Science Friday - Climate Policy And The Election, COVID Winter Forecast, Murder Hornets. Nov 6, 2020, Part 1

Episode Date: November 6, 2020

What Will The Pandemic Look Like During The Winter? It’s been almost a year since officials in China announced the spread of a mysterious pneumonia, and identified the first COVID-19 patients. On January 21, the first U.S. COVID-19 case was confirmed in Washington State. And new record highs for cases were set this week.  Since March, just about every country in the world has tried to get a handle on the pandemic using different interventions. Infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm and physician Abraar Karan discuss what pandemic planning might look like heading into the winter and during the second year of the virus.  Key Congressional Races That Could Affect Future Climate Change Legislation In addition to the presidential race, there were hundreds of local congressional elections that may be important in determining what type of climate change legislation will be passed in the next few years. Reporter Scott Waldman from E&E News/Climatewire talks about some of these races in areas affected by climate change. Not So Fast, Murder Hornets This past spring, you might have seen many headlines about murder hornets making it to the U.S. This is the sensationalist nickname for the Asian Giant Hornet, a large insect native to East and South Asia that preys on honey bee colonies.  Since late 2019, there have been several sightings of these hornets in Washington state. Just last month, the first Asian Giant Hornet nest was discovered in the U.S., in Blaine, Washington, which is on the U.S. and Canada border. On October 24th, that nest was successfully eliminated by a group of scientists from the Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).  Joining Ira to talk about why it was so important to destroy this nest are two entomologists who worked closely on this effort: Chris Looney, with the WSDA in Olympia, and Jackie Serrano with the USDA in Wapato, Washington. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. A bit later in the hour as the number of cases break records daily yesterday was 116,000 cases of COVID-19. And over 1,100 deaths. We'll check in on the COVID outlook. And we'll check in on the murder hornets. We'll talk about that. But first, the presidential election has taken center stage this week. And while most of the attention was focused on the names at the top of the ballot, But around the country, there were plenty of science adjacent items up for a vote. Joining me in an interview we recorded this morning to talk about those and other stories from the week in science is Maggie Kerrith, senior science reporter at 538, based in Minneapolis. Welcome back, Maggie, a busy day and week, right? 538. Yes, indeed. You may have heard there was an election. That happened and that it happened and then it kept happening.

And, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I got out of the case. this morning and just found out about it. Let's talk about some of the local side stories from this election. Yeah, well, let's start, as is traditional with drugs, or in this case, drug law reform. So decriminalization and legalization of marijuana is a growing trend in the U.S. And this election saw four new states making pot legal. And a fifth, Mississippi legalized it for medical purposes. But maybe a bigger thing is what happened in the state of Oregon, which passed two measures, one that decriminalizes possession of small amounts of many

different drugs, including things like heroin, and another that enables health care institutions to give people hallucinogenic mushrooms. Both these changes are actually evidence-based. Research on similar measures in countries like Portugal suggests that decriminalization of drugs can play a big factor in harm reduction, reducing drug-adjacent crime and keeping people healthier. And those psilocybin mushrooms have been found to be effective in treating mental health disorders like severe depression. Yeah, that is a first for any state that's good to hear. Okay, let's move on to your next story about wolves in Colorado. Yeah, they're back or they will be.

Colorado voted to reintroduce gray wolves to parts of the state. And this was a really tight race. It wasn't actually decided until Thursday. And it was hotly contested, pitting a heavily rural anti-wolf coalition against a heavily urban pro-wolf one. The anti-wolf groups were concerned that the animals are going to negatively affect hunting and ranching. And the pro-wolf groups are looking at the ecological impacts that have happened in places like Yellowstone, where a reintroduction of wolves in 1995 ended up creating this really interesting cascade of systemic changes that led to things like cleaner streams and brought several native species of plants and animals back from the brink.

Let's move on to Nevada renewable energy. Big story now, I would imagine if it's going to be President Biden talking about renewable energy. Right. So Nevada passed a mandate that required utilities in the state to get 50% of their power from renewable resources by 2030. That's interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it required a really high threshold to pass. This is actually the second time Nevadans have voted on this measure because it's, It's a change to the state constitution, not just an average law. And so it required approval in two even numbered election years. And that says something about support for renewables in the state. That measure is also notable because it would put this one state at least on track to meet those agreements for the Paris Climate Accords literally on the day that the U.S.

formally withdrew from the accord, although if, as it looks like, we're going to end up with President Biden will likely be back in that accord soon too. Very interesting. Let's go to other than the election news. We didn't get hit by an asteroid, did we? We didn't. Yay. The whole Earth wasn't destroyed. Always good news. They call me good news, Maggie. So you may recall that there was that seven foot diameter rock that had a one and 250 chance of hitting our planet on November the 3rd. Instead, it shot past us like a cache of mail-in ballots in the night and it's flying off somewhere through space. There were reports of fire. balls in the sky in election night, but those were related to the ongoing torrid meteor shower and should not be interpreted as portents of doom. That's terrific. I love your wordsmanship on that,

