KAXE's Tuesday Morning Show strives to take an in-depth look at some natural resource-based issues important to the region.
We hope to discuss not only the problems but also highlight some creative solutions. A number of Minnesota state agencies play roles in monitoring the health of pollinators in the state, but with thousands of species, it's a big job.
Rebeca Gutierrez-Moreno is state pollinator coordinator with the Environmental Quality Board. She leads an interagency team working to develop strategies to protect pollinator species in distress while raising awareness with the public about how they can help. Gutierrez-Moreno was the guest on the first conversation of a series on pollinator decline with Mark Jacobs, KAXE producer, alongside Morning Show host Heidi Holtan and John Latimer, staff phenologist.
"If we think about insect pollinators, it's a complicated thing to say, 'They're doing great,' or 'They're doing badly,'" Gutierrez-Moreno said. "There's some species that are doing better than others. [There are some] that are more commonly distributed and seem to be doing OK, but there are others that definitely are not doing well.
"There are some species that haven’t been recorded in the state for the longest time: We cannot say for sure that they have disappeared, but there needs to be more efforts to survey and monitor in their common habitats."
Below is a transcript of the conversation, but first, here are resources mentioned by Gutierrez-Moreno for those interested in learning more about pollinators and how to help.
- Minnesota State Agency Pollinator Report
- Pollinator and Biodiversity Toolbox - Minnesota Board of Soil and Water Resources
- Lawns to Legumes program
- Minnesota Biological Survey
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This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Heidi Holtan:
I'm Heidi Holtan with John Latimer. On Tuesdays, we talk nature and conservation. We're beginning today a new series, thanks to our producer Mark Jacobs, on the decline of pollinators.
Our guests today are Mark Jacobs and Rebeca Gutierrez-Moreno. She is the state pollinator coordinator with the Environmental Quality Board. Welcome to you, thanks for being here.
Rebeca Gutierrez-Moreno
Thank you for having us. Very excited for this conversation.
Mark Jacobs
Good morning.
Heidi Holtan
Thank you. So, Rebeca, we want to find out about what your job is. But first, let's talk about what you mean by pollinators.
Rebeca Gutierrez-Moreno
Thank you. So, pollinators are animals that help or assist plants in their reproductive cycles. So, there are different types of plants. Some plants have self-pollination, so they don't really require pollinators. There are plants that need that third party to carry pollen from male flowers to female flowers: they wouldn't be able to produce fruit if it was not for the help of those animals.
And there can be insects that do that. There are reptiles that do that, birds, and even bats. And there are also plants that do both: that have self-pollination, but also have some assistance from animals that help them reproduce. So, that's in general what we define as pollinators.
John Latimer
It's a pretty important job, the pollinators! Yours as well: I have to admire your title, the “Pollinator Coordinator.” That's very nice.
Rebeca Gutierrez-Moreno
I love it!
John Latimer
I wish I had that kind of [title]! I'm the Staff Phenologist, which is pretty important, but not a Pollinator Coordinator. That's very nice. Glad to have you aboard this morning, Rebeca.
Rebeca Gutierrez-Moreno
Thank you.
John Latimer
So, tell us about your role with the EQB and the Interagency Pollinator Protection team.
Rebeca Gutierrez-Moreno
Yeah, so EQB is the Environmental Quality Board. EQB works with projects and programs that require interagency coordination. [In] my role, I lead and coordinate the Interagency Pollinator Protection team. This is a team that is comprised of 10 state agency staff from 10 state agencies, and we work together to develop strategies to help pollinators in the state.
So, things that the state can do with the resources we have, and we also think about how to involve the public and help the public care about the subject. In addition to that, we also work to strengthen interagency relationships and try to help each other and not duplicate efforts. So, I'm not talking about sharing resources necessarily, but talking about things that we can do together and figure out, where are those places where we can really optimize our resources and amplify our message?
So, we would use the help of each other's communication staff to get messages [to] different places. We also work together with the expertise of each agency that participates to design, for example, native seed mixes for restoration projects, or to think about ways in which we can help pollinators not be directly affected by pesticide drift and other human activities that we do. So, those are some examples of activities that we do together.
Every year we produce our IPT annual report. It's all on the EQB pollinator website. We really put in a lot of effort on those reports to help people understand pollinators, and how Minnesota's pollinators are doing. We do a lot of work with other partners that are outside state agencies as well, and it's one of our goals to strengthen those extra-agency relationships as well.
Heidi Holtan
So, how are pollinators in Minnesota? How are they doing?
