How to Waste Less Food and Save Money & Why Insects Rule the World -SYSK Choice

Ever wonder why you're always told to wait about 10 seconds before turning your phone, computer, router, or tablet back on after rebooting it? Is there really something magical about 10 seconds, or is it just one of those tech myths everyone repeats? The answer has to do with what happens inside your device after the power goes off—and why waiting just a little while can make all the difference. https://www.howtogeek.com/165110/do-i-really-have-to-unplug-my-cable-modem-for-at-least-10-seconds/ Americans throw away an astonishing amount of perfectly good food—about 40% of everything produced. That's money straight into the trash, and much of it is completely avoidable. The surprising part is that food waste often has less to do with leftovers and more to do with everyday habits, confusing expiration dates, oversized refrigerators, and the way we shop. Kathryn Kellogg explains simple, practical changes that can dramatically reduce waste, save you money, and make life a little easier. Kathryn is founder of Going Zero Waste and author of 101 Ways to Go Zero Waste (https://amzn.to/3yfHSMV) Kathryn's website GoingZeroWaste.com https://www.goingzerowaste.com Insects may be tiny, but they are among the most successful creatures ever to inhabit Earth. They pollinate crops, recycle dead plants and animals, feed countless other species, and have survived for hundreds of millions of years. Yet most of us know almost nothing about them. Why are there so many insects? What's the difference between a bug and an insect? Why do some live only a day while others survive for decades? And what would happen if they disappeared? Steve Nicholls answers these questions and reveals why the future of insects is closely tied to our own. Steve is an Emmy Award-winning wildlife filmmaker and author of Alien Worlds: How Insects Conquered the Earth, and Why Their Fate Will Determine Our Future (https://amzn.to/4d1M1mP). An afternoon nap might seem like an indulgence, but research suggests it can be one of the easiest ways to improve alertness, memory, learning, and even problem-solving ability. The key isn't sleeping for hours—it's knowing how long to nap so you wake up refreshed instead of groggy. Listen as I explain why a short daytime snooze can actually make you smarter. https://www.prevention.com/health/sleep-energy/a69068628/are-naps-healthy/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS AIR DOCTOR: Head to ⁠https://AirDoctorPro.com⁠ and use promo code SYSK to get $250 off select AirDoctor air purifiers, including the 3500, 4000, and 5500 models. Plus, you’ll receive a free 3year warranty, an $84 value, and AirDoctor’s 30-day money back guarantee WAYFAIR: Ready to upgrade your home for way less? Head to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Wayfair.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ right now to shop all things home and get your space ready for less. QUINCE: Elevate your everyday. Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! SHOPIFY: It's time to turn those "what ifs" into CHA CHING with Shopify Today! Sign up for your $1 per month trail and start selling today at ⁠https://Shopify.com/realm⁠ INDEED: Get a $75 Sponsored Job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/PODCAST⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mike Carruthers?

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• 0:44Mike Carruthers?

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• 1:22Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know. When you reboot your electronic devices, why do you have to turn it off for 10 seconds before turning it back on? Then, food waste. A lot of perfectly good food gets tossed out.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  So for instance, a bell pepper. A bell pepper has to be able to stand. If it has some sort of bend in it where it doesn't stand or stack very well, it gets thrown out right there. So there's a lot of food loss that happens that we don't see.

• 1:51Mike Carruthers?

  Also, why an afternoon nap could do wonders for you. And insects, they're fascinating. There are millions of them, and many of them don't live very long. For example.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  It's a wingless mosquito, and it lives on the surface of the ocean. And the adult life of one of those things is about two hours. And you have to wonder how the hell it actually finds a mate in a two-hour window on the open ocean.

• 2:16Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know.

• 2:21Mike Carruthers?

  There's probably no better endorsement for a company than this. I keep buying their stuff. That's exactly what's happening with me and Quince. It started with their clothes. I've bought sweaters, polos, pants, jeans, shoes, a belt. And Quince has become one of the first places I look when I need something new to wear. And my wife and son buy from Quince too, all the time. What keeps bringing us back is the quality and the price. Quince uses premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, merino wool. Their cashmere sweaters start at just $60. And with colder weather coming, they have down jackets

• 3:06Mike Carruthers?

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• 3:51Mike Carruthers?

  please let them know it was Something You Should Know. It's the best way to support our show.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life today. Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

• 4:11Mike Carruthers?

  Well, hi. Welcome to Something You Should Know. I want to start today talking about the electronics in your life, the electronics that you use every day. Smartphones, computers, modems, routers. Well, as you know, the remedy for when a lot of those kinds of electronics aren't working right, if they're glitchy or something, the advice is to reboot them, specifically to turn them off, wait 10 seconds, and turn them back on. But why 10 seconds? And sometimes it says 30 seconds. Well, does it really matter that you wait 10 seconds or 30 seconds? Well, it can, it really can. The reason is that your devices have capacitors in them, which are basically tiny batteries.

• 4:56Mike Carruthers?

  And when you turn off your device, the power drains from those capacitors, and that's what shuts the device down completely. If you wait less than 10 seconds, it's possible that enough power is still in a capacitor, or two, or three, that the device never really fully shuts down and resets. So be patient, give it a good 10 seconds or 30 seconds or whatever it says, and allow the power to drain and everything to reset. And that is something you should know.

• 5:30Mike Carruthers?

