 Hi everybody! We're just running through our last minute live video checks to see that we are streaming to our website as well. Thanks everyone for coming out. We're going to be starting the podcast in just a moment. We will be interviewing a few wonderful researchers from this entomology conference live during the program and the interview should last about 15 minutes, but there will be an opportunity for one or two questions from the audience once our portion of the interview is over. There's a microphone that is right over there. If you have questions, please step up to the mic and ask questions into the microphone because then they go into our recording and if you just ask them from your seat, we may not actually hear you later. Let's see. So this is a live podcast recording and we are going to be starting. Yeah. Let's do this. All right, I believe our recording is over there. Make sure I'm going to the right rundown. All right. Are we good? Okay. Starting in three, two, this is twist this week in science episode number 643.5 recorded on Monday November 6th 2017 live from entomology 2017 I'm dr. Kiki and today we will fill your heads with baby eyes embalming licks and ant self-control but first disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer for those unfamiliar with entomology the definition of entomology is a branch of zoology that deals with insects and while the entomology of entomology agrees that it is the study of insects it is not uncommon for an entomologist to study spiders scorpions mites or ticks despite the fact that these are not insects but arachnids and then there are the myriapods centipedes millipedes and other multi-legged critters also studied by entomologists But there is a terminology that includes insects arachnids and myriapods arthropoda And whether you like the way arthropoda logical rolls off the tongue or before the long standardized entomological the following episode of twist is Crawling with sciencey news as we are broadcasting from the open circulatory system of bug researchers the 65th annual meeting of the entomological Society of America in Denver, Colorado Here on this weekend science coming up next And good science to you too Justin especially those of you in our live audience here at entomology 2017 have a wonderful show laid out for you today here at the entomological Society of America's annual meeting in Denver, Colorado The show is made possible by the generous efforts of Joanna Ellsenson and Rob Dunn and the entomological Society of America and they've gotten us here, and we are thrilled to be here Thank you for joining us live today All right our show today. It's full of guest interviews Normally we have lots of stories, but today we're talking to lots of people which is just exciting We're gonna be chatting about evolution ecology and conservation of insect species galore and the whole show is Completely tuned to the key of entomology And this this is my bad joke gratuitous laughter inserted here All right on this week's show I have a new story about things that we can learn about fear from watching babies Justin, what do you have? embalming licks and Blair, what do you have? Oh, I have ants and Their ability to you know restrain themselves from things Restraint and restraints self-restraint in ants right our guests today are going to be dr. Jessica where also Raul Medina and Martha Ryskin and we will be introducing them each individually as they come on to the show to be Grilled tested about their knowledge, you know, that's what we're gonna be doing here Before we jump into all of that though I want to remind everyone that you can subscribe to the twist podcast all good places where Podcasts are found on the iTunes portal the podcast the Google Play podcast portal stitcher Spreaker tune in we're on YouTube. We're on Facebook. You can find us looking for this week in science Just visit twist.org Everyone, okay. Let's jump into some science. So who's afraid of spiders? Anyone in here afraid of spiders? Yeah, this is probably the wrong crowd to ask that question. I am a little bit Blair says she's a little afraid of spiders and it has been tested previously that There is a large percentage of entomologists who are actually afraid of spiders even though you might not admit it in public But a new study came out in the last couple of weeks in Frontiers in psychology and I wanted to kind of set up set the stage For our evolutionary perspective on entomology with this story today researchers looked at six month old infants and how they reacted to pictures of flowers versus spiders or Snakes Versus other nice things. So the question was Was there an innate fear of response there have been studies previously that showed that little babies as young as seven months old Have a noradrinergic This is part of their stress system a noradrinergic response to fearful faces and they can measure that by Pupillary dilation so how big the pupils get if and it's not really fear but arousal That's that's actually being measured and so historically They've been able to show that seven month old infants when they see fearful faces have increased Pupillary dilation they're aroused by these looks of fear on other people's faces So the question was what if not faces but actually images Of things that people are afraid of how does the baby respond to that? So they took six month old infants and measured pupillary response to flowers versus spiders in these snakes and And fish so fish fish aren't so scary. They flop around a bit, right? But snakes I don't know some people love snakes some people love spiders So this is a is it is it a learned response or is it innate and that is the big question Wait, wait before you before you tell us the answer Uh-huh So my I have a four-year-old who is absolutely fearless of she'll pick spiders up in the house and take them outside At the pet stores, they had these these folks that would let you hold the mice And she just hold the mice and just you know totally thought they were adorable until she found out her sister was afraid of these things And now she's like oh, I don't I don't I don't want to touch go anywhere near that spider I don't want to hold it but she really did have to learn it from her sister because She had no fear of any of these things, right? So I don't know maybe according to this study Your four-year-old is an outlier So it turns out the majority of these six-month-old babies have a pupillary dilation That's highly significant in response to these fearful images of spiders or snakes versus the things that are kind of innocuous and Not really threatening at all So there may be I mean that's this doesn't mean that the babies are afraid They're pupils dilated. It just means they're aroused that this is something they go. Oh, I should pay attention to this versus Not pay attention to something else And so this suggests that there is an innate pathway Within the human psyche to be prepared potentially for threatening stimuli So spiders We're just afraid of them Yeah, and the thing that I would wonder about with that is that here in the United States for example There are not that many venomous snakes and there are a lot less Actually spiders that are dangerous to humans here than perhaps on other continents So is this something that starts way back in our evolutionary history when there were a lot more Life-threatening spiders and snakes then we have to deal with here Which is the thing that I always do it especially in California where I teach kids about snakes We're I'm always having to tell them that in California There's only one species of snake that you have to worry about rattlesnake the rattlesnake and it tells you where it is right so to be to have this innate fear of snakes is Not necessarily an evolutionary advantage in some places especially because snakes and spiders are pest control Absolutely, so a desire to So how did kind of extricate yourself from those animals might actually be a problem So Blair you used to be terrified of spider terrified if there was a spider in the room and I did not see it get Removed I would not go into the room for days This is also coming from the same person who wants to to create wallpaper of jumping spider correct Yeah, so my head's a mess. What can I say? Yes overcome this how did I overcome it actually by learning about them? That was that was ultimately it was finding out more about these animals why they're important the fact They're not dangerous Education and diving into the science of these animals life history and all this kind of stuff That was the key to me because it wasn't this weird creepy-crawly thing moving in a way I didn't understand that was that was dangerous. It was a thing that had a job in my house And a good job and some of those jumping spiders as we've seen from the entomology conference have really nice eyelashes From the calendar that we all got there's great little jumping spiders in there I actually probably offend somebody here But I convinced my daughter that spiders were okay my four-year-old that to allow them to you know Sort of not be afraid because the one thing she really can't stand is mosquitoes So once I told her that no that's this is what eats mosquitoes This is what's going to catch the errant mosquito that's going around our house Is if the spiders allowed to remain with us and so she became a lot more friendly towards the spiders again? That's fabulous. You know what it's time for now I hope our guests have no fear because it's time for our first interview I would like to welcome dr. Jessica Ware up to the stage Dr. Ware is an evolutionary biologist and entomologist. She is assistant professor at Rutgers University, New York Studying the evolution of insect physiology and behavior particularly particularly dragonflies and Dicopter as well as their geographic Distribution and on an interview that she that she gave her a website once she said she studies the evolution of insects Through space and time So you are like the doctor who? Insect study I actually am like one of my graduate students one time made a slide from you With the doctor who logo changed the doctor where it was my most beloved slide I'm a doctor who fan. I'm a who'd be in perfect. Yeah, this is great So tell us a little more about what you and your lab focus on so we as you mentioned We work on dragonflies and damselfies But we also look at Dicty after which are the termites and cockroaches praying mantises are also in the Dicty after