Entomologist Answers Insect Questions

On my arm right now is a cave roach.

Now on my hair.

One second.

I'm entomologist Jessica Ware

from the American Museum of Natural History.

Let's answer your questions from the internet.

This is Bug Support.

[upbeat music]

We have a question from Reddit about praying mantises.

Why do praying mantis behead their partners after sex?

So not all praying mantises

actually eat their partners after sex,

but many of them do,

because it's a good strategy for the female.

So females are about to lay an egg case

and that takes a lot of energy.

Eating your mate is a really great food source,

'cause it's right there,

it's readily available,

you've just gotten, hey,

you've just gotten the sperm

that you need to fertilize your eggs.

It's the ultimate nuptial gift

that the male gives her.

And it benefits him

because if the egg case is well provisioned,

then the chances are good

that it will hatch,

the babies will survive to adulthood,

and then his genes will be passed on

to the next generation.

This mantis, you can see,

is kind of camouflaged.

So mantises mimic lots of different things.

What this mantis is trying to look like is lichen.

Some mantis look like leaves,

some look like flowers,

like the orchid mantis,

and some look like sticks.

We have a question from the AskScience subreddit.

What is the internal anatomy of a bug like?

Mostly just goo,

they don't have a circulatory system.

They do have nerves

that kind of flow throughout them,

as well as fat bodies.

But the external part of the insect

is very interesting.

That's made up of their exoskeleton.

They have, like all hexapods,

three pairs of legs,

they have a head, a thorax and an abdomen.

For the winged insects,

then in their thorax,

which is divided up into three segments,

the last two segments have pairs of wings.

So there's two pairs of wings

for a total of four.

posrev25 asks, Would cockroaches survive a nuclear war?

Probably not, the heat and radiation

ultimately would be so much that they would die.

But we do know that cockroaches

can withstand a lot of radiation,

but also, they can live a really long time without eating.

A lot of cockroaches have these organs

in their body called mycetecites.

It allows them to store the food

that they eat as nitrogen.

And then during times of environmental stress

or when they don't have food available,

they basically re-metabolize

the food that's in the mycetecites.

They can just eat from what is already within them,

and then instead of excreting,

they actually just restore the contents

back in the mycetecites.

So there are some species of cockroaches

that actually don't have excretion whatsoever.

That leads to this kind of myth

that they'd be around even after a nuclear war.

They probably would do better than you and I would do,

that's for sure.

This is Gromphadorhina,

a type of hissing cockroach. [cockroach hissing]

Ooh, they're sometimes called that

because if you were to go to Madagascar

and find one of these on a tree,

if you were to kind of tap them,

their response would be

to kind of push air out of their spiracles,

or their breathing apparatus.

So it's called a hissing cockroach.

And they make a very good pet.

You don't have to feed them very much,

and they're pretty quiet.

@InkIV asks, Do you think the 'Bug's Life' movie

is accurate to what a bug's life is really like?

'Cause I feel like it is.

The Bug's Life movie portrays locusts as jerks.

Sometimes they like to eat

the same food that we like to eat,

and so we kind of villainize them.

But honestly, like Bug's Life movie

is not the movie that I would wanna pick apart.

I would wanna pick apart the movie Antz.

You know, I have strong feelings for you.

That would not happen

because the queen releases a perfume,

a pheromone is what we call it.

That is basically changing the behavior of the colony

so that the workers do their jobs

and the soldiers do their jobs,

but it also kind of suppresses any reproductive urges

and suppresses the development of the genitals.

In the Antz movie,

the Woody Allen and Sylvester Stallone characters

are working as workers in this ant colony.

Anytime you see bees or ants,

all of the individuals

that you're usually seeing are female.

The workers and the soldiers in the colony are sisters.

TeddyStayGassin asks,

I asked Google, 'What's the most dangerous animal?'

[bleep] why Google said a mosquito.

See, I knew I wasn't tripping

when people made fun of me

of how terrified I was.

