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Are Cicadas The Only Ones Having a Hawt Gurl Summer? with Dr. Jessica Ware
Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness #168 June 30, 2020
On this week’s Getting Curious, Jonathan is taking the creepy out of crawly with entomologist and evolutionary biologist Dr. Jessica Ware. We’re talking periodical cicadas, cockroaches, dragonflies, and more. Dr. Ware is a curator of Odonata and non-Holometabolous insect orders at the American Museum of Natural History, New York and a professor at the Richard Gilder Graduate School. She is also the VP-Elect of the Entomological Society of America, and the President of the Worldwide Dragonfly Association.
Follow Dr. Ware on Twitter @JessicaLWareLab and Instagram @jessicaleeware42.
Find out what today’s guest and former guests are up to by following us on Instagram and Twitter @CuriousWithJVN.
Transcripts for each episode are available at JonathanVanNess.com.
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Hear the Episode
Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness
& Dr. Jessica Ware
JVN [00:00:00] Welcome to Getting Curious. I’m Jonathan Van Ness and every week I sit down for a 40 minute conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious. On today’s episode, I’m joined by evolutionary biologist and entomologist Dr. Jessica Ware, an associate curator at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, and an associate professor at the Richard Gilder Graduate School, where I ask her, “Are bugs and insects the only ones having a hawt gurl summer?” Welcome to the "Getting Curious," this is Jonathan Van Ness. I'm so excited for today's episode. There is a lot to digest and a lot to process in the world. And sometimes you just need to get into that science so you can just, like, keep learning. But just give yourself a bit of variety. So with that being said, welcome Dr. Jessica Ware. You are an entomologist, an evolutionary biologist. You're an associate curator of the Odonata and Non-holometabolous insect orders at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. And you're an associate professor at the Richard Gilder Graduate School. And this is also I just think one of the most amazing things is you're the, also the VP-Elect of the Entomological Society of America. And the president of the Worldwide Dragonfly Association. You got credits on credits with a side of credits, all in caps lock. Like with some other pretty fonts too. So thank you so much for taking your time to come talk to us, Dr. Jessica Ware.
- JESSICA WARE [00:01:28] Thank you for having me. I got to say, if you call me and ask me to talk about dragonflies or insects, I will be there in five seconds because I think talking about insects is one of the best and most fun pastimes. So I'm ready. I'm excited.
- JESSICA WARE [00:02:50] I mean, in a way they are really amazing, right? Because they do have, either 13 years or 17 years. Maybe that's why you didn't see them, because it's 13 or 17.
- JESSICA WARE [00:03:03] There's no 7. But there are, so there's two kinds of cicadas. There's the periodical ones that come out in these batches. Right? Like you describe, they're everywhere, you put, you can shovel them up, you know? And then there are the annual ones, and there, annual ones come out every year. So people sometimes get confused, I think, about which ones that they have. But you can tell them apart because the periodical ones. So they all have beady eyes. So they're very beady eyed creatures. But the periodical ones have red beady eyes. And so that, and they're a little bit smaller. So maybe those. But those are probably the ones that you saw on your second garage. And it's a really good strategy for them because they can avoid. So they live underground as nymphs and they suck on sap, on, you know, plant juices. They suck on roots and rootlets. And they molt five times to get larger until the soil temperature’s around, you know, 64 degrees. It signals a cue and they all emerge at once. And they think that maybe the reason why they do this is so that that way they could just basically use satiation as a strategy. So they stuff the predators, birds or whatever. And hopefully most of your brothers and sisters get eaten and you don't. And you can mate, you know, do what you need to do to pass your genes on to the next generation. By coming out in such a huge number. Only some of you are going to get eaten because eventually the predators are full. Right? And then the rest of you can mate, lay eggs, and then you can crawl into the ground and do what they gotta do.
- JESSICA WARE [00:04:55] Yeah. So I like all insects. I mean, I'm mostly, my specialty are kind of dragonflies and damselflies and then termites and cockroaches. But, you know, I have a graduate student that works on hemiptera. So hemiptera are the true bugs. Only. So all the bugs are insects, but not all insects are bugs. Right? So it's just this one order that are bugs, and I have a grad student that works on, on bugs. So this, you know, I think-.
- JESSICA WARE [00:05:25] So all, so there's 27 or so, 24, depending on who you talk to, orders of insects. They're kind of these, these boxes, these bins in which we tried to group like things with the, with other like things. And one of them is called hemiptera. And they're called the true bugs. And they're the only ones that are actually bugs. All the other things that are insects are dragonflies or, you know, a-.
