Should we really kill all the lanternflies?

When an invasive bug landed on the East Coast, people embraced the order to squish it to death. But what has all that squishing done to us? Guests: Julie Urban, professor in the entomology department at Penn State; Chelsea Batavia, community engagement coordinator with a PhD in forestry For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:17Speaker 00

  Okay, I have returned today to a scene from my past. This is where I was standing last summer when I saw a bug skittering up this tree trunk. It was a very distinctive bug. It has a polka-dotty sort of wing with red underneath. This unmistakably was a spotted lanternfly.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  The spotted lanternfly may be pretty small, but it has the potential to cause big problems.

• 1:49Speaker 03

  The invasive species showing up around the tri-state area this summer.

• 1:52Speaker 04

  These gray and black dotted bugs that are said to be a destructive pest that feeds on more than 70 different plants that are critical to the state's agriculture.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  So I knew what this thing was. I had seen these many times before. They are all over Brooklyn. They took off around 2020, 2021.

• 2:11Speaker 00

  And so I knew what I was supposed to do in this situation.

• 2:14Speaker 05

  Authorities say if you see one, you're asked to kill it.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  You heard right, kill the bugs.

• 2:20Speaker 00

  So I ran after it. I ran up to this tree and I remember I tried to stomp it like on the tree, which is hard to do. So it got away from me and I was going after it again. And then this is what I remember most. This woman yelled at me from down the street. And I don't remember exactly what she said, but the spirit was like, yeah, get it. Get the lanternfly. And this is not the first time I've had that kind of interaction. Like this is definitely been the vibe.

• 2:54Speaker 06

  Welcome to New York, guys, where citizens have turned merciless mercenaries to protect nature. Your friend lanternbug, ask him about it. Ask him what happens when you [BLEEP] with New Jersey.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  Huh? No, he ain't here? I wonder where he went. Maybe under my [BLEEP] shoe. Like, people really, really got on board with just the mass murder of bugs. And I, in that moment, was actually feeling really ambivalent. Because like, on the one hand, it did feel good to be a part of this big civic project with my neighbor. And also, it is satisfying to kill one of these bugs. Like, it feels like you're almost scoring a point in a game. But I also kind of wanted to say to her, like, isn't it weird that we're all just happily participating in this big project that is about killing living creatures and we're like giving each other high fives over that? Something about it just feels also really bad.

• 3:48Speaker 00

  And I did not say any of that. I was kind of just like, uh huh, it was a lanternfly. But now lanternfly season is coming again. There's a chance the lanternflies are above me in this tree right now, like getting ready to hatch. And I'm once again going to be faced with essentially a moral question of a kind that comes up in conservation all the time, where we're forced to choose between different types of beings and their lives. So the question is, should I personally be killing these invasive lanternflies? And also just, what is the right way for any of us to think through that kind of decision?

• 4:46Speaker 00

  One of the first people to learn that the lanternfly had arrived in the United States was a scientist named Julie Urban. An old acquaintance of hers unexpectedly left her a message.

• 4:58Speaker 04

  You know, Julie, this is Leo. Call me back. And like, they found it. They got it, it's here. I knew instantly.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  You knew just from that?

• 5:06Speaker 04

  Why else, why else we haven't talked to the guy in like years, right?

• 5:08Speaker 00

  You were like, it's the lanternfly. It's gotta be.

• 5:10Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 5:11Speaker 00

  Wow. Oh, my gosh. How'd you feel?

• 5:14Speaker 04

  Freaked out, totally freaked out.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  The lanternfly had been on Julie's radar because she studies the group of insects that it belongs to, the plant hoppers. And she got into that work not because she was interested in invasive species management, but because she was into evolutionary biology. And she just thought that these bugs were incredibly cool.

• 5:34Speaker 04

  Cicadas are great and everything, but if you've seen one, seen them all, okay? They kind of have the same like body shape and form. But plant hoppers, they're extremely, we call it morphologically, but body shape diverse, right? One of them, its common name is the peanut-headed bug because it looks like it has a peanut on its head, right?

• 5:51Speaker 00

  Okay, good.

