Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 2: is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3: And I am Joe McCormick. And hey, Rob, you're back.
Speaker 3: You've been out of the country.
Speaker 2: That's right. Yeah, me and the FAM just spent two
Speaker 2: weeks in Japan so much fun. Highly recommend it, but
Speaker 2: it also means that, yeah, we're back. I'm only on
Speaker 2: my second day back and I'm still somewhat jet lagged,
Speaker 2: So I'm going to apologize in advance for any extra
Speaker 2: fumbles that I make today in handling our notes in
Speaker 2: our recording.
Speaker 3: What's the time difference EUS Eastern to Japan?
Speaker 2: What it's like thirteen hours? I believe it's I was
Speaker 2: constantly breaking my brain by pulling up the world clock
Speaker 2: on my phone and figuring out exactly like where we
Speaker 2: were and where back home was, and then all of
Speaker 2: that's fallen apart since I've come back, and I'm attempting
Speaker 2: to readjust.
Speaker 3: But it's like an almost perfect to day night inversion.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, pretty much, and really was. It was easy,
Speaker 2: easy enough to get used to it going over. It'sn't
Speaker 2: just been much harder coming back.
Speaker 3: Well, folks. If you remember from before we were out
Speaker 3: for a couple of weeks, we had a kind of
Speaker 3: strange but I think good scheme where we broke right
Speaker 3: in the middle of a series so we could jump
Speaker 3: back in with part two of our talk about cicadas. Now,
Speaker 3: of course it's been a while, so you might not
Speaker 3: remember some of the things we talked about in part one,
Speaker 3: But in that episode we discussed our personal experiences with cicadas.
Speaker 3: We talked about finding their abandoned former exoskeletons after molting,
Speaker 3: or just finding random body parts, wings, legs, and stuff
Speaker 3: like that. Here and there, we talked about how cicadas
Speaker 3: fit into the insect class as a member of the
Speaker 3: so called true bugs, the Hymiptera, and we had a
Speaker 3: digression on the etymological history of the word bug in
Speaker 3: English referred to monsters and scarecrows before it actually referred
Speaker 3: to insects. We talked about the physical characteristics of cicadas.
Speaker 3: They're piercing and sucking mouthparts. They have this needle like
Speaker 3: mouth called a rostrum, which they used to feed off
Speaker 3: of Xylum sap from plant roots and then stems in
Speaker 3: their adult stage. We talked about how they emit their
Speaker 3: famous song, not by rubbing together wings or legs like
Speaker 3: some other insects, but with dedicated organs called timbals, these
Speaker 3: kind of corrugated drumheads on the sides of their bodies
Speaker 3: that they can buckle and snap back and forth to
Speaker 3: make a sound. We of course talked about their reproductive cycle,
Speaker 3: with an early developmental stage taking place underground where they
Speaker 3: feed on Xylum from plant roots, and then their emergence
Speaker 3: as an adult into the air or above where they mate.
Speaker 3: And then of course after they the females lay eggs
Speaker 3: with this wonderful knife like ovipositor that they gouge into
Speaker 3: twigs and soft tree branches to make little canyons for
Speaker 3: their eggs to live in. And then finally we talked
Speaker 3: about the periodical cicadas of North America that we have
Speaker 3: here and we just recently had a big emergence in
Speaker 3: our area. The periodical cicadas which emerge not every year everywhere,
Speaker 3: as most cicadas do, but instead after bizarrely long periods
Speaker 3: of underground development, so some go thirteen years before emerging,
Speaker 3: some go seventeen years. And we discussed evolutionary pressures that
Speaker 3: could have led to this adaptation. One hypothesis that we
Speaker 3: talked about, and to be clear, this is not the
Speaker 3: only one. There are other possible explanations in the mix,
Speaker 3: and we might try to get into them in a
Speaker 3: later part of the series. But one hypothesis we talked
Speaker 3: about is that it prevents local predators and parasitoids from
Speaker 3: adapting to cicadas as regular prey or host animals, because
Speaker 3: once they're out, as I've read in multiple places, everything
Speaker 3: eats them. Cicadas are nutritious, they have almost nothing in
Speaker 3: the way of individual defenses, and there are a zillion
Speaker 3: of them, so it's nature's buffet. But the idea is
Speaker 3: if you only appear at weird, irregular time intervals, predators
Speaker 3: can't come to depend on you, and there won't be
Speaker 3: enough of them to eat all of you when you
Speaker 3: do come out. So it's like if you had a
Speaker 3: buffet that you didn't want too many people eating at
Speaker 3: so you know, and it was delicious and you had
Speaker 3: lots of food, but instead you just like were very
Speaker 3: squirrely about what you're operating hours were.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, it's the the complete inversion of what you
Speaker 2: would expect with some sort of a business model for
Speaker 2: a restaurant, a buffet or anything that's like bringing in bodies.
Speaker 2: You know, in this case want you want your audience.
Speaker 2: You want the consumers to be taken off guard so
Speaker 2: that they can't be ready for it. They can't ramp
Speaker 2: up to meet this dietary bounty that occurs again, not
Speaker 2: every year, but every thirteen or every seventeen years with
Speaker 2: these periodical cicadas.
Speaker 3: But of course many species of cicadas are just annual cicadas,
Speaker 3: and they do come out every year, and many things
Speaker 3: do still eat them.
Speaker 2: That's right. But that leads to the big question, right, Joe,
Speaker 2: Lots of things can eat them, We can eat them.
Speaker 2: We'll probably get into that a little bit more in
Speaker 2: a subsequent episode, But can they eat us? To question
Speaker 2: that has garnered a lot of discussion of you.
Speaker 3: Yes, it's a wonderful question. It's a question people apparently
Speaker 3: cannot stop asking. So if you go back through newspaper articles,
Speaker 3: radio programs, all kinds of media that accompany these big
Speaker 3: cicada booms whenever they happen, it seems readers and listeners
Speaker 3: are always expressing concern that the cicadas will bite them
Speaker 3: or sting them. And then maybe if people know a
Speaker 3: bit more about their morphology, about the piercing and sucking
Speaker 3: mouthparts rather than the chewing and tearing arrangement some other
Speaker 3: bugs have, they might ask instead, will Cicada's stab their
Speaker 3: needle like rostra into my veins and drain all my blood?
