TED Radio Hour - The birds and the bees

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

"The birds and the bees" may be a euphemism for human reproduction, but procreation of actual winged animals is far wilder. This hour, TED speakers explore how birds, bees and bugs multiply. Guests include beekeeper Noah Wilson-Rich, biologist Carin Bondar, behavioral ecologist Marlene Zuk and comedian Julia Sweeney.Original broadcast date: July 15, 2022. TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at plus.npr.org/ted. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

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From Ted and NPR. I'm Manushe Zamoroti. I see bees. Hello, friend. Hello. And today on the show, one just landed on me. The birds and the bees. Oh, my goodness.

We have just come up a very steep ladder into paradise. This is amazing. A few weeks ago, I visited biologist and beekeeper. Noah Wilson Rich on a rooftop covered with wildflowers and trees right in the middle of Manhattan. Okay, so where do we go to find the highs? Okay, so we are going to walk past these bronze sculptures, and there are four be beards in the corner. So follow me. We're going to make our own pathways.

Can I just see how odd it is to be talking to you, surrounded by a cloud of bees, and not being fearful or running? I feel like we've got like a bee soup swimming around our heads. You said it was going to be calming, and it kind of is. You have to vibe with it. You know, everything we do in like... I mean, okay, so Noah, we had to come up,

we had to take the subway, and then we had to come up this flight of, you know, a steep ladder. We're in Manhattan. Somebody who maybe doesn't know you might think, why go through all this trouble? Why not just put these hives in a beautiful, fields in New Jersey.

You know, Manush, I did not set out to become an urban beekeeper at all. I was living in the city of Boston, going to graduate school nearby, when I needed to get more beehives for our research at the time developing vaccines for bees. And I just began to notice that bees were dying outside of the city, and they were thriving inside the city and on the higher-up rooftops as well they were doing better. So we need to have beehives here on a rooftop in Manhattan instead of the fields of New Jersey because they're dying there. This is where they're thriving.

You've likely heard that bees are in trouble for many reasons, including climate change and pesticides. Noah's company, Best Bees, collects data from hundreds of honeybee hives that they install and maintain in cities across the U.S. This research, he says, is helping biologists better understand how to protect all kinds of bee species. We can start to see which beehives are thrifted. which beehives are not on this network and then ask questions about the habitat,

which so far seem to really converge around the habitat hypothesis that as with this rooftop, the more plant diversity around a beehive, that seems to be the leading explanation for why beehives are thriving. Yeah, I'm just wondering, as an expert in bees, as you look around, what are you looking for? What are the indicators that you want to see? So what I'm looking for in a healthy bee population is safety, first and foremost. Are these bees just doing their own thing?

Are they ignoring humans as they should? Bees are vegan. They should go to flowers and come back. That's really it. So far, does it look good? It looks amazing so far. These four bee hives are thriving. I know from our database also when our beekeepers visited recently

that we've done everything to make sure that the bees have a healthy queen. She's laying eggs. They're starting to make honey. And we're working with bees that are already in the environment, and that's a beautiful thing for sustainability. So some behaviors will notice, these bees are kind of happening on the one of the other. Multiply and survive. That is the goal of every organism.

Yes, the goal of bees is to make more bees. In an evolutionary biology perspective, the goal of humans is to make more humans. And that's what organisms do. We pass our genes to the next generation. Maybe as a child you first heard reproduction referred to as the birds and the bees. But your parents probably didn't teach you about pollination or insect intercourse or eggs hatching. So today on the show, we investigate the birds and bees quite literally. We'll learn how feathered creatures and various insects breed, what can get in their way, and if linking their mating rituals to ours is ever a fair comparison. Which brings us back to biologist Noah Wilson Rich, who says humans have made honeybees essential to their own survival.

