-
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.
-
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 fight, 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 assumptions
-
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 are 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
-
with all of the attachments pulled out.
-
(Laughter)
-
They use these formidable devices like
like scoops, to remove the sperm
-
from previous males that
the female has mated with.
-
(Laughter)
-
So, what can we learn from this?
-
(Laughter)
-
Alright, it is not a lesson in the sense
of us imitating them or of them setting
-
an example for us to follow.
-
Which given this, is probably just as well.
-
And also did I mention sexual cannibalism
is rampant among insects?
-
So, no, that's not the point.
-
But what I think insects do, is break
a lot of the rules that we humans have
-
about the sex roles.
-
So people have this idea that nature
dictates kind of a 1950s sitcom version
-
of what males and females are like.
-
So that males are always
supposed to be
-
dominant and aggressive, and females
-
are passive and coy.
-
But that's just not the case.
-
So for example, take katydids, which are
relatives of crickets and grasshoppers.
-
The males are very picky about who they
mate with because they not only transfer
-
sperm during mating, they also give
the female something
-
called a nuptial gift.
-
You can see two katydids
mating in these photos.
-
In both panels, the male's the one on
the right and that sword like appendage
-
is the female's egg-laying organ.
-
The white blob is the sperm and the green
blob is the nuptial gift, and the male
-
manufactures this from his own body
and it's extremely costly to produce.
-
It can weigh up to a third
of his body mass.
-
I will now pause for a moment
-
and let you think about what it would be
-
like, if human men --
everytime they had sex
-
had to produce something that weighed
50, 60, 70 pounds.
-
(Laughter)
-
Okay, they would not be able
to do that very often.
-
And indeed, neither can the katydids.
-
And so what that means, is the katydid
males are very choosy about who they
-
offer these nuptial gifts to.
-
Now, the gift is very nutritious
and the female eats it during
-
and after mating.
-
So, the bigger it is, the better
off the male is because that means
-
more time for his sperm to drain into her
body and fertilize her eggs.
-
But it also means that the males are very
passive about mating, where as the females
-
are extremely aggressive and competitive,
in an attempt to get as many as these
-
nutritious nuptial gifts as they can.
-
So, it's not exactly a
stereotypical set of rules.
-
Even more generally though, males are
actually not all that important
-
in the lives of a lot of insects.
-
In the social insects --
the bees and wasps and ants
-
the individuals that you see everyday,
the ants going back and forth
-
to your sugar bowl, the honey bees
that are flitting from flower to flower.
-
All of those are always female.
-
People have had a hard time getting their
head around that idea for millennia.
-
The ancient Greeks knew that there was
a class of bees, the drones, that are
-
larger than the workers, although
they disapproved of the drones' laziness
-
because they could see that
the drones just hang around the hive
-
until the mating flight --
they're the males.
-
They hang around the hives until
-
the mating flight, but they don't
-
participate in gathering nectar or pollen.
-
The Greeks couldn't figure out
the drones sex, and part of the confusion
-
was that they were aware of the stinging
ability of bees, but they found it
-
difficult to believe that any animals
that bore such a weapon could
-
possibly be a female.
-
Aristotle tried to get involved as well.
-
He suggested, OK, well if the stinging
individuals are going to be the males,
-
then he got confused because that would
have meant that males were also taking
-
care of the young in the colony
and he seemed to think that would be
-
completely impossible.
-
He then concluded that bees had the organs
of both sexes in the same individual,
-
which is not that farfetched.
-
There are some animals that do that, but
he never really did get it figured out.
-
And you know, even today, my students
for instance call every animal they see
-
including insects, a male.
-
And when I tell them that the ferocious
army ant soldiers with their giant
-
jaws, used to defend the colony are all
always female, they seem to not
-
quite believe me.
-
(Laughter)
-
Certainly all of the movies --
Antz, Bee Movie
-
portray the main character in the social
insects as being male.
-
Well, what difference does this make?
-
I mean, these are movies.
-
They're fiction.
-
They have talking
animals in them,
-
what difference does it
make if they talk
-
like Jerry Seinfeld?
-
(Laughter)
-
I think it does matter and it's a problem
that actually is part of a much deeper
-
one that has implications for medicine,
and health and a lot of other aspects
-
of our lives.
-
You all know that scientists use
what we call model systems,
-
which are creatures --
white rats or fruit flies
-
that are kind of stand-ins for all other
animals including people.
-
And the idea is, that what's true
for a person will also be true
-
for the white rat.
-
By in large, that turns
out to be the case.
-
But you can take the idea
of a model system too far.
-
And what I think we've done, is use males,
in any species, as though they are
-
the model system.
-
The norm.
The way things are supposed to be.
-
And females as a kind of variant --
something special that you only study
-
after you get the basics down.
-
And so back to the insects.
-
I think what that means, is that people
could not see what was in front of them.
-
Because they assumed that the world's
stage was largely occupied by male players
-
and females would only have minor,
walk-on roles.
-
But when we do that,
we really miss out on a lot
-
of what nature is like.
-
And we can also miss out on the way
natural, living things incudling people
-
can very.
-
And I think that's why we've used males
as models in a lot of medical research,
-
something that we know now to be a problem
if we want the results to apply
-
to both men and women.
-
Well, the last thing I really love about
insects is something that a lot of people
-
find unnerving about them.
-
They have little, tiny brains with very
little cognitive ability the way
-
we normally think of it.
-
They have complicated behavior,
but they lack complicated brains.
-
And so, we can't just think of them
as though they're little people
-
because they don't do
things the way that we do.
-
I really love that it's difficult
to anthropomorphize insects,
-
to look at them and just think of them
like they're little people
-
in exoskeletons with six legs.
-
(Laughter)
-
Instead, you really have to accept them on
their own terms because insects make us
-
question what's normal and what's natural.
-
Now, you know, people write fiction
and talk about parallel universes.
-
They speculate about the supernatural,
maybe the spirits of the departed
-
walking among us.
-
The allure of another world is something
that people say is part of why they want
-
to dabble in the paranormal.
-
But as far as I'm concerned, who needs
to be able to see dead people?
-
When you can see live insects?
-
Thank you.
-
(Applause)