- JESSICA WARE [00:05:52] Bees or beetles or, yeah, or ants or whatever.
- JESSICA WARE [00:05:58] They are part of the bees, ants and wasps. But only the group that's hemiptera are the true bugs. So you can always impress an entomologist if you say, oh, do you study insects or bugs? And then they're like, oh, wow, that's a very good distinction. I can't believe that, you know, the difference between bugs and insects. It's a good, it's a good party trick.
- JESSICA WARE [00:06:20] Well, hemiptera all have their mouthparts that are designed for sucking. So most of them suck plant juices, xylem or foam, but some of them actually are modified to suck blood like assassin bugs and things like that. But, so, they're mouthparts are like a little beak. It's called a rostrum and it looks like a little pointy straw and it kind of points down towards their belly and then they just kind of stick it up and poke it into the, to the plant material. Or in the case of things like bed bugs, they stick it into you to get your, your blood.
- JESSICA WARE [00:07:00] Yeah. So hemiptera are a kind of, hemiptera are a kind of insect.
- JESSICA WARE [00:07:07] Yeah. The only true bugs. Yeah.
- JESSICA WARE [00:07:12] To be a bug, you got to suck. Yeah. No you have to, you have these sucking mouthparts with a rostrum. It's a kind of beak with the straw that kind of points downwards towards your belly, your abdomen and, and you suck either, you know, they, they've evolved over time to suck lots of different things. But I think the ancestor, ancestral state is that they were drinking, you know, plant juices.
- JESSICA WARE [00:07:42] And termites. So people for a long time thought termites and cockroaches were really different. But it turns out termites are just like a fancy version of cockroaches that are social. So they had kings and queens and workers and soldiers that work together in the colony. But they're really just cockroaches. They're just like a specialty version of a cockroach. So it kind of makes sense-.
- JESSICA WARE [00:08:04] No.
- JESSICA WARE [00:08:10] Yeah, they're just living their life, you know, mating, eating, dispersing, but with one goal in mind, just passing on their genes. Whereas in, in colonies like in the, in things like termites, they have altruism. They have, you know, collective behavior and sharing and, you know, group effort for a common goal and stuff like that, which the average cockroach doesn't do.
- JESSICA WARE [00:09:16] Yeah. Like people who are entomologists really can approach it from different angles. And a lot of people who do entomology do it for pest control. You know, they want to protect our food storage. You know, we, we like food. Food taste good. And pests also like food. And they want to eat our crops. And so a lot of entomology is dedicated to kind of managing pests that would otherwise, you know, invade homes, invade crops and what have you. But those of us who are evolutionary biologists, we're kind of looking at insects from the different angle. We're not really trying to kill them necessarily. We're trying to, you know, study what's happened over the last 400 or so million years, which is about how long we think there's been flying insects. What happened? Like, what made them, what made there be so many different kinds of insects?
- JESSICA WARE [00:10:59] Yeah, so cicadas, cicadas fly. They have very rigid and stiff wings. And they're members of the, the group of insects that have wings. And there's 3,000 species or so of cicadas. There's a lot of different species.
- JESSICA WARE [00:11:19] So we actually. So there's 3,000 species globally. But we, the periodical ones are only in the United States, which is mindblowing.
- JESSICA WARE [00:11:26] Right? They're only here in North America.
- JESSICA WARE [00:11:43] Oh, the roach. Yeah. The roach one.
- JESSICA WARE [00:11:45] Yeah.
- JESSICA WARE [00:12:02] Well, it's true. I mean, we do find new species all the time. I feel like something huge, like periodical cicadas where they come out in thousands and thousands. Some human would have noted and said like, hey, just so you know, there's thousands of cicadas here right now. I feel like we would have had some notes about it. But it's still like there's-.
- JESSICA WARE [00:12:24] Yeah. The locusts.
- JESSICA WARE [00:12:26] Yeah. They're close relatives to hemiptera. But they're not hemiptera, they're a different group called orthoptera, and those are, talk about cool. Those are really neat because they, they, they can either be swarming or they can not be swarming. And it depends on whether as juveniles, they're in crowded conditions or if they're in solitary conditions. So if they're just eating their grass and chilling and not around a lot of other locusts, then they don't do this swarming behavior and they have green body coloration. But then if they are in, in large groups, if they're grown, you know, or raised or reared, there's someone who's done a lot of research on this, Hojun Song. If they're reared in large groups, where it's very, very dense, then there's like a switch that turns on. They have a black form and they are locust, like the ones that you hear about from the plagues that like swarm and, you know, consume everything, they have a voracious appetite and they're dispersing. And it's a real problem.
