Factually! with Adam Conover - The Mass Disappearance of Insects with Akito Kawahara

Episode Date: April 8, 2020

Entomologist and professor, Akito Kawahara joins Adam to discuss why insects are disappearing at an alarming rate, how humans must play a critical role in their survival, and how incredible insects truly are. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You know, I got to confess, I have always been a sucker for Japanese treats. I love going down a little Tokyo, heading to a convenience store, and grabbing all those brightly colored, fun-packaged boxes off of the shelf. But you know what? I don't get the chance to go down there as often as I would like to. And that is why I am so thrilled that Bokksu, a Japanese snack subscription box, chose to sponsor this episode. What's gotten me so excited about Bokksu is that these aren't just your run-of-the-mill grocery store finds. Each box comes packed with 20 unique snacks that you can only find in Japan itself.

Plus, they throw in a handy guide filled with info about each snack and about Japanese culture. And let me tell you something, you are going to need that guide because this box comes with a lot of snacks. I just got this one today, direct from Bokksu, and look at all of these things. We got some sort of seaweed snack here. We've got a buttercream cookie. We've got a dolce. I don't, I'm going to have to read the guide to figure out what this one is. It looks like some sort of sponge cake. Oh my gosh. This one is, I think it's some kind of maybe fried banana chip. Let's try it out and see. Is that what it is? Nope, it's not banana. Maybe it's a cassava potato chip. I should have read the guide. Ah, here they are. Iburigako smoky chips. Potato

chips made with rice flour, providing a lighter texture and satisfying crunch. Oh my gosh, this is so much fun. You got to get one of these for themselves and get this for the month of March. Bokksu has a limited edition cherry blossom box and 12 month subscribers get a free kimono style robe and get this while you're wearing your new duds, learning fascinating things about your tasty snacks. You can also rest assured that you have helped to support small family run businesses in Japan because Bokksu works with 200 plus small makers to get their snacks delivered straight to your door.

So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, but okay. I don't know anything. Hello, welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Conover, and if you go around the classroom of kindergartners and ask them for their favorite animal, chances are they'll choose something big, vertebrate, and mammalian, right? We're talking elephants, pandas, lions, and dolphins, hippos, wolves, and giraffes. You know, there might be one kid in the class who picks a platypus or something, but he just wants attention. Okay, Tevin, Simmerdown. There's a term of art used by conservationists for these big, cool, attention-sucking beasts. They call them, quote, charismatic megafauna. Fauna for animal, mega for big, and charismatic for

sick as hell, right? No question, charismatic megafauna are sick as hell, but that doesn't mean they should be our only or even our main focus in conservation. If you take a look at any patch of ground or hillside, you'll see that there are far, far more tiny critters than huge ones. We live in a world of bugs, really, and right now those bugs are being wiped out. Insect declines in recent decades are giant and dire. The statistics here will blow your mind. A major study from last year found that 41% of insect species, all insect species, are in decline. That's twice the rate of decline for vertebrates.

That study also found that one-third of all insect species are in danger of going extinct, a third of them. 50% of butterflies are declining or threatened, around 44% of bees and ants, and 40% of dragonflies. So look, if you were hoping to propose to your beloved on a summer evening at a riverbank lit only by lightning bugs, tough shit, time to invest in a flashlight, pretty much. lit only by lightning bugs. Tough shit. Time to invest in a flashlight, pretty much.

This massive decline is a problem since bugs are a huge chunk of all of the living mass on Earth. It's called biomass. The famous naturalist E.O. Wilson estimated that every couple acres in the Amazon might have a couple dozen vertebrates, but over a billion bugs. And he estimated that if you weighed all the critters in that chunk of land,

around 90% of the entire mass would be bugs. So when we think of saving the animal world, we're thinking of an animal world that is mainly bugs, invertebrates. And according to this study, the bug world is declining at a rate of 2.5% annually, year over year. By the way, that's about on the level that, you know, cable television viewership is declining year over year. And we all know cable television is dying. That's not going to be around that much longer. So just think about what that means for bugs. Now, look, you might be wondering, hey, bugs, who cares, right?

I don't mind there being less creepy crawlies around. But look, even if you do feel that way, you have to understand that when we lose our bugs, we put other creatures at risk as well. A study looking at a rainforest in Puerto Rico found an astonishing 98% of insects were lost in the last 35 years. A huge proportion of birds in the canopy depended on these bugs for food, and their numbers dropped by 80%. And insect declines in Central America have also led to declines in lizards and bug-loving frogs in addition to birds. The fact is that insects are a crucial component to pretty much every food chain on land, and they are dying. So if we want to save the elephants and lions, and even the weirdo critters like Tevin's

platypus, we need to start thinking about saving the bugs. And fast. And that's not even to mention the incredible importance of insects on our own agricultural supplies, right? We need insects to save ourselves as well. And humans have played a critical role in insect decline, so now we must also play a critical role in their survival. To discuss how and why insect populations have declined and what we might do about it, our guest today is Akito Kawahara. He's an entomologist and an associate professor who runs the Kawahara Lab

at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Guys, this conversation was so much fun. He got me so excited to talk about insects, why they are so cool, and why they are so worth saving. If you have a kid in your life, I suggest putting this one on and having them listen to it with you. They might just want to grow up to be an entomologist. Without further ado, let's bring on Dr. Akito Kawahara.

