The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 208: Dr. Justin Schmidt on Why It Hurts So Bad

Episode Date: February 17, 2020

Steven Rinella talks to Dr. Justin Schmidt, Li Schmidt, Corinne Schneider, Ryan Callaghan, and Phil Taylor.Topics discussed: A quick Chinese love song; developing the Schmidt Pain Index; lying down on an ant hill; camouflage in the animal world; what Steve thought when he got stung by a bullet ant; poisonous defense systems; hitching a ride on a mosquito; how science progresses one coffin at a time; bot flies; having a furry proboscis; hell hath no fury like a horsefly; the big 5 of ants; the relativity of pain; the cold-blooded and nasty cruelty of a tarantula hawk; a good junior high school science project idea; what the hell does aposematic mean, anyway?; and so much more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or listen at themeateater.com. This is the Meat Eater podcast coming at you shirtless severely bug bitten and in my case underwearless the meat eater podcast you can't predict anything presented by on x hunt creators of the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters download the hunt app from the itunes or google play store know where you stand with on x digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with OnX. Okay, we're going to start out with a quick song. That's what I'm talking about. That's beautiful.

Beautiful. I'm going to leave that hanging. I'm going to leave that hanging as like a source of tension while I take care of a couple of things. We're joined by, I'm going to leave this hanging too, but we're joined by Dr. Justin O. Schmidt. You don't know this, Dr. Schmidt, but we've talked about you a whole bunch. Uh-oh. So we've talked about the Schmidt Pain Index. And that led me to starting reading about you

and reading your book and getting interested in you. But can you just hang tight a minute? Sounds good. I was telling you I have two... Before we started here, before that beautiful song, I was telling Cal that i had two cal's telling me that i told him a story that's not my story you're confusing me with someone else you don't that's correct yeah it must be correct yeah yeah so cal's saying like oh when you were saying and he told stories like that's not my story but i have two there's two chicken stories i do have not your chicken story is i have where um

there's a place in in in mexico on the yucatan peninsula tulum which used to be like just all like hippie kids and stuff but now it's you know it's like families go there people like what i used to be like people like that used to there. Now it's just people that are like what I'm like now that go there. But they had this – in the old days, 25 years ago, there was like this little street in town and people would cook chickens. It was like the local thing, grilled chickens. And they'd have stumps. I mean like full-on stumps and cleavers and machetes. And they would be like grilling chickens and chopping chickens on

stumps chopping blocks my buddy eric um my uh dear late friend eric was obsessed with these chickens and how they could make these chickens so good and he understand like what what the magic touch was so he spoke very poor spanish but he makes it back into the kitchen. Like, you know, like he's penetrated the depths of the facility where they grill this chicken. And he's trying to like inquire, like, what makes it so good? How do you do it? And the guy gestures to him that there's this trash can full of marinade. And he is very eager to have eric taste the marinade so eric you know drinks some of the marinade and then no sooner does he have a nice sip of the marinade as the

guy reaches into the trash can and produces from it um a number of raw chickens then eric's like oh this isn't gonna be good um for my gut but then the man then goes to a fridge a freezer a chest freezer that's not even plugged in and opens it and it's just he says it's just the most foul the most foul foul ever festering in like chicken liquid that's not refrigerated and he replenishes the vat of marinade with these chickens and then um he indeed did get sick i don't think i'm surprised yeah i'll tell you the other story later but has to do with when i got to visit a turkey a place where they um process turkeys which isn't even a chicken story mike no yeah not even chicken story real quick before we get into what we're supposed to be doing here to uh the whole our whole live tour is like about licked there's two venues left where you can get

tickets licked as in sold out sold but there's two venues left where you can get tickets April 15th What's 4? 4 April April 15th and April 16th We still have tickets Mesa Arts Center In Mesa, Arizona So like you Phoenix folk And then you LA folk We're going to be at the National Grove in Anaheim 4-16

Other than that you missed your chance So hurry up and book them up if you want to go and thanks for getting on it okay now real quick can you

the beautiful song we heard was from Dr. Schmidt Justin Schmidt's wife can you introduce yourself real quick

I'm Lee Schmidt I'm the queen of sting oh the queen of sting and can you, the Queen of Sting. And can you offer us a rough translation of the song, and then we're going to turn the attention to your husband. Yeah. It's actually a wedding vow song

from a Chinese minority group. And the meaning is basically said, when the flower blooms, bee comes. Flower and bees are inseparable. Bee seems born to love flowers. And flowers bloom just for the bees. And that's a metaphor for the love that will be shared between the husband and wife of the wedding. Yes.

That's cute. And it's called 鲜花和蜜蜂 but in Chinese it's 婚事 wedding vows. Are you familiar with I don't fully understand it. I might be mutilating this. Are you familiar with the concept of in Greek mythology there's this concept of

like zinnia I think it is or the guest host bond and it has to do with the relationship of a pollinator and the flower. And it somehow translates into a bond that exists between a guest. Like, what are the obligations of a guest to their host? Oh, yeah, no, go ahead. Let her rip.

Because in China, guest has no obligation to host. Host has full obligation to the guest. Oh, is that right? Yes. Guest has no obligation to host. No. So try to be a guest to China. You'll be treated like a king.

So when you, so it would be unusual in China to bring a, like when you You'll be treated like a king. So when you, so it would be unusual in China to bring a, like when you go to someone's house for dinner, it would be unusual

to bring, say, a bottle of wine or a gift. Not a custom at all. When you come, it's always a full service. It's a food. It's always,

like we prepare everything. But now, maybe it's different now because China always want to mimic America. So, but yeah. For better or worse. Guests have no obligation. In fact, the Chinese culture, which she has half of it, is very like if guest, you're everything.

Like we will prepare everything. Like he got the treat when he came to China. And so I think our culture doesn't have that at all. How long have you guys been married? We will prepare everything. He got the treat when he came to China. I think our culture doesn't have that at all. How long have you guys been married? 31 years. Seriously? 31?

No, it's impossible. We've been here for 30 years. Almost 28, 27. That's great. I'm not going to argue. Women are always right. Oh, yes. We remember those dates. At least I didn't underestimate it. Yeah. Okay. Tell people what an entomologist, do you describe yourself as an entomologist? Pretty much. I describe myself as an entomologist or a biologist, or for the general public, I often just say I'm a bugologist. A bug is anything that has creepy crawly legs and jointed legs, and that pretty much gets the concept across. But an entomologist doesn't work because you work on things that

aren't insects, right? Well, I work on arachnids, which are spiders, scorpions, vinegaroons, and various things of that sort, as well as mostly on hymenoptera, which are ants, wasps, and bees, and they're, of course, insects. And what initially drew you to digging into these animals? I'm not really sure. When I was about five years old, I was dared one time to sit on an ant mound, and those ants, of course, didn't sting, but they could sure crawl up your britches and bite. And that got my attention.

And I realized at that point that, well, there's life out there, and it's more complex than I thought it was. And isn't this kind of interesting? You know, I find that, like, if you're a writer, you know, oh, you are a writer because you have a book. But if you're a writer, people, you go a writer because you have a book but if you're a writer people you go to do an interview and they'll be like why did you write this book and it's like there's two answers there is you could you could be glib but very honest you'd be like well i wrote it because i was trying to make money to support myself bad chance of that

right so but i'm saying it's like there's like that answer then it'd be the answer that is expected of you which is um oh i had a story that had to be told you know and both are equally true but when you were growing up to become and wanted to become a scientist was that you couldn't have thought to yourself at a young age that like, there's a way that I'll be able to make a living is by studying bugs. No, I was in fact dissuaded from studying bugs. You can't make a living studying bugs, I was told. So I became a chemist. Chemists make all kinds of cool things and all kinds of not so cool things. But anyway, they get paid well for doing it. So I went to chemistry

and went to bachelor and master's degree and said, all these people are my friends. They're having such a good time. They're outdoors, they're geologists, they're biologists, they're marine biologists, whatever they are, and they're having a lot of fun outside. This was in Vancouver, British Columbia, which is very much like Montana. It's got lots of trees and streams and opportunities. I said, gosh, I got to find a way to make life more interesting. Entomology was the way I applied chemistry to studying insects and bugs. And so that was where the transition came. They weren't jealous of the lab jacket and the protective goggles? And the benzene and the carbon tetrachloride I was breathing every day, no. Okay.

So that became your focus with insects is the chemistry of it, particularly what they do to their enemies. Well, exactly. I thought, you know, here I am. I have all this chemistry training and I have very little entomology training. What can I do with this training that I have in this whole new field? And I thought, well, these things hurt. You ever been stung by a bee or a wasp or anything? We all have. And they hurt. So I said, hmm, what makes them hurt? What's the chemistry? There's chemistry behind everything. And so I started working on this particular ant called the harvester ants,

which hurt a whole lot more than a bee or a wasp. And I said, these little dinky things, a third of an inch long, you know, how in the heck do they hurt so doggone much and hurt for four to eight hours? What's the chemistry behind this? So I said, ah, mystery. Let's go and work on this. When I found out about you, it was after I got stung by a bullet ant. Oh, lucky you. In Bolivia. And I later, in researching it, I came across you and I came across the Schmidt Pain Index. Like, you have a whole lifetime of work you've done.

It probably drives you crazy that people reduce it index, like you got a whole lifetime of work you've done. It probably drives you crazy that people reduce it down to like I'm doing right now that they reduce it down to you. You came up with this like very clever pain index when you've done all this work where that's like what you're known for now to layman. Is that annoying? No, I think figures better be known for something than nothing at all. So I found you that way, but to my credit, I dug deeper. But I found you because you had a description of what it's like to be stung by a bullet ant. And the reason I became interested in the chemistry of it is because of, I think you give it the most severe score.

Exactly, yes. Four plus. Yeah, it's the highest of anything the tarantula hawk is about equally high but it only lasts two or three minutes was a bologna and asked last 12 to 36 hours so given the choice i'll take the two to three minutes over the 12 to 36 hours when i got uh stung by one what i became what enthralled me about it was how severe the pain was exactly but then for me that three hours later i couldn't remember what foot it was you probably didn't want to remember no it just was so unbelievably intense that i was worried

about and i didn't i didn't know about bullet ants it was so intense i was worried about. And I didn't, I didn't know about bullet ants. It was so intense. I was worried about dying because I didn't know what it meant. I didn't know. Is it like getting, is it like getting bit by a snake? Like I knew it was bad to get bit by one, but I didn't know how bad. And so there was a lot of psychological, like a lot of anxiety around the bite, but then the pain was gone. And I just wondered like, how could something hurt so bad and seem like it's doing so much damage to your body, but then it's ephemeral? Well, I think the reason is because we're so big. If you were a mouse, you would have been past tens because they're actually quite toxic and do a lot of damage as well. But you figure a little ant, it's an inch long at max, and it has relatively small size.

Now, if it was, say, four feet long, like a typical snake, and it stung you, well, you probably wouldn't be here today. They can kill a mouse. Oh, yeah. Why did—just to back up on this a little bit, just kind of like the beginning, and I had just read your book, The Sting of the Wild. Let's approach this this way why do you feel that certain index or certain insects or anything spiders why did bugs need to develop a way to sting like what were the the things that led them to to have the necessity to do this there's quite a few different things that would go on. One of the problems when you're a social insect, like an ant, you have a colony of 3,000 fairly big ants, you know, that's a lot of meat

there to eat. And that means big people are going to want to eat you, you know, like raccoons and cootamundas and things of that sort, larger animals. If you're dealing with something that's a million times bigger than you, biting, scratching, kicking just doesn't cut the muster. You have to have some way to get through. And the sting gets through your skin and gets directly to where the nerves are. So that's a way of defending yourself and your nest mates and your young and that kind of thing. But the bullet ant is a little bit different from most of the rest of them.