Actually, mosquitoes have killed more people

than any other animal.

They are the deadliest animal on the planet,

not because mosquitoes themselves are deadly,

but they vector deadly diseases.

So diseases like malaria,

yellow fever, Chikungunya, dengue fever,

West Nile virus, Eastern Equine Encephalitis, and so on.

They all kind of hijacked

the mosquitoes' natural feeding system

and then get transported into humans,

and they can cause severe illness or death.

Males don't drink blood,

males they drink flower nectar.

But females have been selected

to also give an injection

into whatever they're biting,

a pain reliever and anticoagulant

to try and prevent themselves from being squashed.

When the anticoagulant

and the pain reliever are injected,

that's when the pathogen

actually goes into your body.

jonzalez-cs asks, Where do butterflies

get their pigmentation and wing patterns from?

Why do they have different wing patterns?

Butterflies and moths have scales

that coat their wings,

and the scales themselves can have pigment.

But there also can be kind of bumps and ridges

on the surface,

that when light bounces off of it,

it gets perceived as color.

Their whole body could be colored

or it could just be patterns on their wings.

But then there are also color patterns

that are related to kind of hiding in plain sight,

which we call camouflage.

And sometimes butterflies

actually try and mimic each other.

Take for example, a monarch butterfly.

Monarchs are kind of neat

because they have aposematic or warning coloration,

and it communicates something to birds

that if you eat me,

you'll probably barf.

They have these distasteful compounds

that they sequester in their body.

And there are other types of butterflies

that have kind of mimicked

the appearance of a monarch butterfly,

so that way they could get the same type of protection.

One example of this is the viceroy.

It looks a lot like a monarch.

The difference is that it actually has

this additional dark-patterned vein

that goes down in the hind wing.

The color patterns of butterflies and moths,

sometimes it's camouflage,

sometimes it's mimicry,

sometimes it's males communicating with females.

@ReinaDeLaIsla asks,

Are the scarab beetles from 'The Mummy' actually a thing?

[victim screaming] Luckily no,

scarabs mostly are consuming poop.

They make balls of dung,

they lay their eggs on it,

their larvae hatch and eat poop.

They don't eat humans.

fox-mcleod asks, How do dragonflies and flies

coordinate flight while mating?

I wouldn't necessarily say it's super coordinated.

Males clasp the female behind the back of her head

with the tip of their abdomen,

which is called the claspers.

The female then brings her abdomen up

to the male's second penis,

because they have two penises.

It takes a really long time for them to mate,

sometimes like 20 minutes.

Females can mate multiple times.

She has two sperm storage organs,

short-term storage and long-term storage.

We don't know how she chooses,

which sperm to put in which one.

But then the males wanna ensure paternity,

so they use their secondary penis

to kind of like scrape out the previous male's sperm.

You can see that the male

has like kind of like a little bump

near the base of its abdomen,

and that bump is this secondary penis.

And it kind of goes out like that

and then the sperm is transferred to the female.

And then they fly together

in this kind of copulatory wheel, as we call it,

which looks like a heart.

It's kind of like an aerodynamic feat

that males are able to do this.

If you wanna catch a dragonfly,

catching mating dragonflies

[laughing] are the easiest ones to catch.

Sometimes the male will stay attached to the female,

still holding on to the back of her head

while she lays her eggs in the water.

So they're not the most coordinated, I would say,

but somehow they manage.

@sagetenayaa asks, So do mosquitoes

have a specific blood type that they can have,

or does it not matter?

How many mosquitoes carry HIV?

Mosquitoes don't vector HIV.

It's not something to be concerned about.

And they don't themselves have a certain blood type.

They have something called hemolymph

and it just kind of flows in their open smushy body.

Often people wonder,

do they prefer to have a certain kind of blood?

Like is O blood type the best type of blood?

Some people tell me, Oh, I have A blood type,

I get eaten all the time.

No, it doesn't matter whether you have O, A or B,

you will be equally likely to be bitten by a mosquito.

