Durell Kapan:
He took this nice textbook, quite thick. He said, “Everything you need to know if you want to go to college and study biology is in this textbook.” And he tossed the book out the window, but he said, “We’re going to actually learn biology in nature.”

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and that was the voice of Durell Kapan, a senior research fellow at the California Academy of Sciences. This episode came about because last summer I interviewed Derek Mitchell, the CEO of Partners in School Innovation, and Scott Sampson who leads the California Academy of Sciences about regenerative education. Here’s how Scott explained what regeneration is and how it differs from sustainability.

Scott Sampson:
Sustainability is all about holding on to what’s left. It’s about protection. It’s about separating people from the natural world and saying, “Hey, we better sustain this resource out here.” And that frame isn’t working for us, and so if we’re going to move into a thriving future, we can’t just protect these places. We actually have to give Mother Nature a helping hand regenerate these places enough that they can become eventually self-regulating and withstand all of the environmental perturbations that we know are coming with climate change and other forces. So for us, regeneration is a way of taking on this whole new frame that it’s not about doing less bad, it’s about doing more good.

Alec Patton:
Or in the words of marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, “If you asked me how my marriage was doing and I replied that it was sustainable, you would be concerned.” Derek, Scott and I talked a lot about what we need to do to transform human society so that it’s regenerative and we kept coming back to stories. Here’s Scott again.

Scott Sampson:
What we’re really in desperate need of now are stories that on the one hand connect us to the larger living world, and on the other hand are telling stories about the regeneration of that world, that we’re inspiring people with the things that can happen so that more people feel that they too can get engaged in making a positive difference in the world.

Alec Patton:
This episode is about one of those stories because Durell Kapan, who watched his biology teacher throw a textbook out the window, has been working on a project that has expanded my idea of what regeneration can mean. And to bring an educator’s perspective to the story, we have another guest on this episode: Shelley Glenn Lee, Director of High Tech Elementary North County. Shelley first joined the High Tech High Community in 2005 as a high school science teacher. In 2007, she left the classroom to work at the University of California San Diego as deputy director of a program called ScienceBridge. ScienceBridge connected researchers at UC San Diego to teachers in schools. Here’s an example. ScienceBridge facilitated a collaboration between biology teacher, Matt Leder, environmental science teacher, Chris Morissette, and a marine biologist named Aaron Hartman, who based at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. That collaboration led to what at the time was the largest ever lab experiment studying the effect of environmental stressors on coral, and it was carried out by 11th grade students.
In fact, they were my students. It was my first year as a teacher, and Matt and Chris were my teaching partners. I haven’t even mentioned that the coral tanks all sat on tall metal stands that the students welded together themselves. That project was awesome, but now Shelley’s going to tell you about another partnership she facilitated between High Tech High teachers and UC San Diego, one that continued after she came back to High Tech High. First an elementary school science teacher and now is an elementary school director. It starts with a UC San Diego lab that studied bees.

Shelley Glenn Lee:
And one of the grad students was interested in biodiversity of bees in San Diego County. That was the topic of his dissertation. And so we found an opportunity to have a High Tech High biology teacher work on designing a project where the students were able to collect bees from their own backyards to contribute data to this project where otherwise the scientists would not have access to these spaces like backyards. So our kids coming from around the county were able to contribute information about bees, and that partnership just developed over time where once I came back to High Tech High, High Tech High then became an educational partner with this lab. We got to expand our citizen science work across grade levels and contribute to this ongoing question about not bees, but ants and the invasive Argentine ants and how they’re displacing the native ants around San Diego and Southern California.
In that project, our students were able to collect from our schoolyards, from their backyards, from community spaces and help with this research project on looking at how the Argentine ant has taken over in spaces and where our native ants are. Again, a biodiversity question, simple protocols kids could engage in and contribute to this research project.

Alec Patton:
And which grade levels?