Why it needs to be so extreme is they live down on the ground of a rainforest, down at the base of a tree. They crawl up the tree, up into the canopy. Up in the canopy, they forage for nectar and sweet honeydew and aphids and those sorts of things, and prey, you know, prey for feeding their young. Well, if you've ever been up in a canopy of a rainforest, there's frogs, there's lizards, there's birds, there's monkeys, everything on earth. And what do they all have in common? They all eat insects.

And if you can't jump away like a grasshopper and you can't fly away like a fly, because you're an ant without any wings, you don't really want to drop off from 50 or 60 feet up, because how are you ever going to find your way back up? So you've got to be so tough that these things learn, ooh, big black ant, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't think I want to go there. And the way that happens is they get stung once and that's it. They'll learn for life to never mess around with you. And so that's

basically a defensive system that allows them to exploit the most dangerous place on earth for a small insect. But what about all the insects that, I mean, what about all the insects that can't do that? Right? Like a butterfly has no defense system like that. Well, butterflies, some of them actually are quite toxic. You eat them in the famous picture of Lincoln Brower or Blue Jay eating a monarch butterfly, and it barfs its guts out after that. And as you all know, if you've eaten a bad meal or something and you barf your guts out, you don't want to eat that same kind

of food for quite a long time. You get this toxic aversion. And so a lot of butterflies do that. A lot of things actually avoid the predators by hiding. You know, caterpillars are often green. They're living on green vegetation. So they're just hard to see and they don't move. And grasshoppers, of course, can jump. And once they're an adult, they can fly. And grasshoppers even have some of the clever approaches.

You'll see a lot of them up here in Montana. They fly and they click. They make a noise which alerts you to where they are. They have bright colored wings. And then when they land, they pull their wings in and they become absolutely like the dirt. They're just kind of grayish or brownish, speckled. And they become invisible.

So you're following the noise and the view and it vanishes and you can't find them. And it's almost a fail-safe defense that they have. So each insect, that's one of the things that's really cool, is each insect has their own strategy of how they make it. You're familiar with whitetail deer, I'm sure. Oh, yeah. How could you not be?

They're tasty. Have you ever heard the idea that the whitetail functions similar to what you're talking about with grasshoppers where when they're running away they put up this this big white tail it's like this like beacon exactly going through the woods and then they stop and drop the tail and then your eye is your eye tunes into that highly visible white tail and that's what you're following when it runs away and then it just drops his tail and it takes away the thing that you had the thing that you had found focus on it becomes invisible and actually you weren't you weren't actually watching the deer you were watching the tail. But we have an even more interesting scenario in Arizona.

We have a zebra-tailed lizard, which is a fairly fast-running lizard. And if you're 20 feet or so away from it, it waves its tail back and forth saying, I'm here. I dare you to try to catch me. And you run and it takes off. Usually, most predators don't bother because they realize it knows that I'm here. It's too fast. I can't catch it. Much like the deer. If the deer is a long way away, it'll have the tail. But if it's really close to you, it's not going to do that. If you're just 10 feet away, it's going to just try to freeze and hope the heck you don't know it's there.

But once it gets some distance away, then tail tail goes up and it runs the lizard does the same sort of thing and it's actually a very good strategy it's a beautiful way to uh enhance your chance that you're not dinner for somebody else was it i've been i've been quoting a story you told in your book um i swear i'm gonna tell you what it is and you remind me if it was your book or a different book. I read a handful of books by researchers such as yourself. Did you talk in The Sting of the Wild about how young scientists are so impactful because they're asking original questions and that you find that older scientists spend their time defending their old ideas.

Exactly. I call that science progresses by one coffin at a time. You got to kill off the old guys so the new guys can have freedom to make new discoveries. What was your idea when you were young? Like, if you had this thing where here you are, you're going through the education system, you're getting a doctorate, you know you have an interest in chemistry, you're developing an interest in insect stings. But you have to sort of turn it into a question. Right? Yeah. There has to be some sort of turn it into a question, right? Like, there has to be like some sort of foundational premise, I'm guessing, if you're going to pursue the line of work that you pursued.

What became your thing that you needed to answer? Basically, I was asking a question, how did sociality and insects evolve? In other words, how did you go from single mom raising all her young alone, like a sand wasp or a digger bee, something like that, where it's just mom and her young, all of a sudden you get to a huge social society like a honeybee colony with 30, 40, 50,000 individuals, or some ant colonies that have up to a million individuals. You have a whole lot of them. I was asking a question, how did you get around the predation pressure of predators? You know, my analogy is if you're in a party and you see a bowl and it has one peanut,

it's across the room, it's not worth the effort to go and get that peanut. I'm hungry. But the bowl is full of peanuts, then you're going to go and grab a handful. Same kind of thing with social insects. So the question is, how does that peanut, for the analogy, defend itself when it becomes many peanuts so it doesn't get eaten? And I came up with a hypothesis that, well, the stinging venom, which relies on two things, the pain, gets your attention, and the toxicity, which does your damage, that that was the reason that they could evolve sociality, whereas you don't see social flies, or you don't see social beetles, because they don't have any way to defend themselves,

other than maybe being nasty, toxic. But the ants, bees, and wasps had this automatic stinger ability. So all they had to do was evolve the behavior to use it right and the chemistry to make it effective. So that was my hypothesis. I wanted to collect evidence to either refute or support that hypothesis. And that's basically what I did. I'm guessing you thought to ask this question. Is it in fact true that the ability to sting and have societies is something that progressed over time and that there weren't things that used to be venomous and social that over time became not venomous and not social? Like, does it always move in that direction? Does it always move toward complexity?

Well, yes and no. Most of the time it does. If there's an advantage of complexity, you have social behavior. You can have some individuals specializing in foraging, some in defending the nest, some in building the nest, some in collecting water, someone building the nest, someone collecting water, someone reproducing, and these sorts of things. A specialist is much better than a generalist. And the other thing is when you're away from home, if you're just a single mom, say a digger bee out there in a

sandbox someplace, you go away to get the flowers for nectar and pollen, somebody can invade your nest and eat your young while you're gone. If you're social, you have a bunch of people still there. Hey, get out of here, intruder, and we'll teach you the lesson by stinging you or attacking you. So there's a lot of advantages to sociality, which means most of the time it doesn't reverse. But there are a few cases, there's some solitary bees that evolve sociality and low levels. But then as they progress further north into shorter seasons, those that were social become back to solitary because there's not enough time to have two generations. If you're social, you have to have mom living with babies. Babies help mom, and they rear the next grandchildren at least.

Yeah. And most of them, they continue on for many generations. But you need at least the overlap of mom and her young to help mom in order to be social. And so in some extreme situations, you can lose that. But it's not because of the normal disadvantages it's because climatic restrictions you know just don't give you the time to do it when it shows the name for this concept in evolution and maybe you can provide it for me but they'd be like that well you see

something fly okay so you see that there's birds that fly and insects that fly um one could be excused for looking at these two things flying through the air a dragon fly and a hummingbird and think that there's a relationship there that somehow flight began, like flight happened, and it spread and became like flight for hummingbirds and flight for dragonflies. But in fact, they independently arrived at this. So are there, like, to be venomous, like a bee or whatever, to be venomous,

are there like a bunch of families of insects that all kind of like independently invented this technology or does it seem like there's like a thing somewhere that did this and it proliferated and dispersed over time when we caught in the case of ants bees and wasps there's a one ancestor that had that had an ovipositor actually an egg laying to that's a tube that you punch into a plant or another insect and use that to inject an egg, kind of like a syringe that injects eggs. Does a botify do that when it puts a baby inside you? No, they actually lay the egg on a vegetation,

or some of them will get on mosquitoes. And then the larvae, which is what they call a planarian, which is kind of this mobile worm-like thing that's very rapidly moving. And when the mosquito lands on you, then it crawls off the mosquito and onto you and the young larva, which is a tenth of a millimeter long, is a really tiny, tiny little thing, burrows into your skin. And then from there, that's what becomes the bot fly. That's how that happens?

Yeah. It's kind of disgusting. We just had to send in a harrowing picture of a squirrel he got. My goodness, is that upsetting. That's like out of the horror film. At Steven Ornella. Instagram. His Instagram post, guys. This little tiny squirrel has got three or four of these enormous,

whoppingly big bot flies in it. And you can say, how does this squirrel survive that? Can you do me a favor? Give me that life cycle of a bot fly again. Well, it's basically they lay eggs. I'm not sure where. I think it's on vegetation. Okay.

And somehow or other it gets onto a mosquito. And the mosquito then flies around. Like he hitches a ride on a mosquito. Yeah, basically a freeloader. And what they do is— He crawls off on you or a squirrel or whatever. Yeah, or whatever it is. And they detect when the mosquito is feeding because you're warm and the squirrel is warm,

whereas the mosquito is landing on a leaf or on a flower sucking nectar, you know, because they drink sugar water too to get their energy to fly. The planarian doesn't crawl off then because you're not warm, you're not their host. They just hang tight until the mosquito finally gets on you or the squirrel or whatever it is. There's a lot of different species of them. Then they crawl off. They're pretty quick about doing that. And then they're so small you don't feel them. They won't be moving any hairs in your body to tickle you or anything.

We'd swat them or rub them or something. They're just very small and quiet. They just burrow in and you don't really notice anything until they're quite a bit bigger. Now, one of the questions of chemistry on these things, which I'm not aware anybody's looked at, is how do they burrow a hole in you without you feeling it? My hunch is that they have an anesthesia, you know, kind of like you go to the dentist and he numbs your skin or your tooth or whatever it is. I suspect they do that, but, you know, something a tenth of a millimeter long, how are you going to study that?

It's a pretty tough problem. Your body doesn't, like your white blood cells, like you don't really attack that. You just end up being host to that little thing. Yeah, they probably also have other defenses against the immune system. You know, most of these things have a whole suite of complex behaviors, some of them for numbing it, some of them in a mosquito's case or a tick's case, they have other chemicals to prevent clotting so you don't stuff up their blood-feeding tube, be there proboscis or whatever.

And then they also have things to prevent the immune system from attacking them and so there's there's a whole smorgasbord of goodies that they inject into you which aren't good for you but it good for them I want I know where you were when I when we got you sidetracked and I'm gonna I'm holding it in my head just so we know, you were beginning to talk about the evolutionary forefather of a stinging insect and how it had to do with the proboscis. Ovipositor. Ovipositor, sorry.

Egg-laying tube, yeah. I'm still not ready to come back to that, though, because you talking about mosquitoes got me. I got a mosquito question. Only female mosquitoes bite. That's right. And most of the males are pretty nice guys. And ants, bees, and wasps and males are nice guys too.

Is that right? It's the girls that you got to worry about. Is it true that a female mosquito can still be successful, can still be a successful egg layer, even if it never bites a mammal and gets blood out of it or a bird and gets blood out of it? Well, it's kind of a yes or no question that it's both. Often they'll lay a small batch of eggs, you know, just a few dozen or something.