• 5:52Speaker 04

  Like, who, who has that, right? And some of them shoot wax out their rear ends. And I'm like, wow, like, they shoot wax out their butts? I'm in.

• 6:03Speaker 00

  But like, even if you're in it for the wax, you do have to stay up to date on bugs you study that could have a real world impact. So that's why Julie had her eye on lanternflies. Because around 2004, they had landed in South Korea. And they did a lot of damage there, mostly to grapevines, but also to apples and other tree fruit, to ornamental trees and timber trees. They have this straw-like beak that sits along their abdomens, and they use that to suck on a part of the plant tissue called phloem, which carries sugars that are created by photosynthesis.

• 6:40Speaker 04

  That sugar is what fuels its growth.

• 6:44Speaker 05

  Allows it to reproduce, that kind of thing. And so it's.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  But it's also famously delicious.

• 6:49Speaker 05

  It's fa- exactly, right?

• 6:50Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 6:52Speaker 05

  And so the insects are stealing that.

• 6:54Speaker 00

  So Julie calls Leo back and she learns that the lanternfly has indeed been detected in the United States, specifically in Pennsylvania. And a little while later, in the spring of 2015, she heads up there with a team of people who are trying to figure out what to do.

• 7:13Speaker 05

  We went to the landscaping company where it was thought that that was like ground zero, so to speak. I had never seen a landscaping company at this scale.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  What did it look like, like greenery or?

• 7:26Speaker 05

  Green- well, piles of stone, like really from around the world.

• 7:31Speaker 00

  The lanternflies seem to have arrived on one of those piles of stone, a shipment from Asia. These bugs are unusually good at hitchhiking. And when the team looked closer, they found old egg masses on the grounds of this landscaping company, meaning that actually the lanternflies had probably arrived more than a year earlier. And they also noticed that lanternflies seem to be feeding especially on the tree of heaven, which, despite the nice sounding name, is actually itself an invasive species from Asia. Now, non-native species arriving in new places, that is not always a problem.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  Like honeybees are not from North America, nor are most earthworms. But the worry is that a non-native species with no natural predators can get out of control. They can displace other species, or in the case of lanternflies, they can kill a lot of trees. So Pennsylvania took some steps to manage the lanternflies. They put some areas of the state under quarantine so that things like landscaping materials had to be inspected before they could move. They cut down some trees of heaven. They used insecticides. And at first, the population is not exploding.

• 8:55Speaker 00

  But then comes 2017. Julie now has a job at Penn State studying lanternflies, and a grape grower has agreed to test some insecticides at his vineyard. As part of that, he leaves a couple of rows of grapes untreated for comparison.

• 9:13Speaker 05

  And so we go out, and it was raining cats and dogs. You know, we're in this grower, in the back of this grower's pickup truck, and we're driving through this vineyard. And the support posts at the end of the rows, we just see them, post after post, slackered with lanternfly egg masses. Like, a lot. And we're all, oh, my gosh. Like, you know, and so it, if the movie Jaws, you know, when Brody first sees a shark, I think we're going to need a bigger boat.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  Julie described 2017 as one stomach drop after another. She'd been working with a grad student on all this, and one day, the student calls her.

• 10:01Speaker 05

  She said, Julie, I'm out here. I'm going to the Walmart. They're flying into Walmart. And I'm like, what the?

• 10:09Speaker 00

  What are you guys doing here?

• 10:10Speaker 05

  And then she called me again. At that vineyard, he also grew apples. And she called me, she said, Julie, I'm, you know, at the vineyard, and they're flying over into the apple trees. They're hitting my car. And we had never seen them on the apples before.

• 10:28Speaker 00

  The general public gets wind of all this, and some of them begin to take matters into their own hands. One enterprising individual goes after some lanternflies with a blowtorch. Try to surprise attack them here and just go at them.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  And some people who are hearing about the rise of lanternflies start getting angry.

• 10:53Speaker 05

  They say...

