Good Job, Brain! - 59: Creepy Crawlies

Episode Date: April 23, 2013

Bllyyeeechhh....we celebrate the slimey, slithery, and creepy creatures of our world! Crunchy facts about crime-solving bugs, deceptively cute snails, and the guinea worm. Learn the right first aid steps of how to remove a bug stuck inside your ear. And when life gives you toads, you make "toad sausages." ALSO: a quiz about the master of creep - Stephen King, and a sssssssssspecial dedication. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Hello, alluring allegiance of allies, allowing alliterations about alligators. Welcome to Good Job, Brain, your weekly quiz show and offbeat trivia podcast. This is episode 59. And of course, I am your humble. host, Karen, and we are your triad of trivia tricksters who treasure triceratops and triscaphobia.

I'm Colin. I'm Dana. And no, Chris. Hence, I said triad. Chris is on vacation in Japan. So hopefully... Does Chris like Japan? Oh, I think so. Okay. Yeah, I wasn't aware of that. We miss him dearly, and

we can't wait until he comes back. And without further ado, let's jump into our first general trivia segment, pop quiz, hot shot. And here I have a random trivial pursuit card, and you guys have your barnyard buzzers, and let's do this. Let's answer some questions. Yeah.

All right. Here we go. Blue Wedge for Geography. What country are you in if you're called an April Gock after falling for an April Fool's Day joke? And that's spelled G-O-W-K. An April G-G-G-G-G-R-G-A. April gock. Huh.

I'll guess Australia? Incorrect. New Zealand? Incorrect. It is Scotland. April Gawk. April Gock. All right.

Pink Wedge for pop culture. What Gilligan's Island character also goes by the name Jonas Grumby? That is the Skipper. Skipper. Yes. I think it's only mentioned in the pilot or the very first episode. Oh. They do mention it.

Yeah. And Yellow Wedge, here we go. What cable TV show follows the exploits of Henry the 8th? The Tudors? Yes, the Tudors. Pretty steamy. Purple Wedge. What author coined the Dollar Baby Deal letting student filmmakers adapt his short stories for $1?

Stephen King. Correct. Stephen King, which is actually a really smart. That is a lot. I didn't know that. That's a really nice thing to do, too. Yeah. For $1.

All right. Green Wedge for science. What aquatic animal can literally spill its guts when frightened? Oh, my God, your eyes. I'm like it's liver and lungs come out. Oh, man. Sea turtle. I'm just kidding.

Is it a squid? Or, I mean, is a squid or octopus? Incorrect. It is actually a sea cucumber. Ew. Ew. Ew. Ew.

The purpose of the purge is a mystery, but the organs do not regenerate. Huh. Yeah. Did they just kill themselves? Do they die? It's like a one-time last-ditch effort. To what end? To what end?

All right. Orange wedge. Last question. Oh, God, this is good. A silhouette of what player is pictured in the NBA logo. I thought it was just a generic dude. Oh, no. This is a great one.

Yes. That is, of course, Jerry West. Wow. Yes. Yes. He was just an iconic player at the time they came up with the logo. I wonder if they paid him. I don't think they did.

I don't think that he got paid. I don't think it was enough of an honor to be the logo. In fact, one of his nicknames is the logo even. Really? Yeah. And it's, you know, it's well known among the players, yeah, that he is the basis for the logo. I thought it was just a normal dude.

Now I'm curious about all the other sport logos, like if they're based on real players, too. I think they're all meant to be generic, actually. Oh, okay. Yeah. That's the only one that that's based on a recognizable or known. to be based on recognizable person. Oh, cool. All right.

Good job, Brains. So, I first want to say that I want to dedicate this episode to a special someone, more like someone. In addition to the intense and emotional roller coaster of events in Boston this past week, something else happened that I thought deserved a little bit of TLC from us. Good job, Brain. In the Connecticut town of Shelton, there's a library, the Huntington Branch Library, and they had a resident pet slash mascot snake, a corn snake, and her name is Peaches. Very cute, and Peaches is a local celebrity and a hit with all the kids who come to the library,

and she's been living in her tank at the library for like eight years. So a few weeks ago, some anonymous jerkface one night intentionally poured heavy-duty cleaning solvent went onto Peaches and into her tank. And sadly, Peaches, the snake, died. And not only is the library staff saddened by this loss, but a lot of the kids are just heartbroken because it's sad by this. I know. That's terrible.

