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Entomologist Answers Insect Questions
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 or connect with the Museum on YouTube at 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: Its use is possible under the following creative commons license. 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 - On my arm right now is a cave roach. Now on my hair. One second. I'm entomologist Jessica Ware from the American Museum of Natural History. Let's answer your questions from the internet. This is "Bug Support." [upbeat music] We have a question from Reddit about praying mantises. "Why do praying mantis behead their partners after sex?" So not all praying mantises actually eat their partners after sex, but many of them do, because it's a good strategy for the female. So females are about to lay an egg case and that takes a lot of energy. Eating your mate is a really great food source, 'cause it's right there, it's readily available, you've just gotten, hey, you've just gotten the sperm that you need to fertilize your eggs. It's the ultimate nuptial gift that the male gives her. And it benefits him because if the egg case is well provisioned, then the chances are good that it will hatch, the babies will survive to adulthood, and then his genes will be passed on to the next generation. This mantis, you can see, is kind of camouflaged. So mantises mimic lots of different things. What this mantis is trying to look like is lichen. Some mantis look like leaves, some look like flowers, like the orchid mantis, and some look like sticks. We have a question from the AskScience subreddit. "What is the internal anatomy of a bug like?" Mostly just goo, they don't have a circulatory system. They do have nerves that kind of flow throughout them, as well as fat bodies. But the external part of the insect is very interesting. That's made up of their exoskeleton. They have, like all hexapods, three pairs of legs, they have a head, a thorax and an abdomen. For the winged insects, then in their thorax, which is divided up into three segments, the last two segments have pairs of wings. So there's two pairs of wings for a total of four. posrev25 asks, "Would cockroaches survive a nuclear war?" Probably not, the heat and radiation ultimately would be so much that they would die. But we do know that cockroaches can withstand a lot of radiation, but also, they can live a really long time without eating. A lot of cockroaches have these organs in their body called mycetecites. It allows them to store the food that they eat as nitrogen. And then during times of environmental stress or when they don't have food available, they basically re-metabolize the food that's in the mycetecites. They can just eat from what is already within them, and then instead of excreting, they actually just restore the contents back in the mycetecites. So there are some species of cockroaches that actually don't have excretion whatsoever. That leads to this kind of myth that they'd be around even after a nuclear war. They probably would do better than you and I would do, that's for sure. This is Gromphadorhina, a type of hissing cockroach. [cockroach hissing] Ooh, they're sometimes called that because if you were to go to Madagascar and find one of these on a tree, if you were to kind of tap them, their response would be to kind of push air out of their spiracles, or their breathing apparatus. So it's called a hissing cockroach. And they make a very good pet. You don't have to feed them very much, and they're pretty quiet. @InkIV asks, "Do you think the 'Bug's Life' movie is accurate to what a bug's life is really like? 'Cause I feel like it is." The "Bug's Life" movie portrays locusts as jerks. Sometimes they like to eat the same food that we like to eat, and so we kind of villainize them. But honestly, like "Bug's Life" movie is not the movie that I would wanna pick apart. I would wanna pick apart the movie "Antz." - You know, I have strong feelings for you. - That would not happen because the queen releases a perfume, a pheromone is what we call it. That is basically changing the behavior of the colony so that the workers do their jobs and the soldiers do their jobs, but it also kind of suppresses any reproductive urges and suppresses the development of the genitals. In the "Antz" movie, the Woody Allen and Sylvester Stallone characters are working as workers in this ant colony. Anytime you see bees or ants, all of the individuals that you're usually seeing are female. The workers and the soldiers in the colony are sisters. TeddyStayGassin asks, "I asked Google, 'What's the most dangerous animal?' [bleep] why Google said a mosquito. See, I knew I wasn't tripping when people made fun of me of how terrified I was." Actually, mosquitoes have killed more people than any other animal. They are the deadliest animal on the planet, not because mosquitoes themselves are deadly, but they vector deadly diseases. So diseases like malaria, yellow fever, Chikungunya, dengue fever, West Nile virus, Eastern Equine Encephalitis, and so on. They all kind of hijacked the mosquitoes' natural feeding system and then get transported into humans, and they can cause severe illness or death. Males don't drink blood, males they drink flower nectar. But females have been selected to also give an injection into whatever they're biting, a pain reliever and anticoagulant to try and prevent themselves from being squashed. When the anticoagulant and the pain reliever are injected, that's when the pathogen actually goes into your body. jonzalez-cs asks, "Where do butterflies get their pigmentation and wing patterns from? Why do they have different wing patterns?" Butterflies and moths have scales that coat their wings, and the scales themselves can have pigment. But there also can be kind of bumps and ridges on the surface, that when light bounces off of it, it gets perceived as color. Their whole body could be colored or it could just be patterns on their wings. But then there are also color patterns that are related to kind of hiding in plain sight, which we call camouflage. And sometimes butterflies actually try and mimic each other. Take for example, a monarch butterfly. Monarchs are kind of neat because they have aposematic or warning coloration, and it communicates something to birds that if you eat me, you'll probably barf. They have these distasteful compounds that they sequester in their body. And there are other types of butterflies that have kind of mimicked the appearance of a monarch butterfly, so that way they could get the same type of protection. One example of this is the viceroy. It looks a lot like a monarch. The difference is that it actually has this additional dark-patterned vein that goes down in the hind wing. The color patterns of butterflies and moths, sometimes it's camouflage, sometimes it's mimicry, sometimes it's males communicating with females. @ReinaDeLaIsla asks, "Are the scarab beetles from 'The Mummy' actually a thing?" [victim screaming] Luckily no, scarabs mostly are consuming poop. They make balls of dung, they lay their eggs on it, their larvae hatch and eat poop. They don't eat humans. fox-mcleod asks, "How do dragonflies and flies coordinate flight while mating?" I wouldn't necessarily say it's super coordinated. Males clasp the female behind the back of her head with the tip of their abdomen, which is called the claspers. The female then brings her abdomen up to the male's second penis, because they have two penises. It takes a really long time for them to mate, sometimes like 20 minutes. Females can mate multiple times. She has two sperm storage organs, short-term storage and long-term storage. We don't know how she chooses, which sperm to put in which one. But then the males wanna ensure paternity, so they use their secondary penis to kind of like scrape out the previous male's sperm. You can see that the male has like kind of like a little bump near the base of its abdomen, and that bump is this secondary penis. And it kind of goes out like that and then the sperm is transferred to the female. And then they fly together in this kind of copulatory wheel, as we call it, which looks like a heart. It's kind of like an aerodynamic feat that males are able to do this. If you wanna catch a dragonfly, catching mating dragonflies [laughing] are the easiest ones to catch. Sometimes the male will stay attached to the female, still holding on to the back of her head while she lays her eggs in the water. So they're not the most coordinated, I would say, but somehow they manage. @sagetenayaa asks, "So do mosquitoes have a specific blood type that they can have, or does it not matter? How many mosquitoes carry HIV?" Mosquitoes don't vector HIV. It's not something to be concerned about. And they don't themselves have a certain blood type. They have something called hemolymph and it just kind of flows in their open smushy body. Often people wonder, do they prefer to have a certain kind of blood? Like is O blood type the best type of blood? Some people tell me, "Oh, I have A blood type, I get eaten all the time." No, it doesn't matter whether you have O, A or B, you will be equally likely to be bitten by a mosquito. Some