Entomologist Dr. Jessica Ware joins WIRED to answer the internet's burning questions about the world of insects. Are cockroaches so resilient that they'd survive a nuclear war? Why do praying mantis behead their partners after mating? Why do crickets chirp? Are tarantulas dangerous? Answers to these questions and many more await on Insect Support.
For information about the American Museum of Natural History, visit https://amnh.org or connect with the Museum on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/c/AmericanMuseumofNaturalHistory
The footage of bees at 10:40 is part of the following article by Hiruni Samadi Galpayage Dona, Cwyn Solvi, Amelia Kowalewska, Kaarle Makela, HaDi MaBouDi, Lars Chittk: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347222002366
Its use is possible under the following creative commons license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Director: Lisandro Perez-Rey
Director of Photography: Charlie Jordan
Editor: Richard Trammell
Expert: Dr. Jessica Ware
Line Producer: Jamie Rasmussen
Associate Producer: Brandon White
Production Manager: Peter Brunette
Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark
Casting Producer: Nick Sawyer
Camera Operator: Constantine Economides
Sound Mixer: Austin Ramsey
Production Assistant: Shanti Cuizon-Burden
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Post Production Coordinator: Stella Shortino
Supervising Editor: Erica DeLeo
Assistant Editor: Andy Morell
For information about the American Museum of Natural History, visit https://amnh.org or connect with the Museum on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/c/AmericanMuseumofNaturalHistory
The footage of bees at 10:40 is part of the following article by Hiruni Samadi Galpayage Dona, Cwyn Solvi, Amelia Kowalewska, Kaarle Makela, HaDi MaBouDi, Lars Chittk: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347222002366
Its use is possible under the following creative commons license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Director: Lisandro Perez-Rey
Director of Photography: Charlie Jordan
Editor: Richard Trammell
Expert: Dr. Jessica Ware
Line Producer: Jamie Rasmussen
Associate Producer: Brandon White
Production Manager: Peter Brunette
Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark
Casting Producer: Nick Sawyer
Camera Operator: Constantine Economides
Sound Mixer: Austin Ramsey
Production Assistant: Shanti Cuizon-Burden
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Post Production Coordinator: Stella Shortino
Supervising Editor: Erica DeLeo
Assistant Editor: Andy Morell
Category
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TechTranscript
00:00On my arm right now is a cave roach.
00:02Now on my hair.
00:04One second.
00:05I'm entomologist Jessica Ware from the American Museum
00:08of Natural History.
00:09Let's answer your questions from the internet.
00:11This is Bug Support.
00:17We have a question from Reddit about praying mantises.
00:20Why do praying mantis behead their partners after sex?
00:23So not all praying mantises actually
00:26eat their partners after sex, but many of them do.
00:29Because it's a good strategy for the female.
00:31So females are about to lay an egg case
00:33and that takes a lot of energy.
00:35Eating your mate is a really great food source
00:38because it's right there, it's readily available.
00:39You've just gotten, hey, you've just gotten the sperm
00:42that you need to fertilize your eggs.
00:43It's the ultimate nuptial gift that the male gives her.
00:46And it benefits him because if the egg case is well provisioned
00:51then the chances are good that it will hatch.
00:53The babies will survive to adulthood
00:55and then his genes will be passed on to the next generation.
00:58This mantis you can see is kind of camouflaged.
01:00So mantises mimic lots of different things.
01:03What this mantis is trying to look like is lichen.
01:06Some mantises look like leaves, some look like flowers,
01:09like the orchid mantis, and some look like sticks.
01:12We have a question from the Ask Science subreddit.
01:15What is the internal anatomy of a bug like?
01:17Mostly just goo.
01:18They don't have a circulatory system.
01:20They do have nerves that kind of float throughout them
01:22as well as fat bodies.
01:23But the external part of the insect is very interesting.
01:27That's made up of their exoskeleton.
01:29They have, like all hexapods, three pairs of legs.
01:32They have a head, a thorax, and an abdomen.
01:34For the winged insects, then in their thorax,
01:37which is divided up into three segments,
01:38the last two segments have pairs of wings.
01:41So there's two pairs of wings for a total of four.
01:43Pawsrev25 asks, would cockroaches survive a nuclear war?
01:48Probably not, that heat and radiation ultimately would be
01:51so much that they would die.
01:52But we do know that cockroaches can withstand
01:55a lot of radiation, but also they can live
01:58a really long time without eating.
02:01A lot of cockroaches have these organs in their body
02:03called mesetocytes.
02:05It allows them to store the food that they eat as nitrogen.
02:08And then during times of environmental stress
02:10or when they don't have food available,
02:12they basically re-metabolize the food
02:15that's in the mesetocytes.
02:16They can just eat from what is already within them.