That's all they have in their own body reserves from not having, you know, fed on blood versus if they feed on you or me or an elk or a reindeer or, you know, something of that sort, then they fill up with double the amount of energy that they had before and they can produce hundreds of eggs. And then they can get another blood meal, produce another couple of hundred. So if you look at two or three cycles of several hundred eggs versus one cycle of paltry dozen or two, you can see that that's why I say yes and no.

That yes, you technically can do it, but it's not a very successful strategy to do it. It's much better to take your risk. What's my chance of getting swatted and killed, which means I pass no genes along, versus 10 times as many as if I don't feed. And obviously the calculus in the case of mosquito is it's worth the risk of getting the blood meal.

Where are all the guys? Like when you're out and you're getting swarmed by mosquitoes, are you swarmed by males and females, but it's only the females biting you or are the guys elsewhere? The guys are elsewhere. They're looking for the girls and they often hang out where they're going to be feeding because blood doesn't have much energy. It's mostly just protein, which is of course what you need for laying eggs. But your energy comes from floral nectar or something of this sort, sugary sweet things. So often the guys will kind of hang out around that looking where they can sneak up and catch a gal while she's

getting lunch or something like that. Are they born on a one-to-one ratio, or are their boatloads more females than males? No, they're pretty much one-to-one. Huh. So when you've got that huge swarm, there's that many guys sitting under some leaf. Exactly, but they're not bothering. And they'll fly away if you get anywhere near them.

They're not dumb. They don't want to be swatted. But they look the same though, right? Pretty much. They have a furrier proboscis. They're stingery. Their blood feeding tube usually is more furry because they need this for sensory things to detect and find the female. Yeah.

Can I hit you with one more mosquito one? Yeah, exactly. When we were kids, we had the belief, and I feel like I swear it works. Cal, you probably did this. Where you'd catch a mosquito biting you, and the idea was that you would pinch it so that you were trapping his sucker. What's the word for a sucker? Proboscis. You'd pinch him and trap his proboscis. And our belief, where I

grew up, was that they could not stop sucking. Once they got in there, they, and you would blow it up. You would eventually, if you did it right, it would eventually erupt. Cool. I'd never heard that.

Sounds like a great thing to do. I would have done that if I'd known about it. That's your next paper. So that doesn't ring true to you? Well, I don't know. I knew we used to sometimes they'd get in the crease of your knuckle and you straighten your finger and it pinches so they can't get away. And then you could just kind of look at it and torment this thing. But we never actually did it long enough to see whether it exploded. That's a good experiment. You need to repeat that.

Man, I haven't done it in a long time, but, yeah, you'd suffer a lot of stings in order to eventually get one. And I know for a fact you can hold them captive. Yeah, I know. We did that. But our view is, I don't know that I ever saw it. It might have just been like a thing we knew to be true, even though no one ever saw it saw is that it would eventually,

like I said, explode. Well, considering. Maybe your book needs another chapter. Yeah, considering you have

three kids of prime age for this, you'll be able to collect some data very quickly. I'm going to work on this. I'm going to wait for a nice wet June evening

and I'm going to make them go out in the yard. And they can write it up with a nice photograph and publish it in a journal. I've got make them go out in the yard. And they can write it up with a nice photograph and publish it in a journal. I've got a couple of good candidates who would love to have them published in their journal.

I like it. Okay, I wanna go back to where you were trying to talk, what you were trying to talk about. I was asking you about like, where did it begin? Where did the ability to like wallop someone with a nasty sting begin? And you were getting into explaining that here's a bug and it had an ovipositor. Yeah, when it first started out, they went through solitary bees and solitary wasps.

And they use the stinger mainly for paralyzing their prey, say a cicada killer, for example. It's a big wasp. It looks like a yellow jacket on steroids and growth hormones, so it's quite huge. But it doesn't sting it's solitary it's just mom and she goes out and catches a cicada and she stings it and it paralyzes it it doesn't just by piercing it not by poisoning it no no she poisons she poisons it okay and so she pierces it and poisons it and then she has this venom which is very ineffective on us because we don't prey on cicada killers because, again, it's not worth the effort to try to track down this fast-flying insect just to get one snack, a bite. It's not worth the energy to do that. But then some of them adapted different behaviors like ants. Of course, they can't fly,

so they have more limited ability to escape. And we don't really know the ancestor of ants because the closest we have is very primitive ant societies which have maybe say a dozen or so individuals, but they're already social. So we don't know the step between that when you have a single individual that go to the small first step, or so individuals, but they're already social. So we don't know the step between that one. He had a single individual that go to the small first step, but presumably something happened there where he had overlap of generations and mom and a few ones, few individuals helped out.

And the advantage of having a stinger is there's something that's messing with you. You can sting it and chances are it'll go away and then leave you and your mom and your siblings alone. And so then this, as you got bigger colonies, and you've all, you know, say something where you have a couple of hundred ants, then you have to have a better defense because there's more enthusiasm. I'm more willing to eat a hundred something than I am a dozen or fewer. And so I have higher motivation. So in order to blunt the higher motivation, you've got to get a more effective sting. So this is basically the hypothesis of stepwise as you get bigger and

bigger. And it takes it to the extreme, which there's about a dozen wasps in this category, honey bees are also in it, and one ant species, a harvester ant. What they do is go to the extent of actually giving up their life, sacrificing, committing suicide by stinging you, ripping the stinger out. Everybody that's been stung by a honey bee knows they leave the stinger in you. You say, why would they do that? Well, it's because at this point, the individual honey bee doesn't reproduce.

She doesn't lay eggs or anything. She's protecting mom. So she's basically like a cell of mom that she's a part of the system to reproduce. And he's got to keep, now I'm getting into the he like you, sorry. The worker honey bee, the female honeybee, has to defend its mom. And by leaving a stinger in you, that prevents you from,

if you get stung and you give it a karate chop, you get it off before it does much damage to you, gets much venom in you. It takes about 30 seconds to a minute to get a full load of venom in. If you lose your stinger, then you karate chop and you knock off the bee and say, ah, solution, bee gone. Ah, kill you, rascal. Wrong, because the stinger's in you

and it pumps that other 90% of the venom into you. And that's beneficial as an even stronger defense than just the venom and stinging itself. Because now you get 10 times more in, and it's often very hard to find a penetrable part of the animal. You know, you have a lizard or something like that. It's hard to find between the scales to sting. Yeah. Well, most mammals, we have all this fur and hair and everything.

You know, we're unusual people. We're pretty easy to sting. We don't have much hair. But it's often very hard to manage to get, you know, a place where you can sting it. So it's important once you get it to maximize the damage that you did. So it just keeps accentuating as there's more and more risk. All these ones that lose stingers are huge colonies. They're big, like the honey wasp and the honey bee.

And there's a bunch of polybia wasps, which are paper-making nests down in Latin America and in the tropics, that also have huge colonies of sometimes 60,000, 80,000 individuals. You think about it, you lose one individual. Yeah. So what? Who cares? But if you have a colony of 10, like some of the small ants, you lose one, that's a big price to pay. So they never lose their sting.

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Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. This is an impossible question for anyone to answer, but the ones that self-eviscerate, they sting you and they die. It's impossible to know what their self-awareness is. Right. But like most creatures are gonna, I shouldn't say most, a lot of creatures exhibit a desire to not get killed.

Self-preservation. Yeah. They do things because they don't want to get killed. I would love to know, like, to what degree it has any sort of self-awareness about the finality of the decision to bite? I think they're quite well aware of that. I just have a paper submitted just six months ago. And basically that question, I asked the question of honeybee colonies, will you make a decision? Is it worth dying for my colony or is it not? And the two questions I gave them is one case where they have only a nest. They have no young.

They have no food, no pollen, no nectar, no honey or anything of that sort. Just building a house like just in the initial stages. Three days old colony. And so you came from a swarm and you had a bunch of honey in your tummy. And you've been there three days. And if worse comes to worse, you just off you go. Find a new nest. So you have very little to lose.

And the other case that I had was 19 to 22 days. Whereas that's midway through your life cycle. The oldest bees are starting to die off. They live about 40 days in general. You have a whole bunch of young there which are just about to emerge and start taking over. You have a lot of honey, you have a lot of pollen, you have a lot of wax, you have a lot of investment.

In that case, if you're a worker bee, will you decide, oh, I have a lot more to risk my mama, who's everything to me because I can't reproduce, all I can do is allow her to reproduce. So should I sacrifice my life for my mama much more readily when I'm in a colony that's older and has much more to lose than younger? And the answer is yes, two and a half times more likely to sting when they're older at the bigger risk. So they have some kind of awareness that they have a value. Wow.

That's fascinating. They exhibit that by their behavior. Does that ever begin to reverse? Oh, yeah. Like, will they then... Like if it's an old colony and they're like, we're going to get set to take off for a new one. And then he goes like, now I'm losing my desire to die because it's not as important anymore. Or is it only a thing that just increases, increases, increases, and then they die?

No, it goes both ways. I had a couple of examples. I had 20 total colonies, eight of the three days and nine of the 19 to 22 day. But I had three that were what we call queenless. In other words, the queen died for whatever reason. Either something happened to her at an old age. We often don't know. Maybe she got pinched or something happened.

And these colonies have no reproductive potential at all because, again, the workers can't lay eggs. And so they have nothing to lose, nothing to defend, except themselves, and they're just going to live out their last of their 40 days of old age. And you go and mess with those colonies, they won't do anything at all. No way. Yeah, they're back.

Like, they're aware of what's going on with the queen. Oh, yeah. They know they have no queen. And so they'll go, they were about 2% would come out and defend, whereas I'd have 60 or 70% come out with some of the ones that had the most to defend. So they knew, why should I go and sacrifice myself for my useless sisters? When I could just hang out for 40 days. Yeah, just hang out and enjoy life as best you can. I mean, what else is there to do?

You know, everything's pretty. That is so wild, man. Yes, it is. Wow. See, that's where you wind up in this. You wind up in these like difficult things where you're like, is it that they know it or is it just somehow that it's. Well, they certainly behave as if they know it. Yeah. But there's an

even more interesting... Honeybees are fascinating, which is one of the reasons I worked on them a lot and everybody else does. You got the males, on the other hand. The males, when they mate, they explode. Their genitalia explode into the queen, and they fall off paralyzed and die

and get hauled away and eaten by the ants. Oh, back up. Who does this? The male honeybees, the drones as they call them. And so you ask the drone, well. You got a colony. It's got the drones. How many of the drones are going to have the opportunity to go out like this?

Well, there'll probably be 2, two or 3,000 of these drones per summer in a colony. And they probably get to mate with one or two queens at most. Each one does. Well, the whole colony worth. And so if you figure a queen mates about 18 to 26 times, so let's say 50 males get a chance out of 2,000 or 3,000 to mate. And so the males know this is a very rare opportunity. Most of us are just horny and never get a chance to find a mate. And so if you get the chance to find a mate, what are you thinking? I'm succeeding, but I'm exploding and I'm rupturing my whole system and being paralyzed and falling to the ground.

And, of course, the queen then turns around and kicks the rest of your genitalia. It's like having your penis stuck inside, ripped off. And then she goes and rips it out and throws it away. Yeah. And so that's what the male has faced. It wasn't anything meaningful. No. Exactly.

Put it someplace. And so his genitalia come off. Yeah. You can actually hear it. It's a pop if you're down on the ground near it. They explode. And then she discards it. Exactly.