Speaker 3: And yes, one historical newspaper article does discuss this possibility.
Speaker 3: The short answer is no, no, no, this does not happen.
Speaker 3: But it is kind of interesting to explore the way
Speaker 3: this question keeps coming up over and over again, because
Speaker 3: it turns out recent generations are not the first to
Speaker 3: arrive at this question. People have been asking this for
Speaker 3: a long time. So I was looking for sources on
Speaker 3: this and I came across an article by an author
Speaker 3: whose name always fills me with delight when I see it,
Speaker 3: May Berenbaum. May Barnbaum is an American entomologist affiliated with
Speaker 3: the University of Illinois. She has been recently and I
Speaker 3: think still is editor in chief of PNAS, and we've
Speaker 3: cross paths with her work a lot on stuff to
Speaker 3: blow your mind because she has written a lot of
Speaker 3: science based articles that cover I don't know, our kind
Speaker 3: of beat like strange and funny questions about insects, but
Speaker 3: with a scientifically informed perspective. And just one example is
Speaker 3: I think we did an article of hers that was
Speaker 3: talking about cases of bugs crawling inside people's bodies, stuff
Speaker 3: like that. This particular article was called same Old Cicada Song,
Speaker 3: and it was published in the magazine American Entomologist in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty one, related to a big periodical cicada emergence
Speaker 3: that year, specifically brood Now do we say brood X
Speaker 3: or brood ten?
Speaker 2: I mean, I always read it in my head is
Speaker 2: brute x, but of course it's brood ten.
Speaker 3: I think we should follow the Jason X convention though,
Speaker 3: even though it you know, it's the tenth Jason movie,
Speaker 3: but everybody says Jason X. So I think it should
Speaker 3: be brood x brude X. It is so. In this article,
Speaker 3: Barenbaum talks about the long history of media stories about
Speaker 3: emerging cicada broods, and she goes way back into the
Speaker 3: newspaper archives and finds a story from March first, eighteen
Speaker 3: sixty in the New York Times. This would have been
Speaker 3: only nine years after the paper was founded that begins
Speaker 3: as follows the locust plague to reappear this year. You
Speaker 3: know that's classic headline flair all caps locust plague about
Speaker 3: insects that once again harm no one. So the article
Speaker 3: goes on. Mister Gideon B. Smith communicates the following unpleasant
Speaker 3: bit of entomological news through the National Intelligencer. The locusts
Speaker 3: or cicada septin decim will appear very extensively this year,
Speaker 3: occupying probably a larger surface of the country than those
Speaker 3: of any other year. Now a note about referring to
Speaker 3: them as locusts. We talked in the last episode about how,
Speaker 3: of course cicadas are not locusts. Locusts are a type
Speaker 3: of swarming grasshopper, and cicadas are not even especially closely
Speaker 3: related to grasshoppers. They're both insects. But cicadas again are hymiptera.
Speaker 3: They are the true bugs. But many of the popular
Speaker 3: sources from the nineteenth century that discuss cicadas do refer
Speaker 3: to them as locusts or sometimes with other common names
Speaker 3: like harvest flies. But locust is very common, and because
Speaker 3: of course locusts are associated with threats to crops, I
Speaker 3: think this sort of bleeds over that, like calling incorrectly
Speaker 3: calling cicada's locusts bleeds over into this idea that cicadas
Speaker 3: themselves are a threat to crops, which they are generally.
Speaker 2: Not right, right, and making it far easier to confuse
Speaker 2: yourself not only with accounts of actual locust based destruction,
Speaker 2: but even like cultural biblical mentions of the locusts and
Speaker 2: plagues of locusts.
Speaker 3: Exactly. Yeah. So after this, barren Baum goes on to
Speaker 3: highlight another article that appeared in The Times a little
Speaker 3: more than seventeen years after that first one, in June
Speaker 3: eighteen seventy seven, for the seventeen year re emergence of
Speaker 3: the same brood. This article was called the Dry Cicada,
Speaker 3: and she brings up this article as the first example
Speaker 3: of a recurring theme that we'll see in a lot
Speaker 3: of these where the author is starting to argue that
Speaker 3: cicadas are not a threat to humans. And she includes
Speaker 3: a short quote that was so good I had to
Speaker 3: go look up the original article in full, and I'm
Speaker 3: glad I did so. I'm going to summarize a bit
Speaker 3: and read from some of it here. The article starts
Speaker 3: off with a vivid description from the point of view
Speaker 3: of a hypothetical new Yorker. They call them a townsfolk
Speaker 3: visiting the rural districts of New Jersey, and it describes
Speaker 3: the sites and sounds associated with a mass emergence of
Speaker 3: periodical cicadas. It talks about their sound as similar to
Speaker 3: a chorus of tree toads, or to quote the shrilling
Speaker 3: of the railway track when the train is at a
Speaker 3: distance and happens to enter a rock cutting. It describes
Speaker 3: going on a ramble through the woods, seeing characteristic holes
Speaker 3: in the ground as if someone had been stabbing the
Speaker 3: ground with a walking stick, especially near the roots of oaks, chestnut, cottonwood,
Speaker 3: and maple trees, and then finding leftover shells from cicada
Speaker 3: moltz clutching onto the lower branches of trees like festoons.
Speaker 3: And then I'm going to read a paragraph from the
Speaker 3: article here. The author writes, quote, pretty soon one of
Speaker 3: these peculiar creatures will be found, having just freed itself
Speaker 3: from the grim, uncouth shape it has borne for so
Speaker 3: many years. The long, transparent double pair of wings have
Speaker 3: been shaken out from two limp close packed masses into
Speaker 3: their full expanse of brittle pinions. The body takes a
Speaker 3: darker tint, and the red eyes that distinguished this harvest
Speaker 3: fly gleam brightly. The insect is fully prepared for its apotheosis.
