Tarek El Moussa and Heather Ray Young are both familiar with buying and selling LA Real Estate but since becoming a couple they haven't moved into their dream home yet. The pair purchased a house in Newport Beach back in fall of 2020 and have been renovating it ever since and now it's finally close to being ready for them. In the meantime, Tarek and Heather have been renting, shacking up in a chic modern beach house nearby and prior to this, Tarek's bungalow in Costa Mesa which he sold for over $2.7 million last May. Today we'll be checking out where the real estate loving couple calls home. We even found the listings. In these videos we don't reveal any addresses even though I've done a house tour of my own place please do not show up at any private residences because it's not safe for anyone. Tarek El Moussa is best known for being the host of popular HGTV series Flipper Flop alongside his ex-wife Christina Anstead and he's also a real estate agent. These days he's engaged to Heather Ray Young who's no surprise also a realtor and a TV star except she's part of the cast of Netflix's Selling Sunset series. It would seem the couple is a match made in real estate heaven or reality TV heaven or both. While Heather's exact net worth is unknown we know that Tarek is worth at least $10 million and the couple is doing very well for themselves. Hey guys it's Kara The Vampire Slayer back with another exclusive house tour here on Famous Entertainment as this one checking out where Tarek El Moussa and Heather Ray Young call home. Be sure to subscribe and ring that bell for notifications because we post brand new videos daily. As always you can follow me over on Instagram to chat and now let's get into this video. End of 2020 Tarek successfully sold his home in Costa Mesa California for over asking price which was where he was living with Heather at first. The modern farmhouse style residence was sold for over $2.7 million while Tarek paid closer to $2.2 million for the place back in 2018. As you might expect the Flipper Flop star did some flipping of his own on this residence during his time living here which likely increased the home's value even if just a little. Tarek touched up the floor to ceiling fireplace in the living room as well as the massive marble island located in the kitchen among some other small fixes. Built back in 2015 the home spanned 3,000 square feet and looked both contemporary and welcoming from the outside with a wood fence surrounding the property along with 4 beds and 3.5 beds inside. Tarek's charming home was in the desirable neighborhood of east side Costa Mesa in Orange County, California. The abode boasted an open floor plan with bifold door systems that allow for true indoor-outdoor living. The main living area was contemporary and chic with high sloped ceilings and the fireplace which Tarek glammed up also featuring a mountain TV above. The area encompassed a couch as well as a dining table on the other end with glass sliders out to the poolside terrace. The white kitchen was also attached to this space and had a huge island with seating, stainless appliances and a wine fridge. The attached bath had a free standing tub and separate walk-in shower with steam. Elsewhere there were bonuses like a large home office that doubled as a separate casita while the entire place had smart home automation for the interior and the exterior. The property sits only 2 miles from the water's edge in Costa Mesa but in the comfort of the backyard there's a pool and spa in case you don't want to travel that far. This spacious grounds were complete with an outdoor kitchen and fire pit as well as a covered patio and bar. This was Tarek's bachelor dad pad after his divorce, however his fiance Heather had first moved in with him here. In early 2020 he announced on Instagram that they'd been living together for a while. He said they split their time between this abode in Orange County and spend a couple of nights in West Hollywood. While the pair lived comfortably for a while here, Tarek knew it was a good time to sell and he took advantage. He said, Tarek and Heather were excited to get a place together and make it their own and were looking for a new house months before the pandemic started. Finally they found one they thought was their forever home and put an offer only to decide the place actually had a few flaws. The couple then decided to back out of the offer, however Tarek's Costa Mesa home had already been sold at that point. Instead of freaking out, the couple decided on another option, a chic modern beach house to rent just the block away from the ocean. So let's take a look. Located in Newport Beach, California, Heather and Tarek's rental home had a hotel vibe being so close to the ocean. They managed to turn the two level five bedroom abode into a welcoming home for their family. Not to mention the couple fell in love with Newport Beach and the outdoor lifestyle the neighborhood offers. This rental overlooks the Wedge, which is a world famous surf spot and the couple's boat is parked nearby for an easy getaway. Their home is also attached to a tennis court and boasts a backyard twice the size of the other homes in the area. The beautiful home has a beachy blue exterior and brings accents of that inside and some of the walls. We can see that there's a modern kitchen with stainless steel appliances as well as plenty of glass walls leading to the deck. Heather and Tarek also gave the master suite here a special makeover and now the couple feels like they're in a hotel when they stay here. Not to mention they put a sign over their bed that reads, I love you too honey bunny. And that is Tarek's nickname for Heather, how precious. The room also boasts a mini bar, seating area and of course a balcony with views of the water. While the couple's master suite is decorated with homemade gifts from the kids, they still describe the space as sexy and very romantic. Unfortunately Tarek and Heather were forced to move from this Newport Beach home into another one in the area just because the home they're fixing up. Unfortunately Tarek and Heather were forced to move from this Newport Beach home into another one in the area because the home they're fixing up as their forever home still isn't ready. A few months back in spring 2021, we could see that Tarek and Heather's dream home was coming along. Turns out the pair did purchase a residence in Newport Beach back in September 2020 and have been working on it ever since. Heather had given her followers a tour of their remodel which was still in progress and at the time the couple was staying at a nearby hotel. They were building a little office area in the home and putting drywall back up among plenty of other fixes. A dining room area was getting redesigned to be closed in and they were also installing a really cool bar and a built-in breakfast snug. The kitchen here came with white cabinets but the couple decided a new look but both a lot of black in the color scheme. This includes a bold backsplash which was a glossy black tile. Finally the pair was able to furniture shop for their new home after running five months behind with progress. Heather and Tarek had planned to move in sooner but there were complications mainly a storm. In November 2020 the home had flooded which took a major hit on their Renault plans. They had to repair the ceiling, kitchen and some of the floors while the roof was also gone. I'm gonna hope that by now after all the couples hard work and roadblocks that they're finally settling in the new house. Now that we've taken a look at where Tarek el Musa and his fiance Heather Ray Young call home that just about wraps up this house tour. While they're still finishing up their forever home in Newport Beach I'm sure they'll be showing it off soon enough. In the meantime we got to see their former OC bungalow and the beach house rental. What did you think about their properties and what do you expect for the couple's home that's in the works? Before I go I'm gonna read out some of your comments from previous videos. On our recent JWoww house tour Heidi S. Coolish wrote, Nicely done as always Kara thanks I really like the look of her newer home. Nice and clean looking without being too cold and sterile. And the grounds and landscaping are simply magnificent. I totally agree Heidi JWoww's current home is the nicest one in my opinion and it looks super spacious and beautiful for her family. And on our Shamar More house tour Huckster Marilyn said, I like his new home I've been a fan of Shamar since he started on Young and the Restless and I watch Criminal Minds and his current SWAT show. I have the same name as his mom. Great video Kara I always enjoy your work too. Take care and hugs. Thank you for watching I like Shamar and his house as well it's awesome. If you'd like me to show you out be sure to leave a comment on Heather and Tarek's homes down below. Thanks for watching don't forget to follow me on Instagram to chat and I will see you all in the next video. Bye.


