Science Friday - Endemic Diseases, Insects and Light, Opossum vs Aye-Aye. Sept 17, 2021

Episode Date: September 17, 2021

Nighttime Streetlights Are Stressing Out Urban Insects As insect populations—including bees, moths, and other pollinators—decline worldwide, researchers have established a variety of potential causes, including climate change, pesticides, and habitat loss. But now, new findings suggest yet another culprit may be part of the equation: night-time lighting, like street lights in populated areas. A team of entomologists in the United Kingdom looked at populations of moth caterpillars under street lights, compared to populations that lived in darkness all night. In conditions with night-time lighting, they found nearly half as many caterpillars, in some cases. In addition, caterpillars that grew up under street lights were bigger, suggesting that they might be stressed and attempting to rush into metamorphosis earlier than they should. Furthermore, the greatest threat seems to be coming from energy-efficient LED lights, whose bluer wavelengths may be more stressful than the warmer, redder light of older sodium bulbs. The team published their work in the journal Science Advanceslate last month. Guest host Umair Irfan talks to co-author Douglas Boyes about why nighttime lighting might be so bad for insects, and why ditching LED lights isn’t actually the best solution.     The Endemic End To The Pandemic Over the past year and a half, we’ve been talking about the COVID-19 pandemic. But there’s another stage of global virus spread to consider as well—the endemic stage. Instead of a sudden cacophony of viral noise, you can think of it as a constant low-level hum, with occasional bleeps.  Viruses such as the coronaviruses responsible for many colds, or the influenza virus, are already endemic worldwide. They’re pretty much everywhere, all the time—and sometimes make you ill. But they don’t usually threaten to overwhelm health systems the way COVID-19 is currently. Maureen Miller, an infectious disease epidemiologist and medical anthropologist at  Columbia University, joins guest host Umair Irfan to talk about pivoting from pandemic to endemic conditions, and what past outbreaks can teach us for future health decisions.       Charismatic Creature Carnival: Who Rules The Night? We’re in week two of our Charismatic Creature Carnival, our celebration of six overlooked or unfairly maligned species that deserve a closer look. Our audience submitted our candidates, but only one will be crowned the very first carnival inductee into the Charismatic Creature Corner Hall of Fame. This week’s friendly head-to-head battle is between the opossum and the aye-aye, submitted by listeners who remarked these creatures are cute, though unconventionally so. Defending the opossum is Lisa Walsh, postdoctoral researcher at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, based in Washington, D.C. Squaring up against them to support the aye-aye is Megan McGrath, education programs manager at the Duke Lemur Center in Durham, North Carolina. Find out how to participate in the final creature face-off and check out what you said about the last round between the mantis shrimp and the hellbender salamander!    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 Omer Erfahn in for Ira Flato. It's been more than 15 years since beekeepers first started reporting mysterious waves of death in their hives over the winter. Now, colony collapse disorder, as it's now known, is high on the list of threats to ecosystems and agriculture. But in the last few years, researchers have been sounding a new alarm about all insects. One study in Germany in 2017, for example, found that flying insects had declined by as much as 75% in protected areas in the country. And researchers are seeing declines in butterfly and moth populations all over the world. The causes for this loss of insects include habitat loss, climate change, and pesticide use. But new research published in the journal Science Advances last month investigated another

possible culprit. Artificial nighttime lighting, like streetlights. One of the authors of that research is here to explain more. Douglas Boyes is a Ph.D. researcher at the United Kingdom Center for Ecology and Hydrology. joins us from Henley on Thames. Welcome to Science Friday, Douglas. Thank you. It's great to be here. So this experiment you ran, you set up plots of land

where you were looking at areas that were under street lights, and then you compared them to identical plots that had no lighting. And then you counted caterpillars. Tell us what you found. So the most striking finding was just the sheer difference in the number of catapers. We found that there were up to half as many caterpillars in lit areas, between a half and a third as estimated by our statistical models.

And really that's a very striking reduction. We're not really used to seeing, even by that order of magnitude in ecology, it's usually 5, 10% here and there. But to get half the number of insects due to this one factor, it was really quite striking. And the caterpillars themselves, they also seem to be bigger when they were under lights. Is this a good sign?

Yeah, you might think that bigger caterpillars must have been a more healthy, perhaps. We don't think that's the case. We don't think it's a good thing. And we think this is due to the caterpillars in lit areas being under stress. Essentially, these caterpillars, they've evolved for millions of years with completely dark nights. And now in these areas, there's essentially no nighttime, perhaps. They don't know how to respond to this new stressor in the environment. And what they'll do is they'll eat. They'll develop very quickly. So they'll assume that there's something wrong and invest in early pupations. So they'll try and fasten up as quickly as possible to get out of that stressful environment. And that's something that's been shown in some lab studies.

