How to Waste Less Food and Save Money & Why Insects Rule the World -SYSK Choice

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1:22Today on Something You Should Know, when you reboot your electronic devices, why do you have to turn it off for 10 seconds before turning it back on? Then, food waste. A lot of perfectly good food gets tossed out. So for instance, a bell pepper. A bell pepper has to be able to stand. If it has some sort of bend in it where it doesn't stand or stack very well, it gets thrown out right there. So there's a lot of food loss that happens that we don't see. Also, why an afternoon nap could do wonders for you. And insects. They're fascinating. There are millions of them, and many of them don't live very long.

2:01For example... It's a wingless mosquito, and it lives on the surface of the ocean. And the adult life of one of those things is about two hours. And you have to wonder how the hell it actually finds a mate in a two-hour window on the open ocean. All this today on Something You Should Know. There's probably no better endorsement for a company than this. I keep buying their stuff. That's exactly what's happening with me and Quince. It started with their clothes. I've bought sweaters, polos, pants, jeans, shoes, a belt. And Quince has become one of the first places I look when I need something new to wear.

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3:30We shop at Quince, and I absolutely recommend you try it. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to Quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, please let them know it was Something You Should Know. It's the best way to support our show. Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Well, hi. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

4:14I want to start today talking about the electronics in your life. The electronics that you use every day. Smartphones, computers, modems, routers. Well, as you know, the remedy for when a lot of those kind of electronics aren't working right, if they're glitchy or something, the advice is to reboot them. specifically to turn them off, wait 10 seconds, and turn them back on. But why 10 seconds? And sometimes it says 30 seconds. But does it really matter that you wait 10 seconds or 30 seconds? Well, it can. It really can. The reason is that your devices have capacitors in them, which are basically tiny batteries.

4:56And when you turn off your device, the power drains from those capacitors, and that's what shuts the device down completely. If you wait less than 10 seconds, it's possible that enough power is still in a capacitor, or two, or three, that the device never really fully shuts down and resets. So be patient, give it a good 10 seconds, or 30 seconds, or whatever it says, and allow the power to drain and everything to reset. And that is something you should know.

5:30One of my pet peeves, for some reason, is food waste. I just hate to throw out something because it went bad before I could use it. And I hate walking through restaurants and seeing all that food left on plates after people have left. It turns out that food waste is a huge problem, particularly in the United States. And there are things we can all do to help the problem. And when you cut down on food waste, you also can save yourself a lot of money, and it doesn't take a lot of effort. Here for a fascinating discussion on how food gets wasted and how to stop it is Katherine Kellogg. She's owner and founder of GoingZeroWaste.com and author of the book, 101 Ways to Go Zero Waste.

6:15Hi, Katherine. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi, Mike. Thank you so much for having me. So let's start by identifying and you explaining just how big a problem food waste is. On average, about 40 % of all the food in the United States goes to waste. It is a really, really big problem. And if it were a country, food waste would be the third largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions behind the United States and China. So it is a really, really large problem. And what's really fascinating about it is almost half of the food waste happens in our own homes. So it's a problem that we can really tackle.

6:51It's a problem we can see. And it's a problem that's going to save us a lot of money. I think one of the reasons why people really dislike wasting food is because you can physically kind of see just throwing away those dollars that you spent. And we all know, I mean, groceries are going up in price. So if you can find a way to make sure that you're actually using what you buy, it's just a win, win, win. It's a win all across the board. So let's talk about what you just said about half of the problem is in our own homes. Well, where's the other half? So that comes from food that is in production.

7:27So a lot of that's going to be food that's wasted in the production, at farms. And something a lot of people don't know is in our grocery stores, they have beauty standards for food. So for instance, a bell pepper, a bell pepper has to be able to stand if it has some sort of bend in it where it doesn't stand or stack very well, it gets thrown out right there. So there's a lot of food loss that happens that we don't see. And one of the major problems is grocery stores not buying produce that's considered less than, you know, peak or less than perfectly beautiful. Isn't that amazing? And I've heard that there are some entrepreneurs who are like, they, I don't know what the name of the company is, but it's something like ugly fruit or ugly produce that you can buy that stuff from people at a much lower price rather than throw it away.

8:18Yes. Misfits Market is one of the ones that I personally use. And I think they're a fantastic company and they do a really good job of taking that less than peak produce and they sell it on at a discounted rate. So it's really great to be able to avoid that food waste and you get a discount and it's delicious. It's perfectly fine food. And some of the reasons why you get something is, well, blow your mind. I recently got these lemons from them. And these lemons were just slightly bigger than normal. And grocery stores wouldn't buy them because they were just, you know, just maybe about an inch bigger than they should be.

