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Shirtless, severely bog bitten, and in my case, underwear listening Don't Me to Eat podcast You Can't Predict Anything presented by on x Hunt, creators of the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store, nor where you stand with on x Okay We're gonna start all with a quick song. She waki fall me for home live, she me for fun boo ca me for shan right you'll yeah, she um wa what do want me? Ful car, That's what I'm talking about. That's beautiful, beautiful. I'm gonna leave that hanging. I'm gonna leave that hanging as like a source attend and well I take over other quick couple of things. We're joined by um this is not i' gonna this hanging to, but we're doing joined by Dr Justin. Oh Schmidt. You don't know this, uh, Dr Schmidt. We've talked about you a whole bunch. So we've talked about the Schmidt paint index and that led me to start and reading about you and reading your book and getting interested in you. But can you just hang tight a minute? Sounds good? I was, I'll tell you I have to. Before we started here, before that beautiful song, I was telling Cal that I had to. Cal's telling me that I told him a story that's not my story. You're confusing me with someone else, you don't, that's correct, Yeah, I must be correct. Yeah. Yeah. So Cal's saying like, oh, when you were saying and he told the story. It's like, that's not my story. But I have to this two chicken stories I do have, not your chicken stories. I have where. Um, there's a place in in in Mexico on the uk Tam Peninsula to Loom, which used to be like just all like hippie kids and stuff, and now it's you know, it's like families go there. People like what I used to be like, people like that used to go there, and now it's just people that are like what I'm like now that go there. But um, they had this in the old days twenty years ago. There's like this little street in town and they would people would cook chickens, is like the local thing, grilled chickens, and they'd have stumps, I mean like full on stumps and cleavers and Machetti's and they would be like grilling chickens and chopping chickens on stumps, chopping blocks. My buddy Eric, um, my dear late friend Eric was obsessed with these chickens and how they could make these chickens so good. And you don't understand like what what the magic touch was. So he spoke very poor Spanish, but he makes it back into the kitchen like you know, like he's he's penetrated the the depths of the facility where they all this chicken, and he's trying to like inquire, like what makes it so good? How do you do it? And the guy gestures to him that there's this trash can full of marinade, and he uh is very eager to have Eric taste the marinade. So Eric drinks some of the marinade and then no sooner does he have a nice sip of the marinade is the guy reaches into the trash can and produces from it, um a number of raw chickens. Then Eric's like, oh, this isn't gonna be good um for my gut. But then the man then goes to a frit a freezer, a chest freezer that's not even plugged in, and opens it and it's just he says, it's just the most foul, the most foul foul ever, festering in like chicken liquid that's not refrigerated. And he replenishes the vat of marinade with these chickens, and then he indeed did get sick. I don't think I'm surprised. Yeah, I'll tell you the story later has to do with when I got to visit a turkey a place where they process turkeys. Story, yeah, not even chicken. Story real quick before we getting what we're supposed to be doing here to uh the whole our whole live tour is like about Licked. There's two venues laugh where you can get tickets. Licked isn't sold out sold but does two venues laugh where you can get tickets April five what's four? Four April April fifteen. In April sixteen, we still have tickets Masa Arts Center in Mesa, Arizona. So like eu Phoenix Folk and then uh u l a Folk, we're gonna be at the National Grove in Anaheim for sixteen. Other than that, you missed your chance, so hurry up and book them up if you want to go, and thanks for getting on it. Okay, now real quick, can you uh the beautiful song we heard was from Dr Schmidt, justin Schmidt's wife. Can you introduce yourself real quick? I'm Leash Schmidt. I'm the Queen of sting O, Queen of sing and can you offer us a rough translation of the song? And then we're gonna turn the attention to your husband Yeah, it's actually the wedding vowel song from a Chinese minority group, and the meaning is basically said, when the flower blooms becomes flower a bees are inseparable. Bees seems born to love flowers, and flowers bloom just for the bees, and that's a metaphor for the love that will be shared between the husband and wife of the wedding. Yes, that's cute and it's called me fun, but in Chinese it's a hunch wedding. Wow. Are you familiar with um? I don't fully understand. I might be mutilating this. Are you familiar with the concept of um? In Greek mythology, there's this concept of of like zenia I think it is, or the guest host bond, and it has to do with the relationship of a pollinator and the flower, and it somehow translates into a bond that exists between a guest. Like what what are the obligations of a guest to their host? Hm? H uh oh, yeah, I'll go ahead, letter rip because in China, guest has no obligation to host. Host has full obligation to the g guess there's no obligation to host. Try to be a guest to China, so when you so, so it would be