Yeah, there it is just shall I read it do it knock it out Walt Whitman When I heard the learned astronomer When the proofs the figures were ranged in columns before me When I was shown the charts and diagrams to add divide and measure them When I sitting heard the astronomer where where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick Till rising and gliding out I wandered off by myself Into the mystical moist night air and from time to time looked up in perfect silence at the stars It is a beautiful phone. It's beautiful. Too bad. He didn't like the mathematical formulas Hey everyone, thanks for watching if you want to see the full episode with Neil deGrasse Tyson I invite you to click the link in the description for more awesome interviews with incredibly fascinating people or inside knowledge from the best in Influence persuasion negotiation and nonverbal communication. Please hit that subscribe button


Good evening everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. My name is Kendra Sakamoto, I'm one of the librarians at the West Vancouver Memorial Library. I recognize that we are all in different places this evening and I would like to acknowledge that the library sits on the traditional ancestral and unceded territories of the Squamish, Slewa tooth and Musqueam nations. I think gardening for food is deeply rooted in having a close relationship with the land. You really can't garden without having a really healthy relationship with the land and the soil that you're working on. The Coast Salish peoples in this part of the world have been the careful caretakers of these lands since time immemorial. I strive to have a respectful relationship with the land and to learn from all of those who have always lived in harmony with the land. Tonight I'm delighted to welcome Linda Gilkison. Linda is a master gardener and has a PhD in entomology. She spent years working for the provincial government promoting programs to reduce and eliminate pesticide use. She was the head of the provincial state of environment reporting unit and the executive director of the Salt Spring Island Conservancy. She's the author of the remarkable gardening book Backyard Bounty the Complete Guide to Year Round Organic Gardening in the Pacific Northwest. Welcome Linda. Well hello. So it's great to be speaking to you tonight. I imagine if some of you are gardeners, you've been out and I wonder if you're having the same experience I've been having in my garden, which is where are the bees? Where's my pollinators? What's going on? I have a little colony of mason bees, but I don't see much else going on and it really concerns me. And that's why the subject of this talk tonight is really near and dear to my heart. So where have all the insects gone? Well, they've been going for a while. It's served. It turns out the bad news has been accumulating for some time. Oh, more than 10 years ago, a study came out reviewing papers that monitored that tracked some species over time. Now, I'll just to put this in context, there are between 10 and 30 million species of insects. So the research papers that this group found, they tracked only 452 species. But those with a history or of records going back 40 years showed a 45% drop in populations. So that's very concerning. And in 2017, this paper came out and this one really, I was going to say set the entomologists abuzz, if you can stand the pun. But these were 27 years of records from 63 protected natural areas in Germany. So this is not where pesticides are being used or any agricultural activities or people are not living there. So, and these entomologists have been were tracking species and numbers of insects over time for with very accurate records, and they found more than an 80% decrease in insects present. It was actually larger. It's sometimes of the year it was even more of a decrease in airborne insect biomass and what that means is is insects flying by that we're landing in the various kinds of trapping or sampling devices they were using. That really caught people's attention because the record, it just went straight down. So various other papers have come up. I didn't, I used to go through all the papers at the time but I don't need more I've just picked these out because they're kind of markers along the way in 2019 another review of all of the existing research because entomologists started scrambling like mad, looking for data and looking for papers looking for studies of in the past and then they would rush out and do a new study and in the present to be able to compare the numbers. And these people found in their review of what was available that there's a risk of possible extinction of 40% of insect species in the next few decades. They started tracking different insect groups and found that the rate of extinction for bees and ants and beetles which is a critical group of insects, beetles are the largest group of insects. That rate of extinction was eight times higher than it is for mammals or birds that we're a lot more aware of right now. Another summary looking for global studies showed that the terrestrial insects were declining about 9% per decade, which is just about the number that keeps coming up in all of these studies we're tracking, but around 9 or 10% per decade drop in insect total numbers. Now, why should we care. Now, I don't know, I probably should go back here I don't know how many of you noticed that you're not having insects hit the windshield anymore. The entomologists dubbed this the windshield effect some years ago when they started looking into this and they may and a lot of people did what I did which is I just assumed. I noticed that we didn't hit insects I'm not getting any insects on my windshield when I was a kid. Every time we stopped for gas somewhere you had to wash the windshield and wash the headlights and the grills of cars and trucks were covered with smashed bugs. Now that doesn't happen anymore and I assumed it was because cars are more aerodynamic and oh well the bugs are there but they're just blowing over the top of the car because how could it possibly be that we would actually have so many fewer insects that we would see it that way. But in fact that's the case I mean there's a British entomologist that's been driving the same 1950s pickup truck around and recording the splats on his windshield since then and yes they're just they're not there. People have been driving around with big nets on top of their car and with pieces of glass straight up in front so the insects will hit it they're just not there. So that's the windshield effect and everyone notices it now. If you're in a garden you really notice how many fewer insects are around our gardens in the spring. So why should we care. Well a couple you know important ecologists EO Wilson said if insects were to vanish the environment would collapse in chaos. The problem with insects is they're really really little and they underpin an incredible amount of stuff that goes on in the world and we don't we don't know what you know how important they were till they're not there. Doug Talamé the second quote here is an ecologist working right now insects are the primary means by which the food created by plants is delivered to animals. Now we all know insects pollinate flowers most people are aware at least of honey bees and maybe other bees. But there are of course many other insects that do pollination as well. You know pollination by insects is vital for most plants to survive 87% of all plants and it's more than 90% of the flowering plants depend on pollinators to be able to reproduce. So if you think about a cabbage plant well we don't depend on pollinators to give us a cabbage the cabbage but we we utterly depend on them to pollinate the flowers so they'll be seeds to grow cabbages from you know the next season. In a recent study I was quite shocked that you know that's biting globally that they figured just inadequate pollination is cutting global production of fruit vegetables and nuts 5%. So a third of our human food plants require pollination and that's about 100 crops in Canada, but in a very major part of the diet of a quarter of all the birds and mammals on the planet also depend on fruit and seeds that come from pollination. And the pollinators are not just bees as I mentioned they're not certainly not just honey bees honey bees actually pollinate a very limited range of plants. But there are thousands of species of native bees. We have 32 species of just bumble bees alone in on the BC coast here. But it's not just bees there are flies wasps moths beetles, and it's estimated that the value of that group that the ones that are not bees is equal to the value of the ones that are bees. So they do up to half of all the flower visits, they're better at pollinating some plants, even when bees are present, you get better pollination when these other insects have access to the flowers. They often get to different parts of the flower or flowers on a different part of the plant, and some things like flies carry pollen much farther than bees do. And we're only really in recent years becoming to realize how critical moths are, they pollinate at night. I think most of us just thought they flew around lights at night, but they actually do some really important percentage of pollination. The pictures are all flies and that's the second largest group of pollinators after all the kinds of bees. Now, pollination is something a lot of people are aware of, but as gardeners you're probably also quite aware how important some insects are because they prey on or they parasitize pests. Though these are just a few of the thousands of native aphid predators. This beautiful fly here has larvae that look kind of like little slugs, but they're eating madly eating their way through this colony of aphids on a cabbage. This tiny little orange larva here is eating aphids. It's one of the most common aphid predators around, never gets any bigger than this, so most people miss it.  But there are many, many kinds that just prey on aphids, never mind caterpillars and other problems that occur in our garden.  You know, and of that 10 to 30 million species, most of which we don't know who they even are. It's estimated that less than a tenth of 1% are actually what we would consider pests. So what's everybody else doing? Well, in every ecosystem on the planet, they are key players in building soil and aerating soil decomposing. In this case, there's carrion beetle picture here, sorry about it. I hope you're not eating your dinner in front of the screen. They're decomposing organic material, any kind of plant material, animals, but nutrient cycling. They're part of what ecologists generally call ecosystem services. It's how the world works. They're absolutely essential recyclers.  So insects make the existence of plants possible. Plants are capturing energy from the sun and turning it through photosynthesis into biomass, into leaves. And insects eating those leaves move those nutrients on to the next level in the ecosystem or through the food web. They digest it, other animals get it, some of that goes to the soil, some of it goes sooner or later to the soil and provides nutrients for plants. And of course, pollination is important because plants can reproduce. So just think about caterpillars. They eat leaves, yes. Now, are they just pests of plants? Or think about them as an essential pathway for nutrients to get to the wider food web. And I've specifically mentioned carotenoids here. Baby birds need a diet rich in carotenoids. Plants are rich in carotenoids. Baby birds are not fed leaves. They are fed caterpillars that have eaten leaves. Caterpillars are very rich in protein, fat, and carotenoids. And then a soft skin and a bird can bring that to a chick and stuff it down its throat and it won't choke. I mean, this is their utterly essential diets for birds. So insects make the existence of animals possible.  