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Speaker 1: where you stand with on x Okay We're gonna start
Speaker 1: all with a quick song. She waki fall me for
Speaker 1: home live, she me for fun boo ca me for
Speaker 1: shan right you'll yeah, she um wa what do want me?
Speaker 1: Ful car, That's what I'm talking about. That's beautiful, beautiful.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna leave that hanging. I'm gonna leave that hanging
Speaker 1: as like a source attend and well I take over
Speaker 1: other quick couple of things. We're joined by um this
Speaker 1: is not i' gonna this hanging to, but we're doing
Speaker 1: joined by Dr Justin. Oh Schmidt. You don't know this, uh,
Speaker 1: Dr Schmidt. We've talked about you a whole bunch. So
Speaker 1: we've talked about the Schmidt paint index and that led
Speaker 1: me to start and reading about you and reading your
Speaker 1: book and getting interested in you. But can you just
Speaker 1: hang tight a minute? Sounds good? I was, I'll tell
Speaker 1: you I have to. Before we started here, before that
Speaker 1: beautiful song, I was telling Cal that I had to.
Speaker 1: Cal's telling me that I told him a story that's
Speaker 1: not my story. You're confusing me with someone else, you don't,
Speaker 1: that's correct, Yeah, I must be correct. Yeah. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: Cal's saying like, oh, when you were saying and he
Speaker 1: told the story. It's like, that's not my story. But
Speaker 1: I have to this two chicken stories I do have,
Speaker 1: not your chicken stories. I have where. Um, there's a
Speaker 1: place in in in Mexico on the uk Tam Peninsula
Speaker 1: to Loom, which used to be like just all like
Speaker 1: hippie kids and stuff, and now it's you know, it's
Speaker 1: like families go there. People like what I used to
Speaker 1: be like, people like that used to go there, and
Speaker 1: now it's just people that are like what I'm like
Speaker 1: now that go there. But um, they had this in
Speaker 1: the old days twenty years ago. There's like this little
Speaker 1: street in town and they would people would cook chickens,
Speaker 1: is like the local thing, grilled chickens, and they'd have stumps,
Speaker 1: I mean like full on stumps and cleavers and Machetti's
Speaker 1: and they would be like grilling chickens and chopping chickens
Speaker 1: on stumps, chopping blocks. My buddy Eric, um, my dear
Speaker 1: late friend Eric was obsessed with these chickens and how
Speaker 1: they could make these chickens so good. And you don't
Speaker 1: understand like what what the magic touch was. So he
Speaker 1: spoke very poor Spanish, but he makes it back into
Speaker 1: the kitchen like you know, like he's he's penetrated the
Speaker 1: the depths of the facility where they all this chicken,
Speaker 1: and he's trying to like inquire, like what makes it
Speaker 1: so good? How do you do it? And the guy
Speaker 1: gestures to him that there's this trash can full of marinade,
Speaker 1: and he uh is very eager to have Eric taste
Speaker 1: the marinade. So Eric drinks some of the marinade and
Speaker 1: then no sooner does he have a nice sip of
Speaker 1: the marinade is the guy reaches into the trash can
Speaker 1: and produces from it, um a number of raw chickens.
Speaker 1: Then Eric's like, oh, this isn't gonna be good um
Speaker 1: for my gut. But then the man then goes to
Speaker 1: a frit a freezer, a chest freezer that's not even
Speaker 1: plugged in, and opens it and it's just he says,
Speaker 1: it's just the most foul, the most foul foul ever,
Speaker 1: festering in like chicken liquid that's not refrigerated. And he
Speaker 1: replenishes the vat of marinade with these chickens, and then
Speaker 1: he indeed did get sick. I don't think I'm surprised. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you the story later has to do with
Speaker 1: when I got to visit a turkey a place where
Speaker 1: they process turkeys. Story, yeah, not even chicken. Story real
Speaker 1: quick before we getting what we're supposed to be doing
Speaker 1: here to uh the whole our whole live tour is
Speaker 1: like about Licked. There's two venues laugh where you can
Speaker 1: get tickets. Licked isn't sold out sold but does two
Speaker 1: venues laugh where you can get tickets April five what's four?
Speaker 1: Four April April fifteen. In April sixteen, we still have
Speaker 1: tickets Masa Arts Center in Mesa, Arizona. So like eu
Speaker 1: Phoenix Folk and then uh u l a Folk, we're
Speaker 1: gonna be at the National Grove in Anaheim for sixteen.
Speaker 1: Other than that, you missed your chance, so hurry up
Speaker 1: and book them up if you want to go, and
Speaker 1: thanks for getting on it. Okay, now real quick, can
Speaker 1: you uh the beautiful song we heard was from Dr Schmidt,
Speaker 1: justin Schmidt's wife. Can you introduce yourself real quick? I'm
Speaker 1: Leash Schmidt. I'm the Queen of sting O, Queen of
Speaker 1: sing and can you offer us a rough translation of
Speaker 1: the song? And then we're gonna turn the attention to
Speaker 1: your husband Yeah, it's actually the wedding vowel song from
Speaker 1: a Chinese minority group, and the meaning is basically said,
Speaker 1: when the flower blooms becomes flower a bees are inseparable.
Speaker 1: Bees seems born to love flowers, and flowers bloom just
Speaker 1: for the bees, and that's a metaphor for the love
Speaker 1: that will be shared between the husband and wife of
Speaker 1: the wedding. Yes, that's cute and it's called me fun,
Speaker 1: but in Chinese it's a hunch wedding. Wow. Are you
Speaker 1: familiar with um? I don't fully understand. I might be
Speaker 1: mutilating this. Are you familiar with the concept of um?
Speaker 1: In Greek mythology, there's this concept of of like zenia
Speaker 1: I think it is, or the guest host bond, and
Speaker 1: it has to do with the relationship of a pollinator
Speaker 1: and the flower, and it somehow translates into a bond
Speaker 1: that exists between a guest. Like what what are the
Speaker 1: obligations of a guest to their host? Hm? H uh oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll go ahead, letter rip because in China, guest has
Speaker 1: no obligation to host. Host has full obligation to the
Speaker 1: g guess there's no obligation to host. Try to be
Speaker 1: a guest to China, so when you so, so it
Speaker 1: would be unusual in China to bring a Like when
Speaker 1: you go to someone's house for dinner, it would be
Speaker 1: unusual to bring, say a bottle of wine or a gift.
Speaker 1: Not a custom at all. When you come as always
Speaker 1: a full service. It's a food, that's always like we
Speaker 1: prepare everything. But now maybe it's different now because China
Speaker 1: always want to mimic America. So but the guests have
Speaker 1: guests have no obligation. In fact, the Chinese culture, which
Speaker 1: she has half of it is very like if guests
Speaker 1: your everything, like we we will prepare everything, like he
Speaker 1: got the treat when it came to China and so
Speaker 1: we I think our culture doesn't have that at all.
Speaker 1: How you guys been married one years? Seriously? Hm, no,
Speaker 1: it's impossible within China for thirty here for thirty years almost.
Speaker 1: That's great. I'm not going to argue that women are
Speaker 1: always right. We remember those dates. At least I didn't underestimate. Yeah, uh, okay,
Speaker 1: tell people what an entomologist do? You describe yourself as
Speaker 1: an entomologist. Pretty much, I describe myself as an entomologist
Speaker 1: or a biologist or for the general public off and
Speaker 1: just say I'm a bugologist. A bug is anything as
Speaker 1: creepy crawley legs and jointed legs, and that pretty much
Speaker 1: gets the concept across. But an entomologist doesn't work because
Speaker 1: you work on things that aren't insects, right, well, I
Speaker 1: work on racknets, which are spiders, scorpions, vinegar, ruins, and
Speaker 1: various things of that sort, as well as mostly in
Speaker 1: hymenopter which are ants, wasps, and bees, and there of
Speaker 1: course insects. And when, uh, what drew you too, like
Speaker 1: what initially drew you to to to digging into these animals,
Speaker 1: I'm not really sure. When I was about five years old,
Speaker 1: I was dared one time to sit on an ant
Speaker 1: mound and those ants, of course didn't sting, but they
Speaker 1: could sure crawl up your breeches and bite. And that
Speaker 1: got my attention. And I realized at that point that
Speaker 1: while there's life out there, and it's more complex than
Speaker 1: I thought it was, and it isn't this kind of interesting,
Speaker 1: you know? I find that like if you're a writer,
Speaker 1: you know, oh you are writer because you have a book.
Speaker 1: But if you're writing people, you go to do an
Speaker 1: interview and they'll be like, why did you write this book?
Speaker 1: And it's like there's two answers. There's you could you
Speaker 1: could be glib but very honest. You'd be like, well,
Speaker 1: I wrote it because I was trying to make money.
Speaker 1: That chance of that. So what I'm saying, it's like,
Speaker 1: there's like that answer, then there'd be the answer that
Speaker 1: is expected of you, which is um oh, I had
Speaker 1: a story that had to be told, you know, and
Speaker 1: both are equally true. But when you were growing up
Speaker 1: to become and wanted to become a scientist, was that
Speaker 1: you couldn't have thought to yourself at a young age
Speaker 1: that like, there's a way that I'll be able to
Speaker 1: make a living is by studying bugs. No, I I
Speaker 1: was fact swait it from studying bugs. You can't make
Speaker 1: a living studying bugs, I was told. So I became
Speaker 1: a chemist. Chemists make all kinds of cool things and
Speaker 1: all kinds of not so cool things, but anyway, they
Speaker 1: get paid well for doing it. So I went to
Speaker 1: chemistry and went to bachelor and master's degree and said,
Speaker 1: all these people and my friends are having such a
Speaker 1: good time with outdoors or geologists. They're biologists and marine biologists.
Speaker 1: You know whatever they are, and they're having a lot
Speaker 1: of fun outside. This was in Vancouver, British Columbia, which
Speaker 1: is very much like Montana. It's got lots of trees
Speaker 1: and streams and opportunities. I said, gosh, I gotta find
Speaker 1: a way to make life more interesting. Etmology was the
Speaker 1: way I applied chemistry to studying insects and bugs. And
Speaker 1: so that was where the transition came. That they weren't
Speaker 1: jealous of the lab jacket and the protective goggles and
Speaker 1: the benzine and the carbon tetric clarda was breathing every day, No, okay,
Speaker 1: So that became that that became your focus with insects
Speaker 1: is the chemistry of it, particularly what they do to
Speaker 1: their enemies exactly. I thought, you know, here I am.
Speaker 1: I always have all this chemistry training and I have
Speaker 1: very little animalogy training. What can I do with this
Speaker 1: training that I have in this whole new field? And
Speaker 1: I thought, well, these things hurt. Ever been stung by
Speaker 1: a bee or a wasp or anything? We all have
Speaker 1: and they heard so I said, hm, hmmm, what makes
Speaker 1: them hurt? What's what's the chemistry? This chemistry behind everything?
Speaker 1: And so I started working on this particular ant called
Speaker 1: the harvest rants, which hurt a whole lot more than
Speaker 1: a bee or a wasp. And I said, these little
Speaker 1: dinky things the third of an inch long, you know,
Speaker 1: how in the heck do they hurt so dog on
Speaker 1: much and hurt for four to eight hours. What's the
Speaker 1: chemistry behind this? So I said, ah, mystery, let's go
Speaker 1: and work on this. When I found out about you,
Speaker 1: it was after I got stung by a bullet ant
Speaker 1: lucky you in Bolivia, and I later in researching it,
Speaker 1: I came across you, and I came across the your
Speaker 1: you know, the Schmidt paint index. Like you have a
Speaker 1: whole lifetime of work you've done. It probably drives you
Speaker 1: crazy that people reduce it down to like I'm doing
Speaker 1: right now, that they reduce it down to you. You You
Speaker 1: came up with this like very clever pain index when
Speaker 1: you've done all this work. But that's like what you're
Speaker 1: known for now to layman, is that annoying? No? I
Speaker 1: think figure is better to be known for something than
Speaker 1: nothing at all. So I found you that way. But
Speaker 1: to my credit, I I dug deeper. But I found
Speaker 1: you because you had a description of what it's like
Speaker 1: to um be stung by a bullet ant. And the
Speaker 1: reason I became interested in the chemistry of it is
Speaker 1: because of I think you give it the most severe
Speaker 1: score exactly four plus. Yeah, it's the highest of anything.
Speaker 1: The Tranchila hawk is about equally high. But on the
Speaker 1: last two or three minutes was that bullet and asked
Speaker 1: last twelve the thirty six hours. So given the choice,
Speaker 1: I'll take the two to three minutes over the twelve
Speaker 1: and thirty six hours. When I got um stung by one,
Speaker 1: what I became what enthralled me about it was how
Speaker 1: severe the pain was exactly. But then for me that
Speaker 1: three hours later, I couldn't remember what foot it was.
Speaker 1: He probably didn't want to remember. No, it just was
Speaker 1: so unbelievably intense that I was worried about and I
Speaker 1: didn't I didn't know about bullet ants. It was so intense.
Speaker 1: I was worried about dying because I didn't know what
Speaker 1: it meant. I don't know, is it like getting is
Speaker 1: it like getting bit by a snake? Like I knew
Speaker 1: it was bad to get bit by one, but I
Speaker 1: didn't know how bad. And so there was a lot
Speaker 1: of psychological like a lot of anxiety around the bite,
Speaker 1: but then the pain was gone, and I just wondered, like,
Speaker 1: how could something hurt so bad and seemed like it's
Speaker 1: doing so much damage to your body, but then it's ephemeral. Well,
Speaker 1: I think that reason is because we're so big. If
Speaker 1: you're a mouse, you would have been past tens because
Speaker 1: they're actually quite toxic and do a lot of damage
Speaker 1: as well. But you figured a little and it's inch
Speaker 1: long and at max and it has volatively small size. Now,
Speaker 1: if it was say four ft long, like a typical snake,
Speaker 1: and it's stung you, while you probably wouldn't be here today,
Speaker 1: they can kill a mouse. Oh yeah. Why did just
Speaker 1: back up on this a little bit, just kind of
Speaker 1: like the beginning, And I have just read your book
Speaker 1: The Sting of the Wild. Um, Why let's approach this
Speaker 1: this way. Why do you feel that certain indec or
Speaker 1: certain insects or anything spiders? But why did bugs need
Speaker 1: to develop a way to sting? Like what were the
Speaker 1: things that led them to to have the necessity to
Speaker 1: do this. There's quite a few different things that would
Speaker 1: gone One of the problems. When you're a social insect
Speaker 1: like an aunt, you have a colony of three thousand
Speaker 1: fairly big ants, and you know, that's a lot of
Speaker 1: meat there to eat, and that means big people are
Speaker 1: gonna want to eat you, you know, like raccoons and
Speaker 1: quada mondays and things of that sort, larger animals. If
Speaker 1: you're dealing with something that's a million times bigger than you, biting, scratching,
Speaker 1: kicking just doesn't cut the mustard. You have to have
Speaker 1: some way to get through. And the sting gets through
Speaker 1: your skin and gets directly to where the nerves are.