people are very allergic to that kind of cocktail that the mosquito gives you. So they end up with really big bumps or really itchy bumps, almost like welts. Often people will say, "Well, I never get bit by mosquitoes." You're probably all being bitten by mosquitoes, it's just that some of you are reacting more than others. From the biology subreddit, "How closely are bugs related to crustaceans? Is a lobster basically an ocean cockroach or is it completely different?" If you looked at a phylogeny, or a tree of life, of the group of animals called arthropods, you would see the crustaceans, things like lobsters, and the hexapods, things like insects, which is the group to which cockroaches belong. So lobsters are very related to cockroaches. You could call them an ocean cockroach, but you could also call them an ocean dragonfly, an ocean true bug, an ocean spotted lantern fly. So @hawtsaucemami asks, "Why is everyone afraid of tarantulas?" Tarantulas are not the bad guys. There's actually no recorded deaths from tarantulas. All tarantulas have venom, but the venom usually is not anything that's gonna kill a human. They do sometimes eat big things. Sometimes people have seen them eat lizards, or snakes, or birds even. But they're not out to get us, they're not out to harm humans in any way. They're slow-moving, ancient arachnids. Tarantulas can be really colorful. There are blue ones, there are pink ones, there are ones that have like kind of this metallic sheen. These are perhaps the fuzziest of the arachnids. They have hairs on their bum called urticating hairs, which are barbed hairs that they can kind of kick off with their feet and they can be irritating, and that's one of their methods of defense. You can eat tarantulas. There are groups of people that actually roast them over fire, and then you break the legs off like you would crabs, and then you suck the contents out. The two structures that are kind of facing forward are her fangs, or her chelicerae. She's kicked some hairs off of her [laughing] butt already. She's kinda got a naked bum. And their toes are very cute. So they're not the bad guys. @franman56 asks, "Why the F do crickets chirp? Can they hear themselves?" So male crickets chirp as part of a communication to females. [cricket chirping] One thing they're communicating is that they have probably a lot of energy. They often do it during the hottest time of day. That probably also signals to the female that you're a pretty healthy male. They're also species specific. So it's telling the female, "I'm the same species as you, so I might be someone that you wanna mate with." @Scrumtrelescentness asks, "How do bug-repellent sprays work?" They work by basically just jamming the chemical sensory apparatus of the mosquito. So mosquitoes have antennae and they have these little chemical sensilla, and odor molecules kind of bind to the sensilla, send an electrical impulse to the brain. Usually the scent that they're picking up on is our carbon dioxide or lactic acids. But if you spray DEET, it actually binds to the chemical sensilla and it actually blocks the sense of smell. They'll still land on you and feed on you, but it just makes it harder for them to sense where you are. @Cokeman asks, "How do you have a stare down with an insect with compound eyes? Which lens am I supposed to look at?" Insect compound eyes are made up of what we call ommatidia or lenses. Dragonflies have tens of thousands of ommatidia. Light basically passes through it, gets kind of bounced around and ultimately sends a signal to their cluster of ganglia that we call their brain. Insects also have light-sensing organs, which are called ocelli. So I suppose if you wanted to stare down an insect, you could also stare at their ocelli. But they probably won't see you. Their ocelli just tells light and dark. So dragonfly eyes, because their ommatidia are kind of arranged in the front of their eye all the way around to the back of their head, they're actually able to see a pretty wide arc around them. Their eyes are not totally attached to their body. They have these hooks in the back of their neck, it's called the head-arrester system. When they're flying, the hooks are engaged and their head is very stable, but when they land, the hooks detach and then they can kind of look around and move their head. They're able to see a lot of different colors, which makes sense 'cause dragonflies are very colorful and they use color for communication. They're really using their eyes for their vision to catch their food. They have a 98% success rate, so they're really, really effective predators. crestonfunk wants to know, "How much do insects know? What do we know about bug consciousness?" I would say we don't know very much about bug consciousness. For a long time, people thought bugs didn't have consciousness and that perhaps insects were just hardwired to do certain behaviors over and over again until they died. Now we know that insects can make decisions. We know that they can learn. So there was a study by Lars Chittka. They gave bees a series of little balls they could play with. There was no reward or treat that they got for doing so, but they seemed to engage in this behavior, and the researchers interpreted that as play. And if they do that, maybe insects have consciousness. We often, especially in TV and movies, talk about a collective consciousness or a hive mind. In the movie "Starship Troopers," they had that. Things like ants moving as a group where the bodies of the ants are kind of attached to each other. When people saw behaviors like that, they thought, "Oh, maybe these insects are acting with one collective mind," but really they're just communicating by these chemical cues that they can pick up from each other. Is that a way that you could have a hive mind? Maybe. Poem170 asks, "Are scorpions insects? No, they're not insects, they're arachnids. They have these palpi that they use to grasp their prey, and then they have this telson with a sting, which has a cocktail of chemicals, neurotoxins. Depending on the size of the prey, they will have a different chemical cocktail that they use. They kind of swing this forward, sting or immobilize their prey. Then they bring it towards their mouth parts. And in their mouth parts, they have chelicerae, or fangs. They would inject something that would liquefy their food, and then they would drink it through the straws that are their mouth parts. Let me show you a different type of arachnid, it is called a tailless whip scorpion. And it's called a whip scorpion because it has really long legs, the ends of which are [laughing] kind of like little whips. And they kind of bring food towards their mouth that are then caught with their jaws. See, look, the legs are like real whips. Just. [imitating whipping] There are these long spines that you can see, and they use that to kind of puncture their prey items as they're bringing them to towards their mouth parts. They're really nothing to be scared of, [laughing] even though they sometimes move in a way that can be startling. She got me pretty good. When I tried to pull her out, they have these little spines on their legs. - [Production] Like, are you bleeding? - No, I'm good, I'm good. [production laughing] But she got me, she got me pretty good. [hands smacking] [production faintly speaking] forthesakeofusall asks, "How do certain insects, like the leaf bug, look like, well, a leaf?" Well, over long periods of evolutionary time, Phasmatodea have evolved to mimic things. And what they usually mimic are either swaying leaves or sticks. There's changes to their genes. There's also changes to their phenotype or their overall appearance that occurred over hundreds of millions of years. But sometimes they start out like this juvenile, where they might mimic an ant or they might mimic a stick. As they get older and older, they look more and more like just basically swaying leaf. Sometimes they look like a leaf that is slightly decaying. Sometimes it looks like a fresh leaf. I also have a stick-like Phasmatodean. You can get these in New Jersey. They tend to stay pretty still. All stick insects, whether they are the ones that look like sticks or the ones that look like leaves, they all are vegetarians. So they're just kind of chowing down on leaf material. sun_of_nothing asks, "How do insect antennae work?" So insect and antennae have these tiny little pits in them, and inside are these little chemosensilla. There are odor molecules, sometimes it's a pheromone, sometimes it's things that they're interacting with in the environment. Those odor molecules kind of bind to the sensilla and that triggers an electrical impulse that goes to the brain that tells this insect, in this case, this cockroach, something about what it's tasting or what it's smelling. So on my arm right now is a blaberus, or a cave roach. Now on my hair. One second. I use a lot of coconut oil in my hair and I think she's probably like, "What is going on?" You can see that the antennae are touching constantly and that is her kind of trying to smell her surroundings and figure out [laughing] "What is happening?" This cave roach you would commonly see in Central and South America, often on the