It's so sad. But it sounds like Peaches had a great life at the library, and she was surrounded by people who loved her every day. And we actually sent the library a condolence card for Peaches. And if you like to, too, too, I'll put up. the library's address in the blog post on the website, so maybe you can send something nice to honor Peaches. And in memory of Peaches, we thought it'd be fun to do an episode on the slithering and swarming

and slimy, wonderful creatures of our world. So this week, we're talking about creepy crawlies. Okay, well, this is, I would say, a less heartwarming story about a slimy or slithery creature in the news. In Florida, they've had an outbreak of giant African snails. Oh, I saw that in the news. They're huge. Oh, I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. By snail standards.

Yeah, yeah. It's like you can hold in your hand. They can get up to around eight and a half inches long. They're, call them rat-sized. Oh. I saw a video of someone giving one a bath and I was thinking

Why would you give a snail a bath? Because you can. It looked like it was enjoying it. This sounds like the first half of a laughy-tappy joke is why did you give a snail a bath? Oh, what's the answer? I don't know, Dana, you're the best at these, yeah. I was feeling sluggish?

Yeah, I don't know. Oh! I saw this news story on CNN posed in a very formal matter about like, oh, the snail invasion. And of course, the first comment that this new story got. I thought it was like a serious comment at first.

And he said, I heard these snails are even big enough to drive a car. One particularly fast vehicle was festooned with the letter S. All the police could say was, look at that S Cargo. And I lost it. I know it's an old joke. Yeah, womp, womp. But it's on CNN.

Bravo, bravo. Good job. So I don't think. they can drive a car, but they can eat houses. They eat stucco. They're eating the stucco. They're looking for calcium to make their shells bigger. It helps them get bigger. They can eat like little bones and rocks. So they're a big problem. How did they get here? Do they just get here somehow? Or are they an invasive species? They're an invasive species. They're actually all over the world. There's outbreaks of these snails all over the world in kind of tropical or humid climate.

There was an outbreak of African snails in Florida in 1966 that they were able to eradicate. And those came when a little boy went to Hawaii and came back with snails in his pocket as pets. And his grandmother released them into the backyard. And they had a really big problem. It took them about 10 years to get rid of them in Florida. It cost a million dollars in 1960s money. That one boy. There was an outfit and outbreak in Bangalore, India, where the university was using the snails for some scientific research.

and then people let them go for compassionate reasons and they've overrun the forest outside of Mangalore and if it got into like the more inhabited areas it would be a really big problem because they eat a lot of things and Barbados Barbados is overrun with them their shells are all over the highway

they can puncture tires I don't like snails are they faster like does their speed scale up no so the thing with these snails is apparently they are adorable like they're so big and they have cute little faces like the person giving it a bath It kind of was cute in the water.

And I think it uses its trickery to get, to get, but it's good looks. These things are hermaphroditic, so they can, they have both male and female reproductive organs. And so in a small colony, they can impregnate themselves. They don't need other snails in order to. Hey, when times are tough. Yeah. You do what you got to do. They can live up to 10 years. Every time they lay a sack of eggs, it could have up to 1,200 eggs.

I'm just imagining like opening, like go at the front door and there's just a swarm of 10-inch-long snails coming at you. Yeah, a really slow, slimy, shelled wave. And then one more thing I found out about these snails. In World War II, the American military actually imported them to the South Pacific Islands and to use them as an emergency food source for soldiers. I mean, they're huge. Probably high in protein, I guess.