Some people are very allergic

to that kind of cocktail

that the mosquito gives you.

So they end up with really big bumps

or really itchy bumps,

almost like welts.

Often people will say,

Well, I never get bit by mosquitoes.

You're probably all being bitten by mosquitoes,

it's just that some of you are reacting more than others.

From the biology subreddit,

How closely are bugs related to crustaceans?

Is a lobster basically an ocean cockroach

or is it completely different?

If you looked at a phylogeny,

or a tree of life,

of the group of animals called arthropods,

you would see the crustaceans,

things like lobsters,

and the hexapods, things like insects,

which is the group to which cockroaches belong.

So lobsters are very related to cockroaches.

You could call them an ocean cockroach,

but you could also call them an ocean dragonfly,

an ocean true bug,

an ocean spotted lantern fly.

So @hawtsaucemami asks,

Why is everyone afraid of tarantulas?

Tarantulas are not the bad guys.

There's actually no recorded deaths from tarantulas.

All tarantulas have venom,

but the venom usually is not anything

that's gonna kill a human.

They do sometimes eat big things.

Sometimes people have seen them eat lizards,

or snakes, or birds even.

But they're not out to get us,

they're not out to harm humans in any way.

They're slow-moving, ancient arachnids.

Tarantulas can be really colorful.

There are blue ones, there are pink ones,

there are ones that have like kind of this metallic sheen.

These are perhaps the fuzziest of the arachnids.

They have hairs on their bum

called urticating hairs,

which are barbed hairs

that they can kind of kick off with their feet

and they can be irritating,

and that's one of their methods of defense.

You can eat tarantulas.

There are groups of people

that actually roast them over fire,

and then you break the legs off

like you would crabs,

and then you suck the contents out.

The two structures that are kind of facing forward

are her fangs, or her chelicerae.

She's kicked some hairs

off of her [laughing] butt already.

She's kinda got a naked bum.

And their toes are very cute.

So they're not the bad guys.

@franman56 asks,

Why the F do crickets chirp?

Can they hear themselves?

So male crickets chirp

as part of a communication to females.

[cricket chirping]

One thing they're communicating

is that they have probably a lot of energy.

They often do it during the hottest time of day.

That probably also signals to the female

that you're a pretty healthy male.

They're also species specific.

So it's telling the female,

I'm the same species as you,

so I might be someone that you wanna mate with.

@Scrumtrelescentness asks,

How do bug-repellent sprays work?

They work by basically just jamming

the chemical sensory apparatus of the mosquito.

So mosquitoes have antennae

and they have these little chemical sensilla,

and odor molecules kind of bind to the sensilla,

send an electrical impulse to the brain.

Usually the scent that they're picking up on

is our carbon dioxide or lactic acids.

But if you spray DEET,

it actually binds to the chemical sensilla

and it actually blocks the sense of smell.

They'll still land on you and feed on you,

but it just makes it harder

for them to sense where you are.

@Cokeman asks, How do you have a stare down

with an insect with compound eyes?

Which lens am I supposed to look at?

Insect compound eyes are made up

of what we call ommatidia or lenses.

Dragonflies have tens of thousands of ommatidia.

Light basically passes through it,

gets kind of bounced around

and ultimately sends a signal

to their cluster of ganglia

that we call their brain.

Insects also have light-sensing organs,

which are called ocelli.

So I suppose if you wanted to stare down an insect,

you could also stare at their ocelli.

But they probably won't see you.

Their ocelli just tells light and dark.

So dragonfly eyes,

because their ommatidia

are kind of arranged in the front of their eye

all the way around to the back of their head,

they're actually able to see a pretty wide arc around them.

Their eyes are not totally attached to their body.

They have these hooks in the back of their neck,

it's called the head-arrester system.

When they're flying, the hooks are engaged

and their head is very stable,

but when they land, the hooks detach

and then they can kind of look around

and move their head.

They're able to see a lot of different colors,

which makes sense

'cause dragonflies are very colorful

and they use color for communication.