  One of my pet peeves, for some reason, is food waste. I just hate to throw out something because it went bad before I could use it. And I hate walking through restaurants and seeing all that food left on plates after people have left. It turns out that food waste is a huge problem, particularly in the United States. And there are things we can all do to help the problem. And when you cut down on food waste, you also can save yourself a lot of money. And it doesn't take a lot of effort. Here for a fascinating discussion on how food gets wasted and how to stop it is Catherine Kellogg. She's owner and founder of GoingZeroWaste.com and author of the book, 101 Ways to Go Zero Waste.

• 6:15Mike Carruthers?

  Hi Catherine, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Hi Mike, thank you so much for having me.

• 6:20Mike Carruthers?

  So let's start by identifying and you explaining just how big a problem food waste is.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  On average, about 40% of all the food in the United States goes to waste. It is a really, really big problem. And if it were a country, food waste would be the third largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions behind the United States and China. So it is a really, really large problem. And what's really fascinating about it is almost half of the food waste happens in our own homes. So it's a problem that we can really tackle. It's a problem we can see, and it's a problem that's going to save us a lot of money. I think one of the reasons why people really dislike wasting food is because you can physically kind of see just throwing away those dollars that you spent. And we all know, I mean, groceries are going up in price. So if you can, you know, find a way to make sure that you're actually using what you buy,

• 7:11Speaker 01

  it's just a win-win-win, it's a win all across the board.

• 7:15Mike Carruthers?

  So let's talk about what you just said about half of the problem is in our own homes. Well, where's the other half?

• 7:23Speaker 01

  So that comes from food that is in production. So a lot of that's going to be food that's wasted in the production at farms. And something a lot of people don't know is in our grocery stores, they have beauty standards for food. So for instance, a bell pepper. A bell pepper has to be able to stand. If it has some sort of bend in it where it doesn't stand or stack very well, it gets thrown out right there. So there's a lot of food loss that happens that we don't see. And one of the major problems is grocery stores not buying produce that's considered less than, you know, peak or less than perfectly beautiful.

• 8:03Mike Carruthers?

  Isn't that amazing? And I've heard that there are some entrepreneurs who are like, they, I don't know what the name of the company is, but it's something like ugly fruit or ugly produce that, you know, you can buy that stuff from people at a much lower price rather than throw it away.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Yes, Misfits Market is one of the ones that I personally use. And I think they're a fantastic company, and they do a really good job of taking that less than peak, less than peak produce, and they sell it on at a discounted rate. So it's really great to be able to avoid that food waste, and you get a discount, and it's delicious. Like, it's perfectly fine food. And some of the reasons why you get something is, well, blow your mind. I recently got these lemons from them, and these lemons were just slightly bigger than normal. And grocery stores wouldn't buy them because they were just, you know, just maybe about an inch bigger than they should be. But as an average consumer, you would look at that and say, well, that's just the normal lemon.

• 8:58Mike Carruthers?

  So I want to understand who's throwing the food away. So in other words, is it, are those bell peppers that can't stand up, so they get thrown away? Is the farmer throwing them away and not even selling them? Is the grocery store buying them and saying, well, see, this one can't stand up, so they throw it away? Who's throwing it away?

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Most of it happens on the farm. So there's this fantastic video that I love. And it is of a guy who's going to a farm where they produce bananas. And there is a measuring tape and the farmers have the bananas. They're laying the measuring tape across the bananas and they say, nope, that's just about an inch too big. And right then and there, they just grind it into a pulp. They just throw it out. That's where it's lost, right there, because the banana is an inch too big.

• 9:43Mike Carruthers?

  So the food that we waste in our home, I mean, what we end up wasting are things like, well, this strawberries are a big problem. It's like the minute they get home, they start to turn or like basil, basil goes bad really fast. And you use what you can use, but if you can't eat it all, you can't eat it all. And then you end up throwing it away.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  Can I ask how you're storing your strawberries?

• 10:10Mike Carruthers?

  Well, usually I just take the container they come in from the store and put them in the fridge until I use them. And then sometimes they're already bad when I take them out of the fridge the next day or the day after. But I also heard something like, well, you should rinse the strawberries in water with a tiny bit of vinegar in it. So you don't taste the vinegar, but the vinegar will help destroy the bacteria that causes the rotting. And so you rinse them in that, dry them out, and then put them back in the fridge.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  So I'm going to have to disagree with that person. I actually did an experiment where I did it that way. And then I did it my way to see which one would last longer. And mine were perfectly fine after two weeks and those turned into kind of a vinegary mushy mess.

• 10:55Mike Carruthers?

  Two weeks?

• 10:56Speaker 01

  So two weeks, yes. So basically, when you get them home from the store, and this is one of the major points that I go over in my book, is when you get home from the store, do not wash your produce. All you're doing is you're just adding moisture into the produce. And we don't want to add extra moisture. We don't want to add extra air usually depending, depending, it does depend on the type of produce, but for berries specifically, what we're talking about right now, don't wash them. What you're going to do is you're going to take them, you're going to put them in a mason jar or some other sort of airtight container. Make sure they're not pressed down really hard, but they can just, you know, live their lives. And then put them in a mason jar, put the lid on, they'll stay good in your fridge for up to two weeks. And then you can just wash them as you want to eat them.

• 11:37Mike Carruthers?

  That's it?

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's it.

• 11:39Mike Carruthers?

  That's really easy.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Put them in an airtight container, they'll be fine.

• 11:42Mike Carruthers?

  That probably applies to a lot of produce that might go bad, like other berries, for example, or whatever.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  Yep, blackberries. I will say raspberries, no matter how much you baby raspberry is, raspberries are just naturally a little bit mushier. So they do have a harder time, but they still do better in a jar than they do in their container. And like I said, I do not recommend washing them because all you're doing is introducing more moisture into them. And we know that berries usually go bad and they start getting mushy. They take on more moisture. So we don't want to introduce the problem too early for them.