They eat a lot of things. You don't really need to. worried about that. They're easy to catch. Yeah. You don't expend a lot of energy hunting them down. No, no, they escaped. The snails escaped and got loose on the island. They were starting to really interfere with the flora on the island. And so they were like, okay, we will import these carnivorous Floridian snails. There's snails from Florida, ironically, that eat other snails. And so they imported them to the island. And instead of attacking the giant snails, they attacked all the like all the local snails on that island and almost made all the snails become

extinct oh my god it's like short-term solution right they also had they hadn't perfected the targeted snail attack and they're dangerous too because these giant african land snails they have rat lung disease which is like which causes meningitis and humans yeah nobody in the u.s has gotten it yet but yeah the snails are cute your face oh yeah i'm just so you can could get it from handling them. There's a low probability. Oh, I can tell you, there's zero probability that I'm going to handle them, Dana. I'm not worried about that. I can guarantee that. People do use the snails for food in different parts of the world. And that's, you can definitely get meningitis if you ate it an infectious snail. You can get salmonella from handling. Oh, my God. Noted.

Yeah. Oh, my God. Well, so I actually did research on another type of invasive species. And you may recall, we kind of talked about this in our plants, our weird episode. Colony talked about the Cogun grass. Oh, yeah, blood grass. Blood grass, which I lovingly call it the Aho grass. Is an example of invasive species, and it's pretty scary. Plants and animals, you know, like Dana said, that kind of just take over and breed and grow nonstop to a point where it becomes dangerous or a huge threat to the local ecology. They kill off plants.

They kill off other animals. So I want to introduce to you another specific invasive species called the cane toad. And like the snail, it's pretty cute, too. It's like the classic toad, like what you think of toad in your head. It's like brown and it's stocky and it's a lambie. Yeah, but adorable in a weird way. And it's native to Central and South America. And they are prolific eaters and prolific breeders.

And they're actually quite useful to some countries and cultures because, they can be used as agricultural pest controls because they eat a lot of bugs or pests. Sure, sure. Here's problem number one. Many people thought, oh, rad, hey, this toad is so effective against crops, we should bring them over to our territory and have the toad ER pests. And cane toads were introduced to a lot of island nations, Puerto Rico, also to Florida, even to Australia, as a way to protect crops, specifically sugar cane crops.

Hence cane toads because they would eat cane beetles that would infect sugar cane crops. But not all of these pest control experiment introductions were successful. It failed in Australia because the beetles, they're pretty smart. They actually hang out high up on the sugar cane. And these toads are like sucky climbers. And so the toads didn't really contribute at all to the actual pest control. And so you just have a bunch of kind of useless things. foreign toads hanging out, eating, and having sex and breeding in Australia, just chilling.

Lay about, lay about toads. Not earning their keep at all. No, not at all. And here's problem number two. Cain toads are poisonous. Their skin is toxic, and they have several glands that would secrete poison when they're threatened. And they are killing off other animals in the area they live in. When they eat them?

or when they try to eat them. Yeah, when the other animals eat them or are in contact and they get sprayed or ingest the poison. And these animals are now dying off. And this is a huge problem in Australia. And the toads just keep churning out more poison babies. And scientists and ecologists in Australia were scrounging for solutions, which all led to this bizarre headline.

Sausage solution to Australia's cane toad invasion. Uh-oh. So the scientists in Australia, instead of focusing on destroying the toads, they're focused on training the other animals not to eat the cane toads. So what they did was, it would blend up cane toad meat without the toxin, just the meat, laced it with like a mild nausea-inducing compound, and they would extrude the mixture and make sausages. Like they actually used just a normal sausage machine.

To sort of what, train them against, to wean them off the taste of toad meat. Yep. So, so that. Sweet, sweet toad meat. They would scatter these sausages like out in the wild. And animals who smell the toad meat will then eat the sausage. They'll throw up or get sick and quickly train themselves thinking, you know what? I'm going to stay away from toad meat.

Obviously, the sausage solution is not very scalable. You know, I mean, this works for maybe a smaller region, but you know, you can't do it for like a whole kind of. countries or whatever. And one of the researchers said, it would be impossible to put bates out right across the country. I can tell from blending up dead toads in a sausage maker, it's a lot of work. I can picture that. Like, what is my life? What am I doing? I got a PhD for this. I'm a ranger, but here I am. Sitting in front of a sausage maker. So there you go. A very creative way, I would say, to try to stop the cane toad invasion. Very creative, but very, very strange.

