Where Have The Insects Gone?? With Dr. Jessica Ware

Introduction to insect importance

0:00Why do so many people seem to have a visceral freakout to insects? Is this evolutionary or learned? It's your parents, man. If you, like, this one time that you could blame your mom, it's now. Do-do-do, science chats with our favourite nerds. Yay!

0:23Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and this is Science Versus. A lot of us don't think too much about insects, right, unless we're chewing them away or squashing them before they bite us. But insects are actually more fabulous and important than you ever knew. They're like these aliens on Earth, and they survived where the dinosaurs couldn't. It is not an exaggeration to say that life as we know it would not be the same without insects. And yet, recently, scientists have been seeing this dramatic and mysterious drop in the number of insects flying around.

1:02Bugs, beetles, butterflies. It's as if they're disappearing before our eyes. So today on the show, what's going on here? To find out, we're not going to wing this episode. We are going to get all the buzz about the insects from entomologist Dr. Jessica Ware. Jessica is a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, where she serves as the chair of the Division of Invertebrate Zoology. She also was given a presidential award from the U.S. government for her work on insect evolution,

1:36and she's the co-founder of Entomologists of Colour. So today, we're going to chat all about what is going on with the insects, and I swear you are going to feel differently about insects by the end of this episode. We're also going to find out how to milk a cockroach. Don't fly away. My chat with Dr. Jessica Ware is coming up just after the break.

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Arctic fieldwork and ancient dragonflies

2:37Welcome back. Today, we're talking all about insects and the insect apocalypse with Dr. Jessica Ware. Hey, Jessica. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. This is going to be so much fun. All insects all the time. Right? Is that your life? Yeah. And you have, as an entomologist, you have gone outside to some really exciting places. You're not just going to the backyard. Tell me about some of your adventures.

3:08You've been to the Arctic, drilling holes. You've gone to some dangerous places. The Arctic is, like, it's really fun, and in the summer, it's mosquito season, so you're just, if there's so many mosquitoes, that if you open your mouth just to eat, like, a bite of your sandwich, you breathe in mosquitoes. If you put your hand out of the glove, then your hand looks like it's a baseball mitt, but it's all just brown mosquitoes. Like, it's really very, very bitey. Oh, gosh. And then in the winter...

3:39Do they bite your throat if they get in there? And not to gross you out, but I had got eyeball bites. Like, I had mosquitoes that were biting the white parts of my eyeballs. The last time I was there, I had, like, horrible mosquito bites all over my eyeball, the white part of my eyeball. And so your specialty, your area of expertise is dragonflies and damselflies. Yeah. Tell me more about the dragonflies of 300 million years ago. I mean, this is even way before T-Rex.

4:10What would they have been, like, flying around? So they're kind of, like, pre-dragonflies or proto-dragonflies, and they flew in the Carboniferous period, so 350 million years ago. And they have, like, these very dramatic names because they were huge. So meganerity is this one particular family, mega. And each wing was 37 centimeters. So you're looking at, like, a two-foot wingspan. And their, I mean, their abdomens were, like, proportionally also pretty big. Yes. And they had big honking eyes.

4:41And they had a beak, which, like, modern dragonflies don't have a beak. But they had kind of, like, a little bit of a beak in the front of their face, which is also kind of cool. Wow. And they were flying through, like, very oxygen-dense air that was very viscous. So they probably were terrible at it, we think. They probably had very stiff wings. And they were just kind of, like, paddling through this, like, very viscous air. Oh. So clumsily, you know. And then they probably only had each other to eat because there was nothing else in the sky.

5:13Because I think in the beginning there was nothing up there, right? That's so crazy to think about. No birds, no bats, no pterosaurs. And the first thing is something that looks like a, like, a griffin fly, right? But then slowly, like, the air column starts filling up with other insects. And you kind of have to get pretty good at flying or that's it. Like, you're out. And then, so, fast forward to the dragonflies that we have today.

Dragonfly reproduction and golden penises

5:39One of the things you study is dragonfly reproduction. So what fascinates you about how dragonflies get it on? Well, they do, they have, like, very dramatic and complicated sex lives. So there's really, like, no shortage, I would say.