In fact, nearly all terrestrial birds, not the oceanic or the aquatic water birds, most of them rely on insects to feed their young. And I've heard people say, well, no, no, they such and such eat seeds. As adults, many birds eat seeds, but those birds are still reliant on caterpillars to feed their chicks.  And the birds that are dependent through their whole life on caterpillars, the insectivorous birds, that group's declining faster than other bird groups in North America. And then the percentage they've gone down mirrors the percentage that insect populations have gone down. Dr. Talamie, who I cited at the beginning, one of his graduate students was counting how many chicks it took for one pair of chickadees to raise, sorry, how many caterpillars it took for one pair of chickadees to raise a nest of chicks. And they found, she found that it was 9,000 caterpillars were required just for that one nest to get them to fledging. That's not, you know, they even eat more than that because the parents kept feeding them after they fledged for a while. So that is for one nest of birds. It needs an enormous amount of caterpillars. Insects also do other things. We have all kinds of aquatic species that are, when they're living in the water, usually it's the larval stage, they have gills and they clean the water. When they're filter feeders, they consume algae and microbes in the water and turn it into biomass and, you know, a mosquito, for example, turns, you know, basically little particles of crud in the water into an insect body that hatches into something that fish and birds can eat. So even mosquitoes have a value, but there are many, many more insects than just mosquitoes that do this. So how do our activities affect insects? Well, in, you know, in common with our activities, the effect of our activities on other animals, our most pervasive impact is that we're destroying natural habitat. Whether it's for our farms or industry or someplace for us to live, urbanization or paved roads, we've removed a tremendous amount of vegetation and native plants.  We've been waging war on insects for over 100 years in a very concerted way. And then things that our activities are causing, climate change, for example, are as it is affecting other animals, affecting insects as well, and rising carbon dioxide, which I'll talk about in a moment, is directly affecting insects too. And then there are, that's global effects, but there are local impacts. I mean, light pollution, lights at night are really quite detrimental. And there's air pollution, water pollution, soil pollution. I'll talk about these. But loss of habitat, you know, as we've removed native pollen and nectar flowers and host plants for caterpillars, for example, you know, you can't have caterpillars without plants that they eat. And any of any of our activities that have wiped out where insects nest and pupate, then when the larvae go to the next stage, the pupa stage needs a safe place to be, because the insect can't run away until it hatches out of the cocoon or comes out of the chrysalis or hatches out of its pupa case. So we've removed all of this, so they have really nowhere to live, nothing to eat.  So the more we've spread, and the spread of invasive plants in invasive non-native plants is even worse. Doug Talamy's work shows that the loss of native plants may be the greatest contributor to the decline of insect populations. There are scientists that argue that some of these other impacts that I've just mentioned are greater, but it is really important that there's no food out there. This yard here, a lot of this plant material isn't really chewed up much by insects at all. And it's just as barren as this yard from a point of view of many insects.  So here's the problem with non-native plants. Most insects that eat plants eat only a few kinds, just a few closely related species. They might only just eat one kind of plant, and most of them are very limited in what they will eat. They'll just starve to death if there's no plants available that they need to have. And, you know, if the other animals are depending on insects that eat other insects that are depending on plant feeders to survive, the whole thing falls apart. So wherever we found, you know, research that's been done has shown quite conclusively that wherever we've massively altered the landscape, whether it's agriculture or in forestry, you know, planting trees that were not native, are landscape ornamentals. And the invasive plants around the edges that have gotten in in our colonizing waste areas, wherever they've replaced native plants, there's just fewer insect species and smaller populations of insects. And some very detailed work was done in Vancouver on bees showing that. So horticulturalists, of which of course I'm one, has spread the most species of non-native plants around the world.  It's completely full of non-native plants. So just to show you a few caterpillars here, 70% of all species of caterpillars, and these will grow up to be moths, feed on only one family of plant. Bed straw hawk moth, big poplar sphinx, they're named after the plants that they eat. Of course, pesticides kill, and we've been at that for some time.  And you know, the problem with the neonicotinoids, which people are calling neonics, was kind of just the latest chapter in a very long history of trying to exterminate insects. And unfortunately, this particular one, a group of products or active ingredients, particularly backfired on bees, because these are systemic chemicals that get in the plant, moved around in the sap, and they came out basically in the nectar. And who picked up the nectar?   The use of herbicides has taken away host plants and pollen and nectar sources. If you think of a weedy ditch full of all sorts of different things blooming, those were important plants. Think of a ditch of dandelions. How critical that is. Dandelions are one of the most critical urban plants there is.  But if you're going to use herbicides to prevent that from happening, then we're removing a lot of food for insects. And even the least toxic pesticides, I mean, people think that soap is safe. Well, it's not. It can, it can kill, it kills any insects it gets on, but it also makes the leaves stinky, according to the insects point of view, so that they're repelled from coming. For example, if it was a predator on aphids, they won't come to the leaves and lay eggs on aphids around the aphids that have come back on the plants where soap was used. So the predators go looking for a leaf that's not been treated. They're very, very acute senses. So now we get to the rising average temperatures globally. Like other animals, the insects and plants are getting desynchronized as the as the seasons are odd. They're late or they're early. They're not matching day length that plants have evolved with or insects have evolved with so things can emerge at the different at different times. And distribution of host plants is changing, you know, as as the habitats dry up and here's some cedar that's dying in my neighborhood. And probably the most high profile native plant that's disappearing really rapidly from this region and nectar sources dry up in the summer when it's hot and dry and pollinators don't survive if there's no food.  He waves kill directly and anybody that was here during the heat dome knows perfectly well. You know, a lot of people died hundreds of people died, but a lot of marine organisms died and we could see them because they were on the beaches, stinking up the place died they died they estimated that billions of marine organisms died. But insects would have died to but they would have just fallen out of the sky and we wouldn't have seen them. But it's it's known that high temperatures do kill insects and it's suspected in this paper here that the bumblebee populations in North America, they're all going down. It's it's linked, they're half of what they once were. And they correlate that with the frequency of extreme heat like heat waves coming periodically. And some other research is beginning to show that exposing male insects to heat waves. ruins their sperm. And after two heat waves they could be sterile. I, it's not just the fact that it's getting warmer on average and these things are happening. But the fact that the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere has been rising steadily also has another effect on plants and human food. The protein levels in our, you know, food crops is dropping. The sugar levels are increasing. The minerals such as iron and zinc is decreasing. And it's because the plants are being grown in higher carbon dioxide environment. So you get more sugars less protein. And these researchers decided that they would see if something like that might be happening to an insect diet. The protein in pollen is critical for the larvae of bees. Baby bees are raised on pollen. But the adults drink some nectar and take it back. If it's a honey, a honey beehive, they'll take it back and make honey out of it. But basically the adults are eating nectar and the baby bees are eating protein rich pollen. And these researchers went back and looked at goldenrod pollen in herbarium specimens since 1874 and they found that the protein content had dropped 30% since then. And most of that decline was after 1960 and it's really correlated with the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. They also compared in this case it was honey bees that they were raising, raising them on this poorer quality pollen and they have shorter life spans. They have behavior that isn't the same as it used to be. They're less vigorous. And one of the authors in a press release said that pollen is becoming junk food for bees. And of course the bees don't realize that they're going out and getting junk food for their larvae and bringing it home because the bee isn't eating that. The bee is just bringing it home to feed the larvae. Lighting at night is quite problematical for quite a few species of insects. More than half, over 60% of our insects are nocturnal. When they're out in the dark, navigating and doing what they're supposed to be doing, night lighting pulls them away from where they're supposed to be. They may just fly around a light till they die of exhaustion or predators will lurk in there and get them. I remember if you've, you know, ever sat and watched geckos in Hawaii or someplace like that at night, they go up and sit by the light and just catch insects as they show up. So, but if they're flying around a light or being attracted to a light, they're not where they're supposed to be. The other thing about light at night is it changes their internal clocks for this research here, which I did many, many years ago. Now, I found that parking lot lights in a, in a, at the university where I was working were screwing up my research projects, which were on behavior that insects do when they're getting ready for winter as the days get shorter. The short day is a signal that changes the, what changes insects change their blood actually to have antifreeze compounds in it. And they also change their behavior and start looking for little safe places to be for the winter. Well, that's day length. Well, when the days get shorter, that's supposed to happen, but days weren't getting, you know, shorter because the parking lot lights were actually enough to prevent my insects from doing their normal physiological preparation for winter because it was light enough that they just completely upset their, their internal clock. So it affects the abundance of insects, nightlights, it affects who's there, the movement of pollen because as I said, mods are turning out to be very important pollinators. Artificial light at night, there's a NASA map, regions with the sharpest decline in flying insects have the highest levels of light pollution. Well, you'd expect that just surely based on the fact that light pollution, the more lights there are, the more likely it is an urban environment or altered environment and paving and all, all kinds of other disruption. But they're starting to tease this apart now. And this one study I'm just citing here, this was in the UK where they matched streets with street lights and streets without them they tried matching streets that were otherwise very similar in terms of vegetation. And they found that where there were street lights, there were half as many caterpillars compared to the areas that didn't have street lights.  