It's Ruud Kleinpaste! And today is World Bee Day. So let's talk bugs, the insect apocalypse and how not to be afraid of spiders.

It’s world Bee Day, and to delve further into the topic, I have been very lucky to get Ruud Kleinpaste (or you may know him as ‘the bug man') onto the podcast. He is a bug enthusiast, TV presenter and is always happy to share his face with a wētā so who better to join my on the annual day of the Bees!?

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Transcript:

Brianne (intro): Kia ora kaitiaki and welcome to Now That's What I Call Green. I'm your host, Brianne West, an environmentalist and entrepreneur trying to get you as excited about our planet as I am. I'm all about creating a scientific approach to making the world a better place without the judgment and making it fun. And of course, we will be chatting about some of the most amazing creatures we share our planet with. So if you are looking to navigate through everything green or not so green, you have come to the right place.

Brianne: Kia ora, welcome back. I am so, so excited to introduce you to today's guest. Have you heard of Rude Kleinpaster? Yes, the bug man as you probably know him if you grew up in Aotearoa when I did. I asked him if he was an entomologist or someone who studies insects and he said he wasn't. I'm going to let him introduce himself because he has a fascinating life story. He speaks seven languages. He has inspired so many of us to go outside into our gardens and love the animals we find out there. You've probably seen pictures of him with Wither climbing his face. I'm still not that brave. And I also tried to get him to tell me how no longer to be afraid of spiders. Instead, he handed me a web, you know, a nursery spider web. You can hear the panic in my voice, I'm sure. Enjoy the episode. He is an absolute champ and I'm delighted to chat with him.

Brianne: I am very excited to talk to our guest today. We have, oh, I want to say your name right. Ruud?

Ruud: Yeah.

Brianne: Yep. Kleinpaste.

Ruud: Oh, you, oh my gosh. Okay. Are you Dutch?

Brianne: So not Dutch. I'm vigorously irritatingly English. Like 99% according to genealogy, which isso boring. Really?

Ruud: Oh, so sorry to hear that.

Brianne: I know, I know, it's okay. I've come to terms with it.

Ruud: Yeah, yeah. How are you?

Brianne: I'm good, isn't it lovely to see you guys? Thank you for saying yes, because when I listened to you and I thought there's just no chance, but.

Ruud: No, there is no chance. I can walk out now, would you like me to?

Brianne: I'd still put this on the podcast.

Ruud: Look, Brie, it's been lovely. Last time I saw you was at the Blake Awards, right? And I thought, when I saw you there, I thought, yeah, why not? That's exactly what we're doing, isn't it?

Brianne Well, what you want to do, or I'm not gonna tell you what it is that you want to do, but I'm reading about you like a stalker. So what I think you want to do is very much in line with what I want to do and what I'm trying to do with this podcast, right? So you're the perfect person to go on it. You're an entomologist?

Ruud: No. I never studied entomology in my life.

Brianne: So what is entomology?

Ruud: Entomology is the study of insects. It's a hobby.

Brianne: Okay, so what are you?

Ruud: I have a degree in forestry. And forestry is a really amazing thing because you start growing these trees, you look after them, you nurture them, you feed them, you do all things well, and then when they're big enough, you cut them off at the ankles and make wooden furniture out of it. Yeah. But go back even further, Brie. I was gonna study biology in the Universiteit Wageningen in the Netherlands. Yeah. And the first lab that we had there was, you get a frog and you get a brick, and with the brick you smack the frog and then you put electrodes on its legs and then you see all these things moving. And I thought, that's not biology! You know what I mean? That's it. I walked out. Good for you. And decided to study something that I wouldn't be able to kill in that sort of way or do some stupid things with. So I studied forestry, ecology of forests, and that's how I got into becoming a nature nerd.

Brianne: So where did you go from there then? How did this career progression happen?

Ruud: Brie, if you go into your garden and you see how everything flourishes and goes and feeds and birds come in and insects come in, this is exactly the sort of stuff that I so enjoyed doing. So it became a hobby. Birds have been my hobby since I was five, six years old and had binoculars. And when I started doing forestry, I got into forest ecology. So how forests work, exactly. So the operations manual of a forest, that's the one. Because we are looking for the operations manual of our planet, by the way. Just, we'll come to that in a moment, I'm sure. But that is basically how I got into this whole thing. So I've always studied that sort of stuff, but I've always done my hobbies as well, so I became a total nature nerd. I do full frontal nerdity.

Brianne: That is my favourite tagline. I like it. You should put that, you don't have a website, but you should put it on it.

Ruud: I have a website.

Brianne: Okay, well I couldn't find it. I’m not a very good stalker.

Ruud: No, no, I'm going to show you where my website is.

Brianne: Oh, what's that?

Ruud: That's a website.

Brianne: Okay.

Ruud: Don't you give me the language of marketing. This is what a website is. Yes. And what I'm holding up...

Brianne: He's holding a spiderweb up at me.

Ruud: A spiderweb, a baby web, a web of a nursery web spider. That is a New Zealand native that only occurs here, nowhere else in the world, and it's made from six different types of silk.

Brianne: Why six? I have loads of these all over my property, and I'm going to be honest with you, because one of my questions I'm going to ask you is... I love insects…. terrified, phobic of spiders, and I do anything I can to get over it.

Ruud: Okay, but you don't have to... There's nobody alive in here, okay? So this is made from six different types of silk. inside the website, inside the nursery, is a little creamy ball. That is the actual place where the eggs are laid. Number one silk comes from the left-hand side of her bottom, the female. She lays 150, 200 eggs in that very soft silk. Nozzle number two makes it into a ball. Nozzle number three tethers it to, in this case, the nursery. Number five is the raincoat around there. And number six is the stuff that tethers it together. This was found in Uawa, Tolaga Bay, after the cyclone went through. This was the only house that was still standing in the landscape.

Brianne: What does that tell you, right?

Ruud: Exactly.

Brianne: Wow. There's a lot I don't know about spiders, obviously. I had no idea they had more than one type of... Is it a...

Ruud: Spinarats.

Brianne: Spinarats, thank you. I was going to say spinnicap, but that is something entirely different.

Ruud: Spinarats, you got it, yeah.