Akito, thank you so much for being on the show. Yeah, it's great to be here. Thank you. So I talked a little bit in the intro about the decline in insect numbers that we've seen, but put it in your terms for me. What is the starkest way it looks to you? It looks pretty bad. There's been a lot of studies that have come out recently that are showing that insects are declining in large numbers globally. So most of the studies have been done in Europe, but there have been more studies now across the world. And in terms of the starkest numbers, I'd say a study recently suggested that 40% of all the species of insects might decline or disappear or go extinct. In other words, in the next few decades.

40% of insect species might go extinct. And is that just the ones we know or is that even species we have not yet identified yet? So that's based on the ones we know. Got it. But my understanding is, you know, I spoke with Emma Maris, who's a science and environmental writer a few months back, and she pointed out the difference to me between extinction, which is how we often think about the decline in animal numbers, that species are going extinct, they'll never come back. Obviously, extinction is a big problem. But there's also this related issue of

abundance decline, that you might have a large, we might lose a large number of animals, even if the species is still hanging around. Maybe there's a lot less of that species. And I know I saw just a few months ago, there was a story that, you know, North America has lost like a third of its birds since, you know, if you look around North America, you'll see one third less birds, maybe not, you know, that's apart from extinctions. You'll just see less storks, less wrens, all those things. And it's the same thing happening with insects. We think so. Yes. So the studies that have looked at this, I mean, one of the issues here is that we don't have a lot of data still because they're insects and we just don't know what's actually happening to the extent that we want to know. But from the studies that have been published, we see lots of numbers in abundance and also declines in the species themselves.

So a good example of abundance is, for example, there's a butterfly called the regal fritillary. It's a butterfly that's found, used to be found throughout North America, more or less, but was restricted to these habitats, these tall grass prairies, which have declined 99% or so. And now these butterflies have nowhere to go because the habitats themselves have declined so drastically. And so, so they don't, you know,

these numbers are declining in abundance and we've been doing, you know, lots of people have been doing mark recapture studies and kind of checking the abundance of them. And we know that there's very few of them now because the populations have been drastically reduced and the, the habitats are fragmented significantly. And are we seeing like an overall decline in insects period? Like, is it that wide?

We think so. We think, I mean, it's happening in all kinds of different insects groups. So the first studies, you know, there was a big study that came out a couple of years ago that looked at insect declines in Germany, where they looked at, did a survey of insects over 27 years. years. And they showed that about 75% of insect biomass, that's the weight or the mass of the insects that are collected, has disappeared by about 75% in that 27 years or so. And these are malaise traps. So these are people, entomologists, insect enthusiasts going out and setting up these flight intercept traps. So it's basically a trap in which an insect flies into it. It's kind of like a screen and the bugs crawl up and they go into a little jar and they keep them up for about a week or two. And then they measured this over

the years and they were able to show that significant numbers, the weight or the mass of the insects has gone down significantly. So these are folks just trying to measure, hey, how many insects or how many pounds of insect? That's how, when you do biomass, you're like, how many pounds of insect are we getting? And just taking a broad swath, and they're just like, that number is going precipitously down.

That's right. And it's happening more, you know, across different insect groups now. So there's lots of different studies that are coming out. Last week, there was another one on caddisflies. So these are aquatic insects that live in streams and the larvae live in the streams and they're really important sources of food for fish and things like that that live in the water, but their numbers are declining too. So it's not just bumblebees and honeybees and butterflies, it's beetles.

It's happening with dragonflies. It's happening with all kinds of insects. And so for the person listening saying, okay, look, I know about bees and there's been a lot of study about colony collapse and I've heard about that and bees are cute and I understand they help my food supply. Sure. But why should I care about beetles? Like, what is the impact for us? Why should we care about insects? I mean, you obviously you care about insects. You're an entomologist. Yeah. I mean, I would say, you know, so there was a study that was published a while ago that looked at the impact of insects and how many, you know, what's the impact on the economy in the United States. So that study was many, you know, what's the impact on the economy in the United States. So that study was published, you know, over 10 years ago now, but if we correlate it to modern times

or this year, it would be something like $70 billion annually is the impact of all insects, you know, as together as a group. We're making $70 billion off these insects. Yeah, something like that. And it's really like, so we talk about pollination, which is very important, right? So pollination, you know, I think people don't realize if you go to the grocery store and you look at, you know, all these different kinds of fruits and vegetables and so forth, you know, things like peaches, potatoes, onions, peppers, oranges, cabbage, tomatoes, grapes, watermelons. I mean, all this stuff is pollinated by insects. So if you lose your insects, there's a big problem. And it's not just the honeybee. There's lots of other

insects that are pollinators that are important. And in addition to that, there's also, you know, insects serve a really important role, which is to act as physical decomposers. So the decomposing and making the soils more rich. So animals that die, insects are there to take care of them and let them go back into the soil. They're prey for birds. Something like 96% of songbirds rely on insects for their young. Freshwater fishes require insects for their food. Also, grizzly bears. Many people think of grizzly bears as being these big animals that feed on fish and salmon. But in reality, they rely more heavily on insects and with berries and so forth. So those are the kinds of things that we need to be,