So although they were heavier at the time of sampling when we're comparing between the two pairs, the lit and the unleit, we think that is simply because they're just rushed and their developments just a little bit further ahead rather than it being a good thing. And does that have consequences for when those caterpillars eventually turn into moths? Yeah, so in the laboratory studies proceeded, they found that they had faster development, but they pupated at a lower body mass, which would lead to smaller adults. And a smaller adult wouldn't be able to fly as far, perhaps. The females certainly wouldn't lay as of any eggs.

So it's expected to have negative fitness implications for the adults. You also ran an experiment where you set up new lighting in an area that didn't have lights before. What did you see when that happened? Yeah, so we did this experiment looking at one of the groups of moths we were sampling that are nocturnal. So the caterpillar is nocturnal. Many people know most moths are nocturnal, but actually most of the caterpillars are nocturnal too. And we wanted to see whether in the very short term there was some sort of disruptive effect on their normal feeding behaviour.

So they would spend their days at the base of long grass. And then only at night will they come up to feed, climb up these stems and feed. So we installed these four metre light rigs. And we found that the caterpillars would only come up to feed in the unlit transects. And in the transects that were lit with sodium lighting. but there was a statistically significant negative effect under the white LEDs, which was the other streetlight we looked at. So just to reiterate, when caterpillars are first exposed to lighting,

they tend not to eat or eat a lot less, but as they get used to it, they start to stress eat and gain weight. That's what we think. They may be adapted or acclimated somehow at our long-term sites. So they've sort of got used to the light to an extent. in that they can still feed, but they do it in a stress-eating way, as you put it. You mentioned earlier that these fast-growing caterpillars often lead to impaired adults. Would the adult moths also have an impact from this lighting and their behavior?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the main one, I guess, is just this behavior of flying up to the light. People have observed moths flying around a street light and just sort of circling it until they die from exhaustion. I think a more significant source of mortality around streetlights is from predation. Some species of bats will actively seek out streetlights, and they'll just spend their whole night circling the streetlights on the sort of buffet of nocturnal flying insects

that have been attracted to the light. And all these insects, they fail to perform the usual behaviour. that they would when they come in contact with bats. They can drop out of the sky when they hear a bat sonar and all sorts of things, but they just won't do that. So they're sort of sitting ducks. The bats will just have a feast. How about reproductive behavior?

Does this also have impacts on how moths make more moths? Yeah, absolutely. So in insects, it's very closely tied to the day, night cycle. If female moths don't have dark nights, if they are exposed to very low levels of light at night, their pheromone production is altered, and that would reduce their capacity to attract a mate. And then in some male moths, the system through which they produce sperm is also disrupted, so they can essentially become infertile from lighting. And what about the moths in particular?

Are they particularly important? Do they play an important ecological role? Yeah, so I'm a big proponent of moths and not many people are, so they need people to stick up for them. Moths are essentially butterflies with bad PR. They're extremely important for prey. So the caterpillars that I were looking at, they form an integral part of the diet of several species of songbird. And then the adults, of course, I've already mentioned there, the importance for bats. and all sorts of other mammals and invertebrates feed on moths.

The other important role that moths have, and it's one that's been really rather overlooked, is their importance as pollinators. So pollination ecologists have tended to do their studies during the day and maybe not stayed up all night. But actually, over the last 10 years or so, as people have gone out at night, we're beginning to appreciate that moths are really significant and important pollinators for our wildflowers and for some of our crops. Now, looking at the sources of light themselves, you mentioned LED lights, which are these energy-efficient bulbs that are largely replacing in many cities,

those yellow sodium lamps. If they have a more detrimental effect on these moths, then how do we balance that with the energy savings that we want? The good thing about LEDs is that they're in. incredibly flexible in terms of the colour of light that they produce, which is one of the reasons why we think they might be worse for wildlife, but also in terms of things like dimming, part-night lighting, motion sensors, there's even this idea of smart street lighting where they're all talking to each other and only on as a vehicle driving along the road. And all this is only really possible was LEDs. So we can hopefully begin to minimise these negative. impact on insects on ecosystems, while still keeping all the benefits that lighting gives us.