Brianne: Do they have different spinarettes, or do they have... They can tinker with their body chemistry to produce different silks?

Ruud: There's different spinarettes, each one making its own silk. Oh, by the way, number seven silk is the silk that the babies let go when they come out of their website and they let a silken strand go up in the air and that becomes their ballooning silk.

Brianne: Yeah, that's when they land in your hair…Which I was totally fine with….

Ruud: And then what you get is an arachnolactic fit.

Brianne: Yeah, yeah, I've seen a few of those, had a few of those. I was in Niue about this time last year with my parents and it's the most amazing adventure location, right, but they do have some big spiders there. And I was fine. I was going for a wander through this beautiful walk. And mum said, Brianne, stand still. And between sort of my arm and my hip, there was a giant spider. So I had a series of mental breakdowns. My dad was howling with laughter about 50 metres away, totally useless. And mum was like, I'm fine with spiders. I don't really want to help you. So one of the biggest issues of getting people to care about insects and wildlife in general is the ick and the scare factor, right? And I don't know how we help people overcome it because I love snakes. They're one of my favourite creatures and yet most people are instinctively frightened of them, which makes a lot of sense. How do we encourage people to explore that and get over it?

Ruud: At school. So the thing that I do these days, I mean apart from, you know, a bit of radio and a bit of this and a bit of whatever, is I train teachers to teach outside. Now, you immediately know what I'm going to say. You got that in one, because you're kind of very like-minded. So if you start to understand how this planet operates, you do that by teaching outside. There could be numeracy, literacy, there could be science, of course, all that sort of stuff. If you do that outside, you start to understand how these creatures operate, and that is what it's all about. And what I then do is I take live stuff with me and the kids look at it. They first go like “ooh” and then I show them what you can do with wētā and spiders and beetles. And one girl or boy sticks their fingers up and say, can I try? And they all have a go. And that is the moment when they engage. There is literally a physical engagement with all these creepy crawlies. And that is the moment when they start literally looking at them and finding scientific bits and things they want to do and projects, etc. I've got a group of kids in Whareama school in the Wairapa that are looking after a complete colony of Katipō spiders. Wow! They give them homes, they count them, they get rid of the predators, they squeeze the other insects and creatures that eat those Katipō spiders. So they actually look after them and the numbers are going up and up and they're so proud.

Brianne: Because they're very rare, aren't they?

Ruud: They are.

Brianne: And they're endemic to New Zealand?

Ruud: Endemic to New Zealand, but they're proud. And they're beautiful.

Brianne: That's so cool. Yeah, of course you'd be proud because I bought a lifestyle book about three years ago and it was neglected as, it was just in horrendous shape and we spent, I don't know, a lot of time and a lot of money and planting as much as we could and getting rid of weed mat, which should be illegal. And the difference, and I don't know, massively so now, but even in a year, in the wildlife, and mainly insects obviously, and then the bird life that came with it, it's just, it's probably the thing I'm the most proud of, is bringing life back. And it just goes to show you how easy, relatively speaking it is, but also how regenerative, or how able to regenerate our planet is. Which is what should give everybody hope.

Ruud: Exactly. What births do you get back?

Brianne: Loads of fantails, I've seen a couple of tūīs. I had a kingfisher, I saw one on my fence and I tried to sneak up really close, but he wouldn't let me take a decent photo. I mean, we get loads of sparrows, but there's more fantails than anything else.

Ruud: Silver eyes?

Ruud: Yep, only in the change of seasons, they don't hang around in summer or winter.

Ruud: No, but if you give them a big fat ball hanging from a tree, they'll come in the wintertime.

Brianne: Yeah. Fat balls are….my dog sits underneath it.

Ruud: Exactly.

Brianne: Not for the birds, for the dribblings.

Ruud: For the dribbling, yeah, eating everything. But this is exactly the stuff that you can do with schools or with kids. So imagine now that we're going to plant an outdoor classroom, a forest in other words, at a school ground. And then I come back at a year or two later with mist nets, which are huge nets, 12 meters long, four meters high, with fine gores, and we're going to catch those birds. And we give them little metal bands with numbers around their legs, or colour bands. So we know that for instance, red over white on the left-hand side is Georgia, and green over yellow is whatever, and you give them that. And suddenly those kids, they own those birds. And they will then immediately record every sighting of those birds on their school grounds. That is my ideal thing to do with, for instance, with reports to Doc. You know, we found Georgia back. But that's how scientists do it with gulls and penguins and kiwi. I used to work with kiwi like that. You know, this is my first job in New Zealand was studying kiwi, exactly like that. So once you've got that thing in your system as a school kid, you will never, ever lose it.

Brianne: Totally agree. I was always that weird kid that was saving birds or trying to and all sorts of things. And it does come from when you're a kid and you never grow out of asking why. Were you like that as a kid? Did you forever bring things in the house?

Ruud: Still do. Oh, you should.

Brianne: What do you have?

Ruud: Everything. I've got all sorts of species of wet that I've got in my garage that I look after, take to schools.

Brianne: So you live in Ōtautahi Christchurch?

Ruud: Apparently. According to Julie, yes.

Brianne: Your wife, yes.

Brianne: Do you spend most time here?

Ruud: Yeah, I do a bit more. Last year it was only 38 hours a week.

Brianne: Okay, well that's almost a full-time job.

Ruud: Don't ask me about carbon.

Brianne: Yeah, look, net positive, when I look at these things, you do much more good than you do harm, right? Well. That's how I truly believe in that. So, where are you getting your wētā from?

Ruud: Auckland, Wellington, you name it. We have a dozen species.

Brianne: I've never seen them down here and I've gone caving and wandering around and looking for them.

Ruud: Well, they are. We've got the Canterbury wētā that is not common and it goes from Kaikoura all the way to South Christchurch, if you like, and you can find them on the Banks Peninsula, you can find them here on the Port Hills, you know where to look. And they're not as common as the ones I had in Auckland, which I just put a log or a little tube of bamboo on a tree and they would go in there, that's their new home. You look inside and there they are, mum and dad and a couple of kids and all that. It's cool stuff.

Brianne: You say mum and dad, do they have a parental thing? No, but they kind of live together. Okay, that's unusual for insects, to a degree.

