insects Archives - When We Talk About Animals

Ep. 45 – Rob Dunn on what the laws of biology predict about our future

*“These laws [of biology] are often very much at odds with our daily behavior,”* says Dr. Rob Dunn. “In the context of a world that we’re rapidly changing, they seem actually to be growing in their importance, rather than contracting. And they’re not really a part of our discourse. We tend to get caught up with Elon Musk flinging himself out into space, and not pay attention to the fact that whatever we do in space, the species that we bring with us into space are still going to obey the rules of life that we’ve come to understand here on Earth.”
Photo by Amanda Ward.

Humans try hard to control the natural world. We’ve dammed and straightened meandering rivers and filled in wetlands. We’ve transformed primordial forests into farms and turned oceans into highways. Humans and our domestic animals now account for an estimated 96 percent of all terrestrial mammal biomass. Wild mammals account for just four percent. Amid the cataclysms of the Anthropocene, we tend to think of ourselves as the primary shapers of our planet. But for all our efforts to tame, simplify, and cordon off nature, we remain just as beholden to the world’s ecological laws as we were more than 200,000 years ago when Homo Sapiens first emerged.

Like the laws of physics, paying attention to our planet’s biological laws empowers us to understand how the world works and to make predictions about the outcomes of our actions. In his latest book, A Natural History of the Future, Rob Dunn – an extraordinarily creative author and ecologist – warns that continuing to ignore these laws will cause us to fail again and again in our attempts to build a sustainable future for our species.

Dunn makes the case that the human species will survive not by simplifying and isolating, but through embracing biodiversity and living in accordance with the knowledge that we are at the mercy of the law of natural selection, the species-area law, and the diversity-stability law, to name a few examples. These laws aren’t merely fascinating phenomena. Understanding these inescapable rules of ecology is key to our survival and quality of life. Whether or not we heed them will have profound consequences for our future.

Ep. 23 – David Rothenberg on playing music with whales and nightingales

“Science and art,” Rothenberg says, “have different criteria for truth.” Photo courtesy of David Rothenberg.

When our guest, philosopher and musician David Rothenberg, was seventeen, he landed a summer job tracking the flightpaths of birds in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. One day, while transcribing the sweeping flightpath of a hawk, he suddenly lost sight of the creature. He sat down, listening, and heard a rustle in the leaves above him.

The raptor was sitting on a branch “right above me,” Rothenberg writes in his new book, Nightingales in Berlin, “looking down at the map where I’d been tracking his movements, as if he’d figured out what I was doing, much to his displeasure.”

Rothenberg was suddenly inspired. He set the map aside, picked up a small penny whistle, and began to play along, joining the chorus of birdsong overhead.

“You hear this crazy music under the water. When you join into it you realize it’s a whole musical world in which each whale is singing their own song and we’re not sure how much they listen to each other, how much they overlap …” Rothenberg says. “So it’s not so surprising that they’d hear you and change what they’re doing.” Photo courtesy of David Rothenberg.

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.”

Ep. 5 – Lisa Margonelli on the big ideas termites raise about science, technology, and morality

Termite mound photo by Lisa Margonelli — “When I started the book, the working premise of termites was that you could model them with a little robot,” author Lisa Margonelli says. “In a way that goes back to Descartes, who said that animals are soulless automata… What happened was the termites didn’t really act the way they were expected to act once they were in experimental situations… It was a revelation: the termites themselves were individuals.” (Photo by Lisa Margonelli.)

Nobody loves termites. We admire bees and ants for their industry and for their collective decision-making, but, as our guest has written, while parents dress their children in bee costumes and animated ants star in Dreamworks movies, termites are at best crude cartoons on the side of pest control trucks. These bugs are also comparatively unexplored in academic studies. Between 2000 and 2013, about 6000 papers were published about termites. 49 percent were about how to kill them. Despite the fact that termites collectively outweigh humans ten to one, they have lacked a popular writer to bring them to the forefront of public attention. Our guest, Lisa Margonelli, is that writer and champion for the termites.

“It was really kind of a revelation: the termites themselves were individuals,” Margonelli says. “To think that there’s a mound of 5 million termites and they’re individuals, that’s kind of a big thing.”

Her new book, Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology, introduces us to termites and the scientists who study them, so we can see them — and ourselves — in a way we never have before. But this isn’t just a fascinating book about nature’s most underrated bug. What makes this book really special is that it uses termites as a new portal to explore some of the biggest questions we have about technology, power, morality, the nature of science and scientific progress, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going.