8:52But as an average consumer, you would look at that and say, well, that's just the normal lemon. So I want to understand who's throwing the food away. So in other words, are those bell peppers that can't stand up so they get thrown away? Is the farmer throwing them away and not even selling them? Is the grocery store buying them and saying, well, see, this one can't stand up so they throw it away? Who's throwing it away? Most of it happens on the farm. So there's this fantastic video that I love, and it is of a guy who's going to a farm where they produce bananas. And there is a measuring tape and the farmers have the bananas.

9:31They're laying the measuring tape across the bananas and they say, nope, that's just about an inch too big. And right then and there, they just grind it into a pulp. They just throw it out. That's where it's lost, right there, because the banana is an inch too big. So the food that we waste in our home, I mean, what we end up wasting are things like, well, strawberries are a big problem. It's like the minute they get home, they start to turn. Or like basil. Basil goes bad really fast. And you use what you can use, but if you can't eat it all, you can't eat it all, and then you end up throwing it away.

10:07Can I ask how you're storing your strawberries? Well, usually I just take the container they come in from the store and put them in the fridge until I use them. And sometimes they're already bad when I take them out of the fridge the next day or the day after. But I also heard something like, well, you should rinse the strawberries in water with a tiny bit of vinegar in it. So you don't taste the vinegar, but the vinegar will help destroy the bacteria that causes the rotting. And so you rinse them in that, dry them out, and then put them back in the fridge. So I'm going to have to disagree with that person.

10:43I actually did an experiment where I did it that way. And then I did it my way to see which one would last longer. And mine were perfectly fine after two weeks. And those turned into kind of a vinegary, mushy mess. Two weeks. Two weeks. Yes. So basically when you get them home from the store, and this is one of the major points that I go over in my book is when you get home from the store, do not wash your produce. All you're doing is you're just adding moisture into the produce. And we don't want to add extra moisture. We don't want to add extra air. Usually depending, depending. It does depend on the type of produce, but for berries specifically, what we're talking about right now, don't wash them.

11:19What you're going to do is you're going to take them, you're going to put them in a mason jar or some other sort of airtight container. Make sure they're not pressed down really hard, but they can just, you know, live their lives and then put them in a mason jar, put the lid on. They'll stay good in your fridge for up to two weeks. And then you can just wash them as you want to eat them. That's it? Yeah, that's it. That's really easy. Put them in an airtight container, they'll be fine. That probably applies to a lot of produce that might go bad, like other berries, for example, or whatever. Yep.

11:49Blackberries. I will say raspberries, no matter how much you baby raspberries, raspberries are just naturally a little bit mushier. So they do have a harder time, but they still do better in a jar than they do in their container. And like I said, I do not recommend washing them because all you're doing is introducing more moisture into them. And we know that berries usually go bad and they start getting mushy. they take on more moisture. So we don't want to introduce the problem too early for them. Where do you see people wasting the most food? I think a lot of it is produce and a lot of it is bought with the best of intentions.

12:24But then life happens and you get kind of intimidated by the produce. You don't want to chop it or you're just not in the mood for it. There's a number of reasons and my solutions kind of hit on multiple levels. So the first one is planning and I hate meal planning. I hate it. I hate it. So there are different types of meal planning. My personal favorite, I call it the five minute meal plan because that's all of the time personally I can manage to take for meal planning five minutes. So I call it the five minute meal plan and it's a really quick look at what you have before you go to the grocery store, take note of what those items are and And make sure that whatever meals you're planning to make incorporates kind of those leftover things that you may have.

13:09Maybe you have a bag of spinach that's been sitting in your fridge for a week. And maybe it's time that that gets used up first. So just prioritize the stuff that's been kind of pushed to the back of the fridge. The second thing is we tend to overbuy. Now, this is really interesting because this gets into this whole grocery store beauty standard that we talked about earlier. So supermarkets stuff their store with produce to give the feeling of abundance because the feeling of abundance makes you buy more. So they're intentionally enticing you so you want to buy more food. And we have pretty large fridges in the United States.

13:50And if you have a big family, that's great. But if you're a two-person family or a three-person family, you probably don't need to fill or stuff your entire fridge full of food because it will probably go bad before your family can eat all of that. And so making sure that you're getting really comfortable with some negative space in your fridge. Or I have a small kitchen. I have a very small fridge. I call her my French fridge. Her name's Juliette. She's very cute. She's very petite. She's the average fridge size in Europe. and it's amazing how much food, how much less food I waste, knowing that I don't have this massive fridge that in my mind I feel like I need to fill.