Shelley Glenn Lee:
Kindergarten, third grade, sixth grade, and 11th grade. Then we had multiple schools involved in that project as well. So we collaborated with Cabrillo National Monument and set up the first, I guess, survey of ants on the property in decades. The last time they had done a survey or even looked at ants was from the fifties. And so we came in and we had 300 students spread out through the park doing this protocol, and we were able to identify 11 species in one day. That was the first time they had been able to say, “These are the ants that at Cabrillo National Monument.” When we went back a second time with some teachers and engaged them in this survey, we found an additional three species. So all in all, we were able to identify 14 species for the park, and so many of our schools and students and families and teachers were able to participate in that.

Durell Kapan:
Well, that’s amazing. I got started in this whole business based on experiences like the ones you’re providing for your students.

Shelley Glenn Lee:
Oh, amazing.

Durell Kapan:
My name is Durell Kapan and I’m a senior research fellow at the California Academy of Sciences Institute for Biodiversity Science and Sustainability. I had an amazing teacher named Neil Main in Seaside, Oregon where I grew up, and when you went into his class on the first day, he took this nice textbook, quite thick. He said, “Everything you need to know if you want to go to college and study biology is in this textbook.” And he tossed the book out the window, but he said, “For the rest of us, we’re going to actually learn biology in nature.” And then he took us outside.
So this guy was amazing and the experiences we had, including seeing humpback and gray whales in the surf, so many amazing things. We literally were doing biology outside in nature every day or under the microscopes with pond water that we collected or estuarine substrates that I actually put out in the river there and then watched species fall onto the slides and grow and form a community, all these transformative experiences. So that got me on a great pathway that intersected early with museums, and I got a sophomore summer scholarship to go to Eastern Oregon with the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry and kind of continue that theme, and it was called the Ecological Research Team. After that, I met people who had their PhDs in biology on that summer, and I said, “Okay, this is what I’m going to do. I’m not going to turn back.” And I’ve been on that path ever since I was basically a sophomore in high school.

Alec Patton:
All right, I have an establishing question for us. What would you call the bioregion that San Francisco is a part of?

Durell Kapan:
Oh wow, that’s a great question. What’s the bioregion? Well, first I’ll tell you, I don’t know technically, but San Francisco is in an area of California that has a moist Mediterranean climate with winter rains that we’re just getting now. And so the kind of habitats that we have around San Francisco include coastal scrub, coastal prairie and other associated habitats that dominated this area before Westerners came with the gold rush. And so some of those habitats are extremely limited now, and that’s kind of what we’re working on. That’s where we’re working.

Alec Patton:
Let’s go back in time now. We’re talking about butterflies. What was the Xerces Blue butterfly and what was it up to when it was around?

Durell Kapan:
Okay, so let’s wind the clock back before 1850 or even another 500 years before that. The area from Golden Gate Bridge all the way south to Fort Funston, which is the entire coast of San Francisco, which is the city and the county, the coterminous area, was a mix of dune habitats with the species from those two other habitats that I mentioned sort of stabilizing those dunes. So the prairie species and the scrub species. And then there were probably large… Wherever there was water, there were probably large conifers, likely redwoods, and then oak and willow and other species where there were water and creeks running down into the ocean. And right where I’m sitting right now in Golden Gate Park at the California Academy of Sciences was a dune. The dunes are unique. They’re created by the winds, obviously they need a source of sand. We have a huge source of sand from the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento River flow.
All those things combine to create a dynamic environment where the plants stabilize the dunes and the dunes grow up because the plants are holding them down. Then at the backside of the dune, the deflation plane, you get some usually an evolution into sort of parallel creeks that have little meadows that form that eventually turn into forests and that goes over and over and over again. So it’s a very dynamic environment. So Xerces was a taxon, some think a species, a divergent biological unit that literally existed in that habitat just basically all across the western flank of San Francisco up to Telegraph Hill and Lone Mountain where University of San Francisco is and into the Presidio. And it probably literally could have seen the gap that was eventually filled by Golden Gate Bridge. So that’s what it was before we got here.

Alec Patton:
When and why did the Xerces Blue go extinct?

Durell Kapan:
Well, with the gold rush, San Francisco became a bustling economic hub of the biggest city in the west, and part of that included developing the area to the west of the ridges between those hills and mountains I just mentioned. Those were called the Outerlands, and people thought they were kind of a wasteland because of the dune and blowing sand. And so those became developed. So as the dunes and their associated habitats became housing developments, including the ones that my mom and dad were in when I was born, this species was noticed by entomologists, including people from the California Academy of Sciences, that it was just being more and more restricted. So the Xerces story is like many other stories of threatened and endangered species or extinct species. They lost a place to live. The last places it was found was in the Presidio in an area the Presidio at the time was a military base and in an area that was essentially like the last remnant small sandy dune area.