• 10:53Speaker 00

  Why didn't you just nuke them at the beginning? Everything you did was wrong. Julie and her colleagues, including at the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, they had been balancing a lot of concerns as they figured out how to deal with the lanternflies. Like, they could have just torched the infected area with strong nasty insecticides. But, you know, they already were using powerful insecticides. They were just trying to do it in a way that didn't kill too many other bugs. But the containment measures didn't totally work. By 2018 and 2019, despite the quarantines and pesticides, the lanternflies are really on the move.

• 11:37Speaker 00

  They spread to the city of Philadelphia, about 60 miles away from where they were first detected. And in the summer of 2020, amid everything else going on, they are exploding.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  Invasion of the spotted lanternflies in University City. And it looks like ground zero is this Chipotle at 34th and Lancaster.

• 12:00Speaker 00

  There's footage of the bugs absolutely blanketing the sidewalk at the entrance of this ill-fated Philadelphia Chipotle. There are photos of the bugs wrapping around the trunks of Pennsylvania trees, which is very creepy, though also oddly beautiful. And ordinary people in Philadelphia are fighting back, as they have been told to. In the summer of 2020, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture posted on Facebook about the lanternflies, saying that you should, quote, "squish their guts out anytime you see them," unquote. A kill order. And people get very into this. Stomping, squishing.

• 12:42Speaker 00

  There are reports of kids in Philly going after them with skateboards. And it did seem to me that the point of the various lanternfly campaigns was to inspire us all to action. But I did wonder, like, why? One thing I've been curious about is, like, is the "stomp it" part of the campaign actually to help bring down populations? No. So what is it for, then? It's, again, if you don't... Kill it, you're going to carry it. Now, we don't have good data on this, but it doesn't seem like the individual stompers have had that much of an actual impact on lanternfly population levels. Other mitigation measures are way more effective.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  But Julie and the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture are really focused on whether the lanternfly will spread. Like, you stomp it so it doesn't try to hitch a ride with you in your car. And if you look a little more closely, you can see that the public outreach campaigns in Pennsylvania and eventually New York do include information about this. Like, make sure to report these bugs if you see them outside of the quarantine zone. In Pennsylvania, you can call the hotline at 1-884-BAD-FLY. A lot of their communication is also about scraping away egg masses, which is more efficient than stomping individual bugs. But when I started to hear about this, it seemed like some of that nuance had gotten lost.

• 14:08Speaker 00

  People were kind of just stomping with abandon, even with a sense of glee. And like, we were sending children off to do this.

• 14:19Speaker 04

  Girl Scouts love taking action. They love finding ways that they can help out in the community. And one of the ways that Girl Scouts are showing the love to parks today is through a little bit of a lanternfly squish-athon.

• 14:30Speaker 00

  But there were also signs that people were conflicted about the kill orders. One friend told me that in the summer of 2021, she saw someone running after a lanternfly yelling out, "The New York Times told me to kill you." I personally know a couple of people who gave up stomping. And the question even made it on Jimmy Fallon, where comedian Kate McKinnon was making an appearance.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  And I saw this baby on the street. And I was like, oh, my God. This moth. What? It's like sepia-toned wing, fishnets, basically. Basically, it's gorgeous. Peak of red with polka dots.

• 15:11Speaker 05

  Like, this is a burlesque dancer.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. But she promises that now that she knows it's invasive, she's gonna kill it.

• 15:18Speaker 05

  No, we're supposed to. We're supposed to, and I will. I will kill the next lanternfly.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  But take a photo of it. You what? Oh, my God, you're winking.

• 15:26Speaker 05

  No, we're supposed to. We're supposed. I will. I will kill the next one.

• 15:30Speaker 00

  If you didn't catch that, Kate is saying she's gonna do this, but then overtly winking at the audience, like letting us know that she's crossing her fingers behind her back.

• 15:41Speaker 00

  People were starting to wonder why exactly we had to kill these gorgeous burlesque dancer bugs. And actually, the science was getting a little more murky on this question, too. The initial worries about how the lanternflies might kill all these trees and crops, those did not pan out. As of now, in the US, the bugs are really mostly a problem for grapes, and therefore for grape growers. Though Julie told me, in her mind, there is still urgency around making sure that the lanternflies don't expand to new places.