Maggie. Finally, we're talking about hopeful things, a hopeful message from a long-distance friend. Tell us about that. Yeah, NASA sent a message to interstellar space on October 29th, hailing Voyager 2 for the first time since the Deep Space radio antenna in Australia that's able to communicate with it, went offline for repairs in March. This is kind of a big deal because that radio antenna hadn't been upgraded on this crucial transmitter in more than 47 years. So this was a big thing that needed to happen. And the fact that Voyager 2 was able to receive and respond to that signal now is a good sign for the repair team. And also for the Voyager team, given that this is literally the only radio antenna in the entire world that can command that little space probe. Now, I have to say that for

transparency purposes. Voyager 2 is my favorite spacecraft out there because it is really gone where no spacecraft has ever gone. And I remember covering the launch of Voyager 2. So thank you for ending our update on that because it's really happy note for me. Thank you, Maggie. Yeah, thank you so much. We will see again sometime soon. Hopefully. Maggie Kerrith, senior science reporter at 538, and we are all hoping for a relaxing weekend. And that's a good way to start it. Often lost in the noise of the presidential race are the hundreds of House and Senate elections that will form the next Congress. And some of these races may be important in determining America's response to climate change over the next four years. My next guest is here to fill

us in on that. Scott Waldman is the White House reporter for E&E News, Climate Wire. He's based out of Washington, D.C. Welcome to Science Friday, Scott. Thank you for having me. Let's talk about some of these races that were happening in areas that are feeling the effects of climate change, like flooding and wildfires. Were there noticeable outcomes there? You know, Arizona, arguably, is one of the places where they're feeling climate more than almost anywhere else in the country.

And the reason I say that is because of the extreme temperatures they've had. I think a lot of times climate reporters, including myself, think of the folks in the country who are feeling climate effects in terms of those who are. facing hurricanes, facing sea level rise, facing wildfires. But in this occasion, I think Maricopa County in particular has seen just intense heat waves in the last few summers, and we're talking many days over 110 degrees. I think if you want to put climate change in front of people and have them realize that it's happening to them now, I think extreme temperatures are the way that people just can experience it firsthand and recognize the severity of the problem.

them. On another note, we saw in Miami-Dade County, which is, again, another area because of sea level rise and because of its vulnerability to hurricanes, as a place where that actually didn't pan out. That area certainly has had some of the worst effects of climate change in the country. It had a Republican congressman, Carlos Corbello, that represented it for years, who was one of the more aggressive climate advocates in his party. And he lost his election last time to a Democrat. That seat flipped back to Republican hands. And it's unclear. though I imagine issues related to the president's criticisms about socialism, certainly appealed to the Cuban and Venezuelan voters in that area.

And climate played less of a role in powering Trump's win there. Let's go to John Hickenlooper of Colorado, who won his race for Senate. He has an interesting climate change track record, doesn't he? That's right. I mean, as governor, he was certainly a proponent and defender of the oil and gas industry. And I don't think he is at all who your average environmentalist would change. choose to represent them in the Senate. However, he beat Corey Gardner, a Republican, and helps, you know, certainly bring the Senate numbers a little bit closer, though it looks like Mitch McConnell will

keep the Senate, at least until we find out the results of the Georgia special election in January. But Hickenlooper has changed his tune in recent years. He's sort of pledged to be more aggressive about climate change. I think he represents an older sort of democratic approach to climate. And we saw this during the Obama administration. They consider climate, or excuse me, they consider natural gas a bridge fuel and an essential part of their climate plan. I think a lot of young voters and climate voters are sort of fed up with that messaging, and they want to hear about your renewable plan and how you're going to transition off

of fossil fuels, including natural gas as quickly as possible. So Hickenlooper is definitely going to face pressure to up his climate game when as soon as he gets to Washington in a couple months. That brings up my next question about the. Senate, because I'm glad you went there about feeling pressure. Is the climate change issue public and visible enough that we may see some Republican senators crossing the aisle, perhaps, to vote with Democrats on climate issues? I do think so. I think that President Trump is going to be the last candidate we've seen who has just a climate denier platform reacts like the problem

doesn't exist, and then he goes in the other direction and rolling back climate regulations. I think the young people in the Republican Party, and there are people like Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader who has specifically said the party needs to do more on climate. We haven't seen any plans yet that would meaningfully address that. But, you know, these kind of sea changes don't happen overnight. I think that McConnell will face some pressure to do something on climate. Now, I'm not saying he's going to do anything that's tremendously meaningful. You know, I do think some of the members there will pressure the party, the Republican Party, to get a climate stance that moves beyond the denier stage into something that actually addresses the issue.

