It’s Bugs’ World and We’re Just Living In It with Jessica Ware

20:23No, we think that there's a single origin.

20:25Neil deGrasse Tyson:Convergent evolution, I think you guys call that. Yeah, but I think there's a single origin for eyes, a single origin for wings. And so insects in general have a head, a thorax, and an abdomen. They all have that. The abdomen in general has 10 segments, although there's some. Oh, so they're like, they're doing a 10-pack. Doing a 10-pack. The common ancestor all had a head, a thorax, an abdomen, and six legs. Got it. Yeah, the basal hexapods, which are the closest relatives to dragonflies and damselflies, they had no wings. They never evolved them. And then at some point 400 million years ago, boom, wings.

20:59Well, boom. I think that was, I believe that was the sound it made.

21:05Neil deGrasse Tyson:Pop, I got wings. But you have to learn how to fly. I know, that must be like a real head trip when you're like, suddenly I have these things. What do they do? I think they were really, what we think is that they were not good flyers in the beginning. Because the ones at first, like the sky was empty, right? So you could be as big as you want. There was nothing else really hunting you except for each other. So the first ones that flew were really large. Each wing was like 37 centimeters. They were pretty big. And they were really clumsy. They had really stiff wings and they were just kind of like, probably not great.

21:36But then as the sky filled up with other things, then wings tended to get a lot smaller. And there's a bunch of different parts of the wings for fast flight, for maneuverable flight, for aerodynamics.

21:48Neil deGrasse Tyson:And for hovering. Yeah, and for hovering. Because dragonflies hover. Yeah, I mean, they're not as good as hoverflies or for some other. There are some. For the pesky entomologists that's listening to this, they'll say they're not as good at hovering as some other things. But they can stay in one spot for a little while. Right, right. So is and then it's something like crickets that can't fly or. Well, crickets can't fly. They just more like glide. They do like a little hop and they kind of glide. Right. So in that is that just because like is that like they started with that evolutionary thing, but then they just didn't go forward with it.

22:22They were like, we don't really need that model. Yeah. I mean, they have the ingredients in in the kitchen. Right. They have the tools in the toolbox, but they're really focused on jumping. Dragonflies are going everywhere. They're going around the whole globe. So their wings are kind of designed for long-distance flight.

22:39Neil deGrasse Tyson:Wait a minute. You're saying they got big because no one was in the air to eat them, like a bird or something? Well, so there's a couple reasons why we think they got big, but the reason why they were able to be big and clumsy was because there was nothing else in there related to. What's this I remember about, because there was a time when there was much more oxygen in our air, and insects breathe through their skin, right? Not skin. Well, they have little spiracles. They have little holes that open and close and let air go in. And we used to think it was just that like high oxygen, so they were bigger.

23:10Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's what I read like long ago. Well, people have even like reared dragonflies in high oxygen environments, and they did end up significantly bigger than if they hadn't reared them in the high oxygen environments. But recent work just like hot off the presses this spring, not from our lab, but from collaborators in odinatology, they showed that they actually have giant kind of air sacs in their body. They actually held air with them. And it really wasn't necessarily because the oxygen was really high that they were able to be big. It's that they actually were able to carry their own air with them.

23:43Oh, it's like a built-in oxygen tank. Yeah, they had their own iron love. Oh, yeah, that's nice.

23:49Neil deGrasse Tyson:What did you call that field? Odonatology, yeah. Odonata is? That's dragonflies and damselflies. Yes. And so if you study odonata, you're an odinatologist. Yes. And your field is odinatology. Got it. Yeah. I'd never heard of that before. So that's nice. If you Google it, you often get dentistry things. Because there's another word that's related to dentistry that sounds very similar. So just like etymology, which is words, and entomology are similar. That gets confused if you do a quick Google. Yeah. And odontology and odinatology, you'll get those. sometimes you get hits for both. So be careful.

24:28Yeah, yeah. Be careful when you're Googling.

24:30Neil deGrasse Tyson:I will totally be careful next time. You might end up thinking that insects have a lot of teeth. Or, look, you want to see a beautiful picture of a dragonfly and then you get a picture of a root canal. You don't want that. You don't want that. So insects are all built on a basic model that apparently is highly successful. I mean, there are more insects in the world than any other kind of animal. In terms of abundance, that's true. Yeah. And in terms of number of species, also true. Especially given how many species there are, that's the evidence of how successful. Yeah. I mean, there's around the same number of species of dragonflies and damselflies as there are all of mammals.

25:06So if I asked you to name five mammals.

