiruni Samadi et al. 2022. Do bumblebees play? Animal Behavior, 194: 239-251.
8Hallman, Caspar A. et al. 2017. More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas. PLOS One, 12(10): e0185809.
9Lovei, Gabor L. and Ferrante, Marco. 2024. The use and prospects of nonlethal methods in entomology. Annual Review of Entomology, 69: 183-198.
The Grow(in)’ On! Visioning Summit, held September 17-19, 2024, in Portland, Oregon, bridged agriculture and urban design, exploring ways to integrate farming within urban spaces. Hosted by the University of Oregon’s Institute for Health in the Built Environment, this summit convened experts to tackle sustainable building-integrated agriculture. Through workshops and discussions, participants gained insights into global practices, fostering collaboration aimed at reshaping food production in urban settings.
Each speaker not only brought a unique angle to the challenges and opportunities in building-integrated agriculture but also sparked actionable ideas for reshaping our urban landscapes to nourish both people and the environment. This summit reinforced the critical intersections of technology, sustainability, and community-driven innovation that we need to move forward.
One of the highlights of the Grow(in)’ On! Visioning Summit was the time spent in small action groups, where we organized around shared themes and goals. These self-formed groups fostered deeper connections and allowed us to dive into specific challenges in building-integrated agriculture. It was inspiring to see the diverse strategies we came up with and to know we’re collectively moving forward on these fronts. I’m excited to see the impact of our ongoing work and look forward to reconnecting and sharing our progress soon.
For more details about the summit and speakers, visit the event website.
Fake spider webs can be dangerous for wildlife both small and large. The webbing is fine enough to trap insects like bees and butterflies, and strong enough to ensnare small mammals and large birds like Western Screech Owls. Wildlife rehabilitators receive calls to rescue birds, chipmunks, and other animals from webs every fall (Cotroneo, 2020). Consider allowing spiders themselves to set up webs in your bushes, or keeping your fake webs as an indoor-only décor item.
2. Keep your pumpkin out of the landfill
Have you considered where your pumpkin goes, once it’s begun the inevitable post-Halloween rot? According to the USDA, 22.4 million pounds of pumpkin went unused last year (USDA, 2024). This number accounts only for pumpkins unharvested (left in the field). But this statistic doesn’t consider the pumpkins we waste by throwing them into the trashcan at the end of the season. You can reduce the number of pumpkins that wind up in landfills by 1) eating your pumpkin, 2) composting it’s remains or placing it in a yard-waste bin, or 3) donating your pumpkin to feed livestock, such as pumpkins for pigs! Every part of a pumpkin is edible, even pumpkin guts.
3. Leave the leaves, if you can
Leaves play an important role in both carbon storage and natural decomposition cycles (Ferlauto et al., 2023). Fallen leaves also provide shelter for many invertebrates that aren’t active through the winter, including queen bumble bees, firefly larvae, and caterpillars. If you must remove leaves from pathways, consider using them to mulch garden beds, or otherwise keeping them on your property, rather than disposing them.
4. Turn off lights for migrating birds
Fall is one of the two peak seasons annual bird migrations. Nocturnal migrators may be drawn into urban areas by artificial light, which can lead to disorientation and possible death. Collisions with buildings kill hundreds of millions of birds across North America annually (Van Doren et al., 2021). You can reduce your impact on light pollution by turning your exterior lights off, and pulling down blinds in rooms with windows where lights cannot be turned off or dimmed. In Oregon, peak fall migration is expected to be between September and October (Bird Alliance of Oregon).
We’ve created a companion Instagram post to share the information presented in this blog. Share our post to help spread helpful information that could positively benefit wildlife this fall!
United States Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service. 2024. Vegetables 2023 Summary 02/12/2024. United State Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service Vegetables Annual Survey.
Van Doren BM, Willard DE, Hennen M, et al. 2021. Drivers of fatal bird collisions in an urban center. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 118(24):e2101666118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2101666118.
All photos were taken by Jen Hayes and may not be reproduced in any form without explicit permission.