Yes, this is politics. One last question for you. Anything that surprised you, any outcomes that surprised you? I think what's surprising me actually is the Democratic reaction in the last few days where they're sort of focusing on what clearly was a dominant night in some ways for Republicans, and they're ignoring what was literally the most aggressive climate platform in presidential history gaining a record share of the vote. I believe Joe Biden has had more than 70 million people vote for him, which is more than any other candidate presidential candidate in history. He set the stage for what's going to be a new presidential platform.

No other president running, at least on the Democratic ticket, is going to be able to have something that's less than his $2 trillion plan to deal with. climate change. So I think their victory has not set in for Democrats. I've sort of been just surprised at the level of defeat. I was on a conference call with a bunch of environmental groups this morning who are talking about how they can't do this and that in the Senate. But once they realize this sort of climate mandate they've been given, I think they're going to have a little bit more confidence in crafting policy going forward. This is something that transcends age, it transcends a bunch of different ethnic groups. And I think it's really starting to transcend even party division.

And so I think that there was a sea-changing climate that happened on Tuesday, and it's just now playing out and just now becoming apparent to people. Scott Walsman, thank you very much for taking that to be with us today. Scott is the White House reporter for the E&E News Climate Wire based out of D.C. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. New record highs for COVID-19 cases were set this week.

It's been almost a year since officials in charge. China announced last December the spread of a mysterious pneumonia identifying the first COVID-19 patients. On January 21st, the first U.S. COVID-19 case was confirmed in Washington State. Since that time, just about every country in the world has tried to get a handle on the pandemic in some way of their own. We've been through lockdown, social distancing, masks and no masks, vaccine trials, hydroxychloroquine, bleach. What have we learned so far as we head into the winter? What might the pandemic plan in the U.S. look like? That's what we're going to talk about. With me are my guests, Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, University of Minnesota

in Minneapolis, and Dr. Obrar Karan, physician at Harvard Med School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Welcome back, gentlemen. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Michael, Let me begin with you. We had you on the show way back last January. We're almost reaching a year, as I say of the pandemic. There are eight million COVID cases in the U.S., spikes in the Midwest and in the plains. Are we in a second wave or are we still in a first wave? It doesn't look like we actually ever flattened that curve. When you look back at where we were, we could have and should have known, actually in January that we were going to experience a global pandemic. And as we discussed, this is what unfolded.

But back then we didn't understand, would this be like an influenza pandemic that would truly have waves, where, in fact, if you look at the 10 pandemics, influenza pandemics of the last 250 years, there was always a first wave that would you see a PICA case and it would drop on its own after two or three months with no human intervention, be absent for, at least relatively absent for another additional months. and then we'd see a big second wave. And we weren't sure if a coronavirus would do something like that. But in fact, over time, we've come to realize, no, it's more like a coronavirus forest fire,

where it'll burn where there's human wood. And we may do activities to suppress that transmission, which is like firefighters holding it down. And when it does burn, it won't always burn evenly. It will burn in some areas much heavier than others. And so what you're seeing in the world today is why we don't see waves as such, as we are doing in Asia right now. don't see waves. They've really controlled it quite well. In our country, what we've done is we saw that April peak, and we took efforts to suppress cases by distancing and so forth, but then a July peak occurred, and we did it again, but now here we are back at this new peak activity, which is

only going to get much higher. And each one of those are related to just how seriously we took the virus. Europe's the same way. They did a lot to really knock down transmission in April and May, and we did, but they continued to keep that minimization of human contact, reducing transmission until August, and they let the foot off off the break quite quickly, and now we're seeing what's happening there. So I really think this is more of just a forest fires-like model, not a wave model. Let me ask you, Dr. Karan, it's been a year since we talked about the beginnings of coronavirus.

What do you think we have learned in that year since then? I think there's a lot that we've learned, particularly around sort of the way in which the virus is spreading, how it's spreading most efficiently, and sort of a little bit in terms of the dynamics of how it's spreading, particularly around clusters of people, and that not everybody is transmitting the virus as efficiently or to the same number of people. And I think that that's something that we can kind of use to our advantage. If we're able to sort of stop that cluster spreading, then we can actually get a better control of the sort of the rate of increase. As we head into the winter with colder weather and another year of the pandemic, what concerns you? What are you thinking most about, Michael? I think, first of all, we have this combination right now of a perfect storm. We have pandemic fatigue, which is people who really do believe that the pandemic is real, but, you know, it's just been six, eight months, I got to go back to it. So we're seeing, whether it be in colleges and universities, weddings, funerals, going back to the gym, eating at bars and restaurants, having large get-togethers, sporting events.

I mean, I've got a situation right here in Minnesota next week. 720,000 Minnesotans are going to go deer hunting, of which many of them are going to be spending a long time in deer cabins with five, six, seven other people. We're going to see lots of transmission there. So I think that we have that pandemic fatigue issue. Then we have pandemic anger, which is this one where basically people don't believe this is real. And so I don't care what you tell them or how you tell them, they're going to just basically deny it and not take any public health measures as were recommended.