25:08Neil deGrasse Tyson:I don't like that. Well, I mean, it makes sense, though, because if you live in, I live in New York City, and I don't, like, ever run into, like, a fox or, like, you know, a capybara, but I do, on a daily basis, run into insects. Yeah, you don't run into a capybara? I don't either. Both mammals. Both mammals, yes. You know, so the numbers kind of make sense because they can infiltrate like every world. So insects as a branch in the tree of life has the capacity to be highly fit in almost any environment it encounters. They're like gentrifiers. They move in. They take over. So I can move from the countryside into a city and there are insects in the city.

25:51Yeah, we have a lot of insects in New York City.

25:54Neil deGrasse Tyson:Did any evolve here to be unique? We have a couple of species that we think are unique, like Manhattan. There's like a kind of ant. Yeah, Manhattan, which is a species that was described first here in New York City. There's... Wait, wait, what? Yeah, what? Is it? Well, I know. Is it like really well-dressed? Is it like... Is it like... Is it like, yeah. It wears a ball cap a lot and reads the New York Times. Does it know when to wear black? You know. It is black, actually. Is it black? Like, okay, that makes sense. It has to be. It's good for all seasons. I just feel like when they're wearing a black, then it doesn't matter whether the sex are around.

26:29Yeah, totally.

26:30Neil deGrasse Tyson:Is that mostly in Central Park or is it? No, there's, I mean, you could just walk right down the street and there's pavement ants that are having battles on the street. There's pavement ants that actually fight each other. You can see dragonflies flying up Fifth Avenue. I mean, this city is actually full of little bits of green space, right? Whether it's a park, you know, like a little bits of flowers that you have on your stoop or a tree. So I used to host a program for PBS called Nova Science Now, a spinoff of Nova. And one of our episodes, we went to the High Line before it was heavily developed.

27:04Neil deGrasse Tyson:The High Line had been abandoned for decades. It was just railroad tracks up there, okay, in Manhattan. And we go up there, there's like grass and there are insects. And I found a praying mantis. And I'm thinking, how does a praying mantis get into Manhattan? Yeah. What did it, does it hitch a ride on the ferry? Does it walk across the bridge? Manhattan is an island. It can do all of those things. It can also, they can glide with their wings. They can cling to a bit of bark and go across the Hudson River. They can hitch a ride on my car when I drive in from New Jersey. Like insects are highly mobile.

27:45And even though we think of praying mantises, they're not like long distance flyers. They get around. Well, and do they not miss their families? You know what I mean? Are they like always like cutting and running and then just like going to Manhattan? I think about that all the time.

27:58Neil deGrasse Tyson:If a fly gets into my car and then I don't get it out for another hundred miles, then it gets out. That's sad. Yeah, you're like, you live in Pennsylvania now, buddy. Not a lot of insects get to see Pennsylvania. Is that what you say to them? I say that sometimes when I'm bringing insects back from the field and I'm bringing them back to this building. I say, you know, not everybody gets to see New York. This is like actually a gift I've given you. That's to make her feel better before she puts the pin through its thorax. And murders them. Yeah, not a lot of insects get to see New York, right?

28:27So there's a lot of taxa that have been in the Northeast and species that have been in the Northeast for a really long time. And I mean like millions and millions of years. Some of them persist. Some of them we have extirpated. There's a lot of things that used to be in Manhattan that are not there now because of us.

28:46Neil deGrasse Tyson:Extrificated. Out. So when we build environments like the ones that we live in, things that end up being— Like cities. Like cities. Things that do well there are things that used to live on cliff faces, that used to live in areas where there was lots of impervious or hard surfaces. Like the rock doves, which we call pigeons. Like rock doves, like pavement ants. Pavement ants didn't evolve— That's a thing. Yeah. It's called pavement ants. Prehistoric pavement. But probably they were just on rocks. We basically made a rocky environment that a lot of species like to live in. And which ones have we extirpated?

29:23There's a lot, actually. We probably don't even know all the ones that were here. Because it's not like when people were first settling in Manhattan. And this is millennia ago. They were keeping meticulous logs of biodiversity per se. And then when Manhattan was colonized, I don't think people were either taking meticulous logs. There was the first entomologist, Thomas Say, in North America. He actually did keep records of all the things that were around. So because of that, we know that there are some cicadas that used to be here that are not here. We know that there's certain species that are no longer here.

