Radiolab - Hard Knock Life

Episode Date: February 12, 2016

This Valentine's Day, a mysterious tap tap tapping leads us into a world of sex, death, and head-banging. Biologist Dave Goulson introduces us to the lonely yearnings of an especially pathetic beetle and snatches a sound back from the hands of the devil himself.  Featuring rapping about rapping from extra special guests Lin-Manuel Miranda, Utkarsh Ambudkar and Freestyle Love Supreme.  Produced by Simon Adler. We had engineering help from Rick Kwan.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. C. See?

Yeah. I'm Robert Crilwich. I'm Molly Webster. This is Radio Lab. And this week, Jad is off, nestled into his office, working on the next episode, which will play with a lot of the ideas that came up in our last Gary Hart podcast. But like with pop stars and music. Meantime, we've decided.

I wanted to offer you guys a little Valentine's treat. It's going to be part pros, part musical, in a hip-hop sort of way, with some extremely cool guests. Really? Oh, I promise you, yes, at the end of the show. And it all grows out of a tale we heard about a very small animal, which begins appropriately, with a very small noise. Yeah, so in days gone by, people tended to die at home.

This is go back a couple of hundred years before there were hospitals and so on. This, by the way, is David Goulson. I'm a professor of biology at the University of Sussex in the UK. And he told this tale to producer Latif Nasser and I. So you imagine that, you know, grandpa's ill and looks like he might die soon. Sorry, I don't know why that's funny, but... And so he'd be lying in bed upstairs, and everyone would be, out of respect, would be very quiet.

You know, they'd be creeping around the house. It was a time called the Death Watch. And when everyone was really quiet, they'd hear these faint drumming noises coming from the timbers of the house. I can try and do an impression of the noise actually. Yeah, I'd love to hear you. May not work very well, but bear with me. Yeah.

Do you get that? Yeah. Yeah. So five or six identical beats. And legend has it, that this was the devil drumming his fingers, impatiently waiting for the soul to depart the body so that he could claim it. But it turns out actually it's the mating call of a tiny little beetle.

The Death Watch Beetle. That's where it gets its name. So Dave became a kind of a fan of these Beatles. Oh, yeah. It's a widespread species. And, in fact, he's got a house that's full of them. It's pretty decrepit. It's slightly falling down. The roof leaks and whatever.

But it's home to a whole host of these little beetles. And in the quiet, he can hear them. So a while ago he found himself wondering, what's this noise really all about? Which you might not think would be a great mystery. But what he discovered is it's all about love. Or at least sex. So today, a story that reminds us how difficult, lonely, how hard the mating game can be. Perfect Valentine.

No, it'll get better. So we will begin at the beginning. The life cycle. Yeah. So the female beetle lays an egg on a piece of dead wood. And Dave said he would watch them, and the moms would just drop their babies randomly. Some here, some there, usually into a hole in a log or into a wood beam. And it hatches into the little tiny white grub.

So you imagine this little thing, pitch black, you know, in its own little tunnel on its own. and it starts chewing. It chews away at the wood very, very slowly. And eventually, about 10 or 15 years later... Well, years, it's going to chew for 10 to 15 years. Yeah, for a decade or more, all things. And eventually, it reaches the magnificent size of about a quarter of an inch, at which point it pupates, so it turns into a little chrysalis.

A few months later, the adult beetle hatches out of that. And so finally it crawls out of the log and onto the surface. Is that the first time they see light? Yeah, yeah, that would be it. Oh, wow. So it's only the adults that you ever really see. And they're possibly the most boring-looking insects you could imagine. Really?

They're about a quarter of an inch long, bullet-shaped, dull brown. They're really easily mistaken for mouse droppings, actually. And the adult only has really one job, and that's to mate. So the male beel... He has to find himself a female. So he's got his work cut out. For one thing, as an adult, he doesn't eat. He can't feed, so he's going to starve to death in a couple of weeks or so.

On top of that, he's nearly blind. Yeah, and that's where this strange drumming noise comes in. That's their way of finding each other in the usually rather dead. dark places where they live. That's your way of saying, Hello? Hello? Yeah, and they make it by drumming their head.

So the male beetle, he kind of braces himself, and then he waxes his head five, six times. Oh, you say drumming the head, you mean banging the head. Yeah, it's like head butts the timber he's sitting on with these kind of forehead, if you like. So that's what makes the drumming noise. He's basically whacking his head against the wood. So he comes out of his hole,

just wanders about and does his little drumming noise. Now, if a human happens to hear him? People these days, they tend to spray their houses with insecticides, and that's the end of the Beatles. Oh. But let's assume. Yes, let's assume. That he doesn't get fumigated, okay?

He just keeps wondering about banging his head, and then he pauses for a second, kind of listening to see if anyone repeats. And if there's no reply, he wanders on. Unfortunately, according to David, Death Watch Beatles are quite rare these days, so there is a distinct chance that poor male will never find a female. Oh, this just gets more and more depressing. Well, sorry, I'm laughing again.

