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[00:00:00] Michael Hawk: Have you ever seen a really fuzzy looking ant? Maybe it looked like a little pipe cleaner with fuzzy red or yellow hair crawling along the ground. If, so you probably saw a velvet ant. But here’s the thing. It’s not even an ant at all. They’re wingless wasps, and they often turn up along hiking trails, roadsides, and occasionally, even in your backyard. And if you haven’t seen one hit pause and check out the show notes at nature’s archive.com for a few photos, you have to see them. What’s more of these wasps have quite the reputation and an amazing natural history.

[00:00:31] So with me today is Dr. Joseph Wilson. He’s an evolutionary ecologist in associate professor of biology at Utah state university. Uh, Dr. Wilson is also the co-author of a new book velvet ants of north America. As well as the wildly popular the bees in your backyard. I’ve always been fascinated with velvet ants, but found precious little about them online. I purchased the book and reached out to Dr.

[00:00:54] Wilson and he graciously agreed to share some of his knowledge today.

[00:00:57] For example, did he know that some velvet ants have an auditory warning? And about half of the velvet ant species are actually nocturnal.

[00:01:05] We discussed why we often see velvet ants, deterministically wandering their trails. Why they’re often and inaccurately called cow killers and more. But I couldn’t have a chat with Dr. Wilson and not talk about bees. So we kick things off with some discussion of bees buzz pollination, and more before transitioning to velvet ants.

[00:01:23] So without additional delay, Dr. Joseph Wilson.

[00:01:27] Dr. Wilson, thank you so much for joining me today.

[00:01:29] Dr. Joe Wilson: You’re welcome.

[00:01:30] Michael Hawk: as we were just chatting here before hitting the record button I’ve been a fan of your work, your work on bees for a while and own one of your books. And I don’t know what took me so long to reach out to you.

[00:01:41] But the reason I did this time was not bees, not what maybe a lot of our listeners know you for, but velvet ants. I see that you have a new book coming up soon. So I think we’re going to have a fun. meandering discussion today.

[00:01:54] Dr. Joe Wilson: Yeah, I hope so.

[00:01:56] Michael Hawk: And I’ll try to cover both for that matter, but maybe just for a little bit of background and context, can you tell me a bit about where you grew up and how you got interested in nature?

[00:02:07] Dr. Joe Wilson: Yeah. So I grew up mostly in Utah. Provo, Orem, Utah. So south of Salt Lake City in the suburbs and growing up in the suburbs in the Great Basin. So the part of Utah I was in as part of the Great Basin Desert, it’s biodiverse in its own way, but I was really into nature documentaries and field guides.

[00:02:29] Even as a kid, I remember, I think it was third grade. I had to get special permission not to read storybooks. but to be able to read field guides at, in school. And my mom went and talked to the teacher, and they let me read field guides, because I would love to just learn about the animals and plants, and look at their distribution maps.

[00:02:46] And I remember often being disappointed that many of the things I saw in my field guides were not in suburban Utah. But we had a decent sized backyard, and there were some wilder parts of the yard. And while I didn’t see turtles and frogs and things like that that I wanted to see, there was always insects around.

[00:03:05] And so even from a young age, I was noticing insects and being fascinated by insects. There was no documentaries about insects at the time, but I was still able to maybe get my animal fix by observing insects in the backyard.

[00:03:23] Michael Hawk: Yeah, that’s really interesting because I, I’m listening to you telling that story and thinking about my childhood and I too enjoyed. nature documentaries and would spend time outside and see the insects, but I never really equated them in the same way that you’re describing. I wonder what it is about some people who, when they see insects, they, they just have that extra fascination with them.

[00:03:47] Dr. Joe Wilson: Yeah, it’s interesting because None of my family are biologically inclined in the same way as me. My parents aren’t biologists or anything, but they would say I was biologically inclined from birth. My dad tells the story that when, when I was two years old He was, he, so he heard that you should, sit down and have interviews with your kids periodically.

[00:04:07] And as a two year old, there’s not a lot you can ask your kids about, he was trying to be a good dad. So he sat me down and asked, what I wanted to be when I grew up. And he tells me that I told him I wanted to be a lion when I grew up. And so in his mind, that was evidence that I was always kind of a biologist.

[00:04:24] Even as a two year old, I was thinking, thinking about animals. That’s what I wanted to be is an animal, not. Something else

[00:04:30] Michael Hawk: are you still striving to be a lion in some respect?

[00:04:33] Dr. Joe Wilson: I actually use, I use that in some of my bios that I give, and I say, I never made it to lion hood, but being a biology professor is pretty close.