barks of trees, especially if you're out at night. They're vegetarians, they're decomposers, and they help kind of shape the forests that we have. That hair product really freaked her out. For ants and termites, they use chemosensation a lot to tell whether or not individuals they're interacting with are from the same nest as them. Whenever you see something that has really big or really long antennae, that tells you that it's probably smelling a lot. Things like dragonflies have very small antennae because they're visual predators. smaksandewand asks, "Either insects are getting really good at avoiding car windscreens or there simply aren't any insects anymore." So I think smaksandewand is remembering what it was like when I was a kid where you would drive along on the highway, your windshield would be covered with smooshed bugs. We know that insects are declining at a rate that we've never seen before. There was a study that came out in 2025 for North American butterflies that suggested that some species of butterflies have declined just in the last 20 years by up to 98% to 99%. We think that there's many causes of this decline. Land use change, our reliance on insecticides, climate change, all of that together means that when you're out, you hear fewer insects, you see fewer insects, and when you're driving in your car, you have fewer of them that kind of splatter against your windshield. Here's a question from the explainlikeI'mfive subreddit. "If you place a same-species ant from a colony to a new colony with other same ants, will it be accepted or rejected, or it doesn't matter to other ants?" Ants in general are very warlike, so they don't like to interact with other individuals, even from the same species. They can smell when there's an ant that's nearby that's not part of their nest and they will go to war. And definitely ants from different species are often at war. We have a question from the ants subreddit, "Which ants have the most effective armies? Like hypothetically, if there were an ant world war, which ant species would win?" Probably Argentine ants. For some reason, Argentine ants are actually able to move together as like a huge group, a super colony. These super colonies of Argentine ants are hundreds of thousands of individuals. It really does look like a black river. When I lived in Costa Rica at a field station, we'd have all of our stuff out, we'd see the ants coming, we'd leave the kitchen, they'd come through, they eat everything. Kind of like in a cartoon, every carrot, every apple was stripped. They can really eat a lot in a very short period of time. So they are very good at what they do, kind of consuming things as they move. Some people say that all of South America is one [laughing] giant Argentine ant group. We have another question from the ants subreddit. "Why are ant colonies so loyal to their queen?" Well, that has to do with their genetics. So ants are very closely related to each other. A lot of insects have sexual reproduction where there's a male gamete and a female gamete, and they come together to form a zygote. And that zygote is what we call diploid. It has components from one individual and another individual. But what the queens do is she actually clones herself by taking just one of her eggs and they make a male, and so it only has half of the information. We call that haploid. That male is what's called a drone. It mates with the queen and then it dies. I'm only related to my kids by 50%, right? Because I had a parent that gave 50% and I gave 50%. Ants that are in a colony that are sisters, they're related to each other by 75%. The goal of all species, we think, is to get as many copies of your genes into the next generation as possible. So we think that's part of what drives the social behavior in ants. That's why so many members of the colony work together cooperatively. They're loyal to the queen, who they're really closely related to and they're really closely related to their sisters. @agepapers asks, "Why and how do termite kings and queens live so long?" Some termite kings and queens, especially queens, can live like 20 years. Her body just becomes distended as this one giant kind of sack of eggs. The longer time that you're around putting out babies, the greater opportunity there is for you to pass your genes on to the next generation. So there might be this evolutionary drive for queens to live a long time to maximize their reproductive output. Some of the day-to-day strife that workers and soldiers have to interact with, warring ants that come by, anteaters, you name it, the kings and queens don't usually have to face that. So they have a pretty cushy life, and that usually allows them to live their full lifespan. So let me show you what a king and queen termite would look like. So in termites, the only cast that has wings that can fly are the reproductive casts. So that's the king and the queen. The wings are like not great, they can't really fly very far. So termite society, like other social insects, they have a really complicated cast system. So there's the reproductive cast, the kings and queens, then there's soldiers that do a lot of defense for the colony. The workers do everything, they make the colony, they also feed the queen, they care for the queen, they groom the queen, they care for the young, they'll bang their heads against the wall to kind of communicate with each other. They have a crypt where they carry their dead in some species. They have a nursery or an infirmary. So it's very sophisticated. So from the insects subreddit, "Why do dragonflies have indicators slash black marks on their wings?" Dragonflies have a pterostigma. It looks like a little dot. It's near the tip of their wing. Sometimes it's very long. Sometimes it looks like a little square. Sometimes it's black, but sometimes it's not, sometimes it's kind of yellow. Sometimes it's like spangled or multicolored. Dragonflies can fly really fast, some of them can fly like 30 miles an hour. So maybe having this pterostigma helps stabilize the wing. What we do know about pterostigma is that they're probably a pretty recent feature. When you look at fossil dragonflies, especially very old fossils, many of them don't have pterostigma. Dragonflies or something that looked like a dragonfly was probably the first thing to fly. So before birds, before bats, before pterosaurs, before any other insect. And they flew during the Carboniferous Period, which is 350 million years ago, each wing was around 37 centimeters. So it had a total of about a two-foot wingspan. They were just massive. userErebus asks, "Why were dragonflies massive in that time period before the dinosaurs?" When people have tried to rear modern dragonflies in high-oxygen environments, they ended up being slightly larger. So we think oxygen is part of it. Oxygen levels were a lot higher when these massive dragonflies, Meganeuridae, Meganeuropsis, when they were flying around in the Carboniferous Period. But also it was that there was nothing else in the sky. So they were able to be kind of big, maybe not be the best flyers, be clumsy. As the sky started filling up with other species of insects, with birds, with pterosaurs, later on, with bats, insects, especially dragonflies, had to get very good at maneuvering. They tended to get smaller and be more flexible and having slightly different features in their wings so they can maneuver in and amongst vegetation and amongst other animals that are in the sky. A million-dollar question is how did flight start? What we know is that wings are made up of two different types of material that come together, one of which seems to have its origin from legs and the other of which seems to have its origin from the back or the cuticle. And when we have something that is a really important innovation, we call that an adaptive radiation, because after the rise of winged insects, or pterygota, that is where the bulk of the diversity is. We talk about there being more species of insects on Earth than there is anything else. Almost all of those have wings. Here's another one, Siba Mteza asks, "Why do insects hang around people? Go play with your friends, bro." Crying face emoji. Insects tend to come around humans because they are detecting carbon dioxide, which we exhale. Sometimes also lactic acid. So there's this joke in entomology that if you're breathing, insects will find you, but if you stop breathing, there are other insects that will find you, 'cause there's things that like to eat dead humans. [laughing] But the other insects that are around you, butterflies, or dragonflies, or crickets, they're actually not really interested in you. Insects have been around for a lot longer than humans, we're just kind of living in insects' world. Whenever we interact with them, it's not that they're coming around us as much as it is that we are kind of constantly invading the habitats that they've lived in for hundreds of millions of years. At LRosestars asks, "How did they find out dung beetles can navigate using the Milky Way?" There was a research group that actually was kind of looking at how dung beetles were using the Moon to navigate to where they needed to go. But then during a dark night when