So bees are this universal pollinator. They bring over 70 fruit and vegetable crops that we humans rely upon for healthy, nutritious food. They bring nuts, you know, crunchy almonds, sour lemons, tart apples. They are responsible for over $100 billion to the global economy every year through this pollination service. They even support the cattle and dairy and cheese industries through their role of pollinating hay and alfalfa. And there are 20,000 species. of bees worldwide, hard at work, pollinating not just crops, but also plants. And so whether they're pollinating crops or plants around the world, they're providing an really important

ecosystem service that we rely upon every day in our daily activities. So we started the show visiting bee hives right here in New York City. And you have said that these honeybees are doing better in urban areas because of the habitat. Talk me through how you came to that conclusion, because it's a bit surprising. Yeah, so we were looking at the three main hypotheses for what's killing bees. That's the starting point in understanding what's saving them. So the main three killers of bees are agricultural chemicals, so that includes pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, anything that's designed to kill off some intricate part of this relationship between plants and pollinators. So that's one. The second is diseases of which bees are affected by many pests and

pathogens. So two is disease and three is habitat loss, meaning there just aren't enough flowers out there to facilitate good nutrition for pollinators. Now, nutrition is just as important for bees as it is for humans. For bees, it helps them to better metabolize pesticides, which they can do, and also to better withstand disease. So that's how habitat loss relates to the first two leading killers of bees. Now, flipping those a little bit, what's saving bees? We were looking at the areas where bees were thriving and where they weren't on our network of beehives here. So these were beehives at home gardens, at business rooftops across the United States. And we wanted to test to see if the areas where bees were doing great had less pesticides.

Did they have less disease? Or was the habitat better? And we found that in urban areas, there are up to eight times more plant species. for bees to pollinate compared to their nearby rural and suburban areas. Here's Noah Wilson-Rich on the TED stage. So we're finding out now that in rural areas, there are 150 plants on average in a sample of honey. That's a measure for rural.

Suburban areas, what might you think? Do they have less or more plants in suburban areas with lawns that look nice for people, but they're terrible for pollinators? Suburbs have very low plant diversity. So if you have a beautiful lawn, well, good for you, but you can do more. You can have a patch of your lawn that's a wildflower meadow to diversify your habitat to improve pollinator health. Anybody can do this. Urban areas have the most habitat, best habitat, over 200 different plants.

We have, for the first time ever, support for the habitat hypothesis. Spring honey in Provincet is from Privet. What's privet? Hed. What's the message? don't trim your hedges to save the bees. Move to the summer honey, which is water lily honey. If you have honey from Provincetown right here in the summer,

you're eating water lily juice. In the fall, sumac honey, we're learning about our food for the first time ever, and now we're able to report if you need to do any city planning, what are good things to plant? What do we know the bees are going to that's good for your garden? I think we should taste some honey. So we look at all these little nuances, but this is a great time, Manusia.

If you're comfortable, taking off a glove, we're going to taste some honey fresh out of the hive with our fingers. My hunger overcomes all fear. There's no wrong way to do it. I'll do it first. I'm just going to take my finger and I'm smushing it right into the wax comb. And it just squeezes out. It's so beautiful. There's beautiful honey just pouring out.

What you'll notice to. Look at them. They're like, what are you doing, man. These bees will come up right away and say, oh, we've got to clean up your. mess and I'm just going to taste it. Oh, right. Wow. This flavor is unlike anything that you can find in a store. Oh my gosh.

I was going to say it's nectar, but it's nectar. You know, and we don't have the vocabulary still at this modern day to put towards this. We call it all honey. It's flour juice and it's entirely different all around the world. So here's what I'm wondering. Can you give me a pitch? Let's say I am a commercial.

I am a commercial landlord. And I'm like, hey, no, I've heard about U and B's. And I've got this huge rooftop in Midtown, Manhattan. What's the deal? What do you do? Why should I join you? So when you think about real estate companies and when you're entering New York City for anybody who's ever taken a train or a plane in there

and you look out onto the landscape of the city and you see gray, you see, wow, there must have been habitat before these buildings went up. What was there? There's nothing there in its place. And this is part of what's now called the gray to green movement. And so for companies that have under leveraged assets, what more could you do? When you're thinking about how to compete for business, for people to lease an office or an apartment space, think about what they're making those decisions based on. Green space is now the new mandate, having a green rooftop, having the ability to go outside and to experience the feeling of wellness to be able to see some butterflies and some bees or even pick some carrots from a roof. That's the future that we see and we're

seeing spending patterns going towards companies that have a more sustainable brand and reputation. Okay, this has been a pretty exciting, optimistic conversation. But let's say, no, what happens if we don't succeed here? If we don't succeed, then I believe that bees are going to die off much faster than anybody realizes. We already have places around the world where there are humans doing the pollinating with little wands and cotton swabs going from flower to flower to transfer that pollen to create fruit. This is very unsustainable. Those people could be doing other things to benefit society if only we had the pollinators to do that service for us. And so how do we know the health of the other 200,000 species of pollinators if we don't even know what