Alec Patton:
Quick note here for non-San Franciscans, the Presidio is a national park right in the middle of San Francisco. It radiates out from the base of the Golden Gate Bridge. Back to Durell.

Durell Kapan:
One of the most important parts of that dune habitat for Xerces is a species which is on my screen saver here that I’m looking at. It’s called the deerweed. It’s a plant in the pea family. It’s perennial, but it dies back every year and just sort of sprouts from the stump and it has little flowers that are… They’re attractive, but they’re not super flashy. And the adult female, Xerces Blue, had to lay eggs on that plant or possibly occasionally it could accept another plant, the lupine that would be also around it. So that’s where it was basically a very simple problem, not enough habitat for these plants and the butterflies winked up somewhere around 1941 to 1943.

Alec Patton:
And when that happened, when the Xerces Blue went extinct, who noticed?

Durell Kapan:
There’s two scientists, Downey and Lang, that published a paper that said, “Okay, we studied the Xerces in the late thirties, and we also noticed them in 1941.” And they went through and kind of reviewed everything they knew about them, and they said, “We are afraid that it’s gone.” And that was in 1956 and they said, “We haven’t seen it since then.” And there are specimens to back up the 1941 observations, so that’s our last known date. Then by 1956, definitely you couldn’t find them anywhere.

Alec Patton:
And how did losing the Xerces Blue affect the ecosystem?

Durell Kapan:
So there’s two things I want to say. One, the Xerces Blue ate this plant, the Deerweed. It probably pollinated that plant and others, like most butterflies do. It had a very interesting, likely interesting interaction with ants. Now the Xerces is in the gossamer-winged butterfly family. And that family occasionally, depending on the species, will have an interaction with ants. And essentially by providing ants with a nutritional resource from specialized glands on the caterpillar. The ants will tend the caterpillars, sometimes even taking them into their nest and feed the caterpillars so that they get sort of like a two-way symbiosis or mutualism going. That may have been important in Xerces. Its closest relative does that, but it’s not a hundred percent necessary for its development. Then other than being a pollinator and a mutualist, it could also have been prey for many things, including spiders, lizards, birds.
It wouldn’t have generated a huge amount of biomass, so some people would say like, “Well, so what? This is just a blue insect, and there are other ones out there, so it doesn’t really matter.” But it turned out that the Xerces itself was one of the first known invertebrate species to go extinct in North America due to habitat loss. And so the authors of that paper always felt really bad because they were some of the last Xerces they ever saw. They collected a few of them, but it turns out there’s almost no example of collecting that has led to a species extinction. But the other feeling was that they couldn’t tell… They told the base commander, “We really need to not pave over this area. We need to conserve these sandy dunes.” And they were ineffective at getting that done. And so those collectors and researchers always wondered, “What if we could have done more?”

Alec Patton:
Which the collectors felt bad because they like killed a few.

Durell Kapan:
Yeah, and they also witnessed the extinction and didn’t really figure out how to solve that problem. But if you zoom forward, that meant that Xerxes was in the zeitgeist or in the mind of younger, new lepidopterists and biologists. Specifically a young lepidopterist went to Great Britain and saw a similar story playing out with the large blue and was talking to the scientists there. And they were saying, “Well, if the large blue goes extinct on the island, we could get the closest relative from France or nearby and move it back.” And that made him think a little bit about the Xerces, and he wondered, “Wonder if we could do that with a close relative of Xerces.” But that sort of gives us the background that Xerces is like the poster child for invertebrate extinction in North America, and many people around the world know that story.

Shelley Glenn Lee:
Wow.