Speaker 3: It knows exactly what to do, and before its wings
Speaker 3: can bear it, it begins to travel up the trunk
Speaker 3: of any tree nearby to join the frivolous band of
Speaker 3: its fellows that are making the upper air trimble with
Speaker 3: their love notes. You know, theaper, the newspaper reporting style
Speaker 3: was different back then.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, they had a whole different ap style book,
Speaker 2: didn't they.
Speaker 3: Yeah. But anyway, so it goes on to talk about
Speaker 3: a few other things, like how how the cicada flies,
Speaker 3: it's mating, and so forth, But then finally it gets
Speaker 3: to the question of whether that frivolous band of fellows
Speaker 3: will kill you. So here I'm going to read again
Speaker 3: from the article. It says, since the larva lives by
Speaker 3: sucking the juices from roots, and the fly has a
Speaker 3: large and strong sucking tube, there seems no reason why
Speaker 3: this locust, as we call it, should not divert its
Speaker 3: attention from the juices of plants to the red juices
Speaker 3: of animals and men like the just like the large
Speaker 3: horse flies before mentioned. Indeed, just as the small and
Speaker 3: maddening mosquito itself. It seems a mere piece of luck,
Speaker 3: perhaps the result of their slow flight, or some arrangement
Speaker 3: of their sucking tubes, their defective digestive their defective digestive system,
Speaker 3: or even the fact that the ancestors of the present
Speaker 3: harvest fly have been invariably well conducted, that the Jerseymen
Speaker 3: of this year still exists in life instead of being
Speaker 3: reduced to a thoroughly pumped frame of flesh. Nothing short
Speaker 3: of plate armor would have saved him. Or it may
Speaker 3: be that the extraordinary parsimony of nature which leads her
Speaker 3: to give the poor harvest fly, after seventeen or thirteen
Speaker 3: years of underground existence, only a few weeks in which
Speaker 3: to buzz in love and deposit the connubial egg. It
Speaker 3: may be the scantness of their allowance of paradise which
Speaker 3: saves New Jersey from periodical depopulation. For if it were
Speaker 3: not for one or more of these counteracting causes, imagine
Speaker 3: the result of an appetite for blood aroused in the
Speaker 3: horny breasts of these gigantic horseflies. Instead of flying with
Speaker 3: comparatively harmless results about the tops of the trees, they
Speaker 3: would descend upon the helpless jerseyman and drive him forth,
Speaker 3: if it be possible to make that distinction with a
Speaker 3: jerseyman to a foreign climb. Love the dig at New
Speaker 3: Jersey residents at the end there.
Speaker 2: Oh man, there's so much to dissect. There, so many
Speaker 2: logical hurdles were vaulted over in this absolute sprint toward
Speaker 2: the fear the possibility that the cicadas could just one
Speaker 2: day wipe out all of New Jersey.
Speaker 3: But I like that it's making the point that cicadas
Speaker 3: don't do this by just elaborating extensively on how they could.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like, yeah they could. Yeah, I mean if
Speaker 2: humans had xylum and not blood, if we were trees
Speaker 2: and not mammals, then then sure, yeah, it would be
Speaker 2: a dire threat.
Speaker 3: So unfortunately, I feel like I think the article is
Speaker 3: just dreaming up a whimsical scenario. But I can't quite
Speaker 3: tell if the author is trying to argue against a
Speaker 3: belief that some people actually held at the time that like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 3: they'll drink your blood, and it's saying like, no, if
Speaker 3: they did drink your blood, think how you know it
Speaker 3: would depopulate all of New Jersey every thirteen years. I'm
Speaker 3: not quite sure exactly what this author is trying to
Speaker 3: respond to with this elaborate scenario, but either way, I
Speaker 3: love it. But in any case, it is It certainly
Speaker 3: is the case that people are concerned about the impact
Speaker 3: of cicadas, both on plants and on people. Whether or
Speaker 3: not they think, you know, people are actually going to
Speaker 3: be drained of their blood, they do at least think
Speaker 3: that cicadas are going to bite and sting them. So
Speaker 3: Barenbaum finds more articles in the Times. The next one
Speaker 3: is once again seventeen years after this last one, so
Speaker 3: this would be in May eighteen ninety four, and it
Speaker 3: debunks what appear to be several common misconceptions banging around
Speaker 3: at the period. In the period, one is something we
Speaker 3: talked about in part one that you brought up, rob,
Speaker 3: the idea of prognostication via cicada wings that, like the
Speaker 3: wa means that a war is going to happen, though
Speaker 3: that's not really about cicadas, you know, it's just a
Speaker 3: general superstition, so you know, the article attempts to address that. However,
Speaker 3: the second misconception addressed is the idea that the cicada
Speaker 3: can bite or sting, which the author says is not true.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 3: Other persons have feared that these insects may sting and
Speaker 3: carefully avoid handling them, as they have no sting and
Speaker 3: are only armed with a beak for sucking, which however,
Speaker 3: is never used by the perfect fly. Such fears are groundless.
Speaker 3: So we're getting a very different the perfect fly here.
Speaker 3: This is like a be a tific view of the cicada.
Speaker 3: It's like painting it in a very rosy picture. Now,
Speaker 3: something that people do wonder they're armed with this knowledge,
Speaker 3: like Okay, yeah, they don't have a stinger, they don't
Speaker 3: have biting mouth parts. Could they stab you with the
Speaker 3: beak if you threatened them? I've turned up a mixed
Speaker 3: collection of answers on this. For example, I found an
Speaker 3: older book by the Field Museum entomologist William Josiah Gerhard,
Speaker 3: published in nineteen twenty three called The Periodical Cicada, in
Speaker 3: which Gearhard addresses these concerns by saying, quote, under favorable conditions,
Speaker 3: this insect could readily pierce the human skin by means
Speaker 3: of its beak, but apparently it rarely or never attempts
Speaker 3: to protect itself in such a manner.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because again coming back to the basic evolutionary tactic,
Speaker 2: here is overwhelmingtory predatory threats. You know. Again, it's there
Speaker 2: are so many of us you cannot possibly kill and
Speaker 2: eat all of us. Enough of us are going to survive.