29:55Neil deGrasse Tyson:They couldn't take the heat. The cicadas, ironically, couldn't take the noise. It just felt like it was too much competition with what they were doing. They couldn't make it here, so they couldn't make it anywhere. They couldn't make it anywhere. You know, I've heard that's true. Thank you, Frank Sinatra. I've heard that's true. One of the more successful bugs in New York, and I won't have the right word, but cockroaches. Tell me about, so they live with us. Yeah. They didn't create their own world. They are sharing our world and bed bugs. Okay? Yeah. So is this adaptive, I guess? There's only a tiny fraction of cockroaches that live with humans, right?

30:38And most of them.

30:39Neil deGrasse Tyson:Don't tell me that that's only a tiny fraction of all the cockroaches. Because it feels like all the cockroaches. You know what I mean? When you, like, walk down the streets of Manhattan at night, you're like, they're literally all here. No, there's, like, over 7 ,000 species in the order Blatodea, which are cockroaches, and the social cockroaches, which are termites. Those are all just one order. And most of them live outside of the human condition. They're living in forests and deserts and rainforests. So there's just a small number that have adapted to live inside of dwellings or to live inside with garbage and refuse.

31:10It's not us. It's the sewage, right? Like we make garbage. We make refuse. It's true.

31:16Neil deGrasse Tyson:They actually don't want to bother you. Yeah, it's not us. You turn on the lights, they scurry. They scurry. And the big ones, like you guys have the big ones? The big, we call them water bugs. Well, they're not water bugs because actually that's a classic landlord thing. They'll tell you you have water bugs so that you don't freak out and make them spray. But water bugs is actually a bug. It's in hemiptera. It's a totally different insect. A water bug is a completely different insect from a cockroach? Yeah. So if your landlord tells you that you have water bugs. It squashes under my foot in exactly the same way.

31:48Also, are all landlords entomologists? And I didn't know. I have had landlords, when I had cockroaches, the landlord told me those are water bugs. I was like, surely you just. I am an entomologist. I know this is not a water bug. It's not in Mipra. Hello. It's in Blaudia. And he said, how do you know you didn't bring them from work? I know. And I was like, I don't actually know. Yeah. He makes an excellent point. Yeah. Because it's also possible. Plus, if you go to her section of the museum, there's signs that say, no exterminators. We do. We actually, we do exterminate in some parts, but we actually have certain rooms that we don't exterminate because we have live, intentionally live insects in there.

32:27The big cockroaches we have, though, they are not native to here. The ones that are the tiny little guys. I grew up with really big ones in Palm Springs, California, in the desert. And they would sometimes, like, take flight a little. Yeah, the heat. If it's hot, even the ones that we have here, Paralpaneta and Americana, they'll fly. But they're actually originally from Africa. And they were brought over on the transatlantic slave trade in large numbers. So they're actually, like, they're adapted to be in hot environments. And when it's hot, they'll fly. So sometimes people will be really freaked out.

32:58This is like one more. New fear unlocked. Because I don't like roaches enough.

33:01Neil deGrasse Tyson:Flying roaches. New fear unlocked. It's traumatizing. Just stop. Yeah. If you were like not, like you should care about climate change. We all should. But if you were like, I'm on the fence about it, then as it gets warmer, cockroaches will take the skies. Let me go there. Okay. Two things. First, I heard tell that the world population of insects is on the decline. Yeah. My first inquiry with you. Does that relate at all to whatever impact climate change has on the world population of insects, on bugs? And do they migrate? Do they hang out? Do they spring forth? Are these connected? So insects, we think, are declining at a rate that we've never seen before.

33:48People after the Industrial Revolution, there's stuff in the literature that said, hey, I'm not sure, but I think this might have a negative impact on insects. And fast forward to the early 2010s, people started doing studies that showed that populations of a particular butterfly had dropped by 70%. Populations of this other species dropped by big numbers.

34:08Neil deGrasse Tyson:Bug zappers and raid spray are doing their job. Oh my gosh. Are they really? No. No. You know what it is? It's us. It's we change the habitat. We increase the temperature. We have now extreme weather. There's flooding. There's increased fire. All of those things are things that insects didn't evolve with, right? So we know that insects are declining at a rate that's faster than we've ever seen. But the problem is, is that all life that we think about, with the exception of maybe fish, right, it came after insects, right? So plants, they need insects to pollinate them. Birds eat insects. Fish eat insects.

34:48You know, mammals eat insects. We eat insects. In the absence of insects. What did she just say? I know. I'm like, we eat insects? Well, there was a trend. And maybe this is like leading to the kind, I don't know, of like insect snacks as like because they have a high source of protein. Yeah, ma 'am. What do you think of that trend?

