 Good afternoon and thanks for joining us for another episode of Likeable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Ethan Allen, here in the Think Tech studios. Lovely Friday afternoon. And we're going to be talking about a truly likeable science topic today. It's a new book. The author, Kristie Wilcox, is here. Venomous is the title. And it's an amazing book. It's all about those venomous creatures, right? Snakes, spiders, scorpions. Snakes, spiders, scorpions, jellies, urchins. You name it. Whatever has venom, it's pretty much in there. It is. I noticed you covered a whole lot of stuff, including venomous mammals. Yeah, yeah. I mean a lot of people don't realize that our own lineage, even, there's a venomous primate. Right, yeah, exactly. Yeah, all kinds of great stuff. I found that the amount of information this book is just intriguing and overwhelming. I'm a longtime herper way back. I kept photos of pythons for many years. So I chose the safer ones. Understandable. So how did you come to write this? Well, so for my PhD, I ended up studying venomous fish, lionfishes. And so I got really into venoms, venom systems, understanding the evolution of venoms. And as I went into my postdoc, I really wanted to write a book that sort of showcased these amazing animals because venomous animals, they often get a really bad rap. They're sort of the species we love to hate. And I wanted something, a book or a way of sort of sharing the amazing science that I had learned through my scientific career with everyone else. You did a top-notch job. I also actually present a bunch of great information, including now that the emerging uses of venom is that they're beginning to develop drugs from venoms and they're really beginning to understand evolution through looking at venoms. They're incredibly useful animals. I mean, when it comes, we think of them as sort of all the negatives, all the fact that they're, oh, they're going to kill me. I'm going to get bitten. I'm going to die. But when it comes to venomous animals, those incredibly potent toxins that they produce have a wide range of uses for humans, everything from bio-insecticides to life-saving drugs. Yeah, exactly. And as you say, we tend to focus on the negative. I suppose that's understandable. These are some of the animals that are most likely to do us harm. We've sort of eliminated most of the other bigger predators or driven them away from where we live in most parts of the world. And so the venomous animals are the only ones we're sort of more likely to run into. We have a few around Hawaii, right? Yes, we absolutely do. We have jellyfish in the oceans, box jellies that come up on Waikiki Beach every eight to 10 days after the full moon. We've got some urchins. I know that one firsthand for better or worse. We have occasionally a sea snake. We don't really have them a whole lot here. And then we have some insects now. And cone snails? And cone snails. Absolutely the cone snails. And I wasn't aware of, and yet from your description it sounds like it's one of the larger hazards in some sense. Yeah, well, cone snails, they tend to be pretty shy. The great scientist who studies cone snails, Toto Oliveira, he says essentially you have to harass them to get them to actually sting you. It takes a bit of effort. But people, they have really beautiful shells. And so people all the time will be out in the tide pools and they're like, oh, this is a pretty shell. Let me look at it. Let me pick it up. And you have run the risk of being stung if you're holding that snail. And here in Hawaii we have a few snails. We don't have the world's deadliest cone snail, but we have a few that are capable of producing a pretty nasty sting. And then the box jelly is also, I guess, again, I don't know if it's ours here. They're quite the deadliest, but certainly it sounds from the story you've held there, the ones here are certainly bad enough. Yeah, the ones here are definitely bad enough. They're not the deadliest. They're not the really big, multi-tenacled chyronex, which are the Australian box jellyfish. And those are the ones that kill people within five minutes or less. But the ones here, they wash ashore every month and, of course, on one of our busiest beaches. And so they have the potential to cause some serious symptoms and even what we call Irokanji syndrome, which is this sort of delayed effect to the venom that can be really, really bad four to 48 hours after you've been stung. Wow. Oh, I haven't known that. I've gotten one or two little very light whaps from nothing of note. So it's sort of a slight deviation here. The rumor is we didn't used to have those here. They were introduced at some point. So they didn't used to come ashore. Now, we're not exactly sure, scientifically, what the exact reason they started coming ashore is the most likely explanation has to do with the fact that we ended up creating a lot more habitat for baby jellies. So sinking of the artificial reefs and the ships that we have for our dyesights, those are prime habitat for the young jellies and the young polyps so that the population could become more established and larger and then every month they come in. Okay. So some people, the sort of persistent rumors that was brought in only brought in some sand from