[00:04:42] Michael Hawk: Yeah. Yeah. I, I see that. I can see

[00:04:44] Dr. Joe Wilson: And the reason I bring it up because with the insect thing, in animal documentaries, there’s lots of things about. And there’s always some kind of conflict between the predator and the prey, often it’s a lion or it’s a cheetah or something like that.

[00:04:59] And I think why I was able to get behind bugs broadly is you have all those different roles. among insects and their relatives. You have the predators, and you have the prey, and you have the, the herbivores, and just all these dynamics that are being played out. So there’s still the kind of intrigue and drama that you see in those nature documentaries, but it’s happening in your backyard underneath, your leaf pile or whatever.

[00:05:25] So I think I was able to make those connections, maybe subconsciously, that there was some exciting stuff happening in the worlds of insects in the backyard.

[00:05:36] Michael Hawk: totally. And that’s one of the things that I, I advocate people pay more attention to their yards. And when you start to see that happening and the different hunting strategies that different insects or spiders or, whatever you find take really is very similar on a small scale in your own backyard.

[00:05:54] Dr. Joe Wilson: Yeah.

[00:05:55] Michael Hawk: Were you from this early age interested in bees and wasps or did that come later?

[00:06:00] Dr. Joe Wilson: No, it came later. There’s, there’s two, two kind of versions of the story. I do remember, so in sixth grade, we had to make a, an insect collection as part of our curriculum. And I already had one because I was already interested in insects, but I do remember finding bees that were not just honeybees.

[00:06:16] And, having just a recognition in my mind. Oh, there’s other things besides honeybees, but that’s as far as it went until college. So through high school, I was still interested in biology. I started college and was interested in biology. I thought I wanted to study the charismatic megafauna, bears or wolves or something like that.

[00:06:36] And so I started school at Utah State University in the College of Natural Resources. They have a wildlife management program there. Within that first semester, I realized that, that wildlife management was focused more on the management side of things and less on the, maybe the, the ecology or, or biology of the things.

[00:06:57] And I wasn’t really that interested in management. I don’t like the management aspect. I just want to know what, what these organisms are doing, not necessarily how can we as humans manipulate the system is how I was seeing it. So in my, I was making this shift over into the biology, which wasn’t doing the management side.

[00:07:14] But at the same time, I met a girl who was super cool, and she just barely had gotten back from a summer research job studying bees in Southern Utah. She was working for the USDA bee lab. And she just basically spent the previous four months out in the back country of southern Utah collecting wild bees.

[00:07:33] And so she reintroduced me to this idea of wild bees. And as I became better friends with her and pursued a relationship with her, she got a job for me at the USDA Bee Lab as a, as an undergrad. So she’s now my wife and she graduated with natural resources degree, but I stayed with that, job that she got me in bees and stayed with bees and expanded to wasps.

[00:07:57] So there’s the long version of the story.

[00:07:59] Michael Hawk: Gotcha. And I guess drilling in expanded to wasps and now maybe tease a little bit, the velvet ant part of the discussion. So how did, how did velvet ants get into the picture?

[00:08:11] Dr. Joe Wilson: Yeah, that’s a good question, because it’s not always a simple transition. So as an undergrad, I was working with the bee lab. I ended up doing some undergrad research projects and heading some bee based studies. And then, realizing I wanted to do graduate school, I made the conscious decision not to become just a bee biologist.

[00:08:33] It’s really easy to do, especially in biology in graduate school, you get so specialized that that is what you are. And while I really liked bees, I wanted to make sure I was looking at, at other options and in hindsight, expanding to wasps really isn’t that different, but as an undergrad working in the bee lab, I met a professor that was just new at Utah State University that specialized in wasps.

[00:08:57] He came out in the field with me for my research, and we became friends, and he’s the one that suggested. pursuing graduate work with something other than bees. He was working on velvet ants, which are a kind of wingless wasp. And convinced me that there was a lot of work to do with velvet ants.

[00:09:13] And so that’s where I went. And he was able to help me take my, my interests and use velvet ants as a study subject to answer the biological questions that I was really interested in.

[00:09:25] Michael Hawk: So velvet ants are not a charismatic megafauna, but they’re charismatic in their own right. And I think when people see one there, it’s hard to ignore them and hard not to ask questions about them.

[00:09:36] Dr. Joe Wilson: Exactly. Well, and what’s interesting with that is We see those bright, fuzzy velvet ants that’s what people are familiar with, but that’s only half of the diversity in North America. The other half are nocturnal velvet ants, which are not. Bright and not as fuzzy. And my PhD work was actually on those, these nocturnal velvet ants.

[00:09:56] Michael Hawk: Yeah, and I was largely oblivious to nocturnal velvet ants until preparing for this interview, in fact.