And then you put that together with indoor air, as you just said, it's the most potent mix I could imagine because indoor air will clearly dramatically enhance this transmission. And so this is why I think this period right now, between now and getting a vaccine first, second quarter of next year and then most of the population having access, hopefully by the third quarter is going to be the darkest weeks of this pandemic, I believe. Dr. Karan, you're a physician. You've been working in a hospital throughout the pandemic. What are your concerns about being prepared or having enough facilities, PPE, all of those things?

Do you think it's there for you? Yeah, that's, you know, I think it's, at least now it is in the sense that, you know, we've been through this once in Boston. So we had to have N95s that were recycled weekly. We had to use N95s very carefully, right? Like I had my N95, my PPE, I knew where it was. I, like, would not lose it. And there was a time in the very beginning where we didn't even have that.

But I think the one issue is that even though people say, oh, maybe you don't die from this, well, you very well may need to be hospitalized and use up a hospital bed, meaning that other people that need to be hospitalized for other things no longer may have that bed. So you may need to get remdesivir. You may need to get dexamethosone. You may need to have your oxygen monitored, et cetera, and be in the hospital. And so, you know, this sort of overfocus on mortality is so problematic because hospital beds are very limited. And as Dr. Ostrom was saying, our energy as staff is limited to, right? Like I'm young.

I'm early in my career. I have energy still. I mean, it's not going to be unlimited, though. Dr. Osterholm, we know that black and certain communities were hit harder by the pandemic. Now, as we anticipate the winter cases coming up, what needs to be. put in place to help these communities? Well, this is a really important point and one that as a nation we've really not addressed head on.

I mean, if you look for example among essential workers, people who are keeping our everyday economy going, much, much of the workforce is an overrepresentation of those from the black and indigenous population community of colors. That whole area involves much more than just their exposure. work, but living at home. I mean, when I hear, for example, people say, well, you know, we'll just bubble up those at risk. You're a single mom. You have two young kids and your mom lives with you in an apartment with two bedrooms. Tell me how you bubble that up when she comes home with the virus. And so we've seen this kind of social economic status combination with

occupational risk be a challenge. And I don't have an easy answer other than to say that we have to recognize that, you know, just merely letting this virus go willy-nilly in our communities. is absolutely immoral. If I could just also add one of the pieces, I appreciate your answer just now because I think health care workers are also going to start experiencing another kind of pandemic fatigue, that of not that they don't care, not that they don't want to deal with it, but they're burning out. We have to understand the country's resources is not going to be limited in a number of beds. It's going to be limited by a number of staff. And I have seen far too many people on the front lines who after even, you know, weeks to a few months are beginning to burn out in such a way.

I mean, people who just will repeat over and I'm broken. I am just broken. We have to understand what's happening to our health care workers in this country and support them from a mental health standpoint in ways we haven't done. Because if they're not on the front lines, we really are in trouble. In the beginning of the pandemic, we all remember Italy and other countries had tight lockdowns. Now the UK is facing another lockdown. Do lockdowns work? Do we need to think about lockdowns in perhaps a different way, Dr. Karan? I personally would say that I don't think lockdowns are a strategy so much as they're an emergency

backstop. They're a way to quickly stop transmission. And what that does is it essentially is buying you time to set up a public health system that can trace the virus that can test people efficiently, that can set up health care resources, it's essentially stopping everything so that you can get things restarted again and approach it in the right way. The second part is to not overwhelm your health care system, and those are both related. But with the past lockdowns that we had, our federal sort of response did not use that time as well as it could have to set up the systems that we need. And I think that's

the problem. And so when it becomes politicized and people say, oh, well, it's either lockdowns or it's sort of this other and herd immunity, et cetera, I'm saying, well, no, lock down, there was a point to locking down, and that wasn't done. So let's focus on getting that done. Michael, would you agree? Oh, I agree completely. And in fact, let me even take it one step further and say, the Asian countries have taught us what can be done to control this virus and watch what happens to their economy when it comes back when they actually do control the virus. So if you want to see minimizing pain and suffering both physically and economic, look at them. But in addition, you know, in a column, the op-ed piece that Neil Cash-Carrie,

the president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank and I did in the New York Times back in August, we actually laid out how lockdowns could actually be effective and support everyone. Right now, we've watched an amazing thing happen during this pandemic. We've gone from about 8% of our income to savings up to over 22%. That money is sitting there in banks, waiting for somebody to borrow it. Lowest interest rates in modern history. our government could borrow that money as an investment back to cover the cost of people who have lost their work, of businesses who have been hurt, of city, state, county governments that have suffered, and actually invest back in them to do exactly what Dr. Perrin just said

and to basically support this concept of a lockdown in a way that says we do minimize the economic pain and suffering that's occurred. If we did that and then did exactly as he just said, where then we get testing and, and contact tracing, isolation, and quarantine together, which means we need a national plan for testing, which means we need to have the resources there to support that. We could have a much different picture between now and the time of a vaccine. We just haven't done it. Speaking about a vaccine, there has been talked since the beginning of the pandemic

of a vaccine is coming. It's not coming. Michael, when do you predict we will start seeing a vaccine? And I guess just as importantly, the distribution on a larger scale? Well, first of all, we will see vaccines, I believe, in the first quarter of this next year. I think that they'll be there, how much will be there will be a challenge. I think there are two things about the vaccines that we still have to understand.