I am sure that we have more than one listener out there right now wondering, I wonder what cane toad sausage tastes like. Oh, chicken. Chicken apple sausage. Well, I've got a segment here for you guys that I have entitled, What's that buzzing sound? And this segment is about one of my personal, just creepy, crawly nightmares, which is bugs in your ears.

Like just as a kid, I don't know if it's rational or irrational, but I just like, that was the thing that just always sent shivers down my spine, more than anything, a snake, spiders, whatever, just the idea of a bug getting inside my ear and flitting around. It just makes me squirm right now. I've been talking about it. Or just like when you hear mosquito, you're like, ah, yeah, yeah. Hear about people with cockroaches in their ears.

Yes. Once I came to the hostel and I looked on my pillow and there's a worm on the pillow. I couldn't go to sleep that night. Yeah, so let's get some of the urban legends around us out of the way first. We've heard these stories of bugs, whatever, type crawling and eating people's brains or laying eggs inside your head. All right, none of those are true.

What? They don't crawl in. They're not going to crawl in and eat your brain. Bugs do not crawl in and lay eggs inside your skull. My brain is so delicious. But my brain's so tasty. These are not true. These are not true.

Good. Now, what is true is that bugs will crawl inside your ears sometimes. And Dana, as you said, there have been stories in the news of kids waking up with a cockroach that had crawled inside their ear over the night. Or it just drives me crazy thinking about it. Recently, I remember not recently, but maybe last year, some woman in China had a spider crawl into her ear. Sure. And it got stuck. Yeah.

And that's the thing. They get stuck in there. This does. They do. They crawl in more often than not. they, when you hear about it, it's because they got stuck in there. They're not doing it to attack your brain. They're not doing it to lay eggs.

They're doing it because they're just dumb bugs, really. Like, it's, I mean, the entomologists, they really say, like, the reason that a bug would crawl inside your ear is it's just looking for warmth, maybe looking for moisture, and it just gets stuck. It gets in there. It's like, okay, well, maybe it's nice and warm for a while. When it comes time to leave, they can't always find their way out. A lot of twists and turns inside there.

We've all seen that cutaway view. Dave a Bowie in my ear. So I've just, I've got some great anecdotes here. Historical anecdotes of bugs in people's ears that have, that, and this is my way of facing my fear, okay? With humor. I'm confronting it, you know, head on or ear on at least, right, right. One of the first stories I heard about this, I remember this was a long time ago was, you know, David Letterman. He, you know, he's notorious actually being a speeder.

He loves to drive fast. One of the stories when he was pulled over speeding, this was years ago, he was driving late at night, he pulls him over, pulls him over, pulls out the window, may I'm not recognize him, right away, but ultimately as Mr. Letterman was going on, and he's like, officer, I'm sorry, I've got a moth stuck in my ear. And what had happened was he was at home and moth flying around his head and it either flew in there just being a dumb moth or he may have knocked it inside his ear, but it got in the ear and crawled a little bit further in. And then you can hear the moth flying around in there, flapping around. And if you can imagine, you can't get it

out yourself. So he gets in the car and speeds off to the hospital. That's Karen's fearbug. Yeah. She's red. I had the advantage of preparing this segment. It's the flapping gross. Yeah, it is, it is. This was just a couple years ago. There's a player for the St. Louis Cardinals, the baseball player named Matt Holliday. There's footage of this because it happened during a game.

He was out and out field, and a moth flew in his ear while he's just out in the field. And the footage, you sort of see him at first, like, kind of like, what's going on, you know? And then he has to come out of the game. I mean, he has to come out of the game eventually. They take him into the trainer's room. And, like, if this happened to you, what would be the first thing that you would try? to get a moth out of your ears. You know, that seems like the first thing I would try, too, is just reaching

in there and pull out with tweezers. They darkened the room and held a light up next to his ear. It's pretty smart. I don't know. That's pretty smart. It's either really smart or really naive, but suffice it to say it didn't work. He's stuck. Yeah, right.

It's stuck. Lord him out with food. No, light, no. The light didn't work. It would be funny if they set his head on fire. Yeah. They had to pull it out with a pair of tweezers. Yeah.

So he's fine now. I will pee in my pants. You're like, just knock me out. This is why everybody, you should listen to podcasts and music at all times and have earphones in your ears to prevent this. This is our mission. Good job, my mission. It's a public health issue.