unusual in China to bring a Like when you go to someone's house for dinner, it would be unusual to bring, say a bottle of wine or a gift. Not a custom at all. When you come as always a full service. It's a food, that's always like we prepare everything. But now maybe it's different now because China always want to mimic America. So but the guests have guests have no obligation. In fact, the Chinese culture, which she has half of it is very like if guests your everything, like we we will prepare everything, like he got the treat when it came to China and so we I think our culture doesn't have that at all. How you guys been married one years? Seriously? Hm, no, it's impossible within China for thirty here for thirty years almost. That's great. I'm not going to argue that women are always right. We remember those dates. At least I didn't underestimate. Yeah, uh, okay, tell people what an entomologist do? You describe yourself as an entomologist. Pretty much, I describe myself as an entomologist or a biologist or for the general public off and just say I'm a bugologist. A bug is anything as creepy crawley legs and jointed legs, and that pretty much gets the concept across. But an entomologist doesn't work because you work on things that aren't insects, right, well, I work on racknets, which are spiders, scorpions, vinegar, ruins, and various things of that sort, as well as mostly in hymenopter which are ants, wasps, and bees, and there of course insects. And when, uh, what drew you too, like what initially drew you to to to digging into these animals, I'm not really sure. When I was about five years old, I was dared one time to sit on an ant mound and those ants, of course didn't sting, but they could sure crawl up your breeches and bite. And that got my attention. And I realized at that point that while there's life out there, and it's more complex than I thought it was, and it isn't this kind of interesting, you know? I find that like if you're a writer, you know, oh you are writer because you have a book. But if you're writing people, you go to do an interview and they'll be like, why did you write this book? And it's like there's two answers. There's you could you could be glib but very honest. You'd be like, well, I wrote it because I was trying to make money. That chance of that. So what I'm saying, it's like, there's like that answer, then there'd be the answer that is expected of you, which is um oh, I had a story that had to be told, you know, and both are equally true. But when you were growing up to become and wanted to become a scientist, was that you couldn't have thought to yourself at a young age that like, there's a way that I'll be able to make a living is by studying bugs. No, I I was fact swait it from studying bugs. You can't make a living studying bugs, I was told. So I became a chemist. Chemists make all kinds of cool things and all kinds of not so cool things, but anyway, they get paid well for doing it. So I went to chemistry and went to bachelor and master's degree and said, all these people and my friends are having such a good time with outdoors or geologists. They're biologists and marine biologists. You know whatever they are, and they're having a lot of fun outside. This was in Vancouver, British Columbia, which is very much like Montana. It's got lots of trees and streams and opportunities. I said, gosh, I gotta find a way to make life more interesting. Etmology was the way I applied chemistry to studying insects and bugs. And so that was where the transition came. That they weren't jealous of the lab jacket and the protective goggles and the benzine and the carbon tetric clarda was breathing every day, No, okay, So that became that that became your focus with insects is the chemistry of it, particularly what they do to their enemies exactly. I thought, you know, here I am. I always have all this chemistry training and I have very little animalogy training. What can I do with this training that I have in this whole new field? And I thought, well, these things hurt. Ever been stung by a bee or a wasp or anything? We all have and they heard so I said, hm, hmmm, what makes them hurt? What's what's the chemistry? This chemistry behind everything? And so I started working on this particular ant called the harvest rants, which hurt a whole lot more than a bee or a wasp. And I said, these little dinky things the third of an inch long, you know, how in the heck do they hurt so dog on much and hurt for four to eight hours. What's the chemistry behind this? So I said, ah, mystery, let's go and work on this. When I found out about you, it was after I got stung by a bullet ant lucky you in Bolivia, and I later in researching it, I came across you, and I came across the your you know, the Schmidt paint index. Like you have a whole lifetime of work you've done. It probably drives you crazy that people reduce it down to like I'm doing right now, that they reduce it down to you. You You came up with this like very clever pain index when you've done all this work. But that's like what you're known for now to layman, is that annoying? No? I think figure is better to be known for something than nothing at all. So I found you that way. But to my credit, I I dug deeper. But I found you because you had a description of what it's like to um be stung by a bullet ant. And the reason I became interested in the chemistry of it is because of I think you give it the most severe score exactly four