Speaker 1: So that's a way of defending yourself and your nest mates,
Speaker 1: and you're young and that kind of thing. But the
Speaker 1: bullet ant is a little bit different from most of
Speaker 1: the rest of them. Why it needs to be so
Speaker 1: extreme is they live down on the ground of the rainforest,
Speaker 1: down at the base of a tree. They crawl up
Speaker 1: the tree up into the canopy. Up in the canopy
Speaker 1: they forage for nectar and sweet honeydew and hay fits
Speaker 1: in those sorts of things, and pray, you know, pray
Speaker 1: for feeding their young. Well, if you've ever been up
Speaker 1: in a canopy of a rainforest, there's frogs, there's lizards,
Speaker 1: there's birds, there's monkeys everything on earth, and what are
Speaker 1: they all having common? They all eat insects. And if
Speaker 1: you can't jump away like a grasshopper, and you can't
Speaker 1: fly away like a fly because you're an aunt without
Speaker 1: any wings, you don't really want to drop off from
Speaker 1: fifty or sixty ft up because how are you ever
Speaker 1: going to find your way back up? So you've got
Speaker 1: to be so tough that these things learned oh big
Speaker 1: black ant. No no no, no no, no, no, I don't
Speaker 1: think I want to go there. And the way that
Speaker 1: happens is they get stung once and that's it. They
Speaker 1: will learn for life that never mess around with you.
Speaker 1: And so that's basically a defensive system that allows them
Speaker 1: to exploit the most dangerous place on earth for a
Speaker 1: small insect. But what about all the insects that um,
Speaker 1: I mean, what about all the insects that can't do that? Right?
Speaker 1: Like a like a like a butterfly has no defense
Speaker 1: system like that. Well, butterflies, some of them actually are
Speaker 1: quite toxic. Eat them. And the famous picture Lincoln Brower
Speaker 1: blue jay eating a monarch butterfly and barsets guts out
Speaker 1: after that. As you all know, if you've eaten a
Speaker 1: bad meal or something in your barf your guts out.
Speaker 1: You don't want to eat that same kind of food
Speaker 1: for quite a long time. You get this toxic aversion,
Speaker 1: and so a lot of butterflies do that. A lot
Speaker 1: of things actually avoid the predators by hiding. You know,
Speaker 1: caterpillars are often green, they're living on green vegetation, so
Speaker 1: they're just a hard to see and they don't move.
Speaker 1: And grasshoppers, of course can jump, and once they're an adult,
Speaker 1: they can fly, and grasshoppers even have some of the
Speaker 1: clever approaches. You'll see a lot of them up here
Speaker 1: in Montana. They fly and they click, so they make
Speaker 1: a noise which allergs to where they are, and they
Speaker 1: have bright colored wings, and then when they land, they
Speaker 1: pull their wings in and they become absolutely like the dirt.
Speaker 1: They're just kind of grayish or brownish speckled, and they've
Speaker 1: become invisible. So you're following the noise and the view
Speaker 1: and advantages and you can't find them, and it's almost
Speaker 1: a failsafe defense that they have. So each insect, that's
Speaker 1: one of the things that's really cool is each insect
Speaker 1: has their own strategy how they make it you're familiar
Speaker 1: with white tail deer, I'm sure, how could you not be?
Speaker 1: They're tasty. Uh have you ever heard the idea um
Speaker 1: that the white tail functions similar to what you're talking
Speaker 1: about with grasshoppers, where when they're running away, they put
Speaker 1: up this this big white tails like this like beacon
Speaker 1: exactly going through the woods, and then they stop and
Speaker 1: drop the tail, and then your eye is your I
Speaker 1: tunes into that highly visible white tail, and that's what
Speaker 1: you're following when it runs away. And then it just
Speaker 1: drops his tail, and it takes away the thing that
Speaker 1: you had, the thing that you had found focus on.
Speaker 1: It becomes invisible. You weren't You weren't actually watching the deer,
Speaker 1: You were watching the tail exactly. But we have an
Speaker 1: even more interesting scenario in Arizona. We have a zebra
Speaker 1: tail lizard, which is a fairly fast running lizard. And
Speaker 1: if you're tw so away from it, it it waves this
Speaker 1: tail back and forth saying I'm here, I dare you
Speaker 1: to try to catch me, and you're running it it
Speaker 1: takes off. Usually most predators don't bother because they realize
Speaker 1: it knows that that I'm here. It's too fast. I
Speaker 1: can't catch it much like the deer. If the deer
Speaker 1: is a long way away, I don't have the tail.
Speaker 1: But if it's really close to you, it's not gonna
Speaker 1: do that. You know you're just ten feet away. It's
Speaker 1: gonna just try to freeze and hope, hope the heck
Speaker 1: you don't know it's there. But once it gets you know,
Speaker 1: some distance way, then the tail goes up and it runs.
Speaker 1: The lizard does the same sort of thing, and it's
Speaker 1: actually a very good strategy. It's a beautiful way to
Speaker 1: enhance your chance that you're not dinner for somebody else?
Speaker 1: Was it I've been I've been quoting uh story you
Speaker 1: told in your book. Um, I swear it. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: tell you what it is, and you remind me if
Speaker 1: it was your book or a different But I read
Speaker 1: a handful books by researchers such as yourself Did You Talk?
Speaker 1: Did You Talk? Talk? In the Sting of the Wild,
Speaker 1: about how young scientists are so impactful because they're asking
Speaker 1: original questions, and that you find that older scientists spend
Speaker 1: their time defending their old idea. Exactly. Yeah, I call
Speaker 1: that science progresses by one coffin at a time. You
Speaker 1: gotta you gotta kill off the old guys, so the
Speaker 1: new guys gonna have freedom to make new discoveries. D Uh,
Speaker 1: when you were what was your idea when you were young?
Speaker 1: Like if you had to say where here you are?
Speaker 1: You know, you're going through the education system, You're getting
Speaker 1: a doctorate. You know you have an interest in chemistry,
Speaker 1: you're developing an interest in insects things. But you have
Speaker 1: to sort of turn it into a question, right, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: there has been like some foundational premise. I'm guessing if
Speaker 1: you're gonna pursue the line of work that you pursue,
Speaker 1: what became your thing that you needed to answer? Basically,
Speaker 1: I was asking a question, how did sociality and insects evolve?
Speaker 1: In other words, how did you go for mom single
Speaker 1: mom raising all her young alone like a sand wasp
Speaker 1: or or digger be something like that. It was just
Speaker 1: mom and her young. All of a sudden, you get
Speaker 1: a huge social society like Honeybee colony with thirty thousand
Speaker 1: individuals or some ant colonies that have up to a
Speaker 1: million individuals. You have a whole lot of I was
Speaker 1: asking a question, how did you get around the predation
Speaker 1: pressure of predators? You know, if you're My analogy is
Speaker 1: if you're in the party and you see a bowl
Speaker 1: and has one peanut, it's across the room. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: not worth the effort to go and get that peanut hungry,
Speaker 1: but the bulls full of peanuts, then you're gonna go
Speaker 1: and get grab a handful. Same kind of thing with
Speaker 1: social insects. So the question is how does that peanut,
Speaker 1: for the analogy, defend itself when it becomes many peanuts
Speaker 1: so that doesn't get eaten. And I came up with
Speaker 1: a hypothesis as well, the stinging venom, which relies on
Speaker 1: two things. The pain gets your attention and the toxicity
Speaker 1: which does your damage. That that was the reason that
Speaker 1: they could evolve sociality. Whereas you don't see social flies
Speaker 1: or you don't see social beatles because they don't have
Speaker 1: any way to defend themselves other than maybe being nasty toxic.
Speaker 1: But the ants, spies, and wasps had this automatic stinger ability.
Speaker 1: It's all I had to do is evolve the behavior
Speaker 1: to use it right and the chemistry to make it effective.
Speaker 1: So that was my hypothesis. I wanted to collect evidence
Speaker 1: two either refute or support that hypothesis, and that's basically
Speaker 1: what I did. I'm guessing you thought to ask this question.
Speaker 1: Is it in fact true that the ability to sting
Speaker 1: in in HAVE societies is something that progressed over time
Speaker 1: and that there weren't things that used to be venomous
Speaker 1: and social big overtime became not venomous and not social, like,
Speaker 1: does it always move in that direction? Does a does
Speaker 1: always move towards complexity? Well, yes and no. Most of
Speaker 1: the time it does. There's an advantage of complexity. Have
Speaker 1: social behavior. You can have some individuals specializing and foraging,
Speaker 1: someone defending the nest, someone building the nest, someone collecting water,
Speaker 1: someone reproducing, and these sorts of things. A specialist is
Speaker 1: much better than a generalist. And the other thing is
Speaker 1: when you're away from home. If you're just a single
Speaker 1: mom said digger, b out there in a sandbox someplace
Speaker 1: you go away to get the flowers for nectar and pollen.
Speaker 1: Somebody can invade your nest and eat your young while
Speaker 1: you're gone. If you're social, you have a bunch of
Speaker 1: people still there. Hey, get out of here, intruder, and
Speaker 1: we'll teach you the lesson by stinging you or attacking you.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of advantages to sociality, which means
Speaker 1: most of the time it doesn't reverse. But there are
Speaker 1: a few cases. There's some solitary bees that evolve sociality
Speaker 1: and low levels, but then as they progress in the
Speaker 1: further north in the shorter seasons, those that were social
Speaker 1: and become back to solitary because there's not enough time
Speaker 1: to have two generations. If your social, you have to
Speaker 1: have mom living with babies. Babies help mom, and they
Speaker 1: were the next grandchildren at least, and most of them
Speaker 1: they continue on for many generations. But you need at
Speaker 1: least the overlap of mom and her young to help
Speaker 1: mom in order to be social. And so in some
Speaker 1: extreme situations you can you can lose that. But it's
Speaker 1: not because of the normal disadvantages. It's because climatic restrictions,
Speaker 1: you know, just don't give you the time to do it.
Speaker 1: When there's that shows a name for this concept and evolution, um,
Speaker 1: and maybe you can provide it for me. But to
Speaker 1: be like that, well, you see something fly, Okay, so
Speaker 1: you see that there's birds of flying insects that fly. Um,
Speaker 1: one could be excused for looking at these two things
Speaker 1: flying through the air, a dragonfly and a hummingbird and
Speaker 1: think that there's a relationship there that somehow flight began,
Speaker 1: like flight happened and it spread and became like flight
Speaker 1: for hummingbirds and and flight for dragonflies. But in fact
Speaker 1: they they independently arrived at this exactly. So are there
Speaker 1: like to be venomous like a beer or whatever to
Speaker 1: be venomous? Are there like a bunch of families of
Speaker 1: insects that all kind of like independently invented this technology
Speaker 1: or does it seemed like there's like a thing somewhere
Speaker 1: that did this and it proliferated and dispersed over time,
Speaker 1: when in the case of ants, bees, and wasps, there's
Speaker 1: a one ancestor that had had an ovpositive actually an
Speaker 1: egg laying to that's a tube that you punch into
Speaker 1: a plant or another insect and use that to inject
Speaker 1: an egg kind of like a syringe injects eggs. Bo
Speaker 1: is that how about does a body fy do that
Speaker 1: when it puts a baby inside? You know, they actually
Speaker 1: uh lay the egg on vegetation or some of them
Speaker 1: will get on mosquitoes. And then the larva, which is
Speaker 1: what they call a plenary in which is kind of
Speaker 1: this mobile worm like thing that's very rapidly moving, and
Speaker 1: one of the mosquito lands on you. Then it crawls
Speaker 1: off the mosquito and onto you and the and the
Speaker 1: young larva, which is tenth of a millimeter long, it's
Speaker 1: really tiny, tiny little thing burrows into your skin and
Speaker 1: then from there that's what becomes the bot fly. And yeah,
Speaker 1: that's how that happens. Yeah, it's kind of sending a
Speaker 1: harrowing picture. Squirreling got my goodness, is out upsetting squirrels,
Speaker 1: Stephen rolla squirrels. This little tiny squirrel has got three
Speaker 1: or four these enormous whopping The big bot flies in
Speaker 1: and you can say, how does this squirrel survive? That?
Speaker 1: Can you give me the favorite to give me that
Speaker 1: life cycle of abot flagon. What's basically they lay eggs
Speaker 1: and I'm not sure where. I think it's on vegetation
Speaker 1: and somehow where they gets onto a mosquito, and a
Speaker 1: mosquito then flies around it like he hitches a ride
Speaker 1: on a mosquito. Yeah, basically a freeloader. And what they
Speaker 1: drawls off on a you or a squirrel or whatever
Speaker 1: it is. And they detect when the mosquitoes feeding because
Speaker 1: you're warm and squirrels warm, whereas the mosquitoes landing on
Speaker 1: a leaf or on a flower sucking nectar, you know,
Speaker 1: because they drink sugar water too to get their energy
Speaker 1: to fly the plnary and doesn't crawl off then because
Speaker 1: you're not warm, you're not their host. They just hang
Speaker 1: tight until the mosquito finally gets on you or the
Speaker 1: squirrel or whatever it is. There's a lot of different
Speaker 1: species of them, and then they crawl off. They're pretty
Speaker 1: quick about doing that. And then they're they're so small
Speaker 1: you don't feel them. You know, they won't be moving
Speaker 1: any hairs in your body to tickle you or anything.
Speaker 1: We'd swat them or rub them or something that just
Speaker 1: very small and quiet. They just burrow in and you
Speaker 1: don't really notice anything until they're quite a bit bigger.
Speaker 1: That One of the questions of chemistry on these things,
Speaker 1: which I'm not aware anybody's looked at, is how do
Speaker 1: they burrow a hole in you without you feeling it.
Speaker 1: My hunch is that they have an anesthesia, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of like to go to the dentist and he
Speaker 1: numbs your your skin or your tooth or whatever it is.
Speaker 1: I suspect they do that. But you know, something a
Speaker 1: tenth of a millimeter long, how are you going to
Speaker 1: study that? It's pretty tough problem. Your body doesn't like
Speaker 1: your white blood cells, like, don't you don't really attack that,
Speaker 1: you you just end up being host to that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they probably also have other defenses against the immune system.
Speaker 1: You know, most of these things have a whole suite
Speaker 1: of complex behaviors, some of them for numbing it, some
Speaker 1: of them in mosquitoes case or ticks case. They have
Speaker 1: other chemicals prevent clotting so you don't stuff up there.
Speaker 1: They're blood feeding to be their proboscus or you know whatever.
Speaker 1: And then they also have things to prevent immune system
Speaker 1: from attacking them, and so that there's a whole smorgest
Speaker 1: sport of goodies that they inject into you, which aren't
Speaker 1: good for you, but good for them. Uh. I want
Speaker 1: I know where you were when I when we got
Speaker 1: you sidetracked, and I'm gonna I'm holding it in my
Speaker 1: head just so we all know. You were beginning to
Speaker 1: talk about the evolutionary forefather of a stinging insect and
Speaker 1: how I had to do with the proboscus over a
Speaker 1: positive the positives are egg laying too. Yeah, I'm still
Speaker 1: not ready to come back to that though, because you
Speaker 1: talk about mosquitoes. Gott me, I got a mosquito question. Um,
Speaker 1: only female mosquitoes bite, that's right, And most of the
Speaker 1: males are pretty nice guys, and antspeas and wash and
Speaker 1: males are nice guys too. It's the girls that you
Speaker 1: gotta worry about. Is it true that a female mosquito
Speaker 1: can still be successful, can still be a successful egg
Speaker 1: layer even if it never bites a mammal and gets
Speaker 1: blood out of it or a birden gets blood out
Speaker 1: of it. It's kind of a yes or no question
Speaker 1: that it's it's both. That often they will lay a
Speaker 1: small batch of eggs, you know, just a few dozen
Speaker 1: or something. That's all they have in their own body
Speaker 1: reserves from not having you know, fed on blood versus
Speaker 1: that they feed on you or me, or or an
Speaker 1: elk or a reindeer or you know, something of that sort.