• 12:15Mike Carruthers?

  Where do you see people wasting the most food?

• 12:18Speaker 01

  I think a lot of it is produce and a lot of it is bought with the best of intentions. But then life happens and you get kind of intimidated by the produce. You don't want to chop it. Or, you know, you're just not in the mood for it. There's a number of reasons. And my solutions kind of hit on multiple levels. So the first one is planning, and I hate meal planning. I hate it. I hate it. So there are different types of meal planning. My personal favorite, I call it the five minute meal plan because that's all of the time personally, I can manage to take for meal planning, five minutes. So I call it the five minute meal plan. And it's a really quick, look at what you have before you go to the grocery store, take note of what those items are,

• 13:02Speaker 01

  and make sure that whatever meals you're planning to make incorporates kind of those leftover things that you may have. Maybe you have a bag of spinach that's been sitting in your fridge for a week. And maybe it's time that that gets used up first. So just prioritize the stuff that's been kind of pushed to the back of the fridge. The second thing is we tend to overbuy. Now, this is really interesting because this gets into this whole grocery store beauty standard that we talked about earlier. So supermarkets stuff their store with produce to give the feeling of abundance, because the feeling of abundance makes you buy more. So they're intentionally enticing you so you want to buy more food.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  And we have pretty large fridges in the United States.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  And if you have a big family, that's great. But if you're a two person family or a three person family, you probably don't need to fill your or stuff your entire fridge full of food because it will probably go bad before your family can eat all of that. And so making sure that you're getting really comfortable with some negative space in your fridge. Or I have a small kitchen. I have a very small fridge. I call her my French fridge. Her name's Juliette. She's very cute. She's very petite. She's the average fridge size in Europe. And it's amazing how much food, how much less food I waste, knowing that I don't have this massive fridge that in my mind, I feel like I need to fill.

• 14:31Mike Carruthers?

  We're discussing food waste and how to stop it, how to stop wasting food with Catherine Kellogg. She is author of the book, 101 Ways to Go Zero Waste. A big thank you to today's sponsor, Vinted. I think most of us have what I call someday clothes. I'll wear that someday. That'll fit better someday. Someday I'll have a place to wear that. Meanwhile, it's been hanging in the closet for three years. Vinted offers another possibility, sell it. Every day, people can sell clothes they're no longer wearing and make some extra money. And they've made the process pretty painless.

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• 16:29Mike Carruthers?

  So Catherine, here's a problem. I will go to the store and buy food to make something with the best of intentions, but something will come up, you know, that the meal you were going to make didn't happen because somebody came over and you all ended up going out to eat. And then you forget that you bought it. And then two months later, you find this like bag of mush at the bottom of the drawer. That's just disgusting, but it's you've, you meant well, but you forgot.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  It has happened to me. I, one time I got super, super sick.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  And I couldn't cook at all. And there were things that I had in the fridge, obviously best of intentions, but I couldn't eat anything for about a week. And so things went bad. And you know, it does happen. Life happens. And yeah, the last thing on my mind when I was so ill was, you know, what was in my fridge? So I do compost and I think composting is a lovely solution, especially, but it should be a last resort. Composting should be a last resort for those times where, you know, I was so sick, I physically couldn't take care of that problem.

• 17:36Mike Carruthers?

  So what else? What are some other tips people can do, things people can do to combat this problem? Understanding that, you know, it's never going to be perfect, but you could make a difference if you tried a few things.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So we talked a little bit about meal planning and shopping. One of the other main ways is making sure your produce is stored correctly. Like we talked about a little bit earlier with the berries or with your greens. Making sure your produce is stored in an optimal way really, really helps it last. And then prioritizing the things that go bad a little bit quicker. We had mentioned raspberries. So raspberries are just so delicate. So if you had raspberries, strawberries and grapes, you're probably going to want to eat them in that order because that is the order in which they are the hardiest or the least hardy, I should say. So the raspberries are more fragile. The strawberry is a little heartier and then the grapes are the hardiest. So you'd want to kind of prioritize your snacking, maybe in that order.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  As well as making sure that, you know, when you shop, one of my major, major recommendations is buy less than you think you need. You can always go back to the store. You can always go back to the store if you need to grab something. But as you said, some things typically come up where, oh, you went out to eat or you got invited out last minute. And you had planned for maybe, you know, six lunches, six breakfasts and six dinners. But now you actually only have four breakfasts at home because you're running late. You only had three lunches because two wound up being business lunches. And you only had four dinners at home because you went out on a date or you went over to your friend's house. And so you bought all these food for meals that you never even ate. And we're really bad about remembering that we get, you know, busy or that things come up.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  So buy less food than you think you need. And then the last one would be leaning in to the state of your produce. So if you have a cucumber and maybe I will say cucumbers are my kryptonite. That's my kryptonite food. The one that just seems to always elude me is making sure cucumbers stay good the longest. That that's the hardest one. I think they're, they're of the delicate variety. But if your cucumber is not tasting super great raw, well, how can you use it? Well, I like to make cucumber gazpacho. So if I have a slightly limp cucumber, I can turn that into a delicious gazpacho that I'm going to want to eat. So I don't have to rely on that really crispy, crispy raw crunch.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Or if you have carrots and your carrots start to go a little limp, can you turn those into a stew? That kind of leans into its slightly limp-ness rather than trying to force it to eat, force yourself to eat it raw, but it's not going to taste very good raw because it's missing a lot of that crunch.