you know, thinking about in terms of insects. And of course, they're also important in terms of progress, like scientific progress, right? So, you know, drones are being designed using, you know, looking at how flies fly, for example. And we do a lot of genetic research using, you know, flies and other kinds of insects. Silk is another example that, you know, it's a huge industry, especially in Asia. It's dependent on a particular moth. These are the kinds of things. Silkworms, right? Am I right about that? Silkworms, right. Yeah, it's a domesticated silkworm. It's actually domesticated. The moth can't fly anymore. Yeah, wait, I heard about, I'm sorry, can we do a little tangent? Because I read, I went down a Wikipedia rabbit hole about this once. I want to make sure I got this right. Cause I'm remembering and it's like blowing my mind all over again that we make

silk using domesticated silkworms, which are like a domesticated insect. And we've domesticated it so thoroughly, like it can't like breed by itself in the wild, right? Like they can't be let go and, and continue to do their thing. Like they now require like humans to tend them because we've had such a long relationship with them as a species. Am I right about that? That's correct. Thousands of years. That's right. They can't, they, they, they can't really do anything. They require us to feed, give them food. That is so fucking, I don't know what, I mean, like you expect, okay, dogs, horses, whatever. But like, I didn't know that. Yeah. We've had this thousand year long relationship with with domesticated worms,

silkworms, moths. And is that, are, are we still using, like how important are, are they to, if I have a piece of silk, is it, is it coming out of worms butt? Is that why they have a, it's coming out of their mouth parts, actually. Oh, okay. It's okay. They have silk glands and they produce silk, which is also surprising. A very interesting area of research is silk, right?

A lot of products that are important for bulletproof vests and things. These are designed from things like spider silk because they're elastic, but they're very, very strong. It's one of the strongest compounds on the planet. And we rely on them. And a lot of the research so far has been on a few species of spiders or the silkworm moth. But there's hundreds of thousands of other insects that produce silk.

So if you think about it, the diversity of an opportunity that we have here is astonishing. And we're just beginning to find out what's out there. Now, you have such a passion for insects. How did that develop for you? Where does that come from? Yeah, it actually comes from when I was a child growing up in Japan. So I'm Japanese. And in Japan, you know, there's, it's a culture where you can go to the department store and they sell beetles in these cages as pets. And, you know, you go to the park, for example, and you just, in the summer, you always see kids like running around with butterfly nets and looking at nature.

And that environment is pretty unique, I think. And it's where I grew up. And it was actually my father who got me into it when I was really young. And we used to spend, you know, every weekend we'd go somewhere to look for butterflies and insects. And I started a little insect collection. And it just all started from there. And I've always loved insects since then. That's really wonderful because, and I've, I feel like I've, uh, you know, in my experience with, uh, I've, you know, certain pieces of Japanese culture, I've seen that, that like bug catching is much more of a hobby, um, and, uh, much more of an interest. And that's such a wonderful thing to like take a closer look at the environment and

to, you know, because bugs are everywhere. We have bugs in the United States, but nobody was encouraging me, hey, like bugs are really cool. Like go, you know, categorize them, catch them, like learn about them. You know, we have dinosaurs, you know, et cetera, but that didn't have a relationship with bugs. And that's such a wonderful thing because, yeah, I mean, bugs are bugs are fascinating. I mean, I just I just nerded out with you about silkworms for like I got really excited about it. Yeah, it's it's it's amazing bugs.

I mean, they are really great. You can you don't really need that much to study bugs. You just need a little, you know, pot of, you know, just a, you know, flower pot outside of your window and there'll be insects, you know, and, you know, I think it's a great opportunity to look at the small things that are around us. And it's a, for me, it's kind of an opportunity to kind of meditate too and think about, you know, the world and this amazing world that's out there in terms of nature and the opportunity for people to go outside. I think right now we have an opportunity to go outside and look at organisms and animals

and nature and wildlife more. And I think we should take that advantage too. So how do you feel as someone who just studies insects, loves insects, right? I mean, what does this sort of large decline feel like for you? I mean, is this a horrifying prospect? Yeah, it's shocking. It's really surprising. So, you know, as I mentioned, I, you know, I'm Japanese and I go back to Japan every, pretty much every year. And, you know, when I was a child, I used to see certain insects, really abundant everywhere. And now, you know, you go back and you can't find them. And so you talk to some of the local, like, you know, entomologists and they don't know what happened either.

And these are things that were, you know, you just see hundreds of them everywhere and you can't find them anymore. And we don't really know exactly what the reason for that is, but it is very alarming. And I think having that kind of perception to see, you know, insects and watch them, you begin to really see these kinds of trends and you need to, I think it's important for people to, you know, try to see that. And it's something that's unique, I think. But it's, have you had trouble getting attention for this issue? I mean, I, again, I saw this study about a third of bird species decline, right? And I saw that headline and I was like, this is, this is apocalyptic. Like, this is not, oh, there's a warning light flashing. This is like the world that we live in is changing before our eyes in a way that was, you know, I grew up in the 90eties when, you know, we had so much media about the environmental apocalypse and you'd see like

the, the, the, the fast, you know, the flash forward to like what the future could look like if we don't protect nature, you know, and seeing my God, a third of bird species, not species, a third of birds are gone. Feels like that. That's like, okay, we're a third of the way to having no birds, right? We should all be panicked about that. This should be the biggest news story in the country. And yet, you know, it was on the front page of the Times for one day and that was about it. I could only imagine that with insects, it's even tougher to get attention. Yet this, you've convinced me this issue is