Robert Michael Pyle first used the term “extinction of experience” over 30 years ago in his memoir, which centers on the power of human-nature interactions. Extinction of experience refers to humankind’s increasing alienation from the natural world and the consequent impacts that include increasing disaffection towards the natural world. As Pyle so eloquently phrased it, “What is the extinction of a condor to a child who has never seen a wren?” 1
I grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore City, Maryland, where I relished opportunities to catch lightning bugs, pick mulberries, and crawl through the culverts of channelized streams. These experiences constitute some of my favorite childhood memories. Yet I remember being confused when I learned about deforestation in school, because I could see trees on every street. I had no frame of reference for how vast and diverse nature could be. It wasn’t until I took an undergraduate student position in an ecology lab that I started to understand how important the natural world was to humanity—and to my own existence. I worked in a peri-urban wildlife refuge, where I saw my first deer, hunted for spiders at night, and learned the names of an array of plants, birds, and invertebrates. I describe this time of my life, at the age of 21, as one where I felt like a scrim had been lifted from my eyes, and I saw the world in a whole new light.
More recent research has found that gardens can counteract extinction of experience. This is somewhat surprising, since gardens themselves are not natural areas; garden floras are diverse mixtures of both planted and volunteer plants and tend to be dominated by non-native and cultivated species.7 Nonetheless, gardens were ranked in the top five most frequented natural areas in a survey of 4,600 French adults.8 Gardens provide opportunities to notice and experience elements of the natural world in an accessible and relatively safe setting. And multiple studies (including those from the Oregon State University Garden Ecology Lab) have shown that, as people become more familiar with the plants, insects,9 and birds10 in a garden, they grow more positive feelings towards the natural world. This cycle of familiarity and increased emotional attachment to nature thus creates a positive feedback loop that disrupts and counteracts extinction of experience.10
There are two things you can do to create a positive feedback loop of familiarity and increased attachment to the natural world in a garden. First, you need to create a space that promotes biodiversity. If you have an affinity for neat and tidy gardens, challenge yourself to create at least one section of the garden that has a more natural look. If your garden is dominated by non-native and cultivated plants, look for opportunities to add a few native plant species. Don’t release beneficial insects into your garden. Instead, try to attract them with proper plant selection and by reducing or eliminating pesticide use. Second, practice noticing and identifying the volunteer plants, resident insects, and visiting birds in your garden.
If you are online, you may want to try using iNaturalist, which is a social media platform that uses artificial intelligence to help identify organisms. However, the artificial intelligence built into iNaturalist depends upon the community of naturalists that use the platform. The community aspect of iNaturalist allows nature lovers to connect with and learn from others. It is not unusual for a nationally or internationally renowned taxon expert to provide species-level determinations for bees, or beetles, or other syrphid flies on this platform. I use iNaturalist often and have expanded my own understanding of local biodiversity as a direct result of my engagement with the site.
Noticing and identifying nature in your garden are the very first steps to growing an appreciation for local biodiversity. Once you are able to identify a new garden organism, further challenge yourself to learn more about its basic biology and ecology. There are so many surprising ways that organisms make their way in this world, including cooperation and altruism to social parasitism and deception. Nature never ceases to amaze me.
This column is most likely to be read by gardeners, who already have a level of appreciation and affinity for plants and greenspaces. What about others, including those most fascinated with the digital and virtual worlds? With my students and my own kids, I try to connect elements from popular movies and video games with analogs in the natural world. The creature from the Predator movies has a face with insectoid-like mandibles that extend like a dragonfly naiad. The fictional Sarlacc pits from Return of the Jedi remind me of how antlion larvae hunt. And when you’re really struggling to catch the attention of someone seemingly bored with the natural world, you can always draw from British biologist Olivia Judson’s excellent and hilarious book,11 Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation, which was first recommended to me by a Lane County gardener. For readers of this book, there will be no denying that the natural world is often stranger than fiction.
A few of the 213 garden species observed during a 2021 one-day BioBlitz of Oregon Gardens. There is a diversity of nature in every garden, particularly if you can pull back on pesticides and other design and management practices that exclude diverse species.
References
1Pyle, Robert M., The Thunder Tree: Houghton Mifflin, 1993.
2Clements, Rhonda, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 5(1): 68-80, 2004.
3Soga, Masashi and Gaston, Kevin J., Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 14(2): 94-101, 2016.
4Nabhan, Gary P. and St Antoine, Sarah, Chapter 7. (pp 229-250) in, The biophilia hypothesis Island Press, 1993.
Anna Perry joined our lab group, to work on the Building-Integrated Agriculture project that is a collaborative effort between the University of Oregon School of Architecture, OSU College of Agriculture, and WSU Western Center for Metro Extension and Research. Specifically, Anna will be studying the agriculture array that is located outside of the windows on the 5th floor of the PAE Living Building. The arrays currently struggle to produce crops, in part because they go through cycles of drought and over-irrigation.