And someone hauls this paralyzed, dying thing off. It falls down to the ground. And then the ants say, oh, yum, nice, fat, juicy bee. Let's have dinner. And so they haul it off to the ground and then the ants say, oh, yum, nice, fat, juicy bee. Let's have dinner. And so they haul it off to their nest and eat it. Wow. So what is the male thinking?

Have you tested? I have no idea. Yeah, but have you been, just like you looked at their eagerness to, that you looked at a species eagerness to die for the cause. Is there any study you can think of that would measure the male's awareness? Like, are there males that get the opportunity and then bail? I don't know. Unfortunately, they're about 20 feet up going 14 miles an hour and flying, chasing this queen who's buzzing around.

Oh, they're, you guys don't say having sex, I don't imagine. They're mating up in the air? Yeah, see, she's pretty clever. She figures, I don't want to get a reject male because that makes reject kids. So you want to get the strongest, fittest male.

So you're flying fast and the male's got to be able to catch up with you and beat out all the other males that are there, all the other drones. So she's intentionally making it hard for him to do it. So I guess he's more

thinking about the immediate, I've got to catch her rather than thinking about, oh, I'm not going to make her be alive much longer. I'm not sure what the bees think, but if you analogize that would be probably how his behavior would be, that he's more worried about catching the queen and worrying later about you know we're somewhat the same way with with people i guess i shouldn't go that way but there seems to be a lot of interest in the mating part oops i got a kid now what you know we don't really think about the kid in too many cases you know once we're married and that sort of thing then

we do think about that but before you're married and you're young you know you don't really go to that depth of thought you're you're focused on the immediate yeah in the back of your mind you're aware this is a thing that could happen exactly exactly but that's about as far as you take it uh how did you, in doing your work, why did it become necessary, and did it become necessary that you would start exposing yourself to getting stung by everything? Basically, it was late in the scheme where I had to, earlier I wanted to expose just

because I was trying to collect enough information from, it's kind of a statistical thing, you can't use one example, that's an anecdote, or five or ten to get the information I needed. I needed dozens and dozens. So each time I've had a new species, I would go after that to kind of collect the chemical and pain information about them. And so eventually I got to, I was 50 or 60 different types of stinging insects that did that. And I'd go to meetings and give presentations and I'd show a picture of a mud dauber wasp, dirt dauber wasp, which you have pretty much around the world. It's a long, skinny thing, about an inch long.

It's got a really narrow, thread-like waist. They're deathly afraid of them in some parts of Texas. Oh, my God, these things are awful. Have you ever been stung by one? And I said, well, no. Why not? And they said, well, because they're solitary. They just sting spiders and paralyze them for their prey.

They have very few predators that are big, you know, like birds or anything, doesn't want to mess with them. They don't really need a stinger for defense. So they probably don't hurt much, and it's very hard to get them to sting you. So they probably don't hurt. And they'd say, yeah, Schmidt, yeah, you're just afraid of these things. So about the third or fourth time. You got taunted. Yeah, third or fourth time I got those sorts of questions. I said, oh, damn it. I guess I have to bite the bullet and go test my theory, which said it'd be about a one on this very, very low pain. So I went out to a cattle tank

where they water the cattle in the desert of Arizona. There's no water for miles away. Mud dauber wasps need mud. That's what they make their nest out of. So I knew they'd be coming in there. And it's again, only the females that do the work. The males just chase the females. So they're kind of useless, basically. So the females were all coming in. They could all sting and they were collecting mud balls. So I grabbed three of them, and I'd apply them to my arm. I'd stick them, come on, ladies, sting me, please sting me, sting, sting, come on, you can do it, you can do it, you can do it. And I finally got a couple of stings to sting me, and they were what I'd call underwhelming, just as I predicted. So like all the Texans are all worked up about it, but then you get stung and you weren't

impressed. Yeah, it was basically, they're scary looking. I admit that they are scary looking. You look at them. And so there was a number of things like that. The cicada killer was another one. This was a little bit of serendipity, foolishness, and opportunity. I'd never been stung by one, and there was only one recorded literature history

of a guy who got stung underneath his thumbnail at the end, and that's one of the more sensitive parts of your body underneath there. He complained that it hurt a lot, but then he said it really wasn't that bad a thing compared to, you know, something like a honeybee or something like that. It was just this kind of passing thing in 1940, you really old paper and i'm not even sure why he put that in today they wouldn't even allow you to put this chafe in the side in there but it was nice we got a little bit of natural history so then i thought well this is probably it's big it's you know about two inches long so how much is this thing gonna hurt again i was asked about that and i thought well i've worked on for years and years and they don't sting you so i i went out one day i didn't

have a netter or anything and i saw one on a flower so i grabbed and it stung the palm of my hand which incidentally has more pain than most other areas because we have all the sensory nerves there. Palms are very sensitive to touch and that sort of thing. So we need a very good nervous system in that part of our anatomy. And it hurt about a one and a half, as I called it, less than a honeybee, more than a sweatbee, more than a dirt dauber wasp, but not as much as a honeybee. And this is a great big thing.

And again, that was a prediction. It's just mom doing everything on her own. If you had a colony of things like that, analogy being the giant hornets of Asia or Japan, we have hundreds of them in a nest, and they're the same size. Those do herd. When you say you gave it a one and a half, explain the scale you eventually

came up with. Yeah, the scale, it's very hard. You can't put an electrode in the skin or in a nerve or anything and get like a galvanometer we do in high school physics class where the needle swings over and you can record how far it swings and say, oh, that implies this strength. You can't do anything like that with pain, so it's just relative. So I made a pain scale of four, one, two, three, and four. And I said, well, we need to have a comparative because the pain you experience might be different from the pain I experience. Say maybe you're ten times tougher than I am. So if you get stung by a honeybee and you call that a two by definition,

I get stung by a honeybee and I call that a two for me. So even though it may hurt me 10 times more than you, I'm normalizing it to myself. So next time I get stung by, say, a sweat bee, which is a one, I can say it's a whole lot less than the two. Yeah. And one of the ways you can tell the difference is you hold up the two and ask somebody, which one would you prefer to get stung by if you had to, if there's a gun to your head?

Oh, I'll take that one for sure. Absolutely that one. Well, that would indicate a strong recognition that that one hurts a lot less. And kind of on the semi-quantitative arena, what I do is I say it's like an exponential scale of a two is 10 times more painful than a one, and a three is 10 times more than a... Yeah, the Richter scale for earthquakes. Exactly.

A seven is 10 times worse than a six. Exactly, same sort of idea. And you say how you can match that is, okay, take a fire ant, which is something that readily stings numerous times. You get one fire ant. It kind of smarts. It's kind of a one. You get 10 fire ants. They kind of, ladies on cue, all sting.

And all 10 of them sting you. It seems that's the way they are. They aren't really that way, but that's the way it seems to the poor victim when he gets stung. Ten fire ant stings hurt about as much as one honeybee sting. Okay. You get ten honeybee stings, they hurt about as much

as one harvester ant, which is a three. And you get ten harvester ants and that's maybe as much as one bullet ant or a tarantula hawk, which is a four. So you can see it's not a linear scale like one is half of two, which is half of three. It's more of a tenfold difference. When you started subjecting yourself to getting stung by everything, did you get to where there were some things that you were reluctant to want to go get stung by? Well, early on in my career, before I actually had the concept of the sting pain scale, I was still just working on the chemistry in 1980.

I didn't really get the pain scale formulated in my mind until 1983, so it was three years later. I was in Japan, and they had these huge mandarin hornets. Everybody's seen them on YouTubes and such. They're about two inches long, big boxy, blocky things with a bright orange head and orange stripes on their abdomen. These things are enormous. And I was studying them for the venom. They have a lot of venom.

And I didn't want to get stung. I mean, who wants to get stung by some sausage on wings that's two inches long? Boy, I mean, this thing's kind of scary. So I managed to collect two colonies with the help of Japanese who were very protective of me. They didn't want, you know, their colleague from the U.S. at the beginning stung up and say, these Japanese maltreated me or anything like that. So they were very covetous and made sure I didn't get stung, and I was all suited up. Had all the students.

Students are expendable, so they'd have them behind me with insect nets. They were catching anybody that got behind me, could attack me from the back. So the long story short was I managed to get all the members of both colonies and never get stung. So in retrospect, I kind of say, gosh, I wish I had been stung because everybody asks about how much does the Mandarin Hornet has. I say, well, I don't really know. I've never been stung by one.

We don't have them in the U.S. or North America. So to this day, you haven't been stung by it? That's right. And so I say, well, if somebody wants to fund me for a junket to Japan or China for $4,000 to go and get stung, fund me there. And I can do that and continue my research on a free trip. And all I have to do is get stung once. once but my prediction is you know predicting based on the biology and natural history of these things it'd be like a yellow jacket which is a two except a whole lot bigger than a yellow deck it's 10 times or so bigger so my prediction is it'd be about a three you know 10 yellow 10 little

yellow jackets equal to one humongous yellow jacket likelike relative. Yeah. So that's what I would predict. Have you traveled to other places to get stung? Oh, yeah. Just like specifically went there to get stung? Well, no, not to get stung, to collect the venom of whoever was there. I went to Malaysia. We had a nice study there, which was kind of an interesting thing. I found these ants that live in trees,

and they turned out to be very mild in disposition, and they didn't hurt very much. I brought them back to the lab and looked at their chemistry. My God, they're incredibly toxic. They're one of the most toxic insects I've ever run into. So there the question I ask is, why, if you're so toxic, do you not hurt? I mean i mean normally if you're a big strong dangerous thing you want to address hey i'm big strong dangerous don't mess with me yeah and you you'd want it to be painful and hurt and they don't do this so that's one of the you know the more you do research you have many questions you can't answer and that's one of the ones that I got there. But I went to South Africa specifically to study. They have a whole, what I call a big five of ants.

Of course, you know the big five. The big five. Oh, yeah, like cave buffalo, leopard. Exactly, yeah. Hippos and elephants and rhinos. Rhinos, that's the last one, yeah. So they have these big five. They're good whopping-sized ants.

And they were talked about in some of the old literature, the naturalists being really, really fierce and scary and all this. So I thought, well, that should be a good source of venom chemistry and good things to study. And so I found all of those. It turned out most of them really didn't hurt that much I think it's just the problem that you relate how much

painfulness is relative to your experience and if your experience is mostly mild things then the least mild of them is really hurts yeah for sure whereas the least mild is about a third or a half as much as anything and the new world actually has the most painful

stinging things by far. Oh, really? We're lucky, yeah. Especially if you go to Amazonas or someplace fun like that. And so South Africans, relative to their experience, these things really hurt. But compared to what I'd run into here in North America and South America, they were pretty mild. And so all five of them were.