• 20:14Mike Carruthers?

  Can you run down your recommendations for storing the food that, that tends to go bad the fastest?

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I'll go over kind of the main, kind of top five things that I see people throw out the most. First one is berries, which we talked a little bit about storm in an airtight mason jar. They will last so long. When it comes to lettuce, similarly, you don't want to, you don't want to overcrowd it. You don't want to shove it into a container, but we have some of those really large glass kind of Tupperware containers. We put our lettuce in that. We will chop our lettuce. So it's ready to go. We don't have to chop it. We just have to wash it. And you add, I like to add a thin piece of cloth on top so that absorbs any excess moisture. And then the airtight container prevents any air from getting in. Your romaine will stay good for at least two weeks that way.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  It'll stay crunchy, crispy. So will your spinach. So will your kale. It's a great way to store your greens. Next, surprisingly, bread is one of the things that's most thrown out. And I recommend if you live in a humid environment, if your pantry gets a little bit humid or if it's quite warm during the summer months, store your bread in the freezer. Make sure it's pre sliced. All you have to do then is go into the freezer and you can just pull two slices out. You can pop it in the toaster. My toaster even has a setting that says defrost. And it's not a very nice toaster. It's just a very like run of the mill toaster. And you can just pop your bread in there and it'll defrost and it'll be perfect. And it will stay fresh for a very, very long time.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  Fourth on the list, apples. Apples are one of the foods that are also most thrown out. I just store those loose in the fridge. I don't personally like eating cold apples. So I like to kind of set them out as the week goes by, just it'll be room temperature when I eat them. But they stay crispy in the fridge for a very, very long time. And then the fifth most wasted item I believe is milk. I believe that's the fifth. And you know, when you store things in the door of your fridge, that's where the most heat and warmth comes from. So it's actually recommended that you would store your milk more internally inside the fridge if you can. But if it does start to go sour, this is really interesting.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  Sour milk is not bad. It is just sour. There's a difference between spoiled milk and sour milk. So I want to make sure we understand the distinction there. But sour milk is milk that just is kind of sour. It doesn't taste super great to drink, but it isn't bad. So instead use it to make pancakes. It's kind of the perfect natural leavening agent that you can use in place of buttermilk.

• 22:51Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, but I don't know where that line is between sour and bad. And I'd hate to find out the hard way.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  If it's moldy, it's bad. If it's really chunky, it's bad. But if it's just slightly sour, it's fine.

• 23:04Mike Carruthers?

  So when you said, put your strawberries, for example, in a mason jar with a lid on it. You specifically said mason jar as opposed to say a Tupperware with a lip lid on it. What's the difference or is there a difference?

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Oh, there's a difference. You can also use a Tupperware container. I just, I just have always used a mason jar for it. That's all. That's why I say it. One of the reasons why I like mason jars is how they take up vertical space. And because it's a clear container, you can easily see what's inside of it. It's really just easier to see what I have because if you can't see your food, you're not going to eat your food. You're going to forget that it's there. So I hate using any sort of container that's not clear.

• 23:48Mike Carruthers?

  Here's something I think a lot of people do. I do it. So you're cooking something and say the recipe calls for half an onion. So now you have another half of an onion and I would never throw it away. I don't need it for this recipe. So I put it in the, in the refrigerator. And, and usually I keep it till it goes bad and then throw it away. Same with, you know, a bell pepper where you use part of it. So you save what you didn't use, but you don't know what to do with it. So you keep it because you feel bad throwing it out and then it goes bad and then you throw it out.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  One of my favorite tips is something I call chop once, eat twice. And so that definitely falls into the category of only using half an onion or half a bell pepper. So if you're already there chopping that bell pepper, you might as well just chop the whole thing. And if you don't use it, since it's already been washed and chopped, then you're a little bit more likely to kind of throw it into the next recipe versus just looking at a half of something and you're like, man, I really don't want to chop that right now. So you don't. And so then it does wind up going bad. So next time you do it, try chopping the whole thing and then storing it. And I bet you'll snack on it or maybe find a different dish that you can throw it into since it's already ready to go.

• 25:02Mike Carruthers?

  Some food, I'm thinking like tortilla chips, popcorn. It's not that it goes bad. It just gets stale and people throw it out, but, but you can revive it, right?

• 25:13Speaker 01

  What I like to do is tortilla chips, for instance, you'll take your tortilla chips if they've gone stale or popcorn or cookies, like a crispy cookie, ginger snap, that sort of thing. If you lay them in a line on your baking sheet, it doesn't have to be exact, but you just don't want to pile it super high. Just lay them in a, in one single layer, pop those into your oven while your oven's preheating from zero to 350 or zero to 400. Leave them in for maybe about 60 seconds. Once it reaches your temperature, pull them out and they will be good as new.

• 25:44Mike Carruthers?

  I know you say that there are foods that we buy at the store that we, we don't eat because we don't think we can eat them. But that there's a lot of stuff we buy and throw out that we might want to try to eat.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  For instance, carrot tops. Carrot tops and parsley are in the same family. And carrot tops are just a slightly sweeter version of parsley. So if on your grocery list, you had parsley and carrots and you bought carrots and then you threw the tops away. It's wrong. It's the wrong move. So instead you can just buy carrots and then you can use the carrot tops as parsley. And they taste delicious. And so there's, there's all these different things people don't even know they can eat and they throw them away. Beet tops are another great example. Beet tops are very similar to Swiss chard and flavor, texture and looks. And then you also have things like broccoli stalks. This one really blows my mind. But in the U.S., most people chop the broccoli stalk off.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  And you pay for broccoli per pound. So, and they aren't even eating it. And I just think it's because they don't know the best way to prepare it. You just have to kind of shave away that slightly rough exterior, but the inside is super tender and delicious. And it makes me sad that people throw it away because I think it tastes better than the florets.