They're really using their eyes

for their vision to catch their food.

They have a 98% success rate,

so they're really, really effective predators.

crestonfunk wants to know,

How much do insects know?

What do we know about bug consciousness?

I would say we don't know very much about bug consciousness.

For a long time, people thought

bugs didn't have consciousness

and that perhaps insects were just hardwired

to do certain behaviors over and over again

until they died.

Now we know that insects can make decisions.

We know that they can learn.

So there was a study by Lars Chittka.

They gave bees a series of little balls

they could play with.

There was no reward or treat

that they got for doing so,

but they seemed to engage in this behavior,

and the researchers interpreted that as play.

And if they do that,

maybe insects have consciousness.

We often, especially in TV and movies,

talk about a collective consciousness or a hive mind.

In the movie Starship Troopers, they had that.

Things like ants moving as a group

where the bodies of the ants

are kind of attached to each other.

When people saw behaviors like that,

they thought, Oh, maybe these insects are acting

with one collective mind,

but really they're just communicating by these chemical cues

that they can pick up from each other.

Is that a way that you could have a hive mind?

Maybe.

Poem170 asks, Are scorpions insects?

No, they're not insects,

they're arachnids.

They have these palpi that they use to grasp their prey,

and then they have this telson with a sting,

which has a cocktail of chemicals, neurotoxins.

Depending on the size of the prey,

they will have a different chemical cocktail that they use.

They kind of swing this forward,

sting or immobilize their prey.

Then they bring it towards their mouth parts.

And in their mouth parts,

they have chelicerae, or fangs.

They would inject something that would liquefy their food,

and then they would drink it through the straws

that are their mouth parts.

Let me show you a different type of arachnid,

it is called a tailless whip scorpion.

And it's called a whip scorpion

because it has really long legs,

the ends of which are [laughing] kind of like little whips.

And they kind of bring food towards their mouth

that are then caught with their jaws.

See, look, the legs are like real whips.

Just. [imitating whipping]

There are these long spines that you can see,

and they use that to kind of puncture their prey items

as they're bringing them to towards their mouth parts.

They're really nothing to be scared of, [laughing]

even though they sometimes move in a way

that can be startling.

She got me pretty good.

When I tried to pull her out,

they have these little spines on their legs.

[Production] Like, are you bleeding?

No, I'm good, I'm good. [production laughing]

But she got me, she got me pretty good.

[hands smacking] [production faintly speaking]

forthesakeofusall asks,

How do certain insects, like the leaf bug,

look like, well, a leaf?

Well, over long periods of evolutionary time,

Phasmatodea have evolved to mimic things.

And what they usually mimic

are either swaying leaves or sticks.

There's changes to their genes.

There's also changes to their phenotype

or their overall appearance

that occurred over hundreds of millions of years.

But sometimes they start out like this juvenile,

where they might mimic an ant

or they might mimic a stick.

As they get older and older,

they look more and more like just basically swaying leaf.

Sometimes they look like a leaf

that is slightly decaying.

Sometimes it looks like a fresh leaf.

I also have a stick-like Phasmatodean.

You can get these in New Jersey.

They tend to stay pretty still.

All stick insects,

whether they are the ones that look like sticks

or the ones that look like leaves,

they all are vegetarians.

So they're just kind of chowing down on leaf material.

sun_of_nothing asks,

How do insect antennae work?

So insect and antennae

have these tiny little pits in them,

and inside are these little chemosensilla.

There are odor molecules,

sometimes it's a pheromone,

sometimes it's things that they're interacting with

in the environment.

Those odor molecules kind of bind to the sensilla

and that triggers an electrical impulse

that goes to the brain

that tells this insect,

in this case, this cockroach,

something about what it's tasting

or what it's smelling.

So on my arm right now

is a blaberus, or a cave roach.

Now on my hair.

One second.

I use a lot of coconut oil in my hair

and I think she's probably like, What is going on?