massive. It's massive. It's really massive. And we're just, like I said, at the tip of the iceberg. I mean, we don't really know what's happening in the tropics. You know, we know that there's lots of insects there and huge biodiversity there, but are they declining? Yeah, we think they are. And we see some trends that, you know, some data, but the data are so limited. So we really need more people just documenting. I mean, people, you know, we could just go outside and take pictures of insects and that would be very helpful. There are sources like iNaturalist where you can upload your photo. I use iNaturalist. That's a wonderful, wonderful app. You go take a picture. If you're on a walk in the woods, you're on a hike, or you've been in your city, you see an interesting plant or bug or bird, you take a picture of it with the app. And it's actually shockingly good at figuring out what species it is just from the picture. And then you upload it and you're a little citizen scientist. And it says, I saw a, I don't know, a wren or a palm tree or whatever. And it goes into a database of like where these species are. Exactly. That's, it's, it's really great. And a lot of scientists are

using these data now too. So you, you are, you know, you know, as an individual, you can contribute directly to these scientific studies that require, you know, that we need these data that, you know, about the organisms around us. So, you know, I think that's a great way to contribute. So what are the causes of this? I'm sure there's many. You talked about habitat destruction for this one particular species earlier. But when we're looking at such a wide scale decline, it seems like it must be something larger. Is climate change playing a role? What is it? Yeah. So I mentioned habitat declines, of course. And there's also another very important aspect is agriculture. So because human population growth is, you know, there's more people on the planet now than ever before, we require more food.

And because we require more food, we need more land to create the agriculture, the crops that we need. So that is contributing to, of course, habitat declines, but also to increased pesticide use and herbicide use. And so these toxins that are used to control pests are very strong. There are lots of very powerful chemicals that are being used and they end up going into the water systems and they get blown around to the nearby fields and so forth. around to the nearby fields and so forth. And more and more studies are now showing that the use of toxins and pesticides are especially problematic. So that's one thing. You mentioned climate change. And I think there have been some studies now that are showing that climate change definitely is an important factor. Of course, with climate change and changes, weather patterns, the temperature is going up. We can have greater water stress and things like this.

And when you think about insects, many of them are very restricted to particular habitats, right? So like, for example, on the tops of the mountains in Hawaii, on these volcanoes, there are some insects that only live there in the whole world. As temperature rises and the climate changes, those icebergs, those ice shields and things can disappear and those insects lose their habitat. And it's not just in Hawaii, it's all over the world. But these habitats that are very fragmented, that can become influenced by the impacts of climate change, like weather patterns and changes like drought and things like that, we think will have a huge impact on insects. So it's not really just one factor, but multiple factors caused by climate change, we think will lead to many of these problems that we see. What about like artificial light, right? Like when I walk around my city, there's so much light. I remember reading a study years ago about how like pure darkness is

like now endangered itself in the United States. You got to go out in the middle of Montana or something to get a perfect level of dark. There's a problem for astronomers because, you know, you go with a telescope, you can't see certain stars because there's so much, you know, artificial light around. And hey, when I see a light and there's bugs bumping into it, I'm like, hold on a second. This is messing with this bug's habitat in some way. I don't think this bug would in nature be bumping into a light over and over again. So yeah, how does that play a role? Yeah, definitely. Light is a big problem. Some countries are now changing their streetlights to shift the wavelength because we know that UV light, the spectrum goes from UV to infrared and UV light has a big

impact on insects. It attracts insects because they're positively phototaxic, meaning they're attracted to light sources. And so if you leave your light on your porch, if you're using a big, strong UV light or something like that, all these bugs will come to it and what happens is a lot of the bugs um they they'll fly around the light and uh they get exhausted uh and a lot of times they'll just sit there till the morning and the birds come and they all eat them or they just die of exhaustion um sometimes you know we actually think that they a lot of them become blinded by the sheer kind of strength of the light and they can't go anywhere. Yeah, blinded, literally blinded by the light. And so lights are a big problem. And it's something that we know is a factor, but there's been surprisingly few studies still on impact of anthropogenic light on insects.

But we know that insects are attracted to them. And the thing to do about this is really to turn your lights off. It's pretty simple. Use a different wavelength light or just turn your lights off if you can. You know, you look at cities and lots of storefronts and things, lots of excessive use of light and electricity. It is not necessary. But let me get a little pessimistic, if you don't mind. When I think about

issues like that, right? Man, light is just a thing that humans just want so much of, you know, and with, you know, LED lights that switch from incandescent lights to LED lights, you know, lighting got so much cheaper and the result is people put so many more lights out. And, you know, the amount of light, the amount of actual photons we're emitting has gone up and up and up. And the thing is, it makes people feel safer. You know, it makes, I remember, I'm just thinking about, hey, at my college campus, there was a movement to add more lights because people felt that, you know, the area, it was unsafe to walk around in the dark on this. And that was in the middle of upstate New York. You know, you can only think about, you know, in a

city or other places where, hey, that alley's, you know, dangerous. Okay, let's put a light up, right? So that people can see. It seems like a hard ask to ask humanity, hey, for the sake of the insects, let's have 25% less light. Let's have 30%. Let's have 50% less light. And so that to me is one of those things where it starts to feel like just humanity is coming into conflict with insects and we're not going to be able to, I'm not trying to be that pessimistic and say we can't do it, right? But it's just like, hey, light is part of human life, you know? And if light is bad for insects, that means humans are bad for insects in a broader way.