35:05Neil deGrasse Tyson:I heard tell they're high protein. Yeah, they are high protein, low fat, depending on what you're eating. The water bugs and the cockroaches are actually very fatty. So if you were going to skip one, I would skip those ones. Okay. Okay, thanks. I'm writing that down. Totally writing it down. Cockroaches are not good for your diet. Not good for your diet. That's the one reason to not eat them, really. It's just about the calories. When you think about it, it's really about that. But I would say, like, my finger is on the pulse of tomorrow. I'm a young, hip, urban woman. And I think eating insects is cool.

35:38And people should all do it. Well, you're not concerned about us declining the population further by also eating them? I would not go eat street insects. I'm not going to go eat insects just to go and collect on Fifth Avenue. People, when they rear insects for protein, for cricket cookies or whatever, they're doing it in the same way that we rear cattle. Farms, yeah. You just said cricket cookies, like it's next to the Oreos and the chocolate chip on the shelf. Like you're selling it at the bake sale. Shouldn't it be? Cricket cookies. It shouldn't be? Okay.

36:08Neil deGrasse Tyson:I confess, I've had sauteed crickets before. It was good. The little ones like this big. It's popular. They're popular in Mexico, right? It's like a dish. I don't know. It was served to me once. Yeah. Yeah, it's a very common... It tasted like chicken. They're like kind of nutty. No, no, yeah, it tasted like a snack. I mean, just snack like you'd have at the bar. What I don't understand is we're not much different, other than the climate change part of this, we're not much different than we were 100 years ago, moving into cities, taking over the landscape. Why is there extra loss of insects today?

36:39I think urbanization is increasing at a rate that's much different than it was 100 years ago.

36:44Neil deGrasse Tyson:All that means is we are living on less and less of Earth's surface area. But we're expanding. Won't the insects like that? I think we're expanding, though, the amount of impervious surface, the amount of concrete, right? We're decreasing the amount of forest. We pollute the water. There's a lot of insects that are aquatic that dwell in fresh water. That kind of destroys their habitat. I was just recently driving. I forgot where. And I just noticed. I never thought to notice this before. I'm on a four-lane preway going in one direction. There's a big divider, and then there's four lanes coming the other way, and I'm just looking at the total surface area that that is.

37:21Neil deGrasse Tyson:It's huge. It's huge. And the lights that go over it, because we're going to have lights so that we can drive at night, that negatively impacts insects. Why? Well, there's insects eat less, caterpillars eat less, moths that communicate. They're flying kind of using the UV light to navigate with, fireflies that communicate with each other at night. Light, bad. Bad station. But aren't bug zappers evidence that we're smarter than insects? Because we know they're sensitive to UV. So let's make a UV light and then zap them. But we're dumber than we think, right? We shouldn't pat ourselves on the back because we designed those to get rid of mosquitoes and biting insects.

38:00And actually, like 90 % of what bug zappers kill are beneficial insects. They kill almost no mosquitoes. So actually, there's no sense in buying it. And so in a way, I kind of feel like that's kind of a lot.

38:13Neil deGrasse Tyson:Why can't we just get the bug zapper and then collect it all and just eat? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can the bug zapper also barbecue them and turn them to a delicious treat? Yeah, just a little channel goes over to the grill. Yeah, yeah. In a way, maybe it kind of also fricases them itself a little bit with their food. Yeah, a little bit. It does a little saute. A little fast barbecue. But also we're so bad at killing like the bugs that seem to be irritating everybody like ticks. Oh, so yeah. So ticks are not bugs. They're arachnids. It's not that we're bad at killing ticks. It's that because of climate change, because of changing temperatures, ticks from other regions are moving and they're expanding their ranges.

38:58That's why we have the Lone Star tick here, for example, which is the one that causes a meat allergy. It can carry a pathogen that can cause a meat allergy. That's because of us. We changed the climate, and now they've been able to move into our area.

39:10Neil deGrasse Tyson:So we've created habitats that previously were hostile to some varieties of insects. Now they can hang out and do the backstroke, and now we're affected by that because that was a place we created. Yeah, we created them. The catastrophe that we're seeing, we created, and we're kind of keeping it going. We could make decisions that would actually have really beneficial impacts on insects that we should make. Why don't we make it? I can't just go past this because I know people who've been bitten by the Lone Star tick. They can't. So it's not that they can't eat meat, apparently. They can't eat mammals.

39:47Neil deGrasse Tyson:So they can eat chicken and fish. So I heard. You know what I think? I think vegetarians created this in the lab. Yeah. They were like, what could we do? Alpha gal. That's a good. Yeah, but more like pescatarians created this in the lab, like a really specific subset. So I hear tell that in Martha's Vineyard, which is an island off of Cape Cod, a destination for the rich. There's an airport there. You take your private plane onto it. As one does. Famously, don't the Obamas go there? As one would do. I'm told that tick was so prevalent on that island that stores are now reducing their supply of meat for sale because no one's buying them.