Ruud: It is to a degree, but on the other hand, they all know where to go because they can smell where they go. They've got a really good sense of smell and that sort of stuff. They sit in there, and at night they go feeding and then they go back again, and during the day they go, snoring, snoring, snoring. You hear them snore, right?

Brianne: Yes, yes, I can imagine. What is your career highlight then? You say you were studying Kiwi, that'd be pretty cool.

Ruud: That was absolutely brilliant. That was a year and a half, two years.

Brianne: So you've got to cuddle one, probably.

Ruud: No, I caught them all the time. We had heaps of them, little bandits. And we looked at them at night and we found that they, for instance, when they appeared, male and female, they stayed couples for a long time. In fact, after I left Northland decades later, there were some other scientists who found our bandit kiwi, they were still a pair in exactly the same place in Waitangi State Forest. Oh, it was just so lovely.

Brianne: Isn't it sweet? Didn't they give you hope for monogamy?

Ruud: Yes, it went up well. Yes, who knows? But it is the way it, this is the way it goes, really. So that was one of my highlights. There's lots of other highlights. I scored a really cool job with a group called Discovery Channel Animal Planet. I had my own show. For a couple of years.

Brianne: How did that come about? And how was it to film? Tell me all about it.

Ruud: Oh, how did it come about? It was because I did Maggie's Garden Show and all this other rubbish.

Brianne: And because you're naturally brilliant on camera?

Ruud: Oh, well, what the heck. I just love telling stories. So I've done radio and that sort of stuff in New Zealand and suddenly that was picked up in America. And basically it was literally nothing but traveling the world from Madagascar to Alaska.

Brianne: Oh my God. You know how we said this is going to be three and a half hours long? It might be because I need you to tell me everything about Madagascar. It is the number one, maybe number two, Costa Rica's probably number one, but it's top five.

Ruud: Yeah, it is. It is fabulous. It's a great, great place to go. And I took Julie there too. She would come in the school holidays and would come and visit me.

Brianne: Oh, what a life.

Ruud: It was a life like that. But I was home for two months of the year.

Brianne: Yeah. And that would get hard.

Ruud: Yep.

Brianne: You can only do it for so long.

Ruud: You can, so that sort of stuff, there's pros and cons. But I tell you what, the stuff I've learned about people also all over the world was just wonderful.

Brianne: Yeah.

Ruud: One of my favourite places was Tucson, Arizona. I would go on holiday in the United States now because in the U.S., brilliant to go to places like that. That sort of stuff.

Brianne: Okay, why Tucson?

Ruud: Summer, winter, huge cactuses, amazing killer bees.

Brianne: There's not many people I've heard get excited about killer bees.

Ruud: No…

Brianne: That's Africanized honeybees, right?

Ruud: That's the one. And I was the first one to have a bee beard with 60,000 killer bees on my face.

Brianne: Oh, Jesus. Yeah. Okay, so is the hype about them a little over the top?

Ruud: No.

Brianne: Okay, cool.

Ruud: They have no sense of humour.

Brianne: Well, how boring.

Ruud: Boring, yes. You try, you know, if you get stung, they leave a barb in your face that spells them, here's the bastard, go and get him, and everybody goes smells where that is. So I dive into the water and they go bzzzz waiting for me to come back up. That sort of stuff. These creatures are very clever.

Brianne: We totally underestimate them. Excellent. The Insect Apocalypse, which is a very dramatic Guardian headline I think I read a couple of years ago, that in certain areas 75% of insects have vanished. Everyone's like, hooray, it's wonderful because I don't like them. Why is this bad?

Ruud: It's very simple. Insects pollinate, they make compost, they recycle everything, they work on all sorts of fronts to make this planet tick. They're predators. They keep your pests under control in the garden, et cetera, et cetera. That's why that's important. And they have food for our birds, food for our lizards, all the things we've already discussed. So if you look at that, everything is connected and that is so important. And if things go wrong, if things go down the gurgler, then you're starting to lose it and it doesn't work as a literally as a regenerous ecosystem anymore. If you noticed how a lot of people use the word ecosystem we now have an ecosystem for weather.

Brianne: Oh my god, a startup ecosystem, just kill me now!

Ruud: A startup ecosystem! That was 3.8 billion years ago you know the startup ecosystem.

Brianne: Yes it was, depending on what you believe in of course. Yes.

Ruud: Oh language, don't go there.

Brianne: We'll stay away from that. Today is World Bee Day. Well, when people listen to this, it'll be World Bee Day. Everyone gets excited and cares about bees, right? And the PR for bees is pretty phenomenal. We need to transfer that to all insect life. And it's something I've been trying to do. I've been talking on this podcast about how to rewild your garden, how to get rid of your lawn. How do we move that? I totally agree with you that it starts with children, but they're gonna take a while to grow up. And whilst children definitely influence their parents, how do we get parents and how do we get adults to care about this? Million dollar question.

Ruud: No, it's not. It's the very simple solution for that is if you've got kids doing this, they will teach three generations for the price of one. When? Their parents, their grandparents, and their kids. So this is the point. And when these kids know how to put up little wētā motels or insect things or get the right flowers in and the right native plants and know which bird is suddenly coming past them in the garden, then that will literally change the next generations. That's exactly what it's about. You know that because have you ever tried saying no to a 10 year old?

Brianne: I fold very quickly. Children frighten me. Yeah.

Ruud: That's exactly what it's about.

Brianne: They're very persuasive.

Ruud: And so when you have kids doing this, all this environmental stuff at school, but in the garden and whatever, they do their sport and all that. I know. But once they understand what it's all about and you see them walking around at the back of where you live or on the Port Hills, you'll find that they know a heck of a lot. And teachers love it because they can literally merge the whole curriculum into those outdoor activities. Because we all know that if you go, what do you call it, outside, then you don't learn because that's all, outside is fun, that's not learning. But watch it. Watch the next generation, I love them. We are totally disconnected from that.

Brianne: It's a very good point. I do remember we would have outdoor days at school. I wouldn't do anything because I'd focus on not having to do anything, but you'll probably learn more then than ever before. Field trips. Yeah. Why are we having an insect apocalypse?

Ruud: Because we're not really looking after our planet very well, are we?