And therefore moths will not fly into your ear. They lost that game, by the way. Unfortunately. Yeah. It was a little distracting. It was unfortunate. Yeah. So, but this, this anecdote of, what's that?

I think this one just tops them all. And this one, it just, there's so many steps that with this story becomes cringeworthy. I want to talk to you about a man named John Hanning Speak, S-P-E-K-E. And he was a British explorer, did a lot of exploring around Africa in the 1800s, mainly. One of the things that he was really keen on finding was the source of the Nile. And so on one of his expedition trips in Africa, he's out camping one night and notices just tons of these little beetles all over his tent. Oh, Indiana Jones. Crawling, driving him crazy.

Right. You know, tiny, tiny little beetles. One of the beetles ended up crawling inside his ear, flitting around and driving him just bananas. And he's like, I got to get this beetle out of my ear, which would probably be my reaction, too. He kind of panicked a little bit. Now, you know, we said, like, the first thing I might try is maybe some tweezers, maybe get someone else to look in there. Oh, you know what? Before you continue your story, other than tweezers, the thing is it's alive and it's moving.

So I don't want to tweez that because maybe. Maybe they'll pull away or whatever. I think what I would do, and this is I'm not a first aid expert, I would put water in my ear to hope to drown the bug and then have a flow out. That's actually not a bad idea. And that is what some people have tried in cases. Like people tried like mineral oils or water to try and get it out. Yeah. He, for whatever reason, he thought melted butter might be the best thing to pour in there.

I guess maybe it was the only oil he had access to. So he poured some melted butter in his ear. did not get the beetle out. So then he started jabbing at it, basically. He had like a little pocket knife. No, no, no, no. So he's trying to poke at it and dig it out and or kill it. So he eventually kills the beetle inside his ear.

And as you say, Karen, the problem is like, oh, wait, now it's dead. Now this thing isn't going to help me come out at all. So he's got a dead beetle inside his ear. And butter. Right, and butter. And he, you know, is stabbing. So it got infected. Things turned really bad for him from here.

It got infected and started swelling up on the inside of his head. His face got distorted. He had boils. It made him nearly deaf for like several months because of just the pressure, you know, on his ear passages in there. He couldn't hear driving crazy. It actually the infection, this gets really gross, guys. I'm sorry. The infection ate a hole between his ear and his nose because, you know, they are sort of connected back there.

And it led to this horrifying slash hilarious anecdote from his journals that I will read to you. here. Okay. So this is quoting from his journals talking about the infection, or the tumor, as he refers to it. For many months, the tumor made me almost deaf and ate a hole between the ear and the nose so that when I blew it, my ear whistled so audibly that those who heard it laugh. Six or seven months after this accident happened, bits of the beetle, a leg, a wing, or parts of the body, came away in the wax. So it did find its way out eventually, but that is absolutely the most horrifying. That is my nightmare town scenario. There's a bug crawling in there and it dying in there. I looked it up. So what are you supposed to do if this happened? But here are the right

steps. Sure. So first, you lie down on a flat surface with the bug infest you're facing up. Oh, really? Yeah. So that you're comfortable. Right. The next step is to drape the patient with several white or light colored absorbent towels. The light color of the draping will make spotting the insect much easier after the removal process. Then you slowly fill the ear with baby oil, mineral oil, or vegetable oil, or even olive oil.

And this will kill the insect, causing it to stop moving. And then what happens is then you just keep flushing your ear with tepid water to try to like flush the bug out. Wow. I'm curious that nobody wanted to help that guy. I guess not because they laugh when his life.

All right, I'm going to go lie down now. Get my heart rate back to normal. All right, this is a good time. We're going to take a break and a word from our sponsor. Steve Cubine and Man McNamara's podcast from Beneath the Hollywood Sign. Mary Astor has been keeping a diary. Mary writes everything down. And so this torrid affair with George S. Kaufman is chronicled on a daily basis.