But that's what Gavin Svensson's lab works on We're really interested in different aspects of phylogeny How you could use phylogeny to ask questions about behavior and ecology so in dragonflies We're really interested in flight behavior and migration and in the way that they make the way that they're naughty bits Kind of connect to each other. That's an interesting question for our lab We were just talking about that last night. Yeah, cuz they make that heart Copulatory wheel really romantic when you think about it But what the male is actually doing in that heart shape is actually scraping out the previous male sperm And so it makes it less romantic when you think about that way I think I think a man who cleans up around the place is probably That's a desirable quality. Yeah, this is where the shin kicking comes in Continue Well for termites, we have a slightly different question that we ask for termites Actually as an aside if there are graduate students who are interested in copulatory behavior in mating behavior We don't know a lot about how termites do what they do in terms of making progeny How the parts fit together? But what we work on in my lab is looking at differences among termites and what they eat We always think of termites just as being wood feeders But there's actually a whole bunch of termites that are in the group called the lower termites that great that are grazers So they feed on grass and they have different mandibles different teeth Structure that's related to the food that they eat and they have endosymbionts They have things that live inside their hindgut that help them digest their food and that varies Predictably with the type of food that they're eating right so you've got termites that feed on wood sources And so the cellulose that's hard to digest you probably need some kind of bacterial Species to be able to assist that with that and that would vary depending on how difficult that cellulose is to break down Well, perhaps I mean there's a lot of work that's been done looking at the fact that the bacteria and protus There's also protus with Jillian Giles lab works on it in Arizona That seems to have a loot to to vary among species in a phylogenetic way Right, so there's a lot of things that get passed down and they do proctodial Trophlaxis where nest mates look that's a fancy word to say that they're just drinking anal secretions from a nest mate as one does So they're kind of like constantly Recolonizing their gut with these bacteria and protus and so they kind of are local effects of the species that you see But there's a lot of that's kind of a lot of work that other labs are working on So Dragonflies cockroaches termites. These are not I mean aside from being insects. They're not closely related Within that. So how did you come to I mean you love Odinata? I love them. You love the Odinata You're on so many boards and you supporting the Odinata of the world How did you move from dragonflies and your a love of dragonflies into studying? Cockroaches and termites these things that so many people are like What there's a cockroach in my cupboard. It's not clean, you know It's funny how they're so different like when you talk about dragonflies everybody says Oh, I've got a dragonfly tattoo, which is always always an ant lion because it has the wrong antennae But they're quite a dragonfly tattoo or I've got dragonfly earrings No one says that for termites and cockroaches, right? There's always disdain and like a negative visceral reaction But I got interested in them actually when I was a graduate student doing like a term paper on Dicthioptera for my entomology class and I was committed to doing you know Odinata for my thesis work But the paper that I ended up working on was looking at how out-group selection in a phylogeny You have to have the taxa that you want to study and some close relatives and I looked at how that varied Whether or not we thought praying mantises termites or cockroaches were more closely related And I kind of got hooked and so after that I did a post-doc where I looked at termites and termites have a really neat fossil record And so that kind of got me hooked too Right fossil record. So let's get into the question of studying the evolution of these insects You know more into this time and space aspect of you know of how insects are moving from One place to another and one form to another It's really it's an exciting time to be studying insects because we think we are getting close to understanding the true tree of Insects the true kind of relationships of how the different orders are related to each other and once you know How they're related you can then start asking questions about when they diversified when these speciation events took place Dragonflies are really great because they're at the base of the insect tree, right? So before there were bats before there were pterosaurs before there were birds There were dragonflies flying around giant like giant dragonflies. Well, they were these things are not real dragonflies But they're pretty close cousins. They're called proto-odonates by some people And these things have you know 70 centimeter wingspans But they're not those are not the real dragonflies that we see flying around today the crown The the modern dragonflies are only about 250 million years old So much younger than these giant ones that were flying in the carboniferous around 350 million years ago But they did the kind of similar thing, you know, they were hunting in the air But at a time when those giant proto-odonates were flying all they had to eat was each other, right? So there weren't a lot of things flying around and what we think is that they were probably pretty clumsy flyers And if you look at wing venation in dragonflies and damsel flies It can tell you something about flight behavior because certain wing venation patterns are correlated with certain styles of flight So we think that these big like proto-odonates were just kind of paddling through very viscous air But when birds and frogs came on the scene dragonflies had to get really fast at everything They did and be really good at maneuvering So we see like a change of wing venation a change in flight behavior so modern dragonflies have a variety of Flight behaviors and some of them can turn on a dime. They have really good maneuverability Which we think those older, you know carboniferous things probably couldn't right Evan rude Sorry Harkening back to old Disney movies So that the morphology of these insects is really important Because the structure begets function and how they can actually survive and fly in their environments You're working a lot now also on the genomic aspect So not just the structural aspect, but the the internal instructions that make that structure And so how are you looking at that and how is that? Actually influencing or how is it benefiting your research? That's a really interesting question So most of the work that we've done for odenates for dragonflies in my lab has looked at transcriptomics And so that can tell us something about the types of genes that were expressed at the time when we squashed these guys when we killed them But we haven't done a lot of work kind of Yet teasing apart what the actual genes are most of the genes that we know that we've been using for phylogenetics Or for phylogenomics have been housekeeping genes So but there's a lot of this there's like a whole field of diamonds there that people just need to kind of pick up and use To kind of ask questions about color and vision to ask questions about Oxfost genes to ask questions about you know genes that are related with flight or immune response dragonflies and damselflies are victims of mites So you talked about mites before we hate them because they cover dragonflies and damselflies They get covered in them and it blocks their genitalia So that is some type of immune response might be a problem. Yeah, it's round on it You know, it's not great in the in the pond circle So we want to try and like look at use the transcriptomic information that we have for ask other questions about genes that are related to to these phenomena cool, and so What are you doing moving forward looking at look using these tools of the phylogenomics the transcript Transcriptomics and what are you? How are you moving forward and trying to move the field forward? Well, I mean for dragonflies and damselfies what we're trying to do is it's a really small order So there's you'll hear talks today where people will stand up graduate students I'm so impressed and they're working on groups that have a hundred thousand individuals hundred thousand species There's six thousand total species in Odinata So our real it's a realistic goal that we'll be able to have at least transcriptomic information for all of these species But hopefully have more genomic information if we could we could finish this order, you know And have it and know everything about them in terms of their physiology their genes their genomics That's a realistic goal. I think in our lifetime, and that's just for living for extant species of Of these Odinates. Yeah, they have a really good fossil record. So there's lots of Odinates that There are stem taxa there are stem lineages And there's a whole group of people that are working at the Paris Museum and at places in Germany and France There's you know specializing on the fossil the fossil taxa and Looking at the fossil the fossil taxa. How do you do that? Is it the same thing? I mean, I know with human fossils or with you know our Homo ancestors Going back and we're being able to gather blood cells or DNA from the bones that it's been preserved Is it the same kind of process? well for dragonflies and damselfies they It's a bit of a different process. Usually what we have are fragmented pieces of wing venation I mean most of the wing venation is pretty diagnostic and you can kind of pin it down to at least a family and there are certainly Lots of fossils that we have that go right to the species level We can't really do much more than that most of the compression fossils all you can do is really morphology We do have samples that are in that are in amber About 10 years ago. There was only 20 Odinates that were in amber and 19 of those were damselfies But since then there's been a large deposit that's been found in China And there's you know hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of samples of of Odinates that are in amber Some of the amber you can