Science Friday - Future Telescopes, Caterpillars. Dec 14, 2018, Part 2

Episode Date: December 14, 2018

28 years ago, astronauts on the space shuttle Discovery gently raised the Hubble Space Telescope, or HST, up from the shuttle bay, and released it into space. Geologist and astronaut Kathryn Sullivan commemorated the moment with a short speech, as she floated in the shuttle. It would be a few years (and a repair job) before the truly historic nature of the telescope was revealed, showing us new views of the cosmos, and wonders it wasn’t even designed to study, like exoplanets. But Hubble is getting up there in years, and it’s time for new history to be made. Lots of new telescopes are waiting in the wings: The James Webb Space Telescope, W-FIRST, plus a collection of others vying to be the next big thing in space telescopes. Caterpillars might be the squirming, crawling larval stage of butterflies and moths, but they have defenses, behaviors, and lives of their own. Second grader Nina Del Bosque from Houston, Texas was stung by an asp caterpillar. She wanted to know about other stinging caterpillars in the world and what role they play in the ecosystem—so she sent Science Friday a handwritten letter with her questions. We invited Nina on the show with biologist David Wagner, author of Caterpillars of Eastern North America: A Guide to Identification and Natural History, to talk about the stinging asp caterpillar, the woolly bear, and all things caterpillar. View a few of these unique critters below. 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. Later in the hour, we're going to answer second grader, Inna Dolboski, who had a curious caterpillar question. But first, 28 years ago, astronauts on the space shuttle discovery gently released the Hubble Space Telescope, HST, into space. Geologist and astronaut Catherine Sullivan commemorated the moment with a short speech as she floated in the shuttle. With the advent of an observatory such as the HST stands in comparison to the advances of Galileo and even to the advances of periods of observation. It would be a few years, a few repair jobs later, before Hubble lived up to those comparisons, but it eventually did gifting us with new views of the cosmos and wonders. It wasn't even designed to study, like exoplanets.

But Hubble is getting up there in years. In fact, this month is the 25th. anniversary of the first repair mission to the Hubble, and lots of new telescopes are wading in the wings or on the drawing boards, like the James Webb Space Telescope and the W-First, plus a collection of others vying to be the next big thing in space telescopes. So this hour, a tour of space science in the years to come, and the tools are going to do it with. It may be a bumpy ride, though, because, as always, money and politics play a large role in

determining the future of space exploration. So here to help us out is space geek Ryan Mandelbaum, science writer at Gizmodo. Hey, how's everything going? Oh, it's always great to be here. And our question to our listeners is, let's ask our listeners to react, what's most intriguing to you about space and the night sky? Where would you point a future telescope? Our number 844-8255.

You can also tweet us at SciFRI. Let's start out, Ryan. Let's talk about what we've got up there already. Hubble and so on. So how's our space telescope fleet holding up? So I think it depends on who you ask. As far as space research is going, I mean, this was a great year for launching stuff, especially to planets. We have the Parker Solar Probe.

But it was also a rocky year for the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra Space Telescope, the X-ray, Chandra X-ray telescope. Their gyroscopes failed, sort of revealing that they're getting old. just like all of the rest of us. But we've had, we also have a new telescope that's waiting in the wings. That's, how shall I put it, it's waiting in the wings for quite some times. The James Webb Telescope seems like it's always two, three years away, right? So I'm not old enough to know, to really feel it. But, I mean, even in the past couple years, we've seen delays in this telescope.

It's, some would say hundreds of millions over budget. Some would say it's billions of over budget. It's going to do amazing things. I think that's something that we have to keep in mind. It's going to be a great space telescope, but I think some people are getting antsy, and it really does depend on who you ask when it comes to what's going on with that telescope. What are the great things that are expected of it? It's going to look deep.

It's going to look further into the distance over a broader span of wavelengths and the Hubble Space Telescope, so we're going to get even better images. It will have potentially some exoplanetary capabilities. It's really going to help us in answering our mysteries about the universe, and that's why it's so exciting, and that's why so many people think it's going to be worth it. It's just going to look so far and be hopefully crisp. Ryan, great segue for me to bring in our next guest who are experts in these fields.

David Spurgel is the Director of the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in New York. Professor of Astrophysics at Princeton. He's here with us. Welcome. Thank you. And Professor Sarah Seeger is an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at MIT. Welcome back, Dr. Seeger. Hi, Ira.

