Ologies with Alie Ward - Entomology (INSECTS) with Lila Higgins

Episode Date: December 5, 2017

Buuuugs. We cover perhaps Alie's favorite ology ever with an ologist who changed her life. Meet Lila Higgins: the self-professed "bug geek" with passion more infectious than a glassy winged sharpshooter mouth. (That will make sense later.) We talk about clowns in the forest, badgers, Hare Krishnas, solitary bugs vs. social ones, why wasps are such dicks and why it's totally fine to kiss a cockroach and eat a cricket.See Lila's TEDX TalkFollow Lila on InstagramMore episode sources and linksSupport Ologies on Patreon for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramTheme song by Nick ThorburnProduction help by Jason Scardamalia

Hey, and welcome to another episode of The Allergies Podcast. I'm your host, Allie Ward, and my name is Allie Ward, and this is The Allergies Podcast. So last week, I did not put up an episode. I just took a week off and kind of caught up from a holiday break and scrolled away some more episodes for the future, like little winter acorns. So thank you guys for being patient, and also for anyone in the LA area. I'll be doing a really, really quick short live show. I'm just doing a storytelling show for public school on Wednesday, December 6th, and RSVP

at publicschoolshow.com. It's at the Virgil, and I'll just be doing a quick storytelling show, just like five minutes, but they just asked me to do it, and I said, sounds fun. So if you're in LA Wednesday night, then publicschoolshow.com has more information on that. Come say hi. Perhaps you'll meet some fellow Angelino oligites. I have no idea what story I'm going to tell, because I said yes about two minutes ago,

so we'll see how it goes. Anyway, that's Wednesday, December 6th. Okay, on to the episode. This episode, Mom, Dad, don't listen. We're going to talk about bug mating, and it gets real candid. Okay? Cool. Okay, bugs, bugs, bugs, bugs, bugs.

So you may not know yet, I'm really nuts about bugs. I love them. I had a fascination as a kid, and I got bug books for every holiday, every birthday, and my walls are covered in bug posters and dead things. So this week's topic is one of my favorite oligies, of course. But more importantly, this particular oligist honestly changed the course of my life. She was just a friend of a friend at one point a few years ago, and she invited me one day to the Mary Bowells of the Ellie County Natural History Museum in this lab that was off-limits

to the public. It was an insectary. Now, okay, this room is like a really well-lit silence of a lamp set. It's a bug lover's dream. There are terrariums of millipedes and cockroaches. There's butterfly chrysalises hanging like these tiny chandeliers. There's dragonfly niands in gurgling tanks. There's a freezer full of sadly past tarantulas.

And I was going through a really rough time in my life a couple years ago. My dad was just diagnosed with multiple myeloma. I was going through a breakup that was just the saddest thing ever. And not knowing any of this, this entomologist casually suggested that I volunteer at the museum. And I did, which is so weird, because I could never commit to anything. But I just wanted to find some way to cheer the fuck up. And volunteering for $0 an hour, no stakes, talking to kids about bugs one morning a week

was the only thing that seemed to help. It totally changed my life. No joke. After doing it for a few months, I somehow was offered a job as a science correspondent for CBS. I'm doing exactly what I wanted to do since I was 12, all because I took this tour at an insectary. So I recorded this episode of ology's first.

This is the first one I ever recorded in a sound studio with mics that were like a little too good. I wanted her to be my first ologist because it was so special to me. And now I'm having her on, I think this is like the 10th episode, I kept holding it because I just was afraid the episode wouldn't honor her enough. And honestly, I hadn't re-listened to this since we recorded it months ago. At the time, we recorded it in the sound booth drinking like celebratory, terrible champagne. Listening back, I realized I loved this interview.

It's one of my favorites. And I can also tell I was trying to sound like a little more cool than I felt inside. Now that we're a few episodes in, like I just, I don't play it cool. So you're welcome. And I'm sorry. Now, entomology, study of bugs. Sometimes called bug ology, but come on, no one calls it that. The etymology of entomology is Greek.

It means to cut up into little pieces, which is not what you do when you find a bug in your face, but rather it's a reference to insects body being cut or segmented. So having a notch at the waist, there you go. This guest is an entomologist. She's now the manager of citizen science at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles. So get ready to hear about bugs. Larry Krishnas will talk about some terrible mating behaviors, licking cockroaches. What is citizen science?

How to be an amateur scientist and why bugs should be your friends. So please ready your heart and your ears for Leela Higgins. If someone at a cocktail party were like, what's your deal? What would you tell them? Hmm. Well, it depends on how many cocktails I'd had at said cocktail party, but usually I, you know, like I'm bug geek. Usually there's no children at cocktail parties, but sometimes there are.

And then they're like, oh, I'm going to go hang out with the children now and talk all about bugs for the next, you know, a couple of hours. That's actually a good question I have. I just complimented my own question. This is an important question I have. Why are kids so into bugs and adults are like, kill it with fire? What's that? What happens?

I think, I mean, I was really into bugs as a kid. I grew up on a farm in England and I dug up ant nests trying to find the queen. I like would put glasses over bumblebees to observe them. I would try to follow the butterflies down the lane and see where they were going. That sounds so, that sounds idyllic as fuck. Like following a butterfly down a lane in England. Are you kidding me? To the woods, basically.

Not the scary woods. There were badges down there. Say your, your biggest child predator were badgers in England. Basically yes. No clowns. I don't think I ever saw a clown. So what happens? Do people go through puberty and they decide that they hate spiders?