And can you tell the same story from the female's perspective? So she just sort of is, she just waits in silence for three weeks. And if no one comes, she just, she just sort of stands. over and dies. Oh, God. She wanders around a little bit, I suppose, in the hope that she might encounter a male. But that is all she does. It's a tedious life, I'm afraid.

But let's imagine, again, for the sake of ignorance, that after the 15 years of chewing and no fumigations for them at all, let's then think, wow, they get really lucky. He gets a reply. They find each other. She makes the noise immediately after. she hears the cry of a male. And he then gets very excited because he may have been wondering about banging his head for days

and this little duet gets going. He starts to run around banging his head over and over again. You know, this is his moment and eventually by a lot of trial and error and occasionally they got it wrong and fell off the edge and were never seen again. But more often than not, he would eventually find the female

and the males will immediately jump on top of her. And he then continues to drum his head, but this time he's not headbutting the timber. He's whacking her, which family needs to their own, you know, presumably that works for a female Death Watch beetle. But because they're very short-sighted, they will often jump on the wrong way around.

And that's not so good. Because the females can actually control. He can't force them to mate. So he has to persuade her to cooperate or else he's going nowhere. And can humans tell if it's going well? Well, so usually she carries on replying. So he's banging her in the back of the head,

and she's then drumming her head on the wood underneath. And that's usually a good sign. If she carries on banging her head on the timber, that means she's probably going to make with him within the next minute or two. But Dave says when he has watched this happen, he's noticed that quite often the females wouldn't make, even though, you know, they'd maybe been sitting. there for days waiting for a partner to come along.

And then one one finally does and he finally gets to them. They're not interested. You know, it's not good. I thought that they only have three weeks. That is so shocking to me. This is a very discerning lady that she chooses death over an ugly mate. Well, I guess she's not actually choosing. She's hoping that she'll get a better mate.

There's another fish in the sea. Another fish in the sea. Hopefully. But I thought, well, what's the difference? Why are some male successful and some not? And it quickly became clear that the heavier the male, the more likely he was to be successful. So is there some explanation for why? So actually these things, they produced quite staggering amounts of sperm, it turns out.

What is stagger? What do you mean by staggering? The average was 13% of his body weight. 13%. What? If that were us, like what would that be like? We were talking about three or four gallons. So, you know, think about.

Think about that from everyone. It's best not to think about that too much, really. Because that's just so gross. It's a slightly disturbing. So the deep tragedy here would be to be a member of this species and to be born. Scrawny. Scrawny. Yeah.

I mean, just out of curiosity, how big are you? I'm moderately skinny. So if I was a death much beetle, I'd be in trouble. Anyway, so what I really wanted to know, were the females actually just weighing the males, or was it something that was correlated with being a big male? You know, maybe they were stronger or made a louder noise or something. And so the obvious way to try and find out was to artificially change the weight of the males. So make tiny fat suits for the...

Well, exactly. Yeah, not quite. But I wish this worked for people. It would be hilarious, but I don't think it does. So we have this stuff called Blu-Tac in the UK. Do you have blue-tack over there? I don't know. Like Sticky-Tack? Sticky tack, I guess.

You used it to stick posters on the wall. So Dave went to the store, bought some of this stuff, and then just beat it up into little bits. And stuck them on the back of males to make them a little bit heavier. And for the skinny males? It worked an absolute treat, these males. I do feel slightly mean that those poor females, obviously, were getting a bit shortchanged.

But hopefully they managed to produce some eggs anyway. Because in the end, Dave finds these beetles, the males and the females surprisingly chival. charming. And after all, he does live with them. A lot of them. They're still in my house. They're still chewing away at the beams. I've been, I'm torn. You know, part of me knows that if I don't spray them with some insecticide, then eventually the roof will start to collapse. But it's going to take decades. And I kind of quite like having them there. So for the moment, they've been spared. And I kind of quite like listening to them tapping away in the springtime.

So you're sitting in bed at dawn or dusk, and you hear the quiet banging, and you think... Yeah, yeah, it's funny, isn't it, that people thought this was a sinister noise, and actually it's all about love. Thank you to Dave Goulson, who wrote a book all about these bugs, A Buzz in the Meadow, the Natural History of French Farm. I didn't mention to you that it's a French farm. He has this little place in France that he goes to one month a year, and that's where he communes with his beetle French. And has one of the saddest months thinking about the struggles of these people. I found it, it made me think that dating in New York was pretty easy. All right. For people who are feeling, if you're feeling sad, we want to end that problem right away.

In the next part of this show, we're going to revisit this story in such a crazily new way for us. The guys from Hamilton, the Hot Broadway show, I told some of them this story that you just heard and they have decided to musicalize the tale and they will do that right after this brief pause. But oh, before, while during the pause you know how raunchy this

story is? Well, it only gets more so when it's in the musical tell. So you might want to ask your little ones to leave the room around now and then you should by all means stay for the after party. This is Melanie calling from Durham, North Carolina.

Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.s. I'm Robert Krollwich. I'm Molly Webster. This is Act 2 in which I, you know, when I put together these, any story, as you know, I just wander around and tell it to every single person I know. It's part of how you do it.

So, yeah, it could be strangers. So I was talking to a friend of mine who's in the theater, a guy named Tommy Kale. And I'm talking to him and I'm saying, you know, I'm wondering what's going on in the minds of these little, assuming that they have minds, these little animals, because it seems so unfair, 15 years of chewing and then this. So he said, you know, we could be those Beatles. Wait, who's the we? Well, we is an improvisational freestyle group called Freestyle Love Supreme. And it's, now this, I should tell you, Tommy goes to Lynn Manuel Miranda. Who's no joke. Who is Hamilton in the hit musical Hamilton. And he writes, he says, I'll be one of the

beetles. And then they go to Uktash Ambudkar, who was in a movie called Pitch Perfect where he played a rapper. Oh, yeah. And by the way,

this is all guys. This is like, you have to think of himself as in an Elizabethan beetle situation. This is Shakespearean Death Watch beetle.

That's right. All the lady parts will be played by males. So Lynn's going to be a woman. Utkash is going to be the man. So here is the male

beetle being the beetle that he hopes he can be. Hey, ladies. Also the weight is over. Get ready for the beautiful beat to Cassanova. He is I and I am him. The most masculine beetle by the name of Slim. Now evolution made me small so I could slip through the cracks. I'll be the first one to jump on a Lady Beatles back. But it's hard out here and I'm not playing. The human

beings hear me and then they get to spraying. They think that I'm the devil so they get to fumigating. They don't understand that I'm only procreating. But I'm slimmer, so I'm a winner. I finally see the sun peeper Shorty and I know that she's the one so I'm like Beetle Baby doll. Let's get involved. I want to give it to you all right here on this law. I've been chewing through that word for my entire life. And it feels so good to finally find a wife. Yeah, I guarantee I'm your chosen. But can you remind me which end it goes in?

This is hard. Yeah, it's hard out there for a beetle. But for the female, played by Lynn Miranda, I mean, she's going to have her own agenda. She needs to find a guy. It has to be. She hopes it will be the best guy, but I don't know. Somebody's knocking. Could this be the beetle loving waiting?

for somebody's knocking Ben is this a mate worth waiting for My mama told me to never settle I was did as I was told I'm looking for a hottie with a body full of sperm And deeped out a heart of gold But when you hear that knocking And it sounds so rare

Is the grass always greener Is there a heavier beetle somewhere Somebody's knocking But I am a beetle worth waiting The power Somebody's knocking I'm gonna wait for something more The power of the female

And the sadness for the guy But this is a Valentine's Day You never feel sad for the lady What if she gets some lame dude And she's like, oh my God I've waited 15 years for this And I can't do it with you And she has to move on and fall off the table

Okay, okay But now you know that Professor Goulson Is our Cupid here He's going to save both of our sad souls. Yes. With the sticky tack. So here is the, this is the kind of a lame valendated card, but I'm thinking about it. But here is our finish to our own Valentine's tale.

Little Romeo and Julietish, actually. Against all eyes. I'm going to make you mine. At the end of the day. Wait, I'm half blind. Where are you? Fine. Oh, there you are.

I've been chewing all my life long trying to put the world. Beetle baby dog don't let me die a virgin. I'm certain I love will burn like embers. I'll be the one that only love you remember. Keep banging your head on that timber. I agree it'd be easier with tender, but let me loose inside your caboose so I could give you some of my beetle juice. Somebody's knocking.

Okay, I know I was playing it cool before, but seriously, I got no clue what I'm doing, so if you could help me out, you'd be doing me a real solid. Little did she know, before you. Did she know before I beat it? The doctor helped me. I cheated. Slim winds are dead. But what a way to go.

Okay, it is time, of course, for us to go. Thanks especially to Freestyle Love Supreme and to Udkosh Amutkar, otherwise known as UTK, to Thomas Kael and to Lynn Manuel Miranda. And to our producers on this episode, Soren Wheeler and Simon Adler. Thank you, thank you. I'm Robert Krollwich. I'm Molly Webster. And happy Valentine's Day.

Happy Valentine's Day, Robert. Yeah, you too. You too. Message 1 Hi, this is Dave Goulson leading message. This is the credit for the show. Radio Lab is produced by Jad Adamrad, if that's pronounced correctly.

Our staff includes Simon Adler, Brenner Farrell, David Gable, Dylan Keith, Matt Kielty, Robert Crawlwich, Andy Mills, Latif Nasser, Kelsey Padgett, Ariane Wack, Molly Webster, Soren Weiner and Jamie York. With help from Alexandra Lee Young, Tracy Hunt, Steck Mahee, it says here, Tam, that must be Stephanie Tam,

and Mika Lowinger. Our fact checkers are Eva Dasher and Michelle Harris. And I'm Dave Gawson. Good night. End of message.