Nice to have you. Let me ask you, Dr. Seeger, where would you like the new telescopes to do for you? For me, well, for me, I would love the new telescopes to find another Earth. Okay, we can go. What are the odds of that happening, do you think? Well, the odds really depend on what's out there. What did nature provide? Are there Earths around every star, or are they incredibly rare?

I mean, we think we have a bit of a handle on that, but we really don't know. it would be a true journey of exploration. Let me go to David now to talk about you're the co-chair of the science team for the wide field infrared survey telescope, W-First. Is this a lot different from the James Webb? So James Webb will go deeper than ever before. So it takes the Hubble's capabilities and it's a bigger telescope and we'll stare at small parts of the sky very deeply.

W-First is the size of Hubble, but it can, can image 100 times as much sky. So think of every Hubble picture you've seen, now imagine it 100 times bigger. With that capability, we will be able to survey most of the sky at Hubble Resolution. That will let us do a wide range of science. One of the things we hope it will do will teach us more

about the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Adams make up only 5% of the universe. We're in the very embarrassing place of not knowing makes up 95% of the universe. Pretty embarrassing. We'd like to figure that out. It also will be carrying a coronagraph that will let it image and start to characterize

planets around nearby stars. We will not have the sensitivity to see an Earth-like planet with the coronagraph, but it's a stepping stone towards that. And I think as we look towards the future of astronomy, what do we want to do in the next 20, 50 years? the program that Sarah talked about of finding planets like Earth and understanding the diversity of planets that are out there is going to be a big part, already is a big part,

of what we wanted to learn about the universe around us. So, I mean, and what's the timeline for launching a telescope like this? I mean, are we seeing it? Is it going to be right on the heels of WST? Will we have a break between the two? W-first, you mean? It depends on what money Congress allocates. If they allocate the money that we hope for the profile, which will make it, it'll get launched about 2025.

So pretty soon after JWST. And Sarah, what's it going to do for you when you're a search for that Earth out there? Well, the chronograph is a great start. Believe it or not, my team, called Starshade, wants to launch a giant specialist-shaped screen. This screen would have its own spacecraft, and it would work with W-First. And we call the Star Shade, we call the mission Star Shade Rendezvous, because Star Shade would be built and launched separately. And it would rendezvous, it would meet up in outer space with W-first.

And Star Shade would act like the coronagraph, but it's a big screen outside the telescope very far away, and it would block out the starlight so we could see a planet directly. And the star shade has a chance to reach down to Earth's around the very nearest, say dozen brightest sun-like stars. What do you learn by seeing the planet directly as opposed to the way we see it now? Well, the most common way to find planets now, how we see planets, is by transits. They go in front of the star.

It's just lucky, like the orbits are lined up just so. And so the planet goes in front of the star as seen from Earth or the telescope. But those are very rare. In fact, not all for an Earth, an Earth-Sun analog, the chance of it being lined up just so is about 1 in 200. So it's possible that no true Earth around a true sun transits. And so we have to go to different technique. You agree, right? Yeah, so I guess then one of my questions relating to that is just,

so would you say that this is going to help us look for Earth like exoplanets or extraterrestrial life? I mean, that's really what a lot of people my generation are really interested in right now. Right, right. Well, hopefully, I mean, this is like a multi-generational search, right? So the James Webb is our first shot at it, and the James Webb primarily focuses on planets transiting small red dwarf stars. These stars are much smaller, much lower luminosity. At the same time, they have way more flares and giant bursts of energy

than our own sun-type star does. So we have the James Webb with these small M-dwarf stars first. Then we have a lot of plans. We literally, in the astronomy community, have come up with many of options. It's like you go out for dinner, and do you want, like, the appetizer or the main course, or if you're in Europe, you get two courses, and then the dessert. Like, do you want, which one do you want? So we have telescopes of all different sizes that can search more and more stars.

I think you need to think about the search for life and other planets and the search of characterizing other planets. As Sarah said, as this multigenerational effort, it's been 100 years from when Hubble took the Mount Wilson Telescope and started to map out the expansion of the universe. And we've continued that with bigger and bigger telescopes, going to space with a Hubble telescope. W-first in many ways is continuing that tradition by measuring the distances to galaxies. And that's been a hundred-year quest to explore the universe and characterize its shape. I think imaging other planets, the first step is finding them, having the sensitivity to perhaps find signs of life, will take telescopes beyond.

what we are thinking about now. But I think of this like in medieval times building cathedrals, right? It's this 100-year process. And we build one piece and we make one step and we develop one generation of telescopes and we learn from those and move on. And so just to tie it back to something concrete with W-1st and if Star Shade gets to be a real mission

and to go with W-first, you know, if we're lucky, like in the luckiest scenario, we find another Earth and we see signs of water vapor and we see signs of oxygen. But we don't know enough to, like, jump up and down and say, yay, we found life. Even though oxygen is a great sign that life might be producing it. You know, that would be enough to get the next generation telescope built and launched, funded, and operated. So one thing I'm actually interested in is sort of the history of how we ended up with a telescope like W-First as doing this research. I mean, we know that W-First came from mirrors that were donated by the NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office, if I remember correctly. And so is there sort of an element of trying to fit these missions around having that mirror?