02:19And then instead of excreting,
02:21they actually just restore the contents back
02:23in the mesetocytes.
02:24So there are some species of cockroaches
02:26that actually don't have excretion whatsoever.
02:29That leads to this kind of myth
02:30that they'd be around even after a nuclear war.
02:33They probably would do better than you and I would do.
02:35That's for sure.
02:36This is Gromfederina, a type of hissing cockroach.
02:40Ooh, they're sometimes called that because
02:42if you were to go to Madagascar
02:44and find one of these on a tree, if you were to kind of tap them,
02:48their response would be to kind of push air
02:51out of their spiracles or their breathing apparatus.
02:54So it's called a hissing cockroach.
02:55And they make a very good pet.
02:57You don't have to feed them very much.
02:58And they're pretty quiet.
02:59At InkIV asks,
03:01Do you think the Bugs Life movie is accurate
03:03to what a bug's life is really like?
03:05Because I feel like it is.
03:06The Bugs Life movie portrays locusts as jerks.
03:10Sometimes they like to eat the same food that we like to eat.
03:12And so we kind of villainize them.
03:14But honestly, like Bugs Life movie is not the movie
03:17that I would want to pick apart.
03:18I would want to pick apart the movie ants.
03:21You know, I have strong feelings for you.
03:24That would not happen because the queen releases
03:26a perfuma pheromone is what we call it.
03:28That is basically changing the behavior of the colony
03:31so that the workers do their jobs
03:32and the soldiers do their jobs.
03:34But it also kind of suppresses any reproductive urges
03:37and suppresses the development of the genitals.
03:40In the ants movie,
03:41the Woody Allen and Sylvester Stallone characters
03:44are working as workers in this ant colony.
03:46Anytime you see bees or ants,
03:48all of the individuals that you're usually seeing are female.
03:51The workers and the soldiers in the colony are sisters.
03:54Teddy Stay Gasson asks,
03:56I asked Google, what's the most dangerous animal?
03:59Why Google said a mosquito?
04:01See, I knew I wasn't tripping when people made fun of me
04:04of how terrified I was.
04:06Actually, mosquitoes have killed more people
04:08than any other animal.
04:09They are the deadliest animal on the planet.
04:12Not because mosquitoes themselves are deadly,
04:14but they vector deadly diseases.
04:16So diseases like malaria, yellow fever, chikungunya,
04:20dengue fever, West Nile virus,
04:22Eastern equine encephalitis, and so on.
04:24They all kind of hijack the mosquitoes' natural feeding system
04:28and then get transported into humans
04:30and they can cause severe illness or death.
04:33Males don't drink blood.
04:34Males, they drink flower nectar.
04:36But females have been selected to also give an injection
04:40into whatever they're biting,
04:42a pain reliever and anticoagulant,
04:44to try and prevent themselves from being squashed.
04:46When the anticoagulant and the pain reliever are injected,
04:49that's when the pathogen actually goes into your body.
04:52Jay Gonzalez CS asks,
04:54where do butterflies get their pigmentation
04:56and wing patterns from?
04:57Why do they have different wing patterns?
04:59Butterflies and moths have scales that coat their wings
05:03and the scales themselves can have pigment,
05:05but there also can be kind of bumps and ridges on the surface
05:08that when light bounces off of it,
05:10it gets perceived as color.
05:12Their whole body could be colored
05:13or it could just be patterns on their wings.
05:15But then there are also color patterns that are related
05:18to kind of hiding in plain sight, which we call camouflage.
05:21And sometimes butterflies actually try and mimic each other.
05:25Take for example, a monarch butterfly.
05:27Monarchs are kind of neat
05:28because they have aposematic or warning coloration
05:31and it communicates something to birds
05:34that if you eat me, you'll probably barf.
05:36They have these distasteful compounds
05:38that they sequester in their body.
05:40And there are other types of butterflies
05:42that have kind of mimicked the appearance
05:44of a monarch butterfly.
05:45So that way they could get the same type of protection.
05:48One example of this is the Viceroy.
05:50It looks a lot like a monarch.
05:51The difference is that it actually has
05:53this additional dark patterned vein
05:55that goes down in the hind wing.
05:57The color patterns of butterflies and moths,
05:59sometimes it's camouflage, sometimes it's mimicry,
06:02sometimes it's males communicating with females.
06:05At Reina de la Isla asks,
06:07are the scarab beetles from the mummy actually a thing?
06:09Luckily, no.
06:11Scarabs mostly are consuming poop.
06:13They make balls of dung, they lay their eggs on it,
06:16their larvae hatch and eat poop.
06:17They don't eat humans.
06:19Fox McCloid asks,
06:20how do dragonflies and flies coordinate flight while mating?
06:24I wouldn't necessarily say it's super coordinated.