Australia, but these are different species? These are different species. They are found around the world. I mean, they're found even in the Atlantic. So this species is very widespread. I see. Okay. Great to know that. Great to know all the shucks who were just debating that the other day. So you're with UH, but I don't think you gave your proper affiliation or UH faculty there. Well, not faculty. I'm a postdoctoral researcher. So I'm studying under Dr. Angeliana Gujarra. Okay. I'm a senior director of this faculty so take the rank. I'm not going to ask them about that. And you also went to, you talked about some other animals like the Komodo dragons here, right? That people are, of course, very unlikely to run into, but that are certainly among the world's more intriguing animals from many respects. And you actually went and visited the island where they live, right? I did. I did. One of my favorite trips that I got to do for this book, because I wanted to see them in person, and I wanted to see them in person ever since I was a really little kid when I read Douglas Adams' Last Chance to See, which is, if you haven't read it, it's a wonderful book. It's absolutely amazing. It's the same guy that wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but he took all of that charisma and wit and humor and put it into a conservation book looking at endangered species. And so one of the species he was looking at was the Komodo dragon. And in the book, he just describes them so viscerally that I was just like, oh, I got to see one of these. I really wanted to. And so I was really excited when I got the opportunity to go to Rinka and to actually see one for myself. Yeah, yeah. Must be amazing. It's funny. I read that book some years ago. Don't recall that section. I'll have to go back and think it back up and reread it. And you mentioned the sea urchins here. If you've had first time encounters with them. Yes. And they can be at least locally in a way and actually quite damaging too. They're very, very painful. Yeah. I've managed to grab one when I should have known better and get a few spines into my finger. And just the pain got so intense that it started to make me almost panicked. That feeling like your chest is tightening and you're like, what am I doing? And realizing that it was the pain causing that sort of feeling and that overwhelming reaction and then getting myself to get rid of them. Now, intriguingly, my wife on our first visit here, as she said, a sea urchin lept up and attacked her, but basically she put her hand down on one. She was swimming. And then within a matter of 10 days or so, she began having trouble straightening her fingers out and her whole, all her tendons were basically getting messed up by this. Yeah, I mean. And they had to go into hand surgery on her and open her whole hand up and scrape the tendons free of something. Yeah, I mean, one of the problems with sea urchins is that they have these sort of brittle spines that can just get stuck and embedded. And I had something similar, although it wasn't nearly as bad, where about a week to a month afterwards, I mean, I had these bumps under my finger where whatever was left behind was getting attacked by my immune system. Wow, wow. That's one of the things you bring up that I found very odd was how some of these venomous can have these very long-term effects and people can be incapacitated for weeks or months after may. You sort of think, you get bitten, you get sick, you either get better or you don't. But sometimes they can have very long, very persistent. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, some of that's the actual venom toxins, but it's also sometimes the structural components of the delivery system. So we think of, for example, those jellyfish, they have these tiny little tubules that they use to inject the venom and those stay embedded within you. I mean, they have these backwards-facing hooks that's actually really quite gruesome if you look at them up close. And so then there's this foreign material, essentially in your body, in your skin. And over time, it can take weeks to months for your skin to actually fully heal and get rid of that. Wow, okay, yeah, yeah. Quite the set of issues. And the box joys you were saying, and you're doing amazing things physiologically, they actually cause basically punch holes in your blood cell membranes, particularly, right? Yeah. And cause so much potassium to leak out that it really throws off your whole potassium-sodium balance in your body. And basically that can just shut your heart right down, right? Exactly, exactly. So they have these really, really potent toxins called porins, which basically do exactly what you said. They make a hole and you make enough holes in a blood cell membrane, and the potassium will leak right out of it, out of a red blood cell. And that's where those chyronex down in Australia can be so dangerous and so deadly because they can punch, they can cause so much potassium leak that you have this sudden spike and that's what causes that heart to stop working completely, basically. Wow. And sort of on the other end of the scale, that the nasty hematoxic venom that's of some of the rattlesnakes and all, which can just sort of start chewing away a tissue if you don't