So this has kind of a long history. So every decade, the astronomy community identifies its top priorities, what we call the Decadal Survey. In the last decade, different communities came forward and said they want a wide-field telescope. People interested in studying dark energy, wanted a wide field telescope. People interested in mapping the sky to study galaxies, wanted a wide field telescope. People interested in what's called microlensing that's using a gravitational lensing to detect planets around other stars. This is not to get the detail kind of study that Sarah is talking about, but to perhaps see thousands of planets around nearby stars and understand the diversity of planetary system.

they wanted a wide field telescope. So the Cato survey said, let's build a widefield telescope. All right, I'm going to stop doing your story right there because we have to build a commercial break in there. We're going to take a break and come back and talk lots more with David Spurgel and Sarah Seeger, and also my comrade in arms, Ryan Mandelbaum here. Our number, if you want to call in,

and we want to hear from you, 844-8255. What would you like to point these telescopes at? What's most intriguing to you about space in the night sky. We'll get some answers and more questions after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato here with Ryan Mandelbaum of Gizmodo. We're talking this hour about the future of our space telescopes and what we might use them to see with. Our guests are David Spurgel of Princeton and the Flatiron Institute and Sarah Seeger of MIT. Backtracking a little bit, David, what went wrong with the James Webb Telescope Construction Project? Why is it so overpriced

and so far behind? Fundamentally, it's a big telescope doing amazing things, and it's hard to build such complicated systems. So it's a hard, challenging thing. That's the hard challenging things sometimes take longer. It's like Ira, have you ever renovated your kitchen or your house? It always takes longer. Always.

Yeah, now imagine that you're renovating like 13 different things at once. James Webb has over 10 brand new technologies and getting all of those built and, figured out and putting them all together, it's just like a giant tangle of things. Now, most recently what went wrong is it went into Shake Test. You're going to launch on a rocket, you got to shake it, and they shook it, and 200 pieces flew off. That was not good. I hate it when that happened.

I hate it when that happened. So they had to go back and figure out what went wrong and fix all that, and that's added a couple years and a couple years of keeping all those engineers working. working, you know, gets close to a billion dollars in an overrun. So that was a big setback. That's that famous expression about a billion here, a billion there. You're talking about real money. Absolutely, right. Sarah, I've heard that you've described some of these telescope projects as, quote,

Christmas trees. What do you mean by it? Well, okay, I don't want to, yeah. So when you see it here W first and everybody wants something on it, right? And as David described it, the Decadal had blessed it and said, we are going to do W first. The next thing we know, there's a chronograph on it, which benefits my community, so perhaps I shouldn't complain about that. And the chronograph, though, in principle, shouldn't add too much time or money. It makes it the whole thing more complicated.

I'm guilty of adding to the Christmas tree because I represent a large community who wants to add Starshade. Now, Star Shade doesn't, is separate from W-first, but it imposes constraints on W-first, which has to now be what we call Star Shade Ready. It has to be able to communicate with the star shade, et cetera. So any time there's a telescope out there, and we're worried that it may be the only one for quite a while, every other part of the community who's not already involved wants to add something to it. And that's the term, I didn't make that what term up, but the Christmas tree approach where you just keep adding things to it. Ryan, let's talk about the next Crapa telescope, still in the proposal stages. Oh, yes.

So you heard David talk a little earlier about the decadal process. And so what that essentially is is the entire astrophysics community banding together and deciding what they say is basically getting the priorities straight. So what the big missions we want to pursue are. We had a decadal in 2010 and we are coming up on the decadal in 2020. Now it doesn't just include these space telescopes. It also includes them smaller and medium range missions. And, you know, we are pushing through on a lot of those missions from the 2010. But now the big flagship is there's going to be a telescope that's recommended, you know,

They had W-first and the 2010 survey, and now they're going to recommend a telescope for the 2020 survey. Now, there are four teams who are working hard right now to put forth sort of their best proposals, sorry, not proposals, their best studies, their concept studies for what the Decadal might decide. Now, it doesn't mean that they're going to pick one. It could be a combination of some. It could be just one of them. It could be none of them. I mean, so these teams are just going to really try and put forth the best science.

science case. I can go through them if you'd like to hear what they are. Give me a couple. Yeah, so I would say the Louvoire is sort of the one that comes to mind. It is large UV and infrared telescope that would essentially look, it's just, let's just go for it. Let's just see what we can see, see everything. It's deep, it's big. It would be able to maybe directly image and take spectra.