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You're so very special. I'll have that special. but I'm a creep I'm a widow What the heck am I doing here? I don't belong here I'm a creep I'm a nut job

So this is not necessarily Crawley but it's definitely creepy I have a quiz for you guys About Stephen King, The Master of Horror 56 novels, 5 books 13 collections, 2 comics, a script. He's influenced a lot of horror and sci-fi writers. Super creep, super creep, super creepy. Nice. So for this quiz, I'm going to see how well you guys know his body of work. So I will give you

some clues about the novel that I'm talking about or the story that I'm talking about. And I'll start really general, kind of obscure, and then I'll get more specific. As we go along? As we go along. Got it. And so a special rule I want to try is you can buzz in it. answer but you can't you can't enter two times in a row so you have to wait till the other person oh okay we'll take turns yeah but we can buzz in as soon as we think we know the answer yes okay okay okay number one this was stephen king's first published novel one of the column was it carry yes oh what are the other clues it was one of the most frequently banned books in u.s schools there's a new theatrical adaptation coming out this year oh yeah with um

Chloe, Morentz, and Julian Moore. Yeah. And it tells the story of a high school girl with telekinetic powers who uses them to exact revenge on the people who tease her. That was his first published word. I know. Man, it's at the bar high. I know.

This was Stephen King's second novel. It was originally titled Second Coming. It's about a town where all the residents become vampires. Oh. This is the... Dead Zone? No. And the name is a shorter version of Jerusalem's Lot. Karen. No, it's not. I was going to say Pet Cemetery, which is not. You're going to be so mad. What? Salem's Lot. Oh. I didn't know that Salem's Lot was short for Jerusalem's Lot. I did not know that. I did not

know that. Oh, Jerusalem. Salem. I don't think I ever noticed that. All right. The title for this novel was inspired by John Lennon's song Instant Karma. It was adapted into a TV miniseries in 1997. Oh. Is that it? No. Keep going. Before that, it was a movie directed by Stanley Kubrick.

Inspired by a stay at Colorado's Stanley Hotel during the off-season. Is this the wish, dream, wish, dream. and taker wish? No. No. It's The Shining. I didn't know what took its name was an inspiration, or that was inspired by John Lennyson. Yeah, there's a line in there about Shining On.

Yeah, we'll all shine on. Interesting. That's a good one. All right. This novel was published in 1981. The name of the novel is based on the nom de garre of Willie Wolf, one of the men responsible for orchestrating the kidnap of Patty Hurst. A bat bites the main character on the nose.

Yeah, I thought so. I was going to buzz in one question earlier. That's a Kujo. Yes. Yes. Oh, isn't Kujo about the dog? Yeah. You know what kind of dog?

Is it a Mastiff? I think he says St. Bernard. St. Bernard. Oh, no. Yeah. This novel was adapted into a movie the same year it was released as a novel. Karen. The Green Mile.

This is not the one I'm thinking of. It's possible. Is it misery? Nope. It was after it was a big name. Karen. Christine. Yes.

Oh, wow. The killer car, right? Good job. The titular character is not usually an animate object. The titular character is a 1958 Plymouth Fury. Oh, a Plymouth Fury. Oh, clever. All right, last one.

Stephen King actually put away this novel and he didn't want to release it, but he submitted it to Double Day when he needed another novel for his contract. Oh. It must be. So it must be a big. hit one of the words in the title is misspelled on purpose but it's a misspelled word oh is that pet cemetery yes yes it's a pet cemetery good job you guys that's good oh master of the creep do you guys know what spontaneous generation is oh no is that

like when you cut a worm in half and both halves grow back um close kind of it's it's a theory according to this theory um living things come forth from non-living things. It's a very old school way of thinking. Like maggots come from meat. Yeah, right, right. Exactly. This even dates back to like the Greek philosophers. Aristotle talked about

a lot and the theory is that there are different elements in the world. There's air, there's water and through different combinations of that life can be generated. It's funny to sit here and be like, wow, they're really dumb. But this is like centuries and centuries of people

without the right technology or tools to find out about cells. They were putting forth a theory, and their observations held up that theory as best as they could. And it's not that bad. Except would you ever want to eat meat if you really thought that it could become flies with air? From the days of Aristotle, spontaneous generation is discussed as a fact in literature well into the Renaissance. Even Shakespeare, he discusses snakes and crocodiles and other creepy crawlies forming from the mud. And it kind of made sense because the observation is, oh, well, all these crocodiles are living in the river, hang out of the mud. They must therefore come from mud.