• 27:01Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I've certainly learned a lot from you and I can't wait to try your berry idea. Cause I, you know, I can't imagine how much money I've wasted on strawberries that ended up getting thrown out because they go moldy. So I'm going to try your trick. Catherine Kellogg has been my guest. She's the owner and founder of going zero waste.com and her book is called 101 Ways to Go Zero Waste. And there's a link to that book and to her website in the show notes. Thanks, Catherine.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Thank you, Mike. This has been wonderful.

• 27:36Speaker 04

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• 28:05Speaker 05

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.

• 28:36Mike Carruthers?

  In the warm summer months, you're never too far away from an insect or two. They are seemingly everywhere, biting, annoying, buzzing, and generally making life miserable. So why do we have insects? Do they serve a purpose besides being a nuisance? How many different kinds of insects are there? Are they all related? What makes an insect an insect and not just a bug? Well, here to explain all this and more is Steve Nicholls. He's an Emmy Award-winning producer and director of acclaimed wildlife documentaries, and he's author of a book called Alien Worlds: How Insects Conquered the Earth and Why Their Fate Will Determine Our Future.

• 29:20Mike Carruthers?

  Hi, Steve, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  Hi, nice to be here.

• 29:24Mike Carruthers?

  So first, explain what makes an insect an insect and the difference between an insect and a bug.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Well, that's a surprisingly hard question to answer in some ways. So if you look in a kind of, you know, biology textbook or something, it would probably tell you that insects have got six legs. So like spiders have got eight legs, which are not insects. Millipedes have got, well, up to 1,000 legs, actually, in a newly discovered species in Australia. So insects have got six legs. Their body is divided into three bits. A head, which is the kind of sensory stuff. The thorax, which is basically packed full of muscles, which drives the six legs and two pairs of wings in most insects that can fly.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  And then the abdomen, which is kind of like the fuel supply. It digests all the stuff the bug eats, and it produces the energy for the muscles, and it also houses the reproductive organs, because obviously insects are very, very good at making more insects.

• 30:30Mike Carruthers?

  Yes, they sure are. And do we have any idea how many species of insects there are?

• 30:37Speaker 02

  Well, that is another very good question. We have described about a million species. So that's as in, you know, in museum specimens and papers written to give them their Latin name. As to how many there actually are, well, that's very difficult. It's that back in the, I think it was in the 70s, a Smithsonian scientist working in Panama tried to work out by a series of deductions how many insects there might be. And he did it by fogging one species of tree, about 11 specimens of this tree, to see what fell out of it. He identified all the beetles that came out. He knew roughly what proportion of insects beetles represent,

• 31:22Speaker 02

  and then did loads of like multiplication about how many trees there are across the tropics in the world, for example, and then how many other species are there? How many insects might be specific to those trees? And to cut a long story short, he thought there could be as many as 30 million different species of insects on the planet. At the time, most biologists said, oh, that sounds, you know, kind of a bit high to us. And they said, maybe we think there's maybe 5 million. But we keep discovering more ways in which insects have fooled us and that there are more species than we think. So my feeling is that we'll slowly creep back up to that 30 million figure

• 32:03Speaker 02

  and that was ridiculed at the time, but actually is looking more and more likely now.

• 32:08Mike Carruthers?

  Are insects, or can insects be microscopic?

• 32:12Speaker 02

  Oh, yes. Not incredibly small, not like you need a, you know, a big microscope to see them. But there are some parasitic wasps, which, there's a lot of parasitic wasps out there, and they generally lay their eggs into the body of another insect, the caterpillar stage or the adult stage. And their larvae develop rather gruesomely inside the body of another insect. It was genuinely, that was the genuine inspiration for Ridley Scott's kind of alien bursting out of a body in the sci-fi film. They, that was based on these parasitic wasps. But some of these wasps actually parasitize insects' eggs.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  So they lay their eggs inside another insect egg. So to do that, of course, they have to be incredibly small. But they're really the smallest insects. So actually, there's a group of beetles that, they don't have an English name, that they belong to a family called teleodi. And, well, they're sometimes called feather-winged beetles. But they're absolutely minute, fractions of a millimeter long. So small that they've had to move part of their brain out into their thorax, because they haven't got room in their head for their kind of full brain. They can only afford either one ovary or one testis in their abdomen, because they haven't got room for the normal two. So they're at the limit.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  They're absolutely down at the bottom-end limit for insects.

• 33:42Mike Carruthers?

  And so because all these insects fit that definition you gave a moment ago of the three parts and all that, does that mean they're all related?

• 33:52Speaker 02

  They are. One thing we do know is that all insects descended from a common ancestor. When and what the ancestor was like is still up for debate. But they're definitely all related. I mean, some more distant than others. If you want to think of the insects as having like a family tree, or even like a real tree almost, then some insects form, you know, the low branches and others, you know, way up top. But yes, they're all related, and they're related to crustaceans. We know that. We know that actually insects are, in some ways, that they're part of the crustacean group.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  They're very closely related to, you know, the crabs and lobsters and all those kind of creatures. But there is, there is one group of crustaceans that they're very, very close to, and we didn't even know about these things until a few decades ago. They're crustaceans that, called remipeds, which only live in the deepest water-filled caves, where the caves have both seawater and freshwater in them. And they're like, well, the best thing to describe them as is swimming centipedes. And that's the closest relation to an insect that we know still living today that's not an insect.