actually dissolve with chemical solvents And so maybe they'll be able to do some types of dissections with that with that work that Jarzan Bowsky is doing And that that's kind of an exciting time and you know Termites we mostly have compression fossils that we're working with and termites are really just kind of bags of goo When you take out the mandibles you can't see the mandibles in the fossil It just kind of looks like a squashed bag of goo that's in this compression fossil But there's some stuff that you can do with termite fossils too Yeah, hopefully that bag of goo has individual components that once you can get into the molecular and chemical aspects of it You can tease it apart a little bit. Yeah, that's true. And so with these the amber fossils We're gonna have it's gonna be Jurassic Park with Dragonflies That would be great. That's our dream, right? If we could resurrect Meganura, then I think many people will be very Disappointed on their Sunday techniques with these giant things Probably a lot of bugs though. Yeah, and finally for our questions in terms of your study of entomology and Insects not just the insects that you study, but looking at it from an evolutionary perspective. Why is this study? important Well, pretty much every talk that's at this conference that you're gonna hear has some basis It's rooted in evolution whether it's integrated past management whether it's some of the biotechnology talks They're all of the things that we're discussing have a fundamental basis in in evolution and understanding how the different species That have these different concepts or phenomenon that people are talking about They're all related to each other and the phylogenetic history of these organisms really kind of underlines every question that every person is asking So if you go to a biocontrol talk one thing that you might wonder is how are the species that are invasive pests related to each other? So evolution kind of is an undercurrent for all of our all of our work that we do in the anthropological society of America So having a strong insect pylogeny really understanding how you know different orders are related to each other families genus species That's it's it behooves us all it really it behooves us to take a look at that and to really put that into each of our studies and You have also you've spoken at the March for Science and so are an outspoken proponent of entomological science in general And do you do you think it's going to be difficult to continue to reach out? Or do you think it's getting easier to tell the stories of insects to the public and get them interested in what you do? Well, I certainly think that with social media It's a lot easier to get insect messages out. I think that if you Have a social media presence you're able just to slip, you know You mostly drag-and-fly photos, but you can slip some cockroach photos in it Just start slipping in cockroach photos and termites and before you know it you kind of desensitize the person I hope for this negative visceral reaction that most cockroaches elicit So I think I'm optimistic for the future of for those of us who work on things that make you feel itchy like Lice and bedbugs and cockroaches and termites, you know Hopefully we we have kind of a captive audience and our Twitter feed that we can kind of you know Provide a little bit of the love story behind these things, right? So you heard I hear dragonflies the gateway insect In my hometown we have these Very large outdoor cockroaches that are just they're covered the sidewalks usually in the evening Yeah, and you go walking and they go crunch crunch crunch under your feet You sort of do get desensitized to them being out there in the environment But it would also be nice to have like a little bit more of a love story about your you know about your local Community cockroach so that you could feel good. Maybe step around. Yeah I'm also really fascinated by this proto Oda being its own prey Like that's like how does how does that ecosystem survive? Did they also start out in the water and then come above or is it? Yeah, presumably. I mean all odinates and we think the protonate proto and it's as well had their larval You know stages in the water or the nyad nymph juvenile We had a whole debate about that in an earlier session today People call the juvenile stages different things that odinates But anyways, they have aquatic stages and presumably that's what proto odinates had as well And that's probably why you'd want to stay in the water as long as possible because as soon as you came up You were you were eating and even for modern dragonflies. I mean modern dragonflies cannibalize each other constantly So many of the many of the times when you go out to the field to catch dragonflies and you go to catch them They've got things in their mouth so often it's flies and things But many times it's damselfly that's dragonflies. They're really good at eating each other and it's a really good source I mean dragonflies if you're ever, you know in a bad situation and you need to have some food meal Go for a dragonfly because that flight muscle is really thick. It's got a lot of protein. They have good fat stores So that's a good one to consume. Have you eaten the dragonfly? I have eaten the dragonfly And they're not bad, you know, you the muscle of the thorax is pretty good There's actually a guy at the American Museum of Natural History Lou Sorkin who is very into entomophagy and he's tried to feed us I think every kind of of insect that there is I think the farthest I've gone is mealworm powder, you know the flower like make cookies out of the flower We eat mealworms last June when we were in Philadelphia. Philadelphia we ate mealworms. It tasted kind of nutty Does anybody have any questions from the audience? I'd love to if anyone has any comments or questions for Dr. Where we have a microphone if you'd like to step up to the mic. Everyone's gonna stare at the microphone Please feel free to come up. Did you have another? Yeah, no just that that that might be counterproductive if you were collecting and Finding it to be a good snack at the same time. Oh I should have I should have brought a lunch. I'm gonna have to go back out to the field now My food is consumed. Yeah, we don't actually eat I mean, I've never had been compelled to eat cockroaches or termites for some reason even though I know I mean, I have like a lot of information in my brain that should tell my psyche. It's all right You know, there's you know Only two percent of cockroach species are pests usually the bacteria that are coating them They get from kind of being around humans So the things like salmonella that we would want to worry about Probably aren't gonna be at my feel tight in the middle of the jungle in Guyana But I just don't feel compelled to eat them dragon flies. I don't know. It just seems like it's an easier self Yeah, I love the dragon flies. I will eat the dragon flies That's actually how I got into into entomology in a way Was that my Nana was an outdoors person? And so she always was trying to point out different things that you could eat if you were in trouble Like she assumed we were gonna have this bad luck before less in the Canadian wilderness And so dragon flies are one of them You heard it here you guys Dragon flies in a pinch if you're hungry dr. Ware. Thank you so much for joining us And you can find information about dr. Ware's research at her website and also her Twitter account at Jessica Ware lab Jessica where lab comm is her website if you want to find out more about what she does get in touch with her Talk with her about dragon flies cockroaches termites. I don't know. I think I think termites pretty cool things This is this week in science and we are moving on with the show Justin What'd you bring if you are a bee you spend much of your time buzzing about from flower to flower in search of nectar gathering pollen back to the hive and out again over and Over again 40-ish times a day and life is good You're a good worker bee from a respectable hive and you have your whole life ahead of you The world is your nectaree You take a moment to contemplate the wonderful niche you're filling nutrients to the hive Pollination to the plants honey for this suddenly without warning bam digger wasp You are stung worse. You are paralyzed dragged from the Sunlit world into an underground brood chamber You've heard the stories, but nothing can prepare you for what comes next Not only does the wasp cover you in eggs, but it begins licking you all Over turns out it's damp underground in the world of the digger wasp in the best way to preserve Prey from soil fungi is to lick on it and by doing so cover them with a film of digger wasp hydrocarbons Most insects have some form of hydrocarbons on their skin that protects them from fungal infestation But that of bees is not as well adapted to soil fungi as those of digger wasps So digger wasp covers the bee and a better preservative film to ensure that it's still there for the larva When they need it new findings from the biosanitur University of Würzburg show that the composition of the protective layer varies according to the type of prey in the brood care strategy in digger wasps team of professor Thomas Schmidt reports on these findings in the journal evolution turns out beetles Have their own natural resistance to the fungi and because of this they don't require so much licking by the wasps So in areas where the wasps are Praying on beetles. They don't lick them because they don't need it I love the licking this bee the digger wasp saliva is embalming fluid And this is Cody voice from the professor The surface of beetles is much harder than that of bees and wasps and in moist soil It takes fungi much longer to infest the beetle So the beetle hunting digger wasps do not have to embalm their prey From laying the eggs to the hatching of the larva to protect them against the fungi They can have the effort of embalming and no longer need highly effective embalming cocktails as a result Their hydrocarbon profiles have become more diversified during this evolution in fact The beetle hunting digger wasps each have much more species specific hydrocarbon profiles and This in spite of the fact that the examined species are much more closely related to each other than other digger wasps that hunt bees and wasps So we talk on the show all the time about how we have different Bacteria in our gut for different food that we eat and so