Urban agriculture arrays sit outside of the 5th floor of the PAE living building. The arrays were originally planted with nursery pots that had water trays beneath them. The nursery pots have been replaced by larger ‘containers within a container’. The building managers have stated that water should not drain out of the rectangular containers. Water draining outside of the containers results in building stains and issues with a first floor ATM.
The arrays were replanted in 2024, to provide more space for soil/growing media. We will be following how plants perform, and will be tracking the soil temperature and moisture throughout the growing season.
Hey everyone! My name is Anna Perry and I use she/her or they/them pronouns. I’m an undergraduate in my final year here at OSU, where I am pursuing double degrees in Soil Science and Sustainability, a minor in Horticulture, and a certificate in Urban Agriculture.
Anna, in her Corvallis garden.
Aside from my academic pursuits I also have been involved with Ten Rivers Food Web for the past 3 years, a local organization focused on the development of a resilient and sustainable local food system. I’m passionate about food as an unalienable human right, and believe that everyone deserves access to fresh food, regardless of their socio-economic standing.
I grew up in Davis, CA, where I was fortunate to be raised by a mom who is a fervent gardener. I didn’t realize how lucky I was to have this background until I started volunteering at the OSU Organic Growers Club, where I found that most of my fellow students had never gardened before. As the “Berry Manager” for the club in 2022 I found a lot of joy in being part of my peers first exposures to caring for plants, and in eating the literal fruits of our labor.
Last summer I had the privilege of getting to visit Aotearoa/New Zealand for a short faculty-led study abroad. My experiences there prompted me to reevaluate my career and graduate school plans, and as a result I realized that my true interests were more interdisciplinary than I had previously realized. In my time in Aotearoa/New Zealand I became more aware of the effect culture has on land management and design decisions, and by proxy the effect culture can have on the ecological function of landscapes. This prompted a reinvigoration of a long dormant interest in landscape architecture, an area of study which I hope to one day pursue at the PhD level.
My research interests include sustainable urban horticulture/agriculture, building-integrated agriculture, urban soils, and gardens and landscapes as socio-ecological systems. Ultimately, I’m interested in how the land management and design decisions people make impact ecosystem function, especially when food production is involved.
In my (ever-shrinking!) free time I love making and sharing food with my friends and family, knitting, crocheting, gardening, and drinking my weight in tea.
I’m so excited to be the newest member of the Garden Ecology Lab, and for the opportunity to work with such a wonderful and supportive group!
It has been a while since we last posted a lab update. Although we’ve been quiet on the blog, we have been busy! This post provides a brief update on some of our efforts, over the past several months.
An example of a Garden Ecology Lab brief. These briefs were created to translate science to action in the garden.
Nicole Bell successfully defended her M.S. thesis, entitled ‘Urban garden bees: Global context and local perspectives’ in November of 2023. Her thesis consisted of a systematic review of the garden bee literature (which she published in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Cities). The second part of her thesis consisted of an online iNaturalist guide and companion booklet (the Portland Bee Guide). Nicole recently started a pollinator outreach position with the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Congratulations, Nicole!
The Portland Bee Guide represented one aspect of Nicole Bee’s M.S. thesis work.
Svea in front of her photographic array. She captured a garden over the course of a day, using filters that give viewers a glimpse of the colors a bee can see in a garden.
Nina Miller joined our lab group as an M.S. student with a passion for syrphid flies! Nina will be studying the syrphid fly communities of Portland- and Corvallis-area gardens. Specifically, she will document their biodiversity within garden spaces, and will be measuring their capacity for aphid management on kale, collards, mustard greens, and other brassicas. You can learn more about Nina’s study, from this recent blog post.
Anna Perry has joined the lab, to work on a Building-Integrated Agriculture project. Anna will be studying soil moisture and temperature fluctuations, in a 5-th floor urban agriculture array of 13 planter boxes that are part of the PAE Living Building, in Portland Oregon. The data will inform future plantings on this and other urban buildings.
There are 13 containers planted along the east and south windows of this building. Plants are challenged by hot temperatures in the summer, shade, and lack of consistent moisture.
Gail Langellotto worked with Nina Miller and an international group of designers and ecologists to produce a book chapter entitled ‘Supporting Galapagos Native Species via Ecological Landscape Design in Urban Greenspaces’. The chapter came out of the 2023 Association of Pacific Rim University Sustainable Cities and Landscape Conference, which was held in San Cristobal, Galapagos. This interdisciplinary conference coupled architects, designers, and ecologists, to work on urban issues. In the Galapagos, biodiversity drives tourism, but is also under threat from invasive plant species. We compiled a list of 130 native and endemic plant species, and created example landscape designs, to promote the use of native plantings in the urbanized areas of the islands.