So North America has worse stinging stuff than Africa. Oh, yeah. As far as insects go. Africa is kind of a little dull, actually, in some regards. When it comes to stinging. Yeah. They have these, what do they call them, firetail wasps. The long, skinny, kind of tannish wasps that they have. There may be a two of the

most social one. So that's about as high as they get. Then they have the metabeli ant, which is this army ant-like thing that goes out and raids termites. And they're around a two, maybe a little bit less. And then they have the giant stink ant which is an enormous ant it's about as big as a bullet ant and that's at most the two they're pretty minor too just chicken shit ants yeah exactly and most of them well they will sting if you mess with them but you have to kind of mess with them and and they really weren't all that painful. The most painful I ran into was what I call the glossy ants. They're kind of a purpley sheen to them. They weren't listed anywhere on the list,

but those things really kind of smarted. And so I, you know, just go to places. I went to Australia to study their jackjumpers and their bulldog ants and got stung by all of those. Of course, it's hard not to if you mess with them. Were they pretty nasty? No, they were kind of a sharp, clean pain, kind of like a needle stick or a small knife stick,

but they weren't burning. Burning is like a match or an ember from a fire. It pops, explodes your fire fire blows an ember on you you have this hot fiery feeling this is more of a clean piercing you know almost chemical feeling that i had what were the circumstances when you uh went and got stung by a bullet ant well basically it was again desperation that's when most of my stings occurred. I was in Amazonas and near Beiling. What is the word you use in Amazonas?

The Amazon? Yeah, Amazon. It's just a territory around where the Amazon basin is. Okay, I never heard that term. Maybe it's Latin or Spanish or Portuguese. I don't know. I just kind of use that, but the Amazon area. And it was getting near nightfall. It was about five o'clock and I was on half a degree south latitude. So if you ever been in the tropics, when the sun goes down, it goes down. 10 minutes,

it goes from light to black. You can't see anything. There's no angle to it. Yeah. No, nothing. Like if you're in northern Montana or Alaska or northern Canada, you have twilight sometimes for hours. Not so there. So here was I. Had an hour to go. And I finally found this bullet ant colony. And I had an assistant, Hemero.

Hemero was the toughest guy I'd ever run into. Hemero would stick his hand in the fire ant colonies and grab mounds of them and stuff them in a bag for us. Because, you know, we were collecting venom. I was with my professor and we were collecting venoms and ants of anything that was stinging. We didn't care what it was pretty much. And I had this little kind of trowel that I'd carry along, a little plastic thing that's light and easy to transport overseas. I'm digging up this colony and trying to get these bullet ants to come out. I'd run into a root or something like that where I couldn't dig through it.

I'd say, Homero, where's Homero? Where is Homero? He's back there 20 feet behind me. I'd say, Homero, get up here and get this root out of here. He'd run up and give a whack or two and then retreat. I thought, what is wrong? Homero is a man of steel.

Anyway, so then a little bit of my naivety, I had this glass jar about a quart jar where I put talcum powder around the top so the ants couldn't crawl out. They'd slip and fall back down. That's a good trick. Yeah, it works pretty much until they wear off all the talcum

powder, then they get out. Man, that's a hot tip right there. Yeah, but then I had these long tweezers. They were a foot long. I was grabbing them and trying to get them in. I found out, first of all, that bullet ants are very fast and they're very sticky-legged. They could stick to chrome tweezers and crawl up. So the next thing you know, you got four or five of them attacking you all at once and you're trying to say, how am I going to fend off all the... They have a colony of 3,000, so there's a lot of ants there. And when you get them kind of riled up, they take umbrage at this and come after you. And so I'm trying to get these things in, and it's getting dark, and we're having to leave soon.

And I thought, I may never see these things again. I don't know. This is the first time I've seen them. So I got to get them. So I speeded up. Well, sure enough, the faster you go and the more careless you get, the sloppier you get. And yes, you will get nailed.

And that's what happened. Have you been zapped by a tarantula wasp? Oh, yeah. Is that a whopper? Definitely. Absolutely. Can you explain their life history a little bit? Yeah.

Tarantula hawks are a big spider wasp. And what they do is they catch a tarantula hawks are, they're a big spider wasp. And what they do is they catch a tarantula, they hunt one down, and they sting it and paralyze it into permanent paralysis. The thing will never die until it dries out. It will eventually die of either dehydration or starvation, but it doesn't kill it through the venom. So it keeps it fresh meat. It's kind of like having your venison in a cooler. You can keep it over winter, and as long as you keep it in a cooler, you can feed your family for months on end.

So it's the same principle that they have there. You have a paralyzed tarantula, and they have one egg on it, just one, and that egg hatches into a larva, which then— But doesn't he got to stash that tarantula somewhere? Oh, yeah. I forgot that part. Yes, I guess. Yeah, my buddy Mo said he was camping one time and said he saw one fly past.

I don't want to ruin his story. I feel like this is what he told me. He saw one fly past. Then in a while later, here comes that son of a bitch dragging a... Tarantula, yeah. Tarantula back the way he'd come from. Well, it could be. It might have been the same one or a different one.

But what happens is they paralyze him, and then they either put them in a burrow that the tarantula hawk wasp makes, digs a burrow down and puts them in the bottom of the cell, or if it's near where the tarantula has a burrow, they have it naturally dig a hole in the ground. His own hole. Yeah, and then just put it in its own hole,

which is a lot less work. I mean, I would do that if I were the wasp, being lazy. But they do those two different types. And it's got one egg on it. Yeah, one egg. So what happens is the egg then hatches and it starts eating the blood. They have an open system, not like us with veins. They just have an open cavity.

You can just keep sucking the blood. And then when you get a little bigger, you start eating the fat. And when you get a little bigger, you start eating the reproductive system and the gut. And it's alive through all this. Yeah. And of course, none of these things are life support systems for the tarantula, so it's still alive. And when you get to the molt, or the fourth molt into the fifth instar, each different larva doubles or triples the size of the previous one. So you can see the last one is many times bigger than all the four younger ones together.

When the last one gets it, it goes on this ravenous gluttony and just eats everything, the nerves, the brain. Finally kills it. Yeah It just eats everything, the nerves, the brain, you know. Finally kills it. Yeah, finally eats everything. Disney ought to make a live-action movie about this. I heard how they're going to remake Bambi. I feel like they should do a live-action movie about this.

Exactly. And kind of the larva. You want some nature, kids? Here's an educational show for you. Yeah, you can imagine, you know, this larva then at that point gives one big erp. But really, rather than that, it takes one big dump and then becomes a pupa and spins a cell and then molts into the adult. Goes out and kills one or goes out and catches one. But it's even more interesting than that.

Their life history is quite fascinating. The tarantulas come in various sizes, you know, just like people, you have some that are big and some that are little. Males are scrawny and runty. They spend all their time chasing females, so there's not much meat on them. Whereas the females are big and fat and juicy because they have to lay a bunch of eggs and all that.

So the tarantula hawk, not being particularly fussy, if you find a tarantula, you want to capitalize on whatever tarantula you want to capitalize on whatever tarantula you find so if it's a little scrawny thing you say oh well you are what you eat so if you're a little scrawny thing you're getting a little scrawny tarantula hawk was a little scrawny female tarantula hawk is worthless she can't overcome a big fat juicy tarantula she's not big enough strong enough but a male all a male does is transmit sperm to the female. He doesn't have to be big or little or anything else.

So then she'll pick a male for her offspring if it's a little one. Really? She can do this, which fortunately we can't. And how they do that is a male is haploid. It's like half the chromosomes. Yeah. Whereas the female is a double chromosome, has twice as many. So she fertilizes the egg if she wants a female.

She has a sphincter, which lets two or three sperm out as the egg is passing down the oviduct. Hold on. She's able to put her own sperm on her own egg? Well, the sperm that she got from a male before she— She's toting it around. Yeah. She has a storage spermataform where she— Really?

So she mates and holds that sperm and then releases that sperm out onto the egg? When she wants to, yeah. Wow. That is a lot of choice around her body. Dude, that is really great. Yeah. So what she does is if it's a little scrawny one, then she makes a male because because they're worthless they can mate with just as well as the big one more or less and she saves the females for the big juicy ones oh man it's a good thing we don't have that ability yet

i mean we'd end up like china for a while was having a shortage of women because they were well disposing i guess, I guess put it nicely, of too many female babies and they were getting like 10 or 20% more boys than girls. And they found out then there weren't enough wives for them. So the problem there is you have all these males running around without mates. They get pretty disruptive and start messing up society. So it's a bad idea to have an imbalance of sexes, at least in our society. Man, I would love to...

If you could just know the decision-making process. So it could be with tarantula hocks. That may be one. Nobody's actually done the numbers. It might not be a one-to-one ratio. It might be there's a lot more scrawny tarantulas, which would bias you towards too many males. Yeah.

Or it could be maybe there's a lot of big fat juicy ones. But you get a lot, I mean, it's a long lifespan out of a tarantula. And so I, it kind of makes me very interested to know after a couple of seasons of dealing with tarantula hawks, if your older tarantulas have developed a little more defense towards those.

That's the funny thing about the tarantula, which doesn't make sense to the human mind. We cannot grasp, or at least I cannot grasp this concept. Here you have this huge spider, often eight times heavier than the tarantula hawk was. You're a big whopper. You have these huge, massive fangs, which are really strong. Have you ever seen a tarantula catch, say, a nice, juicy American cockroach?

You hear this crunch, snap, and it just shatters the cockroach. And then, of course, it becomes dinner. And you say, with this equipment, why doesn't it fight back? Why doesn't it try to actually kill the tarantula hawk wasp? It doesn't? In 1% or 2% of the cases, they will try to fight back. In almost all of those, they lose anyway. But you'd think if you have a 1% or 2% chance of winning, that's better than a 0% chance.

What they do is they try to run away and they try to hide. So they'll run out of their burrow, the tarantula hawk wasp will go down in the burrow where the tarantula is, chase the tarantula out because it's hard to maneuver in a tight burrow like that where you can get your stinger underneath and paralyze it. So somehow or other the tarantula is A, dumb enough not to stay there or it would be difficult for the wasp to get it. It goes roaring out and it tries to hide someplace and the wasp of course comes out and finds it because, well tarantulas have a smell that you can detect if you're a wasp.

We don't smell them but we're not making a diet of tarantulas, so we don't have that ability. And so the tarantula is really very passive, and it's always one of these things that, you know, to my sense of logic, I would, you know, fight to the end, you know, hope the heck that I'm that lucky one that gets a bite. I think we all like to think that that's what we would do. Yeah, you know, you might be able to get right behind the neck. And eat this thing.

Yeah, exactly. I haven't done the tests. I probably should have because it didn't really relate to what I was doing of seeing if the tarantula can tell the difference between a male and a female tarantula hawk because, of course, the male can't sting. It represents no risk, but it does represent a dinner if you can get through and punch him, which you probably could. I haven't done that. Just too many things to do in life. That's a good project for one of the young budding junior high listeners who wants to do a science

project. That's exactly what came to mind was junior high. How much of your career is just dropping two bugs in a container? You're like, okay, which one's going to win? Well, exactly. And that could be something you could test a few of the tarantulas with males first because if you test them with a female, you may not get to repeat it with a male.

Yeah. And then do your X number 10 of each or something and see if the tarantula behaves differently. I don't know. I had to add a question for you on bald-faced hornets. Seems to be something I run into. And I could be totally misidentifying these. They're pretty hard to misidentify.

They're big and black and white. Yeah, and run into them on trails all the time, oftentimes on horseback. And then they come out and. Horses don't like them. No, they do not. No, they do not. But we had this big mule and she, we tied her up at the end of a very long ride and she kicked a nest. Oh.