You can see that the antennae

are touching constantly

and that is her kind of trying to smell her surroundings

and figure out [laughing] What is happening?

This cave roach you would commonly see

in Central and South America,

often on the barks of trees,

especially if you're out at night.

They're vegetarians,

they're decomposers,

and they help kind of shape the forests that we have.

That hair product really freaked her out.

For ants and termites,

they use chemosensation a lot

to tell whether or not individuals they're interacting with

are from the same nest as them.

Whenever you see something that has really big

or really long antennae,

that tells you that it's probably smelling a lot.

Things like dragonflies

have very small antennae

because they're visual predators.

smaksandewand asks, Either insects are getting really good

at avoiding car windscreens

or there simply aren't any insects anymore.

So I think smaksandewand

is remembering what it was like when I was a kid

where you would drive along on the highway,

your windshield would be covered with smooshed bugs.

We know that insects are declining

at a rate that we've never seen before.

There was a study that came out in 2025

for North American butterflies

that suggested that some species of butterflies

have declined just in the last 20 years

by up to 98% to 99%.

We think that there's many causes of this decline.

Land use change,

our reliance on insecticides, climate change,

all of that together means that when you're out,

you hear fewer insects,

you see fewer insects,

and when you're driving in your car,

you have fewer of them

that kind of splatter against your windshield.

Here's a question from the explainlikeI'mfive subreddit.

If you place a same-species ant from a colony

to a new colony with other same ants,

will it be accepted or rejected,

or it doesn't matter to other ants?

Ants in general are very warlike,

so they don't like to interact with other individuals,

even from the same species.

They can smell when there's an ant that's nearby

that's not part of their nest

and they will go to war.

And definitely ants from different species are often at war.

We have a question from the ants subreddit,

Which ants have the most effective armies?

Like hypothetically, if there were an ant world war,

which ant species would win?

Probably Argentine ants.

For some reason, Argentine ants are actually able

to move together as like a huge group, a super colony.

These super colonies of Argentine ants

are hundreds of thousands of individuals.

It really does look like a black river.

When I lived in Costa Rica at a field station,

we'd have all of our stuff out,

we'd see the ants coming,

we'd leave the kitchen,

they'd come through, they eat everything.

Kind of like in a cartoon,

every carrot, every apple was stripped.

They can really eat a lot

in a very short period of time.

So they are very good at what they do,

kind of consuming things as they move.

Some people say that all of South America

is one [laughing] giant Argentine ant group.

We have another question from the ants subreddit.

Why are ant colonies so loyal to their queen?

Well, that has to do with their genetics.

So ants are very closely related to each other.

A lot of insects have sexual reproduction

where there's a male gamete and a female gamete,

and they come together to form a zygote.

And that zygote is what we call diploid.

It has components from one individual

and another individual.

But what the queens do

is she actually clones herself

by taking just one of her eggs

and they make a male,

and so it only has half of the information.

We call that haploid.

That male is what's called a drone.

It mates with the queen and then it dies.

I'm only related to my kids by 50%, right?

Because I had a parent that gave 50%

and I gave 50%.

Ants that are in a colony that are sisters,

they're related to each other by 75%.

The goal of all species, we think,

is to get as many copies of your genes

into the next generation as possible.

So we think that's part of what drives

the social behavior in ants.

That's why so many members of the colony

work together cooperatively.

They're loyal to the queen,

who they're really closely related to

and they're really closely related to their sisters.

@agepapers asks, Why and how

do termite kings and queens live so long?

Some termite kings and queens, especially queens,

can live like 20 years.

Her body just becomes distended

as this one giant kind of sack of eggs.

The longer time that you're around putting out babies,

the greater opportunity there is

for you to pass your genes on to the next generation.

So there might be this evolutionary drive

for queens to live a long time

to maximize their reproductive output.

Some of the day-to-day strife

that workers and soldiers have to interact with,

warring ants that come by, anteaters, you name it,

the kings and queens don't usually have to face that.