there wasn't a moon out, the dung beetles were still following the same route. And that led them to wonder, "I wonder if there's something in the dark sky that they're still using for navigation?" And they thought maybe it was the brightness of the Milky Way and the position of the Milky Way. So they actually took these dung beetles and they took them into a planetarium. And they displayed the Milky Way, and indeed, the dung beetle was able to use the planetarium Milky Way to kind of go on its trajectory. So that was how they figured out that the Milky Way was being used by dung beetles for navigation. At RishiJoeSanu asks, "Why do people get too riled up over the concept of eating insects? Nobody is forcing you to eat them. Let me have my high-protein cricket powder in peace." I agree. Eating insects is maybe one of the most natural things that humans can do. Our most close relatives are primates, chimpanzees, bonobos, they eat insects all the time. So as long as there have been humans, we have been eating insects. Insects are a really high source of protein. They tend to be low in fat. I eat a lot of insects. I usually eat them cooked, and that kind of gives them like a nutty flavor. I would say that we should all be eating insects. And if you don't wanna eat insects, don't eat them. So AJ_rod354 asks, "How TF does pollination work? Never understood it." Plants wanna get their genetic information moved around because the more genetic recombination there is, usually the better species fair. Insects wanna eat food, so put those things together and that basically is pollination. So flowers often have nectar, and nectar is a sweet substance, it's the reward. Probably when you're thinking about pollinators and pollination, you're thinking about bees. Many of the photos that people actually use of bees doing pollination are actually not bees, they're syrphid flies. So there's lots of flies that look a little bit like a bee, but you can tell that they're a fly 'cause they only have one pair of wings. Their hind wings are modified into these little nubs called halteres. It doesn't matter whether the animals that come to your plants are bees, or flies, or what have you, they pick up some pollen, and when they go to the next plant to drink, then they leave some of that pollen behind, and that basically allows the plants to share the genetic information. We should all be doing our part to save the pollinators, and this includes reducing the use of insecticides, as well as creating habitat for pollinators. They need nooks and they need crannies and they need leaves. So if you don't like raking your leaves, that's actually great for pollinators. If you create a pollinator-friendly garden, different types of flowers that bloom at different times with different heights and different colors, you'll get a lot of pollinators coming. I actually love buzz pollination, where the insect actually does like this kind of shaking vibration behavior, which causes an explosion of pollen by the plant. If insect pollinators were to go extinct, then we ourselves would be really vulnerable because there's some nutrition that we can only get from plants that are pollinated by an insect. @_katelynsantos asks, "Where do fruit flies come from though? They just show up as soon as your fruit gets really ripe." Probably that's because the fruit that you brought into your home was already covered with the eggs of fruit flies. So when you bring bananas into your home, for example, they're covered in fruit fly eggs, [laughing] all over the rinds of your bananas. The warm heat of your kitchen allows for the fruit fly eggs to hatch. Sometimes when you bring them in, the eggs have already hatched and the little maggots are kind of already crawling all over the surface. The larvae can eat along the surface of the rind or they can bore into the rotted fruit, become adult fruit flies and start the cycle again. The fruit fly lifecycle is very short, so they can go through this whole process in just one or two days. So if you buy a set of bananas on Saturday, chances are good that those eggs can hatch and go through their full developmental life stage by the next week. Here's a question from Quora. "How do creatures without any bones or cartilage, squids, cephalopods, insects, et cetera, get fossilized in stone?" So when we think about fossils, we often think of things like dinosaur bones or hardened bones, but sometimes they're just kind of like a hardened imprint of an exoskeleton or things that are trapped in amber. Amber is basically fossilized tree resin, or tree sap. And when it drips out, insects get caught in it, and then those are preserved over long periods of time. Some are kind of green, some are kind of this, well, amber-colored. "Jurassic Park" suggested that perhaps you could take insects from amber and you could get DNA from them. And so far, we haven't been able to do that. But you can dissolve some amber and actually take the insect out. So what I have here is a compression fossil. And this is from Antarctica. And it has examples of juveniles of dragonflies, as well as part of a wing of a dragonfly. It's kind of just the imprint of the dragonfly wing, as well as the imprint of the body parts of the juvenile stage. @Julius4rumEarth asks, "Serious question. Why do lantern flies exist? What is their function? To annoy me, I presume." People have been concerned about spotted lantern flies for a couple of reasons. One, they're an invasive species, and whenever you have an invasive species, that can outcompete native species, but also they have mouth parts that are like a straw with a pump, so they drink tree sap or plant sap. It basically means they have an all-liquid diet. Because they're drinking mostly sap, their poop is like a liquid kind of sugary poop, which we call honeydew. And when it drips onto the plants where it's feeding, it actually can encourage mold growth that can negatively impact crops. the_man_in_pink asks, "How do cicadas know when to emerge? They use a couple of different cues. One is their drinking from the roots of trees, so their drinking plants sap, and that kind of composition of plant sap changes with seasons, but they also can detect temperature. And once it reaches 18 degrees Celsius or 64 degrees Fahrenheit, that is the cue that it is time to emerge. Some cicadas do this every two years, and some do this every 13 or 17 years, where you end up with trillions of individuals who have also used the same timing queue to emerge at the same time. So @michael-ray asks, "Where did Chagas come from? We needed a new crisis, I suppose." In kissing bugs, there are these trypanosomes that actually hijack their body system and they can be transported into our bloodstream, and that trypanosome causes a disease that's called Chagas. And Chagas disease is incredibly bad. They're often called kissing bugs because these bugs often make their piercing mark in easy-to-reach places where they can get a good blood meal, like on your lips when you're sleeping. The trypanosome goes inside of your body, you have a fever, sometimes you have a rash, but then the trypanosome kind of lies dormant in your body, sometimes for decades, and eventually it makes its way to your heart and eats holes in your heart, and then you die from heart failure. The reason why we worry about Chagas now in North America is because, thanks to humans, we now have higher temperatures in North America. So in parts of Texas and Oklahoma, the trypanosome is able to complete its lifecycle in kissing bugs. Right now, it's really a concern in Central and South America. So Chagas was always there, just not in North America. And the new crisis is in part our design because of climate change. thoughtfloss asks, "In my dream last night, I was surrounded by fireflies. I wondered how can they communicate with just flashes of light when humans can't communicate with all our words." Fireflies communicate by having a chemical reaction in their body, it involves luciferin and luciferase, that produces light. So they use this light in a flashing pattern. It's species specific. Males use it to communicate with females to indicate that they're the same species. They need to have darkness for this to happen. So light pollution can negatively impact fireflies. Females can use the flashing pattern of males from a different species to trick them and then eat them. @Particular_Luck4091 asks, "Why does evolution cause bees to die when stinging?" Over time through natural selection, the ovipositor, or egg-laying apparatus, in bees has been modified to function as a stinger, and that is a protective mechanism for these bees. In honeybees at least, when the sting happens, it enters the victim that's being stung. And because it's barbed, as the bee flies away, it actually rips off part of the abdomen. And so with no bum and with no back of the abdomen, then the bee dies. Most of the females in a colony are workers. If they die, there's still hundreds, sometimes thousands, of sisters in the colony that live on. So the goal is to always do the greater good and protect the colony and not really care about your own loss. So those are all the questions for today. Thanks for watching "Bug Support." [upbeat music]