In 1668, Italian physician Francesco Reddy disprove the theory of spontaneous generation. And what he did was pretty basic. Popular claim or the popular example is, yes, there's meat and maggots come. out from the meat. And so what he did was he had samples of rotting meat that some were fully exposed to the air, some were partially exposed, and some of the meat was not exposed to air at all, like in a container of some sort. Obviously, the meat that was exposed to air had maggots and flies, and the meat that was enclosed did not. This discovery completely changed the way people viewed decomposition of organisms. He didn't know it at the time, but Francesco Reddy really is.

is kind of the founding father of what we call forensic entomology. And forensic entomology is application and study of insects and other bugs and arthropods to criminal and legal matters. Thanks to his maggot meat experiment. And now it is a scientific way for experts to determine the time of death of bodies and crimes. We've seen it on the TV cop shows, you know. It's like, well, based on the level of. magazine decomposition time of death was 18 hours ago.

Yeah. And the concept of forensic entomology kind of dates back a while ago, but it was within the last 30 years that it has become a certified kind of a system to explore feasible sources for evidence in investigations and whatnot just from bugs. Here's another way that bugs help criminal matters. There's a certain type of beetle, and they're flesh-eating beetles. Forensic labs would use these bugs to help them. clean skeletons. Oh yeah, right, right. I've heard about this. On bones. I've seen it on the TV

show bones. Oh, really? And it happens on bones. You release these beetles and they can eat all the meat, all the hide, all the skin, and leave a pristine skeleton. And this is actually really helpful because the other way, the old way is they would use a lot of harsh chemicals. Right. And that might deteriorate the surface of the bone. Well, these beetles are getting the job done. I'm like those lazy-ass cane toads. The Natural History Museum in London a while ago, they had a flesh-eating bug cam, and you can see the bugs. But the thing is, you have to keep them enclosed because of some- Because they eat flesh. Yes, they eat flesh. They eat organic material. They're also known as bow bugs, because it's a problem for violinists. Because they like to eat the

bow because it's made out of horsehair and so they would infest and it would just degrade and snap eat all those strings there you go but you know it's cool creepy crawley's actually helping out unlike the cane toads man this episode has been like an emotional roller coaster when i was laying in bed this morning thinking about the show i'm like oh we're going to be talking about some creepy dark stuff it feels really good to be productive but a lot of the time it's easier said than done, especially when you need to make time to learn about productivity so you can actually, you know, be productive. But you can start your morning off right and be ready to get stuff done in just a few minutes with the Inc. Productivity Tip of the Day podcast. You'll hear

advice on everything from how to build confidence to how to get the best night's sleep. New episodes drop every weekday and each one is five minutes or less, so you only have to listen a little to get a lot more out of your weekdays. Listen and subscribe to Inc. Productivity Tip of the Day, you get your podcasts. That's Inc. Productivity Tip of the Day, wherever you get your podcasts. And Colin, you have a last trivia bit for us? I do. I do.

And again, I'm, I'm, I'm just now noticing a theme among my segments, which is, like, invading my body, you know what I mean? That's your core fear. It really is. I mean, maybe it's why, like, yeah, like, you know, alien and aliens movies are just so visceral for me, yeah. You guys, have you heard of draconculiasis? Is it a scientific name?

It is also known as the guinea worm. Are they drunk? Like dracunculiasis. They are parasites. They're draconculus and drunk. It is fun to say. You're drunkocculus. Drumococulus.

These are one of the family of parasitic worms, nematodes, that invade your body and have most of their life cycle inside your body. Yeah, just gird yourself now. Curit yourself now. I'm so grossed out by the whole idea of parasites in your body, but I'm also so interested in it. Yeah. It's almost, it is you can't look away, but I need to know more about it. It's been a little bit higher profile recently.