- JESSICA WARE [00:13:43] Yeah, it's actually really very serious because it not only, I mean, like I said, you know, we are kind of competing with them for food sources. But even, even just like that, that's the primary threat. But, of course, it's also just a giant nuisance. I mean, they're like swarming, they're all over people's houses. You open your mouth, they're kind of, you know, flying at your, you know-.
- JESSICA WARE [00:14:22] Well, yeah, I think what happens is the population density just gets higher and higher and higher until it reaches the threshold. And then they do this swarming behavior. So if you think about it from the perspective of the locusts, it kind of makes sense. Right? Because if you're really, really densely packed, you kind of want to disperse so that you can spread out and you're not all going to be competing and eating the same resources, consuming all the same food, taking up all the same space. So over a long period of our evolutionary time, that may have been a good strategy that, you know, if your population gets really, really dense, that you could have a switch that triggers for you to kind of move on and disperse. I always try and think of it from the perspective of what could have driven an insect to do it. 'Cause we always think of insects doing these things to us. But of course, all of these things, all of these behaviors evolve, you know, hundreds of millions of years or at least, you know, tens of millions of years before we even got on the scene.
- JESSICA WARE [00:15:54] Well, I mean, with cicadas eventu-, I mean, there's kind of like a time, like they all kind of emerge. Most of them, you know, or many of them are eaten. Some of them don't get eaten. They mate, they lay eggs, that it, kind of in the crevices of bark. And then the eggs hatch. The nymphs, you know, drop down to the ground and crawl under the ground. And then you don't see them again for either 13 or 17 years. And that's kind of how it ends. Right? It's kind of relatively predictable, although with climate change, it's becoming less predictable because some of them are emerging early and what have you.
- JESSICA WARE [00:17:41] Oh, well, I mean, for most insects, the lifespan of adulthood can be weeks or months. They're, it's really not that, that long. Even for dragonflies, I mean, they have one hot summer to do all the jobs they have to do. Find a mate, you know, make babies and stuff like that. But in all of these cases, they can have a much longer juvenile stage. So they go through these, what insects do is they, every months or years, depending on the insect. They basically shed their skin and have a slightly larger version of themselves. At least for these insects that we're talking about. And so for dragonflies, for example, they can be, you know, 6 weeks in the water or 5 years in the water. And then they emerge as an adult. For cicadas, especially the periodical ones. The periodical ones might be, you know, molting every 5 years for 17 years. And then they emerge and have one hot summer to do all the jobs they have to do, you know, mate, reproduce, you know, lay eggs, disperse. And the same with locusts. You know, locusts are kind of continually molting in the juvenile stages until the adult stage. And then the adult stages are usually, you know, one hot summer’s length to kind of get all the jobs done then.
- JESSICA WARE [00:19:14] Well, they are, they're multiple year old, they're multiple years old. But like, it's as if, you know, you were a teenager.
- JESSICA WARE [00:19:54] Yeah, it's usually not, not more than a few months. I mean, there have been a few cases where they found, I know someone, Melissa [Sánchez-Herrera]. She found a damselfly with her colleagues in Colombia that had fungus growing on it, which means it probably was at least a few months old. But it's kind of sometimes can be hard to guess how old they are. You can kind of look at how tattered their wings are because their wings kind of start getting shredded.
- JESSICA WARE [00:20:15] Here in North America, I mean, they're not going to live more than, you know, at least until October or so, because in New Jersey, New York, it's going to get cold and then, you know, the temperature will get him.
- JESSICA WARE [00:20:38] Yeah.
- JESSICA WARE [00:21:00] Yeah, that's right.
- JESSICA WARE [00:21:12] Well, you probably have seen dragonflies and damselflies and just thought that maybe they were the same thing. So I have a prop actually to show you. So this is a dragonfly. Right? And it's kind of stocky, thick bodied. And usually they hold their wings out to the side when they land on something. And damselflies, I'm not going to show you one because they're teeny tiny.
- JESSICA WARE [00:21:32] They're not all teeny tiny. But they're very slender. They're very slender bodies, which is why they're called damselflies, because maybe sexism, maybe the patriarchy, I don't know, but they're very slender abdomens and they tend to hold their wings behind their back and not all of them are blue. But in North America, often the ones that you see are blue in color. These like little thin blue things by water, whereas dragonflies, they're kind of stocky, you know, meaty. They often fly. You know, some dragonflies can type really fast, like 30, 35 miles an hour. So their, their thorax, which is this kind of chest part of their body. It's just all muscle, you know, it's just really, really powerful flight muscle for flying. So you probably see damselflies and dragonflies but maybe just thought they were the same thing. There's six thousand species of dragonflies and damselflies. 3,000 are damselflies and around 3,000 or so are dragonflies.