06:26Males clasp the female behind the back of her head
06:29with the tip of their abdomen, which is called the claspers.
06:32The female then brings her abdomen up
06:34to the male's second penis because they have two penises.
06:38It takes a really long time for them to mate,
06:40sometimes like 20 minutes.
06:41Females can mate multiple times.
06:43She has two sperm storage organs,
06:45short-term storage and long-term storage.
06:47We don't know how she chooses
06:48which sperm to put in which one,
06:49but then the males wanna ensure paternity.
06:52So they use their secondary penis
06:54to kind of like scrape out the previous male sperm.
06:57You can see that the male has kind of like a little bump
07:00near the base of its abdomen.
07:01And that bump is this secondary penis.
07:04And it kind of goes out like that.
07:05And then the sperm is transferred to the female.
07:08And then they fly together in this kind of copulatory wheel
07:11as we call it, which looks like a heart.
07:12It's kind of like an aerodynamic feat
07:14that males are able to do this.
07:16If you wanna catch a dragonfly,
07:18catching mating dragonflies are the easiest ones to catch.
07:21Sometimes the male will stay attached to the female,
07:23still holding onto the back of her head
07:25while she lays her eggs in the water.
07:27So they're not the most coordinated, I would say,
07:29but somehow they manage.
07:31At Sage Tanaya asks,
07:32so do mosquitoes have a specific blood type
07:34that they can have or does it not matter?
07:36How many mosquitoes carry HIV?
07:38Mosquitoes don't vector at HIV.
07:40It's not something to be concerned about.
07:42And they don't themselves have a certain blood type.
07:45They have something called hemolymph
07:46and it just kind of flows in their open smushy body.
07:48Often people wonder,
07:50do they prefer to have a certain kind of blood?
07:52Like is O blood type the best type of blood?
07:54Some people tell me, oh, I have A blood type,
07:56I get eaten all the time.
07:58No, it doesn't matter whether you have O, A or B,
08:01you will be equally likely to be bitten by a mosquito.
08:04Some people are very allergic
08:06to that kind of cocktail that the mosquito gives you.
08:09So they end up with really big bumps
08:10or really itchy bumps, almost like welds.
08:13Often people will say,
08:14well, I never get bit by mosquitoes.
08:15You're probably all being bitten by mosquitoes.
08:17It's just that some of you are reacting more than others.
08:20From the biology subreddit,
08:22how closely are bugs related to crustaceans?
08:25Is a lobster basically an ocean cockroach
08:27or is it completely different?
08:28If you looked at a phylogeny or a tree of life
08:31of the group of animals called arthropods,
08:33you would see the crustaceans, things like lobsters,
08:36and the hexapods, things like insects,
08:39which is the group to which cockroaches belong.
08:41So lobsters are very related to cockroaches.
08:43You could call them an ocean cockroach,
08:45but you could also call them an ocean dragonfly,
08:48an ocean true bug, an ocean spotted lanternfly.
08:50So at Hot Sauce Mommy asks,
08:52why is everyone afraid of tarantulas?
08:54Tarantulas are not the bad guys.
08:56There's actually no recorded deaths from tarantulas.
08:59All tarantulas have venom,
09:01but the venom usually is not anything
09:02that's gonna kill a human.
09:04They do sometimes eat big things.
09:06Sometimes people have seen them eat lizards or snakes
09:08or birds even, but they're not out to get us.
09:11They're not out to harm humans in any way.
09:13They're slow moving ancient arachnids.
09:16Tarantulas can be really colorful.
09:17There are blue ones, there are pink ones,
09:19there are ones that have like kind of this metallic sheen.
09:22These are perhaps the fuzziest of the arachnids.
09:25They have hairs on their bum called urticating hairs,
09:28which are barbed hairs that they can kind of kick off
09:31with their feet and they can be irritating.
09:32And that's one of their methods of defense.
09:34You can eat tarantulas.
09:36There are groups of people that actually roast them over fire.
09:39And then you break the legs off like you would crabs.
09:42And then you suck the contents out.
09:44The two structures that are kind of facing forward
09:46are her fangs or her chelicera.
09:48She's kicked some hairs off of her bum already.
09:51She's kind of got a naked bum.
09:52And their toes are very cute.
09:54So they're not the bad guys.
09:55At Franman56 asks,
09:57why the F do crickets chirp?
09:59Can they hear themselves?
10:00So male crickets chirp as part of a communication to females.
10:04One thing they're communicating is that they have probably a lot of energy.
10:10They often do it during the hottest time of day.
10:12That probably also signals to the female that you're a pretty healthy male.
10:16They're also species specific.
10:17So it's telling the female, I'm the same species as you.
10:20So I might be someone that you want to mate with.