14:31We're discussing food waste and how to stop it, how to stop wasting food with Katherine Kellogg. She is author of the book 101 Ways to Go Zero Waste. A big thank you to today's sponsor, Vinted. I think most of us have what I call someday clothes. I'll wear that someday. That'll fit better someday. Someday, I'll have a place to wear that. Meanwhile, it's been hanging in the closet for three years. Vinted offers another possibility. Sell it. Every day, people can sell clothes they're no longer wearing and make some extra money. And they've made the process pretty painless. Take what you don't wear.

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15:58New and exclusive holiday decor just launched online at The Home Depot. Check out the viral Grand Duchess collection with smart holiday lights you can control from your phone. Easily customize the twinkle across trees, wreaths, and garlands to match your holiday vibe. Create stunning light effects, then switch it up with the top of your fingers. Even the man in red will be impressed. Shop the holiday decor you want online only at HomeDepot.com. So, Catherine, here's a problem. I will go to the store and buy food to make something with the best of intentions, but something will come up, you know, that the meal you were going to make didn't happen because somebody came over and you all ended up going out to eat.

16:45And then you forget that you bought it. And then two months later, you find this like bag of mush at the bottom of the drawer. That's just disgusting. But it's you've you meant well, but you forgot. It has happened to me. I one time I got super, super sick and I couldn't cook at all. And there were things that I had in the fridge, obviously, best of intentions, but I couldn't eat anything for about a week. And so things went bad. And, you know, it does happen. Life happens. And yeah, the last thing on my mind when I was so ill was, you know, what was in my fridge. So I do compost and I think composting is a lovely solution, especially, but it should be a last resort.

17:29Composting should be a last resort for those times where, you know, I was so sick, I physically couldn't take care of that problem. So what else, what are some other tips people can do, things people can do to combat this problem? understanding that, you know, it's never going to be perfect, but you could make a difference if you tried a few things. Absolutely. So we talked a little bit about meal planning and shopping. One of the other main ways is making sure your produce is stored correctly. Like we talked about a little bit earlier with the berries or with your greens, making sure your produce is stored in an optimal way really, really helps it last.

18:04And then prioritizing the things that go bad a little bit quicker. We had mentioned raspberries. So raspberries are just so delicate. So if you had raspberries, strawberries, and grapes, you're probably going to want to eat them in that order because that is the order in which they are the heartiest or the least hearty, I should say. So the raspberries are more fragile, the strawberries a little heartier, and then the grapes are the heartiest. So you'd want to kind of prioritize your snacking maybe in that order, as well as making sure that, you know, when you shop, one of my major, major recommendations is buy less than you think you need.

18:40You can always go back to the store. You can always go back to the store if you need to grab something. But as you said, some things typically come up where, oh, you went out to eat or you got invited out last minute and you had planned for maybe six lunches, six breakfasts and six dinners. But now you actually only have four breakfasts at home because you're running late and you only had three lunches because two wound up being business lunches and you only had four dinners at home because you went out on a date or you went over to your friend's house. And so you bought all these food for meals that you never even ate.

19:11And we're really bad about remembering that we get busy or that things come up. So buy less food than you think you need. And then the last one would be leaning in to the state of your produce. So if you have a cucumber, and maybe I will say cucumbers are my kryptonite. That's my kryptonite food. The one that just seems to always elude me is making sure cucumbers stay good the longest. That's the hardest one. I think they're of the delicate variety. But if your cucumber is not tasting super great raw, well, how can you use it? Well, I like to make cucumber gazpacho. So if I have a slightly limp cucumber, I can turn that into a delicious gazpacho that I'm going to want to eat so I don't have to rely on that really crispy, crispy raw crunch.

19:57or if you have carrots and your carrots start to go a little limp, can you turn those into a stew? That kind of leans into its slightly limpness rather than trying to force it to eat, force yourself to eat it raw when it's not going to taste very good raw because it's missing a lot of that crunch. Can you run down your recommendations for storing the food that tends to go bad the fastest? Yes. So I'll go over kind of the main kind of top five things that I see people throw out the most. First one is berries, which we talked a little bit about. Store them in an airtight mason jar. They will last so long.

20:34When it comes to lettuce, similarly, you don't want to overcrowd it. You don't want to shove it into a container, but we have some of those really large glass kind of Tupperware containers. We put our lettuce in that. We will chop our lettuce so it's ready to go. We don't have to chop it. We just have to wash it. and you add i like to add a thin piece of cloth on top so that absorbs any excess moisture and then the airtight container prevents any air from getting in your romaine will stay good for at least two weeks that way it'll stay crunchy crispy so your spinach so your kale it's a great way to store your greens uh next surprisingly bread is one of the things that's most thrown out and I recommend if you live in a humid environment, if your pantry gets a little bit humid or if it's quite warm during the summer months, store your bread in the freezer.