there's this There's different species specific individual specific these different things that we have that that help us Eat prey on whatever it is we're going to eat But this is a whole different level This is a lot more than just the biota that you're carrying around. This is an ingrained change in Structures absolutely. It's very interesting. Yeah, and then using it for an external like the how the prey itself is Evolving the wasps necessity of creating this this licking hydrocarbon activity Yeah so you've got the digger digger wasps that all prey on the on Bees and flies that don't necessarily have hydrocarbons themselves and so they their profile They're hydrocarbons that are found on the skin are They're relatively similar so they're kind of they have little differences But they're relatively similar across the board across space because these these wasps can be in different environments But they're all preying on these bees but then the digger wasps who prey on the beetles Their profiles have become really unique because they're not making they they don't have these specialized cells anymore Or they do but they're not Creating those hydrocarbons that are used for embalming so they're just they're becoming much more unique in their profiles And that's maybe easier to identify and this is this is a diversification yeah an interesting diversification point where we look at this a lot of times and we try to figure out how the The arms races between insects or other predator to prey relationships start How they how they begin and then this is kind of a good example of one where The normal method in which it would be using to embalm because that's not necessary It begins to experiment it can it can sort of use that energy and resource to try other things So this is a case of resource. Yeah of the digger wasps developing this potentially across the board evolutionarily and then the specific group lost the behavioral and the biological adjustment Because of this new food source and now they can go do other things and they can use that energy that would be used to create the Hydro hydrocarbons they can use them that those materials that would be used to create those hydrocarbons for other uses Yes, absolutely repurposing adversity Yeah digger wasp does a diversification. I love it and it's all in their skin in their coating Yes, yes, so what's in our saliva is not necessarily all over our skin Well, what's in our saliva is gonna be a lot that I don't know did you brush your teeth? There's gonna be a lot of microbes in there for us. That's true micro Makeup is probably pretty similar. Mm-hmm. Yeah Yeah, I don't know that would be interesting the next thing to check is whether or not microbes are similar across these digger wasps as well possibly Does anyone need a grad school research project? We'll have quite a few ideas before we're done today That's right every show we come up with lots of potential research projects for people Yeah, I would love in the name of diversification to bring up our next guest Dr. Raul Medina, please come up to the stage No, Dr. Medina is a professor in the Texas A&M at the School of Agriculture and Life Sciences in the Department of Entomology And his research interests center around the role that ecological factors play in the population genetics of Arthropods particularly the incorporation of evolutionary ecology considerations into pest control practices All right, so tell us in a little more detail than what I've just said What you focus on in your lab? What is your research? Well, that was perfect But it can go into more detail what I'm interested about specifically is how The association they call a of insects in particular their interactions with their hosts because I study parasites So how the interaction of insects with their hosts alter their population genetics? And I'm using host in a very unparasites in a very broad sense So I consider herbivore insects parasites of plants. So I study insect herbivores as parasites of plants and I also as I Insects that attack animals for example ticks as parasites of animals So I'm very interested in seeing how the interactions with Prasite hosts affect their genetics and how the processes that affect insects that attack plants Compared to the ones of insects attacking animals Right, so I'm fascinated by this the the parsing of the language itself to having come from this idea We have predator prey and then parasites are this completely different Category than the simple predator prey makeup. So can you talk a little bit more about how you've come to this? Well, it's basically because I see things a little bit from a population genetics standpoint So for me, it's just sets of genomes interacting with different sets of genomes to get resources from them And for me that's a parasitic interaction. I know people that study parasites Perhaps that will be a little bit upset with me, but that's how I see it And what I'm very interested in is it for example seeing how when you have what is called for a generalist herbivore, for example, how in reality We have a bunch of different Genotypically distinct populations interacting with genetically distinct populations of plants So generally typically populations of insects interacting with genetically distinct populations of plants and I what I'm really interested about is how Genetically distinct populations differ in traits that are relevant to their control. So it was ultimately what I Want to emphasize or what I want to I mean now is actually very obvious at the beginning wasn't I mean when you talk about IPM Which is integrated pest management, which is the new paradigm about controlling. Well, not the new but the current paradigm of pest control People knew the importance of ecology in that paradigm But it was a little bit difficult to explain the importance of evolution within that paradigm now That's changing. It's way better now than it was 20 years ago in terms of the I mean I took I mean scientists knew this But not the practitioners not the growers not the insecticide companies as much now with the issue of insecticide resistance I think it's very easy to explain how evolution can affect pest control practices and even resistance to genetically modified plants, which we are starting to see examples of Have helped to sell the importance of evolution in in IPM, but basically I mean, I don't know if I am sorry in your question You are it's great. And now I mean if you want to complicate things a little bit more You just talk about microbes and that's something that I'm interested in studying as well So when we say interactions, I'm talking about interactions about macro organisms So plants and insects but also interact interactions among micro organisms within the insect body And among themselves and how these interactions might affect also the population genetics of the insects that host this mic So so like if Had examples is talking about this before about how the genetics of your household is you maybe your spouse and The family dog that the the skin microbes the slab that that these things become integrated systems So yeah, if there's a there's a parasite of an animal that also has a particular Micro that lives on the animal skin the the parasites going to have to interact with this as well and have that Incorporated yes, and also like we are we now thanks to the developments in our machines the machines with which we Can detect genomes within organisms when now we know that a lot of insects have associations with bacteria that before we Suspected they may have but we didn't know now we can measure them We can know who they are and although a lot of those we cannot rear them We can do correlations and see for example that many times insects that occur in part in some plans have a specific bacteria That facilitate that Explanation of that man, so there are very famous example for example the kutsu back the kutsu back when acquiring a bacteria Candidates a coella if all of a sudden can't feed on soybean without that bacteria it cannot So this is very important for what I study because I study how population genetics of insects allow them, you know Genetically it's from fully the genetically steam populations are able to feed on different host plants But turns out that it's not that's just a genome of the insect But it's also a genome of the bacteria that live within insects which allow them to do this thing And I like to use the analogy of insects thinking of an insect like an iphone and of the bacteria like apps Allow you to do certain things. I'm gonna download this app. Yeah Suddenly, I'll be able to eat soybeans. Yeah, exactly exactly and turns out that in a fits for example We have known this for a long time. We know that there are bacteria that allow them to We to stand high temperatures there are bacteria that provide them resistance or protection against parasitoids There are bacteria even in in some insects not necessarily a fits but already sex that people suspect allow them to be resistant against insecticides so Turns out and there are bacteria for example that produce plant hormones that allowed insects to feed on senescent leaves because they keep them green For longer so we are starting to realize it a lot of things We thought were caused by the insect genome actually are caused by bacteria that live within these insects before we didn't know that because we Couldn't measure them we could we couldn't detect them or identify them But now with next generation sequencing we have seen all these bacteria and some of them We're used to a lot of correlation correlation studies and like kind of like mining from the studies of a fits We actually have discovered that several insects have these Mutualism some interactions that allow them to do amazing things like increasing their host range, which is for example Yeah So yeah, are we going to someday be able to use this information? Maybe to target the The the microbes that exist within a fits and allow the a fits to eat my roses Yes, are we going to be up be able to apply this potentially instead of applying an insecticide? Is it going to are we going to target the microbes and their genetics or do we or do we give up on them? Or do we give up on that that hold the direction completely and just go to finding something that's going to eat the insect because that's gonna Be way too complicated to take on the yeah Is it too complicated or are we gonna go are we going to be targeted? Well? There is some