they are. And that's where honeybees help us so much. We know so much about them. And if they're not doing well and they have human help to create more hives, then we're really in trouble. And some people call this great insect apocalypse. We need to understand the identities of these pollinators so we know how to save them so that they can bring us healthy fruits, vegetables, nuts, all the foods that we want for ourselves and for our kids, as well as to help promote all the plants that are out there bringing in carbon dioxide as part of their photosynthesis and then producing oxygen. Without all of these plants that are pollinated by pollinators like bees, we are not going to be able to move the needle on our carbon goals and to really have a healthy future as humans.

That's biologist Noah Wilson Rich. He's the CEO of the Best Bees Company. You can see all of his talks at ted.com. On the show today, the birds and the bees. I'm Manus Zumerode. And you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anoush Zamoroti.

And on the show today, birds and bees. The buzzy, busy, amazing cycle of reproduction that keeps all life clucking along. So eggs are amazing. This is Karen Bondar. We just think about scrambling them for our breakfast. And fair enough, because there is a great source of routine. But the thing about eggs is they enable a couple of really spectacular things. Karen is a biologist, science writer, and very excited about eggs. And the birds who lay them.

Moms make these little beautiful packages of, you know, there's certainly the DNA is in there. Okay, we've got the embryo. But what else we got in there? We've got food. We've got nutrition. We've got hormones. We've got immune factors. And each one of those factors can, can be individualized for each egg. Tweaked, refined, and personalized. Karen says that bird moms are the micromanagers of the animal kingdom, and they can tailor their eggs in ways you would never imagine. For example, if a mother is experiencing a resource shortage,

if times are really tough, if food is not plentiful, this will make its way into the eggs that she loves. lays. In a lot of cases, mummy birds will lay just a few extra eggs. And those will be almost insurance eggs that will almost certainly, you know, if they develop at all, they will develop into rants of the litter that won't make it. Oh, okay. So these mommy birds are hedging their bets. Like she has to weigh all the factors around her as she determines where or which egg she should invest her time and energy in. Yeah, that's right. It's like, And those decisions have to be made quite early.

But, you know, there's other things that are to be taken into consideration, too. And a really interesting example of this comes from the Galapagos Islands. From the blue-footed booby. Now, these ladies or mothers also base their egg contents on the identity of dad. In the blue-footed booby, you have these males who have blue-gorgeous feet. and this is an indicator of health. And this is something that a female use as a proxy by which to say, okay, yeah, this is a good male.

I like this male. I want to reproduce with this male. Therefore, I'm going to invest a lot into these eggs. So researchers manipulated the system of the blue-footed booby. Females will lay two eggs. So they'll mate with a male, and then about 36 hours later, they'll lay the first egg. Then another three days later, they'll lay the second one.

It almost always works out this way. And so researchers, during that interval, they painted a male's feet, a dark gray, right? As if to say, okay, hang on, we're taking his health away. We're taking away his beauty. Lo and behold, the second egg came along with fewer nutrients, fewer hormones. Mum provisioned the egg according to the fact that dad was no longer a high quality. And isn't that just an incredible demonstration? the ability that she has to allocate at such an early level of development. It blows my mind.

It is bananas. So another thing about bird eggs that you talk about in your book is size. Size matters, like a lot. The size of an egg is actually highly correlated with the success of that egg. So the ones that are somewhat larger, generally speaking, we can assume that that has, you know, more food in there to make for a successful hatching. The latter or the later eggs will often be smaller, which makes sense she's running out of energy. But sometimes what moms will do for these late laid smaller eggs is they'll actually load them up with some more androgens or the hormones that help for the chicks to be a little more aggressive. In some cases,

this will make the difference for them between life and death, because once they hatch, if they are not aggressive enough. I mean, the saying is true, the loudest bird gets the worm. And so if the late hatching little guys don't fight for their share, they simply won't eat and they will then die. So in some ways, she's saying, okay, I get that you little guys are at a disadvantage to start with, but I'm going to give you a boost of androgen or testosterone so that you can fight to the death if needed. Like fight your older sibling? Yes, absolutely. I mean, Sebelicide is. is quite commonplace in a lot of these nesting birds, but from a biological point of view,

that really is the most advantageous thing to have. The older chicks are going to be the ones that are most likely to survive anyway. And for her to receive or realize any biological fitness, she's got to let those smaller ones go. We talked about the size of the eggs, but I didn't realize that there was also a way for birds to modulate when they lay their eggs. Tell us about the process

of actually how long does it take to lay an egg? How much time is there between eggs? Does it vary for each species? Yeah, there actually can be quite a lot of variation there. But generally speaking, for most species, it takes between