5:58So, well, how many penises do you think a dragonfly has? Not a question. That's a question I thought I'd be asked this morning. I'm going to go with two. Two. Two. That's a very, like, scholarly, wonderful answer. But there's more. There's more. Okay, what happens? But there's more. Yeah. Because the male secondary penis, it does that job. Like, it gives her the sperm. Yeah. But before he does that, because females can store sperm in her body, males kind of want

6:31to ensure paternity. So they don't really want her to just use any sperm to fertilize her eggs. Because they want, the male wants a female to use his sperm. So he actually has modified, they have, like, these modified secondary penises that are, like, little scoops or, like, ragged claws. Oh. Oh. And they, like, scrape out the previous male's sperm. And then, only then, will they give her the sperm. And they... Wow, what a, what a contraption he's got there.

7:02This is my magic box of curiosity here. What have you got? What have you got? So, in the glamorous life that we lead as curators at the American Museum of Natural History, we spend some of our time dissecting, with very tiny instruments, out the penises of dragonflies. And we want to look at them, but they're very, very small. And I've dissected hundreds of penises in my lifetime, and they're very, very small. And I want to use a special microscope to be able to look at them.

7:36It's a scanning electron microscope, and so it uses electrons. So, in order for us to use it, we actually have to coat the penises in metal. But because we're at the museum, we actually coat them in... No, just joking. Everybody does this. We coat them with gold. With gold palladium. It's not just us. Golden dragonflies like penises. Yeah, these are dragonfly penises that have been coated in gold palladium. And so, when I put this into an electron beam, the electrons kind of bounce off of the golden penises.

8:08And then that silhouette is actually what creates the image. And so, that way I can see all of the little features. Because sometimes, like I told you, it's like a scoop that's scooping out the previous male sperm. Yeah, can you see the scoop? But some, you can see the scoop. There's lots of different pinecone, bottle brush shape. There's lots of different shapes. Wow. You know how they say there's so many ways to skin a cat? There's so many ways to scoop out sperm from a dragonfly. They say that. I've heard that. You know, I've heard that. That's what they say. Now, you have a tattoo of a damselfly.

8:40Is that correct? Yeah. I do. Yeah. It must be scientifically accurate, I presume. The thing that gets people is that they always put big antennae on. And dragonflies and damselflies all have antennae that you can't see. And so if you ever see someone that has a dragonfly tattoo and it's got big antennae, what they actually have is an antlion, which is a totally different order. That's Neuroptera. Oh, wow. So people are like, oh, you study dragonflies? Look at my cool tattoo. And I don't say anything.

9:12I'm like, that's a very cool tattoo. But in my mind, I know that they really have like a lace ring or something, right? Oh, man. It happens all the time. This is sad.

The alarm of insect decline

9:24So, on to sadder things. I don't want to be too much of a buzzkill, but I want to chat about the insect apocalypse as it's sometimes being known. So entomologists around the world, including yourself, have been talking about this sort of alarming insect declines that we're seeing. How bad is this? It's really bad. Okay. So maybe 10 years ago now, there was a study that was published that had taken 30 years of data where they had kind of weighed the total mass of insects in a particular area in Europe.

10:02And then they looked at the total weight, like the mass of the insects that they had collected in these different time points, and it had decreased by 70%. And so that was like a red flag. But many of us, myself included, said, well, you could have like a very heavy beetle and a very light mosquito. What if it's just the composition has changed? And so you just have a lot of very light insects. And so a lot of people had similar criticisms. It was a paper that came out with long-term data from the Caribbean, and it was also this biomass data.

10:36But what scientists do, we love to collect data. So since those papers came out, basically everybody has been out collecting data around the world. And as we go from north to south, east to west, as we look from the base of the insect tree all the way to the tip of the insect tree, time after time what we're seeing is that insects are declining at a rate that is alarming. It's a rate that's faster than we've ever seen before, and it is impacting all of the life that depends upon insects, right? So there's a lot of animals that rely on insects for a primary source of food, things that we might love, like birds, mammals, humans.

11:15You know, we need insects to pollinate a lot of the crops that, you know, are food that we rely on for nutrition. They also are regulators in the environment. They, you know, affect soil. They affect freshwater. You know, they affect plants. They affect fish. There's a lot of animals that are part of this really, and plants that are part of this big web. And insects are at the center of it. Insects have been around a really long time. So we think that there's been about 400 million years of evolution.