But in fact, that's not great because what are the birds going to eat? So it is found that night lighting decreases pollination by moths. The value of them, it was found that night lighting or lights that are disrupting moth behavior at night reduced their visits to plants by 62% compared to the dark areas. And that directly translated into crop loss. This was apples in this case, 13% lower fruit set. Even though the bees and flies and other insects were present during the day, they weren't excluded from the orchard. And later studies have been showing just how important moths really are. So air pollution, you know, ozone and nitric oxide in the atmosphere or sorry in local air impairs the ability of insects to find the flowers that they depend on. The chemicals in the air make the flower scents break down a lot faster. So the scent doesn't travel very far. And instead of miles, it's traveling a few meters. It's breaking down in minutes rather than hours, which means how are insects supposed to find a flower where their pollen and nectar is if they can't smell it. And this recent study here in the UK found that a 70% drop in pollinators and a 90% drop in flower visits when in food crops that were being grown with the level of air pollution that is what's found near major roads. And that translated into the plants also having much lower yields. So the insects were not there or they were being affected by probably the air pollution in the areas making them very hard to find their plants. So this is quite a litany of all the disastrous things. So what can we do? Well, you know, here's the thing to remember about insects. They're really little. Local conservation actions matter. You can change the whole world for a species in a very small yard or a small area or a park or roadsides changing the plantings. So they live in such small worlds that it's quite possible to make a big difference in local biodiversity. This example here, this is the native sedum, sedum spathialifolium. And I live on one side of a mountain on Salt Spring where there isn't much of it, but just over the mountain, literally over the top of the mountain. There's a lot of it because it's the sunny side. And when I put all my rockery and rock walls in, I went and got little chips and slips and planted it all because I have a very hot dry garden that was perfect. And I just did it because I thought, this will be a great plant. I won't have to water it. And it's native. And it turns out that I now have a little colony of mosses elphins that live in my yard or in my immediate area because that's the only plant those butterfly caterpillars can eat. So what insects need is food for adults and larvae. And sometimes, I mean, often the adults are eating different things than maybe after pollen and nectar, but the larvae are after leaves or they're after pollen or something. So other insects, whatever they need, they need the food. They need a safe environment without someone using pesticides or other hazards like bug zapping lights and things like that. In our region, they need water in the summertime, a lot of insects. If you're eating a leaf, you're getting your moisture. But if you're the moth that has to lay the eggs to make the caterpillar or the hoverfly that's going to come and eat aphids or lay eggs for larvae that will eat aphids, if you're not directly feeding on plants, the dry environment with no dew in our region in the hottest dryest part of the year can be very, can really shorten an insect's life. And then they need protected places for their pupae and where to overwinter and nest sites. So the, you know, the native plants are really important because the non-native plants are just not recognized as food plants. The lot of insects can come to all kinds of non-native plants for nectar and pollen. Now many can come to quite a variety of plants and use that pollen and nectar, although not all of them do, but the ones that eat plants, and that's like the caterpillars and butterflies, there's no butterflies if you don't have the plant for the caterpillar to eat. I always cringe when I see a butterfly garden listed somewhere of, you know, how to plant for butterflies and all it is is nectar plants for the adults. They can get nectar from a lot of places. What's critically missing is somewhere for them to lay their eggs so that there would be another generation. Now some of our native plants support a lot more different insect species than others. And this is a term that you'll see ecologists use, which is keystone species. They have an outsized benefit to the environment compared to some of the others. And one of ours is Gary Oak. The especially valuable trees are oak and cherry, willow and alder. There's so many insects have larvae that feed on those plants or come to the flowers. For example, for Gary Oak in the Pacific Northwest, there's 436 moth species use that as a host plant. So rather than avoiding oak, because it gets caterpillars every now and then, we should be really doing what we can to make sure we get plants out in the environment that caterpillars like. Two really important plants for us, flowers, are golden rods and Douglas Aster. And this is, this is golden rod, you see a little butterfly here. Actually, there's, yeah, there's so anyway, this is the Douglas Aster. And they bloom, excuse me, they bloom later in the season, just when we don't have very much food for insects, and they're very rich pollen sources and well recognized by native insects. And if you're looking for a really good read, Nature's Best Hope is a excellent read, it's very accessible. And it's Douglas Talamie and I'll show you a picture of that at the end of the talk. So one thing we can do is, is start really getting native trees, shrubs and flowers into our landscapes, replacing, filling in, adding to. Many of these are really trouble free, they, they don't need water in the summer, little or no water. So which is very important is, you know, I don't need to tell you guys because we all live here and we're all looking at an extremely dry summer coming with not very much water stored up where it should be no snowpack and our reservoirs are not looking too good. So plants that don't need summer irrigation are going to be very high on our list for landscaping. But you know, red flowering current right now is just beyond spectacular. I mean, people are slowing down to drive by my red flowering current in the yard, you know, on the road because it's so spectacular. It's gone for six, seven weeks in the spring that and there's just a lot of native plant material that is really stunning and at least the equal of some of the non native material that you might be used to seeing. So again, thinking about hosts for the entire insect life cycle. This is really the point that I've just made before. If you don't have food for larvae you don't have the caterpillars that will become butterflies. Five of our native butterflies need stinging nettles to feed on.  There's a couple there's some butterflies have their little wider host range of plants but you know three of these we won't have them if there's no stinging nettles for example. And this little parasitic wasp this is a common native wasp it's one that would lay eggs intent caterpillars and other other caterpillars that we consider pests in our trees. She needs nectar. That's what she drinks, but she's got to have caterpillars to lay her eggs in or there won't be another generation of her either. So, we can look at planting. If you're looking at your yard and thinking well what can I put in here. The priority would be for plants. That bloom all season long and most of us already have a lot of spring flowers, or spring blooming trees, or even native trees around like our beauties and maple that are provided tremendous amount of pollen and nectar in the spring. So we are really well situated for spring flowers, where the whole thing kind of falls apart in this region is that are in the summer things dry up and brown out, and we're really lacking in rich supply of food for late summer and fall. And this is when insects are all getting ready to go into, well, it's equivalent to hibernation is called diapause, but they're getting ready for winter.  Have their new queens and males in the fall and they mate and everybody dies except that queen, and she goes off to hibernate. Well, if they didn't have enough food to get through the summer. Then there is no more queens and in the laboratory, the B lab, Dr. L's lab and at Simon Fraser has estimated that half the bumble bee colonies in this region generally starve out every summer. There just isn't food for them. So if you want to prioritize something to do in terms of planting look at enriching that late summer and fall bloom. So, you know, common snowberry, which is very humble little plant actually blooms pretty much all year. It's one of the best, you know, pearly everlasting absolutely you can grow this in the driest environment you can imagine. The golden rod and Douglas asked her that I've showed you are absolutely fantastic plants and and do not worry about allergies. I know that people that live in the east have golden rod all mixed up with ragweed that both plants that bloom at the end of the summer and they had their yellowish flowers. I don't think they look alike at all but they do have yellow flowers and people think that they're terrible ragweed allergies, which is quite common. They blame it on golden rod ragweed is wind pollinated so it produces an enormous amount of pollen. It's like these conifers right there right now leaving so much pollen everywhere on on every surface. It's because they're wind pollinated but golden rod is insect pollinated that pollen doesn't blow anywhere it sticks to the insects and they carry it to the next flowers. So plant a variety of flowers. Insects are really diverse their mouth parts are very diverse somehow long tubes that they can drink into the bottom of a very narrow deep neck flower. They have flat little faces like this beetle. They can't drink in a deep flower at all they have to get their pollen out of flat flowers.  