Speaker 1: Then they fill up with double the amount of energy
Speaker 1: that they had before, I think, produce hundreds of eggs,
Speaker 1: and then they can get another blood meal produce another
Speaker 1: couple of hundred. So if you look at two or
Speaker 1: three cycles of several hundred eggs versus one cycle of
Speaker 1: paltry dozen or two. You can see that. That's why
Speaker 1: I say yes and no that yes, you technically can
Speaker 1: do it, but it's not a very successful strategy to
Speaker 1: do it. It's much better to take your risk. What's
Speaker 1: my chance of getting swatted and killed? Which means I
Speaker 1: passed no jeans a long versus ten times as many
Speaker 1: as if I don't feed. And obviously the calculus in
Speaker 1: the case of mosquito is it's worth the risk of
Speaker 1: getting the blood meal. Where are all the guys, Like
Speaker 1: when you're when you're out and you're getting swarmed by mosquitoes?
Speaker 1: Are you swarmed by males and females but it's only
Speaker 1: the females biting you, or the are the guys elsewhere?
Speaker 1: The guys are elsewhere they're looking for the girls, and
Speaker 1: they often hang out where they're going to be feeding
Speaker 1: because blood doesn't have much energy. It's mostly just protein,
Speaker 1: which of course what you need for laying eggs, but
Speaker 1: your energy comes from floral neck or something and this
Speaker 1: sort of sugary sweet things. So often the guys will
Speaker 1: kind of hang out around that looking where they can
Speaker 1: sneak up and catch a goal while she's getting lunch
Speaker 1: or something like that. Are they born on a one
Speaker 1: to one ratio or are their boatloads more females and males.
Speaker 1: Now they're pretty much one to one, huh most most so,
Speaker 1: when you got that huge swarm, there's that many guys
Speaker 1: sitting under some leaf exactly, but they're not bothering and
Speaker 1: they'll they'll fly away if you get anywhere near them.
Speaker 1: They're not dumb. They don't want to be squatted because
Speaker 1: they look right pretty much. They have a furrier proboscis,
Speaker 1: their stingery there. Their blood feeding tube usually is more
Speaker 1: furry because they need this for sensory things to detect
Speaker 1: and find the female. I eat with one more mosquito one, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: When we were kids, we had the belief, and I
Speaker 1: feel like I swear it works. Cal You probably did
Speaker 1: this where you catch a mosquito biting you and you
Speaker 1: would you know, the idea is that you would pinch
Speaker 1: it and so that you were trapping his sucker what's
Speaker 1: the word for a sucker probos You pinch him and
Speaker 1: trap his proboscis. And our belief where I grew up
Speaker 1: was that they could not stop sucking. Once they got
Speaker 1: in there, they and you would blow it up. You
Speaker 1: would eventually if you did it right, it would eventually erupt. Cool.
Speaker 1: I've never heard that sounds like a great thing to do.
Speaker 1: I would have done that if I had known about
Speaker 1: that's your next paper. So that doesn't ring true to you. Well,
Speaker 1: I don't know, if I know, I knew. We used
Speaker 1: to Sometimes they get in the crease of your knuckle
Speaker 1: and you straighten your finger and pinches so they can't
Speaker 1: get away, and then you could just kind of look
Speaker 1: at and torment this thing. But we never actually did
Speaker 1: it long enough to see whether they exploded. That. That's
Speaker 1: a good experiment. You need to repeat that, Man, I
Speaker 1: haven't done a long time. But yeah, you'd you'd suffer
Speaker 1: a lot of stings in order to eventually get one.
Speaker 1: And I know for a fact you can hold them captive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, Yeah, we did that. But our view was
Speaker 1: I don't know that I ever saw it might just
Speaker 1: been like a thing we knew to be true, even
Speaker 1: though no one ever saw as it would eventually, like
Speaker 1: I said, explode another chapter. Yeah, considering you have three
Speaker 1: kids of prime age for this, you'll you'll be able
Speaker 1: to collect some data on this and then wait for
Speaker 1: a nice wet June evening and I'm gonna make them
Speaker 1: ball in the yard and they can write it up
Speaker 1: with a nice photograph and publish it in the journal.
Speaker 1: I've got a couple of good candidates who would love
Speaker 1: to have them in their journal. I like, Okay, I
Speaker 1: want to go back to where you were trying to
Speaker 1: talk what you're trying to talk about. I was asking about, like,
Speaker 1: where did it begin? Where did the ability to like
Speaker 1: wallop someone with a nasty sting begin? And and you
Speaker 1: were getting into explaining, um that here's a bug and
Speaker 1: a head an ovipositor, you know, I first started out
Speaker 1: they went through solitary bees in solitary offs, and they
Speaker 1: use the stinger mainly for paralyzing their prey. Say a
Speaker 1: cicada killer for example. It has it's a big boss,
Speaker 1: looks like a yellow jacket on steroids and growth hormone,
Speaker 1: so it's quite huge. But it doesn't sting. It's solitary.
Speaker 1: It's just mom and she goes out and catches the
Speaker 1: cicada and she stings it then paralyzes it just by
Speaker 1: piercing it, not by poisoning it. No, no, she poisons
Speaker 1: and so she pierces it and poisons it, and then
Speaker 1: she has this venom, which is very ineffective on us
Speaker 1: because we don't prey on cicada killers because again, there's
Speaker 1: not worth the effort to try to track down this
Speaker 1: fast flying insect just to get one snack a bite.
Speaker 1: Not worth the energy to do that. But then some
Speaker 1: of them adapted different behaviors like ants. Of course they
Speaker 1: can't fly, so they have a more limited ability to escape.
Speaker 1: And we don't really know the ancestor of ants because
Speaker 1: the closest we have is very primitive ant societies, which
Speaker 1: have maybe say a dozen or so individuals, but they're
Speaker 1: already social, so we don't know the step between that
Speaker 1: when has a single individual to go to the small
Speaker 1: first step. But presumably something happened there where he had
Speaker 1: overlap of generations and mom and a few ones, a
Speaker 1: few individuals helped out. And the advantage of having a
Speaker 1: stinger is there's something that's messing with you, you can
Speaker 1: sting it and chances are to go away and then
Speaker 1: leave you and your mom and your your siblings alone.
Speaker 1: And so then this as you've got bigger colonies evolved.
Speaker 1: You know, say something where you know a couple of
Speaker 1: hundred ants, then you have to have a better defense
Speaker 1: because there's more enthusiasm. I'm more willing to eat a
Speaker 1: hundred something than I am a dozen or fewer, and
Speaker 1: so I have higher motivation. So in order to blunt
Speaker 1: the higher motivation, you've got to get a more effective sting.
Speaker 1: So this is basically the hypothesis of stepwise as you
Speaker 1: get bigger and bigger, and it takes it to the extreme,
Speaker 1: which there's about a dozen wasps in this category. Honeybees
Speaker 1: are also in it, and one ant species of harves strand.
Speaker 1: What they do is go to the extent of actually
Speaker 1: giving up their life sacrifice and committing suicide by stinging you,
Speaker 1: ripping the stinger out. If everybody's been stung by honeybee
Speaker 1: knows they lose the stinger in you. You say, why
Speaker 1: would they do that? It's because at this point, the
Speaker 1: individual honeybee doesn't reproduce, she doesn't lay eggs or anything.
Speaker 1: She's protecting mom. So she's basically like a cell of
Speaker 1: mom that she's part of the system to reproduce, and
Speaker 1: she got he's got to keep. Now I'm getting into
Speaker 1: the heat like you. Sorry, the worker honeybee, the female
Speaker 1: honeybee has to defend its mom and by leaving the
Speaker 1: stinger and you, that prevents you from If you get
Speaker 1: stung and you give it a karate chop, you get
Speaker 1: it off before it does much damage. He gets much
Speaker 1: venom and it takes about thirty seconds to a minute
Speaker 1: to get a full load of venomin. If you lose
Speaker 1: your stinger, then your karate chopping you knock off the
Speaker 1: bee and say ah solution be gune a kill your ascal.
Speaker 1: Wrong because the stingers in you and it pumps that
Speaker 1: other of the venom into you. And that's beneficial as
Speaker 1: an even stronger defense than just the venom and stinging itself,
Speaker 1: because now you get ten times more in. And it's
Speaker 1: often very hard to find a penetrable part of the animal.
Speaker 1: You know, you have a lizard or something like that.
Speaker 1: It's hard to find between the scales the sting where
Speaker 1: most mammals we have all this fur and hair and everything.
Speaker 1: You know, we're unusual people were pretty easy to sting.
Speaker 1: We don't have much hair, but it's often very hard
Speaker 1: to manage to get you know, a place where you
Speaker 1: can sting and so it's important once you get to
Speaker 1: maximize the damage that you did. So it just keeps
Speaker 1: accent to writing as there's more and more risk. All
Speaker 1: these ones that lose stingers are huge. Colonies are big,
Speaker 1: like the honey wasp and honeybee. And there's a bunch
Speaker 1: of Polibia wasps which are papermaking nests down in Latin
Speaker 1: America and the tropics that also have huge colonies of
Speaker 1: sometimes individuals. You think about it, you lose one individual, yeah,
Speaker 1: so what who cares? But if you have a colony
Speaker 1: of ten, like some of the small ants, you lose one,
Speaker 1: that's a big price to pay. So they never lose
Speaker 1: their sting. It's only these super huge monsters social societies
Speaker 1: that do that. It's this is an impossible question for
Speaker 1: anyone to answer. But the ones that self eviscerate, they
Speaker 1: sting in, they die like they you know exactly, It's
Speaker 1: impossible to know what m oh Man like, what their
Speaker 1: self awareness is, right, But like most creatures are gonna
Speaker 1: I should say most a lot of creatures exhibit they
Speaker 1: desire to not get killed self preservation. Yeah, they do
Speaker 1: things because they don't want to get killed. Um, I
Speaker 1: would love to know like, to what degree it has
Speaker 1: any sort of self awareness about the finality of the
Speaker 1: decision to bite. I think they're quite well aware of that.
Speaker 1: I just have a paper submitted just six months ago
Speaker 1: and basically that question. I asked, the question of honeybee colonies,
Speaker 1: will you make a decision? Is it worth dying for
Speaker 1: my colony or is it not? And the two questions
Speaker 1: they give them is one case, they have only a nest,
Speaker 1: they have no young, they have no food, no paul,
Speaker 1: no nectar, no honey or anything. That's like they're just
Speaker 1: building a house. Like, yeah, that's just in the initial stages.
Speaker 1: Three days old colony, and so you came from a
Speaker 1: swarm and you had a bunch of honey in your tummy,
Speaker 1: and you've been there three days, and if worst comes
Speaker 1: to worst, you just off you go find a new
Speaker 1: nest to very little lose. And the other case that
Speaker 1: I had was nineteen to twenty two days, whereas that's
Speaker 1: midway through your life cycle. Of the oldest bees are
Speaker 1: starting to die off. They live about forty days in general,
Speaker 1: and so you you have a whole bunch of young
Speaker 1: there which are just about to emerge and start taking over.
Speaker 1: You have a lot of honey, of a lot of plony,
Speaker 1: have a lot of wax, you have a lot of investment.
Speaker 1: And in that case, if you're a worker be will
Speaker 1: you decide, Oh, I have a lot more to risk
Speaker 1: my mama, who's everything to me. Because I can't reproduce.
Speaker 1: All I can do is allow her to reproduce. So
Speaker 1: should I sacrifice my life my mama much more readily
Speaker 1: when I'm in a colony that's older and has much
Speaker 1: more to lose than younger And the answer is yes,
Speaker 1: the two and a half times more likely to sting
Speaker 1: when they're the older at the bigger risk. So they
Speaker 1: so they have some kind of awareness that they have
Speaker 1: a value, you know, exhibit that by their behavior. Does
Speaker 1: that ever, does that ever begin to reverse? Like oh yeah,
Speaker 1: Like well they then okay, let like if it's an
Speaker 1: old colony, and like we're gonna get set to take
Speaker 1: off on for a new one. And then he goes like,
Speaker 1: now I'm losing my desire to die because it's not
Speaker 1: as important anymore, or is the only thing that just
Speaker 1: increases increases increases, and then they die. No, it goes
Speaker 1: both ways. That I had a couple of examples I
Speaker 1: had twenty total colonies, eight of the three days and
Speaker 1: nine of the nine two days, but I had three
Speaker 1: that what we called queenless was the queen died for
Speaker 1: whatever reason, either you know, something happened to an old age.
Speaker 1: You know, we often don't know, maybe got pinched or
Speaker 1: something happened. And these colonies have no we reductive potential
Speaker 1: at all, because again, the workers can't lay eggs, and
Speaker 1: so they have nothing to lose, nothing to defend except themselves,
Speaker 1: and they're just gonna live out there their last of
Speaker 1: their forty days of old age. And you go and
Speaker 1: mess with those colonies, they won't do anything at all,
Speaker 1: No way. Yeah, they they're like they're aware of what's
Speaker 1: going on with the queen. Oh yeah, they know they
Speaker 1: have no queen, and so they'll go, they'll go. Uh,
Speaker 1: they were about two percent would come out and defend,
Speaker 1: whereas I'd have sixty or seventy come out with some
Speaker 1: of the ones that had the most to defend. So
Speaker 1: they knew, why should I go and sacrifice myself for
Speaker 1: my useless sisters when I could just hang out for
Speaker 1: forty days. Yeah, just hang out and enjoy life as
Speaker 1: best you can. I mean, what else is there to do?
Speaker 1: You know everything? Man, that's where you want up. You
Speaker 1: wind up in these like difficult where you're like, is
Speaker 1: it that they know it? Or is it just somehow
Speaker 1: that it is? They certainly behave as if they know it.
Speaker 1: But there's an even more into honey Bees are fascinating,
Speaker 1: which is one of the reasons I worked on a
Speaker 1: lot and everybody else does. He got the males, on
Speaker 1: the other hand, the males when they mate, they explode
Speaker 1: their genitary explode into the queen and they fall off
Speaker 1: paralyzed and die and get hauled away and eaten by
Speaker 1: the ants. Back up, who does the male honey bees?
Speaker 1: The drones as they call them, and say, asked the drone. Well,
Speaker 1: so you gotta colony, it's got the drones. How many
Speaker 1: of the drones are gonna have the opportunity to go
Speaker 1: out like this? Well, they'll probably be two or three
Speaker 1: thousand of these drones per summer in the colony, and
Speaker 1: they probably get to mate with one or two queens
Speaker 1: that most each one does well the whole colony worth.
Speaker 1: And so if you figure a queen mates about eighteen
Speaker 1: two six times, so let's say fifty males get a
Speaker 1: chance out of two or three thousands to mate. And
Speaker 1: so the males, no, this is a very rare opportunity.
Speaker 1: You know, most of us are just horny and never
Speaker 1: get a chance to find a mate. And so if
Speaker 1: you get the chance to find a mate, what are
Speaker 1: you thinking, I've succeeding. But I'm exploding and I'm rupturing
Speaker 1: my whole whole system and being paralyzed and falling to
Speaker 1: the ground. And of course the queen then turns around
Speaker 1: and kicks the rest of your genitalia. It's like having
Speaker 1: your your penis stuck inside ripped off and then go on.