Speaker 3: Read right. So, Yeah, the food at this buffet wants
Speaker 3: to defend itself. It doesn't defend It doesn't defend itself
Speaker 3: by fighting back. It defends itself by being a part
Speaker 3: of a mass of so much food that it cannot
Speaker 3: all be eaten.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can't possibly get through this many steamer trays
Speaker 2: of cicada. Yeah, you're out of luck. So that's where
Speaker 2: they have That's where the investment is, not in individual
Speaker 2: defensive capabilities.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And so I detect in this phrasing, even of
Speaker 3: this older book, that even though he's saying it's possible,
Speaker 3: he's not aware of any examples of this happening. And
Speaker 3: he's written a whole book on the subject, so it
Speaker 3: seems like he would have come across some examples if
Speaker 3: they were known about. He only mentions this as a hypothetical,
Speaker 3: And most modern sources that I found that consult actual
Speaker 3: entomologists say that as far as they know this does
Speaker 3: not happen. So can a cicada beak you? I don't know.
Speaker 3: The way I would think think about it is like
Speaker 3: if you are handling a cicada, like it does have
Speaker 3: a hard exoskeleton, in some parts of that exoskeleton can
Speaker 3: be kind of pokey. So it's conceivable that one of
Speaker 3: these pokey parts could give you a little scratch or
Speaker 3: a poke, but it's not going to get you like
Speaker 3: other insects would. So even though it seems quite clear
Speaker 3: that the periodical cicadas of North America do not bite
Speaker 3: or sting, and any kind of poke you got from them,
Speaker 3: you would really have to be like sort of go
Speaker 3: in for it by handling them intentionally, and even then
Speaker 3: it seems like it would probably be accidental. There's just
Speaker 3: not really anything to worry about. But I think these
Speaker 3: questions are going to keep coming up because one of
Speaker 3: the themes of me May Berenbaum's article is how writing
Speaker 3: about cicadas seems to be in a constant struggle to
Speaker 3: deal with myths and misconceptions that arise perpetually again and again.
Speaker 3: She quotes another article from The New York Times from
Speaker 3: nineteen thirty six by Donald Peaty, which calls the periodical
Speaker 3: cicada the most misunderstood insect on our continent and talks
Speaker 3: about how it's necessary for the federal government to issue
Speaker 3: bulletins to people in the eastern United States to quell
Speaker 3: the misconceptions. Pd writs, quote and people may at last
Speaker 3: learn that the cicada does not eat crops, does not
Speaker 3: sting babies. No authentic case of baby stinging has come
Speaker 3: to hand or invade gardens. But despite the fact that
Speaker 3: people with knowledge have been debunking this for over one
Speaker 3: hundred years, it never sticks. And she cites example after
Speaker 3: example of these articles over time over the decades, responding
Speaker 3: to reader concerns that cicadas are the same thing as locusts,
Speaker 3: that they eat crops in foliage, that they bite or
Speaker 3: sting people, especially children, And they don't do that. I
Speaker 3: mean they it's not that they can never cause any
Speaker 3: harm to plants. They can when they lay their eggs
Speaker 3: in the you know, the young the greenwood of some
Speaker 3: plants that can sort of kill some of the tips
Speaker 3: of stems, but they're just generally not that harmful to plants.
Speaker 3: They certainly don't eat crops, and that they don't hurt people.
Speaker 3: And I was thinking about this, about these recurring misconceptions
Speaker 3: about the periodical cicadas. Of course, there are misconceptions about
Speaker 3: all kinds of living creatures. We talk about talk about
Speaker 3: them on the show all the time, but it just
Speaker 3: seems they are especially prevalent about cicadas. Every time there
Speaker 3: is a new, local brewed emergence, people are baffled anew
Speaker 3: and prone to the same superstitions that we believed in
Speaker 3: last time. And this struck me as very interesting because
Speaker 3: I started to think it's almost as if the periodical
Speaker 3: cicadas are preventing us from adapting to them in the
Speaker 3: same way and by the same method that they prevent
Speaker 3: predators and parasitoids from adapting to them by appearing in
Speaker 3: different areas on these staggered time schedules. Do you know
Speaker 3: what I mean?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, It's like we instead of having just constant
Speaker 2: news coverage or just you know, annual news coverage about
Speaker 2: mass emergences of cicadas, we get you know, extra concentrated
Speaker 2: news coverage every every so often. Yeah, so we have
Speaker 2: time to sort of forget and then and then to
Speaker 2: sort of grow hungry for new sensationalist headlines, which we
Speaker 2: still have, you know, as we discussed in the last
Speaker 2: episode that we did on cicadas, you know, we still
Speaker 2: have these kind of outrageous news coverage bits that occur
Speaker 2: that seem to even if they don't double down on
Speaker 2: the misinformation aspect of it, they kind of like get
Speaker 2: into the gleeful, ooh bugs aspect of it that is
Speaker 2: almost kind of like the first step in getting to
Speaker 2: a they might suck my blood.
Speaker 3: Yeah. In fact, you know, there are these like different
Speaker 3: scales of plausibility in the people dreaming up scenarios about
Speaker 3: what cicadas could do to them. You know, if you
Speaker 3: don't know anything, it's plausible to imagine they could sting
Speaker 3: or bite you. They're not going to do that, actually,
Speaker 3: but that doesn't seem all that far fetched. And then
Speaker 3: beyond that, you get the will they leave me a
Speaker 3: thoroughly pumped husk? You know, are they going to suck
Speaker 3: out all my blood? That doesn't seem all that plausible.