One is just how well will they protect? And I think at this point, we don't know yet with serious disease exactly what that's going to look like, 50, 60, 70 percent, we don't know. The second thing is, will people take them? we're seeing well over half the U.S. population is highly skeptical of even taking this vaccine. And particularly in some of the communities you just mentioned in the black, indigenous, and communities of color populations, there's a very high level of skepticism about this. Yet that's where we need to get it.

So it's one thing to have a vaccine or something to have a vaccination that's actually in your arm. And so one of the challenges we're going to have is both getting the vaccine out there when it does become available and getting people to actually use it. And I think that's a huge challenge we're not really addressing yet in a very meaningful way. Amira Plato, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Speaking of a challenge, this pandemic, as we all have seen during this campaign, has been politicized. Now that the election is over, do you think we'll see a difference in how officials approach the pandemic planning? At this point, we don't really know.

I think there surely is every reason to think that this. This could be the darkest, the darkest times in terms of convincing people that this is a, one, unreal public health emergency. Number two, that there are things we can do about it. We just have to work together. And three, you know, what we need right now, more than anything in the world, I think, is not just more science. We need an FDR-like moment.

We need someone that can tell a story about where we're at, where we're going, why we're going there, how we're going to get there, how we'll make. things different and believe in it. And I think that by itself could be a dramatic improvement on what's happening right now. That is my hope. We need a story and we need it very, very quickly. Do you foresee such a story happening? You know, at this point, I have every reason to believe it can. You know, I think, you know, when you're dying and when it's your family members who are dying, it has a way of cutting through the truth. And, you know, the problem we have is, I don't want to have people become believers in this pandemic because of the loss of a loved one.

You know, I've seen too many people already who denied that this pandemic existed, only to have the reality of it hit them at home when they lose a loved one. And so our job, if we can do it most effectively, is to get people to understand this in advance of that. And that's the challenge we have right now. You know, if we could just tell all the stories that our frontline health care workers could tell right now about the pain, the suffering, the agony, the desperation, the loneliness, watching someone die alone, then people I think would get a better sense, my God, this is real and this is bad.

To sort of add to Dr. Osterhombe's point there, Ira, I have countless stories. I remember one on Mother's Day this year. I was in full gown PPE with a woman who had COVID was dying, it was sort of end of life at that point, and I was holding an iPad so that she could face time with her daughter. These are the kind of things that people went through real, real, real tragedies. And then on the other hand, this week alone, I've been seeing people, young healthy people who had COVID, didn't have terrible disease initially and are coming in with really debilitating symptoms, symptoms that you don't see in young healthy people. And we don't have a good explanation for them, right? And so we're doing more workup, we're understanding more.

But when you then argue for something like herd immunity, let it sort of infect young people, we're talking about not just mortality. there is serious morbidity that we don't fully understand. I mean, it's really careless to let people get infected with this. I don't know how to answer these because if you watch enough, I guess, television, you've seen so many of these stories that you're talking about on, the challenges to the health care workers, the people dying on ventilators, the tragedy in families. And you don't get the impression that for a large part of the country,

it has moved the needle one bit. You know, one of the things I think we have to remember, and this is actually the implication for our future, is that if you look across the board, clearly there are population areas where it's higher, but we're still looking at about 12 to 14% of the U.S. population has been infected with this virus. That's roughly 1 out of 10.

So there are still a lot of people out there while they may know somebody. It's not really hit them at home yet. That is going to change. This virus is not going to rest because we're done with it. Pretty soon, more and more of these people who say, well, I knew somebody, but they didn't, I don't think they really died from COVID. And then it actually be one of your loved ones.

And I think that one of the things Dr. Grun really hit home on just now, please know everyone, the worst thing you can imagine is when one of your loved one is dying and you can't be there. That is a triple tragedy on top of a tragedy on top of a tragedy. And that's what we're trying to avoid. And that's going to happen more and more often. So our job is to try to help people get there before they have to go through it so that they make the changes that can help reduce transmission. And that's a good place to stop. And on a hopeful note, I want to thank both of you for taking time to be with us today.

Dr. Michael Osterhombe, Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and Minneapolis. Dr. Abraar Karan, physician at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Thank you both again for taking time and have a safe winter. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're talking about murder hornets. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. Back in the spring, the headlines started to come in. Murder hornets have made it to the U.S.