plus. Yeah, it's the highest of anything. The Tranchila hawk is about equally high. But on the last two or three minutes was that bullet and asked last twelve the thirty six hours. So given the choice, I'll take the two to three minutes over the twelve and thirty six hours. When I got um stung by one, what I became what enthralled me about it was how severe the pain was exactly. But then for me that three hours later, I couldn't remember what foot it was. He probably didn't want to remember. No, it just was so unbelievably intense that I was worried about and I didn't I didn't know about bullet ants. It was so intense. I was worried about dying because I didn't know what it meant. I don't know, is it like getting is it like getting bit by a snake? Like I knew it was bad to get bit by one, but I didn't know how bad. And so there was a lot of psychological like a lot of anxiety around the bite, but then the pain was gone, and I just wondered, like, how could something hurt so bad and seemed like it's doing so much damage to your body, but then it's ephemeral. Well, I think that reason is because we're so big. If you're a mouse, you would have been past tens because they're actually quite toxic and do a lot of damage as well. But you figured a little and it's inch long and at max and it has volatively small size. Now, if it was say four ft long, like a typical snake, and it's stung you, while you probably wouldn't be here today, they can kill a mouse. Oh yeah. Why did just back up on this a little bit, just kind of like the beginning, And I have just read your book The Sting of the Wild. Um, Why let's approach this this way. Why do you feel that certain indec or certain insects or anything spiders? But why did bugs need to develop a way to sting? Like what were the things that led them to to have the necessity to do this. There's quite a few different things that would gone One of the problems. When you're a social insect like an aunt, you have a colony of three thousand fairly big ants, and you know, that's a lot of meat there to eat, and that means big people are gonna want to eat you, you know, like raccoons and quada mondays and things of that sort, larger animals. If you're dealing with something that's a million times bigger than you, biting, scratching, kicking just doesn't cut the mustard. You have to have some way to get through. And the sting gets through your skin and gets directly to where the nerves are. So that's a way of defending yourself and your nest mates, and you're young and that kind of thing. But the bullet ant is a little bit different from most of the rest of them. Why it needs to be so extreme is they live down on the ground of the rainforest, down at the base of a tree. They crawl up the tree up into the canopy. Up in the canopy they forage for nectar and sweet honeydew and hay fits in those sorts of things, and pray, you know, pray for feeding their young. Well, if you've ever been up in a canopy of a rainforest, there's frogs, there's lizards, there's birds, there's monkeys everything on earth, and what are they all having common? They all eat insects. And if you can't jump away like a grasshopper, and you can't fly away like a fly because you're an aunt without any wings, you don't really want to drop off from fifty or sixty ft up because how are you ever going to find your way back up? So you've got to be so tough that these things learned oh big black ant. No no no, no no, no, no, I don't think I want to go there. And the way that happens is they get stung once and that's it. They will learn for life that never mess around with you. And so that's basically a defensive system that allows them to exploit the most dangerous place on earth for a small insect. But what about all the insects that um, I mean, what about all the insects that can't do that? Right? Like a like a like a butterfly has no defense system like that. Well, butterflies, some of them actually are quite toxic. Eat them. And the famous picture Lincoln Brower blue jay eating a monarch butterfly and barsets guts out after that. As you all know, if you've eaten a bad meal or something in your barf your guts out. You don't want to eat that same kind of food for quite a long time. You get this toxic aversion, and so a lot of butterflies do that. A lot of things actually avoid the predators by hiding. You know, caterpillars are often green, they're living on green vegetation, so they're just a hard to see and they don't move. And grasshoppers, of course can jump, and once they're an adult, they can fly, and grasshoppers even have some of the clever approaches. You'll see a lot of them up here in Montana. They fly and they click, so they make a noise which allergs to where they are, and they have bright colored wings, and then when they land, they pull their wings in and they become absolutely like the dirt. They're just kind of grayish or brownish speckled, and they've become invisible. So you're following the noise and the view and advantages and you can't find them, and it's almost a failsafe defense that they have. So each insect, that's one of the things that's really cool is each insect has their own strategy how they make it you're familiar with white tail deer, I'm sure, how could you not be? They're tasty. Uh have you ever heard the idea um that the white tail functions similar to what you're talking about with grasshoppers, where when they're running away, they put up this this big white tails like this like