10:22At Scrumtelicentness asks, how do bug repellent sprays work?
10:27They work by basically just jamming the chemical sensory apparatus of the mosquito.
10:31So mosquitoes have antennae and they have these little chemical scensilla
10:35and odor molecules kind of bind to the scensilla,
10:38send an electrical impulse to the brain.
10:40Usually the scent that they're picking up on is our carbon dioxide or lactic acids.
10:45But if you spray DEET, it actually binds to the chemical scensilla
10:49and it actually blocks the sense of smell.
10:51They'll still land on you and feed on you.
10:53But it just makes it harder for them to sense where you are.
10:56At Kochman asks, how do you have a stare down with an insect with compound eyes?
11:00Which lens am I supposed to look at?
11:02Insect compound eyes are made up of what we call omatidia or lenses.
11:06Dragonflies have tens of thousands of omatidia.
11:09Light basically passes through it, gets kind of bounced around
11:12and ultimately sends a signal to their cluster of ganglia that we call their brain.
11:17Insects also have light sensing organs, which are called ocelli.
11:20So I suppose if you wanted to stare down an insect,
11:22you could also stare at their ocelli, but they probably won't see you.
11:26Their ocelli just tells light and dark.
11:27So dragonfly eyes, because their omatidia are kind of arranged in the front of their eye,
11:32all the way around to the back of their head,
11:33they're actually able to see a pretty wide arc around them.
11:37Their eyes are not totally attached to their body.
11:39They have these hooks in the back of their neck.
11:41It's called the head arrestor system.
11:42When they're flying, the hooks are engaged and their head is very stable.
11:45But when they land, the hooks detach and then they can kind of look around and move their head.
11:50They're able to see a lot of different colors, which makes sense,
11:52because dragonflies are very colorful and they use color for communication.
11:56They're really using their eyes for their vision to catch their food.
11:59They have a 98% success rate.
12:01So they're really, really effective predators.
12:03Kristen Fung wants to know,
12:05How much do insects know?
12:07What do we know about bug consciousness?
12:09I would say we don't know very much about bug consciousness.
12:11For a long time, people thought bugs didn't have consciousness,
12:14and that perhaps insects were just hardwired to do certain behaviors over and over again until they died.
12:19Now we know that insects can make decisions. We know that they can learn.
12:23So there was a study by Lars Chitka.
12:25They gave bees a series of little balls they could play with.
12:29There was no reward or treat that they got for doing so, but they seemed to engage in this behavior.
12:34And the researchers interpreted that as play.
12:37And if they do that, maybe insects have consciousness.
12:40We often, especially in TV and movies, talk about a collective consciousness or a hive mind.
12:45In the movie Starship Troopers, they had that.
12:48Things like ants moving as a group, where the bodies of the ants are kind of attached to each other.
12:52When people saw behaviors like that, they thought,
12:54Oh, maybe these insects are acting with one collective mind.
12:58But really, they're just communicating by these chemical cues that they can pick up from each other.
13:02Is that a way that you could have a hive mind? Maybe.
13:05Poem 170 asks, Are scorpions insects?
13:08No, they're not insects. They're arachnids.
13:10They have these palpi that they use to grasp their prey.
13:13And then they have this telsin with a sting, which has a cocktail of chemicals, neurotoxins.
13:18Depending on the size of the prey, they will have a different chemical cocktail that they use.
13:22They kind of swing this forward, sting or immobilize their prey.
13:25And they bring it towards their mouth parts.
13:27And then their mouth parts, they have chelicera or fangs.
13:30They would inject something that would liquify their food.
13:33And then they would drink it through the straws that are their mouth parts.
13:36Let me show you a different type of arachnid.
13:37It is called a tailless whip scorpion.
13:39And it's called a whip scorpion because it has really long legs.
13:42The ends of which are kind of like little whips.
13:45And they kind of bring food towards their mouth
13:48that are then caught with their jaws.
13:50If you look at that, the legs are like real whips.
13:53Just whoosh, whoosh.
13:54There are these long spines that you can see.
13:57And they use that to kind of puncture their prey items
14:00as they're bringing them towards their mouth parts.
14:02They're really nothing to be scared of,
14:04even though they sometimes move in a way that can be startling.
14:07She got me pretty good.
14:08When I tried to pull her out, they have these little spines on their legs.
14:11Are you bleeding?
14:13No, I'm good.
14:13I'm good.
14:14But she got me pretty good.
14:17For the sake of us all asks,
14:19how do certain insects like the leaf bug look like, well, a leaf?
14:23Well, over long periods of evolutionary time,
14:26phasmatodea have evolved to mimic things.
14:29And what they usually mimic are either swaying leaves or sticks.
14:33There's changes to their genes.