- JESSICA WARE [00:22:28] Yeah, they're found all over the world and we have over 370, 400, close to 400 species I think, in North America. So even New Jersey, which I'm not from New Jersey. I'm from Canada. But I've grown to love New Jersey. But New Jersey is not necessarily known for being nature's paradise. Right? We have 188 species here. 188. That's a lot. I'm very impressed by New Jersey's dragonflies and damselflies.
- JESSICA WARE [00:23:39] The periodical ones. So the-.
- JESSICA WARE [00:23:41] Annual ones, you know, worldwide. But yeah, the periodical ones are only in North America. And there's a woman named Chris Simon. She's at the University of Connecticut. She's done a lot of work, her whole lab focuses on this group. And she thinks that probably there was like one brood around 10,000 years or so ago, that just because of, at the end of the last glacial cycle, because as forests kind of changed in composition and humans have modified forests, you know, so we can create our cities and our towns and stuff. These, you know, populations got isolated into these 15 or so different broods that started, you know, because of timing, because of temperature, kind of diverged to have these 17 year, which are mostly the ones that are in the northern part, in the mid-Atlantic states are the 17 year cicadas. And then there's the 13 year cicadas, which tend to be, you know, Alabama, like some of the southern, southern parts of their range.
- JESSICA WARE [00:24:52] Well, you know, I don't actually know which one it is that's in Illinois. But there is, there's a website called Magicicada. And you can look at the broods for your state and it will tell you the dates when they're going to be emerging. The years, like predicted, 10 years out. Like when you can see these because it's actually like a hobby, like for a lot of entomologists and non-entomologists, like, love to travel places to see these emergences. So they have these beautiful tables. They show exactly where in each state each of the broods are. So we could look it up.
- JESSICA WARE [00:25:43] So it's so neat because insects have two different ways of doing it. Right? So you, when we think of things like the "Hungry Caterpillar." Right? That is what's called a holometabolous insect. It has complete metamorphosis. So it goes an egg and then a larva and then a pupa and then an adult. So in the pupa, everything gets rearranged. And then they emerge as a butterfly. And the butterfly looks totally different from the caterpillar. But the things that we've been talking about, like termites and cockroaches or cicadas or dragonflies, they don't have that type of complete metamorphosis. Instead, they have these, like you said, an egg, and then a nymph, and a nymph usually just looks like a small version of the adult. And then they molt into a slightly larger skin, a certain number of times. Different insects, different numbers of times. Until eventually they're the adult size. And then that's the final molt and then after they become an adult, they don't molt again. So the life cycle can be really funny. Like, if you have something that's aquatic as a baby like dragonflies and damselflies are aquatic when they're, when they're nymphs. So they swim around in the water and they look really different from the adult. But technically, they're still the same idea where it's an egg then a nymph. No pupa. And then an adult.
- JESSICA WARE [00:27:21] Or wasps.
- JESSICA WARE [00:27:42] Yeah. So usually what happens is insects are fascinating. So they, females, in a lot of insects, they can store sperm. They can store it for a period of time. So usually what happens is males will transfer sperm to a female and then she'll do her magic. Right? She'll get the sperm into the egg as it passes down the little slide. That's her egg laying device. And then she'll put the eggs into the bark and then they hang out there for a little while and then the eggs hatch and the nymphs kind of dropped to the ground and then crawl into the earth. And some of them make sort of, for cicadas, some of them make sort of tunnels. Some of them make little burrows. They're mostly drinking. I mean, they're only drinking xylem, like the drinking fluid, right? Sap. So they're anal. This is, I don't know how real we want to get here.
- JESSICA WARE [00:28:25] OK. So they their anal secretions are just liquid. Right? Because they're on like a liquid diet, they're on a juice fast. So they're basically in these little like mud areas under the ground, just kind of being bathed in their anal secretion as they drink the sap. And that's their life for 13 or 17 years.
- JESSICA WARE [00:29:09] Right. So that's a good, that's a very good point. So adults cicadas have wings and they have these little beady eyes. They have these long wings. And-.
- JESSICA WARE [00:29:18] Well, they aren't, their legs, I mean, they're, like all insects have six legs. So they have six legs like a grasshopper. But they don't have a really big, grasshoppers have really big hind leg for jumping. And cicadas don't have that. So they just have kind of six spindly legs. But as juveniles, they do not look like that. So they do not have big wings. They don't have wings. So instead they actually are modified for their lifestyle. Right? Wouldn't make sense to have wings and then crawl around under the earth because your wings would get torn to-.