So they have a pretty cushy life,

and that usually allows them to live their full lifespan.

So let me show you what a king and queen termite

would look like.

So in termites,

the only cast that has wings

that can fly are the reproductive casts.

So that's the king and the queen.

The wings are like not great,

they can't really fly very far.

So termite society, like other social insects,

they have a really complicated cast system.

So there's the reproductive cast,

the kings and queens,

then there's soldiers

that do a lot of defense for the colony.

The workers do everything,

they make the colony,

they also feed the queen,

they care for the queen,

they groom the queen,

they care for the young,

they'll bang their heads against the wall

to kind of communicate with each other.

They have a crypt where they carry their dead

in some species.

They have a nursery or an infirmary.

So it's very sophisticated.

So from the insects subreddit,

Why do dragonflies have indicators

slash black marks on their wings?

Dragonflies have a pterostigma.

It looks like a little dot.

It's near the tip of their wing.

Sometimes it's very long.

Sometimes it looks like a little square.

Sometimes it's black,

but sometimes it's not,

sometimes it's kind of yellow.

Sometimes it's like spangled or multicolored.

Dragonflies can fly really fast,

some of them can fly like 30 miles an hour.

So maybe having this pterostigma

helps stabilize the wing.

What we do know about pterostigma

is that they're probably a pretty recent feature.

When you look at fossil dragonflies,

especially very old fossils,

many of them don't have pterostigma.

Dragonflies or something that looked like a dragonfly

was probably the first thing to fly.

So before birds, before bats,

before pterosaurs,

before any other insect.

And they flew during the Carboniferous Period,

which is 350 million years ago,

each wing was around 37 centimeters.

So it had a total of about a two-foot wingspan.

They were just massive.

userErebus asks, Why were dragonflies massive

in that time period before the dinosaurs?

When people have tried to rear modern dragonflies

in high-oxygen environments,

they ended up being slightly larger.

So we think oxygen is part of it.

Oxygen levels were a lot higher

when these massive dragonflies,

Meganeuridae, Meganeuropsis,

when they were flying around

in the Carboniferous Period.

But also it was that there was nothing else in the sky.

So they were able to be kind of big,

maybe not be the best flyers, be clumsy.

As the sky started filling up

with other species of insects,

with birds, with pterosaurs,

later on, with bats,

insects, especially dragonflies,

had to get very good at maneuvering.

They tended to get smaller and be more flexible

and having slightly different features in their wings

so they can maneuver in and amongst vegetation

and amongst other animals that are in the sky.

A million-dollar question is how did flight start?

What we know is that wings

are made up of two different types of material

that come together,

one of which seems to have its origin from legs

and the other of which seems to have its origin

from the back or the cuticle.

And when we have something

that is a really important innovation,

we call that an adaptive radiation,

because after the rise of winged insects, or pterygota,

that is where the bulk of the diversity is.

We talk about there being more species of insects on Earth

than there is anything else.

Almost all of those have wings.

Here's another one,

Siba Mteza asks,

Why do insects hang around people?

Go play with your friends, bro.

Crying face emoji.

Insects tend to come around humans

because they are detecting carbon dioxide,

which we exhale.

Sometimes also lactic acid.

So there's this joke in entomology

that if you're breathing,

insects will find you,

but if you stop breathing,

there are other insects that will find you,

'cause there's things that like to eat

dead humans. [laughing]

But the other insects that are around you,

butterflies, or dragonflies, or crickets,

they're actually not really interested in you.

Insects have been around for a lot longer than humans,

we're just kind of living in insects' world.

Whenever we interact with them,

it's not that they're coming around us

as much as it is that we are kind of constantly invading

the habitats that they've lived in

for hundreds of millions of years.

At LRosestars asks,

How did they find out dung beetles

can navigate using the Milky Way?

There was a research group

that actually was kind of looking at how dung beetles

were using the Moon

to navigate to where they needed to go.

But then during a dark night

when there wasn't a moon out,

the dung beetles were still following the same route.