14:35There's also changes to their phenotype or their overall appearance
14:39that occurred over hundreds of millions of years.
14:42But sometimes they start out like this juvenile
14:44where they might mimic an ant or they might mimic a stick.
14:47As they get older and older, they look more and more
14:50like just basically a swaying leaf.
14:52Sometimes they look like a leaf that is slightly decaying.
14:54Sometimes it looks like a fresh leaf.
14:56I also have a stick-like phasmatodean.
14:59You can get these in New Jersey.
15:00They tend to stay pretty still, all stick insects,
15:04whether they are the ones that look like sticks
15:06or the ones that look like leaves.
15:07They all are vegetarians.
15:08So they're just kind of chowing down on leaf material.
15:11Son of Nothing asks, how do insect antennae work?
15:14So insect antennae have these tiny little pits in them.
15:18And inside are these little chemosensilla.
15:21There are odor molecules.
15:23Sometimes it's a pheromone.
15:25Sometimes it's things that they're interacting with in the environment.
15:28Those odor molecules kind of bind to the sensilla.
15:32And that triggers an electrical impulse that goes to the brain
15:36that tells this insect, in this case this cockroach,
15:38something about what it's tasting or what it's smelling.
15:41So on my arm right now is a blabrous or a cave roach.
15:45Now on my hair.
15:46One second.
15:47One second.
15:48I use a lot of coconut oil in my hair and I think she's probably like,
15:52what is going on?
15:53You can see that the antennae are touching constantly.
15:55And that is her kind of trying to smell her surroundings
15:59and figure out what is happening.
16:01This cave roach you would commonly see in Central and South America,
16:04often on the barks of trees, especially if you're out at night.
16:07They're vegetarians, they're decomposers,
16:09and they help kind of shape the forests that we have.
16:12That hair product really freaked her out.
16:15For ants and termites, they use chemo sensation a lot
16:18to tell whether or not individuals they're interacting with
16:21are from the same nest as them.
16:23Whenever you see something that has really big or really long antennae,
16:26that tells you that it's probably smelling a lot.
16:29Things like dragonflies have very small antennae
16:31because they're visual predators.
16:33Smacksandwand asks,
16:34Either insects are getting really good at avoiding car windscreens,
16:38or there simply aren't any insects anymore.
16:40So I think Smacksandwand is remembering what it was like when I was a kid,
16:44where you would drive along on the highway,
16:46your windshield would be covered with smushed bugs.
16:48We know that insects are declining at a rate that we've never seen before.
16:52There was a study that came out in 2025 for North American butterflies
16:55that suggested that some species of butterflies have declined
16:58just in the last 20 years by up to 98 to 99%.
17:02We think that there's many causes of this decline.
17:04Land use change, our reliance on insecticides, climate change,
17:08all of that together means that when you're out,
17:10you hear fewer insects, you see fewer insects,
17:12and when you're driving in your car,
17:14you have fewer of them that kind of splatter against your windshield.
17:17Here's a question from the explainlikem5 subreddit.
17:20If you place a same species ant from a colony to a new colony with other same ants,
17:26will it be accepted or rejected, or it doesn't matter to other ants?
17:30Ants in general are very warlike,
17:33so they don't like to interact with other individuals,
17:35even from the same species.
17:36They can smell when there's an ant that's nearby that's not part of their nest,
17:40and they will go to war.
17:41And definitely ants from different species are often at war.
17:44We have a question from the ant subreddit.
17:46Which ants have the most effective armies?
17:48Like, hypothetically, if there were an ant world war,
17:51which ant species would win?
17:53Probably Argentine ants.
17:54For some reason, Argentine ants are actually able to move together
17:58as like a huge group, a super colony.
18:00These super colonies of Argentine ants are hundreds of thousands of individuals.
18:04It really does look like a black river.
18:06When I lived in Costa Rica at a field station,
18:08we'd have all of our stuff out.
18:09We'd see the ants coming.
18:10We'd leave the kitchen.
18:11They'd come through.
18:12They eat everything.
18:13Kind of like in a cartoon.
18:14Every, you know, carrot, every apple was stripped.
18:17You know, they can really eat a lot in a very short period of time.
18:20So they are very good at what they do,
18:21kind of consuming things as they move.
18:23Some people say that all of South America is one giant Argentine ant group.
18:27We have another question from the ant subreddit.
18:30Why are ant colonies so loyal to their queen?
18:32Well, that has to do with their genetics.
18:34So ants are very closely related to each other.
18:37A lot of insects have sexual reproduction,
18:38where there's a male gamete and a female gamete,
18:42and they come together to form a zygote.
18:44And that zygote is what we call diploid.
18:46It has components from one individual and another individual.
18:49But what the queens do is she actually clones herself by taking just one of her eggs,
18:54and they make a male, and so it only has half of the information.