Yeah, I mean, I think we should think of it in terms of not just insects, too, right? I mean, it's the insects that are serving as prey, like food sources for all these other organisms that are around us. And if we start to really lose all these insects, something like 40% of all the species, that is going to have an incredible impact on all of wildlife. We just don't really think of insects. They are this invisible force that's out there that we just don't really think about. But they're really, really fundamentally important. And I think I would argue that we really can't let that happen. And there

are solutions. We can shift the wavelengths of light so they are further away from the UV spectrum. And if we do that, we can create, we still can have lights that are, you know, lighting up areas that just don't attract insects. Got it. Better lights. Better lights, yes. More efficient, better lights. That's right. Well, let's talk some more about those solutions right after we get back. We'll be right back with more Akito Kawahara. Okay, we're back with Akito Kawahara. Akito, so I want to ask, just because one of the ones that people have heard about the most is the decline in bees. That's gotten a lot of press.

And, you know, you've even seen, I saw a Kickstarter for a rooftop apiary I could put on my house to keep bees in. And it was part of the pitch was help support the bee population. You've heard so much about it and you can help out. And let me tell you, my girlfriend was not excited about the idea, so we didn't get it. She was not excited about the idea of keeping bees on the roof. But do we know, because I know for a long time these bee disappearances were a mystery. Do we have an idea now of why bees have declined so much? Well, so yes, to some degree.

So we talked a little bit about colony collapse disorder before. But for honeybees, so that's one of the big factors that's taken place recently. um so so with colony collapse disorder that's um you know a situation where a lot of the a huge number of the the colony uh it leaves the the hive and goes somewhere else and um essentially abandons the queen and maybe a few others uh in that space in that hive and so that the in that situation um all the workers go away so we don't have any workers left in the hive anymore. And so this has been shown to have some significant impact on declines of honeybees. And something like 10 million beehives were lost up to 2013 for about six years in that six-year period. And there's evidence that suggests that it's probably pesticides, pathogens potentially being transmitted by things like varroa mites,

possibly habitat loss and things like that. But pesticides seem to be one of the big impacts on colony collapse. And also bumblebees. I mean, we think of bees as being oftentimes honeybees, but the bumblebees are very important in terms of pollinators as well. And there's many species of bumblebees and they're declining pretty rapidly too. There's been some really neat studies that are using museum specimen data. So these, you know, like American Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, the Florida Museum here, we have historical records of all these insects that have been collected for hundreds of years, dating back to the 1700s and things like that. hundreds of years, dating back to the 1700s and things like that. And we can use that data to really understand how these bees and other insects are disappearing. And when you start to plot and

make those maps, and you look at where they were in the past and what's actually happening, you can model this and figure out approximately how much of it has actually disappeared. So yes, globally, bees are declining, both honeybees and bumblebees. But bumblebees are also very important because there's a lot of species that are potentially at risk right now. Now, why do you think that bees have gotten so much press in this issue? We've asked the person on the street, they've heard that bees are declining. They haven't heard about any other species you mentioned. Why is that? And how does that reflect our maybe cultural misunderstandings of insects? Well, I think a lot of people think, when they think of bees, they think of honeybees and they think of, you know, pollination in your yard. And, you know, you go outside and you see some flowers and you see flowers being pollinated by

these insects. But we should really think about the other insects that are there that are also pollinating. Flies are really important pollinators. Mosquitoes now we think are pollinators. Really? Yeah. So a colleague of mine who's here in Florida, he was recently looking at a mango tree and he was telling me that these mango trees are being, he thinks they're pollinated by mosquitoes because you go there at night and these flowers are just covered in mosquitoes. So we think of mosquitoes as these horrible insects that come and bite you. But they're only a small fraction of mosquitoes that actually vector disease and harm human beings.

There's a ton of other things that are happening. And mosquitoes are very important to the environment and possibly helping us pollinate as well. Okay, so hold on a second, because I might have a, we might be able to do a correction of my work here. Because we did on an episode of Adam Ruins Everything a couple of years ago. We did an episode on little bugs. It was the name of the episode, Adam Ruins Little Bugs. And we did a little mini segment in that based on some research and argument that we had seen that we could wipe out mosquitoes in order to prevent mosquito borne diseases. Right. That we could use various techniques to conduct mosquito genocide and that that would be fine because the mosquitoes played almost no other

environmental role or any benefit to us. And, you know, the diseases that they cause are like extremely debilitating, right? That, you know, malaria is one of the, you know, worst global diseases around. And so I just want to know, were we wrong about that in your view? Well, I think, I mean, at the time, you know, you know, we know that some mosquitoes can be problematic. And we, you know, there were some diseases like Zika and things like that, that were also a couple years ago, pretty, pretty serious here in the US and globally. So there is is concern of course, for those kinds of mosquitoes,

but you know, there's 3000 or more species of mosquitoes on the planet. And, uh, most of them are not harmful to human beings. Um, they're mosquitoes that feed on just like leeches and other organisms that are not, you know, vertebrates. And so I think, you know, we just need to think of that, you know, we're not just talking about one species of mosquito, but there's lots of insects out there that are doing important things. And just because it's a mosquito, it's not necessarily, you know, And just because it's a mosquito, it's not necessarily, you know, a bad animal or insect. Can I just say how much that answer like moved me?