• 16:14Speaker 05

  So if heat makes them develop, they're gonna develop earlier as they move south.

• 16:19Speaker 00

  That could mean more time to feed on Georgia peaches, or maybe on the many grapes in my home state of California. So even though things haven't been as bad in the Northeast as they initially feared, it is still possible that in other places, it could be worse. These past couple of summers, I have shared Kate McKinnon's ambivalence about stomping lanternflies. And I have felt especially ambivalent about the kill orders and how happy we all seem to be to comply. But this year, I don't know. I wanted to face my ambivalence head on. It is really not the biggest deal in the world. So I was like, I should actually just decide, once and for all, what I'm gonna do here.

• 17:03Speaker 00

  Make a moral choice that I can live by. Do you think it's morally right for me to kill lanternflies?

• 17:11Speaker 05

  Yes, because I think if, if anything, it, it can only help.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  Julie doesn't like the idea of killing living things, and she knows better than anyone what cool creatures lanternflies are. But she was like, we just gotta do it.

• 17:29Speaker 05

  I mean, this is, it's kind of like, as humans, we've manipulated our Environment so much, you know? And ethically, it's our responsibility to try to fix that or keep it from getting worse as much as we can. You know? We have to do our chores environmentally, right? And a lot of times, they're distasteful. And this is one that's very distasteful.

• 17:55Speaker 00

  I totally see how Julie landed here. And yet, even with what I had now learned about the science, I felt like there were still ethical questions here that I wanted to think through more deeply, ideally with the help of a moral philosopher. And when I did, I learned more than I had bargained for about the ethics of conservation and of decision making in general. That is after the break.

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• 22:00Speaker 00

  I read several different papers and articles as I was trying to think through my decision about whether or not to kill lanternflies this summer if they should be so unlucky as to cross my path. And there was one that I kept thinking about by an author named Chelsea Batavia. She lives in Washington State. The lanternflies have not made it there yet, but I told her the whole story.

• 22:22Speaker 05

  Oh, boy. What a mess.

• 22:24Speaker 00

  Chelsea now works in government. She is representing her own views here, not the state of Washington. But back when she was a PhD student studying ecosystem management and environmental ethics, she got interested in moral dilemmas in conservation. Because, you know, mostly, people who care about conservation are trying to do the right thing. But sometimes, they face conflicting moral demands.

• 22:49Speaker 05

  You know, it's challenging. Should we be killing barred owls to save spotted owls?

• 22:54Speaker 00

  This is something that happened in the Pacific Northwest, starting in 2013. And the images of the bodies of invasive barred owls that had been killed in the name of conservation, they made people uncomfortable. And Chelsea gets that.

• 23:08Speaker 05

  You know, like, I have a kind of a strong intuitive response to like, no, we shouldn't be killing anything. Don't we say that we care about nature? Don't we say we care about wildlife?

• 23:15Speaker 00

  Right. And killing is bad. Like, that's the first thing you learn.

• 23:18Speaker 05

  Exactly. It's like thou shall not kill. But then when you dig into like, the details, because that's, that's the thing. Ethics, we can think about it at an abstract, but at the end of the day, we are making decisions, we're acting in the context of particulars, right? And once you get into those particulars, these like, high level, yes, we should kill, or no, we should not kill, that just doesn't, there's too much nuance.

• 23:40Speaker 00

  So Chelsea started thinking deeply about the ethics of this kind of situation. And she agreed to help me think through my version of that. The lanternflies.

• 23:49Speaker 05

  I guess a first response is that I think it is grossly inappropriate.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  Appropriate for anybody to be killing gleefully.

• 23:56Speaker 00

  This seemed like a very reasonable place to start. Like, a lot of my discomfort is about how the killing sometimes feels like this big collective game. But if you put gleeful killing aside, there is still the question of killing at all. And Chelsea was like, OK, we could get into the world of normative ethics, which is about helping us choose what to do. It's got three big branches, three big frameworks we could consider. Number one is consequentialism.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  Consequentialism says the right action, very, very coarsely put, the right action is the one that produces the best outcomes. So the focus is on what happens.