18:58We call that haploid.
18:59That male is what's called a drone.
19:01It mates with the queen, and then it dies.
19:03I'm only related to my kids by 50%, right?
19:06Because I had a parent that gave 50%, and I gave 50%.
19:09Ants that are in a colony that are sisters,
19:11they're related to each other by 75%.
19:13The goal of all species, we think,
19:15is to get as many copies of your genes into the next generation as possible.
19:19So we think that's part of what drives the social behavior in ants.
19:23That's why so many members of the colony work together cooperatively.
19:26They're loyal to the queen, who they're really closely related to,
19:29and they're really closely related to their sisters.
19:32At Age Papers asks,
19:33Why and how do termite kings and queens live so long?
19:36Some termite kings and queens, especially queens, can live like 20 years.
19:41Her body just becomes distended as this one giant kind of sack of eggs.
19:45The longer time that you're around putting out babies,
19:49the greater opportunity there is for you to pass your genes on to the next generation.
19:53So there might be this evolutionary drive for queens to live a long time
19:56to maximize their reproductive output.
19:58Some of the day-to-day strife that workers and soldiers have to interact with,
20:02warring ants that come by, anteaters, you name it.
20:06The kings and queens don't usually have to face that.
20:08So they have a pretty cushy life, and that usually allows them to live their full lifespan.
20:13So let me show you what a king and queen termite would look like.
20:17So in termites, the only cast that has wings that can fly are the reproductive cast.
20:22So that's the king and the queen.
20:24The wings are like, not great.
20:26They can't really fly very far.
20:28So termite society, like other social insects, they have a really complicated caste system.
20:34So there's the reproductive cast, the kings and queens.
20:36Then there's soldiers that do a lot of defense for the colony.
20:40The workers do everything.
20:41They make the colony.
20:42They also feed the queen.
20:43They care for the queen.
20:44They groom the queen.
20:45They care for the young.
20:46They'll bang their heads against the wall to kind of communicate with each other.
20:49They have a crypt where they carry their dead in some species.
20:53They have a nursery or an infirmary.
20:54So it's very sophisticated.
20:56So from the insect subreddit, why do dragonflies have indicators slash black marks on their wings?
21:02Dragonflies have a terror stigma.
21:04It looks like a little dot.
21:05It's near the tip of their wing.
21:07Sometimes it's very long.
21:08Sometimes it looks like a little square.
21:10Sometimes it's black, but sometimes it's not.
21:12Sometimes it's kind of yellow.
21:13Sometimes it's like spangled or multicolored.
21:16Dragonflies can fly really fast.
21:18Some of them can fly like 30 miles an hour.
21:20So maybe having this terror stigma helps stabilize the wing.
21:24What we do know about terror stigma is that they're probably a pretty recent feature.
21:28When you look at fossil dragonflies, especially very old fossils,
21:31many of them don't have terror stigma.
21:33Dragonflies or something that looked like a dragonfly was probably the first thing to fly.
21:37So before birds, before bats, before pterosaurs, before any other insect.
21:41And they flew during the carboniferous period, which is 350 million years ago.
21:46Each wing was around 37 centimeters.
21:48So it had a total of about a two foot wingspan.
21:51They were just massive.
21:52User Erebus asks, why were dragonflies massive in that time period before the dinosaurs?
21:58When people have tried to rear modern dragonflies in high oxygen environments,
22:03they ended up being slightly larger.
22:05So we think oxygen is part of it.
22:07Oxygen levels were a lot higher when these massive dragonflies, meganerity, meganeropsis,
22:11when they were flying around in the carboniferous period.
22:14But also it was that there was nothing else in the sky.
22:17So they were able to be kind of big, maybe not be the best flyers, be clumsy.
22:21As the sky started filling up with other species of insects,
22:24with birds, with pterosaurs, later on with bats,
22:27insects, especially dragonflies, had to get very good at maneuvering.
22:31And they tended to get smaller and be more flexible and having slightly different features
22:35in their wings so they can maneuver in and amongst vegetation
22:39and amongst other animals that are in the sky.
22:41A million dollar question is, how did flight start?
22:44What we know is that wings are made up of two different types of material that come together,
22:50one of which seems to have its origin from legs,
22:53and the other of which seems to have its origin from the back or the cuticle.
22:57And when we have something that is a really important innovation,
23:00we call that an adaptive radiation.
23:02Because after the rise of winged insects or terigota,
23:05that is where the bulk of the diversity is.
23:07We talk about there being more species of insects on earth than there is anything else.
23:11Almost all of those have wings.
23:13Here's another one.
23:14Seba Matiza asks, why do insects hang around people?
23:18Go play with your friend's bro crying face emoji.