- JESSICA WARE [00:29:48] To shreds, right? So instead they have a very, very hard exoskeleton and they have their front legs are modified for digging. So they have these kind of claws that are spines that they use, can use to kind of dig into the ground. And then they're very smooth over their back really, because they're just underneath the earth. And then when they emerge in their last molt to the adult, that's when they, you see them with the wings. And you know, the cicada look that you'd know and love. That you, that you're used to seeing as an adult.
- JESSICA WARE [00:30:29] I think it's kind of both. I mean, especially with the case, in the case of periodical cicadas, it's frenzy. Right? It's frenzied. And whatever works, I think, to get you into the soil so that you don't get eaten. Do it. You know that probably is selective for whatever behavior gets you into the soil quickly after you emerge that you're not eaten by a predator, probably would be selected for natural selection.
- JESSICA WARE [00:31:03] No. There. I mean, may, maybe other people could but they're very small. I have, don't have the best eyesight, so small like the first instar is, which what we call the the thing that emerges from the egg, first instars are usually very, very tiny. So they'll be, they'll be hard to see. I mean, I guess it's also just unlikely that you would notice them. But certainly you will for sure be able to see the final one. The one that crawls out of the ground that molts to the adult. You'll sometimes see them. They're kind of brown, like they have a hunchback and they'll be attached to a tree bark or a shrub. And you can see them.
- JESSICA WARE [00:31:38] Yeah.
- JESSICA WARE [00:31:46] Yeah. And you can see the seam in the back where they, kind of rips open and they-.
- JESSICA WARE [00:31:52] Pull their body out. When they do that, basically like their entire gut lining and the lining of their trachea, which is with wi-, from which they breathe, it gets ripped out too. So sometimes when you see those little shells, you see these white stringy things sticking out of the back. And that's what it is. It's like the inner part of their breathing apparatus that's been ripped inside out as they kind of pull themselves out of this, this juvenile state into adulthood.
- JESSICA WARE [00:32:21] Yeah.
- JESSICA WARE [00:32:25] Yeah. It's just the lining of it. So the actual structure that, you know, the little tube is still there, but the lining of it is what gets ripped out. What a way to go.
- JESSICA WARE [00:33:00] Yes. Sometimes you see them there because they've just, that's just where they've chosen to emerge. But also sometimes they just fall off of the bark or the shrub and then they land on the ground. I have kids and my kids see them all the time and are like, oh what's that? So they're definitely noticeable around the bottom part of the base of the tree.
- JESSICA WARE [00:33:25] Yeah, that's their goal. They have, it's that one hot summer. They have to eat, disperse. Find a mate, most life has a goal of dispersal just so that you can kind of mixed genes and what have you. So eat. Disperse. Find a mate. Do the mating part and then lay eggs. And. And then you can die, you know, knowing that you've passed your genes onto the next generation. So they do this in, like, a kind of a neat way because cicadas, how do you find a mate? Right? Like who? How do you find a mate? Like when you're, you're a new cicada, you've just emerged from the ground. Well, one of the ways that they do it is with, with noise.
- JESSICA WARE [00:36:12] Well, they go pretty deep, but I mean they don't go deeper than the roots, right? Because they need to be able to be feeding on the rootlets. And so the roots of the trees or shrubs. But I mean, I think the things that are, I mean, certainly they, they can be infected by nematodes, also the things can happen to them when they're in the ground. But it's when we think of them as, as their strategy for predators, we're often thinking about them when they've emerged as adults. Because when they're an adult, birds and, and other things will come and consume them, including humans. I mean, lots of people eat cicadas. They're tasty. If you fry them, they taste kind of nutty. So, I mean, they're at attract-, they're like a good food source or at least a tasty food source. I mean, I don't know how many you'd have to eat to get your recommended daily-, but.
- JESSICA WARE [00:36:58] Yeah. A tasty food source. So, so their strategy of just kind of, it's better to be in a buffet than be a single sandwich sitting out there. Right? Because they're more likely that people will pick other items and not you. I guess it's kind of the strategy that they're using. For the periodical.