get them out. Yeah, hematoxic venoms definitely have a bit more of a gruesome sort of reputation and for good reason, I mean, so they do things like cause increases and decreases in blood pressure, but they can also do things like tear through cells and cause, you know, massive necrosis and death of tissue. Right, yeah. One of my old advisers used to work with rattlesnakes and milked them until the third time he got bitten on his thumb and his doctor said, you know, if it happens once more, you're probably going to lose the thumb, you know. I mean, it's just you've got enough damage to it already. No, and I know a lot of people with missing pieces, little bits and pieces that are missing. So with carpenters, you know. Yeah, a little bit like that, yeah. Do it long enough and you're bound to have an accident or two. People who study venoms are bound to get invenomated at some point. And that actually brings us to the fascinating group of people and I sort of hadn't realized the extent to this, but the SI is a self-injector. Immunizers, right? Yeah, no, they're really, they're a very interesting sort of group, subgroup of the people that like venomous animals and like to keep them particularly in their own homes as pets of sorts. But yeah, they choose to inject themselves with venom on a regular basis. And their goal is to become immune. And it does make a little bit of sense in the sense that when we make an anti-venom, that's exactly what we do. We take an animal like a horse and we inject it with venom doses over and over until it builds up serum proteins. And once it has those antibodies in its serum then we extract those and that's what our anti-venoms are made from. So the idea of building an immune defense against a venom is, I mean, well-established. But that said, doing it to yourself is a lot riskier and I definitely don't recommend it. Don't, not at all, do not do it. Don't try this at home. Don't try this at home, right. And there's a lot we don't know about it because it hasn't been scientifically studied and it hasn't been really, really carefully watched and measured. So things like there are certain toxins that aren't picked up even in the immune system and animals, you know, the ones that anti-venoms have trouble with. And so if you have a species that has some of those toxins you're not actually defending yourself at all when you inject the venom into yourself. Okay, well that's great. We're going to have to take a short break. You're here on likeable science with us and we're talking about venomous. And I've got the author here with me and we're talking snakes, spiders and all kinds of stuff. We'll be right back. Aloha, I'm Kaui Lucas, host of Hawaii Is My Mainland every Friday here on Think Tech Hawaii. I also have a blog of the same name at kauilukas.com where you can see all of my past shows. Join me this Friday and every Friday at 3 p.m. Aloha. Aloha, my name is Josh Green. I serve a senator from the Big Island on the Kona side and I'm also an emergency room physician. My program here on Think Tech is called Health Care in Hawaii. I'll have guests that should be interesting to you twice a month. We'll talk about issues that range from mental health care to drug addiction to our health care system and any challenges that we face here in Hawaii. We hope you'll join us. Again, thanks for supporting Think Tech. And you're back here on likeable science with me, your host Ethan Allen. And thank you for joining us. With me today in Think Tech studios is Christy Wilcox. Christy is at UH and is working on our interest today. He's the author of an amazing book, Venomous and which is sort of an encyclopedia of all the venomous animals on Earth basically. And those are animals who essentially inject toxic substances into us basically. Right, right. So we talk about toxins in a broad category as things that cause us harm. And then we can sort of break that down into the subcategories of poisons, which are things that we just absorb or inhale. So, you know, if you're licking those frogs then that would be a poison. And then there's the venomous animals and venoms have to be actively introduced through wounding. Okay, okay. So that would be the difference in like tetrodotoxin is a poison, but not a venom, right? Well, tetrodotoxin is a poison when it's used by the puffer fishes, but a venom when it's used by the blue-ringed octopus. Okay, there we go. Amazing, amazing. Isn't that interesting how different species have come up to use the same sets of compounds? Absolutely. And that's one of actually the running themes also in this book is that a lot of venoms do use very similar proteins or very similar protein families. And they kind of all converge on the same sort of systems and targets. Right, right. And it makes sense. I mean, there's ways you can disable an enemy quickly if you want. Right, right. Either to eat them quickly because they'll get away or to defend yourself and make them incapable of further attacking you or to move both of those. You want to do something to the nervous system pretty quickly, right? Right, so something like paralysis for those that want to capture an animal or pain, which are both just messing with neurons, really, when you think about it. And then there's other ways of capturing prey, largely