Ologies with Alie Ward - Smologies #16: INSECTS with Lila Higgins

Episode Date: October 25, 2022

We're back with another shorter, cleaner, edition of an Ologies classic. Today it's all the way back from 2018:  INSECTS, just straight up buuuugs. Quite likely Alie's favorite subject ever with an ologist who quite likely also dramatically shifted her life. That would be Lila Higgins, with passion more powerful than a Goliath Beetle's "especially large slicey mandibles." We cover a lot of ground, from dinosaur bugs to why wasps are so problematic, and even why it's totally fine to kiss a cockroach.Lila Higgins' book, 'Wild LA: Explore the Amazing Nature in and Around Los Angeles': A donation went to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County Community Science ProgramMore Smologies episodesFull length Entomology (INSECTS) with Lila Higgins + links hereSponsors of OlogiesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Steven Ray Morris,  Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions, and Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaExtra help from Noel Dilworth, Susan Hale, Kelly Dwyer, Emily White, & Erin TalbertSmologies theme song by Harold Malcolm

Oh, hey. It's your buddy who swaps sandwiches in your lunch, Allie Ward, and welcome to another episode of Smologies, which are condensed, shortened, all ages, classroom-friendly episodes of Allie G's classics. So they're little, and they are safe for littles. Okay, so this one, Bugs, Bugs, Bugs, Bugs, Bugs. So you may not know this about me yet, but I'm nuts about bugs. I love them.

I have had a fascination since I was a kid. I used to get bug books for every holiday and every birthday. My walls now, as an adult, are covered in bug posters and pinned insects. So this week's topic is one of my favoriteologies, of course. But even more importantly, this particularologist honestly changed the course of my life. She was just a friend of a friend at one point years ago, and she invited me one day to the LA County Natural History Museum in this lab that was off-limits to the public, and it was an insectary.

Now this is a bug lover's dream. So there are terrariums of millipedes and cockroaches. There's butterfly chrysalises hanging like these tiny chandeliers, dragonfly niads in gurgling tanks. There's a freezer full of tarantula molts. And at the time, I was going through a really sad period of my life, and not knowing any of this. This entomologist just casually suggested that I volunteer at the museum, and I did.

And talking to kids about bugs one morning a week lifted my spirits. It changed my life. After doing it for a few months, I somehow was offered a job as a science correspondent for CBS for a show called Innovation Nation. It's still on. Every Saturday morning, eight years later, I'm still doing the show, and I'm doing exactly what I wanted to do since I was 12, all because I took this tour at an insectary. I loved this interview.

I love this friend. It's one of my favorites. So the word entomology comes from the Greek, meaning to cut up into little pieces, which is not what you should do when you find a bug in your face. Rather, it's a reference to insects' bodies being cut or segmented. So having a notch at the waist. There you go. And this guest is an entomologist.

She's done a TED talk called Learning to Love Nature in a Big City. She's an author on one of my favorite books called Wild LA, which every Angelino should own a copy of. It tells you all of the things that you see out and about, all the critters and the plants that you see in the parks. It's great. I will link those on my website. She's also the manager of Community Science at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles,

one of my favorite places. So get ready to hear about bugs, licking cockroaches, social insects, less social insects, lots of legs. 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 sell them? Well, usually 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 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 owned bugs and adults are like, kill it with fire? 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, 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. What is the most fulfilling thing about 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. What's a show stopping bug? When you say 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? 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. I have a question. 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. So they outnumber mammals and fish and birds, etc., etc. So in 1949, John Burton 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. John is just in a shack in the backyard, tinkering over and over, being like, man, cannot get enough of these beetles. Can't stop making them. I can't stop. I love them so much.

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, 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, that's a great way, lay definition for sure. OK, 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. So it spreads all these diseases. So what do they do? Well, Lila 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. And they're tiny. They're like like one to two millimeters long.

They're babies. They're and they're some of them are kind of golden. So it's like these little literally like with these really beautiful gosmo wings, 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 like tube that goes into your mouth and then you suck on. And then and then the little wasps go into 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. Yeah, that that's a prosthetic proboscis. What is the deal with with like bees and being social insects and the rest from being like this apple core is mine.

Well, OK, 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. 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 and but the joke was on me because I 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 different types of bees might be wallflowers preferring to hang out alone. And others might be social butterflies, except they're bees.

But there are obviously benefits to to having that kind of social life because 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. 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 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. I have some questions that people wrote in that they can I rapid fire question you? Oh, my gosh, yes. But before your questions, we donate to a cause of theologist's choosing. And this week, it's going to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County,

where I met Leela Higgins and also where she works in community science, which are programs that get local people engaged to help collect data for scientists. And you can learn more about those programs at NHM.org or at the link in the show notes. And if you're not an LA, if you want to find community or civic, sometimes called citizen science programs all over the country, Leela says you can check out SciStarter.com, which will also be linked on my website.

So thank you to sponsors for making our donation possible. OK, let's hear your questions. OK, 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 the arachnids 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 devolved wings like Madagascar and his and cockroaches per se. But those legs are this method of locomotion on land that works really well for them. So it gets them around crawling, crawling wise. That's some of them. Well, they have 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? I'm going back to all my undergraduate classes. Are pedipalps on the front, but they're not? That's more of the arachnids have the pedipalp. Like the scorpions have pedipalps. Is it true that that exoskeleton rigidity is why insects could not maintain their massive prehistoric sizing?

Brandy DeMora wants to know this. Yeah, so the largest, largest insects we have right now in our current climate like pressure on the planet is about the size of a fist, which are the 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 like, imagine that multiplied by 10. So I don't know. I mean, that's an extrapolation. Who knows? 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. Storytime, 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 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 cockroaches that people cared about. Nobody cares about. 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 us 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 are tiny 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. 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 as 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 you it's not dirty. She's a hero. 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 is necessarily something that's going to feel great to them. So, yeah, I've seen cockroaches like really going to town, grooming, right?

Yeah. And I mean, they live the so the Madagascar and 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. They live better lives than I do. 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. So what did we learn? Pick weird bugs to study. Don't inhale them and never, ever, ever feel alone because there are bugs everywhere and they can be your friends.

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. 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.

And I'm on both at Allie Ward with one L and Allergies Merch is available at allergiesmerch.com. And of course, we have more small eGies episodes, including a whole one about bees. One about eating bugs, plus one on snails and wolves and veterinary science and the moon and dinosaurs. So download more at alleyward.com slash small eGies. And in the interest of keeping these short, we're going to list in the show notes all the people who worked on the show.

But extra big thanks to Mercedes Maitland and Zeke Rodriguez-Thomas and Jared Sleeper of Mind Gem Media for the edits on this episode. And if you stick around until the end, I give you a piece of advice. And this week, it's that when you're at a restaurant and people start singing happy birthday to someone, even if you don't know them, join in. Because first off, singing is fun. And also, wouldn't it be nice if a stranger wished you a happy birthday and sang to you?

I actually like to keep a birthday candle in my wallet, just in case I find out it's someone's birthday and they haven't made a wish yet. 10 out of 10. Always glad I have one. OK, have a great day. Small eGites, bye-bye. Slogies? Slogies?

Slogies? Slogies? Slogies?