21:27Make sure it's pre-sliced. All you have to do then is go into the freezer and you can just pull two slices out. You can pop it in the toaster. My toaster even has a setting that says defrost and it's not a very nice toaster. It's just a very like run-of-the-mill toaster and you can just pop your bread in there and it'll defrost and it'll be perfect and it will stay fresh for a very, very long time. Fourth on the list, apples. Apples are one of the foods that are also most thrown out. I just store those loose in the fridge. I don't personally like eating cold apples, so I like to kind of set them out as the week goes by, just it'll be room temperature when I eat them, but they stay crispy in the fridge for a very, very long time.

22:08And then the fifth most wasted item, I believe, is milk. I believe that's the fifth. and you know when you store things in the door of your fridge that's where the most heat and warmth comes from so it's actually recommended that you would store your milk more internally inside the fridge if you can but if it does start to go sour this is really interesting sour milk is not bad it is just sour there's a difference between spoiled milk and sour milk so i want to make sure we understand the distinction there but sour milk is milk that just is kind of sour it doesn't tastes super great to drink, but it isn't bad.

22:43So instead, use it to make pancakes. It's kind of the perfect natural leavening agent that you can use in place of buttermilk. Yeah, but I don't know where that line is between sour and bad, and I'd hate to find out the hard way. If it's moldy, it's bad. If it's really chunky, it's bad. But if it's just slightly sour, it's fine. So when you said, put your strawberries, for example, in a mason jar with a lid on it, and you specifically said mason jar as opposed to say a tupperware with a lip lid on it what's the difference or is there a difference oh there's a difference you can also use a tupperware container i just i just have always used a mason jar for it that's so that's why i say it one of the reasons why i like mason jars is how they take up vertical space and because it's a clear container, you can easily see what's inside of it.

23:38It's really just easier to see what I have, because if you can't see your food, you're not going to eat your food. You're going to forget that it's there. So I hate using any sort of container that's not clear. Here's something I think a lot of people do. I do it. So you're cooking something and say the recipe calls for half an onion. So now you have another half of an onion and I would never throw it away. I don't need it for this recipe. So I put it in the refrigerator and usually I keep it till it goes bad and then throw it away. Same with, you know, a bell pepper where you use part of it. So you save what you didn't use, but you don't know what to do with it.

24:17So you keep it because you feel bad throwing it out and then it goes bad and then you throw it out. One of my favorite tips is something I call chop once, eat twice. And so that definitely falls into the category of only using half an onion or half a bell pepper. So if you're already there chopping that bell pepper, you might as well just chop the whole thing. And if you don't use it, since it's already been washed and chopped, then you're a little bit more likely to kind of throw it into the next recipe versus just looking at a half of something and you're like, man, I really don't want to chop that right now.

24:51So you don't. And so then it does wind up going bad. So next time you do it, try chopping the whole thing and then storing it. And I bet you'll snack on it or maybe find a different dish that you can throw it into since it's already ready to go. Some food, I'm thinking like tortilla chips, popcorn, it's not that it goes bad, it just gets stale and people throw it out, but you can revive it, right? What I like to do is tortilla chips, for instance. You'll take your tortilla chips if they've gone stale or popcorn or cookies, like a crispy cookie, ginger snap, that sort of thing. if you lay them in a line on your baking sheet, it doesn't have to be exact, but you just don't want to pile it super high.

25:30Just lay them in one single layer, pop those into your oven while your oven's preheating from zero to 350 or zero to 400. Leave them in for maybe about 60 seconds once it reaches your temperature, pull them out and they will be good as new. I know you say that there are foods that we buy at the store that we don't eat because we don't think we can eat them, but that there's a lot of stuff we buy and throw out that we might want to try to eat. For instance, carrot tops. Carrot tops and parsley are in the same family. And carrot tops are just a slightly sweeter version of parsley. So if on your grocery list, you had parsley and carrots, and you bought carrots, and then you threw the tops away, it's wrong.

26:15It's the wrong move. So instead, you can just buy carrots, and then you can use the carrot tops as parsley and they taste delicious. And so there's, there's all these different things. People don't even know if they can eat and they throw them away. Beet tops are another great example. Beet tops are very similar to Swiss chard and flavor texture and looks. And then you also have things like broccoli stalks. This one really blows my mind, but in the U S most people chop the broccoli stalk off and you pay for broccoli per pound. So, and they aren't even eating it. And I I just think it's because they don't know the best way to prepare it.

26:50You just have to kind of shave away the slightly rough exterior, but the inside is super tender and delicious. And it makes me sad that people throw it away because I think it tastes better than the florets. Well, I've certainly learned a lot from you, and I can't wait to try your berry idea because I can't imagine how much money I've wasted on strawberries that ended up getting thrown out because they go moldy. So I'm going to try your trick. Catherine Kellogg has been my guest. She's the owner and founder of goingzerowaste.com, and her book is called 101 Ways to Go Zero Waste. And there's a link to that book and to her website in the show notes.