You see what molecules are around exoplanets. Then there's Habex, which would similarly have some. really incredible exoplanetary capabilities. Exoplanets are obviously a lot of conversation right now, especially with the search for extraterrestrial life. There's Links, which is an X-ray telescope, and then Origins, which is an infrared telescope. Origins would be, you know, just looking for the origins, right, the origins of galaxies, the origins of planets, and then Links would be sort of Chandra's successor.

Dr. Seeger, I know you're involved in one of these projects, the Habex. Tell us what that telescope would be designed for. Sure, well, before I told you, we'll have, like, different-sized telescopes that can approach the same problem of studying sun-like stars and looking for Earths and solar systems around planetary systems around those nearby stars. So HabX would be a 4-meter aperture, and it would be what we call off-axis, and it would be working in the ultraviolet and the optical and the very, very near-infrared. So it would kind of be like a replacement for Hubble, but over 10 times the area bigger. And HabX, it's, we call it HabX Observatory. It will do, it has four instruments. Two will be for general astrophysics, and two are for exoplanets.

It will have an internal chronograph, and it'll also be accompanied by a star chate. And its goal in terms of exoplanets is to find habitable world, planets that might be like Earth. Interesting. Let's go to the phones, our number 8447-24-8255. Blake in Paducah, Kentucky. Hi, Blake. How are you doing? Hi there.

Go ahead. Okay, so I'm going to get a little theoretical physics, you know, brain here on you. So I know you're discussing the ultraviolet applications of all these new telescopes, and I've been kind of drug into the whole, you know, big space reemergence, how space is cool finally. So I was wondering if we were going to use these applications to maybe kind of see if we could understand the practicality of the black hole, which is very difficult anyway because they're infinitely large,

but I didn't know if that was kind of a mission. David? So the Lynx telescope, the X-ray telescope, its primary goal is to understand where these supermassive black holes come from and how they evolve. So this is sort of our choice

for the decadal, right? We have all these exciting problems, black holes, extrasolar planets. We probably only have the resources to maybe do one of these, we'll have to make that choice. Speaking of choices, as you say, there is not a bottomless pit of funding here, right? Scientists understand this. And is the new administration, did the Trump administration open to these new products,

new ideas, right? So the first thing Trump did was to say that he's going to scrap W first. But thankfully, we have a Congress who's generally much more amenable to space research in general. and I can't speak for that personally. It's really up to Congress, but, you know, there are scientists who are lobbying Congress to see if they can get the funding for these projects. Well, David and I testified to the Senate last August in preparation for them writing their next NASA bill,

and they love it. People everywhere love space. People in Congress are highly supportive of space science. So that's one of the great things about the Takedo survey is that's bipartisan support. You know, I've gone and talked to. Democrats and Republicans on the Hill, and they like the fact that the science community makes these choices. And we've been doing this for 50 years, so it's a long-standing process.

And there have been times in the past where presidents have tried to not follow the Decatal survey, and usually we've gotten the missions built. And so you're all optimistic? Yep. Okay. We have a lot of tweets coming in, a lot of people. One tweet says, I would like to see future space telescopes pointed toward the closest exoplanet to see if we could get any details of the planet and its solar system. Another says we need to look at a study, study more of the closest stars to us for exoplanets.

People in Dr. Seeger's corner here. Also, someone says, I want to find Halley's comet pointed at it, so I'm not sure how, you know, practical that is. but I want to bring on another guest now who's working on one of the next-generation telescope candidates, and that is called Louvoire, and Ryan mentioned this. Dr. Aki Robourge is a scientist at Louvoire and a research astrophysicist at the NASA-Guarded Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, great to be here. Tell us about your product, your product, your project.