11:45So a lot of animals that came later, mammals are very young compared to this story, right? Birds are actually very young compared to the story. They've only ever existed with insects there. We are incredibly young in this story. We are just a tiny blip in the story. There's been no part of our existence from our earliest hominid ancestors when there weren't already insects on the scene. So all of the environments that you know, every single environment that you know is shaped by insects. And so if we lose them, then all of the environments that you know will be different.

12:21And many of us would say would be much worse. And some people predict, like there's a colleague of mine, Doug Tallamy, who says in the absence of insects, humans wouldn't last more than three months. So, wow. And why is that? Is it, it's the, it's the pollination? Is that the most immediate thing? Because I guess people most associate bees with pollinators. But what are the other insects that help out with that? I mean, for pollinators, there's lots of, I mean, butterflies are really big, important pollinators. The lowly mosquito, male mosquitoes are pollinators.

12:52There are some cockroaches that are pollinators. There's some true bugs that are pollinators that, you know, are walking kind of in and amongst pollinators. Even mantises can accidentally kind of move pollen around. So there's lots of animals that do that job. But, I mean, when we think about soil aeration that we need so that we can actually grow the crops that we want to grow, insects are doing that. And we, the reason why we don't, you know, trip over every loved one that ever died or every pet that we ever lost is because insects are decomposing those things, right? So they do all these kind of invisible tasks that we don't even realize.

13:25Probably a big part of your morning already has been shaped already, you know, by some insect jobs that were done behind the scenes. Wow. And so in their absence, we also lose the animals that we rely on for food or for peace of mind and life. It's like, I don't want to live in a birdless world. I don't really want to live in a mammal-less world. I don't really want to live in a reptile-free world. I don't want to live in a fish-free world. But that's what would happen. Of course, we want to try and protect food security.

13:55There are pest insects that we want to try and, you know, mitigate the risks of, like locust outbreaks. We want to mitigate the risks of vector-borne illnesses. There's lots of insects that are doing great with disturbed climate and climate change. But I think you can talk about both of those things. You can talk about still needing to protect food security and protect human health, but also deal with the staggering reality, right, that life as we know it ceases to exist. And we probably will cease to exist if we don't do something soon.

14:26I think a lot of people might have noticed this in their own lives around insect decline because it's funny. They're just there. We often don't think about insects. But then the ones we love, fireflies, for example, when I was living in New York, a lot of people said – I mean, I almost think, although this is entirely anecdotal, within the eight years I was living in New York, it felt like the first year I was there, there were more fireflies than at the end. But then also, people might remember driving on country roads and seeing, particularly on trips with your family, and seeing insects splattered across the windshield.

15:09And that maybe doesn't happen so much anymore. Yeah. Have you seen this personally in your work as you visit different sites around the world? Absolutely, for sure. In the 90s, we used to go – it was really – an easy way to catch dragonflies as bycatch is in the grill of the front of people's cars. There would be dragonflies. They would get – because you'd be hitting them as you were driving, and you could just go and pick them off of the grill. We can't do that. Sometimes in the Arctic – when we were in Alaska the last time, then I actually saw some – this one genus, Ashna, that were in the grills of people's cars.

15:43So I was like, do you mind if I look through your car grill? But I would say it's very uncommon that we would see that, and certainly I don't see that driving around the Tri-State area now. And my son is a new driver. He's 17. And there was kind of a big firefly year last year because we had a very kind of wet summer – wet spring. And so they need to have kind of a wet spring in order to be out in big numbers. And he noticed it. We were driving, and he was like, why are there all these insects that were hitting the windshield? I was like, kid, this is what it used to be like.

16:15It actually was always like this, that you had to use the windshield washers to kind of clean your windshield. And in his life, he'd never seen that. Wow. But that's our fault, right? I mean, like, we make bad choices about light, and we make bad choices about things that basically ultimately result in drought. And so it was a good opportunity to talk to him and say, you're missing this big phenomenon that would have all humans up until now got to experience, and you don't get to experience it.