They might drown if they tried to get nectar out of something like a fox glove.  Flower diversity equals pollen diversity and especially this is urgent in light of this research on the golden rod pollen. If protein content is decreasing in pollen generally. And bees don't seem to really realize that obviously they don't take more food to feed their larvae when the food quality is poor. But what they do do is they forage a lot of different pollens, and it's different amino acids in the pollen different protein contents they can complement each other it's like when we cook beans and rice together. It's a better diet than if we ate rice in one meal and beans in a different meal so combining the types of protein. The amino acids will improve their diet. If we're planning for pollinators, the, you know, the rule of thumb is to at least have 50% native plants and plant in masses and pollinators need a certain number of flowers of one kind visible noticeable for them to find it. And that's kind of like think of a square meter of flowers or five or 10 plants of any one thing so rather than one of this and one of that try and plant clumps of or, you know, lines or rows or or batches of similar plants, but also still grow many different plants, because more insects visit where there's at least eight flowers species of flowers blooming. So a monoculture of the same area would not have nearly as many insects as that same area planted but into like eight more eight different kinds of flowers blooming. So if you're planting to attract pests into your garden, or sorry, natural enemies of pests into your garden, then the predators and parasitic insects that we want that control caterpillars and aphids for example, our lady beetles and lace wings and they come into these really tiny little nectar rich flowers it's amazing how much nectar there is in a little dill flower and pollen as well and lady beetle adults eat pollen as well.  Goldenrod Aster Yero, candy tuft, lots of different things. As far as choosing other kinds of flowers, look for the least modified ones. You know, you, I, it sort of drives me nuts looking in a, in a seed catalog seeing, for example, the sunflower, cutting sunflowers listed as being pollinator friendly, there'd be a little picture of a bee beside it. Well, actually, these have been bred not to have pollen, because pollen falls out on the dining room table when you put these in a bouquet so they've bred these to have no pollen. They may still have some nectar, but that that's, you know, anytime that we've bred different colors, the insects may not recognize them that they don't look the same to insects. They, they don't necessarily have access to nectar and those the flowers that are double flowers or unusual flower shapes for the kind of flower, the insects can't get at the nectar if it's even there. So double mutations, you know, unusual colors, this is what we want to avoid. Echinacea, which is actually a prairie native is actually a fantastic pollinator plant. But this is the original Echinacea. We see lots of really interesting colors in the nurseries, but people have, you know, compared the impact or sorry, the attractiveness to bees, for example, and this is that they're just not attractive to bees in the same way that the original unimproved one is. Now, the good news is the unimproved flowers, you can grow them from seed and they're really cheap as compared to going out and buying hybrid, beautiful double flower unusual colors that the variety of the season sort of plants. You can grow a lot of things that are really quite inexpensive to grow. Oh, and I'm just reminding you that deer browsing have removed understory plants around the region and, you know, the pollinators and other insects depended on those. So the more deer grazing there is the less insect habitat there often is. And also when you're growing out plants for deer, I actually have great results just planting shrubs that have flowering plants over the, flowers over the season that are attracting insects because the shrubs can get tall enough that if I protect them for a few years then I can take the barriers off. Here's Mahonia and red flowering current and actually this group of plants I've actually taken the barrier off now and then deer nibble the bottoms, but the tops are completely covered with flowers. And there are some deer resistant perennials that are really good at providing food for pollinators and beneficial insects. Beware of invasive plants, you know, butterfly bush keeps getting on these lists of butterfly gardens. Well, there is not a single species of butterfly whose caterpillar uses this as a host plant. It's a great nectar source. But if you put up, if you're growing a native Philadelphus, which is a mock orange, it's just exactly the same. I can go, I have one growing along the, put along the road by my garden and it doesn't need water. It's huge. It's spectacular. It scents up this whole corner of the neighborhood with this really sweet scent and it just is a butterfly magnet. And it's just a native plant. We don't need Budlia. Watch out for bachelor buttons, which are in the centauria anyway. They're often in those, quote, wildflower mixes.  It could have some very invasive species in it. Baby's breath. That's a very invasive sumac you may have seen also on lists. And it's, it's native up in the interior. It just should stay there. It's just leave it right where it's supposed to be.  And appearances can be deceiving. You know, the Himalayan blackberry, the lot of bees, the honey bees and bumble bees go to that. So when you see a thicket of blackberry flowers, usually you will see some bees there, but hardly any other pollinators. And yet Yaro, which is very humble and isn't really of much interest at all to honey bees or bumble bees. The bee lab at Simon Fraser has got it on their list as one of the most valuable plants for the many other kinds of native bees and non bee pollinators. And here's a funny looking little fly that is getting at Yaro flowers here. This fly actually is one that will lay an egg on another insect on a caterpillar, for example. So back to, you know, continuing on with what you could do, provide a safe water supply. If they don't eat leaves, they don't have water, but they need safe water. If there's no do around in the mornings, then a lot of insects can, their lives will be shorter and they'll lay less eggs. So, and, you know, just being dry conditions. Period is a severe stressor so provides safe water by making sure they can't drown them. Some of these insects are so tiny they get caught in the surface tension of the water and they cannot get out. Little tiny parasitic wasps, for example. So they need a safe beach. This person was having bees drowning in this water, this pool here. She thought she was, you know, feeding the animals in her garden water, but there was bees drowning because they couldn't get out of the slippery plastic. So we just put a piece of slate here. It's a nice little bee beach and the insects line up right along here. And if they fall in, they can easily drag themselves out. So it's like a bird bath, you know, you dump the water periodically so mosquitoes don't breed. And because bees and wasps will come and drink, it's better if it's up out of where pets or can drink out of it or little kids might be playing in it. You know, what else can we do? Well, don't use pesticides on anything. And that includes the herbicides and fungicides. There's lots of really effective ways to manage, prevent pests and diseases without having to resort to spraying something. And, you know, even the things that you think are the safest are not any safer to insects than the more toxic stuff. So, you know, people do think that the pesticides that organic growers are allowed to use must be safer somehow. Well, they're, you know, safer to us, but they're not safer to non-target insects.  So never spray routinely. One of my pet peeves is people routinely using dormant oil sprays on their fruit trees. Well, if you have some pests on your fruit trees for which dormant oil will work, and it's a limited range of things, but we do have pests that can be on a fruit tree. If they were there in the summer, then you schedule yourself a dormant spray in the winter. But otherwise, it's a real overuse of pesticides. There are other insects and beneficial mites that are overwintering in that bark, so you're killing them too. So, you know, know what the problem is, learn the life cycles, learn how to decide whether treatment is needed or not.  This is not a tent caterpillar. These are not going to blow up into big tents with lots of foliage disappearing. So is this a problem for this apple tree? It's probably not.  So, knowing what the problem is and are the numbers of something chewing on leaves high enough to affect the tree. Because remember how valuable those caterpillars are in the environment. And, you know, homemade sprays are not okay. If it's something that could kill or even repel a pest, it's going to also do the same thing to other insects. So it's just a spray alone will change the odor on the leaves, as I mentioned earlier. Like this little hover fly, there's aphids on this leaf here on the underside and she's laying her eggs right there. But she's not going to do that if you are messing around with some kitchen soap and things like that. The aphids will come back, but the predator didn't. And a lot of these homemade sprays can damage the plants themselves.  You know, if you keep using soap sprays on seedlings, the leaf cuticle is damaged. So there's a lot of things. This is not a solution. I guess that's all I'm going to say. Homemade sprays are not a solution. And, you know, don't use pesticides inadvertently. They're still neonicotinoids. They've been phased out and in some things they've been phased out, but you can still buy plants from US nurseries where the neonics are being used. If you know an organic supplier or a local grower that you can talk to about what they're doing when they're raising their plants, you know, patronize them and grow your own plants from seed. That's the only way to really, really ensure that you're not bringing in neonicotinoids, which lasts for a very long time in the plant and come up in the nectar. Use any kind of insect control correctly. I don't know what this person was trying to catch, but yellow sticky traps out in the environment catch all kinds of insects. And I'll bet you I'm sure those weren't all what that person was trying to catch, you know, in the past. There's a lot of creatures stuck there that would not be pests. So don't use them outdoors. Use sticky traps indoors. If you're using winter moth traps, the tree bands in the winter, you take it down in February. There's a lot of very beneficial insects that run up and down tree trunks use them as highways in the other parts of the year. And never ever use bug zappers. The old bug zappers, I remember early study showing that in two weeks, six bug zappers, these entomologists caught 14,000 insects and they teased them all apart and identified them and what 31 were mosquitoes. And people think that they're electrocuting mosquitoes when they hear them sizzle in the bug zapper. The new devices that are really being promoted heavily by hardware stores, it's a lovely little single easy unit here with LED, a cool white LED light in it. Cool white LED lights are extremely attractive to many kinds of insects. They're in the blue spectrum and that's where insects see. Very few insects see anything in the, you know, the redder spectrum of light. So these are just as lethal and they make just as little sense as the old bug zappers did. So turn off your outdoor lights or replace them. Don't leave nights, the lights on at night. If you've got sensor lights on they trip on the minute there's an emotion. Then that's what you want for security is you want a security light that lights right up when somebody's there and turns off again. The other thing you can do is just change the bulbs. I've done that with all my outdoor lights that are on sensor lights. Warm LEDs turn out to be really not attractive to insects at all. They're much better than any other kind of light you can buy and now you can get LEDs readily anywhere.  