[00:10:03] Dr. Joe Wilson: Yeah. Well, I think almost everybody is including other entomologists.

[00:10:07] Michael Hawk: really, really. I do want to table the velvet ant discussion for a moment. And and let’s just talk bees for, for a few minutes before we get there. And, partly because I, I suspect that, A fair number of my listeners do recognize you and your name from the work you’ve done in the world of bees.

[00:10:26] And in particular, I think that the book that a lot of folks are familiar with is The Bees in Your Backyard, which you were coauthor of, and there’s a corresponding website. So I’d love to hear about why you decided to publish a book and what your goal with that book was.

[00:10:42] Dr. Joe Wilson: In the bee lab, when I was working in the bee lab, there was a graduate student She was my supervisor in a lot of these different roles I was playing as an undergrad. Her name was Olivia Messenger at the time. It’s now Olivia Messenger Carroll.

[00:10:55] And so we, we stayed friends. She’s really good friends with my wife. We’ve stayed friends since I worked with her. And she went on to get a PhD studying some chemical ecology of bees. I went on to get a PhD in wasps, but during this time we were still in contact and we noticed that culturally there was this shift in, this cultural understanding and awareness of bees.

[00:11:16] People were being more aware of their importance but we were keenly aware that there was no resource. available to a general public about bees. And so there was mistakes being made. We would often see news stories talking about how important bees are, but they would only focus on honeybees, which are not a native species.

[00:11:36] And I consider them more of an agricultural commodity. They’re not, they’re not wildlife. And so Olivia and I. who have, we had both worked with native bees almost exclusively and knew the importance in ecosystems and all the really interesting stuff about native bees we got together and said, hey, let’s make a book that is, is academically rigorous and accurate, but is geared more towards Not just academics.

[00:12:01] We didn’t want to make it only to like a lay audience. We wanted it to be applicable for academics and, and others alike. And so that’s where the bees in your backyard came out. We wanted it to be an introduction to bees so people could learn about bees and fall in love with bees. with accurate information.

[00:12:18] Michael Hawk: Hmm. I think you hit the mark pretty well. I was look, I was mentioning before that we’ve had nice weather here and around seven or eight different bee species in my front yard the other morning, and I pulled your book back out to help re familiarize myself with some of what I was seeing and yeah, you have it

[00:12:36] organized by family and characteristics of the family and photos of collection specimens, but also individuals in the field. So it’s a, it’s a nice mix of being able to look at the insects up close and then also in situ in the field.

[00:12:53] Dr. Joe Wilson: Yeah. I’ve, I have realized that pictures from the field are so invaluable because when you’re looking at a dead specimen, whether it’s a bee or a velvet ant sitting on a pin, it generally is in a position that you never will see in real life. You can look at it closer or in different ways.

[00:13:10] And so seeing what a bee looks like when it’s on a flower helps with this search image. And it also gives the scale perspective, a bee on a pin. They all look the same size, but really, there’s a huge diversity of sizes of bees, and I think that is helpful. So, Me and Olivia both were hobbyist photographers, so we took 90 percent of the pictures from that book, because that was the fun part, go chase bees in the field and take pictures of them.

[00:13:37] Michael Hawk: Nice. So you mentioned that part of the reason for the book was because of some of the misinformation and growing interest in bees. And, you know, unfortunately I still see news stories where it’ll be about bees, but the photo might be of a bee fly or. surfidfly or something like that. So there’s still some room to grow, but in general, how, how have you seen knowledge of bee conservation progress since the publication of this book?

[00:14:02] Dr. Joe Wilson: It really varies geographically, which is interesting. In some parts of the country There has been a huge shift that people are way well aware of native bees and really Enthusiastic about providing for native bees other parts of the country still are in that infancy stage when they’re still trying to figure out what the Difference is between a fly and a bee and so like for example Oregon and Washington here in the West, culturally have this, this kind of this movement to understand the native bees of those countries.

[00:14:35] And there’s volunteers that are going out and photographing them for iNaturalist. And there’s, there’s professorships that they have started there focusing on pollination and native bees. So some parts of the country like that, Ohio is similar. Ohio has a lot of things going on with native bees.

[00:14:50] Then other parts like Utah, where I’m at, there’s still. Hasn’t been a big change. people still are, unsure what a bee is versus a fly. And so I give a lot of seminars every year and I focus for the first 20 minutes of these hour long seminars on how to tell the difference between a bee, a fly and a wasp, and then just telling people what bees are and what they do is where we’re at still culturally.

[00:15:14] Michael Hawk: Yeah, there’s such an anchor of like maybe an anchoring bias with honeybees and what. Most people’s expectation of a bee is, and then when, like almost anything in nature, it seems like the same story exists for so many different taxa, but when you start learning about them, oh, there’s so much diversity and, and they behave differently and act differently and look differently than maybe people expect.