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Entomologist Answers Insect Questions
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 or connect with the Museum on YouTube at 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: Its use is possible under the following creative commons license. 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 - On my arm right now is a cave roach. Now on my hair. One second. I'm entomologist Jessica Ware from the American Museum of Natural History. Let's answer your questions from the internet. This is "Bug Support." [upbeat music] We have a question from Reddit about praying mantises. "Why do praying mantis behead their partners after sex?" So not all praying mantises actually eat their partners after sex, but many of them do, because it's a good strategy for the female. So females are about to lay an egg case and that takes a lot of energy. Eating your mate is a really great food source, 'cause it's right there, it's readily available, you've just gotten, hey, you've just gotten the sperm that you need to fertilize your eggs. It's the ultimate nuptial gift that the male gives her. And it benefits him because if the egg case is well provisioned, then the chances are good that it will hatch, the babies will survive to adulthood, and then his genes will be passed on to the next generation. This mantis, you can see, is kind of camouflaged. So mantises mimic lots of different things. What this mantis is trying to look like is lichen. Some mantis look like leaves, some look like flowers, like the orchid mantis, and some look like sticks. We have a question from the AskScience subreddit. "What is the internal anatomy of a bug like?" Mostly just goo, they don't have a circulatory system. They do have nerves that kind of flow throughout them, as well as fat bodies. But the external part of the insect is very interesting. That's made up of their exoskeleton. They have, like all hexapods, three pairs of legs, they have a head, a thorax and an abdomen. For the winged insects, then in their thorax, which is divided up into three segments, the last two segments have pairs of wings. So there's two pairs of wings for a total of four. posrev25 asks, "Would cockroaches survive a nuclear war?" Probably not, the heat and radiation ultimately would be so much that they would die. But we do know that cockroaches can withstand a lot of radiation, but also, they can live a really long time without eating. A lot of cockroaches have these organs in their body called mycetecites. It allows them to store the food that they eat as nitrogen. And then during times of environmental stress or when they don't have food available, they basically re-metabolize the food that's in the mycetecites. They can just eat from what is already within them, and then instead of excreting, they actually just restore the contents back in the mycetecites. So there are some species of cockroaches that actually don't have excretion whatsoever. That leads to this kind of myth that they'd be around even after a nuclear war. They probably would do better than you and I would do, that's for sure. This is Gromphadorhina, a type of hissing cockroach. [cockroach hissing] Ooh, they're sometimes called that because if you were to go to Madagascar and find one of these on a tree, if you were to kind of tap them, their response would be to kind of push air out of their spiracles, or their breathing apparatus. So it's called a hissing cockroach. And they make a very good pet. You don't have to feed them very much, and they're pretty quiet. @InkIV asks, "Do you think the 'Bug's Life' movie is accurate to what a bug's life is really like? 'Cause I feel like it is." The "Bug's Life" movie portrays locusts as jerks. Sometimes they like to eat the same food that we like to eat, and so we kind of villainize them. But honestly, like "Bug's Life" movie is not the movie that I would wanna pick apart. I would wanna pick apart the movie "Antz." - You know, I have strong feelings for you. - That would not happen because the queen releases a perfume, a pheromone is what we call it. That is basically changing the behavior of the colony so that the workers do their jobs and the soldiers do their jobs, but it also kind of suppresses any reproductive urges and suppresses the development of the genitals. In the "Antz" movie, the Woody Allen and Sylvester Stallone characters are working as workers in this ant colony. Anytime you see bees or ants, all of the individuals that you're usually seeing are female. The workers and the soldiers in the colony are sisters. TeddyStayGassin asks, "I asked Google, 'What's the most dangerous animal?' [bleep] why Google said a mosquito. See, I knew I wasn't tripping when people made fun of me of how terrified I was." Actually, mosquitoes have killed more people than any other animal. They are the deadliest animal on the planet, not because mosquitoes themselves are deadly, but they vector deadly diseases. So diseases like malaria, yellow fever, Chikungunya, dengue fever, West Nile virus, Eastern Equine Encephalitis, and so on. They all kind of hijacked the mosquitoes' natural feeding system and then get transported into humans, and they can cause severe illness or death. Males don't drink blood, males they drink flower nectar. But females have been selected to also give an injection into whatever they're biting, a pain reliever and anticoagulant to try and prevent themselves from being squashed. When the anticoagulant and the pain reliever are injected, that's when the pathogen actually goes into your body. jonzalez-cs asks, "Where do butterflies get their pigmentation and wing patterns from? Why do they have different wing patterns?" Butterflies and moths have scales that coat their wings, and the scales themselves can have pigment. But there also can be kind of bumps and ridges on the surface, that when light bounces off of it, it gets perceived as color. Their whole body could be colored or it could just be patterns on their wings. But then there are also color patterns that are related to kind of hiding in plain sight, which we call camouflage. And sometimes butterflies actually try and mimic each other. Take for example, a monarch butterfly. Monarchs are kind of neat because they have aposematic or warning coloration, and it communicates something to birds that if you eat me, you'll probably barf. They have these distasteful compounds that they sequester in their body. And there are other types of butterflies that have kind of mimicked the appearance of a monarch butterfly, so that way they could get the same type of protection. One example of this is the viceroy. It looks a lot like a monarch. The difference is that it actually has this additional dark-patterned vein that goes down in the hind wing. The color patterns of butterflies and moths, sometimes it's camouflage, sometimes it's mimicry, sometimes it's males communicating with females. @ReinaDeLaIsla asks, "Are the scarab beetles from 'The Mummy' actually a thing?" [victim screaming] Luckily no, scarabs mostly are consuming poop. They make balls of dung, they lay their eggs on it, their larvae hatch and eat poop. They don't eat humans. fox-mcleod asks, "How do dragonflies and flies coordinate flight while mating?" I wouldn't necessarily say it's super coordinated. Males clasp the female behind the back of her head with the tip of their abdomen, which is called the claspers. The female then brings her abdomen up to the male's second penis, because they have two penises. It takes a really long time for them to mate, sometimes like 20 minutes. Females can mate multiple times. She has two sperm storage organs, short-term storage and long-term storage. We don't know how she chooses, which sperm to put in which one. But then the males wanna ensure paternity, so they use their secondary penis to kind of like scrape out the previous male's sperm. You can see that the male has like kind of like a little bump near the base of its abdomen, and that bump is this secondary penis. And it kind of goes out like that and then the sperm is transferred to the female. And then they fly together in this kind of copulatory wheel, as we call it, which looks like a heart. It's kind of like an aerodynamic feat that males are able to do this. If you wanna catch a dragonfly, catching mating dragonflies [laughing] are the easiest ones to catch. Sometimes the male will stay attached to the female, still holding on to the back of her head while she lays her eggs in the water. So they're not the most coordinated, I would say, but somehow they manage. @sagetenayaa asks, "So do mosquitoes have a specific blood type that they can have, or does it not matter? How many mosquitoes carry HIV?" Mosquitoes don't vector HIV. It's not something to be concerned about. And they don't themselves have a certain blood type. They have something called hemolymph and it just kind of flows in their open smushy body. Often people wonder, do they prefer to have a certain kind of blood? Like is O blood type the best type of blood? Some people tell me, "Oh, I have A blood type, I get eaten all the time." No, it doesn't matter whether you have O, A or B, you will be equally likely to be bitten by a mosquito. Some