Rebeca Gutierrez-Moreno
That's not an easy answer. You know, I could say good or bad, because pollinators are so diverse. We're talking about hundreds and hundreds of these different species. We are focused mainly on insect pollinators (which is not an easy task even if we're just focusing on that, not birds or reptiles or other things). There have been more reports of insect pollinator [population] declines.
However, it's different to talk about Honeybees, which are a [human-] managed pollinator, than to talk about the Rusty Patch Bumblebee, which is a wild pollinator that doesn't have someone to take care of them. So, there is a huge knowledge gap about each species and how they're doing.
There're more efforts nowadays: the Department of Natural Resources in collaboration with the Bee Lab, they wrapped up the Minnesota Biological Survey and we found about 490 species of bees in Minnesota. So, that's just talking about the diversity of bees: we're not talking about butterflies, we're not talking about beetles, or even mosquitoes (some mosquitoes can be pollinators as well). So, this is just about bees, and we see the large diversity of native bees that we have in our state.
[As we are] figuring out ways to help them all, there are general things that we can do, for example about habitat and increasing flower resources, that would benefit not only pollinators, but other wildlife as well. Because everything's connected.
So, in general, if we think about insect pollinators, it's a complicated thing to say, “They're doing great,” or “They're doing badly.” There's some species that are doing better than others. [There are some] that are more commonly distributed and seem to be doing OK, but there are others that definitely are not doing well. There are some species that haven’t been recorded in the state for the longest time: We cannot say for sure that they have disappeared, but there needs to be more efforts to survey and monitor in their common habitats.
John Latimer
You know, it occurs to me if you could persuade the food producers to somehow label or color their product to let people know that "without pollinators, you would not be eating this," it would make people much, much more aware of how important they are. Which would hopefully make your job easier because as people become more aware, they begin to understand that all those little critters out there have a part to play.
Rebeca Gutierrez-Moreno
That's a great idea. We are actually working right now on an action framework to figure out ways in which the state, the legislature, and the general public can work together to help pollinators. We're still in the period of receiving public input on the framework. We're searching precisely for those great ideas that people have and ways in which we can raise awareness about this and encourage people to learn more.
And where are those strategic places where people go and they can get that information, right? Because not everybody is going to go to our very small agency websites and then download all our reports and read them from beginning to end. So yeah, we're looking for those types of ideas as well. So, thank you for sharing that.
John Latimer
My first thought was if you could go into the grocery stores and [remove] all of those things that are pollinator dependent. How quickly people would become aware. <laughter> It’d be right now. Like, “Where are my nuts? Where are my fruits?”
Rebeca Gutierrez-Moreno
I am starting to get an idea! Maybe we cannot do that at the grocery store, but maybe at an art installation that simulates a grocery store. People can come in and then just see the produce that isn’t pollinator dependent, and then all the ones that are connected [to pollinators] and are no longer there. That would be interesting! Thank you. You're full of great ideas.
John Latimer
Well, I'll tell you what, me and pollinators, we've been buddies for a long time. I try to keep my land just as it is, and I have increased the number of milkweed plants for the monarchs. Those are not alone: I also grow Monarda and several other native plants that I'm hoping will encourage bumblebees and bats and all the rest to take part.
Rebeca Gutierrez-Moreno
That's really sweet to hear. It always encourages me when I hear people talking to me about their gardens and how they've gone through a transformation from maybe just lawn to having native plants and incorporating these amazing flowering plants (they’re also really beautiful) and just looking through the window and seeing the wide diversity of little animals that are attracted to them. So, that's really encouraging.
Heidi Holtan
We're talking with Rebeca Gutierrez-Moreno. She is the state pollinator coordinator with the Environmental Quality Board, and Mark Jacobs is also joining us. He’s the producer for this new segment on KAXE: the decline of pollinators. Rebeca, what about your garden?
Rebeca Gutierrez-Moreno
Yeah, I live in a condo...
Heidi Holtan
<laughter> Okay!
Rebeca Gutierrez-Moreno
...so I am planning on putting out pots. And that's what I want to do. Actually, I have great news because I was just assigned a community garden plot! So, I'm very excited about planting some fruits and mainly veggies that flower at different times during the growing season. I'm excited to see what pollinators come and pollinate my veggies. But yeah, but I don't have a garden.
Heidi Holtan
Yeah, but pots can also help?