Brianne: Understatement.

Ruud: No, well, that's what it is, isn't it? I'm going to be quite honest about this. It is my generation that buggered it. There's no way I've got time to retire. We need to do something. I will go on for as long as I can.

Brianne: And we appreciate that very much. It's a little overwhelming.

Ruud: Yeah, but hang on. You are doing the same with your business.

Brianne: Yes, that's what I'm trying to do, is try and change the way we do business to stop destroying the planet at all costs.

Ruud: That's right. That's exactly what it's about. And don't ever use the words “I am sustainable.”

Brianne: What does that mean? I actually had a sustainable business event yesterday and I kept catching myself saying, if you want to take steps to be more sustainable, and I kept thinking, but it's the word people know, but it's just been merged into nothing, right?

Ruud: It's the wrong word.

Brianne: We want self-regeneracy.

Ruud: So I always say to people, if I ask you, how's your relationship with your partner? And you answer “sustainable.” Then I say, I'm sorry to hear that.

Brianne: Enjoy your divorce! That's a good call.

Ruud: Well, this is the point. Do you have a website? Well, you now know what a website is. Do you work in the cloud? Well, let me take you outside the studio and look up. That's a frigging cloud! Why do we always call the most generous ecological things after the crappiest things we do to our planet?

Brianne: That's a very fair call. I really like that reframing because I don't like the word sustainable, but you have pointed out a better reason that I don't. She can't articulate something, right?

Ruud: No. That's good. But there's a lot of that sort of stuff going on. You know, that's same with that ecosystem for even in media, a media ecosystem. Are you for real? You know, the lying toads! And the marketing, you know the marketing department is the department of lies.

Brianne: Yes, I think we like to call it spinning. That was such an important thing to me, was that we would always leave with science first and we wouldn't be like clean or natural or whatever other bullshit. And businesses have a huge responsibility to stop marketing this nonsense, because they're just as much of it as the media and everything else. I actually keep remembering what questions I do want to ask you, because this discussion is much more interesting than my questions are.

Ruud: Oh, I never do any. I don't usually have a script.

Brianne: No, I bet you don't.

Ruud: Ask Maggie Berry.

Brianne: So you just use AdLib?

Ruud: I think you do. You're a storyteller.

Brianne: Yes.

Ruud: There you go.

Brianne: And people prefer stories, anyway.

Ruud: There you are. Who cares? Storytelling is the way to go. And if you then look at how iwi operate, they tell stories. That's how you pass history down as well, isn't it? Exactly. And suddenly all these things connect again according to what you know, what you feel, what you've heard and what you've learned. Easy. I don't need a marketer.

Brianne: No, no, you really do not.  Are we doing any better here?

Ruud: In New Zealand? Yeah, we do a little bit better, but the only problem is we grow, we have too much growth at all costs at the moment. God invented economists to make weather forecasters look good. Sorry, sorry! Keep an eye on how many predictions you get from all these economists on the news and the media and all.

Brianne: They're always bad.

Ruud: Yeah, but they're always wrong.

Brianne: They're always bad and always wrong, same for me. Yeah, you're not wrong. My dad will often say meteorologists are the only career you can constantly be wrong and keep your job. Maybe you're right. Economists are the same.

Ruud: Economists, because they always say, yeah, but we didn't know that and they never apologise. They always blame it on something.

Brianne: Yeah. Oh, we didn't know this would happen. Okay, that's how predictions work, yeah. So we're doing slightly better. Well, that, that, you still desire more environmentally aware, right?

Ruud: We have to be. Because we live in the most amazing place. Because we've got a big country, we've got the most amazing mountains, we've got the forest, we've got everything. We always go camping and things like that, and it's slowly becoming overrun by very lots of tourists, which always bring the money, money, money, money, money, et cetera, et cetera. So we are losing that a little bit, but I'm trying to get that back through that whole education again, because I take the kids into the forest.

Brianne: Yeah. Do you still recommend the iNaturalist app?

Ruud: Certainly.

Brianne: Yeah. Tell me about it. What is it?

Ruud: iNaturalist is very simple. It's about learning what lives in your environment. If there's something you don't know what it is, take a photo of it, put it on iNaturalist and artificial intelligence and some scientists who back it up will tell you what it is.

Brianne: Bloody brilliant.

Ruud: Yeah, and then you can google the scientific name and you can learn it's also it's a genus species blah blah blah but also this is what it does. It's ecosystem service. So this is a pollinator, this is a predator, this is a composter, etc. It does everything, plants, flowers, lichens, mosses, toadstools, all that sort of stuff. Even spore, so tracks, skulls, bones, poos.

Brianne: That's clever. Okay. I have long black poo like that in my garden. I'm pretty sure it's a hedgehog, which I'm not pleased with because I like hedgehogs, but also they're going to be eating my native lizards, which I know that I have.

Ruud: And the eggs of ground breeding birds.

Brianne: I know I need to move them on, but it's horrible being, you know.

Ruud: It's the same with stoats. I love stoats. I am actually a member of the stoats appreciation society.

Brianne: I did not know there was one and I'm not surprised because they're adorable.

Ruud: In the Netherlands.

Brianne: That makes a lot more sense. Are they like, um, pine? Pine Martin. Thank you. What a bizarre name, but pine martins, I saw one of them, but not in real life. They're adorable.

Ruud: I know, and also, they've got teeth, eh?

Brianne: Oh, bitey, I see.

Ruud: Yeah, yeah, they're predators, massive predators. But our stoats in the Netherlands are also needing a little bit of attention. I thought, why don't we catch them live in New Zealand and ship them to the Netherlands? But then you get the quarantine thing, the biosecurity thing. So that didn't work, but I'm not a killer, but I know they shouldn't be here.

Brianne: Yeah, it's hard, right, that balance? It does suck, yeah. We should just, because the hedgehogs have a problem in England, we have them for days here. Again, pick them up and ship them over, but it doesn't work quite that straightforwardly. Do wasps have a niche?

Ruud: Yes, they certainly do.

Brianne: What do they do that's good?

Ruud: Nothing.

Brianne: Oh.

Ruud: Not here in New Zealand.

Brianne: Right, yes. You're talking global.

