(gentle music) - There's nothing an insect doesn't do.

And so you can always find something you love.

Insects are, you know, the canary in the coal mine.

So many things depend on insects, you know?

They're really at the bottom of many, many food chains, right?

(gentle music continues) My heart is with the bugs.

(gentle music continues) (birds chirping) A fanny pack is a good way to keep your butterflies close at hand.

We have flat spade-like forceps for collecting butterflies so we can pull their wings.

And we do a very, very high-tech BAND-AID box.

This is a re-survey of historical data that was collected about 25 years ago here in Washington, in Seattle, on the Pieris rapae butterfly, which is a cabbage white butterfly.

(light music) What we're looking at as a team is looking at how this particular butterfly has responded to climate change.

(leaves whooshing) (birds chirping) (light music) I see nothing.

- [Taylor] I'm not seeing anything flying right now.

- I think I see one butterfly.

There's nothing.

It's just all bumblebees.

- This is ecology (laughing) research to the tee, though.

- I have to say this is exactly, like this is so classic.

- Oh yeah.

Should we head back?

- Yeah, let's head back.

(light music continues) - [Taylor] Is that it?

- Yeah, that's a cabbage white.

We get it, we gotta get it, cabbage white, come on, Taylor.

Let's do it, our one butterfly.

(light music continues) It's a female too.

I'm not gonna move very much.

And so the butterfly is now in the net here.

And this is a female.

I'll show you how I know it's a female.

And so the females have fatter abdomens, and they have actually a little hole in the abdomen for the egg laying.

And then you can hold the body.

And if I open up the wings, you can see.

I don't know how well you can see that, but the female has two dots on her forewing inside the wing.

(light music continues) And that's it.

And that's a female butterfly.

That's kind of what our aim is, to get the females, because obviously, they're the egg layers.

- One butterfly.

- One butterfly.

- [Taylor] There should be more if there is one.

(researchers laughing) - [Gwen] Did you get it?

- No, it's running your way.

(laughing) - Did you get it?

- Yep.

- [Gwen] Woohoo.

Yay.

- [Taylor] Let's see which they are.

- [Gwen] Nice work, Taylor.

That's two butterflies.

- Woohoo.

(light music continues) (birds chirping) (bike whizzing) - I also was the one who originally collected this data 20, 25 years ago as a lab tech.

And now we're repeating that project again to see if we see any changes associated with climate change.

It helps us understand evomechanics, like how things change and evolve as temperature changes, as climate changes.

Taylor, who's the lab tech on this project now, is essentially me 25 years ago.

I wanted to show these to you.

This was the evolution of my keeping of journals, which I still do to this day.

And I was trying to figure out when I started, right?

I started this job and I did look back, and I saw that, so before I came here, I worked at Kinko's.

That was the only job I could get.

- (laughing) My last day of torture.

- Me in overalls.

Look, I put, I was weighing caterpillars.

It shows you how long I weighed caterpillars.

And then I had this cute little picture of us weighing caterpillars.

But you can see I kind of like checked caterpillars, fixed databases, anyway.

So that gives you just sort of a image of 25 years ago.

- Yeah.

- And what we were doing.

At the same time now, 25 years later, at the exact same age.

(book thumping) - Woohoo, that's awesome.

- Look, you could be doing this 25 years from now.

(Taylor laughing) I'll be 75, so.

- And we'll bring you in too, multiple generations.

- Yeah, multiple generations.

And we can do it again 25 years from now.

- Yeah.

- If our planet isn't on fire.

- That would be great.

(somber music) - So thinking about generationally how we deal with the question of climate change, unfortunately, a huge amount of the burden, in my personal opinion, lies on the next generation, on what's gonna happen.

I think that we see by a lot of the research that's been published in the last even just this year that's looked at massive losses of populations in the insect world.

And if that doesn't scare the hell out of you, I don't know what will.

So we can look at a very specific response to changes in temperature, and it will help us make some predictions about how other organisms might do the same thing.

And so I would not be surprised if this specific butterfly has been able to shift.

It may give us some sense of what organisms have the ability to respond to environmental changes.

Some organisms may be better than others.

And I tell pretty much anyone I get a chance to is how important it is that we get involved locally as much as we possibly can, that we start changing our behavior.

Just like our butterflies are changing their behavior, right, changing the way they grow and eat, we need to change the way that we live on this planet.

(somber music continues)