• 35:14Mike Carruthers?

  So this next question, you could probably take three hours to answer. So let me ask you not, not to take three hours.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  I promise I won't.

• 35:23Mike Carruthers?

  Why do we have insects? I mean, most people consider them pests. You know, in everyday life, they buzz around, they do things, they, nobody likes them that... But clearly, they're here, and they serve a purpose, they do things. People like you study them. But for most of us, they're just a pain in the neck. So why do we have them?

• 35:47Speaker 02

  Well, it's a very, I mean, I get asked that question quite a lot, as you might imagine, doing talks and such like, sort of, you know, general talks. One of the things I say, which doesn't sound very polite, but actually, in one sense, it's a meaningless question, because there is no reason behind the way things evolve. They, they simply are, you know, self-reproducing little organisms that go their own way, evolve, and get shaped by natural selection. So there's no, there's no forethought in evolution. There's no reason why it does this. It just happens, because that's the last three and a half billion years of history of life on Earth has driven that evolution.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  But that's not a very, very helpful answer. And a better answer is to say they're extraordinarily useful things. They, they underpin every terrestrial ecosystem on the planet, apart from maybe, you know, Antarctica, where there still are a couple of insect species. But, but the rest, the whole ecology of all those places you can think of around the planet is dependent on insects in different ways. I mean, obviously, they provide food for a load of different things. But they're also incredibly important with flowering plants, with pollinators. So, for example, they pollinate about three-quarters of all the different kinds

• 37:14Speaker 02

  of crops that we eat as food. People often ask me as well, you know, like, what's the point of mosquitoes? It's a more, slightly more specific question than you asked. And my answer to them is always chocolate, because the cacao flower, the flower that develops into a pod that gives us chocolate beans, is pollinated by a little mosquito. So without mosquitoes, no chocolate. Sorry, guys.

• 37:38Mike Carruthers?

  Well, well, that's actually good to know because then the next time you're itching from a mosquito bite, at least you can say, well, you know, we wouldn't have chocolate without them. So I guess we can all suffer a little bit. But, but as we've talked about before on the show, I mean, mosquitoes are like one of the world's biggest killers, too.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  Oh, oh, they are as well as vectors as it is transporting because they what they're transporting a diseases that affect they've picked up and then they they sort of pass on. But they are. There are some, you know, quite, quite dangerous insects as well. But as I said, that they're really their role is is far outweighed by the value that they have to the ecology of virtually the whole terrestrial part of the planet. They don't live in the sea that much, but to the terrestrial part of the planet, it would absolutely fall apart if we didn't have insects.

• 38:36Mike Carruthers?

  So we have this interesting relationship with insects in the sense that we're very much at war with them in the in the sense we don't want them in our house. We spray them, we swat them, we kill them, we have exterminators, we have, you know, pest guys. So, you know, does that bother you? I mean, all these species that we're trying to get well, we're not trying to get rid of them. We just want them out of the house.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  Well, it is life. And yeah, even I, you know, don't really want a kitchen infested with cockroaches. Having said that, I keep a lot of different kinds of cockroaches just in the room behind where I'm sitting now. But they're kind of tropical exotic species, if you can think of an exotic cockroach. But yes, I wouldn't want, you know, kitchen infested with with stuff. And they do, you know, transmit diseases and things. So certainly around habitation and such like in in houses and things that, you know, that is a fact of life. But people who spray, for example, their gardens and things are actually doing a lot of damage. The insects, despite the fact that there are an awful lot of them,

• 39:45Speaker 02

  both in species and in numbers, their numbers are absolutely crashing at the moment because of habitat loss and overuse of chemical pesticides. We've lost in places at least some three quarters of the insect population in the last three, four decades, which is not that long. You know, it's I've been studying insects for longer than that. And in my time of studying insects, they've declined by three quarters. So, so we've got to be a little bit careful. It's we can't just willy nilly, you know, get rid of them because we don't like them. We've already discussed the fact that, you know, they're important to the ecology of our planet. And what we're doing to them in agricultural land or in our gardens or

• 40:29Speaker 02

  whatever is is gonna cause us problems. You know, we all worry about climate change these days, but go hand in hand with that, a loss of the insects and, you know, that that that exacerbates any problems that we might be facing.

• 40:43Mike Carruthers?

  So wait a minute, you did I hear you correctly? You said that the insect population overall has decreased by three fourths?

• 40:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, in, I mean, we don't know if that's true globally, because obviously the studies aren't there. But some intensive studies in Germany showed that even on nature reserves, the population had gone down by between 75 and 80%. Where we have data, which is large parts of North America, because it's well studied continent, and large parts of Europe, that that is repeated. And and the pollinators are getting scarce as well. You know, we discussed again, the fact that they're they're important in pollination. And there are places now in in China where the pollinators are so low that they're having to pollinate their

• 41:38Speaker 02

  almond crops by hand, which is an extraordinarily tedious thing to have to do. There are people up ladders with paintbrushes, you know, pollinating flowers because the insects can't do it anymore. They've basically gone. And even California's almond crops, almond orchards can be affected. You know, we normally, when the when the almond blossom is out, lots and lots of honeybee hives are shipped into the area to provide pollination services. So we're moving insects around to to achieve that. But the conditions in most of these almond orchards, which are,

• 42:19Speaker 02

  you know, quite heavily sprayed at times, means a lot of the honeybees die. So the beekeepers have to basically take their honeybees out of the orchards when they finish the flower season, and take them somewhere where there's no pesticide. So they can kind of recover and rebuild their numbers. You know, there's kind of attrition on the on the hives doing the pollination job. So, so yes, it's certainly true in the developed world that we're, we're, we're reaching what people have called an insect apocalypse or an insect Armageddon.