people thinking about Exploiting these mutualistic interactions between particularly a fits because if it we have we have we have a lot of information on a fits And their association with bacteria for example, and there is a lot of people that have been Studying the interactions of a fits and their bacteria with the idea of at some point use this knowledge for pest control However, as you can imagine, I mean the anti use of antibiotics for example to kill these bacteria in pest control is extremely complicated It's a no-no for several reasons You know the little I mean several all of them important, but just in mind about potential You know, yeah, we're already yeah, we're already having issues with antibiotic resistance due to use in ranching Yeah, so yeah applying it broadly to crops does not sound like a good idea Yeah, so that's perfect not gonna be the way in which this is gonna be done And this that is also the issue of the public and the public perception of antibiotics I mean regardless of the scientific validity or invalidity of this argument It will be difficult to introduce but there but the study of the interaction can allow you to for example find receptors or targets For gene editing for example that you could if you actually know the mechanisms by which these bacteria associated with their insect host you could Use pre-transgenic methods or you know, like somehow modify the genetics of the insect to make them Unreceptive to these bacteria some of which are fundamental for their survival For example in a fits book NERA Fidicula, which is one of the main bacteria in a fits without this bacteria So if somehow you can make the bacteria if it's unable to host bacteria Fidicula by genetically modifying the if it's You will control if it's we thought actually use of antibiotics But then you will be targeting their ability to host the bacteria. We have I mean, this is theoretically possible But we need much more study to identify which those receptors are and which mechanism what we use But people have been using pre-transgenic is for example in in mosquitoes like against You know dengue and things like these are people is actually be thinking of using these methods for Parasites of animals on human disease So it's something I think that's how the future of pest control is gonna look like I think actually we're at the beginning of the next phase of Pest control so we're within the IPM paradigm But I think we're gonna enter into a phase of genetic control that is gonna be very interesting With the new developments in gene editing due to the CRISPR-Cas9 revolution I think we're gonna be able to do a lot of control right now the only thing that One of the main obstacles today is just regulation So we need to think the way we are regulating our pest control methods and made them amenable to actually incorporate these new technologies because right now The regulatory system is not ready to take these But we need to have serious discussion as a nation and in scientific communities and circles to convince our government To start thinking seriously about the pros and cons of these techniques as all pest control methods There is it's not gonna be a hundred percent safe But we need to start evaluating if the benefits justify the risks and I start putting numbers there and probabilities to do ecological risk assessments of several things that we can now do with genetic gene editing for example But this is when all the knowledge right the ecological knowledge and evolutionary knowledge About entomology and the interactions with bacteria and their ability of the ability of genomes to combine in certain ways to Feed on certain plants or not on certain animals or not all this information all of science will be very important In order to incorporate these techniques within a context so we can actually assign probabilities to these Potential novel control methods. Yeah, I mean moving on from that I mean this is dealing with agriculture This is dealing with the food that people are going to be eating and so we've already run into problems Communicating about genetic modification. How do you how do you foresee? Communication related to these additional genetic or transgenic CRISPR-Cas9 Technologies that might be implemented as we move forward I think actually that's one of the main challenges that these these techniques of these genetic studies For pest control will have I think the main challenge I mean there are scientific challenges, but nothing unusual for the kind of scientific challenges We have faced in the past as scientists, but the main challenge is gonna be how do we translate? The benefits and risks to the public because I think and I know some people might disagree with me But I think that when we created genetically modified crops in the 90s We made a mistake of not being able to communicate effectively to the public what we were doing as scientists and when the public got You know like their own Idea of what we were doing all of a sudden by the time we realized the power of their advocacy against GMO For example, it was too late and now we're in kind of an impossible dialogue with and there are many studies have shown How is it very difficult? People have to take positions now taking positions for or against GMO as if it is a political point of view There's little scientific. It's very difficult when somebody have chosen their tribe To take them out of the tribe and I think we need to learn a lot from the mistakes of GMO crops to actually not make that mistake I know people that is working with gene editing Particularly gene drives or potential for gene drives in in using it against ticks for example Yeah, and gene drives and mosquitoes are big big push right now Yeah, and they and people that is working in those circles. They are making a huge a very a Huge effort in trying to incorporate the communities in which these things will be released from the beginning so particularly people people trying to use gene drives for a ticks to control to prevent or reduce the amount of line disease in the US is Having dialogues with communities for to make them participate from the beginning and make them feel that if they don't like it Then they probably won't be even developed This situation with mosquitoes is a little bit more complicated because there are millions of life lost every year And this is more a ornamental level discussion rather than community small community discussion But in the US it's been done right now in the small communities particularly with and I mean and I don't know I Mean even with mosquitoes in the US during the elections There was this non-binding referendum about releasing genetic Well, this was it was genetically modified mosquitoes not as not with gene drives with a different method But in the Florida keys and the public was almost 50 54 and again So it wasn't on binding referendum. So it's just was exploratory, but it tells you how people I mean we're trying to do things a little bit different than the way we did them in the past So I have a lot of hope that we will figure out a way to do it That the public will realize that our fight against insects is really very similar to a war I think like the war there it is It is we're fighting for the same resources with thousands of species every day and like yeah And like in every war there is not nothing you do is gonna be a hundred percent satisfactory for everybody There is gonna be collateral damage. There's gonna be some prices will need to pay So the moment the public is with us with we think you know And the moment the public understand that it's not a 100% solution when you talk about best control The moment will have some progress, but we have a long way to go as scientists to communicate this effectively So I strongly I'm really happy about these podcasts Because this is the way which you can do that to the trans you know to start talking more and more about the issues And getting scientists closer to the public which I mean the way we structure science is in the US is We have a little bit of this effort, but it's not the best trait of our scientific community I mean, I'm even afraid if I'm speaking my if I'm making myself clear I mean it's very hard for us to actually because you know you keep studying something some little thing for so many years And all of a sudden you think it's so obvious and turns out that you know Yeah, if I was born speaking German, I will speak German is so obvious But if you don't know German, then it's not very hard to understand so we are in a little bit So in people that do the interface Translators the fallacy of knowledge where you what where you have it and you assume that everybody else has it and it becomes Something that's difficult for you to communicate Yes the result. Yeah, and I think that's a challenge that we're gonna face now with these genetic control methods But it's very important to understand that genetic control is not a silver bullet and without evolutionary knowledge like evolutionary call evolutionary ecological knowledge and systematics and You know behavioral studies all these Gene control methods won't be as effective as they could be for example if we if we release mosquitoes with gene drives It is extremely important for example to know what the population genetic landscape of the insect You're gonna release look like otherwise big to know the limitations of your technology It's not a silver bullet. So I Think this is a very important opportunity to make people understand that science actually matters and it can save lives Yeah, and that this is from entomology sites, but we're facing the similar challenge when it comes to for example But in antibiotic resistance, right? So we are in the insecticide resistant We have the insecticide resistant problem in IPM in entomology, but people in medicine have the Antibiotic resistant problem and we have I Mean it's the same. We which are similar challenges. So one of the ways one of ways I think is you need to create a friendly face to something I would love to see a genetically altered ladybug that doesn't immediately leave my garden when I release But you could have you could have mascots that are something that well at least I'm saying sound simple Maybe there's maybe there's a catastrophic downside to this that I couldn't possibly have imagined But something like that where oh wow a ladybug that stays in the garden That doesn't immediately fly off in some random direction before it settles down