So with LEDs, this is actually a fixable problem. Are there any particular colors or tuning adjustments that would be more ideal for moths that we could perhaps institute into city ordinances? Moths and indeed other nocturnal insects are much more sensitive to shorter wavelength. So that's the blue end of the rainbow, specifically sensitive to ultraviolet, So any street lights with ultraviolet light would be most damaging. LEDs generally don't have UV light. They often have a lot of blue light. So what we would predict would be the best

is if those bluer wavelengths can be reduced or cut out. And what that would give you is a street light that resembles and color those sorts of sodium lights that you mentioned. They're sort of yellow, orange shoes. And some studies have found different colours. LED is good at mitigating the impacts on biodiversity. Other studies have shown that even sort of a monochromatic red LED street light is just as harmful as a white one. So they would certainly help, but they might not solve the problem or they won't solve the whole problem.

Now, while you've found a significant effect with lighting, it seems like there's still a lot of darkness out there across the world, that urban areas still make up a small percentage of land overall. So how does this fit in within the broader picture of all the stresses insects face? How much of a difference would it make if we did, in fact, optimize lighting? Yeah, that's a really, really good question. So this is something we tried to tackle in our study. For the study region, it's a gradient between sort of a big city, London, and then the sort of more leafy countryside. And in that area, which contains 160,000 streetlights, we estimated the lit area from those streetlights. It came to be about 1% of that landscape was lit. And then if we take

out places like urban areas or the road surface, which obviously isn't habitat for insects, the percentages for places things like horrible land or hedgerows or woodlands, it drops to fractions of a percentage. So we think at the moment, the UK moths have been very well studied. They're declined over 50 years, we think lighting is probably only, at most, made a minor contribution to these declines. But I guess what I would say is that if lighting is put in very sensitive areas, if we continue to urbanise at the rate we are, it could become a much more significant threat. And then also, the solutions are so tractable, they're so accessible, they're cheap, and they can be done without really taking away any of the benefits that lighting gives us.

So if insects are in trouble, as we believe they are, then perhaps we should be doing all we can to help them, even if it's not a silver bullet. That's all the time we have. Thanks so much for being with us. Thank you, Sarah, Charlie. Douglas Boyes is a PhD researcher at the United Kingdom Center for Ecology and Hydrology. He joins us from Henley on Thames.

We have to take a short break, but when we come back, what does it mean to shift our thinking from a pandemic to an endemic, accepting a new persistent virus reality. After the break. This is Science Friday. I'm Omer Erfahn in for Iroflato. Over the past year and a half, we've been talking about the COVID-19 pandemic and all the ways that it's changed our lives. Many scientists expect that the number of infections will eventually begin to decline, but also that the virus is unlikely to go away altogether. Instead, COVID-19 is likely to slow down from a raging pandemic to a simmering endemic disease. The virus will continue circulating

and occasionally surge in sporadic outbreaks, but cases that are unlikely to ever go to zero, and people will still continue to be sickened by the disease. So what does it mean to pivot from a pandemic to endemic? And how should we think about managing these risks we'll face over the long term? Joining me now to talk about that is Maureen Miller, a Columbia University infectious disease epidemiologist, and a medical anthropologist. Moraine, welcome. to Science Friday. Thank you. Glad to be here. To begin with, let's start by defining the terms. How is an endemic disease different from a pandemic disease? A pandemic disease is one that is certainly global, but that has a huge impact at the population level. Endemic diseases are those that hover around and

occasionally make their presence known, but then can slip back into the background. They tend to be limited locally, but because of COVID-19's pandemic impact, that's not going to be the case with this endemic disease, which will be floating around in the background. For example, we already have four coronaviruses that are endemic, and they are the cause of the common cold. Is there a hard line between pandemic and endemic, or is it sort of a gradient between the two? How do you know you're on one side or the other? epidemiology, we talk a lot about relativity. So it's a relative line. We will know when we end the pandemic and it becomes endemic simply by the numbers of people who are getting infected and the number

of people who are dying. That will change dramatically. You talked about some of these endemic coronaviruses. And there are other viruses, too, that are endemic. But influenza is sort of the classic example of a disease that has both pandemic and endemic forms. Are there other illnesses that also meet that description? And what do they have in common? Well, it's not currently a pandemic disease, but I would say the Black Plague was very much a pandemic disease. And it is now an endemic disease in certain parts of the world, including the Western United States, where it is harbored in animal hosts. And occasionally, a person will get infected. with plague.