Alec Patton:
So that was the situation. A butterfly had gone extinct in San Francisco. As with any extinction, it’s impossible to know all the ways that threw the ecosystem into disarray. We just know that such a loss was irretrievable, except as that Lepidopterist learned from his colleagues in England, maybe it wasn’t. Our story now moves to 2020, in the California Academy of Sciences Entomology Collection. The academy houses millions of insect specimens. If you’re picturing tiny creatures pinned down in glass cases, you got the right idea. So kind of creepy but useful. Durell describes it as a specimen lending library for biologists. One day in 2020, Chris Grinter, the Entomology Collections Manager at the academy, got a phone call from Ben Novak who’s lead scientist at an organization called Revive and Restore. According to the Revive and Restore website, Ben specializes in genetic rescue and deextinction. Sounds promising. Here’s what Ben had to say.

Durell Kapan:
Ben said, “Hey, you guys have some Xerces Blue specimens. We’re curious if we could learn something about those specimens in order to help think about how to reintroduce a species to be a surrogate.” He didn’t use that word at the time, but instead of Xerces, he basically said.

Alec Patton:
It turned out that Revive and Restore was working with the Presidio trust on restoring the dune habitats within the Presidio.

Durell Kapan:
And so there had been a group of people who had been following Dr. Pyle’s advice, which was restore those dune habitats in anticipation that someday somebody would be able to locate and find a butterfly to release, and I like to say, stand in Xerces big blue shoes. So I was very excited and I made a little proposal to do a genetic, and we call it a phenotypic, but that’s just a fancy word for studying the form and function of the butterfly from our collections

Alec Patton:
With a grant from Revive and Restore, they got to work.

Durell Kapan:
And we began by extracting DNA from Xerces and the species, the Silvery blue, which most experts considered its closest relative at the time. Then we used the DNA to locate… It’s kind of almost like a sleuth job to locate nearby butterfly populations that would be quite close to Xerces. That for required a lot of time, and we ended up getting an anonymous donor who wanted to sequence the genome of Xerces. To do this work, we essentially sequence random fragments of the DNA, think of those as pickup sticks, and you have to do a lot of sequencing because the DNA in a museum specimen is degraded, so you have to get many, many pickup sticks. And when you get them at the beginning, they’re just all jumbled up. It’s like having those on the floor. What you want to do is place those with their unique sequences of the four bases of DNA–A, C, G, and T–in order so that all those base pairs line up.
And ultimately we want to sequence the entire genome so we can do that. So in order to do this, we use that first pass over the DNA, then we assembled it or aligned it to a distant species, and it gave us kind of a weak blurry look. Using that blurry look, we picked the closest relatives of Silvery blues that we could find genetically, which were down in San Jose. We then got permits and collected a few of those, and then we sequenced the genome of that from the fresh DNA using a special technique that our Center for Comparative Genomics staff knows how to do. Matt Van Dam and volunteer Jim Henderson actually built the genome of the Silvery blue from chromosome and to chromosome in for all 24 chromosomes. So then we had a beautiful map with which to map back all those DNA fragments from Xerces.
The end story of that is that we found that indeed the closest relatives genetically were just down the peninsula down in, say, Russian Rouge Reserve and down to San Jose. But then we also looked at the other half of it, which is what they were doing out in the Presidio. And so we wanted to sort of develop a job description for Xerces. So I got a student from the NSF Undergraduate Research Experience program that we have called the Summer Systematics Institute and this student was amazing. She’s a USF student named Alizee Gamber. Alizee literally wrote down all the details of the labels on each of those pin specimens for 300 specimens, and then built a model with me about what kind of ecological niche Xerces had and how does that compare to Silvery Blue populations around California. And we use that model to sort of locate the individual from a population that fit the job description the best, and so we had three aspects of the job that Alizee identified.
One was needs the climate match, so it needs to be able to take a cool foggy environment like the Presidio in San Francisco. The second one was it should have some habitat similarities, so it needs to be in a dune that has coastal scrub or coastal prairie plants. Then finally the last one is that it ate the deerweed host plant, which was its favorite host plant as we know from Downey and Lang’s paper. And so Alizee did all this work, and when it was all done, it pointed to her backyard in Monterey where her parents have a house. So I contacted a couple of managers of various places in Monterey County and got permits to go investigate whether they had big populations of Silvery Blue butterflies. After a year of measuring populations, I wrote a proposal to take the surrogate Silvery Blues from three different places in two different jurisdictions in Monterey County where there were abundant butterflies. And that’s what we did last spring, gathering butterflies in April and May, and then keeping them alive, giving them a unique mark and releasing them in the Presidio.