beacon exactly going through the woods, and then they stop and drop the tail, and then your eye is your I tunes into that highly visible white tail, and that's what you're following when it runs away. And then it just drops his tail, and it takes away the thing that you had, the thing that you had found focus on. It becomes invisible. You weren't You weren't actually watching the deer, You were watching the tail exactly. But we have an even more interesting scenario in Arizona. We have a zebra tail lizard, which is a fairly fast running lizard. And if you're tw so away from it, it it waves this tail back and forth saying I'm here, I dare you to try to catch me, and you're running it it takes off. Usually most predators don't bother because they realize it knows that that I'm here. It's too fast. I can't catch it much like the deer. If the deer is a long way away, I don't have the tail. But if it's really close to you, it's not gonna do that. You know you're just ten feet away. It's gonna just try to freeze and hope, hope the heck you don't know it's there. But once it gets you know, some distance way, then the tail goes up and it runs. The lizard does the same sort of thing, and it's actually a very good strategy. It's a beautiful way to enhance your chance that you're not dinner for somebody else? Was it I've been I've been quoting uh story you told in your book. Um, I swear it. I'm gonna tell you what it is, and you remind me if it was your book or a different But I read a handful books by researchers such as yourself Did You Talk? Did You Talk? Talk? In the Sting of the Wild, about how young scientists are so impactful because they're asking original questions, and that you find that older scientists spend their time defending their old idea. Exactly. Yeah, I call that science progresses by one coffin at a time. You gotta you gotta kill off the old guys, so the new guys gonna have freedom to make new discoveries. D Uh, when you were what was your idea when you were young? Like if you had to say where here you are? You know, you're going through the education system, You're getting a doctorate. You know you have an interest in chemistry, you're developing an interest in insects things. But you have to sort of turn it into a question, right, like, yeah, there has been like some foundational premise. I'm guessing if you're gonna pursue the line of work that you pursue, what became your thing that you needed to answer? Basically, I was asking a question, how did sociality and insects evolve? In other words, how did you go for mom single mom raising all her young alone like a sand wasp or or digger be something like that. It was just mom and her young. All of a sudden, you get a huge social society like Honeybee colony with thirty thousand individuals or some ant colonies that have up to a million individuals. You have a whole lot of I was asking a question, how did you get around the predation pressure of predators? You know, if you're My analogy is if you're in the party and you see a bowl and has one peanut, it's across the room. Yeah, it's not worth the effort to go and get that peanut hungry, but the bulls full of peanuts, then you're gonna go and get grab a handful. Same kind of thing with social insects. So the question is how does that peanut, for the analogy, defend itself when it becomes many peanuts so that doesn't get eaten. And I came up with a hypothesis as well, the stinging venom, which relies on two things. The pain gets your attention and the toxicity which does your damage. That that was the reason that they could evolve sociality. Whereas you don't see social flies or you don't see social beatles because they don't have any way to defend themselves other than maybe being nasty toxic. But the ants, spies, and wasps had this automatic stinger ability. It's all I had to do is evolve the behavior to use it right and the chemistry to make it effective. So that was my hypothesis. I wanted to collect evidence two either refute or support that hypothesis, and that's basically what I did. I'm guessing you thought to ask this question. Is it in fact true that the ability to sting in in HAVE societies is something that progressed over time and that there weren't things that used to be venomous and social big overtime became not venomous and not social, like, does it always move in that direction? Does a does always move towards complexity? Well, yes and no. Most of the time it does. There's an advantage of complexity. Have social behavior. You can have some individuals specializing and foraging, someone defending the nest, someone building the nest, someone collecting water, someone reproducing, and these sorts of things. A specialist is much better than a generalist. And the other thing is when you're away from home. If you're just a single mom said digger, b out there in a sandbox someplace you go away to get the flowers for nectar and pollen. Somebody can invade your nest and eat your young while you're gone. If you're social, you have a bunch of people still there. Hey, get out of here, intruder, and we'll teach you the lesson by stinging you or attacking you. So there's a lot of advantages to sociality, which means most of the time it doesn't reverse. But there are a few cases. There's some solitary bees that evolve sociality and low levels, but then as they progress in the further north in the shorter seasons, those that were social and become back to solitary because there's not enough