20 and 30-ish minutes. However, there's a whole other set of birds. These ones are called brood parasites. And these are, who swoop in to someone else's nest entirely, a different species, in fact, and they lay their eggs in someone else's nest, and then they swoop away again. So they essentially drop off their children in a permanent daycare situation, and off they go. We've got someone like the brown-headed

cowbird. She can lay it in about 41 seconds, which is respectable, but the shiny cowbird can actually lay hers in seven seconds, and the bronzed cowbirds can lay them in five seconds. Whoa. Could you imagine being in labor for five seconds? I can handle that. Yeah, I guess so. But she has to fly there first. She has to fly in.

Fly in, swoop in, lay the egg, and swoop out again. And then get the hell out of there. Right? It is just, it's a drive-by laying. Okay. So these brood parasites. I imagine that this whole scheme only works if they can fool the host parents. And you say in your book that cuckoos can mimic other eggs, like lay them so that they match down to the shade of color.

Oh, yeah. I will often do public lectures where I throw a slide up that has eggs in a nest. And it's nearly impossible for the audience members to tell which ones are laid by the parasite and which ones are laid by the act. actual mum of that nest. They can copy the colors, the pigments. Sometimes there's even little patterns on the eggs, some speckles. But how do they know? Like, are they casing the joint and then returning to their own, you know, nest and saying like, right, okay, I'm going for Tiffany Blue with some brown speckles. Like, how do they know? That's a great question. And that is a question that we, you know, that we don't necessarily have a full-on answer to that as far as the cognitive.

parts of it and the physiological parts of it. But what we do know is that, yes, they will make sort of pre-drop-off flights where they observe the positionality of the nests that they're going to parasitize. They look for nests that are in an appropriate location, that they'll be able to make a quick getaway. But then, you know, what these birds will do, the parasitized birds, will then actually say, okay, well, we're going to put our nests right beside this predatory bird as a means by which to scare you guys off. So the predators hopefully won't eat us, but they will eat these cuckus who are coming incessantly by. It does beg the philosophical question of how does a cuckoo bird know it's a cuckoo bird if it was raised by a magpie, right?

You have to think that the identity, the personal identity of these birds has got to be, right? And they don't even get to meet their parents. birth. Wow. Can we talk about dads? Is that okay? Let's do it. Let's talk about dads. Because, yes, you know, the bird world is really where we see some of the best fathering, I would argue. Really? The bird world. Yeah. And that's just because of that truism that in mammals, I, me, and every other female mammal keeps that baby inside until that baby gets born. So as soon as that sperm has made its transfer, once that embryo has been fertilized, dad's job is done. There really isn't anything biologically relevant that dad can do. But in the bird world, that's not the case. In the bird world, once mom has laid that egg, dad can legitimately sit on that egg and that is worth something. This is why we do see a lot of biparental care in the bird world. As the father settled into their long wait at the breeding ground, the winter's second storm arrives. I feel like the best example.

For example, or the first time I kind of became aware of bird parenting, was that penguin documentary. As they move about, the fathers will balance their eggs like tank broke waters. Where you saw these amazing emperor penguins passing an egg back and forth between themselves to keep it warm. Yeah, so there's a need for adults and specifically the dads to sit on these eggs to keep them warm in these frigid environments. And rocks, for example, large rocks to create these nests are something that's quite a hot commodity in these environments. So a lot of sexual favors will take place by females towards males in order to grab onto some of these rocks to be able to build a nest. There's a good amount of homosexual sex that happens between males who are, you know, also dutiful dads, but certainly doing their own activities on the side.