involving things like dropping blood pressure so that there's no blood to the brain and you just lack out. And you mentioned something that I think, correct me if I'm wrong, please, changed the whole nervous system of their prey in a different way. So the bullet ants have an extreme, extreme pain-producing toxin. And if you ask Justin Schmidt, who's one of the world's most learned entomologists when it comes to pain-producing insects, he's actually felt the sting of, I think it's 80 different species, something like that, a lot of different ones. And he's compared them and ranked them in what he calls the Schmidt pain index. He says the bullet ant is the worst pain, absolutely positively worst pain in the world. So it is called the bullet ant because it's supposed to be the pain equivalent of being shot. So those guys, they have an incredibly, incredibly nasty, painful sting. But what's really interesting is that local cultures have started, have incorporated this into their traditions and their practices. And so several different tribes in the Amazon have these rituals where they take bullet ants and they weave them into a glove stingers facing inward. And young men and boys have to put their hands into these gloves for the estimates vary, but something like 5, 10, 15 minutes. Getting stung hundreds of times, hundreds of different stings. And they have to do it supposedly without shedding a tear to prove they are a man. I'll pass on that to Joel. Thank you. Call me a wimp. Me too. But then there's another whole aspect that you talked about the another animal that uses its venom and some sort of a wasp that changes the brain of cockroach host when it wants to lay its egg there and makes a cockroach behave differently. Yes, the emerald cockroach wasp. And this is a group of parasitoid wasps. They all do this sort of thing to various different species. But what this one in particular does is first it paralyzes the cockroach by stinging it in the chest. And then it lines up and actually inserts its stinger into the cockroach's head. And it's looking for these two brain regions that it wants to inject venom into. And it's really fascinating because if scientists cut them out, which they have done experimentally and get rid of those brain regions, the wasp will just sit there and the cockroach's brain going like this trying to find them. So it's really, really evolved some way to detect exactly that it's in the right spot at the right time. And then once it injects that venom it essentially makes the cockroach sedated, domesticated. So instead of the cockroach running when it gets touched, for example, it just sort of sits there. It'll groom itself, which we think is a flood of dopamine. And I kind of hope it's a happy feeling for them as dopamine is for us because what happens next is pretty gruesome. And then what happens is the wasp is able to actually just lead the cockroach like it's a little puppy or a horse with a bridle into its little burrow attached a larva, a little egg on it, which will become a larval wasp, and then seal them up. And that little larva will come out and it will eat the cockroach from the inside out starting with the least important parts of the body so that the cockroach lives as long and then eventually it'll pupate and become a wasp and leave. And it's fascinating that that strategy there's bacteria who've developed a similar kind of strategy of changing the behavior of their host to their own reproductive success. There are lots of parasites that are capable of doing that. What's so fascinating about this is that you have this venom that is from the outside, I mean it's from the outside. I mean once you're a bacteria or many of these sort of behavior-changing parasites they get inside there. And this is from the outside and make this docile animal. Right, yeah, and it has two different impacts that initially paralyzes and then- Yeah, and it's amazing because it actually uses the same chemical compounds to do both and what they do is they affect chloride channels and chloride channels are essentially the wet blankets of neurons. I mean they allow the movement of these negative ions and usually when neuron signaling goes we have the movement of positive ions go with the positive ions across the membrane and it stops that signal from happening. It's still possible to overcome it so that cockroach is capable of running away and it's capable of walking which of course the wasp takes to full advantage to lead it where it wants it to go. Sometimes for quite long distances for what we would think of as a cockroach but it just doesn't feel the need to in response to normal stimuli that would make it scared. Wow, how very strange, how very strange. It's a beautiful sort of an evolutionary dance here too between the things that are producing venom and things that are impacted whether that's their prey, animals, or their the predators of the venomous animals, right? Right. Everyone sort of one step forward and the other one is- Yeah, one of the venomous scientists that look up to a lot of Brian Frey likes to call it the evolutionary arms race and the idea that the venomous animals developing a slightly more potent venom that does its job a little faster than the prey items or the predators of the venomous