Radiolab - This American Roach

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

A couple summers ago, Radiolab reporter Alex Neason got out of the shower and almost stepped on her worst nightmare: an American Cockroach. It was flipped onto its back, struggling, and for a split second, Alex swears she felt the spiny tickle of its legs on the underside of her bare foot. And, like every other time she has come into contact with a roach, this sent her into a debilitating spiral of fear, anger, and disgust.  This week, Alex tries to understand what might be behind her fear, in the hopes she can overcome it. And in doing so, Alex learns more about these so-called pests than she could have ever wanted to.Special thanks to Jessica Ware, Timothy Marzullo, Alexandra Bell, and Changlu WangEPISODE CREDITS:  Reported by - Alex Neason Produced by - Jessica Yung and Annie McEwen with mixing help from - Jeremy Bloom Fact-checking by - Sophie Samiee and Edited by  - Pat Walters EPISODE CITATIONS: Articles -  American Cockroaches, Racism, and the Ecology of the Slave Ship (https://zpr.io/UNKsMz7ZaLvb) by Lindsay Garcia, Arcadia Books -   Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains (https://zpr.io/6E5wJBM4Kvcv) by Bethany Brookshire The Cockroach Papers (https://zpr.io/CvKePYxEMEAW) by Richard Schweid Cockroach (https://zpr.io/UuEAjmfqKccQ)  by Marion Copeland Other cool stuff - Have fun with neuroscience and ... Roaches @ www.backyardbrains.com Sign up for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Signup (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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

C. See? Yeah. Okay. So, do, do, do, do, do, do. I have to tell you a story. All right. And I think I'm. I'm Lathf Nasser.

This is Radio Lab. And I'm sitting with reporter, Alex Nisa. So my birthday is in August. And a couple summers ago, here in New York, we were in the middle of this very hot, very sticky heat wave. Okay. And I had like a nice day. I didn't do too much. I think I went to my community garden.

I remember spending some time there. There's a park near where I live that I like to go to. And so I'd been outside all day. And I came home and needed to take a shower. Okay. And I was getting out of the shower in this cloud of steam, drying off, putting like, moisturizer on my face. And I went to leave the bathroom barefoot to go into my bedroom, which is right next door,

to get dressed. Okay. And I lifted my foot to take a step into the hallway. But right before it touched the floor. I felt these thready little legs on the bottom of my foot and I looked down

and there, on its back, was a gigantic roach. Oh. Wait, what? I thought you were going to say like a serial killer. You mean like a roach, like a cockroach? An American cockroach, yeah.

And this was like a big one. Um, and it was on its back? Like it was dying? Yeah, but with roaches, you just never know. Like, it could look dead, but be just alive enough that it's going to flip back over and run up my leg. And with my foot hovering over this bug, I'm flooded with revulsion, but also terror. Like, this bug has got to go now.

And so I got back in the shower, scrub my foot, wrapped myself in a towel, ran to go find my cat, put her next to the roach, take a few steps back. And I wait. And she's looking at the roach and looking at me. And I'm like, do something. But she just walks her way. So then I'm like, pull yourself together, like, buck up. I have to square up against the roach.

The dying or dead roach. Right. Okay. So I put on yellow rubber gloves and then I get a wad of paper towels, saturated in water, grab, twirling. Boil Cleaner, you know, like the blue gel. Okay. Squirt a bunch of it into the paper towel.

And from like three feet away, toss it so that it lands gel down on top of the roach. And then I take a shoe and holding it like as far away from my body as I can get it. I'm just like, like, wop, wop, wop, wop, wop, wap, wop, wap. Yeah, wop, wop, wop, wop. Yeah. Wap, wop, wop, wop. Yeah. What, what, what, what, what.

Okay, yeah. What? Yeah. And then I get a trash bag, scoop it up and stick it in there, and then tie it up super tight. Wow. Then it goes into the trash chute. And standing there in rubber gloves, next to the trash chute on my birthday, I'm just like, what is wrong with me?

Like, this is not the first time that this has happened. Every single time I see a roach, I completely unriended. Like, I just go nuts. And I don't even hate bugs in general. It's just something about this bug. I don't know. Like, I just snap. And for some reason, when it happened this time, I was like, I'm a whole adult person.