When we're dealing with a massive pandemic that's killing lots of people, it does seem to make sense to pull out all the stops and do everything possible to contain it. But once you shift to this endemic stage, do those same measures make sense? Do you have to rethink the cost-benefit analysis when you're doing these precautions? When you have an endemic disease, it is usually localized in a certain area. So, yeah, absolutely, there's a different cost-benefit analysis. one of the amazing things that have resulted from COVID-19 is the creation of extremely effective vaccines. So these vaccines have the potential to last quite some time because they involve

all different parts of immunity and the immune system in human beings, and they advance over time each time they get attacked by new exposure to COVID-19. So the fact that we have these vaccines is hugely important. Once we get vaccines available for children and we can get the entire population vaccinated or a large chunk of it, then we're going to see the endemicity declined tremendously. The virus will only thrive in areas where there are lower rates of vaccines. So that means what we're going to have to do is continue to vaccinate children as they're born and when they become eligible for the vaccine.

One of the other side effects of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic was that we saw a huge drop-off in the rate of influenza. And while a lot of people dismiss this as like a fairly mild disease, between 10,000 to 50,000 people a year die from this in the United States. So I'm kind of wondering, like, is this something similar that we're going to have to endure with COVID-19? Are we going to have to pick sort of a number of casualties and debts that we're going to face with this disease from here on out?

I think all diseases have a cost-benefit analysis, and unfortunately, that involves deaths. So, yes, we will likely, if we are unsuccessful in our efforts to vaccinate a huge percentage of the population, anywhere between 85 and 95% of the population vaccinated at once, then we will see deaths. But, you know, you just mentioned the number 10 to 50,000 per year of flu deaths. That's with people vaccinated at approximately a 50% annual vaccination rate. If we can get COVID vaccinations at a much higher rate, we won't be looking at the death rates we had in 2020, which was 350,000 U.S. deaths. This year, 2021, we're on track to have anywhere between 400 and 550,000 additional deaths.

This is not rocket science, that that's not acceptable. If it could be comparable to flu, I think people would be not happy with that because, you know, death is terrible, especially when it can be prevented. But if we could get it to those kinds of numbers, I think the cost-benefit analysis would favor allowing a certain small percentage of infected people to become seriously ill and, unfortunately. There was a lot of talk earlier in the pandemic about this idea of herd immunity, and I'm wondering how does that relate to this idea of the disease becoming endemic, or are these separate concepts? No, they're related. They're related. The challenge with the concept of herd immunity

is what I just mentioned in terms of getting everyone vaccinated. It's going to be impossible to vaccinate the globe for lots of different reasons. Lack of access. residency, outright anti-vaccination attitudes, we will never get the high level of vaccination that we need that we did successfully until recently get among measles. Measles vaccination levels were at 98% until the turn of this century. And there are lots of reasons for that change. But an anti-science bias is going to ensure that more people die than would have died had there been a much more successful vaccination coverage. So herd immunity, I don't think we can really discuss it in that black and white terminology anymore. There are too many

moving parts to make herd immunity a static idea because there will always be population being born. So they will never contribute to the herd immunity. They will benefit. from having people around them vaccinated, but until they're able to be vaccinated and actually are vaccinated, herd immunity is to something that won't exist. And you touched on this idea of attitudes playing a big role here. I would imagine that people who have endured the past year and a half of lockdown, shut down, social distancing, and then getting vaccinated, now being told that this disease is never going to go away, that can seem a little disheartening. Does having this disease become endemic mean that we've lost the first?

fight? Is this sort of a surrender here? Or was this inevitable? Absolutely not. Yes, this was inevitable. It's like flu. If you get a vaccine, it doesn't prevent you from getting flu. It greatly diminishes the chances that you'll get infected with flu, but it greatly diminishes the chances that you will die of flu. So this is the same kind of dynamic that has become acceptable with flu. And we haven't had a panaceous. pandemic flu, which is one of the big contenders, which is what we really, quite frankly, we expected our next big pandemic was going to be an avian flu pandemic, much like the pandemics from the 20th century, the ones in 18, 19, the one in 1957, and the one in 1968.

But it didn't happen. We had a coronavirus instead. Now, Maureen, we've seen pandemics in the past before, and we know about that. at least one disease, smallpox, that's been completely eradicated. What are some of the key lessons to pay attention to from past global disease outbreaks, like the 1918 flu or other ones that stand out? Well, the pandemic flus from the 20th century were all avian flus. So they came from animals and infected humans. So we had no ability to fight these flus off.