You know, this prompted a lot of us to say, what the heck is a murder hornet in his murder really their M.O. The proper name for these insects is Asian giant hornet and their native to east and South Asia. Since late 2019, sightings of these hornets have been reported every once in a while in Washington State. All right, let's cut the music. We're talking about the flight of the murder hornets here, not the bumblebees. Thank you. Last month, the first nest of these invasive hornets were discovered in the United States, in Blaine, Washington, which is our on the U.S.-Canada border. The good news, that nest was taken out successfully.

Why is this a good thing? Well, joining me are two guests who were instrumental in this effort, Dr. Chris Looney entomologist for the Washington State Department of Agriculture in Olympia, Washington. Welcome to Science Friday. Hey, hi, thanks.

You're welcome. Dr. Jacqueline Serrano, research etymologists for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Wapito, Washington. Welcome also to Science Friday. Thank you for having me on. Let's talk about this. Chris, where did the name Murder Hornet come from to begin with?

It seems to have been related to a New York Times reporter by a Japanese entomologist. He was talking to him about the impacts they might have on human health. And it seemed like almost as an aside, he said, oh, yeah, we kind of call him murder hornets here as a nickname. That doesn't seem to actually be in common use, to my knowledge. Most of the Japanese-speaking people I've spoken with refer to him as, you know, O'Susumabachi, these giant sparrow bees. But is it an accurate description? Can they kill people?

They can kill people, sure. Primarily through anaphylactic shock, just like any other kind of stinging hymenoptera. Rarely through mass stinging events, and that is just because they are so big and can administer so much venom that if you get too many stings, your body can't cope with it. But they definitely don't murder people. So that's a real misnomer in the name. It sort of suggests that they are inherently aggressive and they're not. They're just vigorously defensive.

That's good to hear. Before you found the nest, how many sightings had there been of these Hornets in the Pacific Northwest? I am embarrassed to say I'm not 100% positive, but around a dozen to 20. Oh, that many. And that's over two years. Yeah, yeah, they really started ramping up in the last month. We got some photographs. It was a doorbell cam, this fantastic video.

We picked up a few more in our traps. So it's funny you say that many To me, and like 20 is so low We should be seeing more. How are we going to find them? Well, do you suspect you will find more? Yeah, maybe not many more this year, Although we're changing our traps to some of the stuff that Jackie's provided that seems to be working a little bit better,

so we might. But if not this year, definitely next year. And an interesting point, British Columbia just collected their second one of the season just the other day. There we go. Our Canadian neighbor is helping us out. What do we know about sightings, outside of Washington. Do we know just this British Columbia siting?

A couple of British Columbia sightings. So there's a photograph in White Rock, which is the town that basically right over the border from Blaine. There was a specimen found right on the border close to where we eradicated this nest. And then this last one was found a little bit farther northeast of there, which nobody was excited to find in terms of where it was. And also there was a queen found in Langley, I think, British Columbia this spring. Do we know how they got to the Pacific Northwest? Absolutely not. Okay, there you have.

No, mic drop. Now, we suspect that they came on cargo. It's funny, really the only life stage of this that could be easily transported and in such a way that it might be able to start a new population are these overwintering fertilized queens. And it only takes one. So even though they don't habitually overwinter and the kind of stuff that we would move back and forth across the ocean, they normally overwinter in soil or maybe straw heats. It's possible that one was in a cargo ship, and that's how it got here. That is the most likely explanation. And with as much international cargoes we have,

it doesn't actually take that many propagules to get a chance at getting across the ocean. And the potential attack on B populations, is that really what we are worried most about? It is. Yeah, it's what we're most worried about. And it is kind of the impetus for all of the funding that we're receiving to try and try and keep this from establishing. So we're concerned that it might have impacts on the native ecosystem by eating up all kinds of bugs and changing the balance of species. And we're concerned that it'll have agricultural impacts because they are, of course, known predators of bees. And while they haven't decimated beekeeping in their native range, there's certainly something beekeepers always have to mess about with. And we just sort of like to give our beekeepers a break and keep them from having to deal with

it. Give us a description because the hornets look kind of interesting. I mean, and they actually look kind of pretty. Yeah, I've been watching them sitting here in my lab for a couple of days. They're all dead now, but for a couple of days, I had them alive, and they're stunning. I mean, they're large enough that you can really see their behavior and maybe relate to them in a way that you can't smaller insects. They're maybe an inch to two inches long, depending on which cast you're looking at, whether it's a worker or a queen. They can be pretty, pretty thick. They have these really sort of pleasing orangish yellow head and stripes and big, obvious black eyes. they're larger than any native yellow jacket and larger than the other hornet we have in North America,

which is an introduction from Europe, so the European Hornet, which is not on the West Coast, it's back east. Jackie, I want to talk about the work you've been doing over the past few months. It's my understanding that you're part of the Hornet Trap A-Team. Why are you using traps to kill these hornets or to catch them alive? Well, actually, we're doing both. So part of the approach that we're taking is to first, detect these hornets throughout Wacham County where they have been detected in the previous year. And so the first sort of idea we want to get is where are these hornets located within the county?

