So people are more afraid of insects than they are of dying.
(Laughter)
At least, according to a 1973 book of lists survey which preceded all those
online best, worst, funniest lists that you see today.
Only heights and public speaking exceeded the six-legged as sources of fear.
And I suspect if you had put spiders in there, the combinations of insects
and spiders would have just topped the chart.
Now, I am not one of those people.
I really love insects. I think they're interesting and beautiful,
and sometimes even cute.
(Laughter)
And I'm not alone.
For centuries, some of the greatest minds in science from Charles Darwin to E.O. Wilson
have drawn inspiration from studying some of the smallest minds on earth.
Well, why is that?
What is that keeps us coming back to insects?
Some of it of course, is just the sheer magnitude of almost everything about them.
They're more numerous than any other kind of animal.
We don't even know how many species of insects there are because new ones
are being discovered all the time.
There are at least a million, maybe as many as 10 million.
This means that you could have an insect of the month calendar
and not have to reuse a species for over 80,000 years.
(Laughter)
Take that pandas and kittens!
(Laughter)
More seriously, insects are essential. We need them.
It's been estimated that 1 out of every 3 bites of food is made possible
by a pollinator.
Scientist use insects to make fundamental discoveries about everything
from the structure of our nervous systems, to how our genes and DNA work.
But what I love most about insects is what they can tell us about
our own behavior.
Insects seem like they do everything that people do.
They meet, they mate, they break up.
And they do so with what looks like love or animosity.
But what drives their behaviors is really different than what drives our own,
and that difference can be really illuminating.
There's nowhere where that's more true than when it comes to one of our most
consuming interests -- sex.
Now, I will maintain and I think I can defend what may seem like
a surprising statement.
I think sex in insects is more interesting than sex in people.
(Laughter)
And the wild variety that we see makes us challenge some of our own assumptios
about what it means to be male and female.
Of course, to start with, a lot of insects don't need to have sex at all to reproduce.
Female aphids can make little, tiny clones of themselves without ever mating.
Virgin birth, right there. On your rose bushes.
(Laughter)
When they do have sex, even their sperm is more interesting than human sperm.
There some kinds of fruit flies whose sperm is longer than the male's own body.
And that's important because the males use their sperm to compete.
Now, male insects do compete with weapons, like the horns on these beetles.
But they also compete after mating with their sperm.
Dragonflies and damselflies have penises that look kind of like Swiss Army knives