Speaker 1: Then she goes and rips it out and throws it away,
Speaker 1: and so that's what the man and so his gym
Speaker 1: till you come off. Yeah, you can actually hear it.
Speaker 1: It's a pop if you're down on the ground near
Speaker 1: and they explode. And then she discards it exactly, and
Speaker 1: someone hauls this paralyzed, dying thing off when it falls
Speaker 1: down to the ground, and then the aunts say, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm nice, fat juicee be let's have dinner, and so
Speaker 1: they hauled off to them their nest and need it. Wow,
Speaker 1: So what is the male No, idea. Yeah, but have
Speaker 1: you been just like you looked at their eagerness to
Speaker 1: that you looked at you know, species eagerness to die
Speaker 1: for the cause? Um, have you? Is there any study
Speaker 1: you can think of it would measure the male's awareness, Like,
Speaker 1: are there males that get the opportunity and then bail?
Speaker 1: I don't know. Unfortunately, they're about twenty ft up, going
Speaker 1: fourteen miles an hour and flying chasing this queen who's
Speaker 1: buzzing around, and they there, yes, yes, don't say having sex.
Speaker 1: I don't imagine they're they're mating up in the air. Yeah. See,
Speaker 1: she's pretty clever. She figures, I don't want to get
Speaker 1: a reject mail because that makes reject kids. So you
Speaker 1: want to get the strongest, fittest male. So you're flying fast,
Speaker 1: and the mail's gotta be able to catch up with
Speaker 1: you and beat out all the other males that are
Speaker 1: they all the other drones. So she's intentionally making it
Speaker 1: hard for him to do it. So I guess he's
Speaker 1: more thinking about the immediate I gotta catch it, rather
Speaker 1: than think about, oh, I'm not going to make it
Speaker 1: be alive much longer. I'm not sure where the beasts think,
Speaker 1: but you know, that's if you analogize, that would be
Speaker 1: probably how his behavior would be, that he's more worried
Speaker 1: about catching the queen and worrying later about you know,
Speaker 1: we're somewhat the same way with with people. I guess
Speaker 1: I shouldn't go that way, but there seems to be
Speaker 1: a lot of interest in the mating part. Oops, I
Speaker 1: got a kid, Now what you we don't really think
Speaker 1: about the kid in too many cases. You know, once
Speaker 1: we're married and that sort of thing, then we do
Speaker 1: think about that. But before you're married and you're young,
Speaker 1: you know, you don't really go to that depth of thought.
Speaker 1: You're you're focused on the immediate. Yeah, in the back
Speaker 1: of your mind, you're aware that exactly exactly, But that's
Speaker 1: about as far as you take it. How did you
Speaker 1: um and doing your work? Why did it become necessary
Speaker 1: or and did it become necessary that you would start
Speaker 1: exposing yourself to getting stung by everything? Basically it was
Speaker 1: late in the scheme where I had had early I
Speaker 1: wanted to expose just because I was trying to collect
Speaker 1: enough information from It's kind of a statistical thing. You
Speaker 1: can't use one example that's an anecdote or five or
Speaker 1: ten to get the information I needed. I needed dozens
Speaker 1: and dozens. So each time I've had a new species,
Speaker 1: I would go after that to kind of collect the
Speaker 1: chemical and pain information about them. And so eventually I
Speaker 1: got to us fifty or sixty different different types of
Speaker 1: of seeing insects that did that. I'd go to meetings
Speaker 1: and give presentations, a show a picture of a a
Speaker 1: mud dauber wash dirt dauber washp would to have pretty
Speaker 1: much around the world. It's a long, skinny thing about
Speaker 1: an inch long. It's got a really narrow thread like waist,
Speaker 1: and they're dead, dreadly death, deathly afraid of them in
Speaker 1: some parts of Texas, Oh my god, these things are awful.
Speaker 1: And have you ever been stung by one? And I said,
Speaker 1: well no, why not? I said, well, because there's solitary
Speaker 1: they just think spiders and paralyzing for their prey. There's
Speaker 1: they have very few predators that are big, you know,
Speaker 1: like birds or anything. Doesn't want to mess when they
Speaker 1: don't really need a stinger for defense, so they probably
Speaker 1: don't hurt much. And that's very hard to get into stinging,
Speaker 1: so they probably don't hurt. And they'd say yeah, man, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're just afraid of these things. It's about the third
Speaker 1: or fourth time taunted. Yeah, third or fourth time I
Speaker 1: got those sorts of questions, I said, oh damn, and
Speaker 1: I guess I had to bite the bullet go test
Speaker 1: my theory, which said would be about a one on
Speaker 1: this very very low pain. So I went out to
Speaker 1: a cattle tank where they water the cattle in the
Speaker 1: desert of Arizona. There's no water for miles away. Mud
Speaker 1: dauber wasts need mud. That's where they make their nests
Speaker 1: out of, so I knew they'd be coming in there.
Speaker 1: It's again, only the females that do the work. The
Speaker 1: males just chase the females, so they're kind of useless basically.
Speaker 1: So the females are all coming in. They could all sting,
Speaker 1: and they were collecting mud balls. So I grabbed three
Speaker 1: of them and I'd apply them to my arm. I'd
Speaker 1: sticking colin and ladies, stay me, please, staing me, stink, stink,
Speaker 1: come on, you can do it, you can do it,
Speaker 1: you can do it. And I finally got a couple
Speaker 1: of stings to to sting me, and they were what
Speaker 1: i'd call underwhelming, just as I predicted, so like all
Speaker 1: the Texans are all worked up about it, but then
Speaker 1: you get stung and you weren't impressed. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: basically they're scary looking. I admit that they are scary
Speaker 1: looking you look at them. And so there was a
Speaker 1: number of things like that. The cicada killer was another one.
Speaker 1: This was a little bit of serendipity, foolishness and opportunity.
Speaker 1: I had never been stung by one, and it was
Speaker 1: only one recorded literature history of a guy who got
Speaker 1: stung underneath his thumbnail at the end, and that's one
Speaker 1: of the more sensitive parts of your body underneath there.
Speaker 1: He complained that it hurt a lot, but then he said,
Speaker 1: it really wasn't that bad a thing compared to you know,
Speaker 1: something like a honey bee or something like that. But
Speaker 1: it's just this kind of passing thing in you know,
Speaker 1: really old paper, and I'm not in sure why you
Speaker 1: put that in. Today they wouldn't even lie to put
Speaker 1: this chafe in the side in there. But it was nice.
Speaker 1: We got a little bit of natural history. So then
Speaker 1: I thought, well, this is probably it's big. It's you know,
Speaker 1: about two inches long, So how much is this thing
Speaker 1: going to hurt again. I was asked about that, and
Speaker 1: I thought, well, I've worked on for years and years
Speaker 1: and they don't sting you. So I went out one day.
Speaker 1: I didn't have a net or anything, and I saw
Speaker 1: one on a flower, so I'm grab and it stung
Speaker 1: the poem my hand, which incidentally has more pain than
Speaker 1: most other areas because we have all the sensory nerves there.
Speaker 1: Palms are very sensitive to touch and that sort of thing,
Speaker 1: so we need a very good nervous system and that
Speaker 1: part of our anatomy. And it hurt about a one
Speaker 1: and a half, as I called it, less than a honeybee,
Speaker 1: more than a sweatbee, more than a dirt daub or wass,
Speaker 1: but not as much as a honeybee. And this is
Speaker 1: a great big thing. And again that was a prediction.
Speaker 1: It's just mom doing everything on our own. If you
Speaker 1: had a colony of things like that. Analogy being the
Speaker 1: giant hornets of Asia Japan, we have hundreds of them
Speaker 1: in a nest and they're the same size. Those do
Speaker 1: hurt you when you say you gave it a one
Speaker 1: and a half. Explain the scale you eventually came up with. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the scale, it's kind of it's it's very hard to
Speaker 1: You can't put an electrode in in the skin or
Speaker 1: in a nerve or anything and get a like a
Speaker 1: galvanometer we do in high school physics class with the
Speaker 1: needle swings over and you can record how far it
Speaker 1: swings and say, oh, that implies this strange. I can't
Speaker 1: do anything like that with with pain, so it's just relative.
Speaker 1: So I made a pain scale of four for one
Speaker 1: to three and four, and I said, well, we need
Speaker 1: to have a comparative because the pain you experience might
Speaker 1: be different from the pain I experienced, saying, maybe you're
Speaker 1: ten times tougher than I am. So if if you
Speaker 1: get stung by a honeybee and you call that a
Speaker 1: two by definition, I get stung by a honeybee, and
Speaker 1: I call that a two for me. So even though
Speaker 1: it may hurt me ten times more than you, I'm
Speaker 1: normalizing it to myself. So next time I get stung by,
Speaker 1: say a sweatbee, which is the one, I'd say it's
Speaker 1: a whole lot less than the two. And one of
Speaker 1: the ways you can tell the differences you hold up
Speaker 1: the two and ask somebody which one would you prefer
Speaker 1: to get stung by if you had to, if there's
Speaker 1: a gun to your head, Oh, I'll take that one
Speaker 1: for sure, absolutely, that one without indicate a strong recognition
Speaker 1: that that one hurts a lot less and kind of
Speaker 1: on the semi quantitative arena. What I do is they say,
Speaker 1: it's like an exponential scale of a two is ten
Speaker 1: times more painful than a than a one, and three
Speaker 1: is tend to the Richter scale for earthquakes, exactly seven
Speaker 1: is ten times worse than the six. Exactly the same
Speaker 1: sort of idea, And you say, how you can you
Speaker 1: can match that? Is? Okay, take a fire ant, which
Speaker 1: is something that readily stings numerous times. You get one
Speaker 1: fire it kind of smarts. It's kind of a one.
Speaker 1: You get ten fire ants. They kind of ladies on
Speaker 1: on que all sting, and all ten I'm stinging. It
Speaker 1: seems that's the way they are. They aren't really that way,
Speaker 1: but that's the way it seems to poor victim. When
Speaker 1: you get stung ten fire ants stings heard about as
Speaker 1: much as one honey bee sting. You get to ten
Speaker 1: honey bee stings they heard about as much as one
Speaker 1: harvest RNT, which is a three, and you get ten
Speaker 1: harvest ants, and that's maybe as much as one bullet
Speaker 1: and or transa hawk, which is a four, so you
Speaker 1: can see, you know, it's it's not a linear scale
Speaker 1: like one is half of two, which is you know,
Speaker 1: half of three, and it's more tenfold difference. When you
Speaker 1: started subjecting yourself to getting stung by everything, whether did
Speaker 1: you get to where there were some things you were
Speaker 1: nerves that you were reluctant to want to go get
Speaker 1: stung by, or early on in my career, before I
Speaker 1: actually had concept with the sting pain scale, I was
Speaker 1: still just working on the chemistry. I didn't really get
Speaker 1: the pain scale formulated my mind until three So three
Speaker 1: years later, I was in Japan and they had these
Speaker 1: huge mandarin hornets. Everybody's seeing them on YouTube and such.
Speaker 1: They're about two inches long, big boxy, blocky things with
Speaker 1: a bright orange head and orange stripes in their abdomen.
Speaker 1: These things are enormous. Now it is studying them for
Speaker 1: the venom. They've got a lot of venom. And I
Speaker 1: didn't want to get stung. I mean, who wants to
Speaker 1: get stung by some saucy on on wings that's two
Speaker 1: inches long? Boy? I mean, this thing is kind of scary.
Speaker 1: So I managed to collect two colonies with the help
Speaker 1: of Japanese who were very protective of me. They didn't want,
Speaker 1: you know, there their colleague from the US to beginning
Speaker 1: stung up and say these Japanese mal treated me or
Speaker 1: anything like that. So they were very covetous and made
Speaker 1: sure I didn't get stung. And I was all suited up,
Speaker 1: had all those students. Students are expendable, so they had
Speaker 1: them behind me. Within the second nets, they're catching anybody
Speaker 1: cut behind me, could you know, attack me from the back.
Speaker 1: So the long story shot was I managed to get
Speaker 1: all all the members of both colonies and never get stung.
Speaker 1: So in retrospect, I can't say, gosh, I wish I
Speaker 1: had been stung, because everybody asked about how much does
Speaker 1: the Mandard hornet has say well, I don't really know.
Speaker 1: I've never been stung by one. We don't have them
Speaker 1: in the US or North. So to this day you
Speaker 1: have been stung by it, that's right. And so I say, well,
Speaker 1: if somebody wants to fund me for a junk at
Speaker 1: Japan or China for four thousand dollars to go and
Speaker 1: get stung, fund me there and I can do that
Speaker 1: and continue my research on a free trip, and all
Speaker 1: I have to do is get stung once. But my
Speaker 1: prediction is, you know, predicting based on the biology and
Speaker 1: natural history of these things, would be like a yellow jacket,
Speaker 1: which is a two, except a whole lot bigger than
Speaker 1: the yellow deck. It's ten times. It was so bigger.
Speaker 1: So my prediction is it would be about a three,
Speaker 1: you know, ten yellow ten a little yellow jackets equal
Speaker 1: to one humongous yellow jacket like relative. So that's what
Speaker 1: I would predict. Have you traveled to other places to
Speaker 1: get stung? Oh yeah, I'm just like specifically win there
Speaker 1: to get stung. Well, no, not to get stung, to
Speaker 1: collect the venom of whoever was there. I I went
Speaker 1: to Malaysia. We had a nice study there which was
Speaker 1: kind of an interesting thing. I found these ants that
Speaker 1: live in trees and they turned out to be very
Speaker 1: mild in disposition and they didn't hurt very much. They
Speaker 1: brought him back to the lab and looked at their chemistry.
Speaker 1: My god, they're incredibly toxic. They're one of the most
Speaker 1: most toxic insects I've ever run into. So they're The
Speaker 1: question I ask is why if you're so toxic do
Speaker 1: you not hurt? I mean, normally, if you're a big, strong,
Speaker 1: dangerous thing you want to address, Hey, I'm big, strong
Speaker 1: danger don't mess with me, and you you'd want it
Speaker 1: to be painful and hurt, and they don't do this.
Speaker 1: So that's one of the you know, the more you
Speaker 1: do research, you have many questions you can answer, and
Speaker 1: that's one of the ones that I got there. But
Speaker 1: I went to South Africa specifically to study they have
Speaker 1: a whole what I call the Big five of of ants.
Speaker 1: You know, of course into the Big five exactly, hippos
Speaker 1: and elephants and uh ryanos that's the last when Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that these Big five they're good whopping sized dance
Speaker 1: and they were talked about and some of the old
Speaker 1: literature and the naturalists being really really fierce and scary
Speaker 1: and all this. So I said, well, that should be
Speaker 1: a good source of venom chemistry and good good things
Speaker 1: to study. And so I found all those. It turned
Speaker 1: out most of them really didn't hurt that much. I
Speaker 1: think it's just the problem that you relate how much
Speaker 1: painfulness is relative to your experience, and if your experience
Speaker 1: is mostly mild, things. Then the least mild of them
Speaker 1: is really hurts, yeah, whereas the least model is about
Speaker 1: a third or a half as much as anything in
Speaker 1: the New World actually has the most painful stinging things
Speaker 1: by far. We're lucky, yeah, especially if you go to
Speaker 1: Amazoni's or someplace fun like that. And so the South Africans,
Speaker 1: relative to their experiences, these things really hurt. But compared
Speaker 1: to what I'd run into here in North America and
Speaker 1: South America, they were pretty mild. And so all five
Speaker 1: of them. So North America has worse stinging stuff than Africa.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, as far as insects go, Africa is kind
Speaker 1: of kind of a little doll actually in some regards
Speaker 1: when it comes to stinging. Yeah. They have they have
Speaker 1: these uh what they call them firetail wasps, the long
Speaker 1: skinny kind of tanny wasps that they have there maybe
Speaker 1: a two, the most social one that's about as high
Speaker 1: as they get. And they have the metal belli ant,
Speaker 1: which is this army like thing that goes out and
Speaker 1: raids termites and there around it two maybe a little
Speaker 1: bit less. And then they have the giant stink ant,
Speaker 1: which is an enormous an. It's about as big as
Speaker 1: a bullet ant. And that's at most the two of
Speaker 1: their pretty minor two chicken shit ants, Yeah, exactly, and
Speaker 1: most of them, well, they will stinging if you mess
Speaker 1: with them, but you have to kind of mess with them.