27:30Thanks, Catherine. Thank you, Mike. This has been wonderful. New and exclusive holiday decor just launched online at the Home Depot. Check out the viral Grand Duchess collection with smart holiday lights you can control from your phone. Easily customize the twinkle across trees, wreaths, and garlands to match your holiday vibe. Create stunning light effects, then switch it up with the tap of your fingers. Even the man in red will be impressed. Shop the holiday decor you want online only at homedepot.com. Pink Panther is here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it.

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28:36In the warm summer months, you're never too far away from an insect or two. They are seemingly everywhere. Biting, annoying, buzzing, and generally making life miserable. So why do we have insects? Do they serve a purpose besides being a nuisance? How many different kind of insects are there? Are they all related? What makes an insect an insect and not just a bug? Well, here to explain all this and more is Steve Nichols. He's an Emmy Award-winning producer and director of acclaimed wildlife documentaries, and he's author of a book called Alien Worlds, How Insects Conquered the Earth and Why Their Fate Will Determine Our Future.

29:20Hi, Steve. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi. Nice to be here. So first, explain what makes an insect an insect and the difference between an insect and a bug. Well, that's a surprisingly hard question to answer in some ways. So if you look in a kind of, you know, biology textbook or something, it would probably tell you that insects have got six legs. So like spiders have got eight legs, which are not insects. um millipedes have got well up to a thousand legs actually in a newly discovered species in australia um so um insects have got six legs they their body is divided into three bits a head which is the kind of sensory stuff um the thorax which is basically packed full of muscles which drives the six legs and uh two pairs of wings in in most insects that can fly and then the abdomen, which is kind of like the fuel supply.

30:18It digests all the stuff the bug eats, and it produces the energy for the muscles, and it also houses the reproductive organs, because obviously insects are very, very good at making more insects. Yes, they sure are. And do we have any idea how many species of insects there are? Well, that is another very good question. We have described about a million species, so uh that's as in you know in museum specimens and and papers written to give them their latin name um as to how many of there actually are well that's very difficult it's back in the i think it was in the 70s a smithsonian scientist um working in panama uh tried to work out by a series of deductions how many insects there might be and he did it by um fogging a one species of tree about 11 specimens of this tree uh to see what fell out of it he identified all the beetles that came out he knew roughly what proportion of insects beetles represent and then did loads of like multiplication about how many trees there are across the tropics in the world for example and then how many other species are there how many insects might be specific to those trees and to cut a long story short he thought there could be as many as 30 million different species of insects on the planet.

31:42At the time, most biologists said, oh, that sounds kind of a bit high to us. And they said, maybe we think there's maybe 5 million, but we keep discovering more ways in which insects have fooled us and that there are more species than we think. So my feeling is that we'll slowly creep back up to that 30 million figure and that was ridiculed at the time, but actually is looking more and more likely now. Are insects, or can insects be microscopic? Oh, yes. Not incredibly small, not like you need a big microscope to see them, but there are some parasitic wasps, which there's a lot of parasitic wasps out there, and they generally lay their eggs into the body of another insect, the caterpillar stage or the adult stage, and their larvae develop rather gruesomely inside the body of another insect.

32:39It was genuinely, that was the genuine inspiration for Ridley Scott's kind of alien bursting out of a body in the sci-fi film. That was based on these parasitic wasps. But some of these wasps actually parasitize insects' eggs, so they lay their eggs inside another insect egg. so um to do that of course they have to be incredibly small um but they're really the smallest insects are actually there's a there's a group of beetles that they don't have an english name that they belong to a family called teleidae um and well they're sometimes called featherwing beetles but uh they're absolutely minute um fractions of a millimeter long so small that they've had to move part of their brain out into their thorax because they haven't got room in their head for their kind of full brain.

33:29They can only afford either one ovary or one testis in their abdomen because they haven't got room for the normal two. So they're at the limit. They're absolutely down at the bottom end limit for insects. And so because all these insects fit that definition you gave a moment ago of the three parts and all that, does that mean they're all related they are one thing we do know is that all insects descended from a common ancestor when and what the ancestor was like is still up for debate um but they're definitely all related i mean some more distant than others if you want to think of the insects as having like a family tree or even like a real tree almost then some insects form you know the low branches and others you know way up top um but but yes they're all related and uh they're related to crustaceans we know that we know that actually um insects are in some ways um that they're part of the crustacean group they're very closely related to you know the the um crabs and um lobsters and all those kind of creatures um but there is there there is one group of crustaceans that they're very very close to and we didn't even know about these things until a few decades ago they're crustaceans that called remipedes which only live in the deepest water-filled caves where the caves have both seawater and fresh water in them and they're like well the best thing to describe them as is swimming centipedes and and that's the the closest relation to an insect that we know still living today that's not an insect.