Speaker 3: And then there's like even weirder stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Gene Kritsky and what as I believe his
Speaker 2: latest book, A Tale of Two Broods, dealing with the
Speaker 2: latest cicada emergencies. He goes into a number of different
Speaker 2: angles here, but he includes this following actual example from
Speaker 2: an eighteen seventy one publication in the Grant County Herald
Speaker 2: from Lancaster, Wisconsin. And what's interesting here is he includes
Speaker 2: full or most of the either the entirety or most
Speaker 2: of the article, and most of it seems to be
Speaker 2: rather logical, stressing that cicadas are only a threat to
Speaker 2: tree branches, you know, basically doing a good job of
Speaker 2: laying out the science. But then at the very end,
Speaker 2: it's like they felt like, well, we have to acknowledge
Speaker 2: the superstition in a little bit, so they include this
Speaker 2: last bit quote the insect has no sting and does
Speaker 2: not seem to have the power to bite. It is
Speaker 2: possible then, that in exceedingly rare cases, it has attempted
Speaker 2: and succeeded in depositing an egg in the skull of
Speaker 2: a human being. So you know, once you add that
Speaker 2: at the end, if you're like, but there's still there's
Speaker 2: a non zero chance it could lay an egg in
Speaker 2: your skull, Like, it kind of undoes all that great
Speaker 2: work you just did at dispelling the superstition.
Speaker 3: Well, wait, I believe there's a non zero chances that like,
Speaker 3: has this possibly happened? Doesn't seem super plausible.
Speaker 2: But I mean, I didn't see I've not seen any
Speaker 2: real accounts of this, you know, no medical journal, you know,
Speaker 2: recent or old.
Speaker 3: I heard from a guy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's like somebody said it happened, and can
Speaker 2: you prove that it didn't sort of a thing, you.
Speaker 3: Know, yeah, disprove or except yeah, that's great.
Speaker 2: And even then, I feel like there's a danger in
Speaker 2: us mentioning it here too, that now that's in your mind,
Speaker 2: you're like when you experience the cicadas out there in
Speaker 2: the world, that you're going to think, but could they
Speaker 2: lay an egg in my skull? I don't want that,
Speaker 2: but really do not worry about it. These creatures have
Speaker 2: an agenda, and that agenda does not include sucking your blood,
Speaker 2: destroying your crops, landing Well, they may land on your baby,
Speaker 2: but they don't care about your baby, and they're definitely
Speaker 2: not interested in laying eggs and skulls.
Speaker 3: I can very well imagine a scenario that easily leads
Speaker 3: to the misconception that they sting babies, which is that
Speaker 3: like if you've got a kid and like an insect
Speaker 3: flies up in lands on them. The child might become
Speaker 3: scared and start crying, and then it flies away, and
Speaker 3: then you think they're crying because they're in pain. It's
Speaker 3: stung them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Or an insect landed on your child and you're
Speaker 2: overly protective, as many of his parents are, and you're like,
Speaker 2: oh goodness, then you rush forward and you create the
Speaker 2: incident of fear and so forth.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Oh, but I did want to mention one thing
Speaker 3: that I thought was interesting that cicadas. Of course, they
Speaker 3: do not bite, they do not sting. It seems exceedingly rare.
Speaker 3: If they ever even really poke people. That seems to
Speaker 3: not happen much. If it happens at all, so you
Speaker 3: don't have to worry about that. But they might possibly
Speaker 3: pee on you and the p The nature of the
Speaker 3: cicada urination is quite alarming actually if you see it,
Speaker 3: because it doesn't look like what you imagine insect urination
Speaker 3: would be, and in fact it's not very consistent with
Speaker 3: what pre existing models before just recently would have predicted
Speaker 3: of an insect like them. Because cicadas are insects and
Speaker 3: they are xylum feeders. They live by sucking xylum from
Speaker 3: plants and creatures with these characteristics. The little insects and
Speaker 3: xylum feeders were pretty much thought to excrete by creating
Speaker 3: little droplets that they shake off essentially, And this is
Speaker 3: due to how fluid dynamics work at small scales. You know,
Speaker 3: We've talked about this a lot on the show because
Speaker 3: of that essay. I love bringing up the on being
Speaker 3: the right size, you know, or like the way that
Speaker 3: your body interacts with water is very different if you
Speaker 3: are very small, Like the surface tension of water becomes
Speaker 3: a much more powerful and dangerous force to deal with
Speaker 3: in everyday life if you're very small. And it's also
Speaker 3: true that water flows differently at very small scales. So
Speaker 3: you know, larger mammals tend to produce a kind of
Speaker 3: stream of urine that goes out of the body. But
Speaker 3: when you get down to smaller and smaller animals, what
Speaker 3: tends to happen is that they just kind of like
Speaker 3: do a weak, little kind of emission of droplets that
Speaker 3: they might shake off of the body somehow. But I
Speaker 3: was reading about new research published just this year in
Speaker 3: March twenty twenty four in p and As by L.
Speaker 3: Eoj Chalita and M. Sad Bombla, and the paper was
Speaker 3: called Unifying Fluidic Excretion across life from Cicadas to Elephants.
Speaker 3: And so the authors write in their abstract, can insects
Speaker 3: weighing mirror grams challenge our current understanding of fluid dynamics
Speaker 3: in urination jetting fluids like the larger their larger mammalian counterparts.
Speaker 3: And the answer is yes, Yes, Insects can create jets
Speaker 3: just like mammals do. You don't often see it, but
Speaker 3: cicadas can do this. And they got some video footage
Speaker 3: of this, and they studied how the water, how the
Speaker 3: excretion flows out of the cicadas. I would recommend looking
Speaker 3: up video of cicadas peeing because, as I said earlier,
Speaker 3: it's it looks alarming.
Speaker 2: Yeah it is. It's not the medicine dropper scenario we
Speaker 2: were just talking about. It is, well, what you might
Speaker 2: call a proper leak that these cicadas are taking.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's jetting out. And so they talk about
Speaker 3: a previous urination model where it was assumed that jetting
Speaker 3: was basically limited to animals over three kilograms in body
Speaker 3: mass because of just because of how fluids flow, and
Speaker 3: that it's hard to create a jet if you're smaller.