Speaker 1: And and they really weren't all that painful. The uh,
Speaker 1: the most painful. I ran intos what I call the
Speaker 1: glossy ants. They're kind of a purply sheen to them.
Speaker 1: They weren't listed anywhere on the list, but those things
Speaker 1: really kind of smarted and so I, you know, just
Speaker 1: go to place, and I went to Australia to study
Speaker 1: their jack jumpers and their bulldog ants and got stung
Speaker 1: by all of those. Of course, it's hard not to
Speaker 1: mess with them. Were they pretty nasty? No, they were
Speaker 1: kind of a sharp, clean pain, kind of like a
Speaker 1: needle stick or a small knife stick. But they weren't burning.
Speaker 1: You know, burning is like a match or an ember
Speaker 1: from fire pops explodes your your fire blows an ember
Speaker 1: on your this hot, fiery feeling. This is more of
Speaker 1: a clean piercing, you know, almost chemical feeling that I had.
Speaker 1: What were the circumstances when you went and got stung
Speaker 1: by a bullet A well, basically it was again desperation.
Speaker 1: That's when most of my stings occurred. I was in
Speaker 1: Amazonas and near Bay Lange. What is the word you're
Speaker 1: using amazonas the Amazon? Yeah, Amazon, it's just a territory
Speaker 1: around where the Amazon base. That term maybe maybe it's
Speaker 1: Latin or Spanish or Portus, I don't know. I just
Speaker 1: kind of used up in Amazon area and it was
Speaker 1: getting near nightfall is about five o'clock and I was
Speaker 1: on half a degree south latitude. So if you ever
Speaker 1: been in the tropics, when the sun goes down, it
Speaker 1: goes down ten minutes. It goes from light to black.
Speaker 1: You can't know nothing, like if you're in northern you know,
Speaker 1: Montana or Alaska or northern Canada. Yeah, twilight sometimes for hours,
Speaker 1: not so they're so here was. I had an hour
Speaker 1: to go and I finally found this, this bullet ant colony,
Speaker 1: and I had an assistant Himarrow Hemorrow, was the toughest
Speaker 1: guy I'd ever run into. The Hemorrow would stick his
Speaker 1: hand into fire ant colonies and grab mounds them and
Speaker 1: stuff them in a bag because because you know, we
Speaker 1: we were collecting venom. I was with my professor and
Speaker 1: we were collecting venoms and ants of anything, those stinging
Speaker 1: We didn't care what it was pretty much. And I
Speaker 1: had this little kind of trowel that i'd care along,
Speaker 1: little plastic thing that's light and easy to transport, you know, overseas.
Speaker 1: I'm digging up this colony and trying to get these
Speaker 1: these bullet ants to come out. I'd run into a
Speaker 1: root or something like that where I couldn't dig two,
Speaker 1: and I said, hey, Marrow, where is Merrow? Where is
Speaker 1: her arrow? He's back there twenty ft behind me, and
Speaker 1: I'd say here, I get up here and get this
Speaker 1: root out of here. He'd run up and give a
Speaker 1: whack or two and then retreat. What is wrong? Hemarrow
Speaker 1: is a man of steel wise anyway. So then I
Speaker 1: was a little bit in my naivete. I had this
Speaker 1: glass jar about it, a court jar. I'd put telcum
Speaker 1: powder around the top so the ants couldn't crawl out.
Speaker 1: They'd slip and fall back down. Yeah. It works pretty
Speaker 1: much until they wear off all the telcom potty and
Speaker 1: then they get out. But man, that's a hot tip. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But then I had these long tweezers. Theyre foot long.
Speaker 1: I was grabbing them and trying to get them in.
Speaker 1: I found out first of all that bullet ants are
Speaker 1: very fast, and they're very sticky legg They could stick
Speaker 1: to two chromed tweezers and crawl up. So the next thing,
Speaker 1: I got four or five of them attacking you all once,
Speaker 1: and you're trying to say, how am I going to
Speaker 1: fend off all the They have a colony with three thousands,
Speaker 1: so a lot of a lot of ants there. And
Speaker 1: when you get them kind of rolled up, they take
Speaker 1: umbridge at this and come after you. And so I'm
Speaker 1: trying to get these things in and it's getting dark
Speaker 1: and we're having to leave soon, and I thought I
Speaker 1: may never see these things again. I don't know this
Speaker 1: the first time I've seen them. So I got again.
Speaker 1: So I speed it up. Sure enough, the faster you
Speaker 1: go and the more careless you get, the sloppier you get.
Speaker 1: And yes, you will get nailed. And that's what happened.
Speaker 1: Have you uh been z by a Transula wasp? Oh? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Is that is that a whopper? Definitely? Absolutely? What can
Speaker 1: you explain their life history a little bit? Yeah? Transla
Speaker 1: hawks are they're a big spider wasp and what they
Speaker 1: do is they they catch a trantula. They hunt one
Speaker 1: down and they sting it and paralyze it in a
Speaker 1: permanent paralysis. Is the thing will never die until it
Speaker 1: dries out. It will eventually die of either dehydration or starvation,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't kill it to the venom the keeps
Speaker 1: of fresh meat. It's kind of like having your venison
Speaker 1: in a cooler. You can keep it over winter, and
Speaker 1: as long as you keep it in a cooler, you
Speaker 1: can feed your family for months on end. So the
Speaker 1: same principle that they have there. You have a paralyzed
Speaker 1: tranchling the one egg on it, just one, and that
Speaker 1: that egg hatches into a larva, which ends. Doesn't you
Speaker 1: got stash that transl somewhere? Oh yeah, which she forgot
Speaker 1: that part? Yes, I mybody most that he was camping
Speaker 1: one time and said he saw one fly past. I
Speaker 1: don't want to ruin his story. I feel like this
Speaker 1: is what he told me, he saw one fly passed.
Speaker 1: Then in a while later here comes out something bit dragon,
Speaker 1: a trangeler back the way he'd come from. Who could
Speaker 1: be it might have been the same one or a
Speaker 1: different one. But what happens is they paralyze him and
Speaker 1: then they either put them in a burrow that the
Speaker 1: trench la hawk wasp makes digs a burrow down and
Speaker 1: puts in the bottom of the cell, or if it's
Speaker 1: near where the trench as a burrow. They haven't naturally
Speaker 1: dig a hole in the ground his own hole, yeah,
Speaker 1: and then just put it in its own hole, which
Speaker 1: is a lot less work. I mean, I would do
Speaker 1: that if I were the wasps being lazy, but they do.
Speaker 1: You know, those two different things got one egg on it,
Speaker 1: you know, one egg. So what happens is the egg
Speaker 1: then hatches and it starts eating the blood. They have
Speaker 1: an open system, not like us with veins. They just
Speaker 1: have a open cavity and you can just keep sucking
Speaker 1: the blood. And then when you get a little bigger,
Speaker 1: you start eating the fat. And when you get a
Speaker 1: little bigger, you start eating the reproductive system and the gut. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And of course none of these things are life support
Speaker 1: systems for the tranches, so it's still alive. When you
Speaker 1: get to the fifth mold, fourth mold into the fifth
Speaker 1: end star. Each each different larva doubles or triples the
Speaker 1: size of the previous one, so you can see the
Speaker 1: last one is many times bigger than all of the
Speaker 1: four younger ones together. When the last one gets it,
Speaker 1: goes on this ravenous gluttony and just eats everything, the nerves,
Speaker 1: the brain, you know, yeah, finally eats everything and it
Speaker 1: gives one. Doesn't want to make a live action movie.
Speaker 1: I heard how they're going to remake bamb We feel
Speaker 1: like they should remake a do a live action movie
Speaker 1: about this exactly and kind of nature kids. You can imagine,
Speaker 1: you know, the larger than at that point gives one
Speaker 1: big earth. But really, rather than that, it takes one
Speaker 1: big dump and then becomes a pupa and spinds a
Speaker 1: cell and then molds into the adult, goes out and
Speaker 1: kills one, or goes out and catches one. But it's
Speaker 1: even more interesting than that. Their life has to be
Speaker 1: quite fascinating. The trans is come in various sizes, you know,
Speaker 1: just like people who have some of that are big
Speaker 1: and some that are little. Males are scrawny and runty.
Speaker 1: They spend all the time chasing females. There's not much
Speaker 1: meat on them, whereas the females are big and fat
Speaker 1: and juicy because you know, they have to lay a
Speaker 1: bunch of eggs and all that so the Transla hawk
Speaker 1: not being particularly fussy. If you find a transla, you
Speaker 1: want to capitalize on whatever translor you find. So a
Speaker 1: little scrawny thing you say, uh, well, you are what
Speaker 1: you eat. So if you're a little scrawny thing, you're
Speaker 1: getting a little scrawny transla hawk. Wath A little scrawny
Speaker 1: female transla hawk is worthless. She can't overcome a big, fat,
Speaker 1: juicy transla. It's not big enough, strong enough. But a male.
Speaker 1: All a male does is transmit sperm to the female.
Speaker 1: He does not be bigger, little, or anything else. So
Speaker 1: then she'll pick a male for her offspring if it's
Speaker 1: a little one and she she can do this, which
Speaker 1: fortunately we can't. And how they do that is a
Speaker 1: male is haploid. It's it's like half the chromosomes, whereas
Speaker 1: the female has is a double chromosome as twice as many.
Speaker 1: So she fertilizes the egger she wants. A female. She
Speaker 1: has a sphincter which lets two or three sperm out
Speaker 1: as the egg is passing down the over duct hold.
Speaker 1: She's able to put her own sperm on her own
Speaker 1: egg that she got from a male before she Yeah,
Speaker 1: she has a storage she mates and holds that sperm,
Speaker 1: and it releases that sperm out onto the egg when
Speaker 1: she wants to, yeah, and set a choice around her body. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So what she does is it's a little scrawny one,
Speaker 1: then she makes a male because they're worthless. They can
Speaker 1: mate with just as well as the big one, more
Speaker 1: or less, and she saves the females for the big,
Speaker 1: juicy ones. Me, it's a good thing we don't have
Speaker 1: that ability yet. I mean, we'd end up like China.
Speaker 1: For a while, I was having a shortage of women
Speaker 1: because they were well disposing, I guess putting nicely, too
Speaker 1: many female babies, and they're getting like ten or more
Speaker 1: boys than girls. And they found out then they weren't
Speaker 1: enough wives for them. So the problem there is you
Speaker 1: have all these males running without mates. They get pretty
Speaker 1: disruptive and started messing up society. So it's a bad
Speaker 1: idea to have in balance of sex is at least
Speaker 1: in our society. Man, I would love the bow if
Speaker 1: you could just know the decision making process, so it
Speaker 1: could be a transla hawks that maybe one nobody has
Speaker 1: actually done the numbers. It might not be a one
Speaker 1: to one ratio. It might be there's a lot more
Speaker 1: squawny trance as this, which would bias you towards too
Speaker 1: many males. Or it could be maybe there's a lot
Speaker 1: of big, fat, juicy ones, but you get a lot.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a long lifespan out of tarantula, and
Speaker 1: so it kind of makes me very interested to know
Speaker 1: after a couple of seasons dealing with tarantula hawks, if
Speaker 1: you're older, tarantulas have developed a little more defense towards
Speaker 1: those that That's the funny thing about the trancellor, which
Speaker 1: doesn't make sense of the human mind. We cannot grasp
Speaker 1: at least I cannot grasp this concept. Here, this huge
Speaker 1: spider often eight times heavier than the Transla hawk wash.
Speaker 1: You're a big whopper. You have these huge, massive fangs
Speaker 1: which are really strong. Have you ever seen a Transla catch,
Speaker 1: say a nice juicy American cockroach. You hear this craunch
Speaker 1: snap and it just shatters the the cockroach, and then
Speaker 1: of course it becomes dinner. And you say, well, this equipment,
Speaker 1: why doesn't it fight back, Why doesn't it try to
Speaker 1: actually kill the trench La hawk wasp? It doesn't, And
Speaker 1: and one or two percent of the cases they will
Speaker 1: try to fight back, and almost all those they lose anyway,
Speaker 1: But you think if you have a one or two
Speaker 1: percent chance of winning, that's better than a zero pert chance.
Speaker 1: What they do is they try to run away, and
Speaker 1: they try to hide, so they'll run out of their burrow.
Speaker 1: The trans kwas will go down in the borough where
Speaker 1: the translas chase, the trench l out because it's hard
Speaker 1: to maneuver in a tight burrow like that. We can
Speaker 1: get your stinger underneath and paralyze it. So some our
Speaker 1: other the trench is a dumb enough not to stay there.
Speaker 1: It would be difficult for the wasp to get it.
Speaker 1: It goes roaring out and it tries to hide someplace,
Speaker 1: and the wasp of course comes out and finds it.
Speaker 1: Because all trenches have a smell of you can detect
Speaker 1: if you're a wasp. I mean, we don't smell them that.
Speaker 1: We're not making a diet of translates, so we don't
Speaker 1: we don't have that that ability, and so the trans
Speaker 1: is very, very passive, and it's always one of these
Speaker 1: things that you know, to my sense of logic, I
Speaker 1: would you know, fight to the end, you know, hope
Speaker 1: the heck that I'm I'm that lucky one that gets
Speaker 1: a bit to think that that's what we would do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know you might be able to get right behind
Speaker 1: the neck. There's a yeah, exactly. I haven't done the tests.
Speaker 1: I probably should have because it didn't really relate to
Speaker 1: what I was doing of seeing if the transer can
Speaker 1: tell the difference between a male and a female transla
Speaker 1: hawk because of course the male can't sting and represents
Speaker 1: no risk, but it does represent a dinner if you
Speaker 1: can get to punch him, which you probably could. I
Speaker 1: haven't done that, just too many things to do in life.
Speaker 1: That's a good project for one of the young budding
Speaker 1: junior high listeners who wants to do a science. That's
Speaker 1: exactly what came to mind was was junior high, like,
Speaker 1: how much of your career has just dropped? And two
Speaker 1: bugs and a container they're like, okay, which one's gonna
Speaker 1: win exactly, and that that could be something you could.
Speaker 1: You could test a few of the trances with males first,
Speaker 1: because if you test them with the female, you may
Speaker 1: not get to repeat it with a male. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then do your X number ten of each or something
Speaker 1: and see see if the transer behaves differently. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I had to add a question for you on bald
Speaker 1: faced hornets. Seems to be something I run into um
Speaker 1: And I could be totally misidentifying these these um they're
Speaker 1: pretty hard to miss identify. They're big in black and white. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh run into them on trails all the time,
Speaker 1: oftentimes on horseback. And then they come out and horses
Speaker 1: don't like them. No, they do not know they do not.