So, I mean, there's a lot of interesting parental and I guess in a way familial stuff that happens because of the nature of these really harsh environments where the penguins live. My daughter's favorite bird is the peacock. Oh, okay. The male peacock, full feathers. Oh, yes. These showy birds who kind of put on a display for, the female. Does that indicate in any way whether or not they will also be caring for the eggs and the chicks?

It sure does. Yeah, that's a great question. And generally speaking, the more beautiful he is, the less he's going to help. And that's because... Why does that not surprise me? I know, right? That's because, you know, there's only so much biological energy to go around. So we'll often see in species that are lack breeders or species where there is a male and his job is just to give out sperm, they're going to be very pretty because they are trying to give out as much of that sperm as possible. That's their only job. We also would see that in something like a bower bird. So these are the birds that create these beautiful homes, almost like bachelor pads with really beautiful feathers. Sometimes they find pretty things that are plastic from the human world and they decorate their nests with these things. They're doing that to entice her into coming to his, you know, bachelor pad and only to receive some of his sperm.

And once she has received that sperm, that's it for him. He's looking for the next female. To wrap up, you seem to, and I don't know how you'll take this, but you seem to relish the dark. side of our conversation just as much as you relish the beautiful, the gorgeous feathers and songs and well-built nests. There's a little bit of a psychotic side to birds, it feels like, or am I attributing psychological things to an entire world that doesn't deserve it? You know what? I love it. I delight in the macabre and the sort of darker sides because I love that nature is messy and that it isn't what we've been told as a nuclear family or a monogamous

relationship or whatever kinds of things that humans have decided should be happening in whatever species or for our own species. But I really do delight in the fact that there's so much about nature that we maybe glaze over. And it's not necessarily even dark. It's just all a of individual survival. And when you, you know, when you consider how that sort of plays out across the human world as well, for me, it just makes us all that much more a part of the animal kingdom. We are animals just like anyone else is or any other living thing is. And I guess maybe that's where some of my delight in these, in these ridiculous and crazy things comes from. It's like, of course they experience these things. Animals are not these perfect little,

happy family units and stuff. I mean, they just, they go through it just like we do. That's Karen Bondar. She's a biologist and author of several books, including wild moms and the nature of sex, the ins and outs of mating in the animal kingdom. You can see both of her talks at ted.com. We've been hearing about animal instincts, behaviors that are crucial to survival, because it can be tough out there.

Take the lowly cricket, for example. From a cricket standpoint, the world is very big and very dark. This is Marlene Zuck. She's an evolutionary biologist and behavioral ecologist who specializes in insect reproduction. The short version I always tell people as I study bug sex. And Marlene has spent a lot of time observing how crickets do it. They're cool to study from the standpoint of understanding how males and females interact, because as everybody knows, crickets sing, and the song attracts females from a distance.

This cricket story begins when Marlene was invited to a conference in Hawaii 20 years ago, and she spent a couple extra days researching male-female cricket interaction. It's not clear to me why I couldn't come up with the standard things that one does when one goes to Hawaii, like, you know, I want to go to the beach or I want to, you know, go hiking or I want to, you know, learn to hula. I don't know. And instead, I thought I wonder if there are crickets that I can look, for when I'm in Hawaii. Wait, so how does one collect crickets at night in Hawaii?

Or anywhere else. It's a very low-tech operation. Yeah. So you go outside at night and you listen for cricket song. You do have to know what they sound like. And of course, each species has its own song. There is a certain amount of skill involved in sound localization. So if you hear a sound, if you turn your head back and forth, that's actually a good way to figure it out. And it'll be louder on the side where obviously the sound is coming from.

and then you have to just kind of pounce with your hand. But they don't bite and it's okay. And so you can just grab them. Marlene was looking for the Pacific Field Cricket. And that first night, she went out into an open area and noticed that something was off. Unlike the usual situation with crickets where they are all buried under the leaf litter and the grass,