Speaker 3: They say, it's owing to viscous and surface tension constraints
Speaker 3: at microscales like I was talking about. You know, water
Speaker 3: flows differently, liquids flow differently at smaller scales. But they say, quote,
Speaker 3: our findings defied this paradigm by demonstrating that cicadas weighing
Speaker 3: just two grams possess the capability for jetting fluids through
Speaker 3: remarkably small orifices. Using dimensional analysis, we introduce a unifying
Speaker 3: fluid dynamic scaling framework that accommodates a broad range of taxa,
Speaker 3: from surface tension dominated insects to inertia and gravity reliant mammals.
Speaker 3: And then they go on to say, as we often
Speaker 3: get in studies like this, they go on to say,
Speaker 3: you know, this could be useful in designing better nozzles
Speaker 3: for you know, like tiny robots and machines that need
Speaker 3: to jet things out at a micro scale. So maybe
Speaker 3: one day, maybe one day, some medical technology, like a
Speaker 3: little robot that swims inside your body and jets around,
Speaker 3: you know, needs to like squirt a jet of something
Speaker 3: inside your body, will be based on the design of
Speaker 3: a cicada's weird, kind of alarming urination.
Speaker 2: I'll be very surprised if this study doesn't win an
Speaker 2: ig Nobel Prize this year. Yes, you know, yeah, because
Speaker 2: you have the cicada emergence is happening anyway. Cicadas are
Speaker 2: in the public mindset, so yeah, this seems like this
Speaker 2: is a this is a shoehorn for the Biology Prize
Speaker 2: or I don't know what one of the other prizes
Speaker 2: would probably work as well, but surely biology.
Speaker 3: It's possible. We'll be back on this study later this year.
Speaker 2: Yes, all right, Now, for the remainder of this episode,
Speaker 2: I wanted to get back into the whole classification of broods.
Speaker 2: You know, we're talking about brood X and so forth.
Speaker 2: In the last episode, we talked about the evolution of
Speaker 2: periodical cicadas and why they do this, but we didn't
Speaker 2: really get into the amazing way this really shakes out
Speaker 2: in terms of different broods or the history of how
Speaker 2: we got to this point.
Speaker 3: Right, because when we talk about these periodical emergencies, we've
Speaker 3: tried to mention this a few times already as we
Speaker 3: go along, but it's not like the thirteen year or
Speaker 3: seventeen year cicadas all come out at once. It's like
Speaker 3: every thirteen years, they're all there. We have different local
Speaker 3: populations referred to as broods that are on the same
Speaker 3: time schedule.
Speaker 2: Right right, based on their geographical area and the year
Speaker 2: they emerge. And basically all of this our understanding of
Speaker 2: this and our brood classification of periodical cicadas, it traces
Speaker 2: back to the work of American entomologist Charles Lester Marlott,
Speaker 2: who lived eighteen sixty three through nineteen fifty four. Kansas born,
Speaker 2: KSU educated, he was an entomologist who worked most of
Speaker 2: his career. I believe he was a USDA researcher, and
Speaker 2: I was reading about him in the Legacy of Charles
Speaker 2: Marlott and Efforts to Limit Plant Pest Invasions by Leibhold
Speaker 2: et al. Published in the journal American Entomologist in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 2: So he's a pretty interesting fellow. A lot of his
Speaker 2: work for the USDA centered around the control of agricultural
Speaker 2: pest insects, with a focus on invasive threats. The article
Speaker 2: mentions that in nineteen oh one and nineteen oh two
Speaker 2: Marlott and his wife went on honeymoon in China in Japan,
Speaker 2: which again nineteen oh one.
Speaker 3: You know too, this is a.
Speaker 2: Pretty adventurous vacation. That's a pretty adventerous honeymoon. You know
Speaker 2: that we had to get there by ship and just
Speaker 2: more of an undertaking compared to today. But while there,
Speaker 2: it also gave him a chance to check out the
Speaker 2: native range of a particular invasive pest insect known as
Speaker 2: the San Jose scale, or it was known it was
Speaker 2: known in the US at the time. It's the San
Speaker 2: Jose scale. Uh, this being a creature that was a
Speaker 2: big problem at this point in California. But it was
Speaker 2: originally native to Siberia, northeast China, and I believe parts
Speaker 2: of the Korean Peninsula. I believe it has since spread
Speaker 2: to various places, not just you know, to to North America.
Speaker 2: But so anyway, this this vacation, this honeymoon, gave him
Speaker 2: a chance to investigate this organism's natural environment, to make
Speaker 2: note of its natural predators, and even bring back specimens,
Speaker 2: and all of this at his own personal expense. That's
Speaker 2: just how devoted an entomologist he was. And this kind
Speaker 2: of line of work would ultimately lead to the introduction
Speaker 2: of the Italian ladybird beetle or lady bug, though it's
Speaker 2: not a true bug, the particular species being Chillcorus similis.
Speaker 2: This is the red spotted ladybird, so Charles Marlott would
Speaker 2: be the individual to orchestrate it being introduced to North
Speaker 2: America in order to combat the San Jose scale threat.
Speaker 3: Weird. I just looked up the red spotted ladybird and
Speaker 3: if it is the thing, I've found it looks like
Speaker 3: an inversion of a ladybug.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, so you know, not to be confused with
Speaker 2: various other ladybirds and related insects. But this is interesting though,
Speaker 2: because he was in this effort, he was very much
Speaker 2: a pioneer of biocontrol, introducing species to another species that
Speaker 2: has already been introduced into an area. Again, as we've
Speaker 2: discussed in the show before, though, this of course is
Speaker 2: a very delicate balancing act and one that especially now,
Speaker 2: we do not engage in willy nilly. There are all
Speaker 2: sorts of things that can go wrong and do go
Speaker 2: wrong when we attempt to write a previous wrong.
Speaker 3: Yeah, google cane toads in Australia if you want to
Speaker 3: see how this can go wrong.
Speaker 2: Now, this honeymoon to Japan and China that Marlott and
Speaker 2: his wife went on. It ends up taking a tragic
Speaker 2: turn because during his travels in Asia, his wife contracted
Speaker 2: some unknown illness. I don't know that. I didn't even
Speaker 2: run across any suspicions of what it might have been,
Speaker 2: but she caught some sort of unknown illness ultimately died
Speaker 2: from it, and the authors of this paper add that quote.