Did it? Yeah. Just like your, again, just your passion for these things and how much you care about mosquitoes and how much you made me care about mosquitoes in that answer that like, yeah, just because it's a mosquito doesn't mean it's bad. Like, yeah, no, I have been too judgmental of mosquitoes. So Adam, did you know this? I have to tell you, can I just say something? This is really pretty, pretty interesting. There's actually some mosquitoes that we think feed on other mosquitoes too. They actually control the mosquitoes. So they're these big mosquitoes that, you know, that you can find in ponds and streams and stuff like that.

But they feed on, they're specialists on little mosquitoes. So they're actually a biocontrol agent for mosquitoes. I mean, it's amazing that what's happening. So we shouldn't just, I guess my point is that we shouldn't be just sort of discarding mosquitoes as these horrible things and use bug zappers and just kill them all. Like that kind of, I think, mentality is not really the right way to deal with the situation. Okay, well, consider that a correction for our segment.

And in the event that we're able to do so on television, we will, because I think, yeah, I think that's a good point. And I think that take that we put forward there, which, again, was based on that wasn't our original take. That was, you know, it was from other experts putting that forward that we were signal boosting. But it's it's glib at the very least. Right. And I think what you're giving me an appreciation for is that in nature, there's like almost an infinite amount of detail. You know, when we look at any species or any group of species, like when you get really close, they're definitely doing things

that you don't understand. And the interconnections between them are so nuanced. And, you know, the amount that is happening in any square centimeter of earth, like the number of species who are interacting there, a bunch of which are insects,

are doing things that we don't even understand and know about because it's like a fractal in terms of the closer you get, the more detail there is. Is that how you see it? Yeah, yeah, totally. And I think, yeah, completely. I think, you know, especially with kids, one of the things that we should do is bring kids out into nature and really show them this stuff. You know, there's these little things that are happening. They can look at them really up close and it's just fascinating, you know? And the thing is, if you want to make a contribution to science, you know, what you can do is become an entomologist. There's infinite things that we can discover. I mean, even in the United States,

there's estimates like 80,000 species of insects are undescribed in the United States alone. I mean, that's crazy. 80,000 species. I mean, you just go in your backyard and you'll find new species. That's what we're talking about. And that really is the case. I mean, so your contribution as a human being to this world of understanding the world around us, I think can be, you know, everybody can contribute. And I think kids are, you know, kids are innately interested in moving things. And there's actually a period of time between about six and 12 years old that kids will, you know, are extremely like the highest interest in the world, the natural world. And so, you know, in Japan, where I'm'm from we tried to encourage kids to go outside during that time period because they're gonna learn a lot and even if

they don't become entomologists just having a general understanding of the natural world into whatever profession they you know they they proceed my hand is really important you know and to understand that the world is is really complicated and about you know there's a balance between these different organisms and there's all this stuff happening, even at the microscopic and fascinating levels. Yeah, that innate fascination, I think of that all the time. I think of how interested I was in categorizing dinosaurs, for example. Kids love to do that. for example, like kids love to do that. And this reminds me of how I read that the creator of Pokemon was like a bug enthusiast as a kid. And that maybe had a similar experience to what you

were describing. I remember that story of, oh, catching bugs as a kid and learning about them and categorizing them. And that led him to create Pokemon, a video game and transmedia intellectual property series that is about catching and collecting and learning about those things. And look, I love Pokemon. I'm not going to say let's not do Pokemon. But, you know, if you've got a kid and you're like, oh, my kid loves learning about, you know, oh, this one has a fire attack and this one has a nice attack. Well, your kid is going to love, would love bugs in exactly the same way. Like that's tapping into the same thing that kids are naturally good at, uh, that the, the thing that their brains love to do. And you can just say, Hey, like, let's go, let's go catch some caterpillars and like, get a book about them and like, learn, learn what they eat and learn what special powers they have.

them and like learn, learn what they eat and learn what special powers they have. Totally, totally. And I think, yeah. And, and, you know, we talked about naturalists too, but you could, you know, they can be contributing directly. You know, you can, you can do things like, you know, contribute to science. You can create an insect collection. You can take pictures or you can organize them. I mean, once you start looking at them, you realize how many there are. If you have a little backyard, you know, you will attract, you'll see lots of different kinds of insects out there. And it becomes more and more interesting too, because you start to see rare ones. You know, you start to see things that are typically not there, for example. And then you want to know what they are. So you try to find out, you know, about that insect. And it's just sort of this amazing world that it opens doors in ways that, you know, you can't.

It's just hard to explain, but it's amazing. It's really, I think, important. Well, so that's a really great thing we can do to help make the next generation more aware of these issues. What what steps can we be taking going back to this apocalypse that we're talking about? What are the changes that we can make in order to slow or reverse it? And do you have hope that we can reverse it? Yeah, I think if people come together and we take action, I think, yes, it's possible to slow this down or even reverse the process. Clearly, a lot of this requires government level changes and things like that in terms of controlling pesticides and those kinds of things will definitely need to happen. But as people, I think we individually can do some basic things where we can contribute to helping the insect decline.

