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

Bugs are disappearing at alarming rates, scientists are telling us. Bees, butterflies, beetles: all of them have been dropping like flies. And scientists say there are a bunch of reasons to care about this — for example, fewer bugs means less pollination, which means less pasta in your pantry. But recently, some have suggested that all these scientists crying out about the insect apocalypse might just be crying wolf. They say that the math isn’t math-ing and that the insects are doing all right. And this has been bugging us! So we called up Dr. Jessica Ware, an entomologist and a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, to find out what’s going on here. And Jessica also specializes in dragonfly lovemaking, so of course, we had to ask about that too. Find our transcript here: https://tinyurl.com/SVInsectApocalypse In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Meet entomologist Dr. Jessica Ware (03:27) Dragonflies: Origins and sex lives (08:55) The insect apocalypse: How bad is it? (19:02) What’s causing the decline in insects (22:24) Bees and pollinator gardens (27:16) Invasive species: Lanternflies and murder hornets (33:46) How to milk a cockroach (39:07) Is it beeswax? This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman and Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, with help from Michelle Dang, Rose Rimler, and Meryl Horn. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Wendy Zukerman is the executive producer. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Video editing and sound by Bobby Lord. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. Thanks to Humdinger Studios in Melbourne, and Wolff Island Studios in New York City. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. Find our transcript here: https://tinyurl.com/SVInsectApocalypse In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Meet Entomologist Dr. Jessica Ware (03:27) Dragonflies: Origins and sex lives (08:55) The Insect Apocalypse: How bad is it? (19:02) What’s causing the decline in insects (22:24) Bees and pollinator gardens (27:16) Invasive species: Lanternflies, murderhornets, (33:46) Cockroaches and cockroach milk (39:07) Is it beeswax? This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman and Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, with help from Michelle Dang, Rose Rimler, and Meryl Horn. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Wendy Zukerman is the executive producer. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Video editing and sound by Bobby Lord. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. Thanks to Humdinger Studios in Melbourne, and Wolff Island Studios in New York City. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Why do so many people seem to have a visceral freak out to insects? Is this evolutionary or learned?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  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 favorite nerds. Yay.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  Hi, I'm Wendy Zukerman, 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. Bugs, beetles, butterflies, it's as if they're disappearing before our eyes.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  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 US government for her work on insect evolution, and she's the co-founder of Entomologists of Color. 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.

• 1:53Speaker 00

  Don't fly away. My chat with Dr. Jessica Ware is coming up just after the break.

• 2:05Speaker 02

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• 4:10Speaker 00

  Welcome back. Today, we're talking all about insects and the insect apocalypse with Dr. Jessica Ware. Hey, Jessica, welcome to the show.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  This is going to be so much fun.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  All insects all the time.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  Agreed. Is that your life?

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  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. You've been to the Arctic drilling holes. You've gone to some dangerous places.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  The Arctic is like, it's really fun. And in the summer, it's mosquito season, so you're just swerved. 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.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  Oh, gosh.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  And then in the winter.

• 5:09Speaker 00

  Do they bite your throat if they get in there?

• 5:12Speaker 01

  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 horrible mosquito bites all over my eyeball, the white part of my eyeball.

• 5:26Speaker 00

  And so your specialty, your area of expertise is dragonflies and damselflies. Tell me more about the dragonflies of 300 million years ago. I mean, this is even way before T-Rex. What would they have been like flying around?

• 5:43Speaker 01

  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 Meganeuridae is this one particular family, Megga. 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.

• 6:09Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  And they had big honking eyes. And 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. 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 clumsily, you know? And then they probably only had each other to eat because there was nothing else in the sky. Because I think at the beginning, there was nothing up there, right?

• 6:46Speaker 00

  That's so crazy to think about.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  No birds, no bats, no pterosaurs. And the first thing is something that looks like a griffon 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.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  And then so, fast forward to the dragonflies that we have today. One of the things you study is dragonfly reproduction. So what fascinates you about how dragonflies get it on?

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Well, they do, they have like very dramatic and complicated sex lives. So there's really like no shortage, I would say.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  So, well, how many penises do you think a dragonfly has?