40:31Neil deGrasse Tyson:and restaurants have menus for those who are thusly affected specifically maybe a cardiologist maybe these ticks are out for our health they're a gift reduce your red meat consumption and nobody did it and the cardiologist was like let's import some of this stuff from Lone Star

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43:22Neil deGrasse Tyson:This drop in population, is it just habitat or is there other things that affect them? Are they not finding mates? There are a lot of ways you can drop a population. So population is just a single species. So we're looking at, it's true across all the species of insects that we've looked at, right? So what we think is that for some things, it's water pollution. For some things, and that means that they can't, you know, they don't, they die. So they're not able to survive. For some things like fireflies, if it's light pollution, they can't actually see each other to find a mate, so they're not able to reproduce.

43:54Like, it kind of varies depending on what the species is.

43:57Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's why there are no fireflies in Times Square. I always wondered that. Yeah, there should be. I mean, they make these flashes, and the flashes are species-specific. They need to be able to see each other so they can see the flashes to know which species to mate with. I grew up in the desert, and we didn't have fireflies. And so then as an adult, when I was here in the summers, I was like, oh, my God, these are the coolest things I've ever seen. And still in the summer, I look at them with such awe. They make light with their bum. I mean, it's incredible. Butt light, we call it. Butt light.

44:27You know, I heard that.

44:29Neil deGrasse Tyson:Butt light. Yeah, it's a summer. It's a summer tree. But yeah, I mean, we should all be kind of sad, right? The things that we think about when we think about summer, like fireflies or monarch butterflies, like those are declining at such alarming rates. Monarchs have decreased by like 90 % since 1970. You know, when I was a kid, I saw them all the time. Now I hardly see any monarch butterflies. Yeah, it's us. We destroyed the habitat. They need milkweed. It's a specific plant that they've evolved to eat. And they have an arduous, long migratory route that goes down to Mexico and back. And they get hit by cars and what have you.

45:07So, I mean, we've made decisions in the past, and we're making decisions even right now that negatively impact insects.

45:13Neil deGrasse Tyson:All right, so I got to, this is the 900-pound gorilla in the room. Yeah. Okay? Some insects are prettier than others to the non-entomologist. You mean like head lice? That's a gorgeous one, right? I'm assuming. So I'm just. Neil is body-shaming insects, by the way. I just want to say that for the record. He's like, yeah, gnats aren't looks-maxing enough. Nobody. He's the mean girl part of the Star Talk episode. Nobody doesn't like ladybugs. They're nice. It lands on you. It's not going to bite you or sting you or inject you with venom. Okay. And so I can list insects that emotionally we're cool with.

45:51Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah. Okay? More humans have died at the hands of mosquitoes than have ever died in all wars we have ever fought against each other. Yeah. If we could render mosquitoes extinct from this world, none of us would complain. What would you do as an entomologist? If by that you mean that we would get rid of a specific kind of anopheles and a specific kind of Aedes, Aedes aegypti, those are the deadliest animals on the planet. Those are the ones that vector malaria, dengue, chikungunya, yellow fever. If we got rid of those two or three species complex, then yeah, I think that that would actually have immense help to the human population.

46:36While maintaining others. Yeah, there's thousands of other mosquitoes.

46:39Neil deGrasse Tyson:So the bats have plenty to eat. Yeah, bats, dragonflies. There's lots of things that eat mosquitoes, and there's thousands of species of mosquitoes that live outside the human condition. They're not vectoring diseases that affect humans. Those guys get to survive. Do you feel like there's a way to do that, that we can get rid of the bad ones and keep the good ones? They've been trying. So people have tried releasing sterile males that are just shooting deads that have no ability to impregnate a female. They've tried it a couple different ways, one with sterile males that they were irradiated, and one where they actually have a bacteria called Wobakia that actually makes males...

47:13It's like a draquois noir and the ladies just don't want to have anything to do with it. Is that what it is essentially? You know what it is? The Wobakia makes it so that... The Wobakia is transmitted by females. So the Wobakia changes it so that males are basically... Yeah, males are in very, very low numbers and only females survive. So females aren't fertilized. No eggs, no babies. They tried releasing dragonflies years ago, And dragonflies do eat mosquitoes in the juvenile stage and in the adult stage. But they don't like to eat.