[00:15:36] Dr. Joe Wilson: Yeah. And one of the, when we first started this, a lot of people would make statements similar to like. Well, if people are interested in honeybees, at least it’s starting, like, at least it’s making them aware and there’s some truth to that. The danger is Like I mentioned, they’re not wild animals, but more than that is that if you have too many honeybees in an area, it can have a negative effect on the native bee communities.

[00:16:01] And so a lot of people and organizations and, even conservation organizations were increasing honeybee hives in their areas. There would be, city libraries that would bring honeybee hives onto their rooftop gardens because they thought they were helping bees. And the reality is that In a lot of cases, that was negatively impacting the wild bee communities.

[00:16:24] And so while some people were resistant to this movement away from honeybees, it’s becoming more clear that honeybees as the poster child for saving the bees is probably the wrong direction. It’s a, it’s a great hobby. If you’re a beekeeper and you want to keep bees, it’s a really cool hobby.

[00:16:42] Can be really fun. It just needs to be done wisely. You can’t just bring honey bee hives in and assume that everything will be fine.

[00:16:49] Michael Hawk: So maybe this is a good transition to talk about some of the biggest misconceptions that people might have about bee conservation and native bees. And this could, this is very open ended, but it could be behavior, the types of habitats they need, or, any, any area that comes to mind for you.

[00:17:05] Dr. Joe Wilson: I think that that, what we were just talking about is, is where the biggest misconception lies is that this idea of what a bee is with a queen and a hive and honey and worker bees. Those are all these, facts, and I’m doing air quotes here. Those are facts about bees, but they only really apply to honeybees.

[00:17:23] There are 4, 000 different kinds of bees in North America, north of Mexico, so United States and Canada, 4, 000 different kinds of bees. And only one of them lives in these big hives with queens and workers and honey, and it’s the honeybee, which is not from, from here. And you’ll see things like, and I, I Throw some celebrities under the bus because they’re celebrities, but because they got a lot of attention.

[00:17:46] So Morgan Freeman several years ago got a lot of attention because he has a big property in Mississippi and he decided to make it into a, a bee sanctuary. So he brought 30 beehives in. He hired beekeepers to keep those beehives healthy, and he planted fields of lavender and clover for those beehives.

[00:18:03] But what he just did is he now increased the number of bees on his property from whatever was there naturally. Increasing it by 30 hives. Each hive has, 50, 000 bees in it. So that’s a lot of new bees in the environment. And then planting fields of lavender and clover. What people don’t realize is not all bees like lavender and clover.

[00:18:24] There are a lot of, I say they’re picky eaters as bees, but we call them specialists. A lot of wild bees. will specialize on certain kinds of flowers. And so if you plant lavender and clover, that will do almost nothing for, the longhorn bees, which is a big category of bees that don’t really visit lavender and clover very much.

[00:18:43] Michael Hawk: So he may have increased the population of honeybees, but decreased the population of the native bees by taking that action. Yeah.

[00:18:53] Dr. Joe Wilson: there. Similar Rolling Stone magazine highlighted The bass player for Red Hot Chili Pepper, Flea, he also has, is a hobbyist beekeeper, and so they did this story about how Flea is saving the bees. And the problem is, is those are, those are the stories that get attention, but without recognizing that honeybees are really not like all other bees we can make this, this cultural awareness of bees equals honeybees, and that can be wrong.

[00:19:20] It’s not, it not can be wrong, it is wrong. Honeybees are not equal to bees.

[00:19:25] Michael Hawk: when you mentioned Flea, I feel like maybe he is an entomologist who maybe took a wrong turn at some point, just with his name.

[00:19:33] Dr. Joe Wilson: I know, I always wonder that. What’s his background and what, where’s his interest in insects? And how can I talk to him about native bees?

[00:19:41] Michael Hawk: I’ll put the call out. I, I don’t have connections to Flea, who knows,

[00:19:44] Dr. Joe Wilson: Tell him to call me.

[00:19:47] Michael Hawk: and yeah, speaking of bee conservation I was just going to comment about a great story that I actually had on the podcast. Oh, it’s probably been a year ago now. It seems like yesterday, but and and. Amateur melatologist, Krystal Hickman in Southern California who has gotten into the photography and searching for the rare and hard to find bees in California, just an amazing story. And I guess that’s one of those success stories of somebody getting inspired and reaching a new audience with the story of native bees.

[00:20:17] Dr. Joe Wilson: She has some great pictures, too. She does a lot of good work.