• 7:33Speaker 00

  Not a question I thought I'd be asked this morning. I'm going to go with two.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Two, two. That's a very like scholarly, wonderful answer, but there's more.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  There's more. Okay, what happens?

• 7:47Speaker 01

  But there's more.

• 7:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Because the male secondary penis, it does that job. Like, it gives her the sperm.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  But before he does that, because females can store sperm in her body, males kind of want to ensure paternity. So they don't really want her to just use any sperm to fertilize her eggs. 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. And they like scrape out the previous male sperm. And then, only then, will they give her the sperm anew.

• 8:28Speaker 00

  Wow, what a, what a contraption he's got there.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  This is my magic box of curiosity here.

• 8:37Speaker 00

  What have you got, what have you got?

• 8:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:56Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  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. It'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.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  Gold and dragonfly penises. Jessica!

• 9:27Speaker 01

  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. And 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. But some, you can see the scoop. There's lots of different pine cone, bottle brush shape. There's lots of different shapes.

• 9:55Speaker 00

  Wow, you know, they say there's so many ways to skin a cat. There's so many ways to scoop out sperm from a dragonfly.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  They say that. I've heard that. You know, I've heard that. That's what they say.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  Now you have a tattoo of a damselfly, is that correct?

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do.

• 10:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, it must be scientifically accurate, I presume.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  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 ant lion, which is a totally different order, that's Neurachera.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  So people are like, oh, you study dragonflies, look at my cool tattoo. And I don't say anything, I'm like, that's a very cool tattoo. But in my mind, I know that they really have like a lacewing or something, right?

• 10:48Speaker 00

  Oh, man.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  It happens all the time.

• 10:51Speaker 00

  This is sad.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  So on to, on to sadder things. Don't want to be too much of a buzzkill, but I want to chat about the insect apocalypse, as it's sometimes been 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?

• 11:17Speaker 01

  It's really bad.

• 11:18Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  So maybe 10 years ago now, there was a, a study that was published that had taken 30 years of data, where they had like kind of weighed the total mass of insects in a particular area in Europe. And then they looked at the total weight, like the, 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. There was a paper that came out with long-term data from the Caribbean,

• 12:04Speaker 01

  and it was also this biomass data. But 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.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  You know, we need insects to pollinate a lot of the crops that, that, you know, the 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, and plants that are part of this big web. And insects are, 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. So 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.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  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. And 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.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  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?

• 14:15Speaker 01

  I mean, for pollinators, there's lots of, I mean, butterflies are really big, important pollinators. The lowly mosquito, male mosquitoes are pollinators. There are some cockroaches that are pollinators. There's some true bugs that are pollinators that, you know, are, are walking kind of in 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. Probably a big part of your morning already has been shaped already, you know,

• 14:59Speaker 01

  by some insect jobs that were done behind the scenes.

• 15:02Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  And so in their, in their absence, we also lose the animals that we rely on for food or for peace of mind and life. 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 the 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. There are pest insects that we want to try and, you know, mitigate the risks of, like locust outbreaks. We want to mitigate the risk 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,

• 15:46Speaker 01

  but also deal with the fact, 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.

• 15:57Speaker 00

  I think a lot of people might have noticed this in their own lives around insect decline. Because it's, 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.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  And that maybe doesn't happen so much anymore.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  Have you seen this personally in your work as you visit different sites around the world?

• 16:50Speaker 01

  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, there's, when we were in Alaska the last time, then I actually saw some, this one genus, Aishna, they were in the grills of people's cars. So 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 a, a kind of a big firefly year last year because we had a very kind of wet summer,

• 17:32Speaker 01

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

• 18:17Speaker 00

  I can feel people listening to that story and then just thinking, oh, okay, well, the fireflies are back now. Maybe we're fine. And, and there have been some, 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..." Like, oh, gosh.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:49Speaker 00

  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?