I'm a science reporter. This has to stop. Okay. So is what we're doing here? Like, it's like how Alex learned to stop worrying and love the roach? Uh, not really. I'm not really trying to get cozy with roaches. I just want to figure out how to get to a place where I'm not terrified of them.

And obviously, I know this is something that a lot of people are afraid of. And I wanted to figure out, you know, is there something I can do so that the next time I see one, I don't completely lose my mind. So I figured I'd go hang out with people who face basically the worst version of this. every single day. Okay. Which is how I ended up at the after party. This is one of the finest expos in New York, probably in the nation.

For the New York City Pest Expo. And we get top-notch pest control companies and exterminators from all over. There was like a roach ball? Yeah, it's like the social part. That's fine. Like there's food, there's drinks. There was a DJ. Like there's music.

And also. Oh, yeah. I've seen roaches drop off the ceiling. A ton of people who have been in straight up nightmare scenarios. I've knocked on doors and seen them running up and down the doors. Roaches were in everything from the record player to the TV to the bedhead. This place was literally, I'm telling Stephen King levels of roaches. And yet, no fear.

We had to take care of the situation. How many insects do you do you have at home? Oh, I have about 4,000 or 5,000 bedbugs. Yeah. This is Lou Sorkin, an entomologist and pestilipel. control consultant. All the three cockroach species, millipede, centipede, spiders, whip scorpion. And right next to him, he had this huge plastic tub of cockroaches.

This is a Madagascar hissing cockroach. Oh, yes. Madagascar ones are huge, right? Yeah, like some of the biggest roaches in the world. And at one point, Lou just picked one up with his bare hands. They won't bother you. They're just, you know, sitting. They're tasting.

You could see the palps come from the mouth down and touch my skin. I think I might have nightmares tonight. We'll see. And I was like, how are these people like that? Hi. Nice to you. And could I get like that? Well, let's go.

Take a stroll. So I found some exterminators who agreed to let me follow them around. One named Lakeisha Fulcher. Here we have 11 buildings, all 16 stories. She works at a public housing complex on the Lower East Side. If I go in your house, you have 300 roaches. I'm happy. Give me five days.

Let's go. And also, a guy named Cedric Simmons. He has his own company. So right now, we're headed to North Bronx, to a residential unit that has been having some issues with German roaches. And they just started showing me the ropes. Flashite is the most essential piece of the toolkit. We went into basements and trash rooms.

Watching a light on, of course, the scattering. They're going to places like this. They showed me how to find signs that roaches were living there, even when they're hiding. So you'll be looking for marks like this. What looked like pen tapping? It'll look like pepper, like stuck pepper on a wall. It's roach droppings. And, of course, how to kill them.

There's one right back here, look. Oh, yeah. See it? Cedric takes me inside this house, and the first thing he does is take a look around the closet with his flashlight, and you can see the roaches perched up on the wall. Oh, there's two more up there. And then he goes to the kitchen sink, and he pulls out this jug, and it's this chemical. You know, it's basically industrial strength raid.

Yeah, it is pretty strong. It has a pretty good knockdown, too. Knockdown meaning how quick it reduces the population. The kind of stuff you need a license to buy. Like, you can't get this at Home Depot. So what does this actually do to them? So it attacks their nervous system, and it disrupts it, and it makes them basically just incapable,

and then it succumbs them. Is it painful for them? I don't know. I don't know. At some point, he pointed out a pregnant roach. That one back there has its egg sack about to come out. The one on the wall? Yeah, in the corner.

Is that that that little, like, the hole thing at the very end? Yeah, that's an exact. Oh, man. And then he started spraying them. And after about 10 minutes, they made their last twitches. All you guys, definitely dead. How did you feel about that? Like, did you feel bad?

Um, sort of. Wow. The sack is coming out. Damn. I was like, that sucks for a second. Yeah. And then it's like I didn't think about it for the rest of the day. Oh, well.

Sorry. Honestly, what I really felt were these little glimmers of confidence. Like you weren't afraid. Well, it's not that I wasn't afraid, but it was like my fear had shrunk just a that I was starting to feel kind of bold, like maybe I could kill these things, too. So here we have roach activity, paralleling activity. And then also that's the brand of the bait, yeah. Okay, we saw one.

