-
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 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 scoops,
-
to remove the sperm from previous males
that the female has mated with.
-
(Laughter)
-
So, what can we learn from this?
-
(Laughter)
-
All right, 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,
-
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,
every time 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.
-
(Laughter)
-
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,
-
whereas the females
are extremely aggressive and competitive,
-
in an attempt to get as many of 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 every day --
-
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 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, if the stinging
individuals are going to be the males ..."
-
Then he got confused,
because that would have meant
-
the males were also taking care
of the young in a colony,
-
and he seemed to think
that would be completely impossible.
-
He then concluded that maybe
bees had the organs of both sexes
-
in the same individual,
-
which is not that far-fetched,
some animals 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)
-
And 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?
-
These are movies. They're fiction.
-
They have talking animals in them.
-
What difference does it make
if they talk like Jerry Seinfeld?
-
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.
-
And by and 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 just couldn't 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, including people,
-
can vary.
-
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)