Oh, I wish it was a project. Well, it's not one yet. Is that correct? Yes, that is. I'm the study scientist as opposed to the project scientist. And what are you studying in your, well, the folk-to-be project? Yeah, so as Ryan said earlier, there are these four large mission concepts that NASA is studying right now. And I have to say, compared to previous decadals,

NASA is putting far more time, effort, and detail into these concept studies than has ever been done before. And so I'm the study scientist for Louvre, which Ryan mentioned. And I liked how he described it. Louvre really is kind of, if the philosophy is like, go for it. So it's really key science goal is to do, as Sarah said, find and really study those rocky Earth-size exoplanets that are in the warm inner regions of nearby sun-like stars. And see of them are actually Earth-like, not just Earth-size, but Earth-like. And that includes searching them for signs of life, you know, what astronomers call biosignatures. So Sarah mentioned one of them, oxygen. But to do this, to really study those

planets that are most like the Earth, the small ones that are around the sun-like stars, we need the direct imaging technique that David talked about, and the W-1st chronograph is a technology stepping stone for that, and we need to get above Earth's atmosphere to do this, and we need a more powerful space telescope than has ever been built before. Okay, so Lovar is one of these concepts, it's sort of a, we view it as like a, you could kind of imagine it as a super, duper, duper, Hubble. And we're studying two variants. We're coming up with, you could call them point designs. So one of them is large with an eight meter diameter primary mirror, and the other one is really large with a 15 meter diameter primary mirror. And for comparison, the Hubble mirror

is 2.4 meters. Where would you put this? Earth Sun L2, where all sensible telescopes want to be. Explain that to our listeners, where they're at it. It's the Lagrange 2 point where sort of gravity between the Earth's sun, the Earth and the Sun and the telescope are all balanced, so it's a really stable place to be. It's nice and quiet, it's cold, and it's stable. And the people that realize it's like with Hubble orbiting Earth,

Earth is really bad for astronomy. It's bright and it's hot. So, as actually says, we want to get as far away from Earth as possible. Why not put something on the far side of the moon? We've talked about that for years, the radio telescopes, pointing away from Earth, the cell phone noise. China just launched a rocket to the far side of the moon, and that's part of, radio astronomy is part of that. Is that right? Yeah.

For, I mean, it doesn't really buy you anything out there. I mean, probably you have to land there, and then you've got to assemble it there or build it there. And the regalith, this dust that's on the moon will be really bad for your telescope. Whose idea was that? I didn't remember. Well, it's probably good for radio telescopes, but not so good for optical ones. We studied this for optical telescopes. Remember the astronauts' boots when they came back from the moon?

They're covered with dust, and that's what will happen to your telescope. What's the budget for this? Budget. Give us a ballpark. We don't know, honest to God, we don't not know what this cost yet, but that is part of the concept study. That is an analysis we are trying to do, like right now. And in addition to that as well, the Decatal survey that David talked about, But they will also do their own independent cost analysis of all the missions of all different kinds of sizes that are presented to them.

So we'll get sort of like we'll get two guesses at it. So that'll be good. And I mean, do you worry in the sort of context of the James Webb delays and the president, you know, suggesting to cut W-first that how people will receive sort of these, the next enormous mission? Oh, absolutely. I mean, astronomers are, I think, you know, they're really. rightly nervous and concerned. But that being said, you know, I still have to believe that NASA will be, has the capability and will be allowed to do really big things, the ambitious things that only we can do.

So, you know, we just kind of, so the Louvre our team, the philosophy really is sort of like, you know, just tell, say what we need, say what we really want to do this experiment, to study, you know, dozens and dozens of potentially habitable planets around hundreds of stars. And that's our key goal. Although, of course, I should say, you know, Louvoire would do, would revolutionize, like, huge areas of general astronomy as well, all the topics that Hubble cover it and more, and also be a very powerful, surprisingly powerful platform for observing the planets and moons inside the solar system.

She's selling it. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studio. Oh, but Habex. Yeah, Habex is good, too. I think you have to think of these telescopes not only as doing great astronomy, but as a symbol of a great nation. I mean, I think the Hubble telescope is something we should be proud of as citizens. It's something we built, and these building something like Louvoire or Habex will not only

do science, but be, in many ways, a signature of U.S. leadership. I think the Hubble probably did more for space than any other in recent memory. Yeah. Apparently, you know, by some metrics, Hubble is the most productive scientific experiment ever built by mankind. I've seen people with pillars of creation t-shirts, you know, with the big beautiful plumes. I mean, it's just a pop culture phenomenon almost. But I guess one question that I was wondering is, you know, we love talking about these giant experiments. They're just, you know, they're just so fun and they really sort of, and the weaker imagination run wild. But is there a concern about, you know, this funding going to these large missions and then, you know, maybe leaving some of the smaller missions in the dust?

Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead, David. This is something that the Cato survey has always stressed the need for balance to build both the really big missions and these small focus missions. Most of my career was spent on a small focus mission, WMAP, that was able to do things like measure the age. and composition of the universe.