Shelley Glenn Lee:
Wow, that’s amazing.

Durell Kapan:
So let me know what questions you have.

Alec Patton:
Well, I want to know what’s the latest?

Durell Kapan:
How did they do? Yeah, so we had three different releases. The earliest one was kind of in a cool morning in early April, I think it was April 4th. And we released a total of 70 butterflies.

Shelley Glenn Lee:
Oh my gosh.

Durell Kapan:
The first 15 or so butterflies were happy to be in an area where we had deerweed. We actually let them go underneath this mesh and they’re on the deerweed. The temperature was so cool that they didn’t get started right away to do anything. So we left them under the mesh for quite a while until it warmed up, and then we slowly rolled back the mesh and they fluttered around a bit, but they basically stayed put. I stayed with them the rest of the day and got back the next morning. And of course, the first thing we need to do is figure out whether the butterflies are established. There’s three options. They could stick around, they could fly away, or they might get preyed upon and that’s just the way these things go. We found a small fraction of them established about 30% on that particular day, which is pretty good. And the next day, those butterflies were experiencing warmer weather, and two of the females that were sort of trying to probe around on the deerweed the day before when it was so cold, were actively laying eggs.

Shelley Glenn Lee:
Ah, wow.

Durell Kapan:
So that was just amazing. They stuck around for two or three more days, and I saw one actually fly out of the study area. Who knows where it went? That was the first release. And that one was done just with the core team to see how to do it. In fact, full credit goes to a single male that I was given permission to handle and to see how to transport and to feed and all that I used in mid-March that I kept alive 18 days in my lab and then brought it back to the natural reserve to say, “Thanks, you taught me a lot.” So then we did the second release. We decided this is the one to talk about, so we had sent out press release and gathered different media representatives and had the executive director of the academy, Scott Sampson, and the executive director of the Presidio Trust, and we ended up releasing 28 butterflies that day.
It was really neat. This time it was warm and a bit windy by the middle of the day, and I saw butterflies that afternoon. I definitively detected 17 by the end of the day, but then the next day it just got cold and rainy, which is very San Francisco. I couldn’t find anything. So then I went back another day and I was like, “Okay, where did these butterflies go?” So instead of going to where I released them, I walked way outside of where we released them and then just walked in a spiral all the way back. And this is something… I mean, I have permission to do this as a collaborator at the trust, but we’re not suggesting people just tromp around the dunes. I have to spray my… I bought a brand new pair of running shoes for this that had good support, and I have to spray them down before stepping off the trail and that kind of thing so they’re not bringing any plant pathogens.
I very carefully picked my way around, and I found this sort of area next to some oaks and near some deerweed that had a few other species that looked just like the source site where we gathered the butterflies. I found five butterflies right there. So that was the thrill, and they were laying eggs and the males were chasing the females. It was like, “Wow, this is incredible.” Then I found a few others nearby, and from that release, we decided that if it’s warm, we should let them out of the little nets right away and let them figure out where to go. And so we did that. Our last one for 2024 was May 3rd. We gathered butterflies from state parks with state parks permission, and then moved those butterflies from their thriving populations. By the way, we were basically only trying to gather one out of every three butterflies seen or fewer and actually we gathered fewer than one out of three. It’s more like one out of four or five. That way the host population is not even going to notice.
And so we basically released another 28 butterflies this time, and we had literally removed the nets within 45 minutes, and the butterflies started rapidly dispersing. And I came back and I was like, “No, I see one female over here, but not that many more.” I spent the rest of the day looking around, I didn’t see much, and then I said, “Just relax. You’re going to just let them settle in and then do the big spiral and I’ll come back and I’ll find more.” And I did. We found over positing females that were sort of, one was 50 meters away, one was 25 meters away in a place I wouldn’t have expected.
It did have deerweed, but it was under some grass. It was very similar to the habitat that specific individual was taken from, which is not surprising. So in this case, the butterflies, even though they don’t really have vocal cords, they’re kind of talking. They’re telling us what they like, and that helps us think about how to do better. So overall, we learned a lot and we know that they’ve laid eggs. Several of those eggs hatched. I wasn’t able to see larvae, even though I crawled around on my hands and knees for quite a while. And we’ll know in late March through early May, whether or not it was successful, if we have an unmarked butterfly flying around in the Presidio.
The reason why it’s unmarked is because I’m hoping that we will reconstitute the whole team and get permission to gather more butterflies and release them basically in the same places in one additional place. Because as most population biologists know, in order to kickstart a population in a new area, you have to have many, many individuals released to find those individuals that are happy with the spot and get them at a high enough density that they find each other. And so that’s our goal, and we expect several more years if we’re to get to that goal.