- JESSICA WARE [00:37:23] Well, so females lay around 400 eggs. So but not all of them are going to survive to adulthood. But when it, when the broods emerge, I mean, there are thousands and thousands of individuals that come out like thousands and thousands. It's, I feel like I'm underestimating it. You know, it's, it's really, really huge numbers. And they tend to be rather localized. So even though when you see them on the news or whatever, it seems remarkable. But like in the state of New Jersey, we have several, we have a couple of different broods. But when there's a brood in northern New Jersey that's emerged, I don't see them at my house near Princeton. Like, I have to drive to northern New Jersey to see them. So the thousands and thousands, because that's their kind of local range for that, that brood.
- JESSICA WARE [00:38:12] Yeah, there's one, it goes in West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina. There's three states that it's in this year. So I think normally what we would have done is we would have driven to see them, as, you know, bug lovers. Right? But because of the virus, you know, we, we figured it wouldn't be safe to do so. But those are the ones, I mean, we've had a couple of years recently where broods that weren't supposed to emerge, emerged early. So we have one that's going to be coming up in New Jersey in a few years. And I wonder what the timing is going to be like, because it's, it's, it's like a temperature threshold. So they have to molt to these five, periodical cicadas have these five molts, I think. And then when the temperature in their environment is, I think it's 64, 65 degrees, I forget what the temperature is, then that's a cue to emerge. But as you know, like with climate change in a warming world, that clock is probably gonna need to be recalibrated.
- JESSICA WARE [00:39:24] I think, I mean, some insects are using light as a cue, you know, in day length as a cue. Some insects are using temperature as a cue, for sure. Sometimes it's, you know, there's other cues in the environment or food resource availability. That's also can be a cue and some of it might be hardwired. You know, we're even in an abundance of, of food and and warm temperatures. You know, there's still going to, they're still going to die, you know, after a certain amount of time. So it can be a combination of things I think that they use. But I think it's a testament to how, you know, 400 million years of evolution has allowed insects to do a lot of very sophisticated things. Right? And telling time as well as they can, you know, give or take for, for years.
- JESSICA WARE [00:40:10] Time like that is actually very remarkable, considering that their brains are not really brains, they are not like our brains. They just have these kind of clusters of ganglia, clusters of nerves. But they're able to use this to actually do very, I think, very sophisticated things.
- JESSICA WARE [00:40:48] New York.
- JESSICA WARE [00:40:49] Well, it’s in New Jersey now.
- JESSICA WARE [00:41:08] Oh, that's a good question. I kind of think, like, at the time when you're doing a project, it always seems like it's the most fun one. Like, I don't think there's ever been a project where I thought, gee, this one wasn't very fun. I won't do that again. Like, each one seems like it's the most fun one. So we've done a lot of work. So dragonflies, when I was first starting out, I can tell you this, Jonathan. I thought dragonflies were so pretty. They're so colorful. Like you can get, you know, any, so many different kinds of them. I'm sure every single dragonfly fact has already been discovered. So, there's no sense in working on them, because it's probably everything's already known.
- JESSICA WARE [00:42:31] Yeah. And salt water is death. Right? Salt water is death for insects in general, but dragonflies, you know, they have no tolerance to salt water. They're freshwater insects. So I, you know how I got interested in it? Because I was studying, you know, dragonflies, and I got to go on a couple of collecting trips. And every time I went somewhere, I caught this thing, right? So I am African American and I had never been to the continent of Africa before. And there was a worldwide Dragonfly Meeting there in Namibia. And I was like, so psyched, you know, for the culture to get to go and like, catch African dragonflies, my heritage, my people on this continent. And then the first thing that I caught was Pantala, this thing, this global wanderer that I could get in New Jersey, like in my driveway. That's, oh, my gosh. That's funny. And then when I went to Australia, that was also the first dragonfly that I caught. And so then I just started making me think, why is this everywhere?
- JESSICA WARE [00:44:10] Yeah. We call it the ingredients. So to pass along the ingredients, they have to be really close together, which means that the genetics kind of confirmed that whether we got them in South America or in Japan or in West Africa or Australia, they all were kind of sharing the same genetic pattern.
- JESSICA WARE [00:44:33] Yeah. And we just, we just submitted a new, a new paper on this, but we actually collaborated with a, with a colleague in Canada where we looked at their, so the wings of dragonflies are formed while they're in the water, but they're all just kind of crumpled up in the, in the nymph, in the nymph skin. And then when they emerge, then the wings kind of stretch out and you see like a typical dragonfly wing. But you can look at the dragonfly wing and you can see where the origin was of that dragonfly, because the hydrogen that's in the wings is from the H2O in which they were a baby. You can see whether or not the dragonfly that you've got, whether it was born in that region or not, because the hydrogen actually weighs slightly different amounts, depending on which part of the world you're in. So anyways, we did this study and it turns out almost all the dragonflies we tested were born in a different location than where we caught them, which means they are moving. They're moving.