[00:20:20] Michael Hawk: one thing, and one more bee question, I think, before we finally move on to velvet ants, but I was thinking about something that I wanted to ask about ask Krystle about, or some of my other guests, but always missed, that’s buzz pollination. So this

[00:20:34] may seem random, like a random question, but can you tell me what buzz pollination is and how it works?

[00:20:40] Dr. Joe Wilson: Yeah, is it okay if I take a little bit of a step back before

[00:20:42] Michael Hawk: Certainly. Yes.

[00:20:44] Dr. Joe Wilson: set the stage? I tell people about native bees. Most people know honeybees are pollinators. We kind of associate honeybees with pollination, and honeybees can be good pollinators. But in some crops, I’ll give apple orchards as an example, the job that a hundred honeybees can do in an apple orchard can be done the same by two native bees.

[00:21:06] based on these studies of pollen transfer and all these things like that. And so people might ask, well, why are native bees sometimes so much more efficient? The apple orchard is not a great example with buzz pollination. It does work for things like tomatoes and eggplants and blueberries. All of those plants will produce bigger fruit and more fruit per plant when they have buzz pollination.

[00:21:29] Some plants the flower doesn’t easily release the pollen. It almost has it in like a little compartment. And if you shake the flower, the flower will, will drop the pollen out, like a salt shaker. So buzz pollination is this ability that wild, many wild bees have.

[00:21:47] Honeybees never evolved that ability. So buzz pollination, they can do it in different ways, but basically they are vibrating their muscles. Without flapping their wings at sometimes. So they’re just vibrating and that causes the pollen to fall out of these flowers. And in the act of the pollen falling out, it sometimes will pollinate the flower better self pollinate or or otherwise.

[00:22:08] So you get bigger blueberries when you have buzz pollinators. You get bigger tomatoes when you have buzz pollinators, honeybees don’t know how to do it. Many, many wild bees can buzz pollinate sometimes they will actually. Internally, they unhook their wings from their wing muscle and vibrate their wing muscle.

[00:22:23] So it sounds like they’re buzzing, but really they’re just vibrating.

[00:22:27] Michael Hawk: Hmm. And from what I remember. some plants and some bees, there’s specific frequencies of the buzz that are optimal.

[00:22:36] Dr. Joe Wilson: and I can’t remember what it is because I’m not a musician, but someone actually measured it and it was like a D or something like that. That, yeah, the, the right. So it’s this, it’s this close relationship between native bees and many native plants because they have evolved together.

[00:22:52] And so the bees that are best at pollinating certain plants might. buzz of a certain frequency that causes the plant to release more pollen. Yeah, so there’s, there’s a lot of interesting kind of stories of relationships like that, some with buzz pollination, others with just specialized features, that the bee that has evolved with the flower is often best at pollinating that flower.

[00:23:11] Exactly.

[00:23:12] Michael Hawk: I think that’s just so , fascinating. It’s a look at evolution where the plant is able to reproduce with the same genetics that allowed it to, be buzz pollinated in the first place and the benefit of doing so is it has a more efficient pollinator. It has bigger fruits, it has more seeds, like you can see how this all fits together. It’s

[00:23:33] Dr. Joe Wilson: Well, and it’s really interesting, something that I’ve never really studied, but it’s always fascinated me, is there are many crops that we, that now we use around the world that were originally domesticated by Native Americans anciently that includes things like potatoes and tomatoes and a lot of squash plants and things like that.

[00:23:53] These were all plants or crops that weren’t available worldwide until, the last 500 years, but they were here for a long time. And so there are lots of bees here. that are co evolved with these plants that Native Americans developed like buzz pollinators, or there’s a certain kind of bee that only visits squash plants.

[00:24:12] So that’s really effective at pollinating pumpkins and zucchinis, and especially all these native squashes that were originally domesticated in Mexico thousands of years ago. So it’s interesting to see how, as humans were domesticating these plants, bees were also evolving alongside with that, and aiding in the agricultural aspect of these domesticated plants.

[00:24:34] Michael Hawk: very, very interesting. All right. I think as much as I could talk about bees for forever, I think we should probably move on to the velvet ants that, that we’ve been teasing for a while.

[00:24:44] Dr. Joe Wilson: Yeah, yeah, that works for me.

[00:24:45] Michael Hawk: you mentioned that velvet ants are actually a type of wasp, and I guess that’s maybe one of the first surprises.

[00:24:50] So tell me a bit about what a velvet ant is.

[00:24:54] Dr. Joe Wilson: is a family of wasps, the family is a Mutillidae that are found around the world. Commonly, or they’re known as lots of different things around the world, but most often they are referred to as velvet ants. The females of Mutillid wasps are all wingless, and so they look like big Fuzzy ants, velvet ants, because they, most, many of them have this bright hair covering their body,

[00:25:19] Michael Hawk: It makes you want to touch them. It makes you want to pet them.