16:46I can feel people listening to that story and then just thinking, oh, okay, well, the fireflies are back now. Maybe we're fine. And there has been some pushback around this idea of an insect apocalypse. There's a Reddit thread called The Insect Apocalypse That Never Was. There's a letter to the editor that some scientists wrote in a paper published about the decline of insects. I just want to read you a quote. You know it's dangerous when a scientist starts a sentence with, we respectfully.

17:17Like, oh, gosh. Yeah. So what's coming next? They said, we respectfully suggest that accounts of the demise of insects may be slightly exaggerated. Bad things are happening, we agree, but this is not the whole story. So what do you make of this? You know, there's a good firefly year, a bad firefly year, the data. Sometimes you can cherry-pick studies to show, oh, look, these insects are doing well. What do you think? I mean, the fact that there was a wet year and the fireflies responded well, I think is a good sign.

17:48It doesn't mean that fireflies are saved. What it means is that if some of the stressors that are causing them to be in low numbers are removed, that they can kind of have a bit of a bounce back. So that actually should make us pause and think, huh, I wonder what would happen if we removed some of these other negative stressors. Maybe there'd be a great bounce back and other insects, too. So I think that's actually like a good thing. It doesn't mean that there's not a problem. It means that look what happens when we, the stressor of drought, look what happens when we remove that.

18:19Then we see a population boon again. And the paper that you're talking about is actually a really interesting and good paper because what they're advocating for is very rigorous statistical methods. But since that paper came out, there's just been even more studies that have been published that are actually using, you know, intellectually rigorous, statistically rigorous methodology that shows that, yes, some pest cockroaches are doing better. Yes, there are some bees species that are doing slightly better.

18:52But if you look at, in the other column, the insects that are doing quite poorly, that number is still alarmingly high and increasing because as you, it seems like as someone studies a new group, they find the same pattern, right? Decrease, decrease, decrease. A study that came out last year looking at North American butterflies showed really dramatic declines of things that we think of in North America as just being commonplace, like the cabbage white butterfly decreasing to the point where humans should be pretty concerned.

19:23This may not be something that your great-grandchildren are going to get to see. I think the more we look, the more we see that there's decline.

Causes of the decline

19:32Let's talk about, so what is causing this decline? What are these stresses? The red thread that ties everything together is us. Yeah, to break it down, I mean, drought is a really big stressor. And drought is ultimately one of the things that happens when there's environmental change, climate change. There's floods, is the other side of the coin. There's floods that are unexpected. There's increased fires. We like to have cars. We like to have green lawns.

20:02And so our burning fossil fuels, nitritification, where we're putting lots of nitrogen into the soil, that has a negative stressor. We change the use of land, you know, something that was a meadow, we turn it into a cow pasture. Something that was a forest, we turn it into a cow pasture. Something that was a wetland gets built in and turned into a cow pasture. So we change habitat quite frequently, and that has a negative impact. Noise pollution, light pollution, actual chemical pollution, things that we're putting into the water, into the soil.

20:34So invasive species, we kind of move animals around all the time with trans-oceanic commerce. And often in invasive species, they don't have their natural enemies. And they can go into really large numbers, and they can out-compete native species. That's a stressor. So it's, my colleague David Wagner calls it death by a thousand cuts. You know, there's not one stressor that you could just be the panacea. You fix that, and insect declines over. There's all of these little pieces that together are just too much. It's funny, pesticides, which are another cut in this, that wasn't one of the first things you mentioned.

21:11But I think if you were to tell people insect decline, bee decline, then just say it's the pesticides for sure.

21:17Yeah, and there's, I mean, it's interesting. That is an interesting topic, because pesticides, when we say that, we mean, it is true that there's certain types of pesticides that seem to have a very negative impact on native bee health. And we know that that is true. But we also know, at the same time, that agriculture is heavily regulated in terms of what pesticides can be used and the amount that can be used. We know that farmers, in general, don't want to spend a bunch of extra money on pesticides if they don't have to.

21:52And I think a bigger issue, to be honest, isn't necessarily the agricultural industry's pesticide use, although that is a huge volume. But it's us. Like, it's the average person, you and I. You and I can put whatever insecticide we want. You and I could go buy insecticide tonight. And we could go put insecticide on whatever we want, whenever we want. I bought some weird stuff on Amazon the other day, because some of my plants were dying. I mean, good luck with that.