47:44Neil deGrasse Tyson:Juvenile is still in the water? Yeah. Juvenile mosquitoes and juvenile dragonflies. Yeah. Or sitting mosquitoes. Sitting mosquitoes. Right? Because they're just in the water. Yeah. With a little siphon. Still water, not moving water. Yeah, still water. And dragonflies, as babies, as nymphs, they will eat mosquitoes. But they don't like to breed in large numbers on command. So they could never release them in large enough numbers. Because that would be the solution. Just put dragonflies everywhere. Do you know the film The Hellstrom Chronicle? No. Maybe my finger's not on the pulse of tomorrow.

48:14Am I not a young hip woman?

48:15Neil deGrasse Tyson:It was an apocalyptic documentary from the 1970s describing the future where insects take over the world. And they just eat all of our food supply. The Hellstrom Chronicle. Yeah. Check it out. It is a—I mean, people have— I've never forgotten it. I saw it, like, once in the 1970s. This idea that there's, quote-unquote, injurious insects, the ones that are coming— because they like the same things we like. They eat this, a lot of insects eat the same things we eat. That they would come for our crops, that they would take over, that they're out to get us, right? This kind of, they're all locusts.

48:47Neil deGrasse Tyson:This is the apocalyptic scenario. Yeah, but in reality, I think like, there's a very small number of grain, stored food pests or grain pests that we're worried about. Small number of species, but that doesn't mean they're not out there, ready to eat all of our corn. Yeah, I mean, if you don't put all of your corn in one giant pile, that's open to insects to go in there and eat it, then you're solid. You're good. And how about the boll weevil? Oh, the boll weevil. I mean, the boll weevil was an invasive species. Invasive species are also a source of insect decline because invasive species often can outcompete native species.

49:19Neil deGrasse Tyson:I think a boll weevil might be the only insect, whatever kind of bug it is. Yeah, beetle. Beetle. The only one that has a blues song named after it. Multiple. Because people did different versions. Oh, okay. There's a lead belly one that's very famous. Yes, that's the one I'm thinking of. There's a Bessie Smith did one. Multiple people did. because you can it's a blue yeah you can pop it in yeah because if you're picking cotton and there's a boll weevil eating all your cotton yeah where's our current like pop hits about lanternflies I know right that's what we really need because those are I feel like our modern irritation yeah what's a lanternfly well it's the shall I shall I I think you shall well is it fly or bug lantern bug lantern it's actually a bug that's very that's very astute as a fellow entomologist thank you so much I was very astute And you know what?

50:05Some things are arachnids and some things aren't. It's another thing I wanted to teach you all. No, but the lantern bug is like a thing that eats a bunch of everything, like trees and whatever. Yeah, it's got a sucking mouth part. It's got a sucking mouth part, not a licking mouth. Not a licking mouth, so it sucks the plant juice. And it's been in New York City for a few years now, and we've been told to stop them every time you see one. And they're sort of dumb. It's easy to stop them. Yeah. They don't, like, run away real fast or anything. You just, like, easily murder.

50:38Neil deGrasse Tyson:You got to watch out, though, because if you murder the ones easily, you're actually promoting fast ones. If you kill all the slow ones, because they're easy to kill. Yeah. You just made a whole generation of fast ones. Right. They're, like, adapting to be. Exactly. So what you should do is only go after the fastest ones. But then in the meantime, the slow ones are still eating all the trees or whatever. Well, they suck the, I mean. Okay, yeah, what are they doing? They're just sucking the plant sap, right? Okay. As we do when we make maple syrup. Yeah, in a lot of ways. They're maple syrup tappers, right?

51:11The population we think is basically becoming established in the Northeast. We tried scraping off their eggs because that was the other thing. Well, maybe we'd get rid of the eggs, and that really hasn't done anything. So sadly, we think that this is an invasive species, much like the bull weevil. It's just kind of here. I stomped one this morning. Should I stop stomping them?

51:30Neil deGrasse Tyson:You stomped a bull weevil? No, I mean— Where do you live? A lantern bag. When I was out in the field. When I was writing my blues songs. Yeah, I mean, we don't know that it's really making much of an impact. So the best, if you were to do anything, you know what you should do? Yeah. As a New Yorker, as all New Yorkers should do, is we should learn the insects in our neighborhood so we can prevent the next invasive species from becoming established. Because if you knew what was like on your walk to work, right, and you saw something that you weren't supposed to see that was unusual, you would tell someone sooner, and then you could prevent them from becoming established.

52:08Neil deGrasse Tyson:So if the pavement ants start lifting the slabs off of them.