[00:25:22] Dr. Joe Wilson: exactly, they look super fuzzy and cute but they are, they have, actually have the longest stinger compared to their body out of any bee wasp or ant, we did a study on that, and those people that get stung by various Hymenoptera and rank it, rank velvet ants as one of the more painful stings.

[00:25:40] It’s a tricky name because they’re not ants and they’re not really that velvety, but as, as common names go, we don’t always get to choose the most scientifically sound common name for things.

[00:25:52] Michael Hawk: Well, I guess as common names go, it also, they have a common name of cow killer, which goes along with that powerful sting.

[00:25:59] Dr. Joe Wilson: Exactly. And so people often ask me about that. So I should say they cannot kill a cow. They have never killed a cow. And in fact, their venom which is potentially really potent as far as pain goes, it is really not dangerous as far as lethality goes. People have done these studies, and it’s not a toxic Or it’s not highly toxic, it’s just highly good at causing pain, if that’s the way to say it.

[00:26:24] So cow killer, the idea is some rancher somewhere a long time ago got stung by one of these and said, ow, that hurt bad enough to kill a cow. So that’s where the name came from, potentially.

[00:26:34] Michael Hawk: So you started to talk a bit about the diversity and the fact that this family it’s found all over the world. Can you tell me a little bit more let’s explore the diversity a little bit more, I suppose.

[00:26:43] Dr. Joe Wilson: yeah, and I should have, I should have looked up in my own book with this because I don’t have a good number of how many species there are. But we can talk about why. Here, I’ll pull my book off and see what we say. There’s actually, in the introduction, we have a whole section about this. Because one of the reasons I studied velvet ants for my dissertation work is because there’s so much unknown about them, including how many species there are.

[00:27:06] When we were doing work on, on nocturnal velvet ants, we would put up little traps of basically a fluorescent light that we would lure the male velvet ants to. Males can fly. most of them can fly. And so they would come to these lights like a moth comes to your porch. But in that, four or five years of working on my PhD with, with the co author of this book, Kevin Williams I think we found something like 70 new species of velvet ant in the deserts of Western North America.

[00:27:33] And so all over the world, when people are looking for velvet ants, they’re always finding new species. So to ask how many species there are worldwide, We don’t know for sure, but there are thousands. How many species are in the U. S.? Again, we don’t know for sure, but there’s around 450 ish. So besides being understudied, which would mean that there’s probably more species to discover, as we look more into them and look at them genetically, we also did a lot of work finding that two specimens that look distinct, maybe one of them is orange and one of them is half black and half orange genetically found out that they were actually the same thing.

[00:28:13] So things that used to be known as two species are now known as one species, and it just has multiple color patterns. And so there’s a lot of movement. As far as how many species there are, because sometimes we’re expanding that by finding new things. Sometimes we’re contracting that by realizing two or some, in some cases, nine different what we called species are actually just one species.

[00:28:35] Michael Hawk: How much of that speciation or maybe splitting of species is driven by DNA versus other methods?

[00:28:44] Dr. Joe Wilson: That’s a good question. a lot of my work was looking at the historical geography and how that influenced speciation. So looking over the last 14 million years or so of of North America, some mountains got higher like the Sierra Nevadas. Some areas got lower, like parts of the Great Basin, the valleys would get lower.

[00:29:03] Sometimes there was inland seas that were present, like down in Southern California, there was basically a sea that separated San Diego from everywhere over by Las Vegas because the Sea of Cortez extended farther north. So I was looking at all these kind of factors and then looking at the genetics of the velvet ants to see if I could attribute any of these kind of geographical events to the evolutionary events in the velvet ants.

[00:29:30] And there, it’s a complex story with hundreds of species changing for different reasons. Sometimes they were ice age level changes because western North America was colder. Sometimes they were Pre ice age events like the uplift of the Sierra Nevada mountains. There’s a lot of geography that contributes to the diversity of velvet ants, but then there’s a lot of mimicry and other kinds of ecological evolutionary factors that probably also contributed.

[00:29:58] Michael Hawk: Yeah, it’s interesting to think about so many realms of biology are undergoing a similar kind of evolution of understanding in terms of what species are where and how many there are. But I was just amazed to see that there are at least, in the neighborhood of 450 species right now, that’s, that’s on the same order of magnitude as the number of birds in North America or well in the U S anyway, where there’s maybe what 700, 750 bird species.

[00:30:25] So similar,

[00:30:26] Dr. Joe Wilson: Exactly. Well, and if you include the nocturnal velvet ants, there might be more, more similar to that. Yeah. So we think of all the people that know about birds and all the books dedicated to birds and these velvet ants, which some might argue are cooler than birds are almost unknown by most people.