And it took me a while to figure out what was going on. The mule was freaking out and I ran over there. Of course, there's hornets everywhere. And I untied her and ran her over to a different tree

to get her away from the nest. And then I was watching and trying to remove hornets and it appeared to me that some were burrowing through

the hair and biting and others were stinging. Biting with their mouth, their mandibles. They have pretty sharp mandibles. They can shred most any insects, just cut them up kind of like meat cleavers. They're really pretty good at that. I haven't actually heard that or seen that,

but I would guess if I had to speculate just on what was going on, that it could be the ones that were biting had already spent most of their venom stinging them. So it's kind of like if you're a soldier and you have your rifle and you have a bayonet on the end, you're going to try to shoot the enemy first until you run out of bullets. Then you're going to try to stab them with a bayonet. Yeah, I've seen the movie The Alamo. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly how it goes. Exactly, yeah. So you can imagine it's the same sort of thing as, again, the bald-faced hornet.

She has no reproductive ability herself, the individual worker. She's defending mom, the queen. And so biting helps. Honeybees will do that too once they have stung and lost their stinger in you. We know they've lost it at that point. They'll come and they'll bite on your eyelids or your eyelashes and try to pull on them. And they'll try to crawl in your ears and bite your ears or try to crawl up your nose. Man, it starts playing dirty.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so I had wondered if i was witnessing observing two different classes like some were stinging and some were eating oh different classes right different strategies well we have another project for a junior high kid you know when you're talking about the way the tarantula hawk you know paralyzes the tarantula and keeps it around for a long time how many days go by like how many days that thing alive the tarantula and keeps it around for a long time. How many days go by? Like how many days is that thing alive, the tarantula is alive for? Well, there have been a couple of cases where people have had them in the lab where either the egg died or the experimenter removed the egg,

and that lived two or three months. In one case, a fellow was artificially trying to rehydrate the tarantula. Really? case a fellow was artificially trying to rehydrate the tarantula really i'm not quite sure how he did that whether he was just injecting water into its mouth or whether it was into its body i don't i don't remember the just try to keep it alive yeah just try to keep it from drying out see how long it would last i think you got like five or six months something like that oh hopefully with the intention of uh seeing if it would come back well yeah that's the whole intention of seeing if it would come back well yeah that's the whole idea as long as it would wear off

if that tranche made it back out to where he's from and people were like where you been dude what a story to tell I'm guilty of doing that to a certain extent myself I was studying the green anoles you know the little what they call chameleons they're actually an anole they live in the southeast I was studying the green anoles, you know, the little what they call chameleons.

They're actually an anole. They live in the southeast. I was stinging them to see if they're more resistant than, say, mice are because they're a lizard, which is a different physiology and metabolism than, say, a mammal. And I got a couple of individuals that were completely paralyzed,

but I could tell they were alive. They still had the gloss on their eyes and they could move their tongue a little bit. And I said, well, is this harvester ant venom going to wear off eventually, or how irreversible is it? And so it went on for weeks, and I would open its mouth and put water in the mouth to keep the lizard hydrated. In this case, it succeeded. It could manage to drink it. Slowly, after two or three weeks, it started getting a little flick, flick on its legs. Then eventually, about a week later, it got so it could completely recover and live happily ever after.

That's great. That's a heartwarming story, man. It is possible, except the tarantula doesn't have that good luck. Unreal. Better to be a lizard than a tarantula, I guess. Does the tarantula have a pain index for itself? Does the tarantula, do we know? Yeah, when that thing's coming, is he like, oh, this is going to be a three.

And then while it's dying, being eaten, can it feel anything? Yeah, I don't know. It's hard to tell. It's sort of like if we're under anesthesia or in a coma and we're slowly rotting away, are we feeling pain? And my knee-jerk reaction would be, since I'm not conscious, I'm not feeling pain. But, of course, how do you know whether the tarantula is conscious or not? Oh, yeah. I have no idea.

No, this opens up so many, like this discussion opens up so many ethical questions. Yeah, we need to get electrodes into the primary ganglia on the brain of a tarantula and have a normal one where we can see whatever the wave patterns like what we have in our brains so we know what a normal tarantula is like. And then do the same thing when it's being paralyzed and pinch its leg or something like that and see if we get a spike in some kind of signal in the electrodes in the brain.

Have you watched the film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly? I think that's one I missed. I'm not sure it sounds like a good movie to see, though. Oh, it's phenomenal. It's about a man who's unresponsive. It's about like the inner life of an unresponsive man. Yeah. It's the same guy that made Before Night Falls.

What's his name? He used to be like Julian Schnabel, I think, wasn't it? That's it. Good job down there, Phil. Phil's on it. You just knew that off the top of your head. Have you read a book, in the heart of the sea no i guess i'm pretty pathetic in that no no these are completely different realms but reason i'm bringing it up is the tarantula suffering away there or not

um in the heart of the sea it's it's a book about the whale ship essex the tragedy of the whale ship essex but when they would go out whaling they would stop at the galapagos stack on turtles yeah well they would stock up they just flip them over down in the hold of the ship on their backs yeah keep alive for months man pretty barbaric yeah well or or they're like a tarantula hawk exactly or we're no different than tarantula hawks. Of course, we pretty much assumed the tortoise was conscious at that point because it wasn't paralyzed. It wasn't paralyzed, yeah. Just on its back.

No, keep them in the hold for months like that. But then, you know, they got their comeuppance in that because that ship was sunk by a whale. Oh, good for the whale. And, you know all kinds of cannibalism ensued there's a there's a great line my favorite line in that book is there's later someone's you know me someone meets a guy who was on the Essex and he asked him um you know I came out the guy the guy's name, but he says, oh, did you know Dale Johnson? And the man replies, no, I had him.

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What's the most, like a yellow jacket? I used to have a mild yellow jacket allergy when I was a little kid. Why does it hurt so damn bad? Like, what is it doing to you? Basically, what it is is kinins, wasp kinins they call them, or hornet kinins, and a kinin is kind of like bradykinin, which is a hormone that affects the heart and it makes extreme pain and also causes

stronger contractions and various things that it does to the heart. But the thing I focus on is that it causes extreme pain. So the wasps have just hijacked the chemistry. I don't think they, I think they independently evolved it basically. Just kinins make pain. And so they have a lot of kinins in their venom

and that's what causes the pain. What is a kinin? It's just a- A hormone? No, it's just a polypeptide. In other words, about 11 to 19 amino acids. Whereas bradykinin, the original one, I forget, it's something around 10. I may be off one or two.

So the bradykinin is a hormone in us and in mammals. But the waskinins are just a similar structure. Again, a little bit longer protein, which probably makes it more stable. So it hurts longer and lasts longer. Okay. And that's what causes the pain. But there's things they could deliver it to that it might not hurt.

Probably, yeah. Like if they stung an insect or something like that, because it probably wouldn't hurt. We don't know. You know, that's one of the things, there's so many questions out there and there's so little time to work on all of them. But we know in your case, kinins don't cause allergy. So they have other components in there,

phospholipase, which is a great big enzyme, huge monstrous enzyme, which is again a protein. What it does is it breaks up the lipid membrane around cells. Cells have a kind of a fatty membrane around them, and they're mostly liquid in the inside, and it breaks up that membrane. So phospholipase helps destroy and do damage. And so that's what the main allergen that you would probably have if you're allergic to them. They also have hyaluronidase, which is a spreading agent, kind of like a detergent that helps loosen up connective tissue

and make a path so the goodies of the venom can get into their targets. So it's like a lot of complexity. Yeah, and those are the two main ones that would be in a wasp or a yellow jacket. So what's, like, when you get bit by a fire ant, like, chemically what's happening to you there? You know, the fire ants are really the oddball of all oddballs of the stinging insects. They have papyridine alkaloids, which are very similar to the water hyacinth or whatever it was called that Socrates had to drink to commit suicide. Water hemlock. Water hemlock. That's why I knew I was close. Something was wrong there. And they're relative

to that. And they're neurotoxins. They're cytotoxins. They're hemorrhagins. They do a whole lot of really nasty things to you. But it's a strictly simple alkaloid, which is an organic molecule that has nitrogen in it. And it's not a simple alkaloid, which is an organic molecule that has nitrogen in it. And it's not a protein. It's not an amino acid. It's not a fat. It's an alkaloid, typical of what most bitter things are, alkaloids. And so it's very unusual in that it has these alkaloids, which are very effective against prey. And again, you ask the question, what's going on when you get allergic to them? Because alkaloids are not allergenic. They don't cause allergy. What happens is they have one or two percent, again, of phospholipase, our old friend,

and hyaluronidase, just tiny little bits of this. And that's what you get allergic to. Now, why they're in there, who knows? Probably just a legacy of their phylogenetic history. They came from some ancestor which had these components of their venom. They invented or evolved a new system, which is the alkaloids. I see. So it's probably just the residual leftover, which probably does no functional use anymore for the fire ant. But it does, of course, cause allergy.

So they're an unusual situation. You got into this in your book a little bit, and it's a thing that's kind of puzzling to me. Let's say I'm just finally getting over a burn I had on my hand. I went to grab a thing on a wood stove and it was hot. So burns like holy hell. And it's damaging you. Like the pain is telling you that you are damaging your skin. Exactly.

And you pull it away and the skin blisters and scabs, it gets infected. And it's like, lo and behold, like, wow, good thing I got the pain signal to alert me that I was destroying skin cells. But a lot of the insect stings, it's all bark and no bite. Like it's not actually doing anything to you. That's basically correct, unless you're really tiny. So if you're a mouse, four bee stings will kill you. If you're a human being, it takes about 8 to 10 per pound. So if you weigh 100 pounds, you're a little person,

it takes about 1,000 stings before it would kill you. It eventually would, but who gets 1,000 stings? Not very many people do. Most I've ever had is about 50, and that was kind of an accident where a hive fell apart and I wasn't wearing proper equipment and things you know, things get out of hand. You got stung by 50 honeybees. Yeah, and I got a little bit of swelling on my hand and that was about it.

None the worse for the damage, you know, two or these venoms are designed for a whole suite of predators. Anything from a mouse or a shrew or a mole, you know, something small or a small lizard to something as big as an elephant. And that's what I was missing in this, to be honest with you, is that, you know, you want to relate everything to humans. And I was sitting there going, well, why does a bullet ant need venom that lasts for three hours? I'm like, isn't that a little greedy? Like what needs three hours to hide or three hours to run away? Like that's a little bit much. Yeah, the bullet ant's venom didn't evolve in the presence of humans

because we've been here for anywhere from 14,000 to 30,000 years, depending on who's arguing and fighting over when they came to the new world. Oh, we love all those arguments, though. Yeah, exactly. They're great fun. But that's relatively, you know, as the Germans say, an Augenblick, a blink of the eye in the evolutionary time scale. And so, obviously, bullet ants, which have been unchanged for 100 million years, have

evolved their venom a lot earlier than we were there. So it wasn't intended for us. I think it was more intended for the monkeys up there in the canopy, the lizards, the frogs, and the birds. Yeah. It'd be nice to know what considered the bullet one on the pain index way back around. Oh, if there was something so badass that it just brushed it off? No big deal.