52:15They're like jacked. They have little muscles on their... They work out in the yard.

52:21Neil deGrasse Tyson:All right, so a brief follow-on. I think you already went there, but I'm going to just bring closure to it. We have people among us who are saying, save the whales, save the porpoises, save this, save that. Nobody's ever said save the rats or save the leeches or save the any other parasitic. Save the maggots? The maggots. There you go. If you will. Thank you. Save the headhows. So what I'm asking is we are very species biased about what it is we want to declare that we want to save whereas all of these creatures are on God's green earth just trying to make a living. Yeah. It's not their fault that it's their job to suck your blood.

53:02Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah. That's not, don't blame them for that. Yeah, the bedbugs just trying to make it in New York City. And they're making it. What did they do before mattresses, by the way, bedbugs? I mean, I feel like the day mattresses were invented, bedbugs were like, guys, this is my time. But like, if you look, it's actually, if you like reading about human history, people have been writing about bedbugs for a really long time. because even when you had just clumps of straw, then there were bed bugs that were in there. And plus, lice, this is the most fascinating fact that I've learned about lice. Most fascinating, okay?

53:41Neil deGrasse Tyson:Head lice are genetically different from genital lice. Yeah, it's true. Even, okay, no, no, and so how does that happen? Wait, wait, wait, can I check, can I check? Okay, so go really far back, 30 ,000 years. We're hairy all over our bodies. The lice wouldn't know. There's just hair everywhere. Then when we started getting less and less hair, then we had a hair gap between our genital hair and the hair on our heads so that the speciation would have occurred around when we started becoming hairless in the major parts of our torso, orphaning one branch of the body lice from the other. I read that.

54:23Neil deGrasse Tyson:Is that still true? I think that's true, and I think we think that one is more closely related to the lice that gorillas have and one is more closely related to the lice that chimpanzees have. Wow. Which is which? I forget whether it was... I don't want to know. What are you going to do with this information? I don't know. I have a seven-year-old daughter. I want to say something fun when I have to... About who did lice at supper? About head lice. About things. About head lice. But you know what? Head lice is, you could tell your daughter this, everybody eventually gets head lice. People feel a lot of shame about it.

55:01But like little kids, they put their heads next to each other. And if you have lice, it's not that you're dirty or I felt guilty because my mom said, if you share hats, you're going to get head lice. And there was a head lice outbreak in my grade one class, you know, and I was convinced it was because Jennifer and I had shared a hat at recess. But guess what? Now that I'm a grown up entomologist, you could tell your daughter. It's just kind of a fact of lice. Hey! I see what you did there. I didn't even know that. So you contracted lice? Head lice, yeah. For the record. When she was a child. This was like 50 years ago.

55:35Not like yesterday. It was 50 years ago. And I felt a lot of, I felt very stressed about it. But it turns out, actually, that my mother, who's a high school teacher, there was also a head lice outbreak at her high school. So now I'm like, it wasn't even me. It wasn't even Jennifer's hat. Okay, I read and have reported on the fact that lice infestations are 10 times more frequent among white children than among black children.

56:05Neil deGrasse Tyson:And just wondering, were you white back then when you got the... It's like reverse racism with the lice? So they will go in any hair. It's easier sometimes to find them in hair that is straight. Straight. And people used to think that, and this maybe was true for a period of time from when Madam C.J. Walker invented hair pressing. That would have kept it out. Yeah. So if you were using lye in your hair or if you were using chemical pressing, as we called it, then you would, to straighten your hair, then you would have been less likely to have lyes. The lyes doesn't stand a chance. That doesn't stand a chance.

56:42But if you were having natural hair, which I had natural hair, then you really should have your head checked for lyes. So this actually really happened. And my school, they would have the moms from the neighborhood come in and do a lice check. But the mom said to the three black kids, my twin and I and this other black kid, we don't need to check your hair because black kids don't get lice. But I had lice. I had it and they didn't check it. And then I was scratching my head at home and my mom, and we're all scratching our head. And then my mom was like, oh. And then she said, oh, we all have lice.

57:15And I said, oh, no, they said we don't get lice because black kids don't get lice. and my mom was really mad and she went and she yelled at the principal because it actually is, it's not whether you have black hair or white hair, it's whether you chemically, if you did a chemical perm, you also, like if you were white guys.

57:28Neil deGrasse Tyson:But also straight, if you said the louse likes straight hair better, you're more, so it's a relative, it's not that black people don't get it, it's that it's just less likely. It's not, well I mean, it's not that they like straight hair better, it's just it's easier for us to find it in straight hair. So we often have overlooked, like in my case, they could have checked my hair and they didn't. I had a lot of lice. Okay. It was 50 years ago. Just to underscore, this was 50 years ago. Is that the day you became an entomologist? I hated it. Oh, my gosh. I really didn't like it. But nowadays, there's actually a lot of things that you can do if you have lice.