And in fact, two of the three flus are still in circulation, in wild bird populations and occasionally in agricultural bird populations as well. So one of the lessons we learned about that is that because these two diseases are circulating, they're included in flu vaccines that are developed every year. So there's a little bit of the 1918 flu vaccination components in the flu vaccine, as well as the 1968 H3N2 flu virus. So we're vaccinated against them yearly if you get a flu vaccine, which I highly recommend. Because as we saw when people took their masks off in the United States at the beginning of the summer,

boom, there was a huge uptick in a respiratory virus that children usually get before the age of two. but pretty much everybody under age two had been in lockdown. So they weren't exposed to these viruses and couldn't develop immunity. So there was an enormous increase in this virus in children. There was also an enormous increase in summer colds or viruses among adults. So if we continue to get, let's do best case scenario. We continue to get vaccinated. We start reaching a vaccination at a very high level.

and we stop some of the precautions, mask wearing, social distancing, as vaccination rates improve, then that gives ample opportunity for flu to step in. The recommended time to get your flu shot is anywhere between the last week of September and the first couple of weeks in October. I will certainly be getting mine then. I certainly will myself. And that's amazing to me. I had no idea that we were still vaccinating against the 1918 flu.

Exactly. We are. You know, there's little tweaks, but the solid, the two components, the H and the N, are included, you know, with tiny little tweaks in the formulation, but those viruses are still actively circulating around the globe. You're listening to Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm Omer Erfant talking with Maureen Miller, a Columbia University infectious disease epidemiologist and medical anthropologist. One of the key storylines with COVID-19, though, has been that this virus itself has been mutating and coming up with new variants that has been throwing curveballs at our vaccination campaign. And I'm wondering, is this just going to be a process of running to stand still? Does this threaten to undermine our road to becoming an endemic? Corrotoviruses mutate at a much slower rate than flu viruses, for example. What we're seeing is the enormity of the scale of people. people infected provide an opportunity so that it looks like mutation is occurring at a greatly

increased rate. And it is because it's chewing through so much of the population. So the idea that we're setting up for a perpetual pandemic is a little dramatic because what is happening right now is that the vaccines that we have, the vast majority, are extremely effective, even against Delta. They are preventing the conditions that we wanted to prevent. They're preventing severe disease. They're preventing hospitalizations and they're preventing death. The same thing that flu vaccines do. I find that very reassuring. And you mentioned the best case scenario. Right now, though, it seems that all across the U.S. and across the world, different countries have different approaches to dealing with COVID-19, ranging from basically ignoring it to giving it the full court press with

vaccines. And I'm wondering, how does that start playing out as far as, you know, ratcheting down on the pandemic? I think various countries, I mean, it was Singapore in the lead because they had very good control. They were going for a zero tolerance COVID-19 acceptance. And that's just not realistic. We are so interconnected in the globe that that's just not realistic. So New Zealand is hoping for that. Singapore was. Taiwan was, China certainly still is, that's just not realistic because you can't keep your borders close forever. And that would be a horrible thing to result from COVID-19 if certain countries chose to not allow border passage of their citizens out or other citizens in. That just doesn't

function in a global economy and countries that choose to do that have historically had real challenges in growing their economies and in providing care and support for their populations. It just doesn't work. But if countries did work together and sort of harmonize their policies, could we find our way out of this sooner? Well, I'm not quite sure to answer that question because even in the face of a horrible pandemic that's killing so many people around the globe, we've still failed. to harmonize. And part of that is because it's a whack-a-mole. It pops up and does devastation in

India and then just dramatically disappears and we don't know why. And then, of course, it travels. It travels to England where it does the same thing, pops up, devastation, and then dramatically disappears. It goes to Europe. I mean, we watched the show of waves so many times when it first came from China. Suddenly it was in Iran. It was in Italy. And the rest of the world thought, it's not going to come here. We certainly thought that in the United States. And then it did. Then with this next round of the Delta variant from India hit Europe and we thought, we're home free in the U.S. because we have 50% of our population vaccinated. It doesn't work that way. It crosses borders whether you close them or not. And finally, I'm sure nobody wants to think about this

right now, but what lesson should we take from this pandemic and apply ahead of the next one? We should, because there will be a next one, we should really focus on preventing the next pandemic. And there are, we have tools that can do that right now. What we need to do is go to the global hotspots where we know zoonotic disease spillover is happening and is likely to occur and is likely to be the source of our next pandemic and monitor populations for zoonotic disease spillover. It's a really simple process. It's not one that's been widely adopted, but, you know, Benjamin Franklin, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But we're so medicalized in our society.

For example, the 900-year-old techniques that are known to work, social distancing and mask wearing, they've been reframed as non-pharmaceutical interventions. So, already something that's been successful for almost a millennia, has. has been reduced to second class relative to pharmaceutical interventions. So I think it's going to be a hard cell to try to prevent. Even now, people don't talk about prevention. They talk about preparedness and response. By the time you're responding with a disease like COVID, which is stealthy,

and it explodes even before you know what's going on, preparedness and response will never be enough. Well, I hope everyone takes those lessons to heart. Marine Miller, infectious disease epidemiologist, and medical anthropologist at Columbia University. Thanks so much for talking with me today. Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure. We have to take a quick break, but when we come back, it's an opossum versus II showdown as part of our charismatic creature carnival. Stay with us.