animals are to find one little more defense to try to get rid of that one and it's just this constant battle. Because some of the animal can be- you see different stages of that relationship I guess at everything. Yeah, and some animals like mongooses are surprisingly immune to venom so these guys eat snakes and they've sort of their immunity to venomous has allowed them to take over this whole untapped food resource which is venomous snakes that most predators are afraid of because they can kill them. And so they're able to capture them and what's really interesting is that if you look at the DNA of mongooses and you look at the DNA of copras they actually have the exact same changes to their DNA, the exact same locations on one of the targets of that main toxin in the cobra's venom. So they both survive being invenomated by cobra venom the exact same way and it's a stunning example of convergent evolution. Wow, that is that amazing because you didn't sort of come by the gene in the same way. Exactly. Fascinating. So I think we had a couple more pictures you had sent that Zuru was saying she wanted to pop up here. Oh, the Gila monster, yeah. So this is one of our venomous lizards. They used to have a really really nasty reputation in the southwest U.S. People used to say that they would bite and you'd never need a crowbar to open their jaws or that they could kill a man. They hurt but they're not deadly. Certainly not anything near what we used to think of them. And what's amazing about them is they actually have a compound in their saliva, in that venom that we have now transformed into a very very important drug for diabetes. Bietta was the first drug in this class of drugs but basically it helps turn on the sort of insulin system for people who that is not functioning in and it came from the venom of a lizard. There we go, there we go, it's not amazing. That's just, that's great. We think we're probably going to see more of this, right? I mean there's, they're bringing the biochemical techniques coming out of the stage where they can pull the venom apart much more effectively than they used to study their individual components for getting to find out which components are doing what to resist them. Absolutely, absolutely. And what's amazing about these venoms is that you have dozens to hundreds, even thousands of different components in a single venom and so you're talking about dozens to hundreds to thousands of potential pharmaceuticals all depending on what they do. Many of the things that go wrong in our bodies we don't have very targeted chemicals for. When you think about it, when you're looking for a pharmaceutical and you're looking for some sort of treatment, you're looking for a compound that has a very specific and potent effect. And that's exactly what these toxins do. They're bundled together in chemical cocktails but once you tease them apart you have something, if you have a pitfiper for example that causes severe drops in blood pressure to catch its prey. Well there's a compound in that venom that causes decreases in blood pressure. If you could take that, put it in a pill and you might be able to treat hypertension. And that's in fact exactly what we did. The very first venom drive drug was Captoprol which is a compound from a Brazilian pitfiper that now treats hypertension and high blood pressure. So venoms are our friends. They are, they really are. They're wonderful creatures. Well that's great. And I think it's really marvellous that you've done such a good job of painting that picture. Sort of saying it's no fun to get animated by them. It hurts. It can be unpleasant. It can be even deadly. But at the same time you can't deny the value of studying them and the knowledge we're getting out of them and the potential improvement to well-being that they bring. Absolutely. And I mean I like to think of venomous animals as just this giant biochemical library where we can learn so much about how our world works how evolution works, how our bodies work and when we get rid of them when we kill them for no reason or we things like climate change and pollution that are harming species across the board then we're losing this rich information source that we could be learning from. Right. Right. Because as you say with thousands and thousands of venomous species, each species producing hundreds, dozens of thousands of compounds within the venom you've got, as you say, a massive library there of chemicals. And virtually at this point we know probably something about some fraction of one percent of them. Yeah, very, very little. I mean really up until now we'd only studied the ones that we can get large amounts of venom from. Species like some of the snakes because you can milk them and milk them over and over but you look at some of the ants or some of the other species, they're much harder to get larger quantities of venom from. And that, so those have largely been unstudied. Well great, there's new frontiers to conquer then. Absolutely. Well excellent. It's been so nice having you here. I've learned a great deal as I do for all my years. It's one of the great things about doing this show. Again, venomous by Christy Wilcox. Great book, wonderful read. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. Aloha. Aloha.