I was seeing a bunch of males just walking on top of the lawn. She had heard of only one instance where crickets behaved like this, a case in Texas. Where a scientist named Bill Cade had discovered a parasitic fly that could hear the sound of the cricket and would home in on that cricket and drop its larvae on them

and the larvae then burrow into the cricket, eat it from the inside out, and kill the cricket, which is a gory but wonderful life history. And I said, but that's weird because I've never heard of that happening anywhere but in Texas. And then I was collecting the crickets and dissecting them the next day and what should happen,

but a fly larva pops out. And I thought, oh, my God. It turned out that I discovered that there was these sound-orienting parasitic flies in Hawaii that no one had ever known were there. And so that puts the male in this terrible bind, because the more he calls, the more likely he is to attract a female, which is the best thing ever from an evolutionary standpoint. But it's also the worst thing ever,

because he could attract his fly that will deposit these alien-like creatures that will burrow in, eat him from the inside out, and then leave him a shell of his former self. In a minute, more from Marlene Zuck about how these crickets found a genetic loophole and completely changed their reproductive strategy. On the show today, the birds and the bees. You're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manus Zummerodi. On the show today, the birds and the bees.

And we were talking to evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuck. She is the author of numerous books and essays. Riddled with life, friendly worms, ladybug sex, and the parasites that bring on the aerial and sex with benefits when and how sexual cannibalism is a sex on six legs, lessons on life, love. In addition to writing, Marlene does a lot of life. a lot of field research. And about 30 years ago, she stumbled upon an evolutionary dilemma for the Pacific field crickets of Hawaii. And it turned out that I discovered that there was these sound-orienting parasitic flies in Hawaii that no one had ever known were there.

Year after year, Marlene returned to the island of Kauai to see if these crickets could survive an infestation of parasitic flies. That could hear the sound of the cricket and would home in on that cricket and drop its larvae on them. And the larvae then burrow into the cricket, eat it from the inside out and kill the cricket. Okay, so if it sings, if the male cricket sings, he could either attract a girlfriend or a murderer. Right. There you go. Okay, so how did you go about measuring or observing how the crickets were coping, with this. We'd been working on three islands in Hawaii, and on one of them, the island of

Kauai, the cricket numbers had just been falling for a few years, and I thought, well, you know, maybe we're just going to see extinction happening. And then the following year, I went and didn't hear anything, but thought, okay, well, you may as well get out of the car. And I started walking up the road where we usually see them in Kauai with my headlamp, and all of a sudden I started seeing all these crickets, but I wasn't hearing anything. It's like this moment of cognitive dissonance, because if you see crickets and it's nighttime, then you should be hearing crickets. And if it's nighttime and you're not hearing crickets, then you shouldn't be seeing crickets because that's what crickets do. It's their raison de et-trait. You know,

they call. I mean, that's what male crickets do. And so I literally was picking them up. and thinking, what is this? And, you know, because of course I've been working on them for years by then, so of course I knew what they were. I just couldn't figure it out. And finally, what we realized is that not all, as it turns out, but a bunch of the males on that island, and then later it was on other islands as well, had a mutation in their wings that made them unable to call. These male crickets were certainly males, and they, you know, had everything else that a male needs, but their wings looked like female wings and females don't call. And so this is awesome for the males because it protects them completely from being found by this parasitic fly

because the fly can only hunt by listening. But it's also a hindrance because, of course, from the standpoint of finding a female, they're kind of out of luck. Yeah. Like, yes, they're surviving. They're not being eaten from the inside out by these parasites. but how are they finding females and making more crickets? It turns out that the males with this mutation

act as what are called satellites to the calling males. The key to all of this is it can't work unless there's still a few callers. Because if everybody becomes what we call a flat wing, one of these males that can't call, then the show is over because everybody's just wandering around in the dark and nobody can find anybody else. But if there's a few callers left, the females are still super attracted to them.

And if, as they're walking toward the collar, they're intercepted by one of these flat wings, they will, at least some of the time, mate with them. And even if the females don't like them as much, because those flat wing males are protected from the fly, they live longer. So they can just kind of wait it out. And so even if on a sort of per night basis, they're not mating as much, if they live longer, eventually something, you know, will happen to them.