I didn't freak out. Like, Cedric took me to Grand Central Station. And let's go for it. I was seeing fat roaches and acting like it was no big deal. Ooh, big one. Okay. I didn't like it. It's so tall.

But it was nothing like before. So I can step on them or I can spray them. Um, I don't know. Stepping seems kind of old school. Maybe we do that. Oh! Wow. That was funny.

Yeah. But then, one night, I was just sitting around my apartment. A friend was over. We were watching TV. Okay. And I went to the kitchen for a glass of water. And I saw something slightly moved in the sink. So I looked inside and I saw antenna.

And I was like, nope. Walk straight out of the kitchen, got my friend, told him he needs to come deal with it. And then I stood behind him and squealed while I watched him kill it. Wait, what happened to all your training? I don't know. I just couldn't do it. What? I mean, first of all, Lakeisha and Cedric nowhere to be found.

Right. And second of all, I was seeing this roach in my house, in my sink, where I had just washed blueberries that morning. And I think it triggered some kind of survival instinct. And I just don't think any amount of pest control knowledge was going to override that. Yeah. Basically, I was just like, okay, well, that didn't work. Back to square one, you know, I got to start over.

And one day I was just Googling around. And I stumbled across this guy. Hey, guys. I'm Chef Joseph Youen, edible insect ambassador at Brooklyn Bugs, and we're going to show you how to eat all these bugs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've seen this YouTube video of him doing, like, different dishes with bugs.

Yeah, like gourmet dishes. Yeah. Bug Apetit. The beautiful notes of cricket, umami, and nuttiness, this is perfect. Oh, wait, but you're not. Well, I just thought if anyone could help me get over that revulsion, I feel, towards these bugs. This corpian literally adds so much labor.

Maybe it's this guy. Like, if I could just eat a roach, maybe it wouldn't be nasty anymore. It would just be a little snack. Okay. All right. And so I sent him an email, and I was like, do you ever cook with roaches? And he wrote back to me and was like, absolutely not. I'm already having to do a lot of work to convince people that they should eat other bugs.

Roaches have such a bad reputation. Like roaches don't help my cause, basically. I love that it's a bridge too far for him. So I went back and forth with him being like, you're the only person I can possibly think of who could make me like eating a roach. Yeah. And then finally. You bullied him into doing it.

He, like, I fear I might have. I fear I might have. That sounds good. Fuck. Well, let's see. Let's see. Okay, so what happened? Let's do it.

What's going on? Right. So me and eight of our colleagues. Okay. Joseph had, like, very, very generously invited us to his home in Queens. All right. We're all going to try something really kind of unusual and weird. So obviously all of us are really nervous, including Joseph,

because he's never actually eaten an American cockroach before. So we started with his usual dishes. crickets, ants, mealworms. This is the brood 19 cicadas, and it has a cricket tempera batter on it. Okay, so this is just the warm-ups. Yeah. All right. It's delicious.

I love it. It's good. And the whole time I'm looking over at the bowl of cockroaches on the counter out of the side of my eye. And, by the way, they weren't, like, random roaches. These were food safe from a lab. Okay, good to know. And honestly, Lestev, I was kind of in denial. that any of this was about to happen.

They're quite frightening. Maybe I'll pull the legs off of them. First up, do be roaches. There might be innards that squirt in your mouth. Fried. I can't really taste anything, which is ideal. Oh, something. It's mental.

Something poked the inside of my mouth. It's a leg? You think it's a leg? I, less than I don't know what it was, but I hated it. Inside of the back. You're doing really good. Next.

Madagascar hissing cockroaches. And he had blanched these and done nothing else. He'd dress a cockroach but still a cockroach. He put them on a cutting board and sliced them so we could slurp the insides out like an oyster. It looks like cottage cheese. But this one was not that bad. It has like a really umami smell.

Better. Much better. It was like eggs. Huh. And then finally, my arch nemesis, the American cockroach. Oh. So he grabs some kind of cooking oil,

throws it in a pan, and adds all these aromatics, like garlic, red pepper, and then he throws in the roaches. You know what? It has kind of a chemo smell to it that the other two didn't have. It's kind of weird.

But as he started to cook, everyone's faces, including Joseph's, just started to fall because no matter how long he was like, hanging these freaking roaches with all these aromatics, it just smelled off. Aboard, over, over, let's just have the chocolate crickets.