I think some people do. I was thinking a lot about my kind of trajectory and I totally kind of fell off the wagon in high school. I was trying to remember if I had any memories of insects from, from high school and the only things I could think of were like the hip hop. So Leela was really into this band called Diggable Planets and they had members who were called Butterfly, Ladybug, Doodlebug. She also liked Wu Tang's Killabees.

And that's like literally the only things I can remember from high school to do with insects. You didn't listen to the Beatles or the Scorpions or anything? At what point do you remember being like, I'm going to be an entomologist? I didn't even know that was a thing. Really? As a kid. Nope.

Did not have, I mean neither of my parents, my dad went to like agricultural college for like a hot second. I'm sure he got kicked out for doing naughty things. My parents were Harry Krishnas. What? Yeah. What? How long?

Undetermined because I think my dad still is partly, you know, involved. What does that mean to be a Harry Krishna? I feel like there's just a lot of brown rice in singing, but I don't know. I've never, I brown rice through Harry Krishnas. I always, always ate white rice through Harry Krishnas, so. Okay. Well, then I'm wrong. But there's a lot of really good food.

There is a lot of like singing and symbol, little mini symbol, finger symbols and incense and worship and chanting and, but I, my mother was like, no, I want you to go to regular school. And I'm like, thank you, mommy. Yeah. I was going to say, it sounds more like a lifestyle than a religion. It sounds aromatic. People ask me a lot of questions about, well, what are the tenets of the religion?

I'm like, I don't really know. I know some things. I knew nothing about Harry Krishnas, nothing. So I googled, what are Harry Krishnas? Okay. So I'm going to give you a rundown. It's the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. It's the other thing it's called.

It's a type of Hinduism and it was founded in the mid-60s in this exotic place called New York City and it has four regulative principles. Number one, no meat eating, including fish or eggs, no gambling, no intoxicants, no illicit sex, including that which is not for the procreation of children, including in marriage. So it sounds like a party. I was still convinced that Harry Krishnas eat a lot of brown rice and I looked it up and the first search return was brown rice is for the animals. So okay, I was off the mark there.

P.S. George Harrison went to their temple. Okay. I was a teenager and I didn't want to be there and I was really annoyed at my dad. You know, typical teenager crap. I think most teenagers get annoyed that their dads are Harry Krishnas. I think it's really common. So at what point did you decide to take this path and also if your parents were kind of

like in this old religion, was it weird to be a science kid? So I remember when I was like, I'm going to be a scientist, but at that point, again, I didn't realize that entomology was an option. I had this teacher in high school in England and high school starts a little earlier than it does here in America. Because you guys are nine hours ahead. It starts nine hours early. Eight hours.

And I forgot his name, but he had kind of like crazy Einsteinian hair that was like all over the place. He would wear like a big velvet purple bow tie. He had the, you know, the sports coat that had the corduroy elbow patches. One day he took me aside and he's like, Lila, you're good at science. You need to study science. And I was like, oh yeah, I do. I love science.

I love dissecting daffodils. Quick question. Was he Willy Wonka? Was he actually Willy Wonka? He looks like Willy Wonka in my head, but he looks a tiny bit different because he wasn't, he's not Gene Wilder. Okay. So you were touched by the hand of a science angel.

Yes. And he said, you're good at this. And you're like, you're right. I'm amazing. I don't think I said that. But it was at the same, right around the same time when they're telling us that we have to pick careers. And I had literally been looking at being a hotel manager.

Oh, fuck that. I mean, it's good if you can do it. I'm pretty happy with where I am in my career. And if I was a hotel manager, I think it would be, I don't know, I don't think it would be as fulfilling for me. Right. Then when Lila went to college, she got back into entomology and she ended up at UC Riverside and found out that they have a really great program where she could study bugs for four

years. And she was like, oh dude, it is on. What is the most fulfilling thing about being, having studied bugs? Well, getting to work at the Natural History Museum and being around other bug geeks and getting to go into the collection and pull out drawers and see just these spectacular specimens from all over the world, whether they're the big showy things that the crowd pleases or whether it's the hundreds of tiny little wasps or tiny little flies. Is it like being, like when you see bad rom-coms about women in jewelry stores drilling, do

you feel like that one with bug collections? Yeah. I definitely would not be sitting in a jewelry shop looking at rows of diamond rings and being like, I want that one or that one. I'm definitely looking at the bugs and I'm like, oh my gosh, look at this beetle. Look at this other beetle where it's Elytra, Elytra being the hardened sheath like wing coverings, the outer wings of a beetle. I have a question.

What's a show stopping bug? When you say like the show stoppers, what are you talking about? So like Goliath beetles or Hercules beetles, like some of these beetles that are almost the size of our fist, giant. And then when holding one of those large beetles in your hand, you're just like, oh my god, it's so much stronger than I thought it was going to be. It's a little bit scary. Stronger?

Like have any tried to use their huge jaws, powerful jaws to say hello? I'm pretty good about not touching that end of ones that have large mandibles, especially large, slicey mandibles. Slicy mandibles. Yeah. Keep away from that. Hold them in the, well, because you were saying the end to them thin waisted. So beetles don't really have a thin waist.