again Yeah, something that doesn't just turn immediately into the Franken fish or where you choose your pitchforks something relatable immediately useful and you know garden friendly Might be might be the type of introductions that we would start with versus versus trying to explain the downsides of the gene drive when When we're we're talking about, you know mosquitoes or something like this like We in it because that that what what we get a lot of times too is feedback from the show and What when we're sort of media monitoring is that it is the fear factors of science that get Talked about it that get communicated that becomes sensational Far far far more if you know only compared to the benefits that are going on so we do need we do you're right We do need better communication But but I think part of that too is communicating All of the care that goes into things before they're unrolled which is part of the problem, right? So for example, the earth is kind of this giant open system And so you can't release these genetically modified ladybugs into your backyard Unless you figured out how that's going to affect your neighbor's backyard so how kind of how does that work that you can do assessments on how these new Modified versions of these pests will will not affect other ecosystems. I mean every time we learn We've introduced a species to fix a problem. Oh shoot that created more problems We removed a pest turns out that pest was actually a pollinator, right? So how can we make sure that these individuals are not going to have this kind of domino effect on the ecosystem? We weren't expecting right. That's a very good question. And actually There is an entire field of ecological ecological research assessment when basically it's it's about assigning probabilities to all these possibilities and that the problem with it's a great idea, but it's very Research heavy so to assign those probabilities. You need to do a lot of research And you know how difficult is to get your research funded today But we need a lot of studies to be able to assert to add to add probabilities to all these potential effects and then be able to decide, okay Okay, let's let's say we do all these studies and there is probability about releasing this particularly Generic way they'll say a gene drive to control certain thing and this is what can happen And this is the probability and we and is this better than spraying insecticides for example because insecticides are not risk-free either We're not just introducing this where there's nothing that's out there already causing effects that are affecting human health and you know But you know I live in a heavily agriculture centered area, California Where it's well known a lot of the effects that are on human health from being exposed to the pesticides and chemicals They're used in farming so being able to you know Remove that with something anything else really that's not hurting and you know limiting human life Would be a huge benefit immediately, right? And so necessarily it's not gonna be risk-free, but it's gonna be perhaps better that the current yeah We already have negative effects taking place now. Yes, if we have a little bit less negative effects That's if that's a win right there. That's a win. Yeah, I'm gonna go with the win The problem is that sometimes it can be worse though it's not always it's not always best so we need to know these probabilities and And right now I I mean the lady bug is a great idea But we're very early we're in the beginning so so we're starting to learn the possibilities of these methods and techniques I think that in the future perhaps we're gonna be able to do that But right now where it's we're kind of like going for a low-hunging fruits They either the trees that are explained by a few genes or the things that for example possess most risk Malaria is a very good model to introduce this because although you know and this is interesting because Perception of malaria risk perception of malaria in the US. So if you're a US citizen, for example, you're your assessment of how risky it is is very different than if you are in Africa and All of a sudden you will think that it's more pressing and you will assign more priority to the problem So because the cost are so high we're losing like almost a million people every year by just one disease And if you add the other diseases, you know chicken we are then can all the diseases transmitted by mosquito It that up to a lot of people every year So we believe that's a I think it's a great idea to try to introduce that the genetic control methods through the mosquitoes because at least We know that there the the cost are really high the risk are very high is human lives And then that's an incentive to do this research. I'm talking about to calculate the probability assigned to this other potential risk because Human loss of human life is usually a motivation for a lot of agencies to put money there Right. And the other thing is that You know what we want to do at the end is Find out if whatever genetic control or not. I mean whatever best control of we use we need to decide if we are in a high risk You know a high risk high probability scenario lower risk low probability scenario in combination of those and in many situations When it comes to ecological costs, we don't know because we don't know the data. So Yeah, so that's why we need a lot of studies and that's something that some agencies don't like to hear We need more public funding more research More studies so we can get the data and we can actually start figuring this stuff out because we are bumping up against as you said this war with the insects and Food shortages for our global population. And so there is a balancing act that is Really come we're cutting it close in terms of timing, but thank you so much for joining us today This has been so fantastic meeting you and talking with you. Thank you. Thank you and Raul Medina's website is Medina lab dot t a m u dot edu if you are interested in following up on his research Moving forward. This is this week in science. I'm going to say a few words very quickly About the show and then we will get to our last Bit of the show All right, everyone if you are listening right now or watching live in the audience. Thank you so much for being here We appreciate your time and your your attention to entomological science today this week in science has Lots of things that we offer to you. 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Let them know that you can find us on iTunes on Google The Google Android podcast Porter portal Facebook YouTube all over the place and That will help us out. We really do thank you for your support and for listening. We really could not do this without you We don't have any music. I don't know when the music went away The music went away and We are back. You are listening to this week in science. We are back once again And it is time for our favorite segment of the show where we like to ask people What science has done for them lately and so I would like to bring up Joanna who is Hosting this wonderful session to let us know what science has done for her lately So welcome Thank you for bringing us today My pleasure All right, what a science done for you lately. All right. Well, I'm a grad student But more importantly as somebody who doesn't have a good handle yet on the whole work life balance thing I don't have a ton of time to eat well. And so the problem is though is that I love to eat and I like to eat good food So my solution has been these websites that use science to figure out The best way to cook everything and to make it taste great the first time not the 17th time I've tried to make it And so Because I'm a science dork these websites also provide the background into why you need to cook things the way you do And so that's something that I love and so Serious eats Alton Brown America's test kitchen Thank you for making me a better cook and letting me eat delicious healthy scientifically proven food And that's what science has done for me. Oh, I love that. Thank you so much Every week on the show we like to read a comment a note from one of our listeners to remind us all that science is a part of our lives every day in a multitude of different ways and So food we eat that is one big way that science is a part and yeah I'm gonna have to go look at that website and get some recipe ideas because I'm the science Kitchen experimenter where the food is usually not good for a few times But it's good so anyone who is interested in letting us know what science has done for them lately You can go to our Facebook page Facebook comm slash this week in science and leave us a message Let us know what science has done for you lately and we will schedule it to be read on the show It is time now for Blair What have you brought for us today? Oh, I wanted to talk about delayed gratification So actually speaking of food. Yeah, a lot of you may have may be familiar with a study from the 1970s I know we've talked about it on the show before but it was with a marshmallow and they sat a child down and they said Okay, you can eat this marshmallow right now or if you wait I'll come back in a few minutes and I'll give you another marshmallow. You'll get two marshmallows and They found that four-year-olds were pretty good at waiting up to about 15 minutes for a bigger reward So that's delayed gratification under four years old. It's a lot harder. If you ever see this done with toddlers They shove the marshmallow in their mouth before you finish explaining what actually is happening So once they hit about four years old The human brain is starting to be able to understand delayed gratification And it's able to delay the reward center is able to delay that reward in order of a larger reward later So there's been a lot of experiments done with animals and delayed gratification The methodology of it gets sticky because they don't they can't really understand a researcher saying, okay So dog you can have one cookie now or you can wait and you'll get two cookies later No, so it doesn't work you need to figure out a way to Train these animals to recognize where food is and a lot of this research has been done with dogs with Parrots with animals that are considered to have kind of quote-unquote higher intelligence as compared to other animals Which usually as the entomologists in the room would know is usually assigned to vertebrates even though our invertebrate friends Actually