23:21Insects tend to come around humans because they are detecting carbon dioxide,
23:26which we exhale, sometimes also lactic acid.
23:29So there's this joke in entomology that if you're breathing, insects will find you.
23:34But if you stop breathing, there are other insects that will find you,
23:37because there's things that like to eat dead humans.
23:39But the other insects that are around you, butterflies or dragonflies or crickets,
23:43they're actually not really interested in you.
23:45Insects have been around for a lot longer than humans.
23:48We're just kind of living in insects' world.
23:51Whenever we interact with them, it's not that they're coming around us as much as it is
23:54that we are kind of constantly invading the habitats that they've lived in for hundreds of millions of years.
24:00At L Rose Stars asked, how did they find out dung beetles can navigate using the Milky Way?
24:05There was a research group that actually was kind of looking at how dung beetles were using the moon
24:09to navigate to where they needed to go.
24:11But then during a dark night when there wasn't a moon out, the dung beetles were still following the same route.
24:17And that led them to wonder, I wonder if there's something in the dark sky that they're still using for navigation.
24:23And they thought maybe it was the brightness of the Milky Way and the position of the Milky Way.
24:27So they actually took these dung beetles and they took them into a planetarium and they displayed the Milky Way.
24:34And indeed, the dung beetle was able to use the planetarium Milky Way to kind of go on its trajectory.
24:39So that was how they figured out that the Milky Way was being used by dung beetles for navigation.
24:44At Rishi Joe Sanu asks, why do people get too riled up over the concept of eating insects?
24:50Nobody is forcing you to eat them. Let me have my high protein cricket powder in peace.
24:55I agree. Eating insects is maybe one of the most natural things that humans can do.
24:59Our most close relatives of primates, chimpanzees, bonobos, they eat insects all the time.
25:04So as long as there have been humans, we have been eating insects.
25:07Insects are a really high source of protein. They tend to be low in fat.
25:11I eat a lot of insects. I usually eat them cooked and that kind of gives them like a nutty flavor.
25:16I would say that we should all be eating insects and if you don't want to eat insects, don't eat them.
25:19So AJ Rod 354 asks, how TF does pollination work?
25:24Never understood it. Plants want to get their genetic information moved around
25:28because the more genetic recombination there is, usually the better species fare.
25:33Insects want to eat food. So put those things together and that basically is pollination.
25:38So flowers often have nectar and nectar is a sweet substance. It's the reward.
25:42Probably when you're thinking about pollinators and pollination, you're thinking about bees.
25:47Many of the photos that people actually use of bees doing pollination are actually not bees.
25:51They're syrphid flies. So there's lots of flies that look a little bit like a bee,
25:55but you can tell that they're a fly because they only have one pair of wings.
25:58Their hind wings are modified into these little nubs called haltiers.
26:02It doesn't matter whether the animals that come to your plants are bees or flies or what have you.
26:06They pick up some pollen and when they go to the next plant to drink,
26:10then they leave some of that pollen behind.
26:11And that basically allows the plants to share the genetic information.
26:14We should all be doing our part to save the pollinators.
26:17And this includes reducing the use of insecticides as well as creating habitat for pollinators.
26:23They need nooks and they need crannies and they need leaves.
26:25So if you don't like making your leaves, that's actually great for pollinators.
26:28If you create a pollinator-friendly garden, different types of flowers that bloom at different times
26:33with different heights and different colors, you'll get a lot of pollinators coming.
26:36I actually love buzz pollination, where the insect actually does like this kind of shaking
26:41vibration behavior, which causes an explosion of pollen by the plant.
26:45If insect pollinators were to go extinct, then we ourselves would be really vulnerable
26:52because there's some nutrition that we can only get from plants that are pollinated by an insect.
26:56At Caitlin Santos asks, where do fruit flies come from though?
27:00They just show up as soon as your fruit gets really ripe.
27:03Probably that's because the fruit that you brought into your home was already covered
27:07with the eggs of fruit flies.
27:09So when you bring bananas into your home, for example,
27:12they're covered in fruit fly eggs all over the rinds of your bananas.
27:16The warm heat of your kitchen allows for the fruit fly eggs to hatch.
27:20Sometimes when you bring them in, the eggs have already hatched
27:22and the little maggots are kind of already crawling all over the surface.
27:25The larvae can eat along the surface of the rind, or they can bore into the rotted fruit,
27:30become adult fruit flies, and start the cycle again.
27:32The fruit fly life cycle is very short, so they can go through this whole process
27:36in just one or two days.
27:37So if you buy a set of bananas on Saturday, chances are good those eggs can hatch
27:42and go through their full developmental life stage by the next week.
27:46Here's a question from Quora.
27:47How do creatures without any bones or cartilage,
27:50squids, cephalopods, insects, etc. get fossilized in stone?