- JESSICA WARE [00:45:32] I think they, I mean, they are just really good at taking advantage of wind. So they're not like butterflies. You know, they're flapping constantly. They just kind of glide. You know, they're, they're very, they're very hip. They're just kind of glide on the air and just coast, you know, over, over the ocean from land mass to land mass. From rainy season to rainy season, which is, I think it's so neat.
- JESSICA WARE [00:46:13] Well, I wanted to do marine biology, but I went to the university and I got turned on to insects and I loved it. And then this woman, Diane Srivastava, she had a project in Costa Rica and she invited me to be her research assistant. So I went to Costa Rica and she worked on damselflies. And that was when I first sort of thought, oh, this would be so cool to work on, but it's probably already done, you know. That was kind of what I had that attitude. And then I went to school to do bio control, like to do crop management, pest management, because I thought, well, you know, we need to secure human's food crops. You know, we need that, everybody, it will be a human service, it would be great for society. And there's always jobs in, in integrated pest management. It's a great career to go into. And so I had gone to university to, to grad school to do that. And then around that time, I was like, oh, I just don't want to do this. This isn't fun for me. I'd rather work on dragonflies. And luckily, I was able to find an advisor there who was, who worked on dragonflies. And he was really encouraging, Mike May. And he said, like, that's what, he was the one that was like, girl no, there's a ton of unanswered questions for dragonflies. So you should study them. And that's what I did.
- JESSICA WARE [00:47:30] Termites.
- JESSICA WARE [00:47:52] Yeah, there are-.
- JESSICA WARE [00:47:59] Dragonflies are, don't mess with me. I'll actually eat your face, 'cause they'll cannibalize other dragonflies. Like they don't care at all. They will just eat anything. They're voracious. They're lions, the lions of the air. Then cockroaches are mostly, like, not social. But there is a group that is like a sub social roach that lives in wood. It's called cretaceous. And it kind of has overlapping generations. But it's not really technically social. It's just sub social. And then there are the termites and those are the only ones I study that are truly social. So they have kings and queens and workers and soldiers. But you guys learned about bees and they're social for a very different reason. So the reason why termites, we think, the reason why they're social is because they consume cellulose. They consume wood, wood products. But they can't digest it. So they have to have these endosymbiont that live in their hind gut that break down the cellulose for them. So they, it would be like eating and eating and eating and not being able to get any nutrition unless you have these little things living in your gut. But every time they molt, remember we talked about like it rips your gut lining out. So every time they molt, they lose that stuff in their gut that would digest their food for them. So they have to recolonize their gut with some way, but they don't have access to just random probiotic stores. Right?
- JESSICA WARE [00:50:20] No, they'll kill, they. They. So as juveniles in the water, dragonflies and damselflies, actually eat vertebrates. They'll eat tadpoles. They'll eat fish. Small fish. They don't care. They will eat anything. As adults, you know, they eat all sorts of other insects, they eat each other. And there's even like a couple of photos where it shows some of the larger dragonflies that actually have taken down a hummingbird. I've never seen that myself. But some people say that those photos are real. So they, I mean, they're, they're good at catching things and they're, they're good eating things. They have these mouthparts that are kind of chewing mouthparts. They just rarr, rarr, rarr. You know, bring the food in and then poop it out the back, you know, at the end. That was actually my first job, was looking, the woman who I went to Costa Rica with. I was looking at poop. I look at the damselfly poop and tried to figure out what they were eating.
- JESSICA WARE [00:51:16] Well, Jonathan, sometimes you have damselfly poop. Don't you?
- JESSICA WARE [00:51:27] Well, she worked on a specific kind that lives, where the juvenile stage lives in roumeliotis, which is like a type of plant, pineapple's are roumeliotis. So, you know, that little spikey thing at the top.
- JESSICA WARE [00:51:37] Water collects in between those leaves, insects actually live in the water. And so she was collecting the water and the poop was in the water.
- JESSICA WARE [00:52:10] No. I'd say it happens all the time. It happens all the time. So there's, you know, a group of us, I think out there who are entomologist and who carry a secret shame because we actually are disgusted by members of insecta. And I'm one of them. So I, I appreciate bed bugs so much. I think they're fascinating. They have traumatic insemination. The males have a penis that’s like a knife. They stab the female. It's very, very interesting. But whenever I have seen one, I feel like my skin is crawling and I feel itchy and I don't enjoy it. And I have friends who have colonies like Louis Sorkin has colonies and he feeds them on his arm. I'm so impressed by him. But for me, I just can't be around them.