Shelley Glenn Lee:
It’s so awesome. Do you have concerns about the genetic mixing of the different populations or potentially introducing something like a pathogen or something taking from one spot to another? Is there any concern around those things?

Durell Kapan:
That’s a great question. So the first part is the genetics. And yes, we have a little bit different genetics, but there’s no reason to think that that would impact anybody locally because those local butterflies aren’t there. The second part was whether we would introduce some sort of pathogen. So one of the things we recognize is that we don’t want to move… The ideal thing to move would be eggs, because those eggs are basically as close to sterile as you can get. Unfortunately, if you could get the egg and then immediately contain it, that would be awesome. But if you let females lay on a bush or a deerweed, those eggs are exposed to parasitoids and you’d have to move the plant, and those could have plant pathogens. So the next best thing to a perfectly sterile egg would be a female carrying perfectly sterile eggs.
So the only thing we could imagine is if the female had some sort of pathogen on their scales or on their outer exterior surface, and we did look to make sure there were healthy flying butterflies. That’s all we can do. The other thing is that it’s kind of a very detail-oriented job. So I gathered the butterflies with help from the team, and then I drove them straight to the lab or to my kitchen, and I marked the butterflies overnight with unique codes using a colored sharpie markers. Then we wrote those codes down, and then we used photography to follow them to figure out which butterfly is the one we’re looking at, and we can match the code from the photo of the butterfly before we release it to the one after.
When we do that, we’re hanging out with the butterflies and literally putting them in a small cage and sticking a dot on their wings just by moving the pen up to them. None of the butterflies were ill except for one, and one butterfly seemed to have… It may have been losing a little bit of moisture, and that’s possible if it has a injury of its leg or its wing. And so that butterfly was not released, and that one, we have that one in our collection now/ the other thing is the butterflies then after they’re all done, they live only a short period of time and then they’ll pass away and pretty harsh environment out there for any pathogens. It’s not a hundred percent, but it’s this particular example I think is a fairly low risk.

Alec Patton:
Shelley, as an educator and a school leader, what’s this making you think about?

Shelley Glenn Lee:
Oh my gosh, so many things. I mean, first of all, it’s just such a great example of collaboration, and that’s one of the things we really help students develop those skills as early as kindergarten and throughout their K-12 experience through the projects. And so we can say, “Oh, it’s so important,” and “Oh, you’re collaborating.” But I think this is such a great example. You can see it. You could see why it’s necessary to work with different people and how together you can do something greater than just by yourself. It also shows the importance of interdisciplinary approaches, even just within biology itself. You have the molecular side and the organismal side and the ecology side, and so that also I think shows the importance of how we teach through an interdisciplinary approach, looking for those connections and how one discipline can inform another.
So, it makes me happy to see that and also just know that we’re doing the right thing when we’re designing and teaching and learning through those means. That’s the real world. That’s how we make things happen. And also just an amazing example of the power of human impact. Yes, we’re doing so much negative stuff, but there’s so much positive things too that we can do and that are happening, and this is just a great example of that.

Durell Kapan:
Wow, thank you. Thanks on behalf of everyone involved. It’s a huge, huge group of people going all the way back to those initial scientists.