• 19:12Speaker 01

  I mean, the fact that there was a wet year and the fireflies responded well, I think, is a good sign. It doesn't mean that we, that fireflies are safe. 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 is, makes, 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, 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. Then we see a population boon again. And the paper that you're talking about is actually a really interesting and good paper

• 19:55Speaker 01

  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. But 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.

• 20:39Speaker 01

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

• 21:02Speaker 00

  Let's talk about, so what, what is causing this decline? What are these stressors?

• 21:06Speaker 01

  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, the things that happens in environment, 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. And so our burning fossil fuels, nitratification, 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 filled in and turned into a cow pasture.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  So we, we change habitat quite frequently and that has negative impact. Noise pollution, light pollution, actual chemical pollution, the things that we're putting into the water, into the soil. Invasive species, we kind of move animals around all the time with transoceanic commerce. And often in invasive species, they don't have their natural enemies and they can go into really large numbers and they can outcompete 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, the panacea, you fix that and insect decline's over. There's all of these little pieces that together are just too much.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  It's funny, pesticides, which are another cut in this, that wasn't one of the first things you mentioned. But I think if you were to tell people insect decline, bee decline, and just say, it's the pesticides for sure.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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. And I think a bigger issue, to be honest, isn't necessarily the agricultural industry's pesticide use, although that is a huge volume.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  But it's, it's us, like it's the average person, you and I, right? 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.

• 23:43Speaker 00

  I bought some weird stuff on Amazon the other day because some of my plants were dying.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  I mean, good luck with that. Wear 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 it. And there's, and because we're not regulated, right?

• 24:00Speaker 00

  I know, Jessica, do you, you know, the, 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, this is the ones you want.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:12Speaker 00

  Lesson learned.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  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?

• 24:23Speaker 00

  Yes. And then just, 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 of the amazing work they do with pollination. What's, what are we, how's that going?

• 24:42Speaker 01

  Well, the, I mean, the concern that you're talking about was this phenomenon called colony collapse disorder.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  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. So 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 tank, 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.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  The neonicotinoid.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  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. 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. And 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. It would be like getting, not worrying about any mammals going extinct and only worrying about a cow, right?

• 26:17Speaker 01

  About the cow that we like to eat, right?

• 26:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  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. By 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.

• 26:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it just is some food for thought. In terms of the lawn, the, 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. So if you can shrink your lawn, you still keep it to play, you know, cricket or baseball, whatever you play. But if you can shrink it, add a, 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?

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, like 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. And 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, he was like,

• 28:06Speaker 00

  They garden shamed you?

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Yes, they garden shamed me because it, because it takes a while to get a pollinator garden. You're supposed to have, plants have 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 that 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 the bees.

• 28:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, not for the neighbors.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 28:39Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  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.

• 29:14Speaker 04

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing and wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash apple watch series 12.

• 29:44Speaker 05

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way. Because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai/spotify.

• 30:12Speaker 00

  Welcome back. Today, 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.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  Tell me about the spotted lanternfly.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  So there were some, as I understand it, like landscaping materials that were brought in that had spotted lanternfly on them. And that's how it was introduced into this area. And like, I think that's our, 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, right? Like, the person probably feels terrible because they were just trying to do landscaping. But so by the time people actually noticed that spotted lanternfly, these very colorful, like, 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.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  I remember going for supper and they were kind of jumping all around on these plants behind us. Like, what is happening?

• 31:25Speaker 00

  Wow. And what are they doing to the trees? Why, why are we worried about them?

• 31:31Speaker 01

  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? Style it. And 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.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  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. And then this, 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, Ilanthus. But they also can be on maple and lots of different types of, on apples and unfortunately, grapes. So they seem to be doing a lot of damage on grapes. And so people are concerned because as it moves westward towards our big grape growing

• 32:58Speaker 01

  region, California, that's a concern.

• 33:00Speaker 00

  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. When you heard about their arrival into the US, what went through your mind?

• 33:37Speaker 01

  I guess, well, first of all, we've given them a new name. They have a new trendy hip name, the giant northern hornet.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  Northern hornet. We don't like murder.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  Giant northern hornet.

• 33:47Speaker 00

  That's weird.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Well, if it's a little stigmatizing, to call them, a little stigmatizing to call them murder hornet.