time to have two generations. If your social, you have to have mom living with babies. Babies help mom, and they were the next grandchildren at least, and most of them they continue on for many generations. But you need at least the overlap of mom and her young to help mom in order to be social. And so in some extreme situations you can you can lose that. But it's not because of the normal disadvantages. It's because climatic restrictions, you know, just don't give you the time to do it. When there's that shows a name for this concept and evolution, um, and maybe you can provide it for me. But to be like that, well, you see something fly, Okay, so you see that there's birds of flying insects that fly. Um, one could be excused for looking at these two things flying through the air, a dragonfly and a hummingbird and think that there's a relationship there that somehow flight began, like flight happened and it spread and became like flight for hummingbirds and and flight for dragonflies. But in fact they they independently arrived at this exactly. So are there like to be venomous like a beer or whatever to be venomous? Are there like a bunch of families of insects that all kind of like independently invented this technology or does it seemed like there's like a thing somewhere that did this and it proliferated and dispersed over time, when in the case of ants, bees, and wasps, there's a one ancestor that had had an ovpositive actually an egg laying to that's a tube that you punch into a plant or another insect and use that to inject an egg kind of like a syringe injects eggs. Bo is that how about does a body fy do that when it puts a baby inside? You know, they actually uh lay the egg on vegetation or some of them will get on mosquitoes. And then the larva, which is what they call a plenary in which is kind of this mobile worm like thing that's very rapidly moving, and one of the mosquito lands on you. Then it crawls off the mosquito and onto you and the and the young larva, which is tenth of a millimeter long, it's really tiny, tiny little thing burrows into your skin and then from there that's what becomes the bot fly. And yeah, that's how that happens. Yeah, it's kind of sending a harrowing picture. Squirreling got my goodness, is out upsetting squirrels, Stephen rolla squirrels. This little tiny squirrel has got three or four these enormous whopping The big bot flies in and you can say, how does this squirrel survive? That? Can you give me the favorite to give me that life cycle of abot flagon. What's basically they lay eggs and I'm not sure where. I think it's on vegetation and somehow where they gets onto a mosquito, and a mosquito then flies around it like he hitches a ride on a mosquito. Yeah, basically a freeloader. And what they drawls off on a you or a squirrel or whatever it is. And they detect when the mosquitoes feeding because you're warm and squirrels warm, whereas the mosquitoes landing on a leaf or on a flower sucking nectar, you know, because they drink sugar water too to get their energy to fly the plnary and doesn't crawl off then because you're not warm, you're not their host. They just hang tight until the mosquito finally gets on you or the squirrel or whatever it is. There's a lot of different species of them, and then they crawl off. They're pretty quick about doing that. And then they're they're so small you don't feel them. You know, they won't be moving any hairs in your body to tickle you or anything. We'd swat them or rub them or something that just very small and quiet. They just burrow in and you don't really notice anything until they're quite a bit bigger. That One of the questions of chemistry on these things, which I'm not aware anybody's looked at, is how do they burrow a hole in you without you feeling it. My hunch is that they have an anesthesia, you know, kind of like to go to the dentist and he numbs your your skin or your tooth or whatever it is. I suspect they do that. But you know, something a tenth of a millimeter long, how are you going to study that? It's pretty tough problem. Your body doesn't like your white blood cells, like, don't you don't really attack that, you you just end up being host to that. Yeah, they probably also have other defenses against the immune system. You know, most of these things have a whole suite of complex behaviors, some of them for numbing it, some of them in mosquitoes case or ticks case. They have other chemicals prevent clotting so you don't stuff up there. They're blood feeding to be their proboscus or you know whatever. And then they also have things to prevent immune system from attacking them, and so that there's a whole smorgest sport of goodies that they inject into you, which aren't good for you, but good for them. Uh. I want I know where you were when I when we got you sidetracked, and I'm gonna I'm holding it in my head just so we all know. You were beginning to talk about the evolutionary forefather of a stinging insect and how I had to do with the proboscus over a positive the positives are egg laying too. Yeah, I'm still not ready to come back to that though, because you talk about mosquitoes. Gott me, I got a mosquito question. Um, only female mosquitoes bite, that's right, And most of the males are pretty nice guys, and antspeas and wash and males are nice guys too. It's the girls that you gotta worry about. Is it true that a female mosquito can still be successful, can still be a successful egg layer even if