So how does this example challenge what we think we know about evolution and how it works? You know, everybody always thinks, oh, evolution, the dinosaurs rose and fell, it's millions of years. And so evolution can't happen fast. But increasingly scientists are realizing that evolution can happen really fast or really. really slow or in between, but it's hard to demonstrate in the wild because you're not always there to see it happen. And in our case, because I'd been working on the crickets long term, I knew that it had taken at maximum about 20 generations to have the mutation spread, which, of course, from an evolutionary perspective, is really, really, really fast. And I think that one of the fun things

that's come out of a lot of this work is how flexible insect behavior is. Here's Marlene Zuck on the TED stage. Now, I will maintain, and I think I can defend, what may seem like a surprising statement. I think sex in insects is more interesting than sex in people. And the wild variety that we see makes us challenge some of our own assumptions

about what it means to be male and female. Of course, to start with, a lot of insects don't need to have sex at all to reproduce. Female aphids can make little tiny clones of themselves without ever mating. Virgin birth, right there, on your rose bushes. When they do have sex, even their sperm is more interesting than human sperm. Dragonflies and damsel flies have penises that look kind of like Swiss army knives with all of the attachments pulled out. And they use these formidable devices like scoops to remove the sperm from previous males that the female has mated with. So what can we learn from this? I mean, all right, it's not, it is not a lesson in the

sense of us imitating them or of them setting an example for us to follow. What I think insects do is break a lot of the rules that we humans have about the sex roles. So people have this idea that nature dictates kind of a 1950s sitcom version of what males and females are like, so that males are always supposed to be dominant and aggressive and females are passive and coy. But that's just not the case. So for example, take Katie Ditts, which are relatives of crickets and grasshoppers. The males are very picky about who they mate with because they not only transfer sperm during mating, they also give the female something called a nuptial gift.

And the male manufactures this from his own body, and it's extremely costly to produce. It can weigh up to a third of his body mass. I will now pause for a moment and let you think about what it would be like if human men, every time they had sex, had to produce something that weighed 50, 60, 70 pounds. Okay, they would not be able to do that very often. And indeed, neither can to Katie dits.

And so what that means is the males are very passive about mating, whereas the females are extremely aggressive and competitive in an attempt to get as many of these nutritious nuptial gifts as they can. These nuptial gifts contain protein and a bunch of other nutrients, and the female eats it while she's being fertilized by the male. She's basically eating a power bar while they do it. I like to think of it more as like a box of like really good chocolate truffles. So I would be, you know, I mean, yes, the protein, but, you know, from her perspective, it's really, it's just a fabulous thing to eat because it helps her produce more eggs, which of course makes her produce more offspring, which of course makes her produce more genes in the next generation, which of course is what it's all about.

And so from the standpoint of like, okay, we've always got these competitive males and these picky females, the Katie Dids don't really follow that rule. They're still male Katie Dids and female Katie Dids. It's not like they're not changing sex. It's just that being a male and being a female is way more variable than people tend to think. So this might be kind of a dumb question, but I have to ask it. Do you think, Marlene, that insects, I mean, they're hot for each other because they need to procreate that's in their biology. Sure.

But is there is there a pleasure element in that as well? Or would that just be an example of us anthropomorphizing them? So I think it's a super good question. I don't think it's dumb at all. And I think it gets to something that has fascinated me forever, which is so how much can we think of other animals as being like us? You know, we're fascinated with this. We're like only humans can, you know, fill in the blank.

For a long time, it was used tools. And then it's like, oops, there's lots of other animals that can use tools. people are constantly trying to come up with something that will make us different. And then if it turns out we're not different, then they're all in a tizzy about, oh, but so does that mean that everything is exactly like us? And they all feel the same things we do, and they all, you know, like love the way we do. And this is finally getting back to your question. They all experience pleasure the same way we do.

And that explains, you know, everything. And I just don't see why we have to have it one of two ways. It seems to me that insect, and other animals can be not like little automaton or robots or whatever, but they can also not be like us. And it's like we don't expect other animals to be like us physically. Like we think kidneys are different in different animals. Why do we think that emotions have to be the same in us as in other animals? So I think it's fine. Like insects have a really weird version of kidneys. They're called malpigion tubules. They do strange stuff. They don't look

anything like a kidney, but they have the same function. We have kidneys. Nobody's like having hysterics about, but why do we have such different ways to process waste and, you know, like, it's just you do you. This is why I like insects is because you cannot look at an aunt and say, oh, that's just like a person in an exoskeleton. Because their brain is like the size of a poppy seed. I mean, come on. They cannot be doing the things the way you're doing this. because you're doing them dependent on this gigantic floppy thing inside your skull that then connects to all your nerves. They can't be doing it. And so they're like showing you this other world that is completely different.