• 33:54Speaker 00

  It really should have been bee slaughter, like manslaughter, because then, surely they don't have intent, I imagine.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, they want to kill the bee. They want to eat the bee.

• 34:04Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  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.

• 34:15Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  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 it is. Uh-oh. And everybody was kind of acted like that. 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 on someone's property, noticed, I don't recognize this.

• 34:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  I know what's in my backyard, I don't recognize this. Step one, that was a success. Call the authorities. Not everybody does that. Some people say, I don't, I don't recognize this and they don't do anything about it. So that's like more common, but they told somebody about it. There was somebody that could identify it, my colleague at the Smithsonian, right? 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.

• 35:23Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Because it actually had a bunch of individuals in it.

• 35:26Speaker 00

  The very first giant northern hornet.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Patient zero.

• 35:32Speaker 00

  Patient zero to enter the US. Wow.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. And if they hadn't caught that, there was a ton of individuals. So if, if, if they hadn't contained that, whoo boy, right? So they contained it and were able to eradicate it. That's huge.

• 35:49Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  What did that take? It took like, it took the person, the homeowner saying, hey, I don't recognize this.

• 35:54Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Notifying someone and the scientific community, getting the funding, because that was also an important part of the story, is that the government supported this action, getting the 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? Like, that's not normally what happens, right?

• 36:20Speaker 00

  I know. Amazing. Yeah, so in December of 2024, the USDA announced that murder hornets, AKA giant northern hornets.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  Giant northern hornet.

• 36:29Speaker 00

  Were eradicated. Were eradicated.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:33Speaker 00

  That's amazing. An insect, congratulations, entomologist, you did it.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, we did it. We did it.

• 36:40Speaker 00

  Now, moving on to other insects that people don't particularly like, cockroaches, famously disliked.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  I don't think people, people famously love cockroaches. No, just joking. I personally.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  Can you do some PR for the humble cockroach?

• 36:55Speaker 01

  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 uthica. And so if you ever had cockroaches, you see these little like, things that look almost like a little coffee bean or something, those are the egg cases that they've laid around your apartment.

• 37:13Speaker 00

  That's what you want to hold on to and protect.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  Just want to cherish it.

• 37:16Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  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 ovo viviparis. And then the, the mom actually makes a milk, a cockroach milk. So Deploptera hantata, which is this little cockroach that I have here.

• 37:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  This is one of the, 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 sac that she holds, that she is nourishing them with this milk.

• 38:05Speaker 00

  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?

• 38:16Speaker 01

  They, they modify the spiracles kind of to, to secrete the, the secretion that is the milk. And it has like a lot of proteins in it, like, that we think, I mean, maybe that's the day of the future. Maybe you and I start drinking cockroach milk.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  Well, a few years ago, some European scientists did try to rebrand cockroach milk as the, the next superfood. Good on them for giving it a go. What kind of nutrients are in, are in cockroach milk?

• 38:48Speaker 01

  It actually has, I mean, some of the nutrition that you can get in cockroach milk is not that dissimilar from mammal milk.

• 38:54Speaker 00

  Really?

• 38:55Speaker 01

  It looks a little bit different.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  You've got it for us here.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  So this is some cockroach milk. And it's kind of cloudy. I would say it's, it's like a milky white.

• 39:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  In its, in its color. But you would expect to get the type of high protein nutrition that the embryo would need to be able to develop.

• 39:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. Wow. What does it taste like?

• 39:16Speaker 01

  I've never tried it.

• 39:17Speaker 00

  You've never tried? Do you want to?

• 39:19Speaker 01

  No, I've tried a lot, I've tried a lot of insect things. I like to eat insects.

• 39:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  But I've never tried cockroach milk.

• 39:25Speaker 00

  Why not?

• 39:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 39:40Speaker 00

  It's.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  I feel like we're going to cherish it.

• 39:41Speaker 00

  How did they use their not teats, their sphero, sphero?

• 39:47Speaker 01

  The spiracles?

• 39:48Speaker 00

  Spiracles? How did, so how did scientists use the spiracles to milk the cockroaches?