35:14So this next question you could probably take three hours to answer. So let me ask you not to take three hours. I promise I won't. Why do we have insects? I mean, most people consider them pests. In everyday life, they buzz around, they do things. Nobody likes them. But clearly, they're here and they serve a purpose. They do things. people like you study them but for most of us they're just a pain in the neck so why do we have them well it's a break that's it i mean i get asked that question quite a lot as you might imagine doing talks and such like the sort of you know general uh talks um and one of the things i say which doesn't sound very polite but actually in one sense it's a meaningless question because um there is no reason behind the way things evolve they they simply are you know self-reproducing little um organisms uh that that go their own way evolve and get shaped by natural selection so there's no uh there's no forethought in evolution there's no reason why it does this it just happens because that's the the last three and a half billion years of history of life on earth has driven that evolution but but that's not a very very helpful answer and and um a better answer is to say they're extraordinarily useful things they they underpin every terrestrial ecosystem on the planet apart from maybe you know antarctica where there still are a couple of insect species but um but the rest the whole ecology of all those um places you can think of around the planet um it's dependent on on insects in different ways i mean obviously they provide food for a load of different things um but they're also incredibly important with flowering plants with pollinators so for example um they pollinate um about three quarters of of all the different kinds of of crops that we eat as food people often ask me as well you know like what's point of mosquitoes a more slightly more specific question than you asked and my answer to them is always chocolate because the cacao flower the the flower that develops into a pod that gives us chocolate beans is pollinated by a little mosquito so without mosquitoes no chocolate sorry guys well well that's actually good to know because the next time you're itching from a mosquito bite at least you can say well you know we wouldn't have chocolate without them so i guess we can all suffer a little bit but but as we've talked about before on the show i mean mosquitoes are like one of the world's biggest killers too oh oh they are uh as well as vectors as it is transporting because they what they're transporting are diseases that affect they've picked up and then they they sort of pass on but they are um there are some um you know quite quite dangerous insects as well.

38:18But as I said, their role is far outweighed by the value that they have to the ecology of virtually the whole terrestrial part of the planet. They don't live in the sea that much, but to the terrestrial part of the planet, it would absolutely fall apart if we didn't have insects. So we have this interesting relationship with insects in the sense that we're very much at war with them in the sense we don't want them in our house. We spray them, we swat them, we kill them, we have exterminators, we have pest guys. So does that bother you? I mean, all these species that we're trying to get, well, we're not trying to get rid of them, we just want them out of the house.

39:01Well, it is life. And yeah, even I don't really want a kitchen infested with cockroaches. having said that i keep a lot of different kinds of cockroaches just in the room behind where i'm sitting now but they're kind of tropical uh exotic species if you can think of an exotic cockroach um but yes i wouldn't want you know kitchen infested with with stuff and they do you know transmit diseases and things so um it certainly around um habitation and such like in in houses and things that you know that is a fact of life but people who spray for example you know their gardens and things are actually doing a lot of damage the insects despite the fact that there are an awful lot of them both in species and in numbers their numbers are absolutely crashing at the moment because of habitat loss and overuse of chemical pesticides we've lost in places at least some three quarters of the insect population in the last three four decades which is not that long you know it's i've been studying insects for longer than that and in my time of studying insects they've declined by um three quarters so um so we've got to be a little bit careful um it's we can't just willy-nilly you know get rid of them because we we don't like them we've already discussed the fact that you know they're important to the ecology of our planet um and what we're doing to them in agricultural land or in our gardens or whatever is going to cause us problems.