22:20Wear gloves and a mask, I would say. But, like, you and I can buy whatever we want, and we put a lot of stuff on. And because we're not regulated, right? I know. Jessica, do you know the insecticides I bought? I think they're banned in Australia, but I could get them online. Because a friend in America who does gardening says, these are the ones you want. Yeah. Lesson learned. But it's, like, a myth that your summer would not have insects in it. Like, for as long as humans have enjoyed summer, we enjoyed it with insects there, right?

22:53Yes. Yeah. And then just tell me, how are the bees doing? Because about 10 years ago, there were big fears about a bee apocalypse and that it was going to cause mass food shortages because the amazing work they do with pollination. What's, what are we, how's that going? Well, the, I mean, the concern that you're talking about was this phenomenon called colony collapse disorder. Yes. And it was actually one particular bee that they were talking about, Apis mellifera, which is a European honeybee, and it is not native to North America.

23:27So it's used all around the world for pollination because it's a domesticated bee. And so that one bee was doing very poorly. The bees have a tough life, right? So Apis mellifera, they are in big, you know, hives. And then those hives are shipped on these big tanks, these big trucks. And so it's kind of a strange and stressful life for them. Plus, they, there was an invasive mite, the varroa mite, that was negatively impacting these colonies. And then also insecticide, you know, residue and buildup, that was negatively impacting them.

24:02The neonicotinoid. Neonicotinoid. And so they were kind of having these massive, you know, people who had hives, they would go out and their entire hive was dead. And that was a collapse. And people were really concerned. And so there was a big investment from, well, around the world, really, to try and do two things. One, figure out the cause of colony collapse disorder so that you could mitigate it. But two, ask the question, why are we talking about Apis mellifera? Aren't there other bees? Turns out, yeah, there's a lot of other bees.

24:32And there's a lot of native bees. And they do this really important job of pollination. And that we should actually have a holistic approach, not just to save this one kind of domesticated, managed thing. We like getting, not worrying about any mammals going extinct and only worrying about a cow, right? About the cow that we like to eat, right? Yeah. No, like you want to actually like holistically try and think about bee health so that native, that's why people plant pollinator gardens. That would became very fashionable to have a pollinator garden. That's not for Apis mellifera. That's for all pollinators that might be in your environment.

25:04By planting native plants and allowing those native pollinators to really thrive, everyone should have a pollinator garden. Everyone should try and think of their yard as an oasis. Yeah. And just as some food for thought, in terms of the lawn, the amount of lawns that we have, there was some NASA researchers back in 2005 estimated that in the US, more than 30 million acres of lawn exists. That includes golf courses. And it means that lawns are the single largest irrigated crop in America in terms of surface area.

25:37So if you can shrink your lawn, you still keep it to play cricket or baseball, whatever you play. But if you can shrink it, add a little bit of pollination in there, try not to kill all the insects. That's a little way that we can help the insects. Is that right? Yeah. Let the edges go wild. Don't mow the edges. That's like a very easy, like if you're not sure how to get into this, that would be a very easy one. You could go wild. You could go like really dramatic and actually plant a pollinator garden.

26:08And I did that. The front of my house used to be, I have a kind of a slope going down towards the road and it used to be grass. It was very hard to mow anyways with a lawnmower on an angle. Terrible, right? No kid wanted to do this chore in my household. But I turned it into a garden and boy, did it look bad for like a really long time. And my neighbors wrote about it on like our little town social media website, like that they were like quite cross that I had, he was like dad for the property. They garden shamed you? What? Yes.

26:38They garden shamed me because it, because it takes a while to get a pollinator garden. You're supposed to have plants of different heights that bloom at different times that are mostly native plants. And there's a lot of beautiful plants at the nurseries by my house that are not native plants and they all bloom at the same time. And that wasn't what I was, I was trying to do it for the, I'm doing it for me. Yeah, not for the neighbors. And my neighbors were like, what is this? Why are you doing this to our neighborhood? But over time, it like, it has grown into its own.

27:09Yes. And it got fuller. And now I actually think it looks, I mean, we haven't been on that website. We haven't been listed on that website in some time. So there you go. And it's like hosting all of these animals that live there, which I really love. That is beautiful. After the break, the bugs that aren't our friends. They're invaders and murderers and cockroaches. But can we make you fall in love with them? Coming up after the break. Welcome back.