Speaker 1: But we have this big mule and she we tied
Speaker 1: her up at the end of a very long ride,
Speaker 1: and she kicked a nest. It took took me a
Speaker 1: while to figure out was going on. The mule was
Speaker 1: freaking out. I ran over there. Of course, there's hornets everywhere,
Speaker 1: and I'm tighter and ran her over to a different
Speaker 1: treaty to get her away from the nest. And then
Speaker 1: I was watching and trying to remove hornets, and it
Speaker 1: appeared to me that some were burrowing through the hair
Speaker 1: and biting, and others were stinging, biting with their mouth
Speaker 1: their mandibles. They have pretty sharp mandibles. They can they
Speaker 1: can shred a most any insects. Just cut them up
Speaker 1: kind of like meat cleavers. They they're really pretty good
Speaker 1: at that. I haven't actually heard that I was seen that,
Speaker 1: but I would guess if I had to speculate just
Speaker 1: in what was going on, that it could be the
Speaker 1: ones that were biting had already spent most of their
Speaker 1: venom stinging them, so they they It's kind of like
Speaker 1: if you're a soldier and you have a have a
Speaker 1: your rifle and you have a bandet on the end,
Speaker 1: you're gonna try to shoot the enemy first until you
Speaker 1: run out of bullets. They're gonna try to stab him
Speaker 1: with the band at I've seen the movie The Alimo. Yeah, exactly, exactly, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you can imagine the same sort of thing is
Speaker 1: again the bald faced hornet. She has no reproductive ability
Speaker 1: to herself, the individual workers. She's defending mom, the queen,
Speaker 1: and so biting helps. Honey Bees will do that too.
Speaker 1: Once they have stung and lost their stinger in you,
Speaker 1: we know they've lost At that point, they'll come and
Speaker 1: they'll bite on your eyelids or your eyelashes and try
Speaker 1: to pull on them, and they'll try to crawl in
Speaker 1: your ears and bite your ears or try to Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: and they Yes, I had one. I had wondered if
Speaker 1: I was witnessing observing two different some were stinging and
Speaker 1: some were eating. We have another project for junior high kid.
Speaker 1: You know, when you're talking about the way the trans
Speaker 1: a little hawk, you know, paralyze the transl and keeps
Speaker 1: it around for a long time. How many days go by?
Speaker 1: Like like how many days that thing alive? The translate
Speaker 1: was alive for well, there have been a couple of
Speaker 1: cases where people have had them in the lab where
Speaker 1: they either the egg died or the experiment or removed
Speaker 1: the egg, and I lived two or three months. In
Speaker 1: one case, a fella was artificially trying to rehydrate the translate.
Speaker 1: I'm not quite sure I did that. Whether he was
Speaker 1: just injecting water into its mouth or whether it's into
Speaker 1: its body, I don't I don't remember that trying to
Speaker 1: keep it alive. I just try to keep it from
Speaker 1: drying out to see how long it would last. I
Speaker 1: think he got like five or six months something like that,
Speaker 1: hopefully really intention of seeing if it would come back. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the whole idea man, when he made it back,
Speaker 1: if that trans made it back out there where he's from.
Speaker 1: And Pete were like where are you been? Yeah, dude,
Speaker 1: what a story to tell. I'm guilty of doing that
Speaker 1: to a certain extent myself. I was studying the green
Speaker 1: and knolls, you know, the little a little what they
Speaker 1: call chameleons. They're actually in Annoala live in the southeast.
Speaker 1: I was stinging them to see if they're more resistant
Speaker 1: then say mice are, because they're a lizard, which is
Speaker 1: a different physiology and metabolism than than say a mammal.
Speaker 1: And I got a couple of individuals that were completely paralyzed,
Speaker 1: but I could tell they were alive, and it's still
Speaker 1: the gloss on their eyes, and they could move their
Speaker 1: tongue a little bit. And I said, well, is this harvestrant?
Speaker 1: Then I'm gonna wear off eventually. How how irreversible is it?
Speaker 1: And so it went on for weeks and I would
Speaker 1: open its mouth and put water in the mouth to
Speaker 1: keep the lizard hydrated. In this case, it succeeded. It
Speaker 1: could manage to drink it, and slowly, after two or
Speaker 1: three weeks it started getting a little flick flicked on
Speaker 1: its legs, and then a bunch of about a week later,
Speaker 1: it got so it could completely recover. And you know,
Speaker 1: live happily ever after. So so it isn't it is possible,
Speaker 1: except the tranchula doesn't have that good luck to be
Speaker 1: a lizard than a transla. I guess does the transila
Speaker 1: have like a pain index for itself? Like does the translate?
Speaker 1: We like? And then and then while it's while it's
Speaker 1: feel I don't know. It's hard to tell. It's sort
Speaker 1: of like, you know, if we're under anesthesia in a
Speaker 1: coma and we're slowly rotting away, are we feeling pain?
Speaker 1: And you know why I need jerk reaction to be
Speaker 1: since I'm not conscious, I'm not feeling pain. But of course,
Speaker 1: how do you know what the tranch is conscious or not?
Speaker 1: I now this opens up so many like this discussion
Speaker 1: opens up so many ethical questions. We need to get
Speaker 1: electrodes into the primary gangley on the brain of a
Speaker 1: transition and have a normal one where we can see
Speaker 1: whatever the wave patterns like what we have in our brains,
Speaker 1: so we know what a normal tranch is like. And
Speaker 1: then do this same thing and one that's being paralyzed
Speaker 1: and pinched leg or something like that, and see that
Speaker 1: we get a spike and some kind of signal in
Speaker 1: the electrodes in the brain. Have you watched the film
Speaker 1: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I think that's when
Speaker 1: I miss I'm not sure. It sounds like a good
Speaker 1: movie to see though. Oh, it's Phenomenal's about a man
Speaker 1: who's unresponsive. It's about like the inner life of an
Speaker 1: unresponsive man. Yeah. That that's the same guy that made
Speaker 1: Before Nightfalls. Um, what's his name is? He used to
Speaker 1: be like Julian Schnabble. I think, wasn't it good job
Speaker 1: down there? Philis on it? You just do that off
Speaker 1: the top of your top of your head. Um. Have
Speaker 1: you read a book, uh, in the Heart of the Sea. No,
Speaker 1: I guess I'm pretty pathetic in that these are completely
Speaker 1: different realms. But the reason I'm bringing it up is
Speaker 1: the trantula suffering away there or not? Um in the
Speaker 1: Heart of the Sea. It's a it's a book about
Speaker 1: the whale ship Essex. The tragic the whaleship Essex. But
Speaker 1: when they would go out whaling, they would stop at
Speaker 1: the Galapagos and well they would stock up. They just
Speaker 1: flip them over down in the hold of the ship
Speaker 1: on their backs keep alive for months, ma'n. Pretty barbaric, Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: or or they're like a trench lock. There were no
Speaker 1: different than trange locks. Of course, we we pretty much
Speaker 1: assumed the tortoise was conscious at that point because it
Speaker 1: wasn't paralleled just on its back. No, keep him in
Speaker 1: the hold for months like that. But then you know,
Speaker 1: um they got their come uppings and that because that
Speaker 1: ship was sunk by a whale, good for the whale,
Speaker 1: and um, you know, all kinds of cannibalism ensued. There's
Speaker 1: a there's a great line, my favorite line in that book,
Speaker 1: as there's later as someone's you know, meet someone meets
Speaker 1: a guy who was on the Essex and he asked him,
Speaker 1: you know, I can't read the guy the guy's name.
Speaker 1: He says, Oh, did you know Dale Johnson? And the
Speaker 1: man replies, UM, no him, I had him. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: say it wasn't very tasty, but it's a great book.
Speaker 1: The movie, man, do not waste your time. So chemically,
Speaker 1: what's going on? Like what's the most like a yellow jacket.
Speaker 1: I used to have a mild yellow jacket allergy, and
Speaker 1: I was looking why does it hurts damn bad? Like
Speaker 1: like what is it doing to you? And basically what
Speaker 1: it is as kind ins wasp kindons they call him
Speaker 1: or or hornet kindons, and it kind of is kind
Speaker 1: of like Brady kind in, which is a uh hormone
Speaker 1: that affects the heart and it makes extreme pain and
Speaker 1: it also causes stronger contractions and various things that it
Speaker 1: does to the heart. But the thing I focus on
Speaker 1: is that it causes extreme pain. So the wasp just
Speaker 1: hijacked the chemistry. I don't think they. I think they
Speaker 1: independently evolved it. Basically, it just kindons make pine, so
Speaker 1: they have a lot of kinds in their venom and
Speaker 1: that's what causes the pain. It's just a hormone. No,
Speaker 1: it's just a polypeptide in other words, about eleven to
Speaker 1: nineteen amino acids, whereas Brady kind in the original one
Speaker 1: I forget, it's something around ten, maybe off one or two.
Speaker 1: So they're the Brady kind is a hormone in us
Speaker 1: and in mammals, but wast kinds are just the similar structure.
Speaker 1: Get a little bit longer protein, which probably makes it
Speaker 1: more stable, so it hurts longer and lasts longer, and
Speaker 1: that's what causes the pain. But there's things they could
Speaker 1: deliver it to you that it might not hurt probably, yeah,
Speaker 1: like if they stung an insect or something like that,
Speaker 1: because it probably wouldn't hurt that we don't know, you know.
Speaker 1: That's it's one of the things. There's so many questions
Speaker 1: out there and there's so little time to work on
Speaker 1: all of them. But we know in your case kind
Speaker 1: is don't cause allergy. So they have other components in
Speaker 1: their phosphor LIGHTPAS, which is a great, big enzyme, huge
Speaker 1: monstrous enzyme, which is again a protein. What it does
Speaker 1: it breaks up the lipid membrane around cells. Cells have
Speaker 1: a kind of a fatty membrane around them and they're
Speaker 1: mostly liquid and the inside, and it breaks up that membrane.
Speaker 1: So phosphor lightpase helps destroy and do damage. And so
Speaker 1: that's what the main allergy and that that you would
Speaker 1: probably have for your allergic to them. They also have,
Speaker 1: how you want, a dase, which is a a spreading
Speaker 1: agent kind of like a detergent that helps loosen up
Speaker 1: connective tissue and make a path so the the goodies
Speaker 1: of the venom can get into their So it's like
Speaker 1: a lot of complexity. Yeah, And and those are the
Speaker 1: two main ones that are being a wasp or yellow jacket.
Speaker 1: So what what's a like when you get bit by
Speaker 1: a fire ant? Like, chemically, what's happening to you there?
Speaker 1: You know? The fire answer are really the the odd
Speaker 1: ball of all odd alls of the stinging insects. They
Speaker 1: have propuritine alkaloids which are very similar to the the
Speaker 1: water hyacinths or whatever it was called that Socrates had
Speaker 1: to drink to commit suicide, hemlock water hemlock. That's why
Speaker 1: I knew as close something was wrong there and their
Speaker 1: relative to that, and they're neurotoxins, they're cytotoxins, they're they're hemorrhagens. There,
Speaker 1: they do a whole lot of really nasty things to you.
Speaker 1: But it's a strictly simple alkaloid, which is a organic molecule,
Speaker 1: has nitrogen, and it's not a protein, it's not amino acid,
Speaker 1: it's not a fat, it's it's an alkaloid typical of
Speaker 1: what most bitter things are alkaloids, And so it's very
Speaker 1: unusual in that it has these these alkaloids which are
Speaker 1: very effective against prey. And again you ask the question,
Speaker 1: what's going on when you get allergic to them? Because
Speaker 1: alkaloids are not allergenic. They don't cause allergy. What happens
Speaker 1: they have one or two percent again a phosphorlite base
Speaker 1: our old friend and how Rana is just tying it
Speaker 1: a little bit to this, and that's what you get
Speaker 1: allergic to. Why they're in there, who knows, Probably just
Speaker 1: a legacy of their their father genetic history. They came
Speaker 1: from some ancestor which had these components of their venom.
Speaker 1: They inventor evolved a new system, which is the alkaloids.
Speaker 1: So it's probably just the residual leftover, which probably does
Speaker 1: no functional use anymore for the fire in but it
Speaker 1: does of course cause allergy. And so so they're they're
Speaker 1: an unusual situation. It's it's you got into this in
Speaker 1: your book a little bit. And it's a thing that's
Speaker 1: kind of puzzling to me. Is let's say you grab
Speaker 1: like I'm just finally getting over a burn I had
Speaker 1: in my hand. Okay, I want to grab a thing
Speaker 1: on a wood stove, and those hot so burns like
Speaker 1: holy hell, and it's damaging you, like the pain is
Speaker 1: telling you that you are damaging your skin, and you
Speaker 1: pulled away and the skin blisters and scabs. It gets
Speaker 1: infected and it's like lo and behold, like wow, good thing.
Speaker 1: I got the pain signal to alert me that I
Speaker 1: was destroying skin cells. But a lot of the insects things,
Speaker 1: there's it's all bark and no bite, like it's not
Speaker 1: actually doing anything to you. That's basically correct unless you're
Speaker 1: really tiny. So if your a mouse for beast, things
Speaker 1: will kill you. If you're you know, human being. It
Speaker 1: takes about eight to ten per pounds. So if you
Speaker 1: weigh a hundred pounds, your little person takes about a
Speaker 1: thousand stings before it kill you. It eventually would. But
Speaker 1: who gets a thousand stings? You know, not very many people,
Speaker 1: do you know? Most I've ever had is about fifty.
Speaker 1: And that was in a kind of an accident where
Speaker 1: a high fell apart and I didn't wasn't wearing proper equipment,
Speaker 1: and you know, things get out of hand. You got
Speaker 1: start by fifty honey bees. Yeah, and I got a
Speaker 1: little bit of swelling on my hand and that was
Speaker 1: about it. No, none the worse for the damn rates.
Speaker 1: You know, two or three days later when the swelling
Speaker 1: went away. And so it depends on you know, most
Speaker 1: of these venoms are designed for a whole suite of predators,
Speaker 1: anything from a mouse or shrew or more, you know,
Speaker 1: something smaller or small lizard to somebody as big as
Speaker 1: an elephant. And that that's what I was missing in this,
Speaker 1: to be honest with you, is that you know, you
Speaker 1: want to relate everything to humans. And I was sitting
Speaker 1: there going why it would why does a bullet ant
Speaker 1: need venom that lasts for three hours? Like isn't that
Speaker 1: a little greedy? Like what needs three hours to hide
Speaker 1: or three hours to run away? Like that's a little
Speaker 1: bit much. Yeah, the bullet ants venom didn't evolve in
Speaker 1: the presence of humans because we've been here for they
Speaker 1: were fourteen thousands or thirty thousand years, depending on who's
Speaker 1: arguing and fighting over when they came to the New World. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: They're great fun. But that's relatively you know, as the
Speaker 1: Germans saying, organ blick, a blink of the eye, and
Speaker 1: the evolutionary time scale and and so obviously bullet ants,
Speaker 1: which have been unchanged for a hundred million years, have
Speaker 1: evolved their venom a lot earlier than we were there,
Speaker 1: so that it wasn't intended for us. I think it
Speaker 1: was more intended for the monkeys up there in the canopy,
Speaker 1: the lizards, the frogs and the birds. Yeah, it'd be
Speaker 1: nice to know what what considered the bullet ant one
Speaker 1: on the pain index. Well, there was something so bad
Speaker 1: ascid just just brush it off when there's nothing that
Speaker 1: I know of. The closest I ever came to that
Speaker 1: was that I had what I called the toad project,
Speaker 1: which I wrote about in the book. We were just
Speaker 1: what we've had a couple of too many beers and
Speaker 1: the tummies full of a nice Costa Rican dinner, and
Speaker 1: we were kind of relaxing in the evening after a
Speaker 1: hard day's work, and we had this great big bouffo
Speaker 1: marine as the marine coat of the cane toad they
Speaker 1: call him in Australia, and they're about the size of
Speaker 1: a platter, you know, a plate. There's this one sitting
Speaker 1: there wolfing down everything, three inch long grass offers, and
Speaker 1: my assistant tossed a three inch long scorpion there and
Speaker 1: the thing got the scorpion in the mouth and the
Speaker 1: front end and the mouth and the tail was stinging
Speaker 1: in between the eyes went down the hatch. He said,
Speaker 1: we got these things are tough, so then I had
Speaker 1: nine bullet dances. I'm not sure why didn't kill it. No,
Speaker 1: I had these nine bullet ants that I brought over
Speaker 1: from the Caribbean side, because Coast Week has a Pacific
Speaker 1: and the Caribbean side, and the bullet answer only on
Speaker 1: the Caribbean side. So for some reason I brought nine over.