And so one thing we can do is if you have, you know, if you have a lawn, you know, we can convert that lawn, or at least a little bit of it, to a natural habitat. So I encourage people to try to convert maybe 10 or 20% of your space in your lawn into just a, you know, you just remove the lawn and just let it grow out, you know, just naturally. And if you can plant native species, if you can figure out what the native species are by looking online and getting information and planting those species, that's great. But all you have to do is really just remove a little bit of your lawn because lawns are essentially deserts. They don't help insects at all. And if you just got rid of some

of it, it will regrow and things will start to come in there. And you'll see a lot of amazing different kinds of insects and birds and everything coming back. You're blowing my mind because I've always thought of that as being like, yeah, it's kind of nice if you do, native species are nice. And hey, maybe drought resistant too is like, you know, being in California, use less water. But like, you're really talking about, hey, if we look at how much life and biodiversity is going to be in one, you know, square foot of ground, we're talking about like rewilding our own lawns, right? And like turning them back into, like you're replanting the rainforest essentially

for that one little square foot. And like, there's a ton of life that's gonna benefit just from that change. That's right. And you don't have to do anything. It becomes wilderness and you don't have to do anything. I mean, it's actually less work than having a lawn. You just, and you're contributing to these insects

and their survival and wildlife in general. And it's really important because we think about conservation. Lots of conservation efforts are focused on protecting large parks and things like that. But we need these stepping zones. These little habitats are necessary for organisms to disperse. And even your little several square foot of converted lawn space can function in that way. And even your little several square foot of, you know, converted lawn space can function in that way. And if we all contributed a little bit of our lawn to something like this, we would essentially be able to, you know, re-naturalize our environment and it would be great for this problem. Are there any examples where, you know, insect populations have been

brought back from the brink at all or, you know, where you've seen, hey, here's one story we can look at to take some hope and some success from? Yeah, so there's been some work in Germany now kind of pushing forward this idea of converting lawns and bringing back natural population, wildlife or plants. And they've already seen some of these changes taking place. So it's still pretty young. We've just started to do these kinds of efforts, but it's very promising. And yeah, I'm convinced that it will work if we all do it and we just need to do it. And I think like there are other things too, like we don't want to be using pesticides in your yards.

You know, things like limiting the light outdoors. Don't put a bug zapper outside of your house. You know, those bug zappers are not really killing mosquitoes. They're killing all kinds of other insects that are attracted to that UV light. You know, and even when you wash your car, you know, don't really, it's better not to wash your car in your driveway where a lot of these soaps and things will just go right into the ground. We should be thinking about, you know, biodegradable soaps and different kinds of things like, you know, even driveway sealants are also problematic too. We know that there's lots of toxins and things that go into, you know,

into the runoff and can cause problems. So I think just being conscious of these kinds of things in terms of what we can actually do will, you know, if we all do it together, we can have a big impact on the world. So let me just ask you about these lights. Like I have, you know, at my house, we put our outside lights in a timer, right? Because it honestly, because the way our street is organized makes the street a little bit, feel a little bit safer for everybody. But I have this concern now that, you know, are these lights detrimental to bug health? And I don't know what kind of lights they are.

They're whatever came with the house, you know, they're probably LED lights, right? Like LED lights from Home Depot. And there's only a couple of them. There's like three of these. They're not super bright. They're not floodlights. They're just like, you know, like little lights along the walkway or something. But should I replace these lights? And if so, with what? Yes. yes i don't mean turn this into adam's home improvement that's okay um i mean i think yes we should definitely um try to you know one thing we could do is put them on timers um you did mention that earlier um using uh frequencies of light like towards the infrared so a little further away from uv so uv spectra the uv range is very um problematic for insects different Many, many different insects are attracted to that area of light. So we want to move away from that. And so generally, lower, dimmer lights are better. So if we can get LED lights that are dimmer, if you can use

those, that would be much better, better towards the infrared spectrum. Is that a type of light I can buy? Yes, you can buy some of these lights now for this purpose. What do I look for? So you want to look at the light spectrum, the wavelength. So the wavelength should be, you know, kind of, yeah, around 700. If you can go closer to 700 nanometers, that's, that's better. Got it. And, uh, what do you say to folks who are,

you probably get this question all the time, but I'd like to know how you approach it. Folks are like, ah, bugs are gross. I don't like them. I don't care about this. I have trouble relating to them. Right. Uh, do you have, uh, do you have anything to say to those folks? Bugs rule the world. I mean, there's, you know, I would say that there are bugs everywhere, right? There's bugs everywhere you look. And they're really amazing. I mean, when you stop and look at them, they just, they're incredible. You know, like, they're gonna, you know, just, I mean, for example, like fireflies. When we example like fireflies when we think of fireflies uh we we think of the lights in the summertime they're beautiful but we we now know that these

fireflies a lot of them um use their flashes to attract other species and and they so so the females um of some species can mimic the flashing lights of other species, females to attract males of that other species. And what they do is they call these males of other species that are not related to theirs. And the males think it's their, um, uh, a mate, right? And so they fly to that female and then the female eats it. So, so fireflies are, um, they're predators, you know, they eat other insects, but they, they actually eat a lot of other fireflies.