Spotted lanternflies and giant northern hornets

27:48Today we're flying through the research on insects with entomologist Dr. Jessica Ware. All right. Now let's jump into invasive bugs. The bad, quote unquote bad bugs. And I want to talk about the spotted lanternflies, which they're actually quite beautiful, I think. Tell me about the spotted lanternfly. So there were some, as I understand it, like landscaping materials that were brought in that had spotted lanternfly on them.

28:19And that's how it was introduced into this area. And, like, I think that's my dream in life is to never be mentioned in a textbook as the person that imported an invasive species. Like, I don't ever want to be that guy that gets mentioned for that forever. The person probably feels terrible because they were just trying to do landscaping. But by the time people actually noticed that spotted lanternfly, these very, very colorful and noticeable, very conspicuous insects, by the time they noticed them, they were already pretty much widespread in this part of Pennsylvania, like near Philadelphia.

28:54I remember going for supper and they were kind of jumping all around on these plants behind us. Like, what is happening? Wow. And what are they doing to the trees? Why are we worried about them? Well, initially, people were pretty concerned because they have, so they have a mouth, they're in the order Hemiptera. And that order of insects, they all have a mouth part, mouth parts that are kind of designed into a sucking pump called a rostrum. So they have a mouth part that has this pump here and then straw, right, stylet.

29:27And they kind of poke that into the plant material and then they drink plant juices. So they have an all-liquid diet, which means that their poop is basically just sugary water, right? Sugar water. We call it honeydew to also sound hip and young, like with our finger on the pulse of tomorrow. That's what we call it. And so the honeydew is very sticky and it can, it just, they're just like raining honeydew as they're going, pooping around in their environment.

29:57And then certain types of mold and fungus can grow on that. So there was this big concern that that sooty kind of mold would have a negative impact on many of these plants that they can consume. Because there's over 70 plants that they can have as a host plant. Their preferred host plant is also an invasive species here. It's tree of heaven, ailanthus. But they also can be on maple and lots of different types of apples and, unfortunately, grapes. So they seem to be doing a lot of damage on grapes.

30:27And so people are concerned because as it moves westward towards our big grape growing region, California, that's a concern. And then tell me about the murder hornets. How are they doing? Because several years ago, I mean, everyone was freaking out about the murder hornets. They, for those who sort of vaguely remember, they were infamous for stinging and then decapitating honeybees. There's a CBS article from several years ago that said they lay waste, the hornets can lay waste to tens of thousands of bees within just a few hours.

31:03When you heard about their arrival into the US, what went through your mind? Um, I guess, well, first of all, we've given them a new name. They have a new, trendy, hip name, the giant northern hornet. Northern hornet. We don't like murder. Giant northern hornet. That's weird. Well, if it's a little stigmatizing to call it the murder hornet. It really should have been bee slaughter, like manslaughter, because surely they don't have intent, I imagine.

31:35Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, they want to kill the bee. They want to eat the bee. Okay. I mean, they're, they want, they're intending to kill the bee and they eat the bee. That's true. That part is real. That part is real. But do we want to, yeah, we don't want to introduce it that way, right? So we, so giant northern hornet, that's their new name. Okay. But no, I was very acutely aware of what was happening because my colleagues at the Smithsonian got a call and he got the call. He got the specimen sent to him and he looked at it and he was like, this is what I think

32:06it is. Uh-oh. And everybody was kind of acted like that. But, but what is so impressive about that story is that humans recognize, like the average person who had this, they were like in a tree, I'm on someone's property, noticed, I don't recognize this. Yeah. I know what's in my backyard. I don't recognize this. Step one, that was a success. Mm-hmm. Call the authorities. Not everybody does that. Some people say, I don't recognize this and they don't do anything about it. Yeah. So that's like more common. But they told somebody about it.

32:37There was somebody that could identify it, my colleague at the Smithsonian, right? Yes. And then everybody in Washington, like people on the West Coast, they really immediately mobilized and they went, they found the location and they actually have a chunk of that tree is on display at the Smithsonian. You can go and see it. Wow. Because it actually had a bunch of individuals in it. The very first giant Northern Hornet. Yeah. Patient zero, right? Patient zero to enter the US.