• 39:55Speaker 01

  Well.

• 39:55Speaker 00

  Sounds intimate.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Well, I think this is going to be the hard part. As we move to having like cockroach milk farms.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  The the hard part is right now, the animals usually are sacrificed to get the milk. So I think if if you want to make a business doing this, then you don't want to have them be sacrificed.

• 40:17Speaker 00

  Why do so many people seem to have a visceral freak out to insects? Is this evolutionary or learned?

• 40:25Speaker 01

  It'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. It's a learned behavior. There are people, I have colleagues who did this when 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 the 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. We 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.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  I wonder why its tail is 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. I 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 he 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, ew, squash, ew. Like kind of shrieking when they saw insects.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  So it's very common that people learn that behavior and it's hard to unlearn it once you already have it.

• 42:00Speaker 00

  Wow. So now we're going to move to a little segment. We've invented it mainly for the use of puns. It's is it beeswax?

• 42:19Speaker 00

  That'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.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  I feel pressure. Okay, I'm ready.

• 42:30Speaker 00

  And I'm gonna 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?

• 42:48Speaker 01

  Probably not, but they can live for a long time because they, some of them don't need to poop and they store nitrogen in their body in special cells called mesodocytes.

• 42:56Speaker 00

  25% of the protein in our diet is from swallowing spiders that crawl in our mouths at night. True or false?

• 43:04Speaker 01

  False. But I think it's okay if you eat spiders and you probably should, they're probably great.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  10% of the weight of your pillow is house dust mites. True or false?

• 43:14Speaker 01

  I would say probably true. I would say maybe even more, I don't know.

• 43:18Speaker 00

  Really?

• 43:18Speaker 01

  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 mom.

• 43:27Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  They're in your face right now.

• 43:30Speaker 00

  Do Egyptian scarabs or any insects eat human flesh? Or did the mummy lie to us?

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Egyptian scarabs don't eat human flesh, but there are tiny domesticans 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.

• 43:46Speaker 00

  Insects are simple and stupid.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Oh, false. False, false, false. They're smart.

• 43:52Speaker 00

  Time's up.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  Can I, can I get an extra 10 seconds? They're very, very smart, even though they don't have a brain.

• 43:57Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Make us, make us fall in love with insects.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Insects have clusters of ganglia, but they can do very complex tasks. They can see a lot of colors. Some of them do maternal care. These 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 these characteristics that make us think that they have some social lives that are more complex than we realize.

• 44:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. That's the inaugural segment of Is it beeswax?

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Never mind our beeswax. But this was your beeswax. All of it was your beeswax. It wasn't your, it was your beeswax.

• 44:37Speaker 00

  It was my beeswax. To cap us off, Jessica, we have a lightning round of oddball questions.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 44:45Speaker 00

  So we're gonna hit that theme song.

• 44:51Speaker 00

  All right. What is your favorite title to a paper that you've read about insects?

• 44:57Speaker 01

  Favorite title, Death of an Order by Inward, 2007. That was where they sunk termites into cockroaches. And it was a very dramatic title because Isophrera no longer existed. It was just going to be within blood. Death of an Order. That's, that's a good title.

• 45:12Speaker 00

  If you could only eat one bug for the rest of your life, what would it be?

• 45:16Speaker 01

  Dragonflies? Because they are high protein and low fat. I'm thinking heart health. Heart health is important, I think, in this story.

• 45:27Speaker 00

  Thank you so much, Jessica. This was so much fun. I learned so much and I do love insects a little bit more. So thank you.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  Thank you. I hope everybody goes out and appreciates the lowly mosquito.

• 45:40Speaker 00

  You've got such a heart cell there. We could have picked any other insect, the dragonfly, even the flies.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:47Speaker 00

  You're really, you like a challenge.

• 45:52Speaker 00

  That was entomologist Dr. Jessica Ware. I'm Wendy Zukerman, back to you next time.

• 46:19Speaker 04

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com/AppleWatchSeries12.

• 46:49Speaker 05

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way. Because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai/spotify.