Put on something that flips on and gives a really good view to somebody that needs the light when they're out there and then flips off again. Minimize cultivation in, you know, when you're gardening, a lot of beneficial insects, their pupae are in the surface layer of soil like just a centimeter below the surface or they might just be under under the mulch. And that's where they overwinter as well. So cultivating in the fall will kill a lot of them. And 70% of our native bees overwinter in burrows. They're not up in nests above the ground. They're not like honey bees or mason bees. They're in these little nests, little holes that they've drilled in the soil. So you don't want to cultivate over that. There's a lot of ground dwellers that we need to protect. You won't maybe see some of these unless you're out at night. But this is not an insect, it's a spider, but it only lives on the ground. It doesn't have, it doesn't run up on plants. It eats pill bugs. Wireworm predator. This is an extremely valuable little predator on wireworms. It is exactly the size and shape of a wireworm. It's just that it's white. If you see a white wireworm, well, that's, you don't, you definitely don't want to harm that one. And there are all kinds of ground beetles. And this is a baby ground beetle, a little larva. They need stable places. So if, you know, areas that are undisturbed and perennial beds between annual beds, we may have annual vegetables in some areas but have perennial flowers or perennial vegetables and others leave places on the margins for these insects to go. And again, minimizing cultivation. Somewhere to pupate is really important.  Well, your life is over anyway. You know, it's not going to, you know, all of the leaves in the world feeding those caterpillars are not going to help if the moth can't survive. And this kind of thing is certainly better than nothing because the caterpillars can drop or climb down from the tree and get into the mulch. What would even be better is shrubs here. A clump of shrubbery that the insects would get in and under and the soil would be loose and it would be protected. So understory plants under our trees would actually, whether it was ferns or whatever, would actually be even more beneficial than having the mulch. But the mulch is way better than sod or far better than those poor street trees that are in concrete. And just rethinking our fall cleanup. Insects in this latitude start getting ready for winter. About the first week or two of September, some of them are going off to hibernate or diapause already. So over the period of the next month or so, they're finding their hideaway places for winter. And so you come along at the end of October and do a big garden cleanup and you end up killing or removing most of the creatures that you really would appreciate having next spring. So twig nesting bees get into the hollow twigs of things. Many insects have, for example, this is a butterfly chrysalis. They're attached to stalks and things in the environment. They just look like part of the twigs. So leave standing stems there until spring.  Now, don't chop them and shred them and compost them. And then do your finish, finish your cleanup in the spring. And that gives insects a time to overwinter and emerge and fly away. And this is one last thing. Considering, consider reducing the area of annual gardens and even vegetable gardens and lawns. Use that extra space to plant trees and restore native vegetation. You know, add flowers for pollinators, grow perennials that insects would appreciate. And I say this, even though I'm an avid vegetable gardener, I spend a considerable, you know, time teaching gardeners how to grow more food in a small space so that when we don't have to use all our spaces for lawns or even any kind of annual garden. But start moving to perennial native planting. This is the Nature's Best Hope that I mentioned. This is the Douglas Talamy book. Most libraries would have it. It's widely available. It is a very interesting read. This gardening with native plants is a fairly, is quite recent. There are other native plant guides around, of course, but this one's particularly good. And if you want to read more about the insect crisis just globally, this is one Oliver Millman did a very good book on that. So, just looking, yes, we are on time and we have half an hour or so for questions. All right, stop sharing at this point. Thank you so much for that. So, folks, if you have questions, just type them into the Q&A feature on your menu and I will read those questions out. You kind of touched on this Linda at the end of your presentation, but my question was exactly, but how do you balance gardening for food and having these, you know, robust native plant gardens that support the insect populations? Well, you just need, just garden really intensively in the area you've designated for your annual garden for food. And maybe start, you know, it's giving us some of that lawn space, you know, start, start replacing slowly, piece by piece, lawns and things that are not producing the food. So, I, you know, I try and grow as much food as possible and the smallest space as possible. And I mulch a lot and I disturb the soil as little as possible, even in my annual garden. Yeah. Okay. And I have a question about patio gardening. So, you know, if you, if you just have a balcony and you live in an apartment, you know, how much can you be doing and should you be doing to help support the insect populations? Well, it's really, you know, what would you like to do? I mean, you go to the highest priority things which would be something like a pollen nectar plants that bloom all season or the last half of the summer and into the fall. Those can be really vital. They fill an important gap in what's available out there. You know, and people, I do the butterfly, I lead the butterfly count on Salt Spring here and, you know, have a butterfly presentation and people are always wondering whether should they be planting nectar plants for the butterflies, or should they be concentrating on the native plants the caterpillars need. That's where you are. If you're in an area where there's native vegetation around in parks or wild areas or you're maybe out more in the rural area, in our wooded areas, and there's food for caterpillars, then the most valuable thing is nectar plants for the adults. But if you're living in an area where there's almost no vegetation for the caterpillars to eat, there's probably plenty of nectar plants because people have, you know, landscapes and gardens, then it might be more valuable to plant native plants that are eaten by the caterpillars. So it depends what's going on around you. Makes sense. And here's a question about, you know, depending how high you live.  Oh yeah, it makes a huge difference. Some species don't fly very far above the ground or even mosquitoes only go up to the second or third floor usually. Okay. Yeah, it's going to really depend for sure. Okay. And you talked about how you've got all sorts of critters, you know, living in the soil and overwintering in the soil.  They can still climb out? No, not at all. There wouldn't be any reason to add topsoil in the spring if you've got soil. Yeah. And then that's a good point because I actually don't want little bees making nests in my vegetable garden. So thick mulch prevents that. And I have the photo I showed you, there was some rockery there and there was a bee nest. That's actually at the base of a rock wall, which I keep intentionally all cleared out of mulch. And there's lots of like really good places to go and be a bee and make a nest. But I don't want them in the garden because I've tried marking their little holes and with a tag and it always ends in disaster. But yeah, if you put mulch on top of that, they probably won't get out. And if you put soil on top of that, they for sure won't get out. Right here is a question. With the increased fire risk in our province, Fire Smart BC is recommending not using bark mulch or wood chips on your property as fire embers ignite these products very rapidly. Fire retardant undergrowth may be a better choice. How do you feel about this? Oh yeah, absolutely. Do not use bark mulch. Now wood chips, if it's two chips, wood chips, that's fine. That's not flammable. Those bark mulches, the ornamental bark mulches, boy, it'll make your hair stand on and seeing those videos of flames just shooting down a path to a house. So do not use that stuff. Leaf mulches, wood chips like the big chips, any other kind of organic material is not particularly flammable. I was quite surprised to learn from our local Fire Smart guys that even they are buta sleeves, which I thought I assumed would be quite flammable in the summer when they really start to pile up. They said they couldn't catch them on fire no matter what they did. But they're really worried about bark mulch. So be careful. There's lots of other organic material. There's lawn clippings. There's waste stuff from your garden crops. There's leaves from last fall. It's all soggy. All of those things are not flammable. So definitely mulch, just stay away from bark mulch. Good to know. Anyone has any other questions? Again, you can pop them in the Q&A or in the chat. So we at the library have a mason bee hotel in our garden, which is thriving with life at the moment. But we also have a mason bee lending program. So if you have a small garden, even a balcony and you're interested in participating in our mason bee lending program, reach out to us at the library. You get all the information that you could possibly need and you get a little bee hotel for a year and you get some cocoons to get yourself started. And then if you want to carry on beyond the year and you get lots of support through the whole process and if you want to carry on beyond the year, we get bee houses that are made by the West Vancouver Senior Center, which is really fantastic. So I have a house at my kid's school and it's thriving as well and it's really, really fun and the kids love it. It's great for kids because they don't, you know, they're really harmless bees and they don't sting, so it's great to have around schools. All right. Well, if there are no more questions, Linda, this was absolutely fascinating. I certainly learned a lot. I mean, I just love insects anyway, but I love them even a little bit more. I also appreciate that you pointed out a positive thing about mosquitoes because I think that's the one insect that we all have trouble finding anything good about. Yeah, it's a key dietary item for bats and swallows and lots of birds. Yeah, I'll try and keep that in mind when I'm cursing them over the summer. Well, thank you so much and I hope everyone has a wonderful evening. Thank you. Good night, Linda. Good night all.