Speaker 1: I don't remember why hadn't used them all when I
Speaker 1: was on the Caribbean side. Anyway, I had these nine
Speaker 1: bullet ants, so I said, well, let's toss one and
Speaker 1: see what the toad does with this. It's obviously naive.
Speaker 1: It's never seen a bullet d and because they don't
Speaker 1: live here and ain't the same with loop loop and
Speaker 1: eyes popped in and out, mouth gate and tongue came
Speaker 1: out and said, well, I get the impression it responded
Speaker 1: to the son. So then I thought, well, the other
Speaker 1: hypothesis is that just does that normally when it eats anything.
Speaker 1: So I threw it something about the same size down
Speaker 1: the hatch. No hiccup ng, no eye popping or anything. Okay,
Speaker 1: that suggests to me that it got stung. So let's
Speaker 1: try another ant. See how dumb this this toad is.
Speaker 1: So we did another aunt who eye popping the same thing.
Speaker 1: We did this through all nine ants. He never never learned,
Speaker 1: but was consuming them exactly and getting stung and suffering. Obviously,
Speaker 1: it didn't seem the like I thought it was too spicy,
Speaker 1: but it didn't seem to stop. And and so the
Speaker 1: the question is, you know, why, why was the thing?
Speaker 1: I assume it still lived through it. I didn't follow
Speaker 1: the toad to see if it but he. And the
Speaker 1: funny thing is we've we've never seen in toad stune
Speaker 1: makes and you know any of the herpetology literature where they,
Speaker 1: you know, catch these things and say what are they eating?
Speaker 1: And they open up and see what's in there. We
Speaker 1: had to do that in tenth grade or whatever. I
Speaker 1: opened one up and found a mouse in it. Man,
Speaker 1: it's kind of the I'm still a little bit trauma
Speaker 1: traumatized by it was a bullfrog with a mouse. I'm
Speaker 1: not surprised now eat anything. Bull Frogs the North American
Speaker 1: equivalent of the cane toad pretty much, and so none
Speaker 1: of the literature ever reported bullet dance in them. So
Speaker 1: I don't know whether that's because the bullet dance aren't
Speaker 1: down on the ground near water, usually where the toads
Speaker 1: are there up in the canopy, and they go from
Speaker 1: their nest at the base of a small tree or
Speaker 1: sapling up to the canopy. They don't forage out on
Speaker 1: the ground. I got stung about one out on the ground. Well,
Speaker 1: I guess they should modify. They don't start out that way.
Speaker 1: They go up and they may go thirty ft over,
Speaker 1: fifty over, then down another one and forage on the
Speaker 1: ground there. And the reason they will do that is
Speaker 1: they're fiercely territorial and colonies will kill each other, so
Speaker 1: they're not randomly distributed. Their evenly distributed because of this
Speaker 1: constant warfare. So they don't want their nests to get
Speaker 1: discovered by a nearby bullet ant nests. So that's why
Speaker 1: they go up and down, and so they get discovered
Speaker 1: someplace further away, but they can't find the nests. The
Speaker 1: nest is safe. But usually kane toads aren't on that
Speaker 1: an area. They're usually you know, around the water. So
Speaker 1: I don't know. Maybe it's so the absence of bullet
Speaker 1: ants and cane toad guts is not necessarily an indicator exactly.
Speaker 1: They don't like them. So we have another junior high
Speaker 1: project for a nice Costa Rican got some busy junior
Speaker 1: high people. Yeah, Costa Rican star students know, if they
Speaker 1: were giving away these ecology degrees, I feel like there'll
Speaker 1: be a lot of folks being ecologists. The thing we
Speaker 1: hated most and we were kids was horse flies. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You'd be out swimming, like on the raft or whatever,
Speaker 1: out in the middle of the lake and you get
Speaker 1: found out by a horse fly and everybody like you'd
Speaker 1: be underwater and everybody group effort trying to kill it,
Speaker 1: and you know you eventually get it killed. Nob we
Speaker 1: could breathe easy and then comes Yeah, like they're like
Speaker 1: a slash and lap feeder exactly. They take a chunk
Speaker 1: of flesh out of you. They open you up and
Speaker 1: suck your blood. You tell me, Yeah, they're kind of
Speaker 1: like a couple of Chinese meat cleavers, hacking away your skin,
Speaker 1: getting it all nice and bloody and messy, and then
Speaker 1: they can drink the blood. Why is that hurts the
Speaker 1: damn bad man? Those things hurt I think because they
Speaker 1: haven't evolved to be a better system. Like a mosquito
Speaker 1: doesn't hurt much at all? Does it? On the sly, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they are necessize, and they're sort of sneaky about that.
Speaker 1: Or kissing bugs, which are one of the things I
Speaker 1: work on, their blood sucking, you know, like a stink
Speaker 1: bug type thing, except they suck blood. They don't hurt
Speaker 1: at all, whereas some of the things that do hurt
Speaker 1: of the sloppy feeders, like the horse flies or the
Speaker 1: deer flights, which are just like smaller varieties of horse
Speaker 1: So that hurts because of what he's doing to you,
Speaker 1: because of what he's applying to you. It's because what
Speaker 1: he's doing to you. Yeah, my minus maybe the application
Speaker 1: of anesthesia exactly. Yeah, So that's what it feels like,
Speaker 1: just to have something to give you a bunch of
Speaker 1: real small cuts all of a sudden. Yeah. And and
Speaker 1: some other ones that hurt. If you go to Africa,
Speaker 1: the tetsi fly had never been personally bitten by one,
Speaker 1: but I'm I'm told that they really hurt too. And
Speaker 1: it's again kind of a sloppy feeder. And the last
Speaker 1: one and they and they, they're the ones that are
Speaker 1: responsible for a certain sleeping sick sleeping sickness which is
Speaker 1: which is gotta be some kind of like bacterial infection
Speaker 1: or whatever. You get from it's a protozome and it's
Speaker 1: related to chaugus disease, or it's it's a protozome, which
Speaker 1: is why it's so hard to treat, because the dog
Speaker 1: on thing is that you carry out just like we are.
Speaker 1: The cells are similar. So if it's a bacteria, they
Speaker 1: have a different biochemistry and we can zap them a
Speaker 1: lot more easily than we can something that's similar to us,
Speaker 1: because if you kill them, well you're sort of killing
Speaker 1: us too, which isn't a good idea. The last one
Speaker 1: that really hurts that I know of, which is very
Speaker 1: familiar to anybody around Montana or the northern areas, or
Speaker 1: what we call stable flies look like a small house flying.
Speaker 1: They bite and take a hunk out of it it. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: we love those in with deer flies and horse flies.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, the stable flies. I would, uh, I would,
Speaker 1: I guess I'm an entomologist. I would look at this
Speaker 1: fly of lands on me if it's a house fly,
Speaker 1: won't be bothered to shoot it off because it's not
Speaker 1: doing any dam So I look at its probositive because
Speaker 1: this floppy mop like thing in the bottom, it's a
Speaker 1: house flying. It's safe if it's pointy, there's the stable
Speaker 1: flying whack. I gotta kill it right away. And that's
Speaker 1: what's so funny though about the horse fly. As on
Speaker 1: some of these stable flies too, I think they can
Speaker 1: really take a beating. I whacked, like you score a
Speaker 1: good hit and it doesn't pay off. You're the legs
Speaker 1: tuck up and it tips over and it falls on
Speaker 1: the river rocks, and then you look at the thing
Speaker 1: right itself. Second, or if you're biting in horses and
Speaker 1: horses have tails that are whipping around, they kind of
Speaker 1: hit you, but they don't really squash you. And so
Speaker 1: what you do is you hit them and then ruby.
Speaker 1: That's right, So glancing thing. Do you think you'll do
Speaker 1: a book someday about how best to squash bugs? Probably?
Speaker 1: Rub Probably not, But I actually do mention that in
Speaker 1: the book that I talk about if you get a
Speaker 1: honey being in the hair, stuck in your hair, I say,
Speaker 1: don't whack at it, because in order to squash the thing,
Speaker 1: you have to hit it so hard you'll give yourself
Speaker 1: a minor concussion or at least the headache. And so
Speaker 1: I say a better thing to do is take a
Speaker 1: comb and try to comb out or if you insist
Speaker 1: that you want to kill it, then it and smash
Speaker 1: it as you're rubbing and turned into juice, which gives
Speaker 1: you a good excuse to have a shampoo shower. Uh,
Speaker 1: I want to ask you explain the word of thinker
Speaker 1: pronounces is correctly apple semantic apple apple sematic. The apple
Speaker 1: sematic is basically the technical term saying that you have
Speaker 1: a warning coloration. The classic example people think of as
Speaker 1: a coral snake. You see that red and white and
Speaker 1: yellow or red and black and yellow reather Red on black,
Speaker 1: You're okay, jack, Yeah, red on yellow you're a dead
Speaker 1: feller exactly. That's it. And and because most of you
Speaker 1: look at it, you like, watch out exactly, you say,
Speaker 1: you look at this. And there's been some tests that
Speaker 1: have been done with naive predators of snakes that have
Speaker 1: never seen a coral snake or any dangerous thing, and
Speaker 1: to give them saying a gray snake or a black
Speaker 1: snake or some other color green snake, and then you
Speaker 1: give the pattern that's similar to the the coral snake,
Speaker 1: and they kind of look back and they have this innate,
Speaker 1: genetically programmed apprehension of this appop sematic warning coloration, and
Speaker 1: I think that relates to anything that's warning. Colors are
Speaker 1: basically red, black, yellow, and orange, and those there's one
Speaker 1: exception for color blind animals. The skunk is a warning
Speaker 1: appos sematic because there's jet black and brilliant white. See
Speaker 1: white and black. That's as contrasting as you can get.
Speaker 1: Most people know not to pounce on a snake for you,
Speaker 1: not a snake, Hey, skunk for dinner. Yeah. I imagine
Speaker 1: for that system to work, appop sematic, right, I'm saying
Speaker 1: it right, Yeah, that's right. For that system the work,
Speaker 1: like there has to be um, a bite and bark exactly.
Speaker 1: But there's probably some species i'm guessing exploited where they
Speaker 1: they resemble the trouble things but don't have the bite exactly.
Speaker 1: That's the king snake example. King snake can't do anything
Speaker 1: to really hurt you. Perfectly tasty and yummy, but you
Speaker 1: don't want to take the chance because you don't know
Speaker 1: whether he's a cheater or the real thing. We see
Speaker 1: the same thing with you know, a lot of other
Speaker 1: monarch butterflies have what's called the viceroy, which was originally
Speaker 1: thought to be a cheap mimic. It looked just like
Speaker 1: it and it wasn't toxic. It turns out there mildly toxic.
Speaker 1: So it's a scale from being total cheat to total
Speaker 1: true truth, with a gradation of things in between them.
Speaker 1: But I think there's some innate apprehension of bright things, like,
Speaker 1: for example, in the southeast of the US, they have
Speaker 1: these things called the cow killer velvet and black and
Speaker 1: black and red. You almost never hear of anybody who's
Speaker 1: ever been stung by one. And I say, you know,
Speaker 1: juniors out there are salies out there, two year old
Speaker 1: kids playing in the backyard, cute little fuzzy was he
Speaker 1: let's pick it up? You think that would happen all
Speaker 1: the time, and you'd know if they picked him up,
Speaker 1: they come squawking in Mama or Dada, whoever is there,
Speaker 1: would would you know, be cuddling them and see this
Speaker 1: thing running around. It's quite bright, so you you'd know
Speaker 1: if there's a case of that happening. Yeah, we've never
Speaker 1: heard of any of those, with one exception, Famous EO.
Speaker 1: Wilson reported in a story when he was about three
Speaker 1: that he picked one up. But then he's an in
Speaker 1: them alogist like me, so you have to make exception
Speaker 1: for people like us, but most you know, normal people. E. O. Wilson,
Speaker 1: the guy that popularized the term biophelia right exactly, an island, biogeography,
Speaker 1: and about a dozen other terms. Pretty amazing guy. He
Speaker 1: was an entomologist. Yeah, he's basically an aunt man. Really, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's his true love. But he's an overall general biologists.
Speaker 1: You name it, its living and it's animal. He's pretty
Speaker 1: good at it. But yeah, he's the only one I've
Speaker 1: ever heard of who ever got stung as as a youngster.
Speaker 1: And of course once you get older, parents you don't
Speaker 1: mess with that thing. So now they're communicating, But as
Speaker 1: a two or three year old, you're not being told,
Speaker 1: oh that that red and black thing, don't don't mess
Speaker 1: with that. So you're completely naive, yet you don't pick
Speaker 1: them up. And and that's the interesting question. I think
Speaker 1: we have this innate fear of it. You see similar
Speaker 1: sorts of things and people having an innate fear of
Speaker 1: snakes because we evolved in Africa, and in Africa, almost
Speaker 1: every snake there are at least a good chunk of them.
Speaker 1: Bite you and you're dead. So you learn if it's
Speaker 1: snake or snake, like, don't take a chance, it isn't
Speaker 1: worth it. Avoid the thing. And there's extreme phobia of
Speaker 1: people which persists even to people who are nowhere near
Speaker 1: where there's dangerous snakes, like northern Europeans have no dangerous
Speaker 1: snakes anymore. People's phobia snakes or northern parts of China
Speaker 1: and that sort of thing. Asia or there are no Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's why always would be like a really interesting if
Speaker 1: you could time machine back and watch the first human
Speaker 1: um after coming from Asia across Burringia, and they've been
Speaker 1: generations and generations removed from snakes because they've been in
Speaker 1: the Arctic um that all of a sudden someone penetrates
Speaker 1: down into the mid continent and there's a rattlesnake. Did
Speaker 1: they just like go to grab it or did they
Speaker 1: have that thing like, I'm generations removed from snakes, thousands
Speaker 1: of years removed from snakes, but there's no way I'm
Speaker 1: touching that thing that that would be my feeling. Is
Speaker 1: that what had happened? But they carried that. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: need a time machine to do that, the same thing
Speaker 1: all kinds man. Yeah, when I get a time machine,
Speaker 1: get into the movie, but do that first and then
Speaker 1: I got some other stuff on to take care of.
