When I began converting my garden to mostly native plants in 2017, I started a project on iNaturalist called “My Toledo Yard Biodiversity,” in which I recorded every insect I was able to photograph in my yard. By the end of 2020 the project contained 145 species, and I was surprised and pleased at how high that number was (you can read that post here.). So imagine how I feel today when I check the project and discover that the number of species I’ve photographed here has nearly doubled in less than three years! Yes, that’s right, there are at least 286 species of insects (and arachnids) living in my garden. Wow. And just to be clear, I have a smallish 1/3-acre lot in the middle of a city.

I was so shocked by that number that I downloaded my data and sorted through it to make sure there wasn’t something I was misinterpreting. Here’s what I found, sorted by taxonomic order:

• Lepidoptera 66 (17 butterflies, 49 moths)
• Hymenoptera (ants, bees, wasps, sawflies) 63 (20 bees, 40 wasps, 3 ants)
• Diptera (flies) 41
• Hemiptera (true bugs e.g. cicadas, leafhoppers, etc) 40
• Coleoptera (beetles) 38
• Arachnids (spiders) 15
• Orthoptera (grasshoppers, crickets, katydids) 10
• Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies) 9
• Other 4

I’ve often read that there are more species of Coleoptera (beetles) than any other order, at least 350,000. Based on that, I expected to find that I had more beetles than anything else in my yard. But when I saw that wasn’t the case, it made me curious. In my quick spin around the web, I found one article that makes an argument for Hymenoptera (bees, wasps, sawflies) having more species than any other order. But in general, it’s still accepted that beetles are the predominant insect species on the planet (in terms of number of species, not number of individuals). But maybe it’s just that the distribution of species worldwide isn’t the same, and where I live they aren’t the majority insect species. It’s probably highly variable according to habitat types. Or perhaps my numbers are a reflection of how easy it is to find the different types of insects, and not necessarily an accurate portrayal of how many there actually are here. I don’t know about you, but these types of questions are my motivation to keep studying and learning more.

And speaking of Hymenoptera, here’s a large and beautiful wasp that’s a frequent visitor to my garden.

This is such a satisfying citizen science project for me. I’d like to be able to say that the increase in overall species is due to my native garden, but there’s no way I can make that conclusion. For one thing, I don’t have any data from before I started the native garden, so I can’t compare the ‘before’ and ‘after’ in any valid scientific way. But since I still have a lot of non-native plants here, I have anecdotal evidence that those plants aren’t attracting insects at anywhere near the rate that the native plants are. I do see bees visiting the flowers on some of the non-natives, like the hydrangeas that line the front of my house. But there’s never anyone eating the leaves on those shrubs, whereas most of my natives are supporting a great variety of insect life. They’re active parts of the ecosystem. Sometimes I imagine I can see an entire world on one plant…it’s fantastic.

And the other day I even added two more new species in my last check of the yard after dinner. This little Japanese leafhopper was shy and kept hiding on the underside of a leaf, but I managed to get a good enough photo to identify him. I see lots of colorful red-banded leafhoppers here daily, so I knew instantly that this was a leafhopper I hadn’t seen before.

The Sullivant’s milkweed finally bloomed this week and is emitting its intoxicating sweet fragrance, so I spend a lot of time visiting it and watching the activity. And tonight I noticed someone new crawling around on the flowers. This is a Yellow-horned Flower Longhorn Beetle (Strangalia luteicornis). I like his bold markings as well as the way his long body seems to curve sideways as he scampers around the many flowers on the umbel. This beetle feeds on pollen and nectar, and milkweeds have plenty of both.

One of my favorite beetles is the red milkweed beetle, another long-horned flower beetle that I find charismatic. It’s one of the few arthropods that seem to watch me as I watch them (like jumping spiders do). I found just one of them a few days ago, and then the next day there were three of them, and today I found at least five mating pairs of them at once!

Here’s a short video of a male beetle trying to mate unsuccessfully. Notice how his head turns at the very end of the video, as he’s perched at the top of the leaf. Isn’t that cute? I wish I’d not turned the video off, because a moment later he lifted his elytra and flew off in that silly, awkward way that beetles fly. Probably off to find another more-willing female.

So I’ll continue adding bugs to my project — well, I use that project to document all life forms, not just bugs. I also include birds, mammals, and some plants. But iNaturalist isn’t meant for garden plants, so if I upload things I’ve planted, I have to mark them as “cultivated/captive” so the scientists understand the data they’re using in their work. So even without adding all the native plants in my garden, my project has 359 species so far. One limitation on this is that if I can’t get a photo of something, it isn’t recorded in the project. But I’m pretty tenacious and can usually get at least a crappy documentation photo of an insect.

If YOU want to be a citizen scientist, all you have to do is take photos and upload them to iNaturalist. You can share pictures of insects, as I do, or mammals, birds, plants, mushrooms, or any other life form. You don’t even have to know what it is, because other people will identify it for you (eventually). Your observations will become part of a massive database used by scientists worldwide in their research projects. I find it highly rewarding, and you might too. You can search by your county name to see if other people have seen different things than you have. And you can filter your search by types of insects or limit it to just plants, or whatever. It’s so much fun, and a much better use of your precious brain power than scrolling social media (but I do that too). Just set up your free account at iNaturalist and start uploading. You can even search to see what other people have posted, and follow people the same way you do on social media. You can even follow me if you want — https://www.inaturalist.org/people/321645. Hope to see you on iNat!!