have a lot of secrets in the intelligence field We just haven't quite figured out how to unlock a lot of that because we don't know how to test on them properly So this new study that I brought today from October 24th from the University of Regensburg, Germany Showed ants with self-control they looked at black garden ants and they tested them on Sugar rewards and how far they were willing to go for that sugar reward So the way they did that they actually took eight colonies They bred them from wild caught black garden ants and took the captive bread ants from these eight different colonies They put them in this space Essentially just a box right and then there was a runway that led to a food reward over a drawbridge So they actually started with the farthest drop first so that they knew there was food far away And then they placed a drop right in the middle of their path that was closer and in different Treatment groups. It was either the same sweetness or it was less sweet and they found that even though the Less sweet food option was still good enough to feed them It wasn't useless food for them the the less sweet option They would actually a lot of them would forgo that to go to the farther food item if it was sweeter so they were showing signs of Self-control delayed gratification To get to this farther better food reward So just to get a little bit into the nitty-gritty of the percentages because that's always the stuff that I get hung up on This was really statistically significant, and we were kind of debating about that last night so they found that That in when they had the two food rewards were the same 83% chose the closer option So they were definitely going for the easier option in large numbers if the food was the same quality But when the farther food was better 69% ignored the closer food reward and went to the farther better food So it does sound like a pretty substantial jump there And they were they were definitely showing signs of being able to kind of plan ahead and go Okay, I won't get this food even though it's fine because the farther food is better And I bring this up for a couple reasons one being that I Know when I'm battling ants in my own home I'll sometimes try to give them something Outside so that they're they stay out there. They don't go in now I need to know it needs to be as good as the stuff in my house But also right you just need to leave a big pile of sugar outside. Yeah This is actually a strike that happened for real with a friend of ours. Oh really? Yeah, where where a large bag of sugar Was in the cupboard and was getting attacked by ants But as soon as they found that there were no ants anywhere else in the house, and so he was like I'm not going to move it I'll just not use that cupboard for anything else that goes to the ants. They've left the rest of the house There's none on the kitchen counter anymore But yeah, the other side of this is just first of all we think about animals in In large groups and colonies like this not being able to think for themselves very much and more and more research We come that comes out it proves they're they're individuals within a unit and they make their own decisions But this definitely also showed that that they they tested that the ants actually seem to trust their own experience over Other ants experience so even though they were near ants that maybe have experienced something different They would do what what they had experienced and they were more comfortable with at that point I think what's runs into the problem of anthropomorphizing ant cognition and In terms of ants making known decisions or what they're doing I think that's maybe a jump from what they're really doing which is having different behavioral strategies where some ants are more likely to be more I Guess will search more and other ants will stay with what is known Right, so I'm going to continue searching and find that sweeter reward and stick with that whereas others Maybe they'll maybe they will just be sticking with the one thing that is close and known as opposed to continuing to search So I would say it's I would say it's search strategy Yeah, and that might be what that 17% was of ants that still went to the farther glob of food That I would be because because I would be worried less about the one that the rest of the colonies already grabbing But what if there's another colony further out? Yeah, and they find that further away one then we won't have that anymore Right, but ultimately what we're seeing here is that there's a large number of ants in this experimental group that Was happy to go longer without food to get the better food, right? So was happy right, but yes, they they they made that Jump within the experimental group. So the idea is that just like you tell the toddler Okay, if you wait, you'll get another marshmallow through this experimentation. They were telling the ant Okay, if you go farther, you'll get better food So and this is what I'm going to do from now on with the ants in my house I will sit and talk with them and tell them the better food is outside You need to go outside the better food is out there But really there's a lot more going on in that little ant brain than a lot of people realize ant social colony brain We are moving into our final Wonderful interview with Dr. Martha Ryskin. If you would please come up to the stage We had to delay gratification to get to this fantastic interview Dr.. Ryskin is a research assistant professor in applied ecology at North Carolina State University her research focuses on using molecular methods to determine the Evolutionary history and future evolutionary trajectories of species an overarching theme for dr. Burford Ryskin's research is to understand how future environmental change or perturbations will affect those Evolutionary trajectories of species or communities Welcome to the show. Thank you now looking at your research I see many fish in your life, and I'm wondering How the fish lead into entomology for you? It all has to do with love Yeah, and that's not love for mosquitoes. Um, I actually yes I very interested in adaptive capacity of species to change and I fell in love With a man a human a vertebrate Yeah, not an insect. It's hard to love a mosquito But my husband I met when I was a postdoc worked on mosquitoes and Has this really interesting system with 80s Egypt I the yellow fever mosquito and 80s albopictus the invasive species and Really interesting research. We fell in love. We came to NC State I said, you know, I think you really need to take this one step further and dig down into the genome of 80s Egypt I and see if you can see evidence of rapid evolution and so it was a partnership in love and so really I am a trained evolutionary biologist Conservation biologists and I work mostly with aquatic fish a little bit with aquatic invertebrates and so mosquitoes are a New realm for me Neat, but it this is but it's not really because your methodology is the same there They have DNA Everything has DNA and DNA is what I'm trying to get at and I'm really trying to see how things when they're presented with a new situation like an invasive species or Rapid environmental change or species interactions like the Battle of the 80s, which is what I'm going to be talking about tomorrow How how they how they evolve and how they adapt and whether or not that's really truly something that's heritable Right. I mean, this is really important I mean this mosquitoes are the the 80s Egypt are Incredibly important for us to understand especially as climate change is changing environments And we are actually witnessing them spreading to new regions. That's correct and they carry disease And this is a big yes going to influence human health. That's correct Yes, 80s Egypt is a wonderful vector for lots of different diseases Wonderful, it's very efficient In fact, it's better than 80s albopictus, which is the mosquito that's mostly biting us in the southeast and and One of the interesting patterns that's happened with these mosquitoes and this is why I called the Battle of the 80s is Really 80s Egypt I came over in the 1600s to the United States was responsible for yellow fever Outbreaks in the United States and had a really nice range but in the 80s the Asian Tiger mosquito 80s albopictus arrived Houston and spread and Pretty much took over all the habitat and an area for 80s Egypt I so really all we were left with were these small little islands that are in urban centers or In areas where the less desiccation tolerant invading Asian Tiger mosquito can't live and so We replaced the the better vector for yellow fever for Zika for for most diseases except for chicken goon. Yeah With this other vector, but It's changing and that's the interesting twist to it all is We've now kind of have a better understanding of how that rapid within a decade replacement of the Asian Tiger Of the Asian Tiger mosquito to the 80s Egypt I occurred and now we see it's coming back And so that's one of the things that we track in our lab is landscape genetics the process of Spread of 80s Egypt I but also how it how it happened that they are overcoming this competition Yeah, so is there anything that you can tell us on how I mean, it's not a lot of people out here so I could probably spill the beans, but yeah So what's really it's so bizarre and this is why I got interested in it because I like bizarre stories and I like interesting Combat between species, but there's lots of different hypotheses for why You know this new mosquito container mosquito. It's adapted to humans could replace one that was already present and naturalized here and You know that they thought about parasite mediated competition That didn't seem to be the case. They thought oh, well, maybe the container You know, there's some sort of competition because they like these little small containers that are all around your house You're upturned frisbees things that are scattered trash that are tires And there is evidence that there is some differences in which species will do better in these container in these larval environments, but it was really context dependent it depending on what the resources were and so what my collaborators and I came to was actually that a Female 80s egypti the naturalized species if she mates with the wrong male She's sterilized. She'll never reproduce again. And so it's an incredible fitness cost Wow if you see it the other way around the Albopictus female can mate with the wrong male, but