people are very allergic to that kind of cocktail that the mosquito gives you. So they end up with really big bumps or really itchy bumps, almost like welts. Often people will say, "Well, I never get bit by mosquitoes." You're probably all being bitten by mosquitoes, it's just that some of you are reacting more than others. From the biology subreddit, "How closely are bugs related to crustaceans? Is a lobster basically an ocean cockroach or is it completely different?" If you looked at a phylogeny, or a tree of life, of the group of animals called arthropods, you would see the crustaceans, things like lobsters, and the hexapods, things like insects, which is the group to which cockroaches belong. So lobsters are very related to cockroaches. You could call them an ocean cockroach, but you could also call them an ocean dragonfly, an ocean true bug, an ocean spotted lantern fly. So @hawtsaucemami asks, "Why is everyone afraid of tarantulas?" Tarantulas are not the bad guys. There's actually no recorded deaths from tarantulas. All tarantulas have venom, but the venom usually is not anything that's gonna kill a human. They do sometimes eat big things. Sometimes people have seen them eat lizards, or snakes, or birds even. But they're not out to get us, they're not out to harm humans in any way. They're slow-moving, ancient arachnids. Tarantulas can be really colorful. There are blue ones, there are pink ones, there are ones that have like kind of this metallic sheen. These are perhaps the fuzziest of the arachnids. They have hairs on their bum called urticating hairs, which are barbed hairs that they can kind of kick off with their feet and they can be irritating, and that's one of their methods of defense. You can eat tarantulas. There are groups of people that actually roast them over fire, and then you break the legs off like you would crabs, and then you suck the contents out. The two structures that are kind of facing forward are her fangs, or her chelicerae. She's kicked some hairs off of her [laughing] butt already. She's kinda got a naked bum. And their toes are very cute. So they're not the bad guys. @franman56 asks, "Why the F do crickets chirp? Can they hear themselves?" So male crickets chirp as part of a communication to females. [cricket chirping] One thing they're communicating is that they have probably a lot of energy. They often do it during the hottest time of day. That probably also signals to the female that you're a pretty healthy male. They're also species specific. So it's telling the female, "I'm the same species as you, so I might be someone that you wanna mate with." @Scrumtrelescentness asks, "How do bug-repellent sprays work?" They work by basically just jamming the chemical sensory apparatus of the mosquito. So mosquitoes have antennae and they have these little chemical sensilla, and odor molecules kind of bind to the sensilla, send an electrical impulse to the brain. Usually the scent that they're picking up on is our carbon dioxide or lactic acids. But if you spray DEET, it actually binds to the chemical sensilla and it actually blocks the sense of smell. They'll still land on you and feed on you, but it just makes it harder for them to sense where you are. @Cokeman asks, "How do you have a stare down with an insect with compound eyes? Which lens am I supposed to look at?" Insect compound eyes are made up of what we call ommatidia or lenses. Dragonflies have tens of thousands of ommatidia. Light basically passes through it, gets kind of bounced around and ultimately sends a signal to their cluster of ganglia that we call their brain. Insects also have light-sensing organs, which are called ocelli. So I suppose if you wanted to stare down an insect, you could also stare at their ocelli. But they probably won't see you. Their ocelli just tells light and dark. So dragonfly eyes, because their ommatidia are kind of arranged in the front of their eye all the way around to the back of their head, they're actually able to see a pretty wide arc around them. Their eyes are not totally attached to their body. They have these hooks in the back of their neck, it's called the head-arrester system. When they're flying, the hooks are engaged and their head is very stable, but when they land, the hooks detach and then they can kind of look around and move their head. They're able to see a lot of different colors, which makes sense 'cause dragonflies are very colorful and they use color for communication. They're really using their eyes for their vision to catch their food. They have a 98% success rate, so they're really, really effective predators. crestonfunk wants to know, "How much do insects know? What do we know about bug consciousness?" I would say we don't know very much about bug consciousness. For a long time, people thought bugs didn't have consciousness and that perhaps insects were just hardwired to do certain behaviors over and over again until they died. Now we know that insects can make decisions. We know that they can learn. So there was a study by Lars Chittka. They gave bees a series of little balls they could play with. There was no reward or treat that they got for doing so, but they seemed to engage in this behavior, and the researchers interpreted that as play. And if they do that, maybe insects have consciousness. We often, especially in TV and movies, talk about a collective consciousness or a hive mind. In the movie "Starship Troopers," they had that. Things like ants moving as a group where the bodies of the ants are kind of attached to each other. When people saw behaviors like that, they thought, "Oh, maybe these insects are acting with one collective mind," but really they're just communicating by these chemical cues that they can pick up from each other. Is that a way that you could have a hive mind? Maybe. Poem170 asks, "Are scorpions insects? No, they're not insects, they're arachnids. They have these palpi that they use to grasp their prey, and then they have this telson with a sting, which has a cocktail of chemicals, neurotoxins. Depending on the size of the prey, they will have a different chemical cocktail that they use. They kind of swing this forward, sting or immobilize their prey. Then they bring it towards their mouth parts. And in their mouth parts, they have chelicerae, or fangs. They would inject something that would liquefy their food, and then they would drink it through the straws that are their mouth parts. Let me show you a different type of arachnid, it is called a tailless whip scorpion. And it's called a whip scorpion because it has really long legs, the ends of which are [laughing] kind of like little whips. And they kind of bring food towards their mouth that are then caught with their jaws. See, look, the legs are like real whips. Just. [imitating whipping] There are these long spines that you can see, and they use that to kind of puncture their prey items as they're bringing them to towards their mouth parts. They're really nothing to be scared of, [laughing] even though they sometimes move in a way that can be startling. She got me pretty good. When I tried to pull her out, they have these little spines on their legs. - [Production] Like, are you bleeding? - No, I'm good, I'm good. [production laughing] But she got me, she got me pretty good. [hands smacking] [production faintly speaking] forthesakeofusall asks, "How do certain insects, like the leaf bug, look like, well, a leaf?" Well, over long periods of evolutionary time, Phasmatodea have evolved to mimic things. And what they usually mimic are either swaying leaves or sticks. There's changes to their genes. There's also changes to their phenotype or their overall appearance that occurred over hundreds of millions of years. But sometimes they start out like this juvenile, where they might mimic an ant or they might mimic a stick. As they get older and older, they look more and more like just basically swaying leaf. Sometimes they look like a leaf that is slightly decaying. Sometimes it looks like a fresh leaf. I also have a stick-like Phasmatodean. You can get these in New Jersey. They tend to stay pretty still. All stick insects, whether they are the ones that look like sticks or the ones that look like leaves, they all are vegetarians. So they're just kind of chowing down on leaf material. sun_of_nothing asks, "How do insect antennae work?" So insect and antennae have these tiny little pits in them, and inside are these little chemosensilla. There are odor molecules, sometimes it's a pheromone, sometimes it's things that they're interacting with in the environment. Those odor molecules kind of bind to the sensilla and that triggers an electrical impulse that goes to the brain that tells this insect, in this case, this cockroach, something about what it's tasting or what it's smelling. So on my arm right now is a blaberus, or a cave roach. Now on my hair. One second. I use a lot of coconut oil in my hair and I think she's probably like, "What is going on?" You can see that the antennae are touching constantly and that is her kind of trying to smell her surroundings and figure out [laughing] "What is happening?" This cave roach you would commonly see in Central and South America, often on the