Hi folks, thank you very much for popping in to come and see my little session about an action research project that I did last year as part of my advanced teacher status portfolio, my ATS portfolio. It was a quality improvement project for which I used action research.  However, it is definitely a visual representation of how I felt doing this project and working with all of my peers. It's called Cooking Up Community and it is based on my poster here that I drew up at the end of my ATS portfolio year to present. As you can see, I went fully with this little metaphor. Metaphors really, really helped me to visualize and make sense of the world around me. I'm a big fan of using those metaphors. So if you will, just just roll on with me. This is my poster, which is, as you can see, like a little menu and I'm going to go through each of these little sections in turn in just a moment. But just to set that scene, when I talk about kitchens and culinary communities and ingredients and recipes and all this kind of thing. I want you to think about a kitchen that's at home, that's comfortable, that's maybe, you know, in my mind, it's actually, I don't have a kitchen like this, but this is in my mind, this is my visualization, which is a big open kitchen diner where all of my friends and peers are all just kind of like sitting around this middle island and sharing their ideas as we're cooking together. That's my imagination, OK, so less Gordon Ramsay barking orders at you at the front of the kitchen, more that kind of like homely, comfortable feel. So that's where I'm going with this metaphor. So please, if you will allow me, we're going to get started with what this was about. So as you can see in front of you, I've got this three different kitchens. These are the three different kitchens that I was exploring and exploring with and facilitating. So we have ESOL teachers, teacher trainers and industry trainers. Let's crack on with our amuse-bouche or the aim. So what was the actual intention? What was the aim for this project? And it was to discover ways in which to dissolve that screen between us, that barrier that was between us in those online spaces in order to develop a joyful and supportive online community practice that created meaningful and authentic interactions by devising a series of effective online informal CPD strategies. So you might be thinking, oh, goodness me, that's like that's a bit of a mouthful. So I'm going to go through and explain how I did all of these things. But we're going to start with a little starter, a rationale. Why? Why did I want to do all these things? Well, I think back to the context that I placed us in before, which was COVID 2021 and there was a lot of lockdowns and people were working, teachers, trainers, practitioners were working in very, very isolated ways. And I was really concerned about all of our social emotional well-being, you know, and we were focused as trainers, we're very, very, our mentors, very focused on our practitioners, of course. But I found that, you know, one particular group of trainers that we're working with, you know, who was looking after them because they were focused so much on putting so much energy into helping and supporting teachers and practitioners. And I just thought, you know, who was really helping these trainers who are working so isolated. And in some ways we're quite used to working in isolated ways, working from home, etc.  And that's what a lot of trainers really love, actually love going into all these different organizations, like physically, you know, and being in those spaces, being in those, you know, FV spaces and the beautiful variety that it is, but not being able to do that anymore, you know. And at the same time also teachers that were spending a lot of their time and energy supporting, you know, their learners during such a challenging time. So it was all about that well-being, it was about that isolation, but it was also about, I saw this potential to develop this module of online informal professional learning and it'd be seen with the same kudos as CPD. You know, and how important it was to have those kind of informal spaces that that coffee and chat that coffee and chat is actually really important. It doesn't need to be for an entire hour, of course, but it's so, so important. And that is because it is allowing peers to just work together, to share, to entrust this kind of sense of belonging within the sector, within your peers, within your department, organization, and just in general with us all together. All the way through this, you'll see some lovely little quotes that have popped in there as well from some of the kitchen practitioners, this one particular. She said she loved being part of a team, a real community and coming together every couple of weeks to, you know, catch up and share ideas. And, you know, you wouldn't, if that space wasn't available, then they wouldn't necessarily do that and be working in their own ideas. So just being able to come together, share ideas, share things that have gone wrong as well. That's how it's important. So how did I do this? How did I go about it? What was my action in this action research? Well, my first was doing a little bit of background research, and that was attending, as many of us did during that time, a massive variety of online CPD sessions from quite passive and didactic to all the way to holistic. So, and by doing that, I was really reflecting on, I just noticed a huge, huge difference, massive cavernous difference between all these different online training events and courses and webinars. And, yeah, so I reflected on all of them and kind of thought about which ones were I most engaged in, which ones were I most productive in. And I found that actually the ones I was most productive in were the ones that where I really felt like I'd been nurtured in that community, that learning space. The ones where, you know, even if we're only together for two hours, they'd really taken the trainers had really taken the time to allow us to kind of like get to know each other and share, even if it's only a few minutes. So there was a few different things that you can see here listed that really, really stuck out to me. And these are the things that really stuck out amongst all the different ones that I looked at. But three things involved with the things that I just set the approaches that I decided, particularly to explore and experiment with. One was a well-being check-in. So having some time at the beginning of the session is dedicated to asking people how they are. And I don't just mean, how are you doing? Yeah, I'm all right. That's two seconds. I don't mean that. I mean, a really authentic time where people can just stop, think for themselves and consider how they're doing right there and then it can be right there at that very moment. It can be that day. It can be that week. How are they doing? And being asked that question when they might not have been asked that question that week or they might have been asked it, but not given real people haven't listened to their answer. So I gave the spaces that I would then facilitated. The first 15, 20 minutes, a big chunk of it would be that well-being check-in. Next was thinking environment rounds. Really, really inspired by the thinking environment practices. I won't go into that now because I don't have enough time. But if you're interested in thinking environments, then please have a little look at Nancy Klein, her website Time to Think. And also, if you know of Joy Effie, check Joy Effie out on Twitter, hashtag Joy Effie. All their events are done in thinking environment spaces. And the last one is digital samples.  So, you know, not just being told, hey, mentor me is a really good idea. And, you know, you get to experience it and you use it yourself. It was actually a space in breakout rooms to go and make one yourself to go and then practice sharing screen and sharing it and seeing how it works.  That's what those digital samples allowed you to do. So then what happened after that initial exploration, that's when the action really kicked in. And that was through trials of activities that they were based on both pedagogical and paragogical approaches. And by that, I mean this working together at peer-to-peer community focus space, which encourage practitioners to try out new ideas with one another. So I'm imagining that island again, that setting, that lovely big kitchen really working together whilst nurturing a feeling of belonging within the group. So no one's sitting in the other room. Everyone's together really working together, you know. So those trials, the main trials were carried out over two terms and each term was stimulated by some kind of intervention of conversation stimulus and that was on Mentimeter or Jamboard. And the answers to those activities informed the way in which I then carried out the action research. So the way that I reflect on it, reflected on it, changed it, adapted it, swapped and changed different ingredients and changed how I cooked the ingredients, you know, that kind of thing. So then I could find the most effective recipe for each kitchen. A practitioner from Kitchen 3 here at the bottom mentions the experienced resource that can be plugged into an experienced resource. And that really, really like, really makes stands out to me because I mentioned above about it being a peer-to-peer community and that's what that experienced resource is. It's not one person at the front of the room. It's that it's everyone. It's that it's everyone coming together and it's that whole community. That's what that experienced resource is. It's everyone's experiences coming together. So what were my findings? Well, I found that practitioners appreciated that time and space to come together and connect. I found that they experiencing those digital pedagogies in an authentic manner helped improve their digital confidence and confidence. Trainers felt an increased sense of belonging with their peers with regular staff rooms. They're not just one offs, but that regularity with a familiar structure they could expect and rely on. That doesn't mean a full agenda, by the way, but some kind of structure that they knew was coming. They knew they were going to be asked how are you, for example. That leads me to that question being so important, allowing people to just kind of like stop and park their feelings before then kind of like going on to the session. It led to more productive sessions. Thinking environment allowed people to just everyone had a voice. Everyone had an opportunity of voice without status being in there, you know, and it got rid of that. It got rid of the hierarchy within the space. And their practitioners from all the kitchens felt isolated in their work environments, but having this informal professional learning space did have a positive impact on their well-being. Lastly, I found that actually I went into this thinking there was going to be one recipe, and there wasn't one recipe at the end. I went into this thinking there was going to be one recipe for each of the different kitchens, but there was actually one recipe in the end that was formed that worked for all the different kitchens, but obviously with a few little ingredients as substitutes. Yeah, and actually since the project, it's had a profound impact on the way we facilitate all of our informal online spaces and nurture sector communities. You can see a few of the new kitchens there. Reading Circle and FE Research Circle is open to everybody, by the way. So, you know, if you want to get in on that, have a little look at those hashtags. The last thing there at the bottom and the sides, that's a dissemination. If you would like to have a little look at the reflective journals that I wrote throughout the action part of my research, those two terms, including all of the Mentimeter and Jamboards and all those stimulus prompts, have a little look at those two Wakelet collections at the bottom there. Now, just bringing it all back together again. I know there was a lot there. So, if you want to have a little closer look at this, then do let me know. Email me or find me on Twitter at Chloe Fibonacci. Ask me any further questions if you have any. There's loads of research that's been going on similar to this that really kind of says it's talking about professional learning, how important it is, it really, really is. And you know what? To finish off, I'm going to say, if you've not been asked this today, I want to ask you, how are you? Thanks for listening.