This is just a sampling of the our work over the last few months. Make sure to bookmark our new lab website, and to share the resources for gardeners with your gardening friends.
My mother introduced me to gardening at a young age, growing parsley, tomatoes, marigolds, and basil. With spending much time in the garden, so came spending time with the insects. We would catch bumble bees in little jars to look at before letting them continue with their day. We would ooh and ahh over the butterflies that would visit our lilac bush in the late spring. With learning to garden came an interest in insects that I could not shake. With optimism that I would find a field that I would connect with, I started my voyage within academia in general Biology. Through a series of university transfers and focusing my passions, I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Botany and Entomology from Oregon State University in September of 2023. During my time as an undergraduate student, I came across a paper discussing pollinators in the Arctic. I knew little about the process of pollination in an environment of such varying climates, and soon came to learn that flies were one of the most predominant pollinators in this curious ecosystem.
I took this image in 2021 of the garden space I was lucky to spend my time in. Featured is my beautiful dog, Francis, who is also a fan of insects!
Thus began my exploration into the world of fly pollinators. Underexamined and typically unassuming, I became enamored by these curious insects. As I was living between temperate and continental climates, moving from British Columbia, Quebec, New York, and Oregon, I looked to the ecosystems that I interacted with. Though “flashier” than the arctic muscid fly, as seen in the compelling report by Tiusanen et al. (2016), flower flies became both my academic and personal ardor. Also known as hover flies and syrphid flies, flower flies are integral pollinators in urban environments. Stopping at the flowering bushes and herbs during the blooming seasons to hunt for the flower flies and watching videos about them during the colder months, I ceased to subdue my fascination.
During the final term of my undergraduate degree at Oregon State University, I met Dr. Langellotto who shared my adoration for flower flies. Dr. Langellotto introduced me to the predatory nature of flower fly larvae, expanding my once-exclusively lens of flower flies as pollinators to flower flies as essential managers of insect pests, such as aphids and mealybugs. Under the expert advisement of Dr. Langellotto, I began my master’s degree at the beginning of April 2024 and have dedicated my thesis project to my flower fly friends. As an ode to all invertebrate and vertebrate pollinators, entomologists, gardeners, citizen scientists, and nature-enjoyers, I hope that my research project calls to you.
Thus comes my announcement for folks who garden. For this Summer 2024, the researchers of the Garden Ecology Lab are looking for people who garden in Corvallis or Portland, Oregon, to participate in a study of flower flies. In this study, student researchers of the lab will be examining how garden size, tree cover, and floral abundance changes the composition of flower flies. Excellent at mimicry, voracious predators of plant pests as larvae, and valuable pollinators as adults, flower flies are important insects in urban garden systems. Also known as hover flies or syrphid flies, they are often seen on warm and sunny days collecting nectar. We are looking for gardens of many kinds; whether it is entirely covered by trees, without trees, a garden with a great variety of flowering plants, an edible garden, a highly maintained garden, or a minimally maintained garden. A wide range of garden types will allow us to see patterns in what attracts flower flies to urban gardens.
In a second, more informal experiment, student researchers of the lab will be looking at food preference of flower fly larvae. We will look at flower flies that predate on aphids and if there are aphid species of greater interest to the larvae. To narrow down this study, we will look at Brassicas in edible gardens. Brassicas are a family of plants that include broccoli, cabbage, brussels sprouts, arugula, radishes, collards, mustard greens, and turnips.
If you are interested in sharing your garden in either of these studies, please submit your interest by May 20th, 2024, following the surveys above. After this date, we will close the surveys and contact participants if they were selected by June 1, 2024. If selected, your garden will be surveyed once a month between mid-June and mid-October 2024.
References:
Tiusanen, M., Hebert, P.D.N., Martin Schmidt, N., & Roslin, T. (2016). One fly to rule them all- muscid flies are the key pollinators in the Arctic. Proceedings B, 283: 1839. https://doi.org/10.1098%2Frspb.2016.1271
We live in a world where we’re recognizing and discovering an ever-more complex and interwoven web of life—this vast ecology of our planet. We can see that life has taken many different routes to find success, and we call these paths ‘kingdoms’: animal, plant, fungui, protist, archaea, and bacteria. While we belong to and often focus on the first kingdom—that of animals—we are at what is only the beginning of discovery of the benefits we can reap from those in the last kingdom; we can harness the potential of bacteria to our good.