But Joseph still grabbed a spoon. I think someone has to do it. Took a bite. What does it taste like? And the look on his face made me feel really guilty. I mean, I almost spit out what I ate. Terrestrial's producer Alan Giffinsky also tried it. I'm nervous.

I mean, doesn't, um, Oh, yeah, there it is. Well, initially it just kind of just was tasting sort of the garlic, like an onion. But that smell that you guys have been smelling is it's also a taste. It tastes like something that you shouldn't eat. Yeah. What is the roachy smell smell? Kind of like medicinal, but in like a, like, a fruit.

foul, sour kind of way. So you did not eat it? No, like, according to a bugs-ass food expert, the American cockroach is literally inedible. It's a warning sign to me. It's kind of like, don't eat me. I dare you to eat me. I'll kill you. Man, this is really not going well.

Yeah, no, the whole thing completely backfired. Yeah. So we're going to take a quick break. Yeah, cleanse our palettes. Yeah, but, actually, After the break, things are going to get even messier. We'll be right back. I'm Latif Nasser.

This is Radio Lab back with reporter Alex Nissen, who has just faced her deep-seated fear of the roach in a number of unspeakable ways. Yes. But it backfired and she only managed to surface her maybe even more deep-seated disgust for them. Yeah, I didn't want them in my life, in my city, in my state. Sure. Anywhere. Sure. On planet Earth.

Yeah. I just hate them. And this boom likes to slide. Sort of amidst all of this. I came across this book called Pests. How Humans Create Animal Villains by science writer. Can I cuss on this program? Yes.

Bethany Brookshire. So this squirrel is known as fucking Kevin. And this book, it was just on the front table at my neighborhood bookstore. But it turned out to be exactly what I needed. because while the animal Bethany hates is a squirrel. And he lives in the maple tree in front of my house. Particularly the ones that she named Kevin, who were eating all of her tomatoes.

Doesn't even eat it. Just one bite and then leaves it. So this is like personal. Yes, I really did contemplate a BB gun. Wow. But Kevin is one of the creatures that led me to this deep question of... The question the book was asking... What is it that makes us hate animals?

Yeah. I could sort of feel it elevating. me out of my murder, murder, murder, kill, kill, lizard brain to this idea that I could really get behind. Every time an animal has succeeded really well at living near us, we hate them. If we can't take it in, tame it, and put it in a little doggy sweater, we do not want it.

That word pest takes an animal that is like a living, breathing creature that lives here on this planet with us and turns it into an object. We're saying that that animal has no value. We are saying that anything we need to do to get rid of that animal is worthwhile. Which is exactly how I feel about roaches. And she sort of proposes that we should do away with the category of pest altogether. Wait, that's fascinating.

And, you know, the wheels in my head just like start spinning. And I just kept thinking, like, huh, this is how I want to be in the world, what I want my politic to be. Like, I'm going to make a t-shirt says abolish pests and let people ask me about it. Like, I'm down. And I really want to not hate the roach. Yes. But how?

Well, so a lot of the way we respond to animals and the anger we feel and the frustration arises out of our own ignorance. Sounds like you need to, you know, walk a mile in their little weird, disgusting feet. I know. I think it's time to learn about these. revolting, repulsive, nauseating, offensive, terrible animals. Okay. So let's chat a little bit about the disgust response.

So I called up entomologist Sammy Ramsey, professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Okay. I needed you to see what is happening on this tree. Look at this. Because this guy... Somebody look at this. Really. How cute is this bug?

Loves bugs. This bug, how cute is... This bug. He even has a YouTube channel where he sometimes sings to bugs. Okay, he likes bugs. I love it. And so I thought, if anyone can help me abolish the pest in my heart, it would be Sammy. All right, Alex, listeners, y'all ready for Dr. Sammy Storytime?

Yes. It's Dr. Sammy Storytime. All right, y'all. We're going to get some theme music for that at some point, but anyway. And maybe it's just because Sammy is really charming, but talking to him, I couldn't help but feel my hatred of the roach. They are the coolest. Begin to soften. Cockroaches are survivors.