That was evolutionary biologist and behavioral ecologist Marlene Zuck. Her latest book is called Dancing Cockatooze and the Dead Man Test. how behavior evolves and why it matters. On the show today, the birds and the bees. We have spent the hour talking about procreation, or as some people prefer to obliquely call it, the birds and the bees. Using animal imagery was how parents used to avoid

speaking frankly about human reproduction. Because, let's face it, that can be an awkward conversation for both the child and parent. comedian Julia Sweeney remembers having the talk with her daughter, which went in all kinds of unexpected directions, and we just have to share it with you. Here she is telling the story on the TED stage in 2010. I have a daughter, Mulan, and when she was eight,

she was doing a report for school, or she had some homework about frogs, and we were at this restaurant, and she said, so basically frogs lay eggs, and the eggs turned into tadpoles, and tadpoles turn into frogs. And I said, yeah, you know, I'm not really up on my frog reproduction that much. It's the females, I think, that lay the eggs, and then the males fertilize them.

And then they become tadpoles and frogs. And she says, what? Only the females have eggs. And I said, yeah. And she goes, and what's this fertilizing? So I kind of said, oh, it's this extra ingredient, you know, that you need to create a new frog from the mom and dad frog. And she said, oh, so is that true for humans, too?

And I thought, okay, here we go. I didn't know what happened so quick at eight. I was trying to remember all the guidebooks, and all I could remember was only answer the question they're asking. Don't give any more information. So I said, yes. And she said, and where do human women, like, where do women lay their eggs? And I said, well, funny, you should ask,

we have evolved to have our own pond. We have our very own pond inside our bodies. And we lay our eggs there. We don't have to worry about other eggs or anything like that. It's our own pond. And that's how it happens? And she goes in, how do they get fertilized? And I said, well, men, through their penis,

they fertilize the eggs by the sperm coming out, and you go through the woman's vagina. And so we're just eating, and her jaw just drops. And she goes, Like, where you go to the bathroom? And I said, I know. I know. It's how we evolved.

It does seem odd. It is a little bit like having a waste treatment plant right next to an amusement park. Bad zoning. But? She's like, what? And she goes, but mom, but men and women can't ever see each other naked, mom. So how could that ever happen? And then I go, well, and then I'm like, put my,

Margaret Mead had on, human males and females develop a special bond, and when they're much older, much, much older than you, and they have a very special feeling, then they can be naked together. And she said, Mom, have you done this before? And I said, yes. And she said, but mom, you can't have kids, because she knows I adopted her and that I can't have kids. And I said, yes. And she said, oh, you don't have to do that again. And then she said, but how does it happen when a man and women are together? Like, how do they know that's the time? Mom, does the man just say, is now the time to take off my pants?

And I said, how it happens? Then we got home and we see the cat, and she goes, Mom, how do cats do it? And I go, oh, it's the same. It's basically the same. And then she got all caught up in the legs. But how would their legs go, Mom? I don't understand the legs. And I was like, she goes, Mom, everyone can't do the splits.

And I go, I know. But the legs, I'm probably, I'm like, the legs get worked out. And she goes, but I just can't understand it. So I go, you know, why don't we go on the internet and maybe we can see, like, on Wikipedia? So we go online and we put in cats mating. And unfortunately on YouTube, there's mini cats mating videos. And we watch them, and I'm so thankful because she's just like, wow, this is so amazing. She goes, what about dogs?

So we put in dogs mating and, you know, we're watching it. She's totally absorbed. And then she goes, mom, do you think they would have, on the internet, any humans, maybe? I have taken my little eight-year-old's hand and taken her right into internet porn. And I looked into this trusting, loving face, and I said, oh, no, I would never happen.

Thank you. That was comedian Julia Sweeney. You can see all of her talks at ted.com. Thank you so much for listening to our show this week about the birds and the bees. To see hundreds more TED Talks, check out TED.com or the TED app. This episode was produced by Katie Montalione, James Delahousie, Fiona Giron, and Catherine Seifer. It was edited by Rachel Faulkner and Katie Simon.

Our production staff at NPR also includes Sanaz Meshkampur, Matthew Cloutier, and Rommel Wood. Our theme music was written by Romteen Arablewe. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Feelin, Michelle Quint, Sammy and Daniela Ballorezzo. I'm Anoush Zamoroti, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.