• 42:54Mike Carruthers?

  That is really surprising. But I guess, I guess, because, you know, some insects like mosquitoes are considered pests. But but when you spray for those, you get everybody. So

• 43:06Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 43:07Mike Carruthers?

  That's the problem. There isn't a mosquito only get rid of spray. It's poison to every every insect or every bug.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  It is. If it's a general pesticide spray, yes. And that's what happens when we spray farmland. We're spraying all the good guys as well. So not just the pollinators, but we're spraying all the predators. So actually, it's been shown in quite a few different places now on organic farms, which obviously don't use pesticides, but actually, they they lose very little of their crop to insects. I mean, you would think, oh, blimey, it's going to get overrun. But it's it's a it's a small percentage of the of the crop that is lost to insects, because all the all the herbivorous insect natural predators are actually living in the fields as well. So there's a kind of balance of nature established on these

• 43:58Speaker 02

  farms, which you don't get when you start spraying things because you strip everything out. So, so yeah, it's a problem. I mean, there are some clever tricks that you can use. You can do things like, and this is happening in places like Africa, where, you know, they have a massive problem with things like sleeping sickness, that's transmitted by by tsetse flies or malaria by mosquitoes. And what you can do is is breed up loads of male insects and then sterilize them and then release them. But and then they go out to mate, but only with their species. But there's no viable offspring produced by that mating. And that has reduced the prevalence of some of these diseases in certain areas.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  And that at least is targeted. I mean, it's not good news for the mosquitoes involved, but the but that has, you know, targeted it. So it's not like a general broad spectrum apocalypse.

• 44:55Mike Carruthers?

  What is the biggest insect that you know of?

• 44:59Speaker 02

  Well, so the the kind of cheating answer is there's there's a huge kind of ground cricket thing called a wetter, which lives in New Zealand. And the heaviest insect ever recorded was a female wetter. But it was a little bit of a cheat because she was very heavily pregnant, well, heavily laden with eggs. So it was a bit of a cheat. And I think generally, the biggest insects are the giant beetles, like elephant beetles that you see down in Costa Rica and places. You know, they're they're kind of palm sized insects. But but they're pretty small compared to some of the insects that were around. So

• 45:44Speaker 02

  way back, way back before even the dinosaurs evolved, because insects are very, very ancient group of animals, there were insects flying around the the Carboniferous and Permian coal swamps that looked like dragonflies. They're very distant related to dragonflies. But they had wingspans that was like nearly three feet across. So there were some pretty big, big bugs down there, and they weren't the only ones. And in fact, although it's not an insect, there was also a giant millipede around back then called Arthur Plura. And that was close on six feet long. So you try and imagine a millipede, you know, six feet

• 46:26Speaker 02

  long trundling around the forest. It's an impressive sight. But they only survived back then because oxygen level in the atmosphere was much, much higher. And that supported the way insects breathe, which is different to the way we breathe. These days, I think those giant beetles I talked about or the wetter are about as big as as insects can get.

• 46:50Mike Carruthers?

  Well, you said that that weather weighed in at the most, but you never told me the number.

• 46:57Speaker 02

  Uh, I suppose you guys can't remember the number.

• 46:59Mike Carruthers?

  Well, roughly. I mean, is it 10 pounds? Is it 100 pounds?

• 47:03Speaker 02

  Oh, no, no, it's not. It's not like that. It's a matter of like, you know, 50 grams or something like that. So it's a sort of not a, not a huge number. It's in, it's in ounces, not pounds. So, yeah.

• 47:15Mike Carruthers?

  That would be interesting. But yeah, I mean, everybody has seen these really big bugs and, you know, from the, down in, like you say, in Costa Rica, but even in the United States, in Florida and areas down in the Southeast, there, there's some pretty big insects.

• 47:31Speaker 02

  There certainly are, yeah. I mean, there's some big, like praying mantises, for example, you know, which everyone's familiar with because of the kind of predatory nature. But there's one actually that's, that's introduced to the eastern states now. It's not, there are plenty of native mantises, but Chinese mantis, which is a one that's, I guess it's probably close on six inches long, is doing quite well along the east coast now. And there's quite a few records to have these things catching hummingbirds. So there's, there's records of them hanging around near hummingbird feeders when people have put, you know,

• 48:10Speaker 02

  sugar solution out for the hummingbirds and grabbing the occasional hummingbird that comes past. So, so yeah, the, the, the, you don't have to go very far to find some very, very impressive bugs.

• 48:22Mike Carruthers?

  How do insects move around the world? That, you know, you say that some have been introduced. Well, how do they get there?