58:06God forbid your daughter has lice. Call me. Okay. There's ways you can treat it without chemical insecticide. All right.

58:13Neil deGrasse Tyson:What is the size of the smallest and the largest bug? Oh, that's a good question. So there are these little tiny, tiny, tiny things called fairy flies that are just a couple of millimeters. And they're really, really tiny. That's probably the smallest one. And they fly? They can fly, but, I mean, come on. They're very, very tiny. So they're not going long. Other than by wind. They can be blown by wind. And the biggest ones, in terms of length, there's some really, really long stick insects, Phasmatodea. In terms of weight. Stick ones. Those are the ones that look like sticks on, like, tree sticks.

58:47There's ones that are longer than about as long as my arm here. Oh, wow. But then there are really heavy.

58:53Neil deGrasse Tyson:Are those like in Brazilian rainforest kind of bugs? Vietnam or Asia. There's lots of tropical. Tropical. Yeah, tropical. Although you can get some pretty big ones in Texas if you go back there. There's some pretty big ones in Texas. But then in terms of mass, I would say there are some beetles that are really, really pretty heavy. What are we talking? Like an orange, an apple? Like a navel orange. The weight of a navel orange. What? That's wild. And how big? Let's say navel. How about this? Let's say navel orange in weight and size. That grosses me out so hard. No, it's so good. Because if you step on that, it would go pop.

59:31But you wouldn't. But you wouldn't, of course. I, of course, possibly would, depending on the situation. I'm so sorry. Because to see that, you'd actually have, assuming that you spend most of your time in New York City, you would have traveled somewhere to see it. and you wouldn't be like, oh, I'm here now, squash. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not like in Manhattan apartment. You don't go out of your way.

59:50Neil deGrasse Tyson:Right, right, right. And I remember reading National Geographic and they had an issue on beetles and one of them was the Goliath beetle. Yeah. That was something like this big? Yeah. I mean, I would say they're the navel orange, a big navel orange size. Okay. Yeah, and they're heavy. Are beetles bugs? They're not. They're coleoptera. They're holometabolous insects that have an egg. Holometabolous. Non-holometabolous. The egg, larva, pupa, complete rearrangement, and then adult. And there's more beetles than there is almost anything on earth described right now, although I think that bees, ants, and wasps are catching up because people are describing all of those right now.

1:00:29Neil deGrasse Tyson:Please give us Darwin's quote about beetles, and we will end on that. Or Haldane. Could I give you Haldane's quote? Oh, JBS Haldane? Yeah, okay. How about if I give that one? Okay. Although Darwin did work on beetles. That was the thing he worked on first. But Haldane said that God must have an inordinate fondness for beetles. Given how many, that's the quote I was looking for, Haldane. He's got some good quotes. Yeah, a page turner. Let's go for a page turner. Well, Jessica, my gosh. I had all this pent-up bug energy. But can we do this once a year? Yeah, let's do it insect time. Yes. Once a year.

1:01:05I mean, your entire thing fascinates me. Just a year. And your interest in it, your origin story, which I've decided is with the lice.

1:01:16Neil deGrasse Tyson:It's a lousy story. It was 50 years ago. And you've got dragonfly earrings. I have two different kinds, dragonfly earrings. And I have a beetle ring as well. I went full insect. I mean, you're repping insects hard today. They need a little love. When the insects take over, she'll be their queen. we need someone out advocating for them because everyone really hates them so this is like a good they need you on PR we should all love the insects we gotta save the insects if we want to save ourselves well again thank you Jessica thank you friend and colleague just across the way here at the American Museum of Natural History right up here on the upper west side of New York City we are here in my office at the Hayden Planetarium and we're gonna come back to you with more insect queries, for sure.

1:02:13And, McGeean, your podcast. My podcast is Fake the Nation. Have I ever been on your podcast? You have. You've been on it a few times. Not lately. We're going to bring you back. The people need to hear your takes. You don't call. You don't write.

1:02:26Neil deGrasse Tyson:You don't text. I know. This is, yeah, we will bring you back, and now that you have this bug energy. Fake the Nation. and we can catch you. Are you a regular on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me? That's right. Yeah, tune in to Fake the Nation, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. We'll find you there. We love you. All right. This has been the bug edition of StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Keep looking up. We're down at the bugs.

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