Speaker 2: This experience no doubt shaped Marlott's thinking and perhaps contributed
Speaker 2: to his strong concern about the dangers of accidentally importing
Speaker 2: species from overseas. So again, his wife seemingly caught some
Speaker 2: sort of a pathogen, and Marlott his work dealt with
Speaker 2: agricultural pests. But you could see how this could intensify
Speaker 2: his already pre existing concern about pest organisms from other
Speaker 2: ecosystems being introduced into North America. And indeed, Marlott became
Speaker 2: very concerned about the threat of invasive organisms that had
Speaker 2: already entered the US through soil and trade, as well
Speaker 2: as the potential for future invasive exposures. He was key
Speaker 2: in urging Congress to enact plant quarantine legislation to help
Speaker 2: deal with this threat, and I was The article gets
Speaker 2: into it here. It was a pretty polarizing topic because
Speaker 2: on one hand, you had plenty of people who are
Speaker 2: already like thinkers on this. You know, they could point
Speaker 2: directly at problems with invasive pests in agriculture in North America,
Speaker 2: like with the San Jose scale, and say, yeah, this
Speaker 2: is terrible. We need to combat this and figure out
Speaker 2: ways to prevent it from happening. But on the other hand,
Speaker 2: you had individuals who were saying, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: you can't stand in the way of free trade. You
Speaker 2: can't get in the way of American horticulture because it
Speaker 2: depends on introducing plant species from around the world, and
Speaker 2: you just need to stand back and let us do it.
Speaker 2: And so we end up with another really interesting and
Speaker 2: very newsy and political situation that occurs. And none of
Speaker 2: this involves cicadas, but I thought it was too fascinating.
Speaker 2: It all concerns Marlin, so I do want to go
Speaker 2: into it, at least briefly. Here Basically, what happens is
Speaker 2: in the year nineteen oh nine, you have a number
Speaker 2: of cherry trees, some two thousand cherry trees that are
Speaker 2: gifted from Japan to the United States. It's a gift
Speaker 2: that involved. Basically, there's kind of like a back and
Speaker 2: forth between a prominent Japanese chemist of the time, doctor
Speaker 2: Takamini Jokichi, and the first lady of the time Hell
Speaker 2: and heron taft. So you know, she'd expressed interest in
Speaker 2: the cherry trees of Japan, and the good doctor Here's like, well, yeah,
Speaker 2: I've got some connections here, and lo and behold, now
Speaker 2: we get a state offering of two thousand cherry trees.
Speaker 2: They are sent on their way across the ocean, and
Speaker 2: then they're put on a train and travel across the
Speaker 2: continent to Washington, d c. M. And this is where
Speaker 2: Marlott enters the picture, because a USDA team led by
Speaker 2: him ends up inspecting the trees and he's like, instantly
Speaker 2: he pulls a total ripley on all of this. He's like, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: you cannot do this, Like we just checked. These things
Speaker 2: are infested, they have scale insects, they have root gall
Speaker 2: What we need to do is just burn them all.
Speaker 3: Oh no, I mean I understand the reasoning there, and
Speaker 3: that makes sense, but it's like it was a gift,
Speaker 3: you know, it's just like, oh that sucks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, so they didn't burn it right away, Like
Speaker 2: basically this had to travel up the pole, and I
Speaker 2: believe President Taft himself had to give the authorization, but
Speaker 2: that within a month all these trees were burned. And
Speaker 2: I guess the upside here is that, first of all,
Speaker 2: Agricultural Secretary James Wilson and his staff followed this up
Speaker 2: with a strong push, using scientific evidence to seek a
Speaker 2: national plant quarantine law. So thirty nine states had already
Speaker 2: passed such laws, but with this they were able to
Speaker 2: roll out the Plant Quarantine Act of nineteen twelve, which
Speaker 2: went into effect August twentieth, nineteen twelve, and the establishment
Speaker 2: of the Federal Horticultural Board, and also you know future
Speaker 2: plant quarantine efforts, so you know, they're able to spin
Speaker 2: it off and do some additional good, you know, broader
Speaker 2: good outside of you know, state offerings of gifts. And
Speaker 2: there's even I guess a happy ending to the whole
Speaker 2: cherry tree gift tobacco here as well, because Japan ended
Speaker 2: up offering replacements. These were fumigated before shipment, and ultimately
Speaker 2: the first lady and the wife of the jap these
Speaker 2: ambassador like oversaw the planting of these trees, and the
Speaker 2: Washington d c. Cherry trees remain in iconic aspect of
Speaker 2: the nation's capital. Anyway, none of that involves cicadas, but
Speaker 2: it all involves Charles Lester Marlott. So I thought we'd
Speaker 2: mention it. But if invasive pests were Charles Lester Marlott's
Speaker 2: hated foes, his best friends, his most beloved insects were,
Speaker 2: without a doubt, periodical cicadas. He studied them, immensely, published
Speaker 2: about them. He loved them so much that when he
Speaker 2: had a house built in Washington, d C. This mansion,
Speaker 2: this big brick mansion, he had cicadas carved into various
Speaker 2: features of the home. Huh. And the paper here includes
Speaker 2: some images. I've included them here for you to look at, Joe.
Speaker 2: This home apparently still is still around it currently, I
Speaker 2: believe houses the Institute of World Politics. I intentionally did
Speaker 2: not look them up. I don't know what their world
Speaker 2: politics happened to be, and I'm going to remain blissfully
Speaker 2: ignorant of whatever they are. But it is my understanding
Speaker 2: that the cicadas are still there, like on the banisters
Speaker 2: of the staircases and so forth.
Speaker 3: Uh, huh, it's a beautiful house whatever they're doing in there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but yeah, he was a key figure in our
Speaker 2: understanding and our study of periodical cicadas. He contributed to
Speaker 2: the taxonomic study of them, outlined the thirty hypothesized broods
Speaker 2: of periodical cicadas in North America. His nineteen oh seven
Speaker 2: book The Periodical Cicada laid everything out to signing Roman numerals,
Speaker 2: covering all thirteen years of the thirteen periodical cicadas and
Speaker 2: all seventeen of the seventeen periodical cicadas for a grand
Speaker 2: total of thirty.