This is Science Friday, and I'm a mare, Erfant. And it's time for our charismatic creature carnival. Joining me today is Cy Fry's charismatic creature correspondent Kathleen Davis. Hi, Kathleen. Hey, Eumere, I'm glad to have you along for the carnival. Well, I'm really excited to be here. So before we jump into this week's charismatic creatures, remind us what this carnival is all about. So our charismatic creature carnival is a celebration of six creatures suggested by our listeners. By charismatic, we mean a creature that's overlooked or unfairly maligned by the general public that Once you look a little bit closer, you can tell it has an undeniable charm.

We've got three weeks of matchups, and then we're going to crown a winner. And I hear we have an update about last week's matchup? Yes. So if you remember, last week we kicked off the carnival with a showdown between the mantis shrimp and the hellbender salamander. Our listeners went to ScienceFriiday.com slash carnival to choose their favorite creature out of the two, and the votes are in. So, Umair, I would like a drum roll, please. slithering into the first semi-finalist spot of this charismatic creature carnival, the people's choice is the mantis shrimp.

Congratulations to all the mantis shrimp enthusiasts out there. So we still have two more semifinalists to discover, one of which is going to come from today's matchup. All right, I'm ready. So who are our charismatic creatures today? So our first creature, joining us exclusively from your local woods or maybe even your backyard, is the opossum. This creature was nominated by a couple of people, including listener Anna from Boston, who wrote us on Twitter.

She said, I'd like to nominate the opossum for the carnival because it's the only marsupial in the U.S. And it's pretty cute, even though a lot of people don't like them. And representing the opossum in our showdown this week is Dr. Lisa Walsh, postdoctoral researcher at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center. She is based in Washington, D.C. Welcome, Lisa. Thank you for having. And facing off against the opossum in our showdown is the most suggested creature of our carnival. All the way from the forests of Madagascar is the II. We got quite a few nominations for the II, including this message on our SciFri Vox Pop app from Lawn in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

I think that you should add the I.I. as a charismatic creature. They are the largest nocturnal primate. They have some very specialized hands. Their teeth never stop growing like a rodent and just their cute and cuddly looks, all in the eyes of a beholder. Thanks. And representing the I-I in our carnival is Megan McGrath

Education Programs Manager at the Duke Leamer Center in Durham, North Carolina. Welcome and thanks for joining us. I am excited to be here. We're excited to have you both here. Just to note that this segment was recorded in front of a live Zoom audience, learn how you can join a future radio recording at Science Friday.com slash live stream. So I have to say I am completely charmed that both of our nominators use the word

cute to describe each of these creatures. But I would love a basic description from each of you just to paint a picture for our audience of what your creature looks like. What are they all about? Lisa, I think more people might be familiar with the opossum. So let's start with you. Sure. The Virginia opossum, I'm guessing, is what was nominated. So that's the marsupial that is in the U.S. There are actually over a hundred opossum species across the American continents. But just to be brief, I'm going to focus on the Virginia opossum. It's actually the largest of the American opossums about the size of a cat, usually whiteish gray, pink nose, big, bluish black ears, and a tail that, unless you're really up close and personal, it looks hairless. There is actually hair there, but because they use it to grab onto branches and stuff, they don't want it to be long and lush, just like our hands, which grab things. We don't have a lot of hair on our hands. So it sometimes gets compared to a rat. I don't think that that is fair to the possum, or a lot of rats out there,

actually. The opossum is found from Costa Rica all the way up into Ontario, North Dakota, Maine. They typically are found in deciduous forests. They really like marshland, but they are really resilient animals. They'll be in disturbed environments, including your backyard. I've seen pictures of them on college campuses. They're also found across agriculture fields. They really just don't want to be in desert areas or really high up mountains. But otherwise, they're going to be found all over. Lisa, I wanted to ask, I've heard the term opossum and possum. and they're often used interchangeably. What's the difference?