There's nothing that I know of. The closest I ever came to that was I had what I called the Toad Project, which I wrote about in the book. We were just, well, we'd had a couple too many beers and our tummies full of a nice Costa Rican dinner and we were kind of relaxing in the evening after a hard day's work. And we had this great big bufo marinas, the marine toad or the cane toad, they call them in Australia. And they're about the size of a platter,

you know, a plate. And there was this one sitting there wolfing down everything, three-inch long grasshoppers. And my assistant tossed a three-inch long scorpion there and the thing got the scorpion in the mouth, in the front end and the mouth and the tail was stinging it between the eyes went down the hatch says we got these things are tough

so then i had nine bullet ants i'm not sure why didn't kill it no i had these nine bullet ants that i brought over from the caribbean side because coast week has a pacific and a caribbean side and the bullet ants are only on the Caribbean side. So for some reason I brought nine over, I don't remember why I hadn't used them all when I was on the Caribbean side. Anyway, I had these nine bullet ants, so I said, well, let's toss one

and see what the toad does with this. It's obviously naive, it's never seen a bullet ant, because they don't live here. And ate this thing, whoop, whoop. Eyes popped in and out. Mouth gaped and tongue came out. I said, well, I get the impression it responded to this. So then I thought, well, the other hypothesis is that it just does that normally when it eats anything.

So I threw it something about the same size down the hatch, no hiccuping, no eye popping or anything. Okay, that suggests to me that it got stung. So let's try another ant and see how dumb this toad is. So we did another ant. Whoa, whoa, eye popping, the same thing. We did this through all nine ants. Whoa. And he never learned. Never did this through all nine ants. Whoa. And he never learned.

Never learned. But was consuming them. Exactly, and getting stung and suffering. Obviously, it didn't seem to like it. It thought it was too spicy, but it didn't seem to stop. And so the question is, you know, why was the thing, I assume it still lived through it. I didn't follow the toad to see if it.

If he was all right. But the funny thing is we've never seen in toad stomachs and, you know, any of the herpetology literature where they, you know, catch these things and say, what are they eating? And they open up and see what's in their tummy. Oh, we had to do that in 10th grade or whatever. Exactly. I opened one up and found a mouse in it, man. This is kind of the one. I'm still a little bit traumatized by it.

It was a bullfrog with a mouse. I'm not surprised. They don't eat anything. Bullfrog is the North American equivalent of the cane toad pretty much. Yeah. And so none of the cane toad pretty much. Yeah. And so none of the literature ever reported bullet ants in them. So I don't know whether that's because the bullet ants aren't down on the ground near water usually where the toads are. They're up in the canopy.

Mm-hmm. And they go from their nest at the base of a small tree or sapling up to the canopy. They don't forage out on the ground. Well, I got stung by one out on the ground. Well, I guess I should modify it. They don't start out that way. They go up and they may go 30 feet over, 50 feet over, then down another one and forage on the ground there. Yeah, I got you.

And the reason they will do that is they're fiercely territorial and colonies will kill each other. So they're not randomly distributed. They're evenly distributed because of colonies will kill each other. So they're not randomly distributed. They're evenly distributed because of this constant warfare. Okay. So they don't want their nests to get discovered by a nearby bullet ant nest. So that's why they go up and down. And so they get discovered someplace further away where they can't find the nest.

So the nest is safe. But usually cane toads aren't on that sort of area. They're usually around the water. So I don't know. Maybe it's... So the absence of bullet ants and cane toad guts is not necessarily an indicator that... Exactly. ...they don't like them.

So we have another junior high project for a nice Costa Rican... You got some busy junior high people. Yeah. Costa Rican star student. I know if they were giving away these ecology degrees, I feel like there'd be a lot of folks being ecologists. That's good stuff. You know, the thing we hated most when we were kids was horseflies. Oh, those are terrible.

Yeah, you'd be out swimming, like out on the raft or whatever, out in the middle of the lake, and you'd get found out by a horsefly. Or more than one. on the raft or whatever out in the middle of the lake and you'd get found out by a horsefly or more everybody like you'd be underwater and everybody group effort trying to kill it and you know you eventually get it killed nobody could breathe easy and then another one comes yeah like uh they're like a slash and lap feeder exactly they take a chunk of flesh out of you are they biting is that what it is they biting. They open you up and suck your blood. Or you tell me. Yeah, they're kind of like a couple of Chinese meat cleavers hacking away at your skin, getting it all nice and bloody and messy, and then they can drink the blood. Why does that hurt so damn bad? Man, those things hurt.

I think because they haven't evolved to be a better system. Like a mosquito doesn't hurt much at all. He does it on the sly. Yeah. They anesthetize you and they're sort of sneaky about that. Or kissing bugs, which are one of the things I work on. They're blood sucking, you know, like a stink bug type thing, except they suck blood. They don't hurt at all.

Whereas some of the things that do hurt are the sloppy feeders, like the horse flies or the deer flies, which are just like smaller varieties of horse flies. So that hurts because of what he's doing to you, not because of what he's applying to you. Yeah, it's because of what he's doing to you. Minus maybe the application of anesthesia. Exactly. Okay. Yeah. So that's what it feels like just to have something give you a bunch of real small cuts all of a sudden.

Yeah. So that's what it feels like just to have something give you a bunch of real small cuts all of a sudden. Yeah. And some other ones that hurt, if you go to Africa, the tsetse fly, I've never been personally bitten by one. But I'm told that they really hurt too. And it's, again, kind of a sloppy feeder. And the last one. And they're the ones that are responsible for a certain. Yeah, sleeping sickness. Sleeping sickness, which has got to be some kind of bacterial infection or whatever you get from it, right?

Yeah, it's a protozoan. It's related to Chagas disease, or it's a protozoan, which is why it's so hard to treat because the doggone thing is that you carry out just like we are. The cells are similar. So if it's a bacteria, they have a different biochemistry, and we can zap them a lot more easily than we can something that's similar to us. Because if you kill them, well, you're sort of killing us too. Yeah.

Which isn't a good idea. The last one that really hurts that I know of, which is very familiar to anybody around Montana or the northern areas, are what we call stable flies. Look like a small house fly and they bite and take a hunk out of it. Oh yeah. We lump those in with deer flies and horse flies. Yeah. Yeah. The stable flies, I would, uh, I would, I guess I'm an entomologist.

I would look at this fly that lands on me. If it's a house fly, I won't be bothered to shoo it off because it's not doing any damage. So I look at its proboscis because it's floppy mop like thing on the bottom. It's a house fly and it's safe. If it's pointy, there's a stable fly and whack. And you got to get them. I got to kill it right away. That's what's so funny though about the horse

flies and some of these stable flies too, I think is they can really take a beating. Like whack. Like you score a good hit and it doesn't pay off. Or the legs tuck up and it tips over and it falls on the river rocks and then you look and the thing writes itself and flies off. Second life. Yeah.

Sure. Maybe nine lives. Or if you're biting in horses and horses have tails that are whipping around, they kind of hit you, but they don't really squash you. So what you do is you hit them and then rub. Yes, that's right. So do a glancing thing. That's another hot tip.

A coup de grace. Yeah, you should. Do you think you So do a glancing thing. That's another hot tip. Do you think you'll do a book someday about how best to squish bugs? Probably not. The hit and rub. Probably not. But I actually do mention that in the book that I talk about. If you get a honeybee in the hair, stuck in your hair, I say don't whack at it because in order to squash the thing, you have to hit it so hard you'll give yourself a minor concussion or at least a headache.

And so I say better thing to do is take a comb and try to comb it out. Or if you insist that you want to kill it, then rub it and smash it as you're rubbing and turn it into juice, which gives you a good excuse to have a shampoo shower. I want to ask you, explain the word, I think I'm pronouncing this correctly, aposematic. Oh, aposematic. Aposematic. Yeah, aposematic is basically the technical term saying that you have a warning coloration. The classic example people think of is a coral snake. You see that red and white and yellow, or red and black and yellow, rather. Red on black, you're okay, Jack.

Yeah. Red on yellow, you're a dead feller. Exactly, that's it. I mean, you look at it and you're like, watch out. Exactly. You say you look at this and there's been some tests that have been done with naive predators of snakes that have never seen a coral snake or any dangerous thing.

And to give them, say, a gray snake or a black snake or some other color green snake, and then you give them a pattern that's similar to the coral snake, and they kind of look back and they have this innate, genetically programmed apprehension of this aposematic warning coloration. And I think that relates to anything that's warning colors are basically red, black, yellow, and orange. There's one exception for colorblind animals. The skunk is a warning aposematic because it's jet black and brilliant white. See white and black, that's as contrasty as you can

get yeah most people know not to pounce on a snake for not a snake a skunk skunk for dinner yeah i imagine for that system to work aposematic right am i saying it right yeah that's right for that system to work like there has to be um a bite and bark exactly but there's probably some species i'm guessing exploit it where they they resemble the trouble things but don't have the bite exactly that's the king snake example king snake can't do anything to really hurt you perfectly tasty and yummy But you don't want to take the chance because you don't know whether he's a cheater or the real thing. Yeah. We see the same thing with a lot of other monarch butterflies have what's called a viceroy,

which was originally thought to be a cheap mimic that looked just like it and wasn't toxic. It turns out they're mildly toxic. So it's a scale from being total cheat to total truth with a gradation of things in between them. But I think there's some innate apprehension of bright things. Like, for example, in the southeast of the U.S., they have these things called the cow killer, velvet ant. Oh, yeah. Black and red.

You almost never hear of anybody who's ever been stung by one. And I say, you know, juniors out there, Sally's out there, two-year-old kid playing in the backyard, cute little fuzzy wuzzy, let's pick it up. You'd think that would happen all the time. And you'd know if they picked them up, they'd come squawking in. Mama or dadada, whoever's there, would be cuddling them and see this thing running around. It's quite bright, so you'd know if there's a case of that happening. Yet we've never heard of any of those with one exception. Famous E.O. Wilson reported in a story when he was about three

that he picked one up, but then he's an entomologist like me, so you have to make exception for people like us. But most normal people. E.O. Wilson, the guy that popularized the term biophilia, right? Exactly. And island biogeography and about a dozen other terms. Pretty amazing guy. I didn't know he was an entomologist.

Yeah, he's basically an ant man. Oh, really? Yeah, that's his true love. But he's an overall general biologist. You name it, if it's living and it's animal, he's pretty good at it. Yeah. But yeah, he's the only one I've ever heard of who ever got stung as a youngster. And of course, once you get older, parents tell you, don't mess with that thing.

So now they're communicating. But as a two or three-year-old, you're not being told, oh, that red and black thing, don't mess with that thing so now they're communicating but as a two or three year old you're not being told oh that that red and black thing don't don't mess with that so you're completely naive yet you don't pick them up and and that's the interesting question i think we have this innate fear of it you see similar sorts of things and people have an innate fear of snakes. Because we evolved in Africa, and in Africa, almost every snake there, or at least a good chunk of them, bites you and you're dead.

So you learn if it's snake or snake-like, don't take a chance. It isn't worth it. Avoid the thing. There's extreme phobia of people, which persists even to people who are nowhere near where there's dangerous snakes like northern europeans have no dangerous snakes anymore people still have phobia of snakes

yeah or northern parts of china that sort of thing asia so it's over there are no yeah that's what i thought would be like a really interesting if you could time machine back and watch the first human um after coming from asia across beringia and they've been generations and generations removed from snakes because they've been in the the arctic um that all of a sudden someone penetrates down into the mid-continent and there's a rattlesnake, did they just go to grab it? Or did they have that thing like, I'm generations removed from snakes? Exactly. I have no idea.

Thousands of years removed from snakes, but there's no way I'm touching that thing. That would be my feeling as to what would happen, but it's hard to get it. Like they carried that. Yeah, we need a time machine to do that. The same thing with. Oh, there's all kinds.