So little things... And there's also many small things now. A mission I'm involved with leading is tests. It's an exoplanet finding mission. That's relatively small. I've got a QSat Orbiting Earth. That's tiny. So there's lots of things happening.

The attention is somehow focused on these four big missions because NASA is trying to do their best in flushing them out in terms of technology, risk, and costs that we're ready for the cable. Yeah, I guess I would say arguably that is always a concern, but I think it's a concern that's overblown compared to the reality. I actually think if you look back at what's actually happened,

the balanced portfolio, NASA's actually done it. You know, the large missions haven't destroyed the ability to do small ones. And then I obviously have to plug the ground-based missions as well. I mean, astronomy is a full spectrum of different things, and there's three very large telescopes that are under construction. There's the giant Magellan telescope. I mean, we're really, you know, this isn't just one thing that's going to help elucidate the universe.

It's just there's a lot of technology required. So you're all confident. That's good to see. We'll have you back in about a year from now and see how all this is working out. Hakee Robergh is a study scientist for Louvoire and a research astrophysicist at NASA Goddard. David Spurgel, director of the Center for Computational Astrophysics

at the Flatiron Institute, just down the blog here, Professor of Astrophysics at Princeton. Dr. Sarah Seeger, astrophysicist, scientist at MIT, and can't forget my buddy, Ryan Mandelbaum, who's going on vacation right after I am. Literally on Sunday, I'm going to be on a plane. You're going to Birdwatch? I'll be birdwatching in northern Minnesota. I'm very excited. Christmas Birdwatch.

That's right. We'll be covering that also. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for happiness. Ryan Mandelbaum. Thank you all for taking time to be with us today. We're going to take a break, and after the break, we're going to talking about asps, saddleback, and woolly bears. Of course, those are all caterpillars.

Yeah, we'll talk about it after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. You know, we have great listeners, and we get a lot of letters and emails and questions from you curious science geeks. But we got one a few months ago that really stuck out. It was from a young scientist who had an encounter with a caterpillar that made her curious. This is her letter. Dear Ira Flato, my name is Nina Dolboskis. Is it okay if you guys can study about the Ask Calipillar? Well, the thing is, I got stung. It itches a lot. Well, I was at school playing with my friends,

and the ass caterpillar was under my leg and stunned me. Are there other callipllers that stink? Nina Dalbosca, a seven-year-old seventh grader at Poe Elementary School in Houston, Texas. So we wanted to hear what other caterpillar questions she had. So you've asked her to come on the show. Welcome, Nina. Hi. Tell us about where you were.

What were you doing with your friends when this asp caterpillar stung you? I was playing with my friends, and I was looking for centipedes. And so I was sitting, and so I put my leg down on the ground, and the ass caterpillar was right under my leg. so I put pressure on my leg, and so it stung me because it was under my leg, and yeah. Yeah. Had you ever seen an asp caterpillar before? Yes.

And why were you interested in this caterpillar? Because when I got stung, you know, it, it, it, it's, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, a lot and after it'll hurt a lot. And I was interested why, like, you know, how it works, you know, the calipolar, how it stings us. Yeah, I understand that because I'm interested in things like that too. I understand that you also like ladybugs. Yes. What do you like about them?

Because I hold one before, and they crawl around, and I like it because it kind of feels ticklish because they crawl around very fast, and I like it. And also, they look very cool. Yeah. Do you ever try to rescue these bugs? Yes, I have one. So I have a box. it's called Ladybugland, and I've captured one, and we found it at my school, and it was injured, so I picked it up carefully, and I put it in my box, and so I still have him.

And so I give him food and water once in a while, and, yeah, I take care of him a lot. Yeah, that's nice. I'm going to bring on another caterpillar friend to help us, an expert, to help us out, and answer some of your questions. I know you have some questions for him, and if you have noticed any interesting caterpillars in your yard, I'm talking to my listeners, and you have questions about them, we want to hear from you, too. Our number is 844-8255. You can also tweet us at Cy Fry. I. David Wagner is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut in Stores. He's also author of Caterpillars of Eastern North America, a guide to identification and natural history.

Welcome to Science Friday. Great to be on. So you study the entire life cycle of caterpillars, so the butterflies and moths they become, too? Absolutely, yeah. The egg, the caterpillar, the pupar, chrysalis, and the adults. And so why are caterpillar so? interesting to you? I think they're beautiful. I think they're maybe the largest creatures in all of North America where there's no field guides or identification guides up until about 10 years ago.