Jimmy Carter, the Carter Center, and one of their big causes is working to try and wipe out the guinea worm. And so he's been, you know, making the rounds recently giving a lot of interviews about it. So it's called the guinea worm. It was named basically when they started seeing it along the Guinea Coast in Africa. Nothing to do with guinea pigs. Nothing to the guinea pigs, yeah. It is shrinking in its area now, thanks to Jimmy Carter and other people like him. The draconculiasis, it's Latin for affliction with little dragons.

That's kind of beautiful. It is beautiful and yet really frightening. It's supposed to be one of the most painful parasites to deal with. So let me just walk you through the life cycle. It really does. In fact, you know, that's a really good way of putting it. This sounds like a torture from Game of Thrones. So here's the life cycle.

with a human. It starts off if you drink in contaminated water. And what's in the water are little, little tiny water fleas. And the water fleas, they themselves are infected with the larvae for the guinea worm. Okay. So you drink the contaminated water. The water fleas go into your gut, your system. They die. When they die, the larvae come out of the fleas and they begin the larval life cycle inside you. This cycle takes up to a year. The worm that grows, the fertilized female worm travels inside your body down your leg. This is nightmare town material. Absolutely. Travels down your leg, usually to your foot, your ankle region. I mean, they can sense gravity. Right, right. Well, it's also, this is part of their life cycle. I mean, you know, their evolution

too. A blister will start to form on your foot, a little cyst or blister, and eventually it'll burst open. The worm will sort of stick her head out like, hey, world, I'm here. And the way that this works for the worm is that if you're standing in water at this point again, the worm is releasing new larvae back into the water supply and the larvae get eaten by water flees and then the cycle continues. All right. So, but here's where it just, it just absolutely horrifying. When the worm like pokes its head out of your body, there's really only one basic treatment. And this treatment has been this way for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Goes back to ancient Egypt even. The same treatment was you grab the head of the worm, you wrap it around a stick, and you slowly twist it

and pull it out of your body. On the quick side, you could maybe get it out in, you know, a couple hours or something like that. But on the long side, this could take weeks or months to get. It's that long? It's that long. And it's, oh, I mean, it can, many, many, many inches, even feet long when they grow and are fully fertilized. They're really disgusting to see. And you've got to do it slowly and carefully. So it's, you might do like a turn a day and just leave it there and another turn the next day. And meanwhile, you've got this worm that's half in your body, half outside your body. Does it hurt? Oh, it hurts like crazy. I want to refer you back to the Latin name, Karen. Affliction with little dragons. People have described the sensation of it. Yeah, being pulled out as if it's

just on fire. Like somebody is holding a hot poker to your foot the entire time that you're pulling this thing out. It's just absolutely, absolutely gruesome a little bit of time. You can't like drink something or eat medicine and have that kill the worm from the inside. Nope. I guess you got to get it out. Because it's coming out of your foot. It must not left your gut. This is sort of the good and the bad of dealing with guinea worms is that so they focus the efforts on prevention, really. Like if you can just cut off the beginning of the life cycle, just get people drinking clean water, just filtered water is as simple as that. Yeah, they say that they've gotten it down to only four countries in Africa now, or the only places that it's still prevalent.

They've made amazing progress on it. Just without medicine is the good part. I mean, like, you don't need to get out and get vaccines to people. You don't need to a lot of inject nets, filters, whatever you can do, access to clean water. And so they're saying that this might be the first parasitic disease to be eradicated. That is their hope. And I thought that was pretty cool. Wow.

Yeah. First ever. The first parasitic disease to be eradicated, at least without the use of medicine or anything like that. Yeah, not just that it dies off. Isn't that crazy? Wow. Yeah. So there's a little bit of a happy ending there.

No, I think it's super happy. That is a happy ending. Yeah. That's a happy note to end our show, our episode about creepy crawlies. I think it's actually very good news. Thank you guys for joining me. And thanks to you guys listeners for listening in. Hope you learn a lot about things, bugs in your ear.

Stephen King, cane toads and snails. And thank Jimmy Carter. Yes. You can find us on iTunes, on Stitcher, on SoundCloud, and also on our website, good job, brains.com, and check out our sponsor at bonobas.com, and we'll see you guys next week. Bye. Bye. subscribers comes the Minute Earth podcast. Every episode of the show dives deep into a science question you might not even know you had, but once you hear the answer, you'll want to share

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