I learned that they're at least as old as a dinosaurs as a species. They can go for ridiculous amounts of time without food. You can cut off a cockroach's head and they can survive for more than a week. They can run like three miles an hour. They're basically the cheetah of the insect world. They are very resistant to nuclear radiation. They can eat paper, just paper. It's some of these survival techniques, like their tendency to run away from light

and their ability to flatten their bodies and squeeze into even the tiniest crack or crevice that make people distrust them. Like we step on a cockroach. And then ever so slowly lift our foot. And it runs away. And we're just like, what? How? What sort of sorcery did you just do?

So I was listening to all this stuff, Sammy was telling me. Do they have nine lives? It was almost like I could feel the roach begin to transform into something more. than just a pest. So they've sort of evolved to protect themselves in this way from us, the predator, and like other predators, I guess.

Like these organisms are absolutely incredible and had they not... But then he told me that as much as I didn't want cockroaches around... Cockroaches, they don't want to be here. They didn't want to be around either. Huh. What does that mean? Well, apparently the name...

Paraplenida Americana, the American cockroach. Is a misnomer. They used to live their best lives just running around on a totally different continent. But in order to really tell its story, I need to take you back hundreds of years. When colonists showed up on the west coast of Africa, they corralled a bunch of human beings onto these ships. They stacked them like furniture and gave them no opportunities to behave like humans, to go to the restroom, the cleanliness standards on those ships were pretty low. And there were also some hitchhikers on those ships. See, the American cockroaches actually from Africa. And they climbed

aboard those ships that had a bunch of unprotected food in various places. And they found the slats of wood between the ships to be great spaces for them to wedge their bodies. And when they got to the US, they set up a whole new population. So they got here on slave ships. They didn't really have too much of a choice in the matter. They- tells me this in this conversation, and I, it just like, it felt like, damn. Okay. Why, like, why would you, let's start this whole conversation over and just, like, can we just not? It was just sort of like, like, I can't even just hate a bug without the shadow of slavery.

Like, I just wanted to hate this bug and see if I can not hate it. And then it's like, now this. Hmm. I mean, can you, like, what was inside of that moment for you? Well, I talked to a bunch of people about this. Are you asking me if I feel kinship to these roaches? Nope, absolutely not. And one of them was author and my friend, Angela Flournoy.

Obviously, the metaphor is about. Because there's like the thing that I think everyone's going to do, which is be like, oh, great, shared history. You guys survived something together. And so, you know, you should feel some special connection to this insect. Right. That just sort of walks itself into the room. It does. And I'm like, absolutely not.

That story just plays straight, like, directly into, like, all the old, just the oldest and most boring racist story that's been told about black people in this country. I mean, Roach is an old anti-Black slur. And because of racism, black people were forced into poor housing conditions. And so sometimes had to live in closer proximity to the Roach. And of course, I knew all that, but to see that that line of history actually started with a roach on a slave ship is just like... Wow, that is... Yeah, it just feels like, it's just like, damn. Yeah.

I told Cedric Simmons, the exterminator. You know, a lot of people won't treat it with carrying hands. And he spoke to this fear of mine. I think they'll weaponize it, you know? Like, should I suppress this? Like, everything winds up in the wrong hands. And it's like... Oh, those people.

They probably already know. I just assume. That's CPT is probably telling people this information. You know, we live in a dystopia. But still, does putting this in my story, like, could it deepen this racist idea? Like, does it give legitimacy to the idea that some people have that black people and roaches go together?

I think that it's really, it's legitimate, the feelings of, I've tried since I knew I was going to come I'm talking about cockroaches, which I also, you know, I really don't like them. And I, I've been thinking about some of the origins of my dislike. And when I was growing up, my mom was barely like, we would go over certain relatives' house or whatever, and she would, like, make us shake everything out on our porch before we came inside the house. And she was very over the top, like, vigilant about roaches and assumptions about, like, cleanliness. and some of that had to do with this idea of like shame and like socioeconomic shame.