They're pretty fat around the waist. Yeah. They got a badonkadonk. So you hold them on that fat then you're like, oh, keeping far away from any mandibles that you might have that might want to bite me. I have a question about insects are what, half of all species of living animals on earth? Something like that? I just know that there's about a million described species, but they estimate that could be up

to like 10 million. Yeah. So they outnumber mammals and fish and birds, etc., etc. So in 1949, John Burden Sanderson Haldane was a British evolutionary biologist and he was credited as noting that God, if one exists, has an inordinate fondness for beetles. He actually like laid it out, said the creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars on the one hand and for beetles on the other. God is just in a shack in the backyard, tinkering over and over, being like, man, cannot get

enough of these beetles. I can't stop making them. I can't stop. I love them so much. I guess I should stop wars from happening, but it's going to keep making these beetles. So how do you go about studying that if there's such biodiversity with insects? There's so many different kinds. They have so many different habitats.

How do you tackle that when you're studying it? It's hard because there's only so many scientists and there's only so many scientists who end up going into entomology or choosing that as a career. We don't have that many people doing it. We need more people studying bugs to help figure out what's here. And if we don't know what's here, how can you work to protect it? We have, again, amazing entomology department at the museum and our curator, Dr. Brian Brown, he's a fly expert and one of the leading fly experts in the world.

That's hot. Right. It's pretty amazing. Okay. So Dr. Brian Brown studies this type of humpback fly that hardly anyone else studies. So during his career path, he was like, you know what? I'm going to look at flies. This is kind of a way for me to distinguish myself.

And now he's one of the leading fly experts and has discovered 43, 42, 43 new species of ford flies here in Los Angeles, which is a big deal. That was through Citizen Science, having traps in people's backyards that were said, yeah, sure, we'll have this trap. We'll host this trap in our backyard, called a malaise trap. Not because anyone's in a bad mood or anything, but the guy's name was malaise. So Renee malaise was Swedish and in the 1930s, he invented a death chamber for bugs, but an important tool for fellow entomologists.

So a malaise trap, I've seen them, they look like a really shitty tent. They have netty sides and kind of a white canopy and bugs get trapped and they try to fly out the top, but they're funneled into a trap, which is usually a jar filled with ethanol, which is the scientific term for Everclear. So they die in the worst version of college jungle juice possible. Also I just looked up Everclear, not pure ethanol. It's 95% alcohol by volume and it's illegal in a bunch of places because it's probably very dangerous.

But in some states, you can buy 94.5% alcohol, which is totally fine. So it's a capital M, you always see malaise trap with a capital M. That's a terrible last name. And especially if your legacy on earth is that you invented a trap that kills and collects insects and it's a malaise, like it's so perfectly named. I think it's amazing, I love explaining the name. I wish it were called like a womp-womp trap, like it sounds like such a bummer. Going a little bit back to school, what are some of the first things that an entomologist

learns? Like let's say you're going to be one, do you start with chemistry, do you start with ecology? There was a lot of chemistry, a lot of biology, a lot of physics. Do you gravitate more towards science that with living things, it's like you can look at behavior and patterns. Do you... 100%.

Yeah. Yeah. That's part of what appeals to me about entomology is that I can talk about really inappropriate things, but it's science, so it's okay. When you're gravitating toward a certain bug to study, do you go for like really gossipy behaviors? Like are you like, oh my God, this wasp is such a dick, like why are wasps such dicks? They're parasites, they infect people like zombies, they sting people, they don't even

make honey. Like what's the deal with wasps? Well, the wasps that I actually studied and worked on right after I graduated from UC Riverside, so that's my alma mater, UC Riverside entomology program, amazing place. I studied biological control and I think that I was really into that because it was, oh, we don't have to use so much pesticides out in the world. We can use insects. I mean, there are other creatures you can use for biocontrol, but I was obviously focusing

on insects as biocontrol agents. And biocontrol is when you release an insect to kill another insect instead of spraying everything with like agent orange or something. Basically. Okay. That's a great way, lay definition for sure. So I worked for the California Department of Food and Agriculture and worked on the Glassy Winged Shop Shooter Project, which is a tiny little plant hopper, you know, about

two centimeters. Oh, what is that, an inches? Don't worry about it. Yeah. Okay. Are you guys ready for some serious insect gossip? I hope so. So she was working on this project with the Glassy Winged Sharpshooter.

They are not native to Southern California, they come from the Southeast United States, but they love to hang out on citrus and grapes, which is annoying because they poop everywhere, but also they spread this bacterium and this bacterium is bad news. It causes diseases such as, you ready for this? Sweet gum dieback, cherry plum leaf scorch, and phony peach disease. These are awesome names. Glassy Winged Sharpshooter is already badass anyway. So it spreads all these diseases.

So what do they do? Well, Leela was working on this project where she was helping introduce a wasp that would eat the eggs of the Glassy Winged Sharpshooter so that the Glassy Winged Sharpshooter wouldn't spread the bacterium. Pretty cool. Also, these wasps have the cutest name ever. They're like little tiny superheroes. And they're called fairy wasps.

Oh, stop it. And they're tiny. They're like one to two millimeters long. They're babies. Some of them are kind of golden. So it's like these little literally, like with these really beautiful Gossama wings. And so they sound really beautiful and amazing, right? And the only problem was I was literally collecting these wasps on a daily basis.