And being a professional entomologist, I thought I could help out there and provide something so people could identify what was in their gardens and in the forest when they're on walks. Do you have your own favorite caterpillar? Well, I sort of do. There's something called the the spun glass slug, and it's an absolutely magnificently beautiful. creature. It's small, but you can actually see through part of the body, this beautiful pale green, blue-green color. Actually, it can sting, though, like Nina's caterpillar, but it's so small that it's really innocuous. Now, I understand that like Nina, you actually got stung by an asp caterpillar, but you did it on purpose. Well, I knew they stung, and I'm interested in these sorts of things, so I decided to press one into my arm,

and it was the most painful insects thing I've ever had, and it's most frightening because normally when you get stung or bit by something, it hurts right away, and you're alarmed. But this thing, the pain intensity kept growing and growing over two hours, and you don't know when it's going to stop. So that was really off-putting and quite frightening, actually, and very painful. It didn't stop hurting for hours. Wow. Nina, do you have any other questions you'd like to ask now? Go right ahead.

Yes. Use poison of the caterpillars to make medicine? Well, I don't know of any examples of that, but we certainly will be studying that. But there are different compounds produced by caterpillars that are used in medicines. So there are certain caterpillars that produce chemicals that kill bacteria, so potentially we could use these as antibiotics. Have you got another one, Nina? Go ahead. Are there, how can you tell it?

if caterpillars are safe or dangerous. Oh, I want to know that one, too. Yeah, that's a good question. So normally, if they're green and brown and trying to blend into the background and disappear, then you can be pretty sure that they're trying to hide from birds. And those are probably going to be harmless, and, you know, if birds are eating them, people probably could too,

but we don't eat caterpillars normally. But the ones that are brightly colored, So let's take yellow, orange, red caterpillars, particularly if they have some accentuating black and white color. They're trying to tell you something. They're trying to warn you away. They're your Clint Eastwood caterpillars. And they're possibly going to sting you or spray something at you

or maybe they're mimicking another dangerous caterpillars. But, Nina, if you and I were to go into the Amazon and walk together, and if we saw really brightly colored animals when we're in the jungle walking together, we should generally stay away from those because they're trying to advertise and tell us that they're dangerous. But the other caterpillars, the ones that are just earth colors, greens and browns,

they're probably very safe and you can pick them up. Nina, have you seen any caterpillars you'd like to ask about? Yeah. So we went at Mexico and we're planning going to Mexico and see monarch butterflies.

And also, there might be some calipillars, and we're going to find out what kind of calipulars they are and look at them and enjoy. Yeah, the monarch caterpillar is a splendid creature. It's very handsome. Actually, the website for this show might have a picture of a monarch caterpillar on it. It's a great pet for two or three weeks.

They feed up right away, easy to rear, and it's really wonderful to watch the metamorphosis. I think it's really great and healthy for kids to see growth and development and change. I think it's a great allegory for their own personal development. But it's really wonderful with the monarch because they have this see-through chrysalis. So you actually get to see change and growth, and you get to watch it, turn into the adult, and then break out of its pupa, and then you can let it go outdoors to continue on its journey. Let's go to the phones. Let's see if we have any again.

Here's a phone call from Rachel. Hi, Rachel. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. Thank you. Such an interesting discussion. I'm really in awe of Nina, the young scientists. I have a question because you said if we've seen any interesting caterpillars lately,

and I've seen some this year that I haven't seen before in my yard as the leaves on the deciduous trees have been falling, a couple of times on cold days. There's one that has what looks like. long brown, almost bronze-colored hairs, and then it has some, and then part of the caterpillar is black. And when I've seen them, they look almost like they're folded over in half, and one of them, I thought nine have been trying to form a chrysalis or something. And so when I'm seeing them, at first I don't know what they are, but I'm wondering,

where do I put them to keep them safe? I've seen them on the driveway. I've seen them on the porch by the house, and I'm not sure where they were trying to go to or where they were before they arrived there. Well, you could figure out what they were if you bought my book, but in any case. I know there's websites for this, but I'm just too lazy. You know, he said, hey, have you seen it? I said, maybe someone else can tell me what it is without me having to go through this.

One of the wonderful things about living in eastern North America is that we have a great amount of wildlife in our woodlands and forests, and really within a mile of our homes, we can expect to find about a thousand species of butterflies and maws, each with their own unique kind of caterpillar. So I really can't say which one it was. It sounds a little bit like a monkey slug, and they're just fabulous creatures with lots of hairs on them, and kind of amorphous and hard to recognize, and maybe it was spinning a cocoon on the leaf, but it's hard for me to say, but I would just, you know, put it out of the way of any vehicles or walking paths or that sort of thing and let it go on its natural cycle.