That's a really good question. So historians tend to credit the name with John Smith, actually, kind of anglicizing an American Indian Algonquin word, a possum for the animal, which roughly translates to white animal. This was actually the first marsupial that European colonizers discovered. And so that was kind of what they based on. all other marsupials off of. And so when James Cook arrived in Australia and they found similar-looking marsupials

that were also in trees, they decided, oh, we should name it a possum, like that original marsupial that we, quote, discovered. And I guess somewhere along the line, they decided just for clarity, we should call it possum. Although nowadays, even in America, we really, I don't know if it's lazy or we just don't like the O, we also drop the O and sometimes refer to them as possum. But possums in Australasia, those are very distantly related to the opossums we find here. They come from numerous families. The brush-tailed possum, ring-tail possum, honey possum. But nope, those are distinct and their own really interesting charismatic animals. Now let's move on to the I-I. Megan, what does

this creature look like? They look like a mash of a bunch of different animals got jumbled together. So we've heard comparisons to possums or opossums before. They have big, bushy tails that almost look like a wolf or something. They have giant ears like a bat. But overall, they are about five pounds, lots of bushy black and silver wiry hair all over. And they have, in my opinion, extremely charismatic faces with very kind of light silvery hair around their faces, giant eyes, giant ears, and little pink noses. Now, Megan, I just looked up a picture of an eye eye, and the thing that jumped out to me is that really long finger they have.

What's the point of that? Great question. So eye eyes are full of really unusual adaptations, and not just for being their own animal, but they don't match a lot of primate rules, even though they're a primate. They don't match a lot of lemur rules, even though they're a lemur. So they're kind of like the rebels of lemur evolution. And they branched off super early to have all these interesting things. And the finger is one of the most interesting.

So all of the I-I's fingers are pretty long. That middle tapping finger is actually not their longest finger. It's an aptical illusion because it's so thin and skinny and they hold it at a weird angle. And that tapping finger is basically used for everything. We've seen them drink water with it. They'll eat like slices of orange with it. We've even seen one particularly funny I, I hear who eats his grapes that way, although most of them aren't that fussy. Most of them will just pop a grape in their mouth.

So that tapping finger is elongated, very thin. And some people say it's on a ball and socket joint, but technically it is on a very, very flexible joint that basically doesn't keep the tendon going in one direction like ours does. So it can bend sideways either way, and it can also bend backwards. And that finger is ideal if you like to eat bugs and grubs out of trees. So they will chew in with the beaver-like teeth that the person who nominated them mentioned. And then they will get inside of wood and scoop out whatever grub or bug they want to eat with that amazing tapping finger. So speaking of delicious meals that a creature might eat, I feel like going back to the opossums, a lot of people may associate opossums with trash, for lack of a better term, because they're scavengers, right?

I mean, what is the life of an opossum like? They are scavengers, but they're also predators. They're also foragers. I call them the generalist of generalists. So you'll get mammal species where, you know, across the species, sure, they eat a lot of different things, but individuals will specialize or the one particular thing they want to eat. You look at just one opossum's stomach content. So that's really showing what they ate in a day or two.

It's just an entire evolutionary tree. Birds, plants, slugs, mice, grasshoppers. You name it, they've probably eaten it. I think they get the bad rap that they're associated with trash because they're in our environment. And, you know, they have really delicate noses. They can pick up everything. And if you threw out some tasty food, they will be there. But that's not going to be the only thing they're eating.

And I also have a hypothesis that I haven't been able to test. I think they're also using the trash cans as dens. I think they get a bad rap because occasionally they're in a trash can. They get that picture taken and it becomes a meme. And it just is all downhill from there for possums. Now, Megan, I eyes are so funky looking. What is their family structure like? Is that something that might be a charismatic point? Yeah, absolutely. And I would challenge folks to look up pictures of big. baby IIs, particularly those that lived here at the Duke Glemer Center. We've had some very good-looking babies in recent years. I'd argue that a lot of primate babies look funky. No offense to anyone out there. So with baby care, IIs are primates. So by nature, they're going to have a really strong relationship with their baby. They tend to have one infant at a time, maybe twins, but that's more rare.

And they will spend years teaching that baby primates like IIs and humans are born with notoriously few instincts. We need to learn a lot from our parents in order to survive. And so mom spends a lot of time with them. My favorite thing that baby IIs do, besides all the other normal cute stuff of playing with mom and surprising her, is when they're learning what they can eat and what they can't eat, they will literally just walk up to their mom and grab the food out of her mouth and learn, oh, that's something that I eat by just stealing it out of mom's mouth. I feel like an elephant in the room here is that, I mean, I eyes really look unlike anything I've ever seen. I have ever seen before. Some people, not me, but some people may say that they look a little creepy. And that,