And that led them to wonder,

I wonder if there's something in the dark sky

that they're still using for navigation?

And they thought maybe it was the brightness

of the Milky Way

and the position of the Milky Way.

So they actually took these dung beetles

and they took them into a planetarium.

And they displayed the Milky Way,

and indeed, the dung beetle

was able to use the planetarium Milky Way

to kind of go on its trajectory.

So that was how they figured out

that the Milky Way

was being used by dung beetles for navigation.

At RishiJoeSanu asks,

Why do people get too riled up

over the concept of eating insects?

Nobody is forcing you to eat them.

Let me have my high-protein cricket powder in peace.

I agree.

Eating insects is maybe one of the most natural things

that humans can do.

Our most close relatives are primates,

chimpanzees, bonobos,

they eat insects all the time.

So as long as there have been humans,

we have been eating insects.

Insects are a really high source of protein.

They tend to be low in fat.

I eat a lot of insects.

I usually eat them cooked,

and that kind of gives them like a nutty flavor.

I would say that we should all be eating insects.

And if you don't wanna eat insects,

don't eat them.

So AJ_rod354 asks, How TF does pollination work?

Never understood it.

Plants wanna get their genetic information moved around

because the more genetic recombination there is,

usually the better species fair.

Insects wanna eat food,

so put those things together

and that basically is pollination.

So flowers often have nectar,

and nectar is a sweet substance,

it's the reward.

Probably when you're thinking about

pollinators and pollination,

you're thinking about bees.

Many of the photos that people actually use

of bees doing pollination

are actually not bees,

they're syrphid flies.

So there's lots of flies

that look a little bit like a bee,

but you can tell that they're a fly

'cause they only have one pair of wings.

Their hind wings are modified

into these little nubs called halteres.

It doesn't matter whether the animals

that come to your plants

are bees, or flies, or what have you,

they pick up some pollen,

and when they go to the next plant to drink,

then they leave some of that pollen behind,

and that basically allows the plants

to share the genetic information.

We should all be doing our part to save the pollinators,

and this includes reducing the use of insecticides,

as well as creating habitat for pollinators.

They need nooks and they need crannies

and they need leaves.

So if you don't like raking your leaves,

that's actually great for pollinators.

If you create a pollinator-friendly garden,

different types of flowers

that bloom at different times

with different heights and different colors,

you'll get a lot of pollinators coming.

I actually love buzz pollination,

where the insect actually does

like this kind of shaking vibration behavior,

which causes an explosion of pollen by the plant.

If insect pollinators were to go extinct,

then we ourselves would be really vulnerable

because there's some nutrition

that we can only get from plants

that are pollinated by an insect.

@_katelynsantos asks,

Where do fruit flies come from though?

They just show up as soon as your fruit gets really ripe.

Probably that's because the fruit

that you brought into your home

was already covered with the eggs of fruit flies.

So when you bring bananas into your home, for example,

they're covered in fruit fly eggs, [laughing]

all over the rinds of your bananas.

The warm heat of your kitchen

allows for the fruit fly eggs to hatch.

Sometimes when you bring them in,

the eggs have already hatched

and the little maggots are kind of already crawling

all over the surface.

The larvae can eat along the surface of the rind

or they can bore into the rotted fruit,

become adult fruit flies

and start the cycle again.

The fruit fly lifecycle is very short,

so they can go through this whole process

in just one or two days.

So if you buy a set of bananas on Saturday,

chances are good that those eggs can hatch

and go through their full developmental life stage

by the next week.

Here's a question from Quora.

How do creatures without any bones or cartilage,

squids, cephalopods, insects, et cetera,

get fossilized in stone?

So when we think about fossils,

we often think of things like dinosaur bones

or hardened bones,

but sometimes they're just kind of like

a hardened imprint of an exoskeleton

or things that are trapped in amber.

Amber is basically fossilized tree resin, or tree sap.

And when it drips out,

insects get caught in it,

and then those are preserved over long periods of time.