Speaker 3: That's interesting. So you know, if you go back to
Speaker 3: these articles that I was talking about from the New
Speaker 3: York Times in the nineteenth century, some people were already
Speaker 3: aware that there were like some local emergences that happened
Speaker 3: on seventeen year cycles. But so there was some knowledge,
Speaker 3: but I guess they didn't know. They didn't have worked
Speaker 3: out like what all the broods were and where all
Speaker 3: of them.
Speaker 2: Were, right. Yeah, you look at details from his work,
Speaker 2: which was extensive, like he's making maps, you know, pinpointing
Speaker 2: them like this guy went hard on periodical cicadas and
Speaker 2: as such, like anything you read about periodical cicadas. You
Speaker 2: will invariably see his work sided like there'll be Marlett
Speaker 2: down There often multiple Marlet publications that are cited. I mean,
Speaker 2: his work was just foundational. Gene Kritsky, of course, cites
Speaker 2: him numerous times in a Tale of Two Broods, saying quote,
Speaker 2: he designated the seventeen year cicadas that emerged in eighteen
Speaker 2: ninety three as brood one. The cicadas that emerged in
Speaker 2: eighteen ninety four were called brood two. The cicadas emerging
Speaker 2: in eighteen ninety five were to be called brood three,
Speaker 2: and so on. And then he adds for just to
Speaker 2: drive everything at home, he says, quote, Marlott's system greatly
Speaker 2: reduced the confusion surrounding the study of periodical cicadas, and
Speaker 2: it has stood the test of time. It was particularly
Speaker 2: helpful in areas where there were overlapping broods, enabling observers
Speaker 2: to determine precisely where and when cicadas would again emerge.
Speaker 3: And as far as I can tell, our systems for
Speaker 3: predicting these brood emergencies have been pretty reliable.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, Now, you know, some things didn't quite shake out,
Speaker 2: So you know, it turns out like we don't have
Speaker 2: a full thirty broods. I think it's more like fifteen. Right,
Speaker 2: Some years might not have produced a brood. And we
Speaker 2: know that some broods were in decline when Marlott studied them,
Speaker 2: and some have seemingly gone extinct. So for instance, there
Speaker 2: is a brood twenty three, but not a twenty four
Speaker 2: breod twenty one native to the Florida Panhandle when extinct
Speaker 2: sometime after eighteen seventy. So you know that there have
Speaker 2: been changes. And also it does drive home that you know,
Speaker 2: even though when these broods emerge, it is just overwhelming
Speaker 2: and it just seems like they're a juggernaut that can't
Speaker 2: be stopped. They are vulnerable, you know, there are you know,
Speaker 2: changes to their environment can impact them and they can
Speaker 2: just go away forever. Now, you know, we can't go
Speaker 2: into everything like again, I'll just summarize by saying Marlott
Speaker 2: was the man of his time in laying out much
Speaker 2: of the foundational work for our understanding of periodical cicadas.
Speaker 2: But of course, given the time he was active, and
Speaker 2: given just the pervasive superstitions around cicadas, he of course
Speaker 2: also had to do a little myth busting here and
Speaker 2: there concerning their you know, consumption of flesh and so forth.
Speaker 2: So here's one more quote from gene Kritsky's A Tale
Speaker 2: of Two Broods quote. Reports of periodical cicadas attempting to
Speaker 2: lay eggs in humans popped up in several newspapers during
Speaker 2: the nineteenth century. Marlott settled the question, writing, with every
Speaker 2: general outbreak of this insect our associated accounts in local
Speaker 2: papers of its stinging human beings, the sting often resulting,
Speaker 2: it is stated more or less seriously to the person stung.
Speaker 2: So far as investigation of the reports have been possible,
Speaker 2: they have proved to be either utterly without fandebt foundation
Speaker 2: or much exaggerated. So nothing that nothing that we haven't
Speaker 2: already covered, and that that scientists aren't having to again
Speaker 2: reiterate for the public. But it's it's interesting that, yeah,
Speaker 2: here's this guy who did so much work on cicadas,
Speaker 2: but he would also have to chime in and just
Speaker 2: say no, no, no, they are not going to drink
Speaker 2: your blood. They're not going to lay eggs in your brain.
Speaker 2: They ultimately don't care about you. You are not part
Speaker 2: of the cicada agenda. All right, Well, we're going to
Speaker 2: go ahead and close out this episode right there, but
Speaker 2: we're going to return to the world of cicadas in
Speaker 2: the next episode. There's still a lot we didn't get
Speaker 2: to discuss. There are whole area's mythological yet to be
Speaker 2: to be discussed here on the show. We haven't really
Speaker 2: gotten into the culinary question of cicadas, so there's a
Speaker 2: lot to discuss, and of course in the meantime, we
Speaker 2: would love to hear from everyone out there. You undoubtedly
Speaker 2: have experiences with cicadas, annual or periodical, and we would
Speaker 2: like to hear about them. Do you fancy yourself a
Speaker 2: cicada photographer? Oh, we'll send your photos. We will look
Speaker 2: at them. Do you have any thoughts on cicada urination? Yes,
Speaker 2: we want to know about that as well. And if
Speaker 2: you have any second, third, fourth, fifth hand accounts of
Speaker 2: cicada's biting people, sucking blood, or laying eggs and the skull, yes,
Speaker 2: right in with that as well. We will of course
Speaker 2: discuss that in future episodes of Listener. Made just a
Speaker 2: reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a
Speaker 2: science and culture podcast, with core episodes publishing on Tuesdays
Speaker 2: and Thursdays, listener mail on Monday's short form episode on
Speaker 2: Wednesdays and on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns
Speaker 2: to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
Speaker 3: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 3: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 3: a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 3: you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
Speaker 3: your Mind dot com.
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