Ruud: Yeah, I'm talking global. Of course wasps. We have parasite wasps, parasitic wasps that actually control the numbers of caterpillars that are around and that do all sorts of damage in your vegetable garden, for instance. We have the German wasps and the common... German wasp, there is a real social name for a wasp that didn't even come from Germany.

Brianne: I was going to say, are they even German?

Ruud: They're not German, they came from England. Right. But they were named so by a Swedish entomologist. And even in those days in the 1700s, people were not really that happy with the Germans. This was before the World Cup soccer. You know what I mean? Right. So the Germans then call it the Russian wasp and the Russians call it the Prussian wasp.

Brianne: The poor wasp, nobody wants it.

Ruud: No, but these things, they are native to the European areas, if you like, and they are actually really, A, good predators, but also they're very good at making wonderful paper maché nests from which we can learn how to build our own houses. And that's called biomimicry.

Brianne: Yes, because actually we do a lot with web, I mean, in terms of material science. I don't know a great deal about it, but it is fascinating. And if it worked with nature as opposed to against it in every conceivable notion, imagine how much better off we'd be. I think that's changing. I think you're seeing things move a little bit. Yesterday, the Sustainable Business Event gave me a little bit of hope that people wanna do better.

Ruud: Yeah, these are important things. But you know, as I said, wasps, all these creatures have a job to do, but it is when they are being introduced by accident or on purpose into New Zealand, not on purpose, but excellent usually, that's when things go wrong because they then get into our proper ecosystems and start causing a little bit of trouble. Especially those wasps, the common wasp, German wasp and the Chinese paper wasp, they do all sorts of damage to our native creatures as well. And there's where the kids are starting to learn it's best to actually not take things into New Zealand. How can we protect our country via quarantine technology or whatever. When you come into the country make sure you've cleaned your boots, you've done this, so you start to become a really good...

Brianne: Kaitiaki.

Ruud: Kaitiaki, that's a good word.

Brianne: That's a beautiful word, isn't it? Tell us about New Zealand native bees.

Ruud: Oh, native bees. We've got about, I think about 30 or 40 species.

Brianne: Oh, sure.

Ruud: They live in little holes in clay banks.

Brianne: I've got loads in little tiny holes and I sat there for ages watching to see if anything would come out.

Ruud: That's it. And they are not like the social bees, they're not like in huge colonies. There's only mum and dad in one hole and at the end they lay a few eggs, they put some pollen and nectar for the babies to eat and then basically they come out in the next year. So it's mum and dad together but what they do do is they all live in the same, so the mums and the dads all lives in the same banks. So it looks like it's a colony, but they're not really.

Brianne: They don't interact overly.

Ruud: They don't interact, no.

Brianne: Hmm, okay. I'm going to go and sit outside that bank because I do have a clay bank. And I sat there with my dog and he's like, what are we doing? And then he eventually went to sleep. But okay, I might have to wait. Oh, I can get one of those long pen cameras and see what I can see in there.

Ruud: That's right.

Brianne: I see them quite rarely. I don't think I've got the environment right enough for them to flourish for whatever reason. Which does bring me to, what can people do to make their homes, their environments more wildlife slash insect friendly?

Ruud: Planting as many things as you can. So go to your nearest forest, a real proper forest that is originally native forest. See what grows there. If it's for instance, Totara and if it's Kaikatea and things like that, get things like that going. And you can get them from those forests, the seeds if you like, but you can also get them from organisations that actually plant those things, you know, like Trees That Count and all that sort of stuff. And basically what you're going to do is you're going to mimic biomimicry. You're going to mimic what a forest in your area looks like, and you're going to make your own patch. It doesn't have to be big, as long as it is varied and, how do you call it, variable too, with lots of different...

Yes, the more biodiversity, the better, yeah. I bought a lifestyle block and the whole thing was like English lawns. Yeah. My last three years digging the bloody things up and I created little insect islands because I can't dig my whole life. I got blisters. It was enjoyable, but I'm not made out of digging. So on one of those big patch of lawn I haven't yet dug up, I created little insect islands, which are just holes with loads of native plants in them, and you will see life around them and in the desert of the lawn. I'm forever trying to get people to either dig up or ignore their lawn and just let it grow wild, which people get really funny about, because lawns are a status thing.

Ruud: No, I'm saying on radio now, the best thing to do is actually get rid of your lawn or get rid of it and plant a wildflower.

Brianne: And they're beautiful.

Ruud: And then you can do with your lawnmower, you can actually make nice little paths. Not straight, but nice, wiggly, windy, romantic, Instagrammable paths. Kids, how do you think we should do this path? And do we need to have a 90 degree bend? Have you ever seen a 90 degree bend in nature?

Brianne: Does nature build in straight lines at all?

Ruud: No, that's why Hundertwasser made the buildings that he did. You know, friends like Hundertwasser?

Brianne: No, but I do love his name.

Ruud: He's Austrian. He made the toilet in Kawakawa.

Brianne: Oh! Him. Oh, right.

Ruud: Yes, he designed the building in Whangarei. That is the Hundertwasser Museum.

Brianne: Okay, I should probably know this.

Ruud: You know, you should go there because this is the guy who has an... He's got a photo! He's an architect-designer. He's died, of course, in 2010, I think, he has, I've seen this photo of him with his ruler, but the ruler is not straight, it is bent. And he sits there with his ruler, and so I take this to the kids, and say, why do you think Friedensreich 100 was, they had a bent ruler? And the kids go like, because he wanted to be different. And one girl says, because he wants to bend the rules. he realised there is no straight line in nature. In this studio, everything is straight.

Brianne: Yes, and if you built a building without a straight line, I suspect you'd be in quite a lot of trouble.

Ruud: There you go, there you go. And that is the whole idea of how nature teaches us to build. I think that is a really nice thing. So once they got that, the kids will actually work on their own designs and they get it, don't they?

Brianne: I need to go there, I need to go and have a look. I should know these things about my own country, it's terrible. Okay, so they can plant more stuff, they can start mowing lawns, is there anything else?