And they're tiny and you use a little thing called an aspirator. So you've got like a little tube that goes into your mouth and then you suck on it. And then the little wasps go into the vial. And there's a little screen so it doesn't, then you don't suck them into your own mouth. So it's like a proboscis for humans? Because now a proboscis is a tubular mouth part. Like if a crazy straw grew out of your face. Like a prosthetic proboscis.

But we did have ones that you could hook up to a vacuum cleaner. So you didn't even have to use your own sucking power. I'll do respect that's so weird that you had like a tube that you would suck up. And you literally as an entomologist, you carry them around your neck. And it's almost like you're wearing a necklace. So I had to aspirate hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these tiny wasps. So I would wake up in my, I'd have dreams and then wake up in the middle of the night being like one, two, three, four.

And it was like, oh my gosh, no, I don't want, I love insects, but I'm hating them right now. That used to happen to me when I played Magic the Gathering a lot. I would like be falling asleep and I'd be like, how much mana do I have to tap to brush my teeth? You're just like used to it. How much of your career has been spent in the field versus like in a lab? So that's a great question. So not long after that, that repetitive nature of the aspirating the fairy wasps and then going to the same field sites every month.

So the field work was starting to wear on her. So Leela decided to take a little bit of a detour. And I'd also kind of had figured out right before that that I was better at communicating about science and, and getting other people excited about insects. And I got my first job in a museum and my whole life changed. Really? Yeah. So now you work in museums and you kind of facilitate people getting stoked about bugs. I mean, the bug stuff, I just get so excited when I get to have someone send me a bug picture.

How does that happen? Did you get texted like two in the morning being like, what the fuck is this? And it's a potato bug or something. I totally have texts from people at all times of the day and night from different time zones, different places. And it's not just text messages. It's like Facebook messages, Instagram messages, a few ones through Twitter. But like, that's my favorite thing.

I'm like, more people send me all your bug pictures. I get so, so excited. Leela and I have also attended again on a Friday night. A bug meetup called the Lorquen Entomological Society, which is a bug society. This bug society is legit. It's not like your aunt's book club that met twice. These people have been meeting every Friday night for like a hundred years. It literally turned a hundred a few years ago.

And they meet now in the back of a bug warehouse in Compton. It's called Bioquip. It rules. The first time I went, I went completely alone by myself on a Friday night and I sat down and someone turned around and introduced themselves as Jeff, I'm a kind of a Katie did guy. And I was like, these are my people. And Bioquip is my heaven. The best bug warehouse where you can buy the best bug geeky equipment and books and everything

that you could ever, ever want. They have bug socks. They have butterfly nets. They have books about bugs. They have framed bugs. Video tapes, VHS tapes. They have ties with bugs on them that like, you know, that you have like a weird uncle to give it to.

Okay. Quick shift from bug socks to something grosser. I have a question. How many bugs live on our person? How many bugs are living on me right now? Like not me. I did not wash my hair today. So that's, but for the average person, I don't know.

I know that there's like the, the mites, which aren't technically insects, they're living in our eyelashes and places and eyebrows. I'm non-expert. I like literally don't know. Okay. So check this out. About 90% of the cells that are walking around that you call you and that share your social security number are actually other creatures.

They're microbes, mites, et cetera. Now we're going to cover this in more detail when I have a microbiologist on, but I just want you to know that you're covered and full of organisms, so you're never alone. Feel free to use the second person plural from now on as the royal we refers to trillions of other persons who have hopes and goals and dreams, such as to live in a poor near your nose. Do you hate this podcast? I hope not.

I remember when I was a teenager, moving to America on the way here, I was in the Philippines. This is a gross story, but I'm going to tell it anyway. I was in the Philippines and I was like, oh my God, I've got pubic lice. And I'm like, oh wait, it's an ant. I'm like, how did an ant get in my crotch? Can I tell you a secret? What? An ant bit my butt crack once.

So I get it. What is it with ants? Why are they so social? Maybe they were lonely. What is the deal with bees, ants being social insects and the rest from being like, fuck all y'all, this apocore is mine. Well, okay, so there's some wasps, bees and some wasps right at the hymenoptera. There are many of them that are social insects, but there are wasps and bees who are not.

So like carpenter bees are more like solitary bees. And you see the black ones flying around, which are the females and the like kind of tan colored ones and the males. We call them teddy bear bees, but they're huge. They're so pretty. I once didn't know what it was and I tried to kill one, which I shouldn't have. And I, but the joke was on me because I used to have rolled up magazine and I, and I blew out a window and then I had to pay for the window in college.

Yeah, so they're solitary. So a lot of people expect that most bees and wasps are social, but there are some that are solitary and don't do the whole social thing. So to determine if an insect is social or solitary, what a lot of researchers do is administer this test, the specimen, and it's called this awkward small talk quiz will reveal your introvert type, which is available at buzzfeed.com. But there are obviously benefits to, to having that kind of social life because you, they protect their sisters.

But they're usually ladies though. Like when you see a huge colony, they're usually sterile ladies, right? So if we're talking about the beehives, like the, the European honey bees, which are the bees that we see, like all around here, again, not a species that is from North America. They're from Europe. It's mostly females, but then there are the drones and, but, you know, they're, they're not doing as much work as the women are. Right.

They're just flying around trying to have a gang bang with the queen, right? I was going to bring that back up, but their, their job is to fly as fast as they can in the air, get a quick noogie with the queen, try and have one million babies with her and then die. Um, is that correct or is that wrong? I'm paraphrasing, paraphrasing. I think that's, you know, fairly, again, it works for the lay audience, right? Okay.