barks of trees, especially if you're out at night. They're vegetarians, they're decomposers, and they help kind of shape the forests that we have. That hair product really freaked her out. For ants and termites, they use chemosensation a lot to tell whether or not individuals they're interacting with are from the same nest as them. Whenever you see something that has really big or really long antennae, that tells you that it's probably smelling a lot. Things like dragonflies have very small antennae because they're visual predators. smaksandewand asks, "Either insects are getting really good at avoiding car windscreens or there simply aren't any insects anymore." So I think smaksandewand is remembering what it was like when I was a kid where you would drive along on the highway, your windshield would be covered with smooshed bugs. We know that insects are declining at a rate that we've never seen before. There was a study that came out in 2025 for North American butterflies that suggested that some species of butterflies have declined just in the last 20 years by up to 98% to 99%. We think that there's many causes of this decline. Land use change, our reliance on insecticides, climate change, all of that together means that when you're out, you hear fewer insects, you see fewer insects, and when you're driving in your car, you have fewer of them that kind of splatter against your windshield. Here's a question from the explainlikeI'mfive subreddit. "If you place a same-species ant from a colony to a new colony with other same ants, will it be accepted or rejected, or it doesn't matter to other ants?" Ants in general are very warlike, so they don't like to interact with other individuals, even from the same species. They can smell when there's an ant that's nearby that's not part of their nest and they will go to war. And definitely ants from different species are often at war. We have a question from the ants subreddit, "Which ants have the most effective armies? Like hypothetically, if there were an ant world war, which ant species would win?" Probably Argentine ants. For some reason, Argentine ants are actually able to move together as like a huge group, a super colony. These super colonies of Argentine ants are hundreds of thousands of individuals. It really does look like a black river. When I lived in Costa Rica at a field station, we'd have all of our stuff out, we'd see the ants coming, we'd leave the kitchen, they'd come through, they eat everything. Kind of like in a cartoon, every carrot, every apple was stripped. They can really eat a lot in a very short period of time. So they are very good at what they do, kind of consuming things as they move. Some people say that all of South America is one [laughing] giant Argentine ant group. We have another question from the ants subreddit. "Why are ant colonies so loyal to their queen?" Well, that has to do with their genetics. So ants are very closely related to each other. A lot of insects have sexual reproduction where there's a male gamete and a female gamete, and they come together to form a zygote. And that zygote is what we call diploid. It has components from one individual and another individual. But what the queens do is she actually clones herself by taking just one of her eggs and they make a male, and so it only has half of the information. We call that haploid. That male is what's called a drone. It mates with the queen and then it dies. I'm only related to my kids by 50%, right? Because I had a parent that gave 50% and I gave 50%. Ants that are in a colony that are sisters, they're related to each other by 75%. The goal of all species, we think, is to get as many copies of your genes into the next generation as possible. So we think that's part of what drives the social behavior in ants. That's why so many members of the colony work together cooperatively. They're loyal to the queen, who they're really closely related to and they're really closely related to their sisters. @agepapers asks, "Why and how do termite kings and queens live so long?" Some termite kings and queens, especially queens, can live like 20 years. Her body just becomes distended as this one giant kind of sack of eggs. The longer time that you're around putting out babies, the greater opportunity there is for you to pass your genes on to the next generation. So there might be this evolutionary drive for queens to live a long time to maximize their reproductive output. Some of the day-to-day strife that workers and soldiers have to interact with, warring ants that come by, anteaters, you name it, the kings and queens don't usually have to face that. So they have a pretty cushy life, and that usually allows them to live their full lifespan. So let me show you what a king and queen termite would look like. So in termites, the only cast that has wings that can fly are the reproductive casts. So that's the king and the queen. The wings are like not great, they can't really fly very far. So termite society, like other social insects, they have a really complicated cast system. So there's the reproductive cast, the kings and queens, then there's soldiers that do a lot of defense for the colony. The workers do everything, they make the colony, they also feed the queen, they care for the queen, they groom the queen, they care for the young, they'll bang their heads against the wall to kind of communicate with each other. They have a crypt where they carry their dead in some species. They have a nursery or an infirmary. So it's very sophisticated. So from the insects subreddit, "Why do dragonflies have indicators slash black marks on their wings?" Dragonflies have a pterostigma. It looks like a little dot. It's near the tip of their wing. Sometimes it's very long. Sometimes it looks like a little square. Sometimes it's black, but sometimes it's not, sometimes it's kind of yellow. Sometimes it's like spangled or multicolored. Dragonflies can fly really fast, some of them can fly like 30 miles an hour. So maybe having this pterostigma helps stabilize the wing. What we do know about pterostigma is that they're probably a pretty recent feature. When you look at fossil dragonflies, especially very old fossils, many of them don't have pterostigma. Dragonflies or something that looked like a dragonfly was probably the first thing to fly. So before birds, before bats, before pterosaurs, before any other insect. And they flew during the Carboniferous Period, which is 350 million years ago, each wing was around 37 centimeters. So it had a total of about a two-foot wingspan. They were just massive. userErebus asks, "Why were dragonflies massive in that time period before the dinosaurs?" When people have tried to rear modern dragonflies in high-oxygen environments, they ended up being slightly larger. So we think oxygen is part of it. Oxygen levels were a lot higher when these massive dragonflies, Meganeuridae, Meganeuropsis, when they were flying around in the Carboniferous Period. But also it was that there was nothing else in the sky. So they were able to be kind of big, maybe not be the best flyers, be clumsy. As the sky started filling up with other species of insects, with birds, with pterosaurs, later on, with bats, insects, especially dragonflies, had to get very good at maneuvering. They tended to get smaller and be more flexible and having slightly different features in their wings so they can maneuver in and amongst vegetation and amongst other animals that are in the sky. A million-dollar question is how did flight start? What we know is that wings are made up of two different types of material that come together, one of which seems to have its origin from legs and the other of which seems to have its origin from the back or the cuticle. And when we have something that is a really important innovation, we call that an adaptive radiation, because after the rise of winged insects, or pterygota, that is where the bulk of the diversity is. We talk about there being more species of insects on Earth than there is anything else. Almost all of those have wings. Here's another one, Siba Mteza asks, "Why do insects hang around people? Go play with your friends, bro." Crying face emoji. Insects tend to come around humans because they are detecting carbon dioxide, which we exhale. Sometimes also lactic acid. So there's this joke in entomology that if you're breathing, insects will find you, but if you stop breathing, there are other insects that will find you, 'cause there's things that like to eat dead humans. [laughing] But the other insects that are around you, butterflies, or dragonflies, or crickets, they're actually not really interested in you. Insects have been around for a lot longer than humans, we're just kind of living in insects' world. Whenever we interact with them, it's not that they're coming around us as much as it is that we are kind of constantly invading the habitats that they've lived in for hundreds of millions of years. At LRosestars asks, "How did they find out dung beetles can navigate using the Milky Way?" There was a research group that actually was kind of looking at how dung beetles were using the Moon to navigate to where they needed to go. But then during a dark night when