I want to tell you all about the bacterial genus Streptomyces. The genus is noted for the scent of their spores. You know that smell after a rain? That’s ‘petrichor’, ancient Greek for ‘rock’ and ‘ethereal blood of the gods.’ This smell is from a mix of compounds, but a significant contributor is geosmin, itself a by-product of the hydrophobic spores atop the aerial growth of this filamentous bacteria are launched from the earth with the force of raindrops striking the ground. The average human nose is incredibly sensitive to this chemical; we’re able to notice it as faintly as three parts-per-trillion—like a single drop in 40 Olympic swimming pools! Geosmin is also the reason we like the smell of freshly-dug earth, and it’s responsible if there’s a ‘muddy’ taste in your fish.
But there’s plenty more to love than just a pleasant smell. Most of its many, varied species are found living in soils the world over. They are commonly aerobic and produce exudates which resemble mycelium-like networks throughout the substrate in which they live. These exudates and the volatile organic compounds they off-gas are created in a category called secondary metabolites.
By Anne van der Meij, Joost Willemse, Martinus A. Schneijderberg, René Geurts, Jos M. Raaijmakers & Gilles P. van Wezel - [1]doi:10.1007/s10482-018-1014-z, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94443322
Living organisms create secondary metabolites as interactions with their environment. These compounds are not strictly required for survival. Sometimes called ‘relational’ or ‘ecological’ interactions, because it’s facilitating the meeting of the lifeform with the greater world. Contrast this to primary metabolites, which are required for growth, development, and reproduction.
How Streptomyces offers such tremendous potential
The great genetic variety it holds as the most populous genus in its phylum, with more than 700 species cataloged thus far. There are even species which rank among the longest genomic strands in all the bacterial kingdom: S. violaceoruber with 8.7 million base-pairs (Mbp) and S. scabiei at a whopping 10.1 Mbp.
Add to this the knowledge that Bacteria have more protein-coding genes from Eukaryotes, and that that gulf widens as genomes lengthen, and we find a very complex and active set of organisms.
A final point to the activity of the Streptomyces genome: it averages 12% of its protein-encoding genes dedicated to secondary metabolite production, a “high proportion” when compared to the rest of the kingdom (Nikolaidis et al., 2023). This all paints a picture of Streptomyces having a strong ability to affect the world around it.
Global focus on the genus
The discovery which launched Streptomyces into global focus was the creation of streptomycin, an antibiotic which helped treat tuberculosis. This compound was isolated from S. griseus in 1943 and won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1952. Various extracts and synthetizations from this genus have focused on the antimicrobial properties and their application both for human health as well as pesticidal controls for use in agricultural production.
However, the global zeitgeist of our time is beginning to focus our attention inwards, to examine what we might do to change our bodies from within to better fit their environment without. Of notable interest is what’s been termed our ‘microbiome,’ all the various microscopic life inhabiting our very bodies. We’ve already scoured the genetic potential of Streptomyces for over 100,000 applications of reducing harmful microbial activity in humans and for agricultural chemicals (Alam et al., 2022). What if there is still more to be gained from this genus, and what if the methods might be different than laboratories and synthesized extracts?
Environmental interactions between microbes & humans
Exposure to different environments and inputs can change the various microbiomes in our bodies. We know the gut microbiome is tremendously affected by both temporary and long-term dietary options (Leeming et al., 2019).
Scientific experiments continue to investigate what effects various environmental exposures have on human health. In particular, investigations into affecting the microbiome on human skin are still ongoing. Our skin interacts with the world before and one behalf of all our other organs, and so might hold great potential for affecting reactions or purposeful changes to each of our skin’s microbiomes.
One recent study (Mhuireach et al., 2022) hypothesized that the hands of gardeners would be a likely place for soil-to-skin transfer of microbial populations. Complications, including hand-washing, confound the issue. But they did find Streptomyces among the top ten most abundant genera found in urban garden sample soils! The authors go on to emphasize the importance of soil/skin contact, citing Roslund et al. (2020) who found that biodiverse playgrounds improved children’s health and immune-function. Such findings reinforce efforts— at to get children outside and interacting with curated, natural play environments.
Further reading
Read more about this research on human health and garden soil contact, fresh from Oregon State University’s Garden Ecology Lab.
And now, you can carry on with your day knowing you’ve got about as much breadth of knowledge of Streptomyces as possible without beginning to delve into specific species. Thanks for reading!
