Bug Expert Answers Insect Questions From Twitter

Those are great.

[crunching]

Dried, something of a nutty after-taste,

but yeah, I'm down for it.

Not bad. Hopefully died of natural causes.

I'm Sammy, your friendly neighborhood entomologist.

And I'm here to answer your questions on Twitter.

This is Insect Support.

[upbeat music]

At Adria Kosinski:

Wait, y'all, serious question,

do ants and other little bug boys have tiny little lungs,

like how the hell do they breathe?

And why were we never taught this

when we talked about exoskeletons and bugs,

how do bugs work?

An exoskeleton is something that can be pretty incredible

for an organism, but it does not grow with the creature.

So the major drawback to having your skeleton

on the outside of your body,

is that you have to pop out of it

in order to get any bigger.

I've got these roaches here,

they're called discoid cockroaches.

So the cockroach that is this translucent white color,

this is a Roach that has recently molted.

During this period of time, where they're white,

there are a bunch of proteins in their exoskeleton

that haven't reached the form where they become

the solidified proteins that make their exoskeleton

hard and crunchy.

This gives them a small period of time where they can grow

really rapidly before it solidifies.

And they're stuck in that stadium for a while again.

Insects breathe very differently from the ways

that human beings breathe.

We breathe through a process of negative pressure,

where your diaphragm pulls down,

and allows for your lungs to pull air in.

Insects don't have anything like that.

They're not walking around with tiny little lungs.

They have holes on the sides of their body

called spiracles, air diffuses inside,

and they're able to get all of that oxygen

to where it needs to go, albeit, slowly.

That's the reason why insects can't get to be huge,

or one of the primary reasons.

All of that oxygen has to slowly get to the cells

at the very center of their body.

And if it takes too long, those cells will starve and die.

So usually about the size of a dinner plate

is as big as insects can get

for diffusion to work efficiently.

At Steez_Mcgee: If cicadas are blind,

how do they have sex?

We're just gonna do a quick little fact-check here.

cicadas are not blind,

but I actually do understand why you would think that.

They're very clumsy fliers,

they're always crashing into things.

And part of it is because their flight muscles

can't sustain flight for long periods of time.

So when they meet their limit, they just land.

They land somewhere, they land on anything,

it's kind of their thing.

Another part of this question that kind of perplexes me.

There are plenty of organisms out there that cannot see,

that are capable of procreating, and procreating well.

cicadas are very well able to coordinate themselves,

to move around, to find what they need to find.

A lot of their navigation happens based on sound.

They're constantly making noises that signal to the other,

I'm interested in you. And I'd like to do this thing.

The real question about cicada sex is,

how do you have sex when your button genitals

have fallen off?

At this point, I'm talking about the Masspopora fungus.

It's a type of fungus that is able to penetrate

the cuticle of the cicadas.

And as its fungal-fruiting body grows,

it replaces the genitals of the cicada,

and eventually causes the entire back-end,

the butt of the cicada, to just fall off.

But that doesn't stop the cicadas from wanting to mate.

Oddly enough, they become hyper-sexual in this context,

and try to signal to other cicadas, regardless of gender.

I am receptive to the mating process.

When these cicadas attempt to mate with them,

they walk away with one of the worst venereal diseases

that any creature can ever get.

[grimaces]

So really, the answer to your question: sound.

At AmbientRelish: What are the best insects to eat?

Bugs are really good for you, low in fat, high in protein,

but the ones that are best for you to eat,

they happen to be the ones that are bigger,

it makes for more bang for your buck.

No matter how many gnats or fruit flies you eat,

probably never really going to be enough

for you to feel full.

But you can feel full after eating

a few cicadas or some grasshoppers.

You want to avoid bugs that are like black and yellow,

black and orange, because they're chemically defended,

but there's plenty of bugs out there that are pretty edible.

People eat things like crickets,

and silkworm larvae, all the time.

And to show you that nothing bad happens

if you eat a bug, allow me.

We happen to have some already prepared.

Got some silkworm larvae here, oh,

those are great, those are great.

[crunching]

Dried, something of a nutty after-taste,

but yeah, I'm down for it.

Not bad, hopefully it died of natural causes.

At _Rob_29: Can we circle back to the murder hornets?

They didn't get a fair shake.

These organisms are starting to get the kind of attention

that they actually deserve.

And it's our hope that this year we'll be able to find

all of the nests of these hornets that may still be present

in the environment, and be able to declare

the Pacific Northwest, Asian-giant-hornet free.

Because if this organism becomes established in the US,

it could have really substantial ripple effects

for many of our pollinators, including our honeybees,

and several of our native bees.

But they're not chasing down people,

they're not trying to whisk your children away in the night.

It's really the bees that they're after,

and thus beekeepers are the people

most likely to encounter them.

At Bea_Spooky: Yo, who knew that cricket ears

are right by their knees?

I thought that was pretty cool, too,

when I first found that out.

I read this book called Chirping Insects

when I was a little kid, and was like,

Wait a minute, they have ears on their knees?