And they can switch their light. They can actually switch their light between their light flashing pattern to attract these other species to get food. They're doing a false flag mimicry in order to draw their enemies and destroy them? Or eat them to eat their food? Totally, totally. Yeah. Wow. Another thing, something that we do in some of the research that I

do with one of my colleagues, Jesse Barber at Boise State University, we study moth-bat interactions. Bats are flying around at night, you know, and they rely on moths for food. And what we now know is that moths have these hearing organs. Over like 80,000 species of moths have hearing organs, and lots of other insects also have them. And they can hear high-frequency sounds that, you know, the echolocation calls that these bats are producing. And the moths have figured

out ways to jam the sonar. So they basically can hear the sound of the bat when it's flying around, so the bat is coming to attack the moth and the moth will just send out this really loud noise and the bat can't, it messes up their radar. So they can't actually figure out where the moth is. And some moths actually are toxic too. Sorry, I can go on and on. No, no, no. Please go on and on and on. This stuff is amazing.

Yes. There's some moths that are toxic. So they eat some toxic plants as a caterpillar and they keep the toxins inside their body. And when they become adults, they use that to tell their predators like bats. But the thing is, because it's dark outside at night, they can't use colors like monarch butterflies that are toxic, right? That need to feed on milkweed. So instead of using colors, they use sound. So they actually tell their predators, these bats, that they're chemically defended by making a certain click in the sky.

So there's all the sounds that are happening at night and we can't hear it because we can only hear low frequency sounds. But if you have a bat detector at night in your backyard, I mean, it's so loud. And it's because these bugs are talking to the predators, the bugs are talking to each other, et cetera. And then there's all this kind of interesting mimicry and stuff that's happening where some insects are warning their predators, don't eat me because I'm chemically defended. You're blowing my mind every 30 seconds because, I mean, yeah, that kind of makes sense because, yeah, like in a predator-prey relationship where the predator is like looking for the prey, the prey will do things visually, like take active defenses visually. They'll like mimic another, you know, another species or they'll hide or they'll camouflage or, or things like that. Um, or they'll make themselves look

scary, right? They'll like operate on the visual dimension. So obviously if bats are navigating using sonar, their prey would respond using sound and would like have like sonic defenses. I never thought of that before. These are like sonic defenses that the, that the prey are coming up with, that the insects are coming up with. Right, right. And the sonic, I mean, this is just, you know, we really don't know much about this, but you know, these, the, the, one of the moths that are insects that I really that I really like is a hawk moth. And these are big, you know, big moths. And they produce sounds using their genitalia.

So they stridulate their genitals. I can do that too. I can do that too. I mean, it doesn't sound like what you think, but I can do it. Go ahead. Just wanted to toss it in there. Go ahead. Yeah, Yeah. So, so the, the males of these moths, um, strigilate their genitals really quickly in, in flight. So

they're flying, you know, like five meters a second or something, some real fast speed. But when they hear the sound of a bat coming, they just strigilate their genitals and it just goes crazy. And the bats, um, essentially jams the sonar of the bats and they can't actually locate the moth. Wow. That is incredibly cool. Do you have, okay, we're, we got to wrap up at some point, but I got to hear, do you just give me one more? You got one more cool insect, insect story like that? Cause someone put you on TV and give you a show about this stuff, because this is, this is some of the best, this is some of the best experting I've heard in a while. Give me a little more. So I guess another one is that there's this, there's a really interesting beetle that was

recently discovered from the Amazon and it's called a long, it's a longhorn beetle. And we have longhorn beetles, you know, in the United States too, but this longhorn beetle is really spectacular because it has a venom glands on the tip of their antennae. So they're like essentially And we have longhorn beetles in the United States too. But this longhorn beetle is really spectacular because it has venom glands on the tip of their antennae. So they're like essentially scorpions. And you can actually get stabbed by this thing. But they have two of them. These are big, right?

These are big insects, right? And they have these stabbed, these antennae, and they can impale predators using their antennae. Man. impale predators using their antennae. Man, so thank you for giving us an appreciation of how amazing these insects are. And it definitely makes me more concerned that we're losing so many. How do you approach trying to get people excited about this issue, right? Trying to make this as exciting as honeybees or even as birds to people. Do you have hope that we're going to make that change?

And how can folks at home be a part of it to take us home? Yes, I would say go outside, like go to the yard. Just look in your backyard or look in the windowsill plants that grow outside and start looking carefully at what's there. And every day you'll see change of different things coming and going and try to understand what's out there, show other people, take pictures of them, post them on social media. All of these things are good things that I think that can contribute to this whole process. Yeah.

Akito, thank you so much for being here. This has been an incredibly fascinating conversation and I have so much more passion for insects now. I'm sure our listeners do too. And thank you for sharing it with us. Yeah. Let's save insects. Let's do it, man. Well, I hope you liked that conversation as much as I did. I am so jazzed about insects now, and I hope that you are too.

Thank you, Akito Kawahara, again, for coming on the show to talk to us about it. That is it for us this week on Factually. I want to thank our producer, Dana Wickens, our engineers, Brett Morris and Ryan Connor, our researcher, Sam Roudman, and your WK for our theme song. Hey, you can find me online at adamconover.net. Sign up for my mailing list, follow me wherever you follow people at Adam Conover, and we'll see you next week on Factually. Thank you so much for listening. That was a HateGum Podcast.