And we can do that by trapping them and essentially killing them in the trap. However, our goal now is to hopefully use live hornets to track back to a nest like we were able to successfully do just a couple weeks ago. Do you have a special bait that the Hornets particularly like? Well, so far it seems like there's one particular bait, if you will, that I have provided to the WSDA, and that is made up of two compounds. One is acetic acid, and the other is is isobutinol. But throughout this whole season, you know, since early spring, we've been testing other

combinations of compounds as well because there are so many things that we just don't know about how these hornets are going to be attracted to these compounds. It'll follow up, though. The majority of the trapping we're doing on the landscape to detect these initially is not the lures jackies provided. We just kind of got turned on to those recently because of an experiment, she and I've been running out in the field. Mostly, it's actually orange juice and rice wine that we've put everywhere. That's what our citizen scientists are using, too. So there are sort of two things going on here.

This cottage industry sort of trapping bait that we can afford to deploy at a large scale right now. and then this specific work Jackie and I've been doing with these other baits, one of which seems to be a lot more effective. Yeah. Is there a risk when you set a trap that you're trapping the wrong things, that native pollinators may get into the trap? And how do you avoid that? So we weren't sure if we could avoid it.

So one of the things we made a commitment to this year is to analyze the bycatch. That's what we call that when you catch something you don't intend to. Just like when you kill a dolphin or a turtle in a fishing net, right? That's bycatch. And we wanted to analyze the bycatch from all of the traps in Washington. in state, all of the ones that we placed as an agency and then these other 1,500 or so citizen science traps, to some level try to do exactly that. Are we killing pollinators? Because that would be deeply ironic if we were just removing pollinators from the whole landscape and to see what

else is happening. The good news is we seem to kill very, very few bees. We've processed over 10,000 traps so far and we just have a handful of bees. When they're honeybees, it's usually because somebody placed the trap right by an apiary. But when they're kind of far away where the bees don't necessarily or they blunder into them. Looks like a no-go. We're catching tons and tons of yellow jackets. There'll be hundreds and hundreds of yellow jackets in just one of these bottle traps.

And then other things, like some maws have been blundering into them. Mostly they look like an introduced moth, so I guess we can feel a little bit better about that. And then, man, you would not believe millions of fruit flies. So many fruit flies, especially at the end of the season, that these become a solid mass. It is no longer a liquid trap. It is a pile of fruit fly corpses.

Wow. Very, very fascinating. How did you find that first nest that you eventually took out? Did you stumble on it? Do you have some methodology here? Well, so like Jackie said, we had defaulted to using some live traps. Once we started to have a place, I keep calling it Hornets Central, but once we had a place where there were lots of Hornets,

and this is where those isobutinal lures that Jackie whipped up seemed to really be effective. We caught two hornets in a live trap, and then we caught three more in one of the kill traps baited with that, two of them just that morning, so we were actually able to pull them out and give them a little resuscitation and keep them alive. And then actually we tried this earlier with some that a homeowner had netted. Anyway, we basically captured them. We anesthetized them on ice. It gives us time to work with them without getting stung, and we tied a radio tag to it. The radio tags were

provided by another Department of Agriculture Research Group. The federal researchers working on spotted lanternfly in Pennsylvania. They were looking at flight patterns with them, and we were able to use it and simply track it back just like you would with like a wolf and a radio caller kind of. Exciting day or just another day on the job? Super exciting for a couple of reasons. One, we're walking around. We don't have our special hornet suits on, right? Because you can't do anything in those except fall down a lot. And we're walking around in the woods, listening to this thing get louder and louder and louder, fully expecting any minute hornets to come boiling out of the ground and us to throw it all down and run away. And we got to a place where it couldn't be any louder. And it seemed clear that

they were in this tree and I was super bummed because I assumed that the waspillar tracking just went up to the tree and died or was sitting there. And that's when my boss, Sven Spee Sugar, realized they were actually flying in and out of a crack in the tree. We'd been looking at the ground the whole time. So, yeah, it was exciting, a little nerve-wracking. Chris, on the day of this nest extraction, you were vacuuming hornets out of a tree. What the heck was that experience like? At that point, it was just getting tedious because they not only did they not come bubbling out the ground when we got close to the nest, they wouldn't come bubbling out of this darn tree.