Ruud: Oh, organic material? What I quite often do is, and I've got those at home as well, huge rocks or big pieces of timber, and underneath live all these creatures. It keeps the moisture best, so you get the beetles there, you get all sorts of things there, and it is absolutely lovely. The other thing is flowers, pollen, nectar, all these things. And then, of course, there are creatures that want to eat leaves. You need to know which ones want to eat which leaves. You get case moths. I've just planted out yesterday with my grandson about 15 case moths in a particular plant, and I know every time he comes back, he's going to count, Papa Ruth, we've got 15 of them at the moment. Okay, good. Do you know where they are? Yeah. Now, you know that they will switch position? Yes, I know. When you come back, we'll see how we go. And then he does that. That's what he does. He's also that you talked about kingfishers just before. He is my favourite helper of bird bending because he has small hands and he goes into a tiny, long tunnel, that long, and get the baby kingfishes out that we banned.

Brianne: Oh, that would be so cute!

Ruud: It is unbelievable what he does.

Brianne: They’d be so tiny.

Ruud: No, well, it depends on how old they are. Well, yes. But in this case, I'll show you some photos of it anyway, but he's the kid that does that and he would love to, and when he first did it, you heard the kingfishes sitting in the back of the tunnel going shshhshsh that noise.  So he asked “Papa Ruud, do they bite?” I said, as far as I know, I can't think of anybody ever having been bitten. He said, straight in and pulled them out. And he stands there with a grin on his face with the photo and he's got the kingfishes.

Brianne: That's cool. What is your favourite insect? I think you're going to tell me it's a wētā.

Ruud: No, no, no. I'm asking you what's your favourite parent?

Brianne: Favourite parent?

Ruud: Yeah, what's your favourite kid? This is the point. What is the favourite? To me, they all belong in our ecosystem. And for me, and you'd like this because this is going to be a gold one for you. My favourite creature is the one that I'm holding right now and tell the most stories about. It could be even a nest of silk. It could be a wētā. It could be a beetle that only occurs, like the Alexander beetle that only occurs in Canterbury, endemic, nowhere else in the world.

Brianne: Yeah. And no one appreciates it.

Ruud: Exactly. So the creature with which I can have the most fun telling stories, that is my favourite. And it changes all the time. It could be the Pūriri moth. Have you seen a Pūriri moth?

Brianne: I don't think so.

Ruud: If you're a designer of clothing, you need to know the Pūriri moth.

Brianne: Okay. I'm as fashionable as a sack of potatoes.

Ruud: So am I, but that doesn't matter.

Brianne: But I look at it and I think that is a ball gown. Wow, okay. I'm going to Google that right now. I want to know what it looks like. Pueriri moth.

Ruud: It's only this big.

Brianne: Yeah, that's quite big for a moth. A lot of people are really freaked out about moths for some reason.

Ruud: It's the biggest moth in New Zealand.

Brianne: Oh, wow.

Ruud: Green.

Brianne: I've never seen one.

Ruud: No it doesn't occur in the South Island. Honestly. Yeah. Where will I go and see one of these in the wild? I don't want to see things. The North Island. Just anywhere? Yeah anywhere. Put an ultraviolet light on at night.

Brianne: After I saw you at the Blake Awards I went and got one. Actually another friend who was there bought me one and I've been going around at night looking at things. It's really cool. It's a whole different world.

Ruud: Totally different world. UV light, eh? Yep. Because that's how insects see the world. They see different colours. They don't see a red jacket.

Brianne: Oh, we’re so boring in comparison. Lame.

Ruud: But it is also to do with communication and navigation. They know exactly where they are. Now, why don't we learn from that instead of killing the blinking things?

Brianne: That's a million dollar question, isn't it? A multi-billion dollar question. Okay, so you don't have a favourite, which makes perfect sense. I can't tell you my favourite animal or parent. They'll be glad to hear. Do you have a favourite story or fact that you roll out that intrigues the most people?

Ruud: Yeah, I do. But look, let's take Pūriri moth. In the North Island, basically the babies come out of the eggs on the forest ground. They live there for about two years and they eat mostly rotting wood. Two years on the ground eating rotting wood.

Brianne: That's a long time for a larva, right?

Ruud: Hang on, we're not there yet. Then they start crawling up tree trunks and taste the bark. And when they find a tree species that they really like, they drill a tunnel that goes into the bark, into the trunk, and down in the shape of a seven. And in that tunnel, they live for another three or four years, chewing all the stuff that grows at the front where they make the sky, chewing that as their food. Over the top of that particular sky, they make a silken, if you like, curtain, to protect them from everything else. No weather can get in, no centipedes get in, et cetera, et cetera. After five or six years, they create a chrysalis in that trunk. They come out as that moth that you just saw on your phone, they live for one day. They've got 24 hours, maybe 48 if they're lucky, to do all their loving living and shopping. They mate, the female is huge, and she will literally fly through the forest, last thing she does, like a wounded B-52 bomber, dropping eggs right around the forest, which will become the little babies again for the next generation.

Brianne: A five-year cycle…. for a day.

Ruud: Yeah, that's it. And here comes the thing. Their favourite food plant is not really Pūriri. They like Pūriri, but it's not the favourite. The favourite food plant is marble leaf, which is known in Te Reo as Putaputawētā. And Putaputawētā means the tree from which many wētā arrive. Because once that tunnel that I just described is empty, the tree wētā go in there and use that as their second-hand dwelling.

Brianne: And that is symbiosis, right? That is how everything works together.

Ruud: Exactly. So, the Putaputawētā tree is related to the whole thing of that particular moth, the Pūrīri moth, but in the South Island, the marble leaf is not called Putaputawētā. It has totally different names. And the reason is very simple, because the Pūriri moth doesn't occur in the South Island in no weather, et cetera. So there's your stories. You can make the story as long as you like. And it's to do with Te Reo, and it's to do with names and it's to do with nature. Māori are really good at that.

Brianne: Yes, oh, without question. We have a lot to learn. That's so interesting. And the more you dig into these, have you written a book?

Ruud: A couple.

Brianne: Okay, tell me more about your books.

Ruud: Well, one is called, the first book is called Scratching for a Living.

Brianne: Okay, I like it.

Ruud: Because that Pūriri moth scratches the back. That's another part of that same story. How cool is that? And the other one is called backyard battlefield, because there's always a battlefield going on there. People eat other, some bugs eat certain things and you get all these connections and ecosystems and da da da. But anyway, scratching for a living came from the poor eating. Well, how can I forget?