then she can turn around and mate with the correct male and have Viable offspring so you mean that the cross species mating. Oh, yeah Egypti female mating with Albopictus Males sterilizes her and that's it. That's the end of her life, but the other way around It's asymmetric. Yeah, the other way around it. Well, they don't produce any viable There's no they're phylogenetically far apart So there's no viable offspring to eat to come to interspecific mating But the the Albopictus female can make the wrong choice and turn around and make the right choice and be fine And so it's this asymmetric. It's almost it's a little bit analogous almost of Early modern human and Neanderthal. Yes Interesting the human in Neanderthal offspring weren't as viable. Yeah, and so there's no offspring here this this female, you know, this Mrs. 80s Egypti is pissed and dead and You have killed me. That's it So there's strong selection for females to make a choice and we're finding we found phenotypic my collaborators down at the medical the Florida medical entomology in Vero Beach found that they could take females that were naive that had never seen the wrong male and Over time through about five to six generations They would stop choosing the wrong male once they'd been exposed to it because of this fitness cost And so it was so cool, and I really wanted to see if this phenotype difference Actually was present in the genome And so that's where I came in because I love DNA and I like the guy who was studying it and so No, it just kind of worked out. And so yeah so I actually dig down in the genome and I found evidence of strong Directional selection for this female choosing this of the 80s Egypti females. I gotta know What is it that sterilizes the female? Is it a chemical issue? We're still trying to figure it out It's probably proteins that are in the albopictus males sperm packet. I mean, you know Insects are weird and so It's probably something that just it just ruins it. Yeah, maybe it's some albopictus mate Competition factor that's in yeah I mean, you know some some people have thought well Maybe this is that the competitive advantage of the 80s albopictus males, and I just think it's one of those things where you know There's been enough time separating. They're reproductively isolated and this is just a byproduct of that Right, so it could be something from sperm competition or something like that. It could be Yeah, yeah Yeah So but over five or six generations this choosing the wrong male goes away So eventually these populations as they overlap the Egypti females aren't gonna be making the wrong choice. That's so there's this sterilization factor that is probably limiting Their spread is Going to be minimized. That's correct I mean, there's two things that we think about with 80s Egypti that we're concerned about One is that they are more desiccation tolerant. They're probably more adapted to extremes like extreme flooding and extreme drought than albopictus so that's one concern so from these urban centers like Miami or Palm Beach County, you might start to see some spread and we have evidence for that spread occurring The other thing is that they do have this capacity to when they are Sympathric with the other species to overcome this asymmetric and we call it satirization I'm not cool satir, you know so They can't overcome that that satirization and so that's another factor and and reminding, you know people that 80s Egypti is a superior Transmitter for a lot of these diseases than albopictus. It's not really what we want biting us So, I mean not that we want anything butting us I wonder if there's something genetically about the desiccation tolerance that a lot that is also linked to the the higher ability of Carrying these disease vectors or being a vector for these diseases. Yeah, it's you know I don't know about that it could be a pleiotropic sort of pattern 80s albopictus however is in most cases a better vector except for a few exceptions of Other diseases, so they have their you know, the ones they're particularly good at One of them's got the blue M&Ms. The other one has the green M&Ms and their mosquitoes Mosquitoes But thinking about mosquitoes and controlling them I mean mosquitoes are food sources probably very often for the fish in the aquatic invertebrates that yes and your life and bats and we found recently that they're Pollinators and people are talking about these gene drives to sterilize all the mosquitoes And I mean there are a lot of people on this planet who are like, let's just get rid of mosquitoes Introducing new species or removing entire species there's always going to be some unexpected impact So thinking about your concert from your conservation side of your of your work and thinking about this you know unintended effects or predicting how a species are going to How they're going to act in the future their trajectories I mean, how do you feel about mosquitoes and what we what we should be working on with them? Well, that's a great question. I think it can go a lot of different directions I think that when you think about these two particular species and the cost that they have to human disease and human lives It it's it's a little bit You know these cost-benefit patterns plus both of these species are not necessarily depending on how you Count it They they arrived here. They're invasive. There was a time there when there were no Miss we have a lot well There's we have a lot of we have a lot of mosquito diversity and if you go into our website We actually track the different types of mosquito diversity that you see across the United States So that these two are here And and they're human Adopted I don't know that I I can I don't know that the you know what the unintended Consequences would be other than limiting Disease caring now I can see the argument the other way around we have Often and I and I work a lot most of my work is on invasive species and and trying to find using those as a proxy for Rapid environmental change that you might experience with climate change But we have seen over and over again unintended consequences and You know and and every time we step in we seem to kind of you know Unintentionally really mess everything up Yeah, I think it requires a lot of thought and and I think really one of the biggest considerations with the gene Gene drive is really how to drive it in how to really drive this into the populations or bring them down to levels that are Where they're really not behaving as such a great vector for disease And we argue quite a bit on the show about What is an invasive species? How far back do you go has a landscape changed since it was an invasive? Yeah, so you need to come to my class. I do a genetics on invasive species. We talk about this all the time Yeah, I mean we refer to Egypt I is naturalized because it's been here so long And that I will pick this is the invasive species and so yeah, it's it's it's hard to say I mean I and we have lots of species that arrive and never really get established and never become invasive and so you know And there's a lot of language that we use related to that as well that people argue about yeah And then there are some invasive species that come in and are actually very beneficial to Ecological habitats where they fill a role that something had been lost from that's correct That's correct. And and you know sometimes we see these host shifts where we see a species where? The native population has come down this invasive or what we call invasive has come in and they host shift to it And all of a sudden the native insect is doing much better than it was. So yeah, there's plenty of a bizarre examples Yeah, I mean recently had a we recently had a story on the show where there is a researcher I can't remember his name, but he has postulated he's put forward a book on the idea that That we need to maybe think of not necessarily invasive species, but species that are adapted and working with humans and that are the species that we want to See survive going into the future and instead of conserving all species Maybe conserve the species that are most likely to do well in the future and really yeah hedge our bets with the successful ones Oh gosh, you know and I we talk about this a lot And I think one of the things that you know when we're talking about climate change and and species changing their range and you know How do we? adaptively manage and conserve For these species, you know as we considering all these things in the context of a global climate change and I and I think that Yeah, there's there's just so many wonderful questions you can ask and and I think too that one of the things that we are Struggling a lot with is understanding the adaptive capacity To change, you know, we may be underestimating or we may not have good measures of what that adaptive capacity is You know, we often talk about genetic diversity. Oh, they have to be really diverse So they just can't evolve But then we see things where something with really low diversity does a massive host shift, you know and so we really are at the forefront of trying to Grapple with how to conserve species in the face of all this change But but I can't still make an argument then that we could get rid of the mosquitoes that attack humans in at least North America Okay, I'm probably gonna get in all sorts of trouble. I am a fish biologist Who's wearing the entomology hat briefly? Please don't Shoot me There will be none of that there none of that here. Thank you so much for joining us today to talk about your work Yeah, really interesting. Thanks. Thank you All right, everybody. This has been just a wonderful show we've heard some from some amazing scientists about a diversity of topics and It is now time for us to come to the end of our show. We have done it 90 minutes We're wrapping it up at the end. I would love to give a shout out to our guests Dr. Jessica Ware, Dr. Raul Medina and Dr. Martha Burford-Ricekind to Joanna Esselson Elsenson And Rob Dunn who's not here and also the entomological society of America For bringing us here and allowing us to broadcast and record here at their annual meeting Also, thank you to those of you who've been here the whole time and or even just for a part of it for joining us live in room 605 For this podcast. Thank you so much and those of you who are watching online shout outs to those of you on the chat room Thanks for joining us online. 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