In response to our own findings on the impact of agricultural practices on beneficial insects, their overall decline, and the lack of public appreciation of the importance of these we expanded our Lost Ladybug Project in 2008. In May 2008 the Lost Ladybug Project was awarded almost two million dollars from the National Science Foundation to expand this program in New York and then extend it to a national level. Our goals are to educate youth regarding the importance of biodiversity and conservation and to recruit them to participate in our “citizen science” program to determine the current status of native and exotic ladybugs in the US. Participants can make use of our educational materials and activities and then collect ladybugs in a defined area, take pictures of the ladybugs with digital cameras, and upload the pictures using a web-based interface for species identification and inclusion in a nationwide database. As “citizen scientists”, children and adults will be part of a real scientific experiment and contribute valuable information on these important beneficial insects. We have educated over 25,000 visitors to our webpage so far. In addition to numerous live presentations the project was featured on National Public Radio and an AP article that was carried in hundreds of newspapers around the country. We have so far received over 800 identifiable ladybug images including multiple images of the three rarest native species. This represents more records of those rare species then has been reported in refereed journals for over 20 years. In addition I organized the second annual Ladybug Blitz. Participants from as far as 50 miles away joined in the second annual ladybug blitz to collect ladybugs and learn about their diversity and importance to the local ecology can economy.