But they're, but they don't, drones don't sting, males don't sting. No, they, because it's a modified ovipositor that is what the stinger is for a bee. So an ovipositor is kind of like this pointy tube structure at the end of a lady insect butt and she uses it to lay eggs. It's kind of like a T-shirt gun, but for your babies. So the males cannot do it, but they do, they, they do the trickery. They do the trickery. So a male bee could like land on you and then still like pump his abdomen, not in a sexual

way, but in a, in a, like, oh, I could sting you, but unless you're looking really closely, you know, most people don't really like, but if you know it's a, if you can see that it's a drone, you're like, oh, you can't actually do anything. And drones have bigger eyes. So drones do in fact have larger eyes and they don't gather nectar or pollen or do really any work. Their primary goal is to mate and die. They are nature's doe-eyed jiggalo.

This is literally all of my knowledge of drones, but so I, but I didn't know that a, I didn't know that a bee stinger was a modified ovipositor. Yes. So let's get back to Lila's job at the NHM. Citizen science is essentially non-scientists helping collect data and observations for research. And if you're like, I'm not qualified for that. Just know that scientists are like, either you help me or this shit never gets done.

So please, thank you. Also, no, you don't have to be like a citizen of anywhere. That's a bit of a misnomer. Some people call it community science. Some people call it civic science. Some people call it public participation in scientific research, PPSR. That's not exactly like one of those things that's going to like be like, I want to be a PPSR.

Yeah, no, that doesn't even bring to it. So, and you know, there's a lot of other countries that do citizen science besides just North America and, and in some of those other places, the word citizen isn't quite so polarizing. But I get that that's a thing. So I just want to make sure that that isn't lost in the, in the scheme of things. But ultimately, citizen science is a way to democratize science. Who owns the data isn't just large corporations and the government anymore. People of the community, people, citizens of the country, of the world can own that

data. And so do you think as we were coming upon, we'll just call it a post-truth era, like what do you feel like your role as someone who advocates for citizen science could be in kind of keeping science alive and respected? Again, I think there's a lot of people who don't really understand how science works because it has been a bit of a black box. And citizen science is a way to get people involved in the actual scientific process and so can help to then demystify science isn't that complicated.

How do people get involved in citizen science? Like let's say you've got really shitty karma. You cheated on your taxes or your wife. Like how can you get involved in citizen science and redeem yourself? So obviously there's citizen science that we do at the museum and you can get involved in those projects that are very LA and South Southern California centric. And they're obviously focused on mostly right now the kind of urban terrestrial fauna that lives around here.

We've got a snail and slug project called SLIME. We've got a reptile and amphibian project called RASCALS and we've got a squirrel project which is squirrels and chipmunks because they're all in the same group. And so you can take pictures of any of those creatures, snail, slugs, reptiles, amphibians, turtles, newts, squirrels, chipmunks, anywhere in Southern California and submit them to the iNaturalist website which is also a free app on your phone. Anyone can join. Okay, what if you don't live in LA, like most people on the planet who can afford housing

and don't wear SPF 70 in the winter? But then across the country people can maybe just look up citizen science. There's so many different projects and you can go to a website called SciStarter.com and you can then find a project that is in your area and that you'd be interested in. There's projects, really cool projects online where you can literally sit in your pajamas and do human computing using your free time to help a project on this platform called The Zooniverse and you can go to a project and literally code the different galaxies. Coding galaxies?

I have no idea what you're talking about. Is it cool? Okay, this has absolutely nothing to do with bugs, but it's awesome. Go to galaxyzoo.org. So you go to the Zooniverse website and I think it's called Galaxy Quest and you literally look at pictures of galaxies because imagine a telescope taking all the pictures of galaxies hundred and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and maybe the scientist doesn't have an algorithm that it can go through a computer yet to figure out what it's looking at and the human eye

plus our human brain together, we just have this ability to recognize patterns that computers, we can teach it how to do that based on what humans do. But at first, if you don't know, there's no pattern, how can you teach a computer to do it? So we can have humans do that. So that's called human computing. And you know, how much time do people use on things like Angry Birds or whatever the new Candy Crush Saga, I don't even know what the new one is, there's probably a new one,

but hundreds of thousands of hours people use on these things and some people decide to instead of doing Angry Birds or Candy Crush Saga, decide to go on to Galaxy Quest and to look at different galaxies and code them. And then literally people have found like new galaxies, citizen scientists have found new galaxies. Are you allowed to brag about that? Do they send you an email like, yo, hey Roger, you found a new galaxy? I believe there was this woman called Hanny and she found this thing called, I'm gonna

fuck up the name like VorVelt or something. VorVerp. I have no idea. I think it's the word for thingy in Scandinavian language. Okay. So I look this up, it's called Hanny's VorVerp. VorVerp? VorVerp.

And it means VorVerp just means object, the A.K.A. thingy. VorVerp is my everything now. So Hanny's thingy, not a dirty thingy, a galaxy seal thingy. And it was something that she was like, she'd been doing it so much, she's like, that's a weird thing right there. It's a thingy. It's a weird thingy. Maybe it's something significant.

And then the scientists looked at it like, oh my gosh, this is a whole new thingy that we never knew about. Also, I love that in Britain and like Europe, people are like, yeah, thingy, that's totally good word. We're gonna use it. Anything with a Y on the end? Thingy. Americans don't use thingy or the metric system enough.