it never bites a mammal and gets blood out of it or a birden gets blood out of it. It's kind of a yes or no question that it's it's both. That often they will lay a small batch of eggs, you know, just a few dozen or something. That's all they have in their own body reserves from not having you know, fed on blood versus that they feed on you or me, or or an elk or a reindeer or you know, something of that sort. Then they fill up with double the amount of energy that they had before, I think, produce hundreds of eggs, and then they can get another blood meal produce another couple of hundred. So if you look at two or three cycles of several hundred eggs versus one cycle of paltry dozen or two. You can see that. That's why I say yes and no that yes, you technically can do it, but it's not a very successful strategy to do it. It's much better to take your risk. What's my chance of getting swatted and killed? Which means I passed no jeans a long versus ten times as many as if I don't feed. And obviously the calculus in the case of mosquito is it's worth the risk of getting the blood meal. Where are all the guys, Like when you're when you're out and you're getting swarmed by mosquitoes? Are you swarmed by males and females but it's only the females biting you, or the are the guys elsewhere? The guys are elsewhere they're looking for the girls, and they often hang out where they're going to be feeding because blood doesn't have much energy. It's mostly just protein, which of course what you need for laying eggs, but your energy comes from floral neck or something and this sort of sugary sweet things. So often the guys will kind of hang out around that looking where they can sneak up and catch a goal while she's getting lunch or something like that. Are they born on a one to one ratio or are their boatloads more females and males. Now they're pretty much one to one, huh most most so, when you got that huge swarm, there's that many guys sitting under some leaf exactly, but they're not bothering and they'll they'll fly away if you get anywhere near them. They're not dumb. They don't want to be squatted because they look right pretty much. They have a furrier proboscis, their stingery there. Their blood feeding tube usually is more furry because they need this for sensory things to detect and find the female. I eat with one more mosquito one, yeah, exactly. When we were kids, we had the belief, and I feel like I swear it works. Cal You probably did this where you catch a mosquito biting you and you would you know, the idea is that you would pinch it and so that you were trapping his sucker what's the word for a sucker probos You pinch him and trap his proboscis. And our belief where I grew up was that they could not stop sucking. Once they got in there, they and you would blow it up. You would eventually if you did it right, it would eventually erupt. Cool. I've never heard that sounds like a great thing to do. I would have done that if I had known about that's your next paper. So that doesn't ring true to you. Well, I don't know, if I know, I knew. We used to Sometimes they get in the crease of your knuckle and you straighten your finger and pinches so they can't get away, and then you could just kind of look at and torment this thing. But we never actually did it long enough to see whether they exploded. That. That's a good experiment. You need to repeat that, Man, I haven't done a long time. But yeah, you'd you'd suffer a lot of stings in order to eventually get one. And I know for a fact you can hold them captive. Yeah, I know, Yeah, we did that. But our view was I don't know that I ever saw it might just been like a thing we knew to be true, even though no one ever saw as it would eventually, like I said, explode another chapter. Yeah, considering you have three kids of prime age for this, you'll you'll be able to collect some data on this and then wait for a nice wet June evening and I'm gonna make them ball in the yard and they can write it up with a nice photograph and publish it in the journal. I've got a couple of good candidates who would love to have them in their journal. I like, Okay, I want to go back to where you were trying to talk what you're trying to talk about. I was asking about, like, where did it begin? Where did the ability to like wallop someone with a nasty sting begin? And and you were getting into explaining, um that here's a bug and a head an ovipositor, you know, I first started out they went through solitary bees in solitary offs, and they use the stinger mainly for paralyzing their prey. Say a cicada killer for example. It has it's a big boss, looks like a yellow jacket on steroids and growth hormone, so it's quite huge. But it doesn't sting. It's solitary. It's just mom and she goes out and catches the cicada and she stings it then paralyzes it just by piercing it, not by poisoning it. No, no, she poisons and so she pierces it and poisons it, and then she has this venom, which is very ineffective on us because we don't prey on cicada killers because again, there's not worth the effort to try to track down this fast flying insect just to get one snack a bite. Not worth the energy to do that. But then some of them adapted different behaviors like ants. Of course they can't fly, so they have a more limited ability to escape. And we don't really know the ancestor of ants because the closest we have is very primitive ant societies, which have maybe say a dozen or so individuals, but