there wasn't a moon out, the dung beetles were still following the same route. And that led them to wonder, "I wonder if there's something in the dark sky that they're still using for navigation?" And they thought maybe it was the brightness of the Milky Way and the position of the Milky Way. So they actually took these dung beetles and they took them into a planetarium. And they displayed the Milky Way, and indeed, the dung beetle was able to use the planetarium Milky Way to kind of go on its trajectory. So that was how they figured out that the Milky Way was being used by dung beetles for navigation. At RishiJoeSanu asks, "Why do people get too riled up over the concept of eating insects? Nobody is forcing you to eat them. Let me have my high-protein cricket powder in peace." I agree. Eating insects is maybe one of the most natural things that humans can do. Our most close relatives are primates, chimpanzees, bonobos, they eat insects all the time. So as long as there have been humans, we have been eating insects. Insects are a really high source of protein. They tend to be low in fat. I eat a lot of insects. I usually eat them cooked, and that kind of gives them like a nutty flavor. I would say that we should all be eating insects. And if you don't wanna eat insects, don't eat them. So AJ_rod354 asks, "How TF does pollination work? Never understood it." Plants wanna get their genetic information moved around because the more genetic recombination there is, usually the better species fair. Insects wanna eat food, so put those things together and that basically is pollination. So flowers often have nectar, and nectar is a sweet substance, it's the reward. Probably when you're thinking about pollinators and pollination, you're thinking about bees. Many of the photos that people actually use of bees doing pollination are actually not bees, they're syrphid flies. So there's lots of flies that look a little bit like a bee, but you can tell that they're a fly 'cause they only have one pair of wings. Their hind wings are modified into these little nubs called halteres. It doesn't matter whether the animals that come to your plants are bees, or flies, or what have you, they pick up some pollen, and when they go to the next plant to drink, then they leave some of that pollen behind, and that basically allows the plants to share the genetic information. We should all be doing our part to save the pollinators, and this includes reducing the use of insecticides, as well as creating habitat for pollinators. They need nooks and they need crannies and they need leaves. So if you don't like raking your leaves, that's actually great for pollinators. If you create a pollinator-friendly garden, different types of flowers that bloom at different times with different heights and different colors, you'll get a lot of pollinators coming. I actually love buzz pollination, where the insect actually does like this kind of shaking vibration behavior, which causes an explosion of pollen by the plant. If insect pollinators were to go extinct, then we ourselves would be really vulnerable because there's some nutrition that we can only get from plants that are pollinated by an insect. @_katelynsantos asks, "Where do fruit flies come from though? They just show up as soon as your fruit gets really ripe." Probably that's because the fruit that you brought into your home was already covered with the eggs of fruit flies. So when you bring bananas into your home, for example, they're covered in fruit fly eggs, [laughing] all over the rinds of your bananas. The warm heat of your kitchen allows for the fruit fly eggs to hatch. Sometimes when you bring them in, the eggs have already hatched and the little maggots are kind of already crawling all over the surface. The larvae can eat along the surface of the rind or they can bore into the rotted fruit, become adult fruit flies and start the cycle again. The fruit fly lifecycle is very short, so they can go through this whole process in just one or two days. So if you buy a set of bananas on Saturday, chances are good that those eggs can hatch and go through their full developmental life stage by the next week. Here's a question from Quora. "How do creatures without any bones or cartilage, squids, cephalopods, insects, et cetera, get fossilized in stone?" So when we think about fossils, we often think of things like dinosaur bones or hardened bones, but sometimes they're just kind of like a hardened imprint of an exoskeleton or things that are trapped in amber. Amber is basically fossilized tree resin, or tree sap. And when it drips out, insects get caught in it, and then those are preserved over long periods of time. Some are kind of green, some are kind of this, well, amber-colored. "Jurassic Park" suggested that perhaps you could take insects from amber and you could get DNA from them. And so far, we haven't been able to do that. But you can dissolve some amber and actually take the insect out. So what I have here is a compression fossil. And this is from Antarctica. And it has examples of juveniles of dragonflies, as well as part of a wing of a dragonfly. It's kind of just the imprint of the dragonfly wing, as well as the imprint of the body parts of the juvenile stage. @Julius4rumEarth asks, "Serious question. Why do lantern flies exist? What is their function? To annoy me, I presume." People have been concerned about spotted lantern flies for a couple of reasons. One, they're an invasive species, and whenever you have an invasive species, that can outcompete native species, but also they have mouth parts that are like a straw with a pump, so they drink tree sap or plant sap. It basically means they have an all-liquid diet. Because they're drinking mostly sap, their poop is like a liquid kind of sugary poop, which we call honeydew. And when it drips onto the plants where it's feeding, it actually can encourage mold growth that can negatively impact crops. the_man_in_pink asks, "How do cicadas know when to emerge? They use a couple of different cues. One is their drinking from the roots of trees, so their drinking plants sap, and that kind of composition of plant sap changes with seasons, but they also can detect temperature. And once it reaches 18 degrees Celsius or 64 degrees Fahrenheit, that is the cue that it is time to emerge. Some cicadas do this every two years, and some do this every 13 or 17 years, where you end up with trillions of individuals who have also used the same timing queue to emerge at the same time. So @michael-ray asks, "Where did Chagas come from? We needed a new crisis, I suppose." In kissing bugs, there are these trypanosomes that actually hijack their body system and they can be transported into our bloodstream, and that trypanosome causes a disease that's called Chagas. And Chagas disease is incredibly bad. They're often called kissing bugs because these bugs often make their piercing mark in easy-to-reach places where they can get a good blood meal, like on your lips when you're sleeping. The trypanosome goes inside of your body, you have a fever, sometimes you have a rash, but then the trypanosome kind of lies dormant in your body, sometimes for decades, and eventually it makes its way to your heart and eats holes in your heart, and then you die from heart failure. The reason why we worry about Chagas now in North America is because, thanks to humans, we now have higher temperatures in North America. So in parts of Texas and Oklahoma, the trypanosome is able to complete its lifecycle in kissing bugs. Right now, it's really a concern in Central and South America. So Chagas was always there, just not in North America. And the new crisis is in part our design because of climate change. thoughtfloss asks, "In my dream last night, I was surrounded by fireflies. I wondered how can they communicate with just flashes of light when humans can't communicate with all our words." Fireflies communicate by having a chemical reaction in their body, it involves luciferin and luciferase, that produces light. So they use this light in a flashing pattern. It's species specific. Males use it to communicate with females to indicate that they're the same species. They need to have darkness for this to happen. So light pollution can negatively impact fireflies. Females can use the flashing pattern of males from a different species to trick them and then eat them. @Particular_Luck4091 asks, "Why does evolution cause bees to die when stinging?" Over time through natural selection, the ovipositor, or egg-laying apparatus, in bees has been modified to function as a stinger, and that is a protective mechanism for these bees. In honeybees at least, when the sting happens, it enters the victim that's being stung. And because it's barbed, as the bee flies away, it actually rips off part of the abdomen. And so with no bum and with no back of the abdomen, then the bee dies. Most of the females in a colony are workers. If they die, there's still hundreds, sometimes thousands, of sisters in the colony that live on. So the goal is to always do the greater good and protect the colony and not really care about your own loss. So those are all the questions for today. Thanks for watching "Bug Support." [upbeat music]