Man, yeah, when I get a time machine. Get into the movie business. I'm going to do that first, and then I got some other stuff I'm going to take care of. And we have the same phobia of spiders, you know, it's arachnophobia. Yeah. Technical term for people are dreadfully petrified of spiders in general and tarantulas in particular, which is kind of interesting because tarantulas never bite people and they don't hurt even if they did. Now that's our tarantula. But you're deathly afraid of them.

Exactly. I didn't know until recently how harmless they were. I just assumed there must be something bad about them. I mean, look at them. Yeah. I mean, I do a lot of classroom displays where I will hold a tarantula, take it up to the classroom with third or fourth graders. And the funny thing is the girls always come up first and hold their hands out. The boys, the big brave boys are sitting in the back, you know, watching and, you know, acting tough and brave. And about the fifth time a girl holds the tarantula and the boys are realizing they're embarrassed and they got to show that they're boys. And they come up and start holding the tarantula.

But it's not just me. I've had other people report the same sort of thing. So I don't know what that tells us about it, but it makes an interesting story. No, it is interesting to understand, like, biologically what could have happened there. I got one last question for you, then see if Cal and Corinne or Phil have anything for you,

and then I'm going to plug your book. But can you talk about the drink, the Spanish fly? You mentioned it in your book. It's an aphrodisiac, right? Well, sort of. What is it? Well, Spanish fly is cantharidin, which is, again, one of these small molecules in chemistry.

And what it does is it rots away tissue of the body. It kills a lot of horses. It's particularly bad in Oklahoma and areas like that where it gets into alfalfa, blister beetles. They bale it up in the hay. Horse eats as few as a dozen or few of these things their stomach kind of rots away and you lose your horse horrible painful back up so a guy bails up a beetle inadvertently exactly the horse eats the hay with the beetle the dried up beetle the dead beetle okay so it's just like it's just in its carcass and then yeah he just inadvertently eats some of these and that can be fatal exactly from a toxin that's in the

beetle exactly and the spanish fly was one of these things that we presume was in europe presumably in spain i'm not sure where the one might guess yeah that sounds reasonable and the guys would put it in in the drinks of the food of the gals and and they'd grind up a small part of this beetle. What it's supposed to do is it's a general irritant. So it irritates everything, including your genital system. So you want to scratch, and you're aware of it, and it's painful and whatever. If you get the right dose, the story goes, that then you'll become much more susceptible to being sexually appreciated

by whoever put this into your dinner. I buy that totally. I'm not sure whether that's all wives' tale or not, but that's sort of the folk logic. That's what the hell that comes from? And in that amount, it doesn't rot the inside of a human system. No, well, if they get it wrong, then it's bad news. Yeah, you're like, hey, baby, check it out. I'm not going to put so many of these in here that it rots your insides out and kills you.

I'm just going to put a little touch in, and this is going to put you in the mood. It's kind of like the puffer fish. You have to eat just enough of that that it's really tasty and not enough to kill you. So that's what that comes from? That's what I'm told. And don't call me the world expert, but that's what the general rumor has is where it came from is being called Spanish fly. Of course, it's not a fly at all. It's a beetle, but technicalities.

Gotcha. You know, I said that was my last question, but I have one more question. You run around in the snow in sandals. Exactly. Now, we have just among our circle here,

we have an ongoing debate about whether it's responsible to wear sandals or flip-flops because if there's like my buddy Ronnie likes to point out, let's say there'sops because if there's like a like my buddy ronnie likes to point out let's say there's a volcano and there's lava everywhere are you prepared to like defend your family so he doesn't like not only is he not like sandals he doesn't like people who wear sandals oh um but here you are and there's 12 inches of snow on the ground and it's snowing and you show

up in sandals well can you share with us share with us what went through your head when you dressed? Well, I checked the weather report first. If it gets below 10 degrees, I won't wear sandals. That's the cutoff. Yeah, 10 or 15 degrees. And the nice thing about sandals is they're very comfortable. I never get blisters with them. I do everything.

I get good sandals. Flip-flops don't cut the muster in my mind. Yeah, you got Chacos on. Yeah never get blisters with them. I do everything. I get good sandals. Flip-flops don't cut the muster in my mind. Yeah, you got Chacos on. Yeah, I get Chacos. They're sort of the best that I can find other than South Africa makes Rockies, which they don't import here. They're pretty good too. And today it's 34 degrees with only four to six inches of snow. Yeah, it's a heat wave.

Fresh snow. My wife complains that I have no feeling in my feet, but we did a test the other day, and we had one of these infrared guns that tells you, you know, the temperature, what you're pointing at. Oh, yeah, I'm with you. Her hands were hot, like 86 degrees or something like that, and my hands were like 61 or 62 degrees. I said, I bet my feet are warmer. So she shot my feet, and they were like three degrees warmer. Do you have

like a tolerance to increased tolerance to pain now that you've been stung by all these things? I don't think so. The one case, you know, I get asked this, how do you know that you're just not nerve dead and you no longer respond to these? So the first

adventure that I had in Australia, I was with a group of social insect people, in other words, ant people, wasp people, and bee people. Their fair game is guinea pigs. They're knowledgeable. They should know what they're doing. And if they don't, don't blame me. I'm not exploiting somebody who's completely naive and ignorant. That's my justification. So then I got that out of the way. What the experiment was is I had been stung by them, and I was, oh, it's sharp, and it's clean, and it's chemical-like to me, not burning or anything,

but it's less than a honeybee. It's like one and a half, something like that, which kind of surprised me. I had an expectation from the literature this would be like a three or really hurt a whole lot. So I thought, well, maybe I'm just nerve dead. We can test this. I was on this bus load. We were in Kangaroo Island, which burned up last week.

And the bus driver said, well, you see a bull ant colony alongside of us. And he went, I want to stop. And I went, yes! The whole bus just screamed. So we all got out. I, being sneaky and knowing what I'm doing, I had this jar, and I was picking up an ant. One flipped into the jar. It was about a tenth of a second for each ant I picked up and flipped into the jar. They didn't notice that speed. These things are very fast. I was just faster. And so someone would, they'd try to catch them with tweezers and they can't catch them. They're too big and too agile and they can't suck them up with aspirators. And they're trying, trying to trap them in the short

time we had and they were getting frustrated. So then they do like, they saw, oh, Schmidt, he's the expert on all this sort of stuff. He's just picking them up. So they'd pick them up and get stung, and I would kind of saunter over and say, how does the sting affect you? Is it like more than a honeybee, less than a honeybee, about like a honeybee or whatever? I managed to get five of these people that I sort of sneakily got as my volunteer controls on my own nerve deadness, if that's a word. And they all said, well, surprisingly, it hurts less than a honeybee, a little bit less. All five of them agreed basically what I said.

So I said, aha, Schmidt is not nerve dead. No, what I like about what you're saying, though, is you're pointing out as a way to measure pain. You're not applying an absolute number to it. It's a relative thing. It's relative to a honey bee. Meaning, yeah, like someone might be, someone might think that a honey bee is like crippling and they can't do anything for an hour after getting it, but they could still tell you that that's not as bad.

Or someone might be a honey bee, they don't even think about it, but they could still relatively tell you, you know. Yeah, the one case where I have a little bit of trouble with that is there's beekeepers and there's people who collect, a lot of them actually around the Montana area, who collect yellow jackets for collecting the venom for allergy shots. Oh. And so if you make your profession as a beekeeper, you ask them, have you ever gotten stung by a yellow jacket? Yeah, those darn darn things they really hurt they hurt a lot more than a honeybee but that's true

well and then you ask the yellow jacket people who collect them for a living and they say what about a honeybee versus your yellow jacket those bloody honeybees they really really hurt oh like they've lost some of their yeah I think it's a bit psychological oh you think it's psychological more than

they lost their palate. Because to me, they both hurt the same. I don't like either one of them. Yeah. You guys got any more questions? I kind of thought you were going to applaud Dr. Schmitz. You know, he wasn't willing to take advantage of naive people. And I've kind of heard you say that in, in

certain circles where you're like, uh, hiking a little too fast and you said, well, all those folks knew what they were getting into. Oh yeah. We just different views on it. Yeah. Yeah. That works.

Um, no, I, I liked the book and, uh, I really do enjoy your adventures also. And, and something that you said at the very beginning of the podcast uh when steve said he was bit by a bullet ant and he said oh you're lucky um do you feel that way like do you appreciate your experience oh i'm glad it happened yeah yeah i think one of the things is the acute pain when you have this, you obviously don't like, and you wish you didn't have it. But then as you get to regale this story time and time again, particularly to your children and your grandchildren, you know, Gramps, can you tell me a story about your childhood? And you can tell them about the bullet ant. The kids will be

enraptured with this. So you can get later on in life, you know, good joy out of this. So I say, that's why you're lucky. If you never had this, you have one fewer stories to tell. And maybe that's just me, you know, what, what to me is interesting and what maybe to other people isn't. But yeah, I, I certainly didn't like it when I got stung by it, but well, I got a book out of it, so maybe it says something. Corinne? Not to make this too much longer, but for people who will die from a bee sting, what happens there? Is it that it's the kynan? Is it that bees have kynan in some susceptible people that immediately will affect their heart? Or am I totally off base there?

Well, you're close. What happens is bees have melatonin, which is another one of these small peptides. In other words, 26 or so amino acids. And what they do is they cause extreme pain. And that's what causes the hurt but that's not what will kill you an allergic reaction allergic reaction is our old friend phospholipase a or how you want it it's usually phospholipase a what it does is it causes a massive release of mast cells or basophils these are specialized cells in our body that release endorphins,

not endorphins, histamine, slow-reacting substances, anaphylaxis, which are now called leukotrienes, a whole bunch of other enzymes and things. What they do is they cause a dramatic lowering of blood pressure and people, if they get enough of this reaction, they can actually die of asphyxia. Well, two ways. They cause a swelling in your throat and you die of asphyxia. Or they can cause cardiac insufficiency where you can actually have brain dead because you're not getting enough oxygen to your brain. And the third way they can do it is actually cause a heart attack itself. And so it's our body killing us, not the venom.

I was just going to say, it's our own processes in response to. Yeah, it triggers your body to attack itself. Exactly. And then the bee's like, oh, I didn't mean that. Yeah. And you say, why do we have this- I don't want it to be that bad. Why do we have this dumb immunoglobulin E system that causes this?

And the reason is that's our system that protects us against macro parasites, worms and big pathogens and things of that sort. And if you notice people in places that are very poor hygiene and have a lot worse parasite problems, usually don't have allergies because their IgE is busy fighting off the worms and these sorts of things. Okay. Interesting. We're just too clean. We have the hygienic theory that came out of Japan, whereas we have all these immunizations of childhood diseases in our immune system,

just gets lazy. And that's what causes arthritis and multiple sclerosis and all these autoimmune diseases. None of that acts out. Yeah. Just chews up our own body because we don't give it something useful to work on. All right. The name of the book, again, The Sting of the Wild

by Justin O. Schmidt, creator of, among many other things, the Schmidt Pain Index, which next time you get stung by something, you can look it up. The subtitle of the book, so it's The Sting of the Wild, The Story of the Man

Who Got Stung for Science. And Mr. Schmidt, Dr. Schmidt, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. It's been my pleasure. And thank you for the beautiful song. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law,

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