Both of those things are sorely lacking. Right? It would make us all a little bit happier people, I think. I have some questions that people wrote in that they, can I rapid-fire question you? Oh my gosh, yes. But before we take questions from you, our beloved listeners, we're gonna take a quick break for sponsors of the show. Sponsors?

Why sponsors? You know what they do? They help us give money to different charities every week. So if you want to know where Allergies gives our money, you can go to alleyword.com and look for the tab, Allergies Gives Back. There's like 150 different charities that we've given to already with more every single week. So if you need a place to go donate a little bit of money, but you're not sure where to

go, those are all picked byologists who work in those fields. And this ad break allows us to give a ton of money to them. So thanks for listening and thanks sponsors. Okay. Your questions. I'm just gonna rapid-fire. Just whatever answer you, if you don't know, you can just be like, pass. Sean Paul Caldwell wants to know, what's the visible difference between dragonflies and

damselflies? So dragonflies usually hold their wings out to the side of their body, whereas damselflies hold them, I'm doing it, but you can't see, you can't, no one can see this. I feel like that's a yoga pose that I don't know the name for. Yeah, no, damselflies hold them together over the back of their body. Also dragonflies have eyes that usually meet in the middle to some extent, and damselflies have eyes that are more out to the side, a little bit like hammerhead sharks. And damselflies are very petite and slender.

Sometimes there's a scientist called John Acorn, the nature nut from Canada. He calls them flying neon toothpicks because they're very slender, whereas dragonflies are more stout-bodied. Nice way to go, Canadian bug guy. Yeah. He's like, watch me coin this. John Acorn. Okay, Dave Long wants to know, what's with all the legs?

The six legs, three pairs of legs. Well they're in the arthropod groups, which is jointed, legged creatures, and insects have six versus, like they're rachnids that have eight, versus some of the other creatures like crustaceans that have seven pairs and whatnot. Why do they have six versus the other? I don't know the answer to that, but obviously those legs help them to get around, and some insects don't have wings. They've de-evolved wings, like Madagascar and his incockroaches, per se, but those legs

are this method of locomotion on land that works really well for them. So it gets them around, crawling wise. Some of them have sultorial legs, which are for jumping, good for jumping. Some of them have fissorial legs, which are good for digging. What are some of the other modified legs? Going back to all my undergraduate classes. Are pedipalps on the front that they look like legs, but they're not? That's more of the arachnids have the, like the scorpions have pedipalps.

Oh my gosh, I can't believe I don't remember another. That's okay, it's rapid fire. We got more for you also. Okay, is it true that exoskeleton rigidity is why insects could not maintain their massive prehistoric sizing? Brandy DeMora wants to know this. Yeah, so the largest insects we have right now in our current climate with our current pressure on the planet is about the size of a fist, which are those giant

amazing beetles. But back in the day, when there were different climate conditions and pressure conditions on the planet, there were some giant, oh my gosh, I wish I could go back in time, giant dragonflies that had like a foot long wingspan. What? What fossils? How loud were they, do you think? I can only imagine.

You know, when a dragonfly, sorry, a hummingbird comes like right behind your head. If you're lucky. Imagine that multiplied by 10. So I don't know. I mean, that's an extrapolation. Who knows? And why David Hisaka wants to know why fleas exist? The same reason that humans exist.

They just want to carve out a living. They want to find food, shelter, water, space, pass on their genetic material. How are they any better or worse than us? They're just they're just living their lives. Let them bite you and live their life. Can a flea make a living? I mean, you could compare comparison fleas to certain human beings in the world right now. Parasitic human beings.

Yeah. Aren't we all just parasites of something like consumerism? Or I mean, aren't we? Oh, God, Friday night in Los Angeles. Aren't we all? I mean, I feel like bugs are no more terrible than a human being. Everyone's just trying to fuck and eat and die. Like I just said, food, water, shelter, space, pass on your genetic material.

How what we human beings, we've got a lot of judgments about things we do. Eric Martin wants to know what the white goo is that comes out of a bug when you squish them, white goo or yellow goo? Because when you OK, so, you know, when you have a driving down the road and you're it's a windshield and a bug splats on it. Yeah. If it's a lot of yellow, that's usually the fat body of a female insect that maybe was like got all this stuff ready for her eggs.

I don't know about the white stuff, though. But maybe they mean the yellow like, you know, when you smash a thing and it's like and it looks like twinkie filling comes out. You know what I mean? I don't know about the whole white thing. Like I've definitely I haven't squished that many bugs, surprisingly. I think he must be talking about fat. OK, sorry, story time, quick diversion from the rapid fire.

This one time I was in when I was taking an animal bio class, I had to dissect a cockroach and we had dissected all kinds of stuff. We had dissected pigeons and and fetal pigs that were like the size of a puppy and incredibly heartbreaking. But it was time to kill a cockroach. You had to go to this tank full of people cared about. Nobody cares about. I mean, it was there's they set up a terrarium and it's full of like

empty toilet paper rolls and like apple cores and like some sad carrot shavings and it's just like it's like a essentially it's like a skid row for cockroaches. And so you had to go in and pick one up and then you had to kill it in alcohol and then you had to dissect it. And I had this lab partner who I had been eyeing all semester. His name was Ted. He was he had he was very he had like this really sheepish like sheepish

adorableness and like messy hair. But I thought he was really cute and he asked me to be his lab partner for this one. And I said, yes. So I got my dead cockroach and we started dissecting it and it something happened where it wasn't quite dead yet or or or the nervous system reacted to a scalpel and it grabbed onto my hand. And then I I moved my hand up and I hit Ted in the face with the cockroach on my finger. Oh, my God.