27:54So when we think about fossils, we often think of things like dinosaur bones or hardened bones,
27:58but sometimes they're just kind of like a hardened imprint of an exoskeleton,
28:02or things that are trapped in amber.
28:04Amber is basically fossilized tree resin or tree sap,
28:07and when it drips out, insects get caught in it,
28:09and then those are preserved over long periods of time.
28:12Some are kind of green, some are kind of this, well, amber colored.
28:16Jurassic Park suggested that perhaps you could take insects from amber and you could get DNA from them,
28:21and so far we haven't been able to do that.
28:23But you can dissolve some amber and actually take the insect out.
28:26So what I have here is a compression fossil, and this is from Antarctica,
28:30and it has examples of juveniles, of dragonflies, as well as part of a wing of a dragonfly.
28:36It's kind of just the imprint of the dragonfly wing,
28:38as well as the imprint of the body parts of the juvenile stage.
28:42At Julius for Rum Earth asks,
28:44Serious question, why do lanternflies exist? What is their function? To annoy me, I presume.
28:50People have been concerned about spotted lanternflies for a couple of reasons.
28:54One, they're an invasive species, and whenever you have an invasive species,
28:57that can out-compete native species.
28:59But also, they have mouth parts that are like a straw with a pump,
29:02so they drink tree sap or plant sap.
29:04It basically means they have an all-liquid diet.
29:07Because they're drinking mostly sap, their poop is like a liquid kind of sugary poop,
29:12which we call honeydew. And when it drips onto the plants where it's feeding,
29:16it actually can encourage mold growth that can negatively impact crops.
29:20The Man in Pink asks, how do cicadas know when to emerge?
29:23They use a couple of different cues.
29:25One is they're drinking from the roots of trees, so they're drinking plant sap,
29:29and that kind of composition of plant sap changes with seasons.
29:32But they also can detect temperature.
29:34And once it reaches 18 degrees Celsius or 64 degrees Fahrenheit,
29:38that is the cue that it is time to emerge.
29:41Some cicadas do this every two years, and some do this every 13 or 17 years,
29:45where you end up with trillions of individuals who have also used the same timing cue to emerge
29:50at the same time.
29:51So at Michael Ray asks, where did Chagas come from?
29:54We needed a new crisis, I suppose.
29:56In kissing bugs, there are these trypanosomes that actually hijack their body system,
30:01and they can be transported into our bloodstream.
30:05And that trypanosome causes a disease that's called Chagas.
30:09And Chagas disease is incredibly bad.
30:11They're often called kissing bugs because these bugs often make their piercing mark
30:16and easy to reach places where they can get a good blood meal,
30:19like on your lips when you're sleeping.
30:20The trypanosome goes inside of your body.
30:22You have a fever, sometimes you have a rash.
30:24But then the trypanosome kind of lies dormant in your body, sometimes for decades.
30:29And eventually it makes its way to your heart and eats holes in your heart,
30:32and then you die from heart failure.
30:34The reason why we worry about Chagas now in North America
30:38is because thanks to humans, we now have higher temperatures in North America.
30:42So in parts of Texas and Oklahoma,
30:44the trypanosome is able to complete its life cycle in kissing bugs.
30:48Right now, it's really a concern in Central and South America.
30:51So Chagas was always there, just not in North America.
30:54And the new crisis is in part our design because of climate change.
30:58At ThoughtFloss asks, in my dream last night, I was surrounded by fireflies.
31:02I wondered how can they communicate with just flashes of light
31:05when humans can't communicate with all our words.
31:07Fireflies communicate by having a chemical reaction in their body.
31:11It involves luciferin and luciferase that produces light.
31:15So they use this light in a flashing pattern.
31:17It's species specific.
31:18Males use it to communicate with females to indicate that they're the same species.
31:22They need to have darkness for this to happen.
31:24So light pollution can negatively impact fireflies.
31:27Females can use the flashing pattern of males from a different species to trick them and then eat them.
31:33At ParticularLuck4091 asks, why does evolution cause bees to die when stinging?
31:39Over time through natural selection, the ovipositor or egg-laying apparatus in bees
31:44has been modified to function as a stinger.
31:47And that is a protective mechanism for these bees.
31:50In honeybees, at least, when the sting happens, it enters the victim that's being stung.
31:56And because it's barbed, as the bee flies away, it actually rips off part of the abdomen.
32:01And so with no bum and with no back of the abdomen, then the bee dies.
32:04Most of the females in a colony are workers.
32:07If they die, there's still, you know, hundreds, sometimes thousands of sisters in the colony that live on.
32:13So the goal is to always do the greater good and protect the colony and not really care about your own loss.
32:19So those are all the questions for today.
32:21Thanks for watching Bug Support.