• 48:30Speaker 02

  Well, those kind of insects tend to be moved around by us really, either intentionally, occasionally, it's an intentional thing. More often than not unintentionally in, you know, shipped over in, in packages of, you know, whatever foodstuffs or whatever. So like one of the real big problems in northeastern United States is gypsy moths, which is a, which is a European species. It's native here in Britain and doesn't do much damage, but because there's no predators of it in the States, it defoliates huge areas of forest. I mean, it strips them bare, so many caterpillars.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  And that was, you know, an accidental introduction, maybe in, you know, timber being shipped over or whatever. And now, you know, the, the females are kind of wingless and the males fly, but the females will lay their eggs on all sorts of objects and often on cars, for example. So, you know, you park your car in the, in a, you know, national forest park or whatever, go for a hike, come back, drive it somewhere else. And, you know, you may have gypsy moth eggs on it. So, so they get around like that, but they do get around under their own steam. So the, I mean, we know about monarch butterflies in the States, for example, that migrate in the autumn from as far as Canada, all the way down to, to Mexico, to over winter

• 49:54Speaker 02

  in, in the Mexican mountains. But the longest natural insect migration is a, is a dragonfly, one that's called the the globe skimmer, which is a perfect name for a creature that does what it does. And it migrates from northern India all the way down India, then across the Indian Ocean. It calls in, in often in huge numbers into the Maldives and then carries on over to East Africa. And they, they kind of breed on the way. So it's not one individual that, that does it. But then they make a return journey after that, all the way back, sometimes possibly even to the north of the Himalayas. So that's as far as we know, the, the longest, you know, natural migration of an insect, which is pretty impressive.

• 50:38Mike Carruthers?

  You know, I've always wondered, like, when the monarch butterfly migrates, like, how far does it go in a day? And, and how does it know where to stop and rest? And how does that, how do they do that?

• 50:50Speaker 02

  How do they do that? So they have, they do have resting places. So I've watched the monarch migration in lots of different parts of the States and I've been lucky enough to get out to the mountains in Mexico to see the wintering populations where there's 20, 30 million butterflies hanging up in trees.

• 51:08Speaker 02

  And on the way south, so what I should say first is that going north in the spring, the butterflies move from Mexico, maybe as far as Texas, and then stop and breed. And then the next generation carries the journey on. So it's kind of relay race going north. Going south in the late summer, basically the butterflies that hatch in the late summer are kind of super butterflies, designed to fly long distances. And they make the whole journey from as far north as Canada all the way to Mexico.

• 51:41Mike Carruthers?

  But when they take off and, you know, okay, so we're, we're heading to Mexico from Canada.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:47Mike Carruthers?

  On day one, they take off and they fly. Like, so how long can they go before they have to say, you know, I'm, I'm getting a little tired here?

• 51:55Speaker 02

  Oh, well, they stop every night and they'll feed and they'll drop down and feed if they see a big patch of flowers. So, but nevertheless, they, they make a decent amount of, of time a day. I mean, I think a better example, because it's, it's been more carefully studied, was, there, there was a dragonfly, quite a famous dragonfly, it's called Dave. He was a, an eastern dana that flew down from Canada, because they migrate in the same way as the monarchs, flew down from Canada. But this particular one, Dave, had a little tiny transmitter on him and he, and he could be tracked. And he was followed by, well, by road vehicles, but at certain times even by light aircraft.

• 52:38Speaker 02

  Must have frightened the life out of the poor old thing. But he, he followed a set route down across Delaware Bay and down over Chesapeake Bay. And, and he was making about 50 miles a day. So, you know, he was, that's, that's pretty good going for a thing that's only three inches long.

• 52:57Mike Carruthers?

  Generally insects don't live very long compared to humans, but are there any outliers? Are there any that live a really long time? Or do they all average out? And then what is that average?

• 53:08Speaker 02

  They often live for quite a long time as, as young larvae, because that's the kind of growing phase. But like a, an adult mayfly, for example, might only live a day or so. But there's a little, tiny little mosquito, again, good old mosquitoes. It's a, it's a wingless mosquito and it lives on the surface of the ocean. And the, they, they emerge onto the sort of surface as adults. And the adult life of one of those things is about two hours. And you have to wonder how the hell it actually finds a mate and mates in, in a two hour window on the open ocean, which is a, you know, a big old habitat. So, so, so some of them are very short, but, but some are long-lived.

• 53:53Speaker 02

  I mean, some of my cockroaches next door are probably a couple of years old now. So, you know, they do live quite a long time. And even butterflies like monarchs, you know, the ones that migrate south from Canada survive all the winter in Mexico and then all the way into spring to reach Texas again. So, you know, we think of butterflies as little ephemeral creatures, but, you know, they can live in that case for, you know, maybe kind of eight months, something like that.

• 54:22Mike Carruthers?

  Well, you've answered a lot of the questions that I've always had about insects and wondered about. So I appreciate you coming on and doing that. Steve Nicholls has been my guest. He is an Emmy award-winning producer and director of wildlife documentaries. And he is author of a book called Alien Worlds: How Insects Conquered the Earth and Why Their Fate Will Determine Our Future. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Steve. This was really great.

• 54:50Speaker 02

  It's, it's a pleasure to talk to you anyway. So that's been great. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

• 54:58Mike Carruthers?

  There's some pretty good evidence to believe that a short nap in the afternoon can make you smarter. Studies have shown that a nap from 10 minutes to a half an hour can have real cognitive benefits. You probably don't want to go much longer than a half an hour. Naps that extend past 30 minutes allow a person to move into a deeper sleep and increase something called sleep inertia. That's that groggy feeling you have when you first wake up. Even though the grogginess can pass pretty quick and not everybody gets it, many people find it unpleasant. Also, longer naps are associated with some health problems, including obesity, high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

• 55:41Mike Carruthers?

  But a short nap in the afternoon may be just the thing to help you get through the rest of the day. And that is something you should know. You know, this podcast has several thousand ratings and reviews on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Castbox. If you put them all together, there's several thousand. We really like getting reviews. It's helpful to us. We read them all. It's also helpful to people who are looking for another podcast to listen to. So I would appreciate it if you would please leave a rating and review on whatever platform you listen on. I'm Micah Rutherford. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

• 56:22Speaker 05

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.

• 56:49Speaker 06

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