they're already social, so we don't know the step between that when has a single individual to go to the small first step. But presumably something happened there where he had overlap of generations and mom and a few ones, a few individuals helped out. And the advantage of having a stinger is there's something that's messing with you, you can sting it and chances are to go away and then leave you and your mom and your your siblings alone. And so then this as you've got bigger colonies evolved. You know, say something where you know a couple of hundred ants, then you have to have a better defense because there's more enthusiasm. I'm more willing to eat a hundred something than I am a dozen or fewer, and so I have higher motivation. So in order to blunt the higher motivation, you've got to get a more effective sting. So this is basically the hypothesis of stepwise as you get bigger and bigger, and it takes it to the extreme, which there's about a dozen wasps in this category. Honeybees are also in it, and one ant species of harves strand. What they do is go to the extent of actually giving up their life sacrifice and committing suicide by stinging you, ripping the stinger out. If everybody's been stung by honeybee knows they lose the stinger in you. You say, why would they do that? It's because at this point, the individual honeybee doesn't reproduce, she doesn't lay eggs or anything. She's protecting mom. So she's basically like a cell of mom that she's part of the system to reproduce, and she got he's got to keep. Now I'm getting into the heat like you. Sorry, the worker honeybee, the female honeybee has to defend its mom and by leaving the stinger and you, that prevents you from If you get stung and you give it a karate chop, you get it off before it does much damage. He gets much venom and it takes about thirty seconds to a minute to get a full load of venomin. If you lose your stinger, then your karate chopping you knock off the bee and say ah solution be gune a kill your ascal. Wrong because the stingers in you and it pumps that other of the venom into you. And that's beneficial as an even stronger defense than just the venom and stinging itself, because now you get ten times more in. And it's often very hard to find a penetrable part of the animal. You know, you have a lizard or something like that. It's hard to find between the scales the sting where most mammals we have all this fur and hair and everything. You know, we're unusual people were pretty easy to sting. We don't have much hair, but it's often very hard to manage to get you know, a place where you can sting and so it's important once you get to maximize the damage that you did. So it just keeps accent to writing as there's more and more risk. All these ones that lose stingers are huge. Colonies are big, like the honey wasp and honeybee. And there's a bunch of Polibia wasps which are papermaking nests down in Latin America and the tropics that also have huge colonies of sometimes individuals. You think about it, you lose one individual, yeah, so what who cares? But if you have a colony of ten, like some of the small ants, you lose one, that's a big price to pay. So they never lose their sting. It's only these super huge monsters social societies that do that. It's this is an impossible question for anyone to answer. But the ones that self eviscerate, they sting in, they die like they you know exactly, It's impossible to know what m oh Man like, what their self awareness is, right, But like most creatures are gonna I should say most a lot of creatures exhibit they desire to not get killed self preservation. Yeah, they do things because they don't want to get killed. Um, I would love to know like, to what degree it has any sort of self awareness about the finality of the decision to bite. I think they're quite well aware of that. I just have a paper submitted just six months ago and basically that question. I asked, the question of honeybee colonies, will you make a decision? Is it worth dying for my colony or is it not? And the two questions they give them is one case, they have only a nest, they have no young, they have no food, no paul, no nectar, no honey or anything. That's like they're just building a house. Like, yeah, that's just in the initial stages. Three days old colony, and so you came from a swarm and you had a bunch of honey in your tummy, and you've been there three days, and if worst comes to worst, you just off you go find a new nest to very little lose. And the other case that I had was nineteen to twenty two days, whereas that's midway through your life cycle. Of the oldest bees are starting to die off. They live about forty days in general, and so you you have a whole bunch of young there which are just about to emerge and start taking over. You have a lot of honey, of a lot of plony, have a lot of wax, you have a lot of investment. And in that case, if you're a worker be will you decide, Oh, I have a lot more to risk my mama, who's everything to me. Because I can't reproduce. All I can do is allow her to reproduce. So should I sacrifice my life my mama much more readily when I'm in a colony that's older and has much more to lose than younger And the answer is yes, the two and a half times more likely to sting when they're the older at the bigger risk. So they so they have some kind of awareness that they have a value, you know, exhibit that by their behavior. Does that ever, does that ever begin to reverse? Like