The real power of implicit differentiation comes with related rates problems. Now in order to work with related rates problems, it's helpful to distinguish between variables and constants. A constant never changes its value in the story of a problem. On the other hand, a variable will change during the story. And as a general rule, we want to make sure that we keep our variables as variables until we're ready to answer the question. And so, in general, we'll proceed as follows. First, we'll write down any relationship at all between some or all of the variables. And then, we'll identify the appropriate differential operator, the derivative with respect to something. This tends to be the hardest part of the problem. But once we have it, we can use implicit differentiation to find the required rate of change. For example, here's a standard related rates problems. We have a spherical balloon being inflated at a certain rate. And we want to find how rapidly the balloon's radius is increasing after five minutes. And so, first, we want to identify the variables and constants. Because we're being inflated, it seems that the volume is changing. And because we're interested in the rate of change of the radius, it seems that the radius is also increasing. So, radius and volume are both variables, and we'd like to write down a relationship between the two of them. And so, one possible relationship is that the volume is four thirds pi times the radius cubed. Next, we want to identify the differential operator. We know we want to look at the derivative because the question asks us how rapidly something is going on. To decide on the differential operator, we can use the units given in the problem. And we might start by noting that we're given this quantity of 100 pi cubic feet per minute. And that sounds like a rate of change of volume measured in cubic feet with respect to time measured in minutes. So, it appears we're looking for a rate of change of radius with respect to time. So, the differential operator is the derivative with respect to time. So, we have our relationship. Let's differentiate with respect to time. And now we have our relationship between the rate of change of volume with respect to time and our rate of change of radius with respect to time. So, how do we find how rapidly the balloon's radius is increasing? And so, we want to find dr dt, so we need to know dv dt and r. Again, to find these values, we can look at the units. dv dt is something that should be measured in cubic feet per minute. So, we look around and see that we have a quantity in cubic feet per minute. This must be dv dt. And so, dv dt is 100. We also need r. r is a quantity in feet. Since it's not given to us, we should set up and solve an equation to find it. To find r, we note that we're interested in finding how rapidly the balloon's radius is increasing after five minutes. And so, we need to ask ourselves, self, what can we do with this information? We do have a relationship between v and r, so if we know v, we can find r. And if we know that after five minutes, the volume will be 5 times 100 pi 500 pi cubic feet. So, if we substitute that into our equation, we can solve for r. So, r is 7.2112, which should be in feet. And now we can substitute and find dr dt. And now we can substitute our value for r into our equation and solve for dr dt. And we get our final value 0.4808 feet per minute. Or consider this problem. Here we have two cars approaching an intersection. One car is moving at 20 meters per second southbound, and the other at 15 meters per second eastbound. And we'd like to know how rapidly the cars are approaching each other when they are both 50 meters from the intersection. So to begin with, we have at least three variables. First, the distance from the intersection of the eastbound car, which we'll call x. Next, the distance from the intersection of the southbound car, which we'll call y. And finally, the distance between the cars, which we'll call s. So let x be the distance from the intersection of the eastbound car, y the distance from the intersection of the southbound car, and s the distance between the cars. We'd like to express a relationship between the variables. And if we look at our picture, it seems that x, y, and s form two sides and a hypotenuse of a right triangle. And so we can use the Pythagorean relationship between them. Now let's try and determine our differential operator. Now we do want to find the rate of change of the distance between the cars. So maybe we're looking for ds dx or ds dy. Well, let's look at the units. If we find ds dx or ds dy, the units will be meters per meter. And these will cancel and leave us with a pure number. This cannot answer a how rapidly question. What else can we do? Since we also have a rate of change of meters per second, we might be looking at the derivative with respect to time. And if we find ds dt, the units will be meters per second. And this could answer a how rapidly question. So a differential operator should be the derivative with respect to time. So differentiating. In order to find ds dt, we need to know s, x, y, dx dt, and dy dt. So we know we're looking at a time when both cars are 50 meters from the intersection. And so we know x and y are both equal to 50. We also know one car is moving southbound at 20 meters per second and the other eastbound at 15 meters per second. Since x was the distance from the intersection of the eastbound car, then we know that dx dt is minus 15 because the eastbound car is getting closer to the intersection. Similarly, since y is the distance of the southbound car from the intersection and that distance is decreasing at 20 meters per second, then dy dt is minus 20. But we don't have s, so we can't solve the problem. Or can we? We know x, y, and we do have a relationship with s, so we can substitute these in and solve for s. And now we can substitute these in to find the value of ds dt. So we'll start with our relationship between the rates and substitute in our known values. Then we can solve for ds dt. And so we find ds dt is about negative 24.7487 meters per second.


Hi, I'm Dr. Trish Morton. I'm the Dean of the College of Nursing at the University of Utah. In 2014, I completed a three-year program as a Robert Wood Johnson Executive Nurse Fellow. As part of the fellowship program, each fellow was asked to complete an individual project. My project was to create an online course in publishing that would be available to anyone in academia or in the service world. I'm really passionate about publishing and helping others to learn the publishing process. So I hope you'll find this online course of help and of value to you. I've done a lot of publishing in my career, so I feel like I have a lot of good tips to offer you. I've published three textbooks. One textbook I did two editions. The other textbook I completed five editions. I've also published over 50 journal articles and many book chapters. I've served on the editorial board of eight journals, and for seven years I served as the editor of the American Association of Critical Care Nurses Journal called AACN Clinical Issues. Currently, I'm the editor of the journal sponsored by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing called the Journal of Professional Nursing. The purpose of this course is to help the learner understand how to publish. First, we'll talk about how to overcome your fears and anxieties that you may have as you face the potential of publishing your idea or your manuscript in a professional journal. We'll talk about the publishing process, how it's done, all the steps of a publishing process. In the course, we'll talk about how to plan your manuscript and how to write your manuscript. And finally, we'll cover how to deal with comments from the reviewers and the editors. As you work through this course, it may be very helpful to you if you can find a mentor or an experienced author to work with. They'll be able to guide you through the process of writing, react to some of your work and give you comments and helpful tips. Another aspect of the course is a reflection's assignments. With some of the modules in the course, you'll be asked to work on your reflection assignments, writing down thoughts or ideas you have as you go through the writing and process of preparing your manuscript. Another aspect of the course is an activity log. In that activity log, you'll be doing some work associated with each module. And if you do step-by-step in your activity log, it will really help you tackle the writing process in a clear, concise, and step-wise fashion. The course is organized into modules. And if you go through each module in a slow and systematic way, completing both the reflection activities and the activity log, it will help you do a step-by-step process to be successful in preparing your manuscript. There are a series of modules, do one at a time in the sequence as suggested in the course. There's also an optional module that can teach you how to be a good reviewer for a manuscript if you ever decide or are asked to be a reviewer for a professional journal. I hope this additional extra module will be of assistance to you.


Hello students. Welcome to the session. Let us discuss the following question. A and F are points on the sides PQ and PR respectively of a triangle PQR. For each of the following cases, state weather EF is parallel to QR. For the second part, PE is equal to 4 cm, QE is equal to 4.5 cm, EF is equal to 8 cm and RF is equal to 9 cm. First of all, let us understand the converse of basic proportionality theorem. It states that if a line divides two sides of a triangle in the same ratio, then that line is parallel to the third side of the triangle. That is, if in triangle we are given AD upon DB is equal to AE upon EC. Then by converse of basic proportionality theorem, we get DE is parallel to BC. This is the key idea to solve the given question. Let us now start the solution. Now, in triangle PQR, E and F are the points on PQ and PR. We have to find if EF is parallel to QR. So, first of all, we will find out the ratio PE upon ECU. So, we can write PE upon ECU is equal to 4 upon 4.5, which is equal to 8 upon 9. So, we get PE upon ECU is equal to 8 upon 9. Now, we will find the ratio PF upon FR. So, we can write PF upon FR equal to PF is equal to 8 centimeter and RF is equal to 9 centimeter. So, we will write 8 upon 9. Clearly, we can see PE upon ECU is equal to PF upon FR. F is parallel to QR. Since EF is dividing PQ and PR in the same ratio. So, by converse of basic proportionality theorem, we get EF is parallel to QR. So, we can write how our required answer is yes. EF is parallel to QR. This completes the session. Hope you understood the session. Take care and goodbye.