Brianne: It's weird how circular it is.

Ruud: Oh, that comes back to the circular economy.

Brianne: Not my favourite term. No, it's not. I don't know why, but it does.

Ruud: But that is a form of how they all operate. They don't... Circular economy, you can actually say the other thing with biomimicry, that nature doesn't have the concept of waste. There is no rubbish tip somewhere in the middle of a forest and nature only uses the energy it needs, no more, and it doesn't have straight lines, everything is elegant and nature collaborates. Oh, the word competition, nature doesn't have a word competition. If you want to go to the language of it, competition comes from two Latin or Italian or Greek words or whatever, com and petare, com together, petare striding forward.

Brianne: Interesting.

Ruud: And this was invented by the Romans and the Greek when they invented the Olympic Games. They trained together. Competare is not smacking your brains in, economists, and being more, if you like, wonderful than your opposition, your competition, competare is working together. And that is how the economy of insects and our nature works. And we all, so all these things come back to me. And I go like, this is so important to realize that.

Brianne: Yeah, and that is how we change business as well, by businesses working together. Together. Collaboration. Say it again for me, comp….

Ruud: Competare. Competare. Com, together. Petare, like a petal, is the word for walking or striding forward.

Brianne: I like that. I'm naturally a competitive person and now I'm going to change my mind about it.

Ruud: No, you can't be naturally not competitive. If you are naturally competitive, you're naturally competitive. I wouldn't say you have to change. Just be aware of the other side. And that is what you call learning from nature. Not learning in nature, not learning about nature, not being David Attenborough and all this, it's learning from nature. How does, the question I ask is, how does nature solve this particular problem? And if our problem is competition, I ask nature, what is competition actually about? And it isn't about competition at all, it's about collaboration.

Brianne: It's riding forward together.

Ruud: Working together. Yeah.

Brianne: I like that, learning from nature. Yeah. Okay, next time I have a problem, I'm going to have a think about it. Yeah. Will the seven different types of silk of the nursery web spider, which I have lots of, and I look at from a distance, sort of like, what is going on in there?

Ruud: Yeah. And you see mummy sitting on the bottom of that thing. She's not small. No, she's not small. But she's beautifully, felty brown.

Brianne: She looks soft.

Ruud: She's very soft. And she doesn't bite. She doesn't, she will jump off if you go too close, but you can hold them, no problem at all.

Brianne: It's a very irritating fear because I have no concerns they'll bite me, maybe a Sydney funnel web might be a different conversation, but I'm not worried about being bitten and again I'm not frightened of snakes and they will cause you, well some of them will cause you harm, I'm not worried, I know they can't do me any harm, so the fear frustrates the life out of me.

Ruud: I was the first one to hold a Sydney funnel web spider on camera.

Brianne: Oh Jesus!

Ruud: Yeah, I worked out how to do it.

Brianne: They're only going to be aggressive if you encroach on their territory I presume?

Ruud: No, not bad at all. When they walk over your hand, they don't bite the ground they walk on. Okay, nor do you. I say that to all the kids. But if you have it in front of you and you have to do a piece to camera and you say, hello, this is a Sydney funnel web spider, if you blow carbon dioxide onto that spider, it goes like phoooo there is a predator nearby.

Brianne: Which makes sense.

Ruud: And they go whack. So you don't do a piece to camera like this, you do it like this. That is a funnel web spider. And everybody was pooing their pants, including me, but I was confident I would be fine.

Brianne: Yeah, and people haven't died from anti-venoms, you know, worst case scenario, right?

Ruud: There's some nasty things there. No, people have died from funnel webs.

Brianne: Oh, okay.

Ruud: Sorry.

Brianne: Thank you for that. I have a story, my former business partner used to live in Sydney, and he once found one in the bottom of his pool, and it was still alive.

Ruud: I swam with him them a pool, too.

Brianne Oh, God. Are you frightened of anything?

Ruud: No. Well, yes, of course. Yeah, sometimes I'm frightened.

Brianne: Bravery is not the absence of fear, it is facing it, right? We all do every day various things.

Ruud: But also working out how not to get done. What is it that makes them doing things? What is this white-tailed spider? Oh, my favourite bull.

Brianne: Well, they're not actually aggressive, and they're not going to necrotise in fasciitis. It's all overstated nonsense, right?

Ruud: Well, it kind of is, but you do realise we have no evidence that that happens with white tails? Ask the Ministry of Health, how many do you know? Because if you get bitten by a spider, do you collect the spider, take it to the doctor, get it identified and do the whole thing?

Brianne: Yeah, and the doctor's like, what the fuck? What do I want that for?

Ruud: And so people say to me, I've been bitten by a white-tailed seal, how do you know? Well, the doctor said it was a white-tailed bite. Doctor hasn't seen the spider, sees two punches, could be any spider. But again, if you let that spider walk on your hand, it won't bite you. I get kids to do this all the time. Once they've done it, and I tell them the story second what I told you first. They say, oh, you're telling us now. Oh, well, and they know what to do. But that means they are trained in how to look after these things and how to not pick them up, but let them walk on you.

Brianne: Yeah. What is the one thing you would want people to go away and do after the surgery?

Ruud: Have a look what's around you. See if you can identify it and see what it does for you or what it does for your environment, literally in your garden or in your house, et cetera, et cetera. And you'll find that there's a lot of helpers out there that we need to live with.

Brianne: It's not just bees. There's so much more than just bees.

Ruud: Exactly. I have a little bit of a trouble with bees at the moment because bees are not New Zealand natives, right?

Brianne: No, right, the native bees are, but the honey bees we need because the crops we now grow here, right?

Ruud: Totally. You have to remember that all our food plants are not necessarily New Zealand natives and most of them aren't. So we need pollinators that do that for us. So basically those bees are slave labor if you think about it. Yeah. I'm not being nasty about it, but I'm just saying, remember that. Now, then these bees are starting to get into this manuka. Okay, so what do we get? We get manuka honey and we then suddenly realise that, and this is really well proven, that if you've got a wound on your hand and you put some Manuka honey on it, that Manuka honey is probably one of the best materials you can put on there. It heals like anything.