[00:30:42] Michael Hawk: So I’d love to hear a little bit more about where. all these different species live what types of habitats like what’s their lifestyle and, and I’m guessing it’s 450 different lifestyles.

[00:30:54] Dr. Joe Wilson: Yeah. Well, and so they have one uniform, unifying broad life cycle. These all velvet ants are parasitic. They’re actually, I think officially you would call them parasitoids, but the female velvet ants, their life consists of wandering around looking for a host nest. Most of their hosts are other Hymenoptera that nest in the ground, so ground nesting bees or other ground nesting wasps.

[00:31:18] The female velvet ant will dig her way into the nest and lay her egg. And then the baby velvet ant, which looks like a little maggot, will eat the baby bee or the baby wasp that was in that ground nest at its pupil stage or, when it’s a pretty big host. Velvet ants are parasitic. Or, or parasitoiditic.

[00:31:38] There are parasitoids because they actually kill their host. They don’t just feed off of it. Like a tick might feed off of a deer as a parasite. These ones actually kill the host. So all velvet ants around the world are parasitic, parasitoids. Most of them are parasitoids of other Hymenoptera.

[00:31:57] Many of them ground nesting. Most of the specific host parasite relationships, we don’t know. There are some species that have been dug up from various nests. One species in particular, a nocturnal velvet ant, has been found on something like 30 different ground nesting hosts. But for most of the velvet ant diversity, we are not sure what their host is.

[00:32:21] For those that we do know, most of them are on bees and wasps. And that with with many exceptions. But yeah, so that does unify them. As far as habitat goes velvet ants are going to be more common and more diverse where their hosts are more common and more diverse. And so bees and many wasps are more diverse in the drier parts of the the world.

[00:32:43] In North America that includes the deserts and the Mediterranean areas. So out west, There are, is a lot more velvet ant diversity than in the east. In the northeast, there’s one or two species. In Arizona, there’s hundreds of species, sometimes dozens of species in one, stretch of road. But they’re often in kind of areas with open ground.

[00:33:07] So not, not dense, densely foliated ground. They like bare patches of dirt because they’re searching around in these bare patches of dirt for nests. There’s a little bit of a bias there, because velvet ant researchers find them more in open patches of dirt, because it’s easy to see them. If you’re walking through, a dense scrubland, you might not see the velvet ants crawling underneath the dense bushes.

[00:33:29] But, but as far as we can tell, diversity is higher, and abundance is higher in these dry open areas.

[00:33:37] Michael Hawk: So do ground nesting hymenoptera prefer the more dry open areas?

[00:33:41] Dr. Joe Wilson: They, do, yes. And in fact, like, for a bee statistic, which is informative in this discussion in the US, everything east of the Mississippi River has about 750 bee species. About 70 percent of those are ground nesting. So 700, 750 bee species east of the Mississippi. Utah alone has about 1100 bee species.

[00:34:01] And most of that is concentrated in southern Utah, where it’s dry, sandy soils. There’s in the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument which is in southern Utah, we found 660 different bee species. So almost as many bee species as the entire U. S. live in one national monument in southern Utah.

[00:34:19] Pinnacles National Monument, or I guess now National Park in California, similarly high diversity in that kind of dry that’s in the Central Valley dry hills.

[00:34:29] With a lot of bee diversity.

[00:34:31] Michael Hawk: I know that area well. I look forward to visiting it here soon, I hope.

[00:34:35] Dr. Joe Wilson: Nice.

[00:34:36] Michael Hawk: What you just described, does it also apply to the nocturnal velvet ants? Or, in what ways do the

[00:34:42] Dr. Joe Wilson: It, it does, yes. as far as their kind of ecology goes, it’s very similar as far as we know. Less, less is known about the nocturnals because they’re at night and we don’t see them very much. The females are still parasitic. They still are mostly hunting the nests of ground nesting hymenoptera.

[00:35:01] The difference is that most people are familiar with brightly colored velvet ants. They’re red and black, or yellow and black. The nocturnal ones are almost all just a dull brown. So yeah, but biologically, they’re still doing the same. They’re still more diverse in the western deserts, partly because You need to be somewhere warm if you’re nocturnal, but also for the same reasons as the diurnal velvet ants.

[00:35:25] Their hosts are more diverse in the deserts.

[00:35:28] Michael Hawk: Yeah, and I suppose in the deserts, it it’s almost too warm, and that’s why they’re nocturnal. Like, too warm in

[00:35:33] the day.

