Mall Of America Becomes Home To 72,000 Ladybugs

Clothes, shoes and now ladybugs can be found in abundance at the Mall of America located in Bloomington, Minn.

Large enough to hold seven Yankee Stadiums, the structure is home to more than 30,000 live plants, including nearly 400 trees, according to Discovery News, all of which work together to act as natural air purifiers for the building.

However, while the plants may be safe from predators like deer, the small insects called aphids that feed on plants have enjoyed a cushy, predator-less life in the mall’s flora – until now.

Mall managers released some 72,000 ladybugs this week in an effort to avoid commercial pesticides and not for the first time, according to the International Business Times.

“Ladybugs are what I like to call, sort of a biological defense system,” Lydell Newby, the mall’s senior manager of environmental services, told the local news station KARE 11.

Other environmental-friendly initiatives the mall has undertaken include converting its restaurants’ fryer fat into 600,000 pounds of bio-diesel fuel for the mall’s security vehicles as well as completely circumventing a central heating system through the harnessing of passive solar heat from nearly 1.2 miles of skylights.

Ladybug population distribution throughout North America has undergone rapid change throughout the last 20 years, according to the Lost Ladybug Project, which relies on crowdsourcing from more than 3,000 individuals throughout the nation as well as Canada, Puerto Rico and Mexico to identify ladybug types and locations.

The organization works not only to identify ladybug species and track their distribution, but to help form colonies of species that have seem to have become “suddenly rare,” including the Coccinella novemnotata, the Adalia bipunctata and the Coccinella trifasciata among others.

In addition, the group aims to better understand ladybug pathogens, such as microspordia, which it believes may contribute to the decline of native species.

To see a short video of the ladybug release, click here.