Brianne: It's weirdly magical, actually.

Ruud: It is weirdly magical, there you go. But what I now see is marketing for all our tourists that are coming in. And it's all aimed at, but it's so healthy for you. And there's this over-marketing on the health of Manuka honey, whereas the truth is there is no difference between Manuka honey, $50 a bottle, or other honey, $10 a bottle. Now, I'm Dutch. I can tell the difference between $50 and $10, okay? And if I then hear there is no difference, I say, excuse me, the marketing here is kind of a little bit over the top. Let's be serious about that. Secondly, you can say what you like about bees. The next lie you get is the bees are in trouble. Bees in trouble? They have more than tripled the numbers in the last 10 years.

Brianne: Really?

Ruud: Yeah, that's not in trouble.

Brianne: That's a counter to what we hear.

Ruud: Exactly. So there's the marketing. There's the marketing department again. Got that? So if you look at all these things, I go like, listen, there's another thing that those bees are also taking honey or nectar out of plants that our native bees need. And our native bees are really not well studied at all. So let's be honest about our native bees and about the bees and about the honey and all that sort of stuff. I know you can make shit loads of money, but this is not the way to do it. This is really important.

Brianne: No, you find something good out of nature and it goes further and further away from it and makes more and more money and it gets worse and worse and worse. That is unfortunately the pattern.

Ruud: Exactly. So these things are really important to me. So yeah, I'm quite happy with bees. Great. But I also think we need to know what the native bees do.

Brianne: Yeah, and we don't turn a lot of attention to them at all. Okay, my final question, this is always my favourite question, and I don't know what you're going to say. Okay, so you're supreme overlord, you have the control of the globe. What would be the very first thing you would do to make the world a bit less? It's a big question.

Ruud: Well, it is what I'm doing now. It is going at my age, telling stories to teachers and taking kids outside and taking teachers outside because that's why I'm not retired. That's exactly the reason. And I've kind of always done that. I've done it on radio with Talkback Radio on Newstalk ZB since 1980. God, it's making me feel old. But it's like that. And it's the same on Maggie's Garden Show. Look at these flowers. Oh, look at the creatures on. Now, this is it. And once you understand where you live, you've got to look after it or at least not harm it. You don't have to be an idiot like me that picks everything up and does strange stuff.

Brianne: Put it on your face…

Ruud: Yeah, but it works eh! I can see kids doing that now and it is absolutely wonderful and encouraging for me to see that they are getting it.

Brianne: Well, it's cyclical, right? I don't know, maybe my parents' generation weren't encouraged to go outside and play in the dirt, in nature, right, potentially, because things like washing was harder and making a massive social leap here, but they weren't encouraged to go out and play in it, and that's when we started becoming more and more industrialised, and now we're going back.

Ruud: Yeah.

Brianne: That's what I like to think is happening today.

Ruud: Yeah, and so what I would do with a teacher right now, I say to you, you used a very interesting word. You used the word dirt. Which feeds us, it grows our trees, our vegetables, makes nutrients for all the creepy crawlies that live inside there. It helps the recycling of everything that dies. You call it dirt?

Brianne: And it is quite literally the life support system and we're losing it at a horrific rate because we're treating it like dirt.

Ruud: Do you think we should use the word soil?

Brianne: Yes, but they don't, do they? Playing in the dirt is the idea.

Ruud: It's the idea. That's the New Zealand way of speaking too, you know. Yeah. So there you go.

Brianne: Playing in the soil is much nicer.

Ruud: Yeah, but there you go. So I'm not taking the mickey out of you.

Brianne: No, you're right. The way we word things.

Ruud: But isn't that cross-curricular work? It is language, it is history, it is social studies, it's everything. How do we get on with other people on this planet? Economics, the word of economics. No, don't go there. No, no, no.

Brianne: Look, you've got to have money to change the world and make a difference, unfortunately. It's the world we live in. Yeah, and not the dirt. A very fair point. Is there anything else you want to say to people?

Ruud: I love having stories like this. I love having discussions like this. And a lot of people in the media always have these strange questions, like, why have we got so many cicadas? I said, well, go to your diary from four years ago, five years ago, and have a look at around this time of the year. Did you ring me up then too and say, why do we have so many cicadas? It's to do with life cycles.

Brianne: Because they don't necessarily have an annual one like the Pūriri moth, right?

Ruud: Exactly. Well, yeah, there you go. No, they've got life cycles of, cicadas have life cycles of 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17 years.

Brianne: That's weird. Why have they skipped some odd numbers? And why they don't do even numbers?

Ruud: Isn't it fascinating? It's worse than odd numbers. These are called prime numbers.

Brianne: Oh, okay. I'm not a mathematician.

Ruud: No, no, no, no. Nor am I.

Brianne: That is really weird.

Ruud: Yeah, no, but that's not really weird because if you're a predator that loves to eat cicadas, wouldn't you try to have your system going in such a way that you're always there when the big numbers come out, well, you've got one in 87 years chance of that happening when you are not a prime number breeder.

Brianne: That is remarkable.

Ruud; Clever! Clever!

Brianne: The world is, just do not respect it and appreciate how amazingly wonderful and weird these things are.

Ruud: Can I go now?

Brianne: You are free. Actually, no, you're not because my marketing manager wants me to A, get a selfie and B, get something of you saying on camera.

Ruud: Okay.

Brianne: Well, he is a wealth of information. That was fascinating. Thank you so much, Ruud. I'm so appreciative you came on this podcast with me after I was 15 minutes late (thank you, traffic in Ōtautahi). It was absolute privilege to speak with him. Highly recommend if you ever get the chance to say hello to him. He's a hard man to find online. He doesn't believe in the online world very much, but he has a wealth of information on the stuff you might find in your backyard. Kia ora kaitiaki, see you next week.

Brianne (outro): And there you go. I hope you learned something and realised that being green isn't about everything in your pantry matching with those silly glass jars or living in a commune. If that's your jam, fabulous, but sustainability at its heart is just using what you need. If you enjoyed this episode, please don't keep it to yourself and feel free to drop me a rating and hit the subscribe button. and hit the subscribe button. Kia ora and I'll see you next week.

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