• 24:40Speaker 00

  In the case of lanternflies, there is one big, obvious outcome.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  We're killing life. We're killing insects. We're killing bugs. These are little lives, right?

• 24:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. Many smart people do think that insects are conscious and feel pain. So that is in the don't kill them column. But of course, on the flip side, humans are conscious and feel pain. And humans are harmed by lanternflies, especially humans who grow grapes. So that is in the kill them column. Chelsea also pointed out a whole world I hadn't thought of, also in the kill them column, that is like, if I stomp on lanternflies now, then I may be preventing people in California or other states from having to make this decision. And I'm also preventing the lanternfly's future children from also being killed.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  But then it's like, do it, how do we weigh the value of a potential life that never was against the life that is here right now? So like, to me, that's, I'm just, I think that consequentialism is a useful tool for thinking through things. But I like, I'm very rarely gonna like, put a flag and be like, yes, this is the way we should be thinking about things.

• 25:46Speaker 00

  And you're pointing out, there's just a lot of uncertainty about outcomes.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  There's a lot of uncertainty. And there's a lot of types of outcomes that can't be quantified. And even if they could, they would not be comparable. So. You know, I think that that's not helpful for you making your decision to try to make a calculation based on the best outcomes.

• 26:04Speaker 00

  I gotta say, I was relieved. I think part of me thought I had to have all the information in order to responsibly make this decision, like read the appendix of all the studies or something. But actually, that is not necessarily required in order for me to make an ethical choice. Might even be a way for me to avoid the decision because it's hard. Though Chelsea did say it is, of course, very important that scientists keep learning more about the outcomes. Like, if it turns out that the lanternflies making it to California is definitely gonna cause mass famine, that could really change my moral calculation. But for the moment, we left consequentialism aside.

• 26:45Speaker 00

  The second frame Chelsea told me about is deontology, which means the science of moral duty. It focuses on the intention behind my action. Why am I doing it?

• 26:57Speaker 02

  When you talk about feeling like you're, you know, participating with your community and doing something to support your hometown, that to me sounds a lot like more of a deontological claim. You're thinking about, you know, your intention. Your motivation is not to be cruel and kill lanternflies. Your motivation is to be a good neighbor, to make that connection with your neighbor. So, you know, to me, that's not irrelevant. That is something to pay attention to.

• 27:22Speaker 00

  All right, so we put those issues into the mix. And then framework number three is called virtue ethics. It is a really old branch of normative ethics, which essentially says that virtues should guide your actions.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  So Aristotle talked about virtues being things like, you know, courage and temperance. And so the idea is then, as you are moving through your life and you have to make moral decisions, you do what a virtuous person would do. So like, the reason why this was

• 27:53Speaker 05

  Not very popular for, you know, as we got into the Enlightenment, we were looking for rules. It's like, that's not a rule.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  There's definitely something to be said for rules, but this flexible framework seems useful to me, too. Because there actually are multiple reasonable ways to think about this. Like, maybe a virtuous person would take on the task of killing bugs on behalf of their community. Or maybe a virtuous person would decide the principle of protecting life is the most important thing here. Gleeful killing of creatures could be a slippery slope. The important thing is to think about what is actually good and then try to take action to get there. I also realized I had been assuming that I needed to make, like, an ironclad decision here that I can never violate.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  I think because I wanted to make sure that I wasn't letting myself off the hook. But it's also true that there's no law that I always kill lanternflies or that I never do. Maybe I'd been looking for something overly simple.

• 28:57Speaker 05

  I think that when I see work in conservation ethics and a lot of ethics in general, it tends to be quite definitive. It says, like, you know, this is right, this is wrong. And I just, I really like language that gives us a way to say that it's not that simple.

• 29:13Speaker 00

  When Chelsea was doing her PhD, she felt like she really needed some language like that to describe these conservation moral dilemmas, like the one with the invasive owls.

• 29:23Speaker 05

  So I started snooping through some really gnarly moral philosophy stuff.

• 29:29Speaker 00

  Looking for like a word to describe that feeling?