Not afraid to pick it up, then. You know, you can pick up even these dangerous ones at Sting if you do it very, very gently. So they're using these things as a defense, and never do they actively sting like a bee. So it's basically from poor handling. And the other thing that happens with gardeners is that caterpillar actually drops into the clothing. And that can be quite serious with the asps that stung Nina. It's a miserable thing, and it happens. The pain will last up to two days, and every joint upstream and downstream before you've been stung will feel arthritic.

We have a tweet that came in. Is there any statistical data to support the old wives tale about the width of a woolly bear's bands on the upcoming weather? And we have a video on our website about this. Is there any data about that? Jennifer wants to know. Well, generally, that's pretty weak. And there's probably just more genetic variation in terms of the amount of orange and amount of black in woolly bears. And they range actually all the way from all black to all orange.

But there might be a certain correlation that in certain years, the caterpillars don't get as far along because winter comes early. And they would potentially have, let's say, less orange. And then in another year where it was a mild winter, they would get through their development a little further and have more of the other color. Nina, I'm going to for another question after I tell everybody that I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Nina, give us your next question, if you could. How do the feet work with hooks or claws or stickiness, and also how many feet do they have? Well, that's the easy part. They have about eight different pairs, but in answer to your first question, it's all of the above.

Some caterpillars have claws. In fact, they almost all do. They have the six legs that all insects, even your ladybugs have, up. front, but we kind of think about the fleshy legs and the abdomen that hold up the abdomen is the caterpillar legs, and they have about five pairs of those, and they have hooks on the end. They look just like a little crochet hook on the end, and generally that's a way for them to engage whatever they're sitting on so they don't get pulled off by a bird. But what you don't see is oftentimes they use their silk. They have the little silk spinnerette. All the silk on the

planet comes from caterpillars. But they spin little pieces of silk where they're walking and where they like to rest and where they're eating, and you don't know it, but they're taking their little hooks and hooking into that silk so they don't fall off the leaf or don't get pulled off. Now, I know that you call caterpillars the hamburger meat of the animal world. I think that, you know, if you're going to go out into a kinetic or Houston forest, and you're just going to look at all the insects that you could find, most of the most of the Most of the weight or most of the mass, the meat, what's there for other animals,

birds, foxes, coyotes, mice, and what have you, would actually be caterpillars. So they're sort of, they're tethering together our terrestrial ecosystems. They are what makes a baby bird. So if your listeners love songbirds, you have to appreciate that caterpillars play a really important part in building that baby bird each spring. Let's go to the phones to Ross and Oakland. Hi, Ross. This is Roz.

Hi there. Go ahead. That is a little bit of a carpenter that looks like a dragon was really big. And in the grass? And did we find out? Is it poisonous or not poisonous? Not poisonous, but it had those spines. And what did it look like?

It looked like a dragon. Wow. And then what does it turn into? The biggest muscle. in North America. Oh, the Hickory Horn Devil. It's a magnificent moth. Some of them get over five inches in wingspan,

and they're absolutely enormous, and they're harmless. Like Ross and her child said, they have been declining, though. So I don't know if you've heard about much of the insect loss, but they're one of the groups that seems to be losing ground against all the changes that have been brought by humans.

All right. Thank you, Roz, for that. Excellent question. Nina, do you have anything left or are you just going to go out and do looking for some more caterpillar? I have one more question. Go ahead. Do calipolar sense better with eyes or antennas or smell? That's a good question. And I don't know exactly their eyes. They can see you. So they have image-forming eyes on the side of their head. And sometimes when I walk into the lab, I can see that my caterpillars look at me. But in general, their eyesight's probably not too sharp, and their antennae are much smaller, right?

So they're not like the great big antennae of the monarch or the hickory horn devil. They're very tiny, so I don't think they do too much. And their mouthparts don't do too much either. So I think most of what they can do or sense is actually movement or pressure. So they can sense that a predator is sneaking up on them if they feel wind, maybe. Or if their leaf starts to shake, they can feel it through their feet. So I think they mostly do things by touch. David, thank you very much for taking time to be with the state, David Wagner,

author of Caterpillars of Eastern North America, A Guide to Identification in Natural History. And Nina Del Bosque is second grader at Poe Elementary School in Houston. Thank you for joining us, Nina. Have a good weekend. Bye. And remember, she wrote us a letter. You can write us, too, with your questions.

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