And it's this says something about us. Like we might not have all the money, et cetera, but we're fastidious. And one evidence of that is like we don't have roaches. Yeah. The honest thing is that like when I tell a stranger, a story on the record about a roach in my home, like there is something however small in my chest that's a little bit like, damn. Now they know. Well, you have to free yourself

You have to free yourself in that shame You know? Yeah You have to free yourself of the burden of Like, that roach ain't got nothing to do with you Yeah I think of roaches In the same way that I think of rats

Again, Bethany, Brookshire These are animals that are succeeding Because our social contract has failed Right? The roach arrived in America and succeeded because of a massive failure of a social contract that we called enslavement, right? And they continue to succeed where social contracts fail, where racism thrives, you know, where people end up underserved and kind of forced into histories that leave them in a state of poverty and lack of opportunity, right? And so you could see them not so much as a parallel story,

so much as a symbol of the failed social contract that kind of got us here. My goal here is to regard the roach as a roach. And in so many ways, the roach is not just a roach. The roach is a stand-in for, like, class and race and, like, all of these things that are, like, way more consequential than just, like, a bug being a bug, you know?

Yeah. And all of us got me thinking about another roach fact. I can talk about bugs forever. Sammy told me about, which is that roaches are only dirty because they live in our sewer systems, which are filthy. And just like in New York, the way we dispose of trash, what do we do with it? We stick it out on the street all night. And then the roaches crawl all over it and pick up germs and stuff. And these roaches, as gross as they can be sometimes, are constant cleaners.

They're actually naturally very clean animals, cleaning their antenna almost the way that cats clean their whiskers. Making sure that they're getting rid of all the bits of foreign matter, that could accumulate bacteria or fungi. They spend a lot of time trying to clean themselves of filth that they picked up from us. And it made me wonder, if you take away all the different layers of human filth that we've placed on the roach,

what's left? What is that animal? Huh. Yeah, and where... I'm curious, I want to hear more about, like, how they live on the continent that they are native to. Yeah, so like they live basically anywhere that there's vegetation.

So jungle, forests, and they eat primarily organic matter. Leaves, decomposing trees, logs. They're decomposers. So they also eat like the bodies of dead animals and plants. It's so funny to think of them, like not in a house or a city or something, like that they're actually like forest creatures, you know? Yeah, yeah. And actually, I thought I would end. this story by taking you there to the place they came from. We're deep in a tropical rainforest in the

Congo basin. Huge trees, k-pox and mahoganyes tower hundreds of feet overhead. Their canopies filled with monkeys and parrots and eagles. The air is thick and humid and on the ground, scurrying along the edge of a rotten log is a female American cockroach. And this one is about to become a mother. At the base of her abdomen is a reddish capsule called a new thika. It's shaped like a tiny kidney bean. Inside it are 16 eggs. She carries them and incubates them within this protective casing.

dragging it along like a wagon. She pauses, briefly, to nibble at the edge of a damp leaf. She carries on, gliding effortlessly across the jagged debris that covers the forest floor, until she comes across a small hole in the soft, muddy soil. She pauses, looking both ways, making sure the coast is clear, before dropping the Uthika inside. She stares down at her children, or maybe past them. One by one, she oscillates her antennae up towards the sky and back down again, slow and considered,

as if reciting a prayer, and then she scurries away. A month passes. The eggs inside become tiny translucent larvae, each the size of a grain of a grain of rice. They've grown long, thin, and teny, which are folded forward into a tangle of their six stringy legs. The larvae have no lungs, so they breathe through ten little holes along the sides of their bellies. They're getting hungry and thirsty. And one day, as if responding in perfect time to an invisible conductor, all 16 babies flex the muscles in their abdomens and in unison take a giant collective breath. Their slender bodies swell with air, growing and growing and

growing until the Uthika pops, cutting the last tie to their mother that they've got. And together they scatter. Some towards the river. Some towards a wall of underbrush. Some up the thick trunks of hundred-year-old trees out into the forest to begin their lives. This episode was reported by Alex Niesin and produced by Jessica Young and Annie McEwen.

It was edited by Pat Walters and fact-checked by Sophie Sand. Special thanks to Jessica Ware, Timothy Marzullo, and Alexandra Bell. That's it for us. Thanks for listening. Hi, I'm Gabby. I'm from the Bay Area, California, and here are the staff credits. Radio Lab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Lettif Nasser. Soron Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandbach is our executive director. Our managing editors, Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design.

Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry, Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindu Naina Sambandan, Matt Kielty, Mona Mugauker, Alex Nissen, Sarah Kari, Natalia Ramirez, Rebecca Rand, Anisa Vizza, Arienne Wack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santis. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angelie Mercado, and Sophie Samayi. I'm Aubrey calling from Salt Lake City, Utah. Leadership support for Radio Lab's science programming is provided by the Simon Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.