Woodland Park Zoo celebrated National Pollinator Week on Wednesday with Gov. Jay Inslee, state Sen. Marko Liias and their family members.
The zoo highlighted its butterfly garden, which features hundreds of free-flying North American butterflies, and its pollinator patio, where guests can learn how to help pollinators at home.
Inslee has signed several Washington bills benefiting pollinators into law, aimed at increasing habitat, decreasing pesticide use and establishing education resources. On Wednesday, he said the state is working to save “the basis of our entire food chain.”
“We need to understand that there is really a crisis of the insect world,” Inslee said, “and there is a huge threat to a part of the animal kingdom that we depend on for food.”
One out of every three bites of food you eat depends on the work of pollinators, which help plants reproduce, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Pollinators are more than just bumblebees and butterflies. An assortment of other bee species, flies, wasps, beetles, bats, moths, birds and other insects all play an important role in pollinating crops like apples, tomatoes, cocoa and coffee.
Liias — who is a self-proclaimed pollinator champion — recently sponsored Senate Bill 5972 to restrict neonicotinoid pesticides, which Inslee singed into law in March.
Neonicotinoids are a particularly harmful class of pesticides that kill indiscriminately, exterminating not only pests but also countless pollinators. They’re absorbed into plants and can be found in their pollen and nectar, which is deadly for the pollinators that feed on them. These chemicals can even wash into drainage systems and end up in rivers, oceans and wetlands, impacting ecosystems beyond their intended targets.
“Our whole ecosystem depends — from the bottom up — on having healthy systems,” Liias, D-Edmonds, said Wednesday.
The bill will take these pesticides off Washington shelves and move them into the hands of only certified applicators, ending domestic outdoor use by 2025.
Aside from limiting pesticide use, going forward, increasing habitat is “what we have to keep working on,” Liias said. “What these pollinators need is habitat — they need flowers, they need gardens, they need places to land and to pollinate.”
But the “big granddaddy of threats” to pollinators across the globe, Inslee said, is climate change.
“The fact that Washington has a plan to fight climate change is the most important thing we can do,” he added.
As the zoo celebrates pollinators this week, entomologist and Woodland Park Zoo curator Erin Sullivan urges people at home to think of pollinators.
If you have the space, planting flowers can help pollinators by providing food and habitat. Increase awareness of the pollinator plight by talking to your neighbors, and if you’re buying plants from a nursery, make sure they haven’t been treated with pesticides, she said.
“Everyone can do something.”