• 29:31Speaker 05

  Looking for if there's any scholarship that acknowledges that, like, this is a thing, that, you know, ethics is not a matter of right. Just like, yeah, I got that, like, gold star for me, that there's, there's this gray zone. And that's how I found this language around moral residue.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  Moral residue. It describes the feeling that's left behind when you make what you think is the best ethical choice, and it still just feels bad.

• 29:59Speaker 05

  It's an emotional response, actually, which is super interesting because moral philosophy puts a lot, you know, high premium on the mind, on rationality, on logic, on thinking and deliberation. So it was really interesting to me that something that is recognized as an emotional signal is given language.

• 30:18Speaker 00

  Allowing my emotions into the room, that was actually really clarifying to me. Because I'd kind of been feeling like, if I still felt bad about my decision, maybe I just hadn't yet arrived at the right decision. But actually, maybe I'm just gonna feel bad about both options, and I still have to choose.

• 30:36Speaker 05

  One thing moral residue is not meant to do is let anybody off the hook. You're gonna have to kind of sit in your own moral responsibility and decide what you're gonna do. There is no no action option. You either kill them or you don't.

• 30:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:49Speaker 05

  And I think you're probably gonna have to sit with some sort of discomfort either way. But I think that wading into the complexity is the right way to do things. That's like a responsible way to be as a free, willing, moral agent in the world. Like, if that's not what we're doing here as people, then I guess I'm not sure what we're doing.

• 31:10Speaker 00

  By the end of our conversation, I had enough of a sense of Chelsea to know that she was not gonna tell me what to do here. But I did ask her. What would you do if they do get to Washington?

• 31:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, if they get to Washington, I'm definitely gonna learn more and try to use my best critical brain to understand kind of how the research was done and what it means. But I think that my, this is where I would acknowledge my unwillingness to accept that personal burden of taking a life. I wouldn't do that.

• 31:44Speaker 00

  Wow, yeah, like, you're feeling like, I wouldn't stop them.

• 31:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, and that would be a loss, that, you know, because I would recognize that I do have an obligation for all the reasons that we've already talked about. But yeah, I think my reverence for life is probably a little bit too strong of a signal for me at this point.

• 32:05Speaker 00

  All right, I'm back on this block near my house with this tree that had a lanternfly scuttling up at last summer that I tried to kill. And I've made my decision. When the lanternflies come out this summer, I am going to stomp them. That is not where Chelsea landed for herself, but I think she modeled a way of making the decision that accepts the moral residue, makes the choice based on what feels important to her. And for me, I think the communitarian value of helping people in my region is just really important to me. But I also accept that means I'm going to be taking insect lives and that my individual actions actually don't have that much of an impact. Like, I don't think I should kid myself about that.

• 32:51Speaker 00

  But there is also one big thing that I'm going to force myself to do differently from last year, which is that this time if someone comes up to me and is like, "Yeah, get 'em", I think I'm really going to make myself be like, "I kind of hate doing this. Like, I've decided to do it, but it's a rough trade-off that we're being asked to make, right? Like, killing bugs does not feel good." Because I do think that maybe having a weird, honest conversation with a stranger about something that matters is also a good in itself.

• 33:33Speaker 00

  This episode was produced by me, Sally Helm. It was edited by Lissa Soeb. Christian Ialla did the mixing and sound design. Meredith Hodnot runs the show. Melissa Hirsch checks the facts. Noam Hassenfeld, Valerie Schenkman, and Joanna Solotaroff are wondering what it is really like to be a bird. And Bird Pinkerton immediately pulled out the broken guitar when Flapton hissed, "Shh, not here. They have ears everywhere." And he led down a narrow passageway, away from the outside passageway, deeper into the station.

• 34:12Speaker 00

  Thanks, as always, to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show along with Bird and Noam. If you have thoughts about the show, please send us an email. We love reading them. We are at [email protected].

• 34:24Speaker 02

  You can also leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. That really helps us out. And if you are into supporting the show and all of Vox in general, join our membership program. You can go to vox.com/members to sign up. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll see you next time.

• 34:54Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 35:22Speaker 04

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