40:33You know, we all worry about climate change these days, but go hand in hand with that, a loss of the insects. And, you know, that exacerbates any problems that we might be facing. So wait a minute. Did I hear you correctly? You said that the insect population overall has decreased by three-fourths? Yeah. I mean, we don't know if that's true globally because obviously the studies aren't there, but some intensive studies in Germany showed that even on nature reserves, the population had gone down by between 75 % and 80%. Where we have data, which is large parts of North America because it's a well-studied continent and large parts of Europe, that that is repeated and and and the pollinators are getting scarce as well you know we discussed again the fact that they're um they're important in pollination and there are places now in in china where the pollinators are so low that they're having to pollinate their almond crops by hand which is an extraordinarily tedious thing to have to do there are people up ladders with paintbrushes you know pollinating flowers because the insects can't do it anymore they've basically gone um and even california's uh almond um crops almond orchards can be affected um you know we normally uh when the when the almond uh blossom is out um lots and lots of um honeybee hives are shipped into the area um to provide pollination services so we're moving insects around to to achieve that but the conditions and most of these um almond orchards which are you know quite heavily sprayed at times um it means a lot of the honeybees die so the bee beekeepers have to basically um take their honeybees out of the orchards um when they finish the the flower season and take them somewhere where there's no pesticide so they can kind of recover and rebuild their numbers you now there's a kind of attrition um on the on the hives um doing the pollination job so so yes it's certainly true in the developed world that we're we're we're we're reaching a what people have called an insect apocalypse or an insect armageddon that is really surprising but i guess i guess because you know some insects like mosquitoes are are considered pests but but when you spray for those you get everybody so yep that that's the problem there isn't a mosquito only get rid of spray it's poison to every every insect and every bug it is if it's a general pesticide spray yes and that's what happens when we spray farmland we're spraying all the good guys as well so not just the pollinators but we're spraying all the predators so actually it's been shown uh in quite a few different um places now on organic farms uh which obviously don't use um pesticides but actually they they lose very little of their crop to insects i mean you would think oh blimey it's going to get overrun but it's it's a it's a small percentage of the of the crop that is lost to insects because all the in all the herbivorous insects natural predators are actually living in the fields as well so um there's a kind of balance of nature established on these farms which you don't get when you start spraying things because you strip everything out so so yeah it's a problem i mean there are some clever tricks that you can use you can do things like um and that's just this is happening in places like africa where you know they have a massive problem with things like sleeping sickness that's transmitted by by tetsi flies or malaria by mosquitoes and what you can do is is breed up loads of male insects and then sterilize them and then release them but and then they go out to mate but only with their species but there's no viable offspring produced by that mating and that has reduced the prevalence of some of these diseases in certain areas and that at least is targeted i mean it's not good news for the mosquitoes involved but the um but that has um uh you know targeted it so it's not like a general broad spectrum um apocalypse what is the biggest insect that you know of well so the the kind of cheating answer is there's there's a huge kind of ground cricket thing called a wetter which lives in New Zealand and the heaviest insect ever recorded was a female wetter but it was a little bit of a cheat because she was very heavily pregnant well heavily laden with eggs so it was a bit of a cheat and I think generally the biggest insects are the the giant beetles like elephant beetles that you see down in Costa Rica and places you know they they're kind of palm-sized insects but but they're pretty small compared to some of the insects that were around.

45:43So way back, way back before even the dinosaurs evolved, because insects are very, very ancient group of animals. There were insects flying around the Carboniferous and Permian coal swamps that looked like dragonflies. They're very distant related to dragonflies, but they had wingspans that was like nearly three feet across. um so there were some pretty big big bugs down there and they weren't the only ones um and in fact although it's not an insect there was also a giant millipede around back then called arthropleura and that was close on six feet long so you try and imagine a millipede you know six feet long trundling around the forest it's an impressive sight but they only survived back then because oxygen level in the atmosphere was much much higher and that supported the way insects breathe which is different to the way we breathe um these days i think those giant beetles i talked about or the wetter um are about as big as as insects can get well you said that that wetter weighed in at the most but you never told me the number uh i suppose you guys can't remember the number Well, roughly, I mean, is it 10 pounds?

47:02Is it a hundred pounds? Oh, no, no, it's not. It's not like that. It's a matter of like, you know, 50 grams or something like that. So it's a sort of not a, not a huge number. It's in, it's in ounces, not pounds. So, yeah. that would be interesting that but yeah i mean everybody has seen these really big bugs and you know from the down in like you say in costa rica but even in the united states in florida and areas down in the southeast there there's some pretty big insects there certainly are yeah i mean um there's some big like praying mantises for example um you know which everyone's familiar with because of the kind of predatory nature um but there's one actually that's that's um introduced to the eastern states now it's not there are plenty of native mantises but uh the chinese mantis um which is a one that's um i guess it's probably close on six inches long uh it's doing quite well along the east coast now and there's quite a few records now these things catching hummingbirds So there's records of them hanging around near hummingbird feeders when people have put sugar solution out for the hummingbirds and grabbing the occasional hummingbird that comes past.