Speaker 1: And we have the same phobia of spiders, you know,
Speaker 1: it's a rachnophobia technical term for people are dreadfully petrified
Speaker 1: of spiders in general, translers in particular, which is kind
Speaker 1: of interesting because tranchers never bite people and they don't
Speaker 1: hurt if they even if they did, that's our trend.
Speaker 1: But you're definitely afraid of them, exactly I was. I
Speaker 1: didn't know until recently how harmless they were. I just
Speaker 1: assumed there must be something bad about them. I mean,
Speaker 1: look at them, you know. I mean I I do
Speaker 1: a lot of classroom displays where I hold of transfer
Speaker 1: taking up the classroom with third or fourth graders. And
Speaker 1: the funny thing is the girls always come up first
Speaker 1: and hold their hands out. The boys, the big brave boys,
Speaker 1: are sitting in the back, you know, watching and you know,
Speaker 1: acting tough and brave. About the fifth time a girl
Speaker 1: holds the tranch and the boys are realizing they're embarrassed
Speaker 1: and they got to show that they're boys, and they
Speaker 1: come up and start holding the transulum. But it's not
Speaker 1: just me. I've had other people report the same sort
Speaker 1: of thing. So I don't. I don't know what that
Speaker 1: tells us about it, but it makes an interesting story. No,
Speaker 1: it is interesting to understand, like biologically what could have
Speaker 1: happened there? I got, I got one last question for you.
Speaker 1: They're not gonna then see if colnt uh Corean or
Speaker 1: Phil have anything for you, and then I'm gonna plug
Speaker 1: your book. But can you talk about the drink the
Speaker 1: Spanish fly you mentioned in your book? It's an afergy,
Speaker 1: it's an afrodisiac, right, well, sort of? What is it?
Speaker 1: Spanish fly? Is? Can there? Then? Which is a again
Speaker 1: one of these small molecules in chemistry. And what it
Speaker 1: does is it it rots away tissue of a body.
Speaker 1: It's it kills a lot of horses. It's particularly bad
Speaker 1: in Oklahoma and areas like that, where it gets into alfalfa, blister, beetles.
Speaker 1: They bail it up in the hay. Horse eats as
Speaker 1: few as a dozen a few of these things. The
Speaker 1: stomach kind of rots away and you lose your horse.
Speaker 1: Horrible pain. Back up, So a guy bails up a
Speaker 1: beetle inadvertently exactly, the horse eats the hay with the beetle,
Speaker 1: The dried up beetle, the dead beetle. Yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: like it's just in its carcass and then he just
Speaker 1: inadvertently eats some of these and that can be fatal
Speaker 1: exactly from a toxin. It's in the beetle, exactly. In
Speaker 1: the Spanish fly was one of these things that we
Speaker 1: presume was in Europe, presumably in Spain, I'm not sure
Speaker 1: where the came. Yeah, that sounds reasonable. And the guys
Speaker 1: would put it in and the drinks of the food
Speaker 1: of the gals and they'd grind up a small part
Speaker 1: of this beetle. What it's supposed to do is it's
Speaker 1: a general irritant, so it irritates everything, including your your
Speaker 1: genital system, so you want to scratch, and you aware
Speaker 1: of it, and it's painful and whatever. If you get
Speaker 1: the right dose, the story goes that, then then you'll
Speaker 1: become much more susceptible to being um sexually appreciated by
Speaker 1: whoever put this. I buy that totally. I'm not sure
Speaker 1: that's all wives tale or not, but that's that's sort
Speaker 1: of the folk. That's what that comes from. And in
Speaker 1: that amount doesn't rock the inside of human no, they well,
Speaker 1: if they get it wrong, then it's bad news. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're like, hey, maybe check it out. Like, I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna put so many of these in here that it
Speaker 1: rots your insides out and kills you. I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: put a little touch in and this is gonna put
Speaker 1: you in the mood. It's kind of like a like
Speaker 1: all night to puffer fish. You have to you have
Speaker 1: to eat just enough of that that's really tasty, not
Speaker 1: enough to kill you. So that's what that comes from.
Speaker 1: That's what I'm told. And don't call me the world expert,
Speaker 1: but that's what the general you know, rumor has is
Speaker 1: where it came from. Its being called Spanish fly. Of
Speaker 1: course it's not a fly at all to beetle, but technicalities,
Speaker 1: you know. I said that was my last question. I
Speaker 1: have one more question. You run around the snow in
Speaker 1: uh sandals exactly? Now? Okay? Uh? We have we we
Speaker 1: have just like you know, among our circle here, we
Speaker 1: have an ongoing debate about whether it's responsible to wear
Speaker 1: sandals or flip flops. Because if there's like a like
Speaker 1: my buddy Rownie likes to point outlets da, there's a
Speaker 1: volcano and there's lava everywhere, are you prepared to defend
Speaker 1: your family? So he doesn't like. Not only is he
Speaker 1: not like sandals, he doesn't like people who wear sandals. Um,
Speaker 1: but here you are and there's twelve inches of snow
Speaker 1: on the ground, and it's snowing, and you show upen sandals.
Speaker 1: Can you share with us your what you what went
Speaker 1: through your head when you dressed well? I check the
Speaker 1: weather report first. If it gets below ten degrees, I
Speaker 1: won't wear sandals off. Yeah, ten or fifteen degrees. And
Speaker 1: a nice thing about sandals is they're very comfortable. I
Speaker 1: never get blisters with them. I do everything. I get
Speaker 1: good sandals. Flip flops don't cut the mustard in my mind.
Speaker 1: You got chockos on? Yeah, I get chocos there. You know,
Speaker 1: they're sort of the best that I can find, other
Speaker 1: than South Africa makes rockies, which don't import here. They're
Speaker 1: they're pretty good too. And today it's thirty four degrees
Speaker 1: with six inches of snow. The heat way freshne. My
Speaker 1: wife complains that I have no feeling in my feet.
Speaker 1: But we did a test the other day and we
Speaker 1: had one of these infrared guns that tells you, you know,
Speaker 1: the temperature of what you're pointing out. Her hands were
Speaker 1: hot like eighty six degrees or something like that. In
Speaker 1: my hands were like sixty one or sixty two degrees.
Speaker 1: I said, I bet my feet are warmer. So she
Speaker 1: shot my feet and they were like three degrees warmer.
Speaker 1: Do you have like a tolerance to increased tolerance to
Speaker 1: pain now that you've been stunt? I don't think so.
Speaker 1: The one case, you know, I get asked this, how
Speaker 1: do you know that you're just not nerve dead and
Speaker 1: you no longer respond to these So the first adventure
Speaker 1: that I had in in in Australia, I was with
Speaker 1: a group of social insect people and other AUNT people
Speaker 1: watch people and be people. They're fair game is guinea pigs.
Speaker 1: They they're not edgible. They should know what they're doing
Speaker 1: and if they don't, don't blame me. I'm not exploiting
Speaker 1: somebody who's completely naive and ignorant. That's my justification. So
Speaker 1: then I we got that out of the way. What
Speaker 1: the experiment was. I had been stung by them when
Speaker 1: I was Oh, it's sharp and it's clean, and it's
Speaker 1: chemical like to me, not burning or anything, but it's
Speaker 1: less than a honeybe it's you know, like one and
Speaker 1: a half something like that, which kind of surprised me.
Speaker 1: I had an expectation from the literature this would be
Speaker 1: like a three or really really hurt a whole lot.
Speaker 1: So I thought, well, maybe I'm just nerve dead. We
Speaker 1: can test this. I was on this bus load we
Speaker 1: were in Kangaroo Island, which is burned up last week,
Speaker 1: and the bus driver said, we see a bull ant
Speaker 1: colony and alongside of her, anyone want to stop? Yes.
Speaker 1: The whole bus just screamed, so it all got out.
Speaker 1: I being sneaky and knowing what I'm doing, I had
Speaker 1: this jar and I was picking up an one flip
Speaker 1: flip into the jar. It was about a tenth of
Speaker 1: a second for reach, and I picked him and flipped
Speaker 1: into the jar. They didn't notice that speed. These things
Speaker 1: are very fast. I was just faster, and so someone
Speaker 1: would They try to catch them with tweezers, and they
Speaker 1: can't catch them. They're too big and too agile, and
Speaker 1: they can't suck him up with aspirators. And there trying
Speaker 1: trying to trap them in the short time we had,
Speaker 1: and they were getting frustrated. So then they do like
Speaker 1: they saw, Oh Schmidt, he's the expert, and all that
Speaker 1: sort of stuff. He's just picking them up. So they
Speaker 1: picked him and get stung. And I would kind of
Speaker 1: saunter over and say, how how does this sting affect you?
Speaker 1: Is it like more than a honeybe lesson honeybe about
Speaker 1: about like a honeybee or whatever? I managed to get
Speaker 1: five of these people that I sort of sneakily got
Speaker 1: is my volunteer controls on my own nerve deadness, if
Speaker 1: that's a word. And they all said, well, surprising, it
Speaker 1: hurts less than a honeybee, a little bit less. All
Speaker 1: five of them agreed basically what I said, So I said,
Speaker 1: ha ha, Schmidt is not nerve dead You know what
Speaker 1: I like about what you're saying, though, is you're you're
Speaker 1: pointing out um as a way to measure pain. You're
Speaker 1: not applying an absolute number to it. It's like it's
Speaker 1: a relative thing. Yeah, Like someone might be someone might
Speaker 1: um think that a hunting bee is like crippling and
Speaker 1: they can't do anything for an hour after getting it,
Speaker 1: but they could still tell you that that's not as bad.
Speaker 1: Or someone might be a honeybe they don't even think
Speaker 1: about it, but they could still relatively tell you, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the one. One case where I have a little bit
Speaker 1: of trouble with that is there's beekeepers and there's people
Speaker 1: who collect a lot of them actually around the Montana area,
Speaker 1: who collect yellow jackets for collecting the venom for allergy shots.
Speaker 1: Oh and so if you make your profession as a beekeeper,
Speaker 1: you asked them, you've ever gotten stung by a yellow Yeah,
Speaker 1: those daring things, they really hurt. They heard a lot
Speaker 1: more than a honeybee. You go, well, and then you
Speaker 1: ask the yellow jacket people who collect them for a living,
Speaker 1: and they say, what about a honey v versus your
Speaker 1: yellow jack That was bloody honey bees? They really really
Speaker 1: like they've lost some of their Yeah, I think it's
Speaker 1: a bit psychological psycho. They both hurd the same. I
Speaker 1: don't like either one of them. You guys got any
Speaker 1: more questions? I kind of thought you were gonna applaud
Speaker 1: Dr Schmidt's um. You know, he wasn't willing to take
Speaker 1: advantage of naive people. And I've kind of heard you
Speaker 1: say that in in certain circles where you're like hiking
Speaker 1: a little too fast, And he said, all those folks
Speaker 1: knew what they were getting into. Oh yeah, which different
Speaker 1: views on it. Yeah, yeah that works. Uh No, I
Speaker 1: I like the book and uh I really do enjoy
Speaker 1: your adventures also. And and something you said at the
Speaker 1: very beginning of the podcast, when Steve said he was
Speaker 1: bit by bullet Anton, he said, oh you're lucky. Um
Speaker 1: do you feel that way like you do? You appreciate
Speaker 1: your experience. I'm glad to happen. Yeah, yeah, I think
Speaker 1: one of the things is acute pain. When you have this,
Speaker 1: you obviously don't like and you wish you didn't have it.
Speaker 1: But then did you get to regale this story time
Speaker 1: and time again, particularly to your children and your grandchildren?
Speaker 1: You know, Graham's can't tell me a story about your child,
Speaker 1: and you can tell them about the bullet an. The
Speaker 1: kids will be enraptured with this seeing later on in life,
Speaker 1: you know, good joy out of this. So I say,
Speaker 1: that's why you're lucky. If you never had this, you
Speaker 1: have one fewer stories to tell. And maybe that's just me,
Speaker 1: you know what, what to me is interesting and what
Speaker 1: maybe to other people isn't. But yeah, I I certainly
Speaker 1: didn't like it when I got stung by it, but
Speaker 1: well I got a book out of it, so um,
Speaker 1: not to make this too much longer. But for people
Speaker 1: who will die from a beasting, what happens there is it?
Speaker 1: Is it that it's the kind in is it that
Speaker 1: bees have kind in and in some susceptible people that
Speaker 1: immediately will affect their heart or am I totally off
Speaker 1: base there? While you're you're close. What happens is these
Speaker 1: these have melatant, which is another one of these small peptides,
Speaker 1: in other words, twenty six or so amino acids. And
Speaker 1: what they do is they cause extreme pain. And that's
Speaker 1: what causes the hurt. But that's not what we would
Speaker 1: kill you an allergic reaction and allergic reactions our old
Speaker 1: friend phosphol lippase a or how you wanted, is it's
Speaker 1: usual phosphol lippase a. What it does is it causes
Speaker 1: a massive release of masts cells or basulfills. These are
Speaker 1: specialized cells in our body that release endorphins not endorphins, histamine,
Speaker 1: slow reacting substance, and replaxus which are now called luco
Speaker 1: tryins us um a whole bunch of other enzymes and things.
Speaker 1: What they do is they cause a dramatic lowering of
Speaker 1: blood pressure and people if they get enough of this reaction,
Speaker 1: they can actually die of asphyxia. With two ways, they
Speaker 1: cause it's swelling in your throat and you can die asphyxia,
Speaker 1: or they can cause cardiac you know, insufficiency where you
Speaker 1: can actually you know, have brain dead because you're not
Speaker 1: getting enough enough oxygen to your brain. In the third
Speaker 1: way they can do it is actually cause the heart
Speaker 1: attack itself. And so it's it's it's our body killing us,
Speaker 1: not the venom. I was just gonna say, it's our
Speaker 1: own processes, yeagers triggers your body to attack itself exactly.
Speaker 1: And of course the bees like, oh, I didn't mean that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And you say, why do why do we have Why
Speaker 1: do we have this dumb immunogloby in an e system
Speaker 1: that causes us? The reason is that's our our system
Speaker 1: that protects us against macro parasites, worms and big pathogens
Speaker 1: and things of that sort. And if you notice people
Speaker 1: in places that are very poor hygd and have a
Speaker 1: lot a lot worse parasite problems usually don't have allergies
Speaker 1: because their idea is busy fighting off the worms and
Speaker 1: these sorts of things. Interesting, we're just too clean. We
Speaker 1: have the hygienic theory that came out of Japan. Words.
Speaker 1: We have all these immunizations of childhood disease in our
Speaker 1: immune system just gets lazy and that's what causes you know,
Speaker 1: arthritis and mortivele sclerosis and you know all these autoimmune disease.
Speaker 1: None then it acts out. Yeah, just choose off our
Speaker 1: own body because we don't give it something useful too
Speaker 1: to a to work on. Yeah, all right. The name
Speaker 1: of the book again, The Sting of the Wild by
Speaker 1: Justin O. Schmidt, creator of, among many other things, the
Speaker 1: Schmidt Pain Index, which you next time you get stung
Speaker 1: by something, you look it up. The subtitle of the book,
Speaker 1: so it's The Sting of the Wild, the story of
Speaker 1: the Man who got stung for science and uh, Mr Schmidt,
Speaker 1: Dr Schmidt, thank you very much for joining us. It's
Speaker 1: in my place here and uh and thank you for
Speaker 1: the beautiful song.