Ep. 6 – Gale Ridge on bringing peace to humans’ befuddling relationships with bugs

Dr. Gale Ridge with sign about bed bugs
A concert pianist-turned-entomologist, Dr. Gale Ridge is an insect detective. She solves mysteries and helps thousands of perplexed, struggling people with all varieties of bug problems — from bedbugs to agricultural pests to imaginary bugs that infest our consciousness.

Remember how insects used to smash against your car windshield? Do you ever wonder why that rarely happens any more? The reason is not that insects have gotten better at avoiding highways. It’s because they’ve disappeared. Several years ago, scientists began reporting dramatic declines, domestically and internationally, in honey bees, monarch butterflies, moths, beetles, and lightening bugs. In the U.S., 900 million monarch butterflies have died over the last 20 years, 90 percent of the total, probably thanks to human activities. In the same period, we’ve seen the rusty-patched bumblebee population drop by 87 percent. These historic declines, what some scientists call the “windshield phenomenon” or an overlooked “ecological apocalypse,” could alter the planet in unknowable ways.

In this episode, we speak with a figure at the frontline of the fraught relationship between human beings and insects. Dr. Gale Ridge is an expert on bed bugs and a scientist at Connecticut’s Agricultural Experiment Station. Her primary research is on bed bugs, but her expertise extends to insect morphology, behavior, and ecology. Dr. Ridge is an EPA FIFRA Scientific Advisory Panel member, curator of The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station insect collection, and overseer of the Experiment Station’s Insect Inquiry Office, which fields thousands of queries each year. She has discovered and catalogued many new species of insects and serves as chair of the Connecticut Coalition against Bedbugs. She has also become an expert in delusional parasitosis.

Dr. Gale Ridge with students
“We have this habit of putting everything in little boxes,” says Dr. Ridge, pictured here with students.”But that’s just a control mechanism. Science is an art. When you’re working in science, you’re looking at the macro as well as the micro simultaneously. Just like playing a piece on the piano. There is no difference.”

The Insect Inquiry Office that Dr. Ridge leads serves to diagnose and assist citizens of Connecticut with insect problems. The office is the state’s only government office that will identify — for free — the winged, segmented, alive, squashed, winged, fuzzy bugs perplexing the state’s humans. Civilians, farmers, and big companies and institutions including Yale all turn to the office, and to its sage Dr. Ridge, for insect advice. In this episode, Dr. Ridge speaks about her sleuthing and how she brokers peace between the humans that walk in her door at the Connecticut Insect Inquiry Office and the tiny segmented animals we’ve learned to fear.

Dr. Gale Ridge with rabbit and bed bugs
Dr. Ridge with Radar, a rabbit trained to sit on her lap and have bed bugs feed on his left thigh. Bed bugs feed solely on the blood of animals. “I have no problems with these little animals because I understand them. I know how they tick,” Dr. Ridge says. “What happens with bed bug discovery with most people is that cortisol just pours into their bloodstream and they go into a primitive mind state and are incapable of learning… My job is to find peace.”
Dr. Gale Ridge examining insects under a microscope at the Smithsonian.
Dr. Ridge at a microscope at the Smithsonian. “These folks are struggling,” Dr. Ridge says of her clients with delusional parasitosis. “They’ve been underserved by the medical profession. They have something. For them, it’s absolutely real. They’re just trying to find an answer for something they don’t understand, and they default to a human problem of an anxiety towards insects. They get a creepy crawly sensation on their skin, and they immediately go from zero to sixty in the direction of arthropod activity.”

Recommendations:

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 (“Pastoral Symphony”) 


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