48:15So, yeah, you don't have to go very far to find some very, very impressive bugs. How do insects move around the world? You say that some have been introduced. Well, how do they get there? well those kind of insects uh tend to be um moved around by us really either intentionally occasionally it's an intentional thing more often than not unintentionally in um you know shipped over in in packages of you know whatever um foodstuffs or whatever so like one of the real big problems in the northeastern united states is gypsy moths which is a which is a european species it's native here in britain and doesn't do much damage but because there's no predators of it in the states it defoliates huge areas of forest i mean it strips them bears so many caterpillars and that was a you know an accidental introduction maybe in you know timber being shipped over or whatever and now you know that the females are kind of wingless and the males fly but the females will lay their eggs on all sorts of objects and often on cars for example so you know you park your car in the in a you know national forest park or whatever um go for a hike come back drive it somewhere else and you know you may have um gypsy moth eggs on it so so they get around like that but they do get around under their own steam so the i mean we know about monarch butterflies in the states for example that migrate in the autumn from as far as canada all the way down to to mexico to overwinter in in the mexican mountains but the longest um natural insect migration is a is a dragonfly one that's called the globe skimmer which is a perfect name for a creature that does what it does and it migrates from northern india all the way down india then across the indian ocean it calls in and often in huge numbers into the maldives and then carries on over to east africa and they kind of breed on the way so it's not one individual that that does it but then they make a return journey um after that all the way back sometimes possibly even to the north of the himalayas so um that's as far as we know the the longest you know natural migration of an insect which is pretty impressive you know i've always wondered like when the monarch butterfly migrates, like how far does it go in a day and how does it know where to stop and rest?

50:47And how does that, how do they do that? How do they do that? So they have, they do have resting places. So I've watched monarch migration in lots of different parts of the States. And I've been lucky enough to get out of the mountains in Mexico to see the wintering populations where there's 20, 30 million butterflies hanging up in trees. um and uh on the way south um so what i should say first is that going north uh in the spring the butterflies move from mexico maybe as far as texas and then stop and breed and then the next generation carries the journey on so it's kind of relay race going north um going south um in the late summer basically the butterflies that hatch in the late summer are kind of super butterflies um designed to fly long distances and they make the whole journey from as far north as canada all the way to mexico but when they take off and you know okay so we're getting we're heading to mexico from canada yeah on day one they take off and they fly like so how long can they go before they have to say you know i'm getting a little tired here oh well they stop every night uh and they'll feed and they'll drop down and feed if they see a big patch of flowers So, but nevertheless, they make a decent amount of time a day.

52:07I mean, I think a better example, because it's been more carefully studied, was that there was a dragonfly, quite a famous dragonfly. It's called Dave. He was an eastern darner that flew down from Canada because they migrate in the same way as the monarchs, flew down from Canada. but this particular one dave had a little tiny transmitter on him and he and he could be tracked and he was followed by well by road vehicles but at certain times even by light aircraft must have frightened the life out of the poor old thing but he he followed a set route down across delaware bay and down over chesapeake bay um and uh and he was making about 50 miles a day so you You know, he was, that's pretty good going for a thing that's only three inches long.

52:57Generally, insects don't live very long compared to humans, but are there any outliers? Are there any that live a really long time or do they all average out? And then what is that average? They often live for quite a long time as young larvae because that's the kind of growing phase. But like an adult mayfly, for example, might only live a day or so. um but there's a little um tiny little mosquito again good old mosquitoes it's a it's a wingless mosquito and it lives on the surface of the ocean um and the uh they they emerge onto the sort of surface as adults and the adult life of one of those things is about two hours and you have to wonder how the hell it actually finds a mate and mates in in a two-hour window on the open ocean, which is a big old habitat.

53:49So some of them are very short, but some are long lived. I mean, some of my cockroaches next door are probably a couple of years old now. So, you know, they do live quite a long time. And even butterflies like monarchs, you know, the ones that migrate south from Canada, survive all the winter in Mexico and then all the way into spring to reach Texas again. So, you know, we think of butterflies as little ephemeral creatures, but they can live in that case for, you know, maybe kind of eight months, something like that. Well, you've answered a lot of the questions that I've always had about insects and wondered about.

54:28So I appreciate you coming on and doing that. Steve Nichols has been my guest. He is an Emmy Award winning producer and director of wildlife documentaries. And he is author of a book called Alien Worlds, How Insects Conquered the Earth and Why Their Fate Will Determine Our Future. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Steve. This was really great. It's a pleasure to talk to you anyway, so that's been great. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

54:58There's some pretty good evidence to believe that a short nap in the afternoon can make you smarter. Studies have shown that a nap from 10 minutes to a half an hour can have real cognitive benefits. You probably don't want to go much longer than a half an hour. Naps that extend past 30 minutes allow a person to move into a deeper sleep and increase something called sleep inertia. That's that groggy feeling you have when you first wake up. Even though the grogginess can pass pretty quick and not everybody gets it, many people find it unpleasant. Also, longer naps are associated with some health problems, including obesity, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol.

55:41But a short nap in the afternoon may be just the thing to help you get through the rest of the day. And that is something you should know. You know, this podcast has several thousand ratings and reviews on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, CastBox. If you put them all together, there's several thousand. We really like getting reviews. It's helpful to us. We read them all. it's also helpful to people who are looking for another podcast to listen to. So I would appreciate it if you would please leave a rating and review on whatever platform you listen on. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

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