Shelley Glenn Lee:
Yeah, I think that’s also a really cool thing, the history. We don’t often teach the history of science or… We talk about the nature of science and the process of science and the history, but this is such a great history lesson as well. Another thing that strikes me is, well, I did work at the Natural History Museum for several years and have since brought kids back to the museum to go behind the scenes, see the collections and hear from the curators why it’s so important to have collections, right? Why do we put all this time and energy into this? And you hear, “Well, it could be important one day to have these specimens.” And here’s a great example of why it’s so important to have these specimens.
When technology finally caught up to a point where now we can look at this organism in a really different way on a molecular level, where before we were just looking at their morphology and saying, “Oh yeah, they’re connected because they have these similarities.” That’s why I’m seeing how do we connect kids to these stories and how do we show them… How would anyone justify why it’s important to keep a butterfly for a hundred years? Why? That’s like I said a lot of time and energy. Why is that so important? And this is why.

Durell Kapan:
Thank you for pointing that out. That’s one of the key things that I was excited about, which is that each specimen is like a jewel that has a history. It’s something that was really there wherever it was located, and it was observed by the person who collected it on a date and in place. And so that’s a proof of life. And I know people are saying like, “Hey, facts are going out the window.” But you can come visit, both of you come visit and I’ll open the drawers and show you the Xerces Blue butterflies, and we can all agree that those were really there and they were really a thing then we can all say that that’s a reality. And so that allows us to build a picture of the world that wouldn’t exist otherwise. That’s replicated like 48 million times in museums like the California Academy of Sciences and others.

Alec Patton:
Shelley, I have a final question for you. Is this sparking an idea for an elementary project for you?

Shelley Glenn Lee:
Yes. I’m wondering if at some point, you mentioned that you’re taking photographs in the field, and one of the projects we’ve done in collaboration with the local River Park was helping them with analyzing their camera trap photos. And so taking all those photos and then letting the kids learn how to identify what’s in that photo, and then tracking the date and the time, getting some metadata associated with that. In one respect, then it’s like crowdsourcing the data collection and analysis piece, but then the kids using that data to ask unique inquiry questions.

Durell Kapan:
That would be possible. One of the things we’re thinking of doing, because the habitats are a bit sensitive, we can do iNaturalist and we’d have to geo-obscure the records, but then we could easily work with teachers and other partners to access the data that’s not been obscured. But the other thing I was going to suggest is that these butterflies, the Silvery Blues, are all over California, and the ones in Southern California are called the Silvery Blues in the form Australis. So it’s Glaucopsyche lygdamus australis Southern, basically, and they eat a different host plant. So that would be a really amazing thing to rear those butterflies in your own school, and probably that host plant. And let’s work on that offline, I’d love to help. Ideally, one of the things that we might want to do in the long run is to increase the data set size to literally understand a bit more about how Silvery Blues came to be the way they are in California now, and where Xerces came from off of that sort of like a radiation of subspecies and one species.

Shelley Glenn Lee:
Okay. Yeah, because I was actually going to ask you about that. One thing we might want to do is build a reference collection, but I love your idea of rearing them. So yeah, I think in that case it would be like what are the restrictions around collecting and what’s the best protocol for collecting? That’s where I’m wondering those two questions.

Durell Kapan:
Well, so the state has fairly rigid permits for vertebrates, and they’re right now trying to change things around. So I’m not sure this will be applicable in the future, but right now, gathering butterflies for school groups and school stuff should not be a permitted activity. But you’d want to double check that with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, CDFW. The thing is that the hosts are kind of nice plants. They could be deerweed or astragalus, which is a different species in the pea family. And so you could literally get native garden source for those hosts and put those at your school. The butterflies could just be there on their own if you’re close enough to an existing population. I’ll send you a little bit of information, but let’s talk [inaudible 00:39:00]. This is really exciting. I got a lot. With just your brainstorming right there, I wrote two pages of notes.

Shelley Glenn Lee:
Oh, wow. Well, thank you. So, so amazing to talk with you.

Durell Kapan:
Thank you very much. It’s really cool to see someone so dedicated to teaching and getting students their experience with, I’m going to call it biodiversity science. That’s what it is.

Shelley Glenn Lee:
Mm-hmm.

Durell Kapan:
Awesome.

Shelley Glenn Lee:
Absolutely.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed, it’s hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Durell Kapan and Shelley Glenn Lee for this conversation. You can find out more about the California Academy of Sciences and this project in our show notes. Thanks for listening.