33:08Wow. Yeah. And if they hadn't caught that, there was a ton of individuals. Mm-hmm. So if they hadn't contained that, hoo boy, right? So they contained it and were able to eradicate it. That's huge. Wow. What did that take? It took like, it took the person, the homeowner saying, hey, I don't recognize this. Yes. Notifying someone in the scientific community, getting the funding, because that was also an important part of the story is that the government supported this action, getting

33:39the funding to immediately mobilize and prevent it from establishing. Like it was a real success story of like human collaboration and like immediate action. If only we could do that on all of the stories, right? I know. Like that's not normally what happens, right? I know. Amazing. Yeah. So in December of 2024, the USDA announced that murder hornets, aka giant northern hornets, giant northern hornets, were eradicated. Were eradicated. That's amazing. And insect, yeah, that's right.

34:10Congratulations, entomologist. You did it.

Cockroach milk and learned aversions

34:13Yeah. We did it. We did it. Now, moving on to other insects that people don't particularly like, cockroaches, famously disliked. I don't think people, people famously love cockroaches. No, just joking. I personally. Can you do some PR for the humble cockroach? So cockroaches, well, first of all, cockroaches, there's a lot of different kinds of cockroaches. And most of them make an egg case called an oothika. And so if you ever had cockroaches, you see these little like things that look almost like a little coffee bean or something.

34:44Those are the egg cases that they've laid around your apartment. That's what you want to hold on to and protect. Just want to cherish it. Yes. Just want to cherish it. And when the babies are in there, they all, when it's time to emerge, they all take a breath at the same time and it pops a little suitcase open and then they spill out and go all around your apartment. It's really like, that's evolution, man, to come up with that. That's a very good strategy. I love that strategy. But then there are some other cockroaches that are what we call ovoviviparis. And then the mom actually makes a milk, a cockroach milk.

35:20So diploptera punctata, which is this little cockroach that I have here, this is one of the ones that makes the cockroach milk. So this mom would have her babies basically emerge from this like embryonic little sack that she holds, that she is nourishing them with this milk. What is the milk? What, if I know anything about insects, it's that they're famously not mammals. What, how are they, how are they making the milk? What is the milk? Do they have teats? They modify the spiracles kind of to secrete the secretion that is the milk.

35:57Um, and, uh, it has like a lot of proteins in it, um, like that we think, I mean, maybe that's the way for the future. Maybe you and I start drinking cockroach milk. Well, a few years ago, some European scientists did try to rebrand cockroach milk as the next superfood. Good on them for giving it a go. What kind of nutrients are you in cockroach milk? It actually has, I mean, some of the nutrition that you can get in cockroach milk is not that

36:27dissimilar from mammal milk. It looks a little bit different. You've got it for us here. So this is some cockroach milk and it's kind of cloudy. I would say it's, it's like a milky white. Yeah. Um, in its, in its color. Um, but you would expect to get the type of high protein nutrition that the embryo would need to be able to develop. Yeah. Wow. What does it taste like? I've never tried it. You've never tried it. Do you want to eat it? No, I've tried a lot. I've tried a lot of insect things. I like to eat insects. Yeah.

36:58But I've never tried cockroach milk. Why not? One day. I don't know. I mean, this seems so precious. This took a lot, a lot of animals to make, I mean, this is like a lot of animals to make this tiny amount of milk. So I kind of feel like it's, it's kind of like, like liquid gold. I feel like we're going to cherish it. So how did they use their, not teats, their sphero, sphero, sphero? The spiracles, yeah. Spiracles. How did, so how did scientists use the spiracles to milk the cockroaches?

37:29Well. Sounds intimate. Well, I think this is going to be the hard part. As we move to having like cockroach milk farms, the hard part is right now the animals usually are sacrificed to get the milk. So I think if you want to make a business doing this, then you don't want to have them be sacrificed. Why do so many people seem to have a visceral freak out to insects? Is this evolutionary or learned?