What is it like when they wear headphones?

Seriously, there are strange, strange animals

for having those sorts of proportions,

but it works really well when you don't have a neck.

We use our neck all the time to rotate our heads

so that we can better discern what direction

a particular sound came from.

And they can't really quite do that as well

as we are able to.

And so having it on their legs allows for a very mobile part

of their body to be angled in different ways,

such that they can tell exactly

where a sound is coming from.

Crickets have really good ears.

They have to have really good ears

because the way that they communicate,

that they're receptive to a mating experience,

is by making quite a bit of noise.

You've heard the cricket chirp that's been used

to quite good comedic effect in the past.

[cricket chirping]

They're trying to signal to the other crickets out there,

Hey, I'm single and ready to mingle.

At Ditzydruid: My squash plants bring all the bees

to the yard, and they're like, you want some guards?

Damn right, I want some guards. Okay, I'll stop now.

But seriously, my squash plants are awesome this year,

and the bees are to thank.

There were three in one blossom.

Yeah, you figured this thing out, squash bees are awesome.

Insects, in general, form one of the best means

of pollinating plants on this planet.

The vast majority of fruits and vegetables that we consume

on a regular basis are the result

of the pollination of insects.

They are incredible at this.

Your squash bees are getting into those flowers,

they're dancing around, shaking all the pollen

onto their bodies, it is an incredible experience.

And I'm really glad that they do it as well as they do it.

Bees aren't doing the whole pollination thing

just 'cause they really like

offering this service to the world.

It actually benefits them.

They have something full of protein

to feed to their offspring.

Some bees have an entire section on the underside

of their body, of all of these hairs,

that they attach the pollen to.

And to get it on there, they swim through the flower,

and just rub their backside all over it,

to get all the pollen stuck to them.

There are other bees, like your squash bees,

that have a section of their leg

that they embed the pollen into.

They'll have these things that look like legwarmers,

or big, giant socks stuck to the sides of their legs,

and it's so cute.

We talk all the time, honeybees, honeybees, honeybees,

but there are a lot more bees out there.

There are 4,000 other species of bees in North America.

And we need to give a little bit of attention

to our humble bees, 'cause they're working hard,

and they rarely get any of the attention.

At ButtahPecanTyy: There's this dangerous new bug

that's coming to town called 'the kissing bug'.

They said, 'If you come across one, don't squish it,

trap it in a jar with water or alcohol,

and send it to the lab'.

Why? So you can make more to kill us off?

Weird.

Well, that got dark really quickly.

I know that science has several ills to account for,

in its past, especially ills toward minority people.

And so there can be reasons to be a bit nervous at times

about the directions that things are going.

Thanks to more diversity, and greater transparency

in science, I do think that things are progressing.

I hope that us explaining things more clearly

can also help to diffuse some of that tension.

The reason why people want you to bring in the insect

that bit you to the hospital, or to the entomologist,

is because if a doctor is going to know how to treat you,

after you've been bitten by one of these organisms,

they need to know what bit you.

How you treat someone who's been bitten by

a lone star tick, is different from how you treat someone

who's been bitten by a triatoma and kissing bug.

The entomologist who may want to see it,

may need to know where these organisms are spreading,

such that we can create a geographic map,

and let people know if there's a bunch of them

showing up in their neighborhood.

The kissing bug is a type of insect

that is in a category called true bugs.

So things like cicadas, bedbugs, aphids,

are all in this category of true bugs.

They have a stylet, or pretty much a straw as a mouth part.

They pierce something in order to feed on it,

as aphids pierce plants, kissing bugs pierce people,

and some pets.

They extract blood from the organism,

and they use that as a good source of nutrition

in order to produce a sizeable clutch of eggs.

Why are they dangerous?

Most creatures that interact with your bloodstream

can be very competent vectors of viruses, bacteria, fungi,

and parasites, various sorts, into your body.

The reason why they've been referred to as kissing bugs,

is because we were under the impression

that they primarily fed around the lips of the host,

sort of as a really creepy goodnight kiss.

But they don't just feed around the lips,

that's just the most conspicuous and memorable place

where people have found them feeding.

At Fiorebianca: Strawberries were on sale

at the grocery store this morning.

I bought some for the first time in a couple of years,

but now I want to try that whole saltwater soak

to see if bugs come out of them.

And what happens if there are bugs?

Do I just rinse them off and eat them anyway?

You kind of just rinse them off and eat them anyway.

Or you just don't do the saltwater soak at all.

Because if you've been eating fresh produce,

you've been eating bugs your entire life.

It's not just strawberries, it's pretty much everything.

The United States Department of Agriculture has standards

for the amount of insect legs and whole bugs

that can be in any particular food product.

And spoiler alert, the levels are higher

than you will probably be comfortable with.

But the reason for that is because insects

are just a part of life.

They are present in all of the different elements

of the development of that plant.

That it's impossible for them to sell that plant to you,

having removed all of them.

Thank you so much for your questions.

This has been Insect Support.