Standing up there in this awkward suit in the dark with my red light pounding on the, I'm not pounding on the tree. Somebody else is pounding on the tree and I'm holding this vacuum in and seeing them crawl out one by one by one. It took quite a while to vacuum up the, we caught like 87 hornets or something like that day. By the time we were getting to the end, I just wanted them to attack already, get it over with. Really? You're expecting an attack? I was. Yeah, they keep those nests pretty warm. So even though it was cold outside, they should have been warm inside and ready to defend. And they seemed like they were ready to defend, but in really lackadaisical way. So do you wear a special suit, you know, like a space suit or something? That's your traditional

B-suit? We were wearing these kind of crazy space suits. The Hornet has a stinger that's a quarter of an inch long. It'll go right through the heavy canvas that B-suits are typically made of. So we were kind of scrambling around in our safety committee, who was excited to buy a thing that contributed immediately to safety, but got these hornet suits from us from Amazon. And they were made of a thick mesh that designed to keep the stinger away and actually maybe kind of locks the stinger up

by these two different mesh layers rubbing on each other. You know, they're awkward to get in and out of. We don't really have very good range of mobility in them. The face shield presses up against your face, which seems to really defeat the point. So there are some drawbacks to the suits, but we wore them just to make sure. And they, I'm sure you've seen the pictures,

they do indeed look like kind of spacesuits from an older bad science fiction movie. I'm I Refledo and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking about the first Asian giant hornet nest discovered in the U.S. It has since been destroyed. With my guest, Chris Looney, entomologist with the Washington State Department of Agriculture in Olympia and Jackie Serrano, research entomologist for the USDA in Wapato, Washington. So you take the nest out? And what do you do with all the residents and the nest itself?

They are pretty much all dead, except for some that Jackie is maybe still working with. If she's been able to keep them going, they're more fragile than you think sometimes. They are being dispersed to different researchers. We have Jackie's group looking at pheromones, another group working on pheromones. People are looking at the genome. A research group in Belsville will be looking at some for viruses and diseases. diseases that might be transmitted to bees, since these prey on bees, they're going to come in contact with them a lot. I weighed and measured all the remainder of these hornets, preserved as many of the

larvae as we could. And most of this will, at this time, go back to the landowner ultimately. They sort of fall through a special legal loophole right now that doesn't prevent anybody from owning them, and they're not a clearly property of the state. So these will go back to that landowner for his preservation. And then obviously some will go into museums, too. So what would be the most helpful or important piece of information for you to have right now about these Hornets and what they're doing here? How far do Queens disperse? Like how far are they going right now when they leave the nest? And then how far do they disperse again in the spring?

And those are two sort of critical things that we don't know that can help us plan what we're doing on the ground. And then the other one is the work Jackie's doing. What can we come up with that is irresistible to them? we can trap them at really low densities. Even if we think there's multiple nests, there's certainly not anything close to their sort of capacity on this landscape. And so we're trying to trap them with things that are competing with every other thing that might interest a hornet. We just need the best hornet lure. Money can buy and science can make.

Exactly. Jackie, are you working on one of those? That's the plan. So, you know, one of the things that Chris mentioned is we want to specifically target the hornets. What is the best attractive for them? The lures that I'm providing right now are kind of more of a general attractant used for other wasps as well, including, you know, your yellow jackets that you find as well. So, you know, my goal is to see if I can come up with something that will not only trap just the Asian giant Hornet, but trap them in large numbers as well. And, you know, that's that's sort of my overall goal and, you know, contribution for WSDA.

Are you looking for help from our 2 million listeners at all to see if they spot any? Or is it so specialized you don't think they could be helpful? They could absolutely be helpful with one caveat. If you are not in Washington State or British Columbia, it is incredibly, incredibly unlikely that you're going to be seeing one. So don't freak out. And also don't call us. I had somebody call today from Florida, a delightful conversation. But realistically, I can't get on a plane and go to Florida and do anything about it.

it would be better to talk to your local department of agriculture. But yeah, if you're in Washington State or British Columbia, we have a whole bunch of different ways. People can contact us. We have a website where they can put up sightings. We had about 5,000, I think, by now. Of course, only 12 of those or so were legit. We have a hotline and email and just several different ways people can contact us. And this nest we took out, it is entirely likely we would never have found it if a nearby homeowner hadn't said, oh, yeah, this looks like one of those things.

We should let them know. and it turned out to be a really good relationship. That's what got that particular site rolling. We need the eyes of the public on this. And this thing is pretty easy to recognize. So I think it's a good one for everybody to get involved with. I want to thank both of you for taking time to enlighten us about these. We'll just have to share the adventure with you as you guys move along.

Dr. Chris Loney, an entomologist for the Washington State Department of Agriculture in Olympia. Dr. Jacqueline Serrano, research entomologist for the USDA. in Wapato, Washington. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Of course, thank you for the opportunity. My pleasure. Nice being here. Charles Berkowitz is our director. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor,

Katie Feather, and Kathleen Davis, B. Jamie Leatherman, composed our three music. And of course, if you missed any part of this program or you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts, or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. One more thing before we go. Our Science Friday Vox Pop app

this week, due to COVID-19, a lot of us are taking our temperatures more frequently than in years past. I know I certainly have. We want to know your questions about how human body temperature works. That's all on our Science Friday Vox Pop app. You can download it wherever you get your apps. Have a great and safe weekend. I'm Irafledo.