We never worked together again. American cockroach. This. No, I think it was the Asian cockroaches, the wingless ones. OK. I think I don't know. Maybe it wasn't American. I can't remember. All I remember is that like Ted and I never worked together and I had to look at him from the back of the room.

But I remember slicing it open and a lot of like these feathery fat deposits came out. Well, because this is so the spiracles inside of an insect. So they insects do not breathe the same way as humans do. We don't they don't breathe through their mouth. And then the oxygen goes through the lungs into the circulatory system. Instead, insects have these things called spiracles along the side of their body, which will tie little holes and then oxygen is brought in through those

holes through these like very white. When I've dissected some insects, they let those tubes kind of like white and opalescence kind of pop out. So I again, I'd have to see with your eyes, which I can't mind, meld and get inside your mind and be there with Ted and maybe Ted and I have a thing who knows. But yeah, so they just breathe in this whole different way. And also, if it was a medicast and hissing cockroach, those spiracles are

the same things that when they breathe out, when they exhale air, exhale again, not with the same terminology as humans. When air is let out through those holes fast, kind of like when you're blowing through a straw very fast, it makes that hissing sound. And that is to that's to say, yo, back off, jerks. Well, they can also be doing it for like, hey, ladies. Really? There's multiple communications for the hissing.

It's like, hey, you hissed at me. Do you want to have 10,000 babies in the dirt? I mean, obviously, like as a handler of hissing cockroaches, a lot of times they're like, dude, stop touching me. But don't I have heard that if you have a hissing cockroach as a pet, after a while, it gets used to you and stops hissing because it's like, oh, it's you. Totally. Really? That happens.

Yeah, our live animal keepers and the people who look after the insects at the museum. Yeah, the cockroach is like, oh, there's no threat here. Why would I bother hissing at you? What if you came in with a Freddy Krueger mask or something else scary? No, cloud, someone named Cloudburst asked if they're legit, not lethal ways to keep common bugs away from their spray happy dad. This person says, I'm a Buddhist. I don't want anything dead.

And they think that this person's dad thinks that spraying them with soapy water and plain water is friendly. But how would you get rid of crickets, ants and roaches without being like too big of a jerk? I know. Yeah, I mean, personally, I'm all about integrated pest management, IPM. So what are the cultural and mechanical methods of excluding them from getting into your house in the first place?

Admittedly, if you get into gardening, it's a whole other thing. Right. I've been a gardener. And, you know, so like if they're coming for coming into your house, obviously, we talk about this in the museum field a lot. IPM is a big deal. You don't want bugs coming in and eating your collections that are in your care. And we're supposed to be keeping in perpetuity. Obviously, things are going to degrade over time,

but you don't want insects coming in and eating your mammal collection. Right. Like a carpet beetle will just chew the hell out of a hide, right? Yeah, those carpet beetles, domested, are amazing. And that's the same beetle that is used to basically skeletonize specimens. So carpet beetles are great when you need to clean flesh off of bones, say, let's say in a museum setting, please. You don't want to sit there with tweezers and a toothbrush and bleach and Q-tips trying to get every bit of flesh off of, say, a skull.

So you jump it in a bucket full of a bunch of carpet beetles, and they are like yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, and they eat off all of the flesh and they give you in return poop, but they love it. Now, that's great when you need a skull cleaned, but it really sucks when they get into hides or fur or leather or whatever in your specimen collection. So museums do not like carpet beetles getting in where they're not supposed to be. And if you listen to the Ornithology episode and you remember,

I asked the Ornithologist the worst thing about his job, the worst. And he said carpet beetles. And this is a man who's been held up a gunpoint on the job. So carpet beetles. And those in museum collections equals very fricking bad news. So, yeah, in your home, I would go around and make sure that you have sealed up every single entrance point. Where are those ants coming in? Where are those cockroaches coming in?

I have a do you have any bugs that you're afraid of? Like are there like for me, I love bugs. I'm going to short this is bugs on it that was made for me. But like a cockroach is no friend of mine. And I and I can't really explain it. Like if I see a cockroach in my house or especially inside, I get terrified. But I can hold up like a spider on my face and not care. Like what do you wouldn't hold a cockroach?

I could hold a cockroach. Sorry, I'm just laughing because I've licked a cockroach in front of children before to show them it's not dirty. I was like, you know how people think cockroaches are dirty kids? This was literally in a museum program many a number of years ago. Cockroaches aren't dirty. This cockroach lives in the jungle and from Madagascar. And I was like, they're not dirty.

And I literally licked it in front of children. How'd that go over? They thought it was amazing. They thought it was the coolest person that ever existed until they went home. I don't know. I know that they're really fastidious, right? They're really like they're in-depth groomers. Yeah, they having particles on their body isn't necessarily something that's going to feel great to them.

So, yeah, I see cockroaches like really going to town. Grooming, right? Yeah. And I mean, they live the so the Madagascar cockroaches we have at the museum, they live in these amazing little habitats that we create for them. And we feed them all these little vegetables and sweet potato and little bits of mushroom and corn and all of this other stuff. And honestly, they eat better than they live better lives than I do. Like, let's talk about debunking some flim flam.