Rebeca Gutierrez-Moreno
Actually, this is very exciting because that's something that sometimes people don't know: that even little things can help. So, the Board of Water and Soil Resources (which is also part of the Interagency Pollinator Protection Team) has created a pollinator toolkit. You can just Google it, and they have lots of ideas and resources on how to plant pollinator-friendly plants in small spaces. So, even if you have a roof or if you have a balcony, you can have a pot. Usually, they require sun, so if it's south-facing or if you can supplement that’ll help.
But yeah, even little spaces can help pollinators, and you would be surprised looking at what comes to your flowers, even if they're on the balcony. Yes, I did it last year. Not all my plants emerge because I don't get great sun, so I'm trying to be strategic this year about that.
Mark Jacobs
I was approved this year for a Lawns to Legumes grant, so I'm working on that right now.
Rebeca Gutierrez-Moreno
Wow, good. Congratulations.
Mark Jacobs
I've done a bunch of projects as well, but I thought I'd give it a shot and I was approved. So, we'll get a little financial help doing it.
Heidi Holtan
Mark, tell us what that is.
Mark Jacobs
The program is through the Board of Soil and Water Resources. It helps individual landowners with a grant to do some native plantings, and it pays up to $350.
John Latimer
Can you name some of the legumes for those of us that might just want to go out and harvest some seeds off of plants out in the woods?
Mark Jacobs
I'll let the expert do that.
Rebeca Gutierrez-Moreno
I'm not sure I'm completely informed about the specific legume plants. I know that they encourage native seeds and the flowers that you've talked about, John, like milkweeds and Monardas and other species. They have a list of species that are adapted and native to this region and that you can think strategically about where to put them according to your space.
They also provide resources, like guidance through the Master Gardeners Program or the training through the Lawns to Legumes Program to provide that assistance to the people that are getting those grants and that require that guidance. That’s so it is as successful as possible.
Mark Jacobs
It's really handy that they have a seasonality, too, to make sure that what you're planting is blooming throughout the growing season rather than just "one and done." That's really helpful, I think.
John Latimer
Yeah, it occurred to me when you were talking about potted plants, oftentimes really early in the season (especially in [years] where the spring might be really early or late in arriving and a lot of the insects are out of phase with it), if you can get a plant and maybe force it [to develop] indoors and then put it outdoors when the time comes, you can have flowers available for those really early arriving insects.
And that can be very beneficial: that can mean the difference between life and death for bumblebees. That queen needs a lot of energy, and she needs to be able to get it in a hurry because she's got a lot of work to do. So, what are some of the animals that are under threat that we are watching that are going to be in trouble if we don't come to their aid?
Rebeca Gutierrez-Moreno
So there's this ginormous group of people counting numbers of the Monarch Butterfly down in Mexico right now, and [other people] that count larvae and eggs up here during their mating season. We [also] have the Rusty Patch Bumblebee and the Dakota Skipper Butterfly.
The Minnesota Zoo, who is also part of our interagency team, has a great conservation program for the Dakota Skipper. When they started their program, they initially went to the field to collect specimens and then they reared them in their facilities and tried to get their numbers up. Then they do releases during the summer. So, they're trying to reintroduce them to their native habitat.
That is also one of the challenges, because the amount of prairie is now just 1% of what it used to be in Minnesota. So, the zoo has to be very strategic about where to find the best place to release the adults and make sure that they're going to be safe and be able to repopulate. So, that's a really cool program that the zoo has.
A lot of people don't know that they're also working on the Poweshiek Skipperling (this is a different species of skipper butterfly). This one hasn't been recorded in Minnesota for the past several years. I don't know the number exactly, but it's presumed to no longer be in Minnesota. Apparently, there's just a small population in Michigan and so the zoo is working in collaboration with people in Michigan and in Canada (where the species is definitely endangered) to rear and reintroduce them to their habit.
[They’re working on] other species that haven't been found in Minnesota (and this is mainly butterflies that [I’m talking about]). You know, the Karner Blue Butterfly hasn't been recorded in Minnesota for the longest time. I think there are records of them in Wisconsin. There's the Ottoe Skipper, the Uncas Skipper, and the Uhler’s Arctic Butterfly.
Right now, the Biological Survey was focused on bees, but I think there's the need to do a big survey on butterfly species. And then, after that, we would maybe need another one for beetles for us to have the information about what species need protection and [to] update those [species] lists as soon as possible.
Heidi Holtan
Well, I'm sorry to say we are out of time. This has been the 1st in our conversations for our new series, the Decline of Native Pollinators. Thanks so much to Rebeca Gutierrez-Moreno and Mark Jacobs for your time today.