- JESSICA WARE [00:52:55] Well, I mean, now because of COVID, yes. But normally he keeps them at the American Museum. And they're fine. And he is, you know, he does all this interesting work with their behavior. It's so cool. As a scientist, I appreciate it. But when I see them-.
- JESSICA WARE [00:53:08] I feel sick to my stomach.
- JESSICA WARE [00:53:12] No, they're not social.
- JESSICA WARE [00:53:13] They just end up-.
- JESSICA WARE [00:53:26] Well, I shouldn't say this because it's going to make it seem like I'm actually scared all the time but I do have another one. So, you know, for whatever reason, I kind of have a little bit of a bugaboo about scorpions. They're not my favorite. They're arachnids.
- JESSICA WARE [00:53:45] They're not my favorite, they're arachnids. I know people who work on them and they're really, really cool. But one time, it was actually that first time I went to Costa Rica with, with Diane and we were cutting down a bromeliad that was up in a tree. So we were cutting it like this and it was above my head. And we had done this a bunch of times and we were always worried there might be a snake inside. So we kind of rattle it a little bit and no snake came out. If there's a snake, the snake usually comes out right away. So we're cutting this down with a saw above my head. And she was just standing, like, kind of behind me. And she goes, "Jessica, above you." And I'm, "Yeah." I'm looking, right? But I don't see it. And she's like, "No, no, no. Like above you. There's scorpions." And I swear, there was like 13 or 14 scorpions that just came piling out of this bromeliad, falling all over me. And I got the bromeliad and I screamed and I thought, like, this is it. I'm going to get stung a bunch of times. I don't know which scorpions these are. Maybe they’re-, I don't know what kind they are. And I felt, I felt bad. I still felt bad about myself that I reacted that way. But honestly, because by the time I saw what they were and they were pouring out on top of me, like, your eyes are like focusing. You see these scorpions kind of falling on you. I don't know. My hair's curly, too. I was like, oh, they're gonna be all over me. You know? I didn't enjoy it.
- JESSICA WARE [00:55:06] See, this is where I end up looking kind of foolish, right? Because, of course, it's not like I got stung. And I was fine and I shook them off me. I think I had, Diane helped me. We were just flicking them off me. I jumped up and down a bunch of times. I ran around in circles a bunch of times like a crazy person. And then. And then that was it. And I didn't get stung at all. So in the end, I guess maybe the message is that scorpions aren't that bad, but for some reason, even when I think about it. My stomach just goes in knots just thinking about that.
- JESSICA WARE [00:55:49] Yeah. Well, there's a woman, Vanessa. She's at Rutgers and she has a whole, she's a psychologist. And she, she studies, she, like, brings babies in and she exposes them to scorpions or snakes or whatever to see, like, when it is. And it's like a learned behavior usually from, from childhood that you learn to be afraid of, of insects and you're not necessarily born with an inherent dislike of them. So-.
- JESSICA WARE [00:56:20] Sara would be so disappointed.
- JESSICA WARE [00:57:18] Well, thank you.
- JESSICA WARE [00:57:36] Oh, that's exciting. First of all, thank you for saying such nice things. I do think that, you know, we should make more room for, for different types of people in science. So I, I think it's really cool to get to, you know, I was, said to my kids like, oh, I'm worried. What if I seem like I'm a real square? Like, I'm not a fun person and I do a bad rap for entomologists. And my kids were like, who wouldn't think you're a square? You are, of course, a square. All entomologists are squares. Even my kids think that. So hopefully I can, I can, I did a good, good rep for entomology.
- JESSICA WARE [00:59:42] It can always scoop it out. And sometimes it looks like a little spoon. Sometimes it looks like a claw. Sometimes it looks like, like, like a Spock hand or something. And they, they do it for like 20 minutes. I mean, sometimes they're scraping for like a very, very long time. And then the actual, you know, ejaculation is, is much shorter. So but females still have, they don't always scrape out all of the sperm. Sometimes they also just displace the sperm. So they just like kind of push, like with a ramming rod, kind of like push the sperm deep inside. So that way it's less likely that she'll use it. But I think that, you know, some, some females are able to still, you know, make some type of choice over which sperm they use. They used to think it was last in, first out kind of model. But now they think that's not true, that they're still, you know, females are able to choose as their strategy, you know, which makes sense. Right? She should be able to use whatever sperm is going to make her offspring the most fit, that should be selected for by natural selection. So.
- JESSICA WARE [01:00:52] Thank you for having me.
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