[00:35:33] Dr. Joe Wilson: That is one hypothesis about why there’s so many nocturnal species in the deserts is because it could be a way to escape some of the environmental pressures and diversify that way. It could also be a way to escape some of the competition among other parasitic organisms, like other velvet ant species, even, because The diurnal velvet ants are out in the day, and if you could be out in the night, you could be parasitizing the nests before someone else gets to it.

[00:36:01] Michael Hawk: So I think you, you answered a bit of this question already without me asking it. But , if people want to seek out velvet ants, how can they do it? What approaches would you recommend?

[00:36:12] Dr. Joe Wilson: I’ve thought about this a lot because I’ve spent the last almost 20 years now looking for bees, but also looking for velvet ants, and the, where I have the best luck is Velvet ants, specifically the diurnal velvet ants, are more active kind of in the late summer. So often, I mean there’s some exceptions, but often it’s going to be June or even July through maybe October.

[00:36:37] And they are often most active not in the hottest part of the day. Me and Kevin and Aaron, which are the three of us that authored this book, we have the best luck in the evening. So maybe early evening, six o’clock p. m. through sundown. We look for dry areas. Often the sides of dirt roads are really good.

[00:36:59] Sand dunes are also quite good for finding them. In the east and in the midwest, if you can find a sandy, sandy area that has sandy soil and go out in the evening, that’s where we’ve had the best luck. And then we just walk up and down the sides of the road or trails and look at the ground and watch for velvet ants crawling by.

[00:37:19] The same thing is true for the nocturnal ones, we just have to do it with a flashlight and walk really slow. Because in that case, you’re looking for a little brown velvet ant crawling along the ground rather than a red fuzzy one.

[00:37:31] Michael Hawk: Yeah, really interesting. I your description of that matches my own kind of casual observation. I’ve never actively sought out velvet ants. It’s always been happenstance for me. And it, it tends to match everything that you’re talking about there. With the exception of nocturnal velvet ants, which I’d never seen and never looked for.

[00:37:48] Dr. Joe Wilson: Yeah. Well, and you can find the nocturnal male velvet ants because they’ll fly to your porch light, they’ll fly to a black light. We used to use the cheap camping lanterns that had a fluorescent bulb in them because they would attract velvet ants but not as many moths and beetles. But yeah, the nocturnal velvet ants, and there’s pictures in our book, but they The males are winged, and so they look like a brownish wasp of some kind.

[00:38:12] Michael Hawk: yeah, I do a little bit of UV moth lighting, quote unquote, because, other things are attracted to. And so I guess it will happen sooner or later

[00:38:20] at, and the one crazy exception to all of this, I can’t recall the species, but there was one afternoon in my backyard and a little velvet ant just went walking across my patio.

[00:38:31] They’ll even show up in a yard, I suppose, once in a while.

[00:38:34] Dr. Joe Wilson: Yeah. And I’ve, I’ve noticed the same thing in mine and I, I’ve, I’ve noticed patterns that certain velvet ants are more common in yards than others. So I’m guessing yours was in the genus Timula, which if you have the, I don’t know if you have my book

[00:38:46] around you,

[00:38:47] but, uh, I’m just going to pause here for.

[00:38:50] Those are people listening so I can tell you where to look, There are not a ton of species of Timula in North America, but they are basically The head and thorax is red and the abdomen is black.

[00:39:01] Michael Hawk: I could probably look it up on iNaturalist very quickly and see,

[00:39:05] see what people claimed it to be. I, I’m not, I, when I was looking at the photos in your book and how similar so many different. Species are, I started to question how accurate some of the identifications have been on, on

[00:39:19] Dr. Joe Wilson: Oh, it is really hard, except for the fact that Kevin Williams, who’s the lead author on this book, is an avid iNaturalist user. And he is, he has, he has basically an encyclopedia of velvet ants. So he can look at the pictures on iNaturalist and not just look for certain characteristics, but also sort through this knowledge he has in his head, to know what species are in that area, what species might be in that area, and which ones really won’t.

[00:39:47] So if you have a velvet ant ID on iNaturalist, most likely Kevin has looked at it and most likely it’s pretty accurate.

[00:39:54] Michael Hawk: I’ll tell you what, I just found it and Kevin Williams identified it. I, I’m probably going to butcher the name Kocanioherta, Kocanioherta.

[00:40:04] Dr. Joe Wilson: so I say it, I say Dazimutila coccineoherda,

[00:40:08] um, which is interesting because that one, when I lived in Reno, that one was in my backyard, so that’s a species that only lives in California, and then gets over into Reno, because Reno actually has a lot of plants and animals that are only known from the Central Valley of California, California.

[00:40:25] And Reno, for some reason.

[00:40:27] Michael Hawk: Interesting.

[00:40:28] Dr. Joe Wilson: that was another one I guess I’ve seen in my yard. It wasn