Is there any myth about insects or entomology in general that you just you wish that you could debunk? Oh, myths, myths. All spiders are venomous. People do say poisonous spiders, but really it's venomous, right? Well, yeah. So, OK, the whole poison versus venom thing. We like to debunk that as a as a thing. So, yeah, poison is something you ingest versus venom is something

where you are like getting injected or envenomated by a spider. So, yeah, you could literally eat a black widow spider and because it's going through your digestive system, the digestive juices are breaking down the the proteins that are in the venom. It's not going to affect you the same way as if it's going into your blood. So there's a whole different route of action. So if you eat something and it kills you, it's poisonous.

If it's something that stings you or bites you, it's venomous. Exactly. And things that have venom that you would eat sometimes may not affect you at all. And other creatures can can also be be stung or bitten by something that's venomous and it not affect them the same way as it affects humans. Oh, OK. Yeah. So I from when I remember dogs, really

black widow bites, not a big deal. Really? But they can't eat chocolate. Get it together, dogs. Make up your mind. Should we be eating bugs? Oh, entomophagy. Yeah. That's what eating bugs is. I love eating bugs.

I know I've invited you to the museum and you've eaten bugs there with me. And then you are an official judge of the 30th annual bug fair. This last year. Yeah. I ate a tarantula. I felt bad because tarantulas, like it takes a while for them to get to that size. So I felt bad about that. But I ate crickets and some mealworms, I think. With a grasshoppers, too.

And then I think you also ate a toe biter. I ate a toe biter and I'm in just a toe biter is like a really big water bug, right? Yes. And then also, I think you ate some Odinate or Dervs. So some dragonfly temper about a dragon flies. Yes, this is all coming back to me kind of like a bedroom. You know what's weirder to me, though, really quick on the topic of eating bugs before we wrap up is it's honey's weirder to eat because it's beef on it. Isn't that weirder to eat than the actual cricket or the actual bee?

Right. So. Well, this is the whole vegan thing where, like, we're not going to eat honey because we're subjugating bees. And with commercial hives, there's a whole bunch of shit there, too. Hives are taken out of hibernation early or like put into hibernation early, trucked across the country on flatbeds, fed corn syrup, all this stuff. So like there's a whole bunch of research that people can do in that. I think that there's so many feral colonies of bees and then those beekeepers

who are collecting those feral colonies and then keeping them in their own backyard and taking some honey and trying to be responsible beekeepers and not taking too much and leaving enough for the bees to be able to sustain themselves over a winter. But we're going to be eating bugs in the future because they're easier to farm, right? So well, there's a lot of great protein. There's a lot of great vitamins and minerals in vitamins and minerals

in in bugs and meat production is hard on the planet. You know, I think there's going to have to be some like reduction of meat. Again, my parents were Harry Krishna, so I grew up vegetarian. I eat a little bit of meat now and then, oh, God, hope my dad doesn't hear this because he'll be like, I did not know that. Sorry, dad. So, yeah, I definitely eat bugs. I am more than happy to eat, you know, protein bars

and other things that have insect flour in it. Like cricket, cricket flour is a thing. Cricket flour is a thing. And, you know, again, you can have use up so much less space than you would need to obviously raise a cow. Right. So get used to it, world. So do you have any closing advice? Like if someone wants to become an entomologist,

if someone's interested in the field, like what advice would you give to a future entomologist? Like find your niche, like study the study the unglamorous flies. No one cares about. Well, first of all, there's just not that many entomologists in the world. There's just not that many out there who have the entomology focus and background, and I've literally worked at so many different places and I'm the only entomology expert there.

And at the museum, there's a bunch of other entomology experts, which is awesome because I get to hang out with all these bug geeks. But yes, if you are going to be an entomologist and be a research scientist, focusing on something that has is a little bit less studied. I hope one day there's there's some kind of insect named after you, Lila, because I feel like you deserve it. I feel like you deserve it. Thank you for talking bugs with us.

So what did we learn? Pick weird bugs to study. Don't inhale them and never, ever, ever feel alone. Also, volunteer somewhere you love if you're bummed out and Google Lila Higgins and follow her on social media. She just did a TEDx talk that came out a week ago. She killed it. So if you have 18 minutes, look that up.

Learning to love nature in a big city. So good. Allergies is on Instagram and Twitter at just Allergies now thanks to the wonderful Sarah Hamilton. Now she had been sitting on the Allergies handle on Twitter. So I had to go as Allergies pod. She recently contacted me, voluntarily turned it over to me in an exchange that was thrilling. So now my Instagram matches Twitter.

Now I'm just at Allergies on Twitter and Instagram. If you're already following me, you're still following me. Don't worry, just handle change. Very exciting. Also, it turns out Sarah Hamilton is a really, really, really good graphic designer. She lives in St. Louis. So Google Sarah with an H, Hamilton and Dribble, D-R-I-B-B-L-E. And you'll find her design page.

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There was production helped by Jason Scaramaglia and the theme song was written and performed by Nick Thorburn, who is of the band Island. So check out his music too. And stay tuned for next week's episode with another smart person who I will barrage with sometimes dumb questions because that's, that's how I do it. Okay. Bye. Hackadermatology.

Homiology. Cryptozoology. Letology. And technology. Meteorology. Peptology. Nephology. Cereology.

Pseudology.