38:00It's your parents, man. If you, like, this one time that you could blame your mom, it's now, right? Like, that's what the research shows. Yeah. It's a learned behavior. There are people, I have colleagues who did this at Rutgers, they would bring babies in and they would show them a tarantula and let the tarantula walk all over them. But then if their mom was there or a caregiver with whom they spent a lot of time showed an aversion, then the baby would show an aversion. And they've also done this for snakes and for other animals. It's not like you inherently know that you should avoid a cobra.

38:33We know we should avoid a cobra because we've been told many, many times a cobra is not a good thing to get bitten by, right? We know to avoid scorpions. But probably if you saw a scorpion and no one had ever told you, you would think, oh, that's so interesting that it's doing that. I wonder why its tail's like that. What's that little drop of water that's sticking out of the tip of its tail? I wonder what happens if I poke it, right? That's probably what I would do. But I don't do that because I've been told like scorpions are the bad guys, right? So my children, I have two children and my daughter, she grew up with me.

39:04I didn't send her to daycare until she was almost a year old and she was never afraid of insects. And my son started daycare at six weeks old. And so he was around daycare teachers who did not like insects and he grew up afraid of insects. And I'm his mother and I'm not afraid of insects. But just he was around people all day that were like, ooh, squash, ooh, like kind of shrieking when they saw insects. So it's very common that people learn that behavior and it's hard to unlearn it once you already have it.

39:35Wow. So now we're going to move to a little segment where we've invented it mainly for the use of puns. Is it beeswax?

Insect myths and trivia

39:54That's what this segment is called. Is it beeswax? We've put together a bunch of insect myths. So we're going to put a 60 second timer on the clock. Can't feel pressure. Okay, I'm ready. And I'm going to ask Jessica a bunch of potential. Are they myths? Are they not? Is it beeswax? All right, let's put 60 seconds on the clock. Is it beeswax? Begins now. Staying without cockroach friends. Could they survive a nuclear bomb?

40:23Probably not. But they can live for a long time because some of them don't need to poop and they store nitrogen in their body in special cells called mesetocytes. 25% of the protein in our diet is from swallowing spiders that crawl in our mouths at night. True or false? False. But I think it's okay if you eat spiders and you probably should. They're probably great. 10% of the weight of your pillow is house dust mites. True or false? I would say probably true. I would say maybe even more. I don't know.

40:53Really? We have mites that are all over our bodies anyway and you actually have mites that are living in your face right now and you probably inherited them from your mum. Okay. They're in your face right now. Do Egyptian scarabs or any insects eat human flesh or did the mummy lie to us? Egyptian scarabs don't eat human flesh but there are tiny domestics that eat your flesh skins, like little bits of flesh that are all around your apartment right now. They're probably doing it right now. Insects are simple and stupid.

41:23Oh, false. False, false, false. They're smart. Time's up. Can I get an extra 10 seconds? They're very, very smart even though they don't have a brain. Absolutely. Make us fall in love with insects.

41:38Insects have clusters of ganglia but they can do very complex tasks. They can see a lot of colors. Some of them do maternal care. Bees are actually able to play and they play with balls and they rest. And so they do a lot of important things, yes, but they also seem to have a lot of have these characteristics that make us think that they have some social lives that are more complex than we realized. Yeah. That's the inaugural segment of Is It Beeswax? Never mind our beeswax. But this was your beeswax. All of it was your beeswax.

42:09It wasn't your, it was your beeswax. It was my beeswax.

Favorite paper titles and wrap up

42:14To cap us off. Jessica, we have a lightning round of oddball questions. Okay. So we're going to hit that theme song. Oddball questions. All right. What is your favorite title to a paper that you've read about insects?

42:32Favorite title, Death of an Order by Inward, 2007. That was where they sunk termites into cockroaches. And it was a very dramatic title. Because isoptera no longer existed. It was just going to be within blood. Yeah. Death of an Order. That's a good title. If you could only eat one bug for the rest of your life, what would it be? Dragonflies? Because they are high protein and low fat. I'm thinking heart health. Heart health is important, I think, in this story. Thank you so much, Jessica.

43:04This was so much fun. I learned so much. And I do love insects a little bit more. So thank you. Thank you. I hope everybody goes out and appreciates the lowly mosquito. You've got such a heart cell there. We could have picked any other insect, the dragonflies. Even the flies. Yeah. You really, you like a challenge.

43:27That was entomologist, Dr. Jessica Ware. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. We'll be right back.