Some are kind of green,

some are kind of this, well, amber-colored.

Jurassic Park suggested that perhaps

you could take insects from amber

and you could get DNA from them.

And so far, we haven't been able to do that.

But you can dissolve some amber

and actually take the insect out.

So what I have here is a compression fossil.

And this is from Antarctica.

And it has examples of juveniles of dragonflies,

as well as part of a wing of a dragonfly.

It's kind of just the imprint of the dragonfly wing,

as well as the imprint of the body parts

of the juvenile stage.

@Julius4rumEarth asks,

Serious question.

Why do lantern flies exist?

What is their function?

To annoy me, I presume.

People have been concerned

about spotted lantern flies

for a couple of reasons.

One, they're an invasive species,

and whenever you have an invasive species,

that can outcompete native species,

but also they have mouth parts

that are like a straw with a pump,

so they drink tree sap or plant sap.

It basically means they have an all-liquid diet.

Because they're drinking mostly sap,

their poop is like a liquid kind of sugary poop,

which we call honeydew.

And when it drips onto the plants where it's feeding,

it actually can encourage mold growth

that can negatively impact crops.

the_man_in_pink asks,

How do cicadas know when to emerge?

They use a couple of different cues.

One is their drinking from the roots of trees,

so their drinking plants sap,

and that kind of composition of plant sap

changes with seasons,

but they also can detect temperature.

And once it reaches 18 degrees Celsius

or 64 degrees Fahrenheit,

that is the cue that it is time to emerge.

Some cicadas do this every two years,

and some do this every 13 or 17 years,

where you end up with trillions of individuals

who have also used the same timing queue

to emerge at the same time.

So @michael-ray asks,

Where did Chagas come from?

We needed a new crisis, I suppose.

In kissing bugs, there are these trypanosomes

that actually hijack their body system

and they can be transported into our bloodstream,

and that trypanosome

causes a disease that's called Chagas.

And Chagas disease is incredibly bad.

They're often called kissing bugs

because these bugs often make their piercing mark

in easy-to-reach places

where they can get a good blood meal,

like on your lips when you're sleeping.

The trypanosome goes inside of your body,

you have a fever,

sometimes you have a rash,

but then the trypanosome kind of lies dormant in your body,

sometimes for decades,

and eventually it makes its way to your heart

and eats holes in your heart,

and then you die from heart failure.

The reason why we worry about Chagas now in North America

is because, thanks to humans,

we now have higher temperatures in North America.

So in parts of Texas and Oklahoma,

the trypanosome is able to complete its lifecycle

in kissing bugs.

Right now, it's really a concern

in Central and South America.

So Chagas was always there,

just not in North America.

And the new crisis is in part our design

because of climate change.

thoughtfloss asks,

In my dream last night,

I was surrounded by fireflies.

I wondered how can they communicate

with just flashes of light

when humans can't communicate with all our words.

Fireflies communicate by having a chemical reaction

in their body,

it involves luciferin and luciferase,

that produces light.

So they use this light in a flashing pattern.

It's species specific.

Males use it to communicate with females

to indicate that they're the same species.

They need to have darkness for this to happen.

So light pollution can negatively impact fireflies.

Females can use the flashing pattern of males

from a different species to trick them

and then eat them.

@Particular_Luck4091 asks,

Why does evolution cause bees to die when stinging?

Over time through natural selection,

the ovipositor, or egg-laying apparatus, in bees

has been modified to function as a stinger,

and that is a protective mechanism for these bees.

In honeybees at least,

when the sting happens,

it enters the victim that's being stung.

And because it's barbed,

as the bee flies away,

it actually rips off part of the abdomen.

And so with no bum

and with no back of the abdomen,

then the bee dies.

Most of the females in a colony are workers.

If they die, there's still hundreds,

sometimes thousands, of sisters in the colony that live on.

So the goal is to always do the greater good

and protect the colony

and not really care about your own loss.

So those are all the questions for today.

Thanks for watching Bug Support.

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