I hear, is the source of some myths in their native ranges. Is that right? Yes, it can be. So it's interesting. Our recent understanding of the Malagazi people, so that's the people who live in Madagascar and their view of IIs and other lemurs is evolving as we learn more about how diverse those people are. So for a little background, Madagascar's home to over 27 million people. So that's a lot of people to summarize beliefs on animals. And a recent study that came out with a Malagazi scientist and a German scientist actually found that even two villages that are within a day's walk of each other might have vastly different views on the Ii. So in one village, they might find people who see them as an evil omen. There are even some held beliefs still to this day that IIs, if they're seen,

they will bring evil, might even involve killing the Ii to protect their village. But on the other side, less than a day's walk away, they found people who actually saw the IIs as a form of pest control because they were growing things like sugar cane and IIs like to eat the grubs and bugs that infest their plants. And so it really varied, but the overall trend was not surprising, just like everywhere else in the world, the more ecological knowledge and biological knowledge came in, the lower the rate of the superstitions and the cultural taboos against the animal. But I would just caution everyone not to think that everyone in Madagascar has the same view, just like everyone in the U.S. doesn't either. Staying on this morbid theme for a moment, I know that opossums have a flare for the dramatic, particularly playing dead. Why do they do

that? How does it work? I love my dramatic, stuffy species. We are not entirely sure why. It's involuntary, people equate it to a human fainting. So it's not something you want to do, but it's essentially fainting out of fear. And for possums, it seems to really happen with touch. So if a dog is running at them, as soon as the dog actually reaches them, that's when they keel over, they're on their side, mouth is hanging open, you know, like the biggest smile, except it's kind of, it doesn't actually look like a smile. It's salivating. when that happens, the eyes stay open, it defecates, it releases this foul green liquid from its anal glands. So it's doing everything possible to not be eaten.

Studies show that their heart rate and their brain activity isn't actually changing. So again, similar to fainting. But it can take them a few minutes up to an hour to recover. And I think the issue is if you're like, oh no, I'm so sorry, possum, when you are going after your dog who just chased after this possum, As you touch it, then it just kind of prolongs their feigning death. What an argument for the charismatic of awesome. But it's an important thing to mention. Just a quick note that I'm Kathleen Davis,

and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. We have just about reached the end of our time here, but I need to ask both of you to give me your best final arguments for your creatures. Why does your creature deserve to be crowned the most charismatic of this? match up. Megan, why don't you go first with the I-I? All right. I will. So I want to start by saying, I'm so glad both of these creatures are being featured, but obviously I'm team I-I. I think what edges them into the top for me is that they're just so incredibly unique. They don't fit into the same mold as other primates. They don't fit into the same mold as other lemurs. They have all these

incredibly unique things about them. And they're solitary and really hard to find in the wild. So there's still so much more that we can learn about them that we don't even know yet. And so I would argue that all of those factors together just make them kind of a modern day mystery that makes them fascinating and worthy of the title. All right, Lisa, it's your turn now. What is your closing argument for the opossum? There are over 100 opossum species in the Americas, but we just have one that made it all the way up into Tecourt, North America. And so this is a really unique species. They are very hardy and they are also resistant to rattlesnake venom. And we recently discovered that if you shine UV light on possums, they will glow pink. In terms of charismatic

mammals, marsupials are largely understudied, especially American marsupials are just so understudied and up until recently have been largely maligned. There was a New Year's Eve possum drop in North Carolina up until 2019, I think. So, They get really bad wraps for just kind of looking different and being different as the only marsupial in the U.S. Okay, Umer. Do you think that we've heard enough for our listeners to choose their favorite charismatic creature of the day? I think we got pretty comprehensive arguments, and I think listeners have a pretty difficult choice ahead of them. Where can they vote?

So listeners can go to sciencefriiday.com slash carnival to cast their vote for which creature they think is the most charismatic. That's Science Friday.com slash carnival. Yep. And I would love to thank our guests for today, Dr. Lisa Walsh, postdoctoral researcher at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center. She is based in Washington, D.C., and Megan McGrath, education programs manager at the Duke Leamer Center in Durham, North Carolina. Thank you both so much for joining us today.

It was so much fun. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you. And Kathleen, next week is our last matchup of the Charismatic Creature Carnival. Who are we going to hear about? So next week is going to the birds. Our charismatic creatures up for discussion are the pigeon and the shoe bill stork. And listeners can sign up to join our behind the scenes recording of this event on our website,

Science Friday.com slash live stream. Sounds great. Sci-fi producer Kathleen Davis. Thank you for being our carnival ringmaster once again. Thank you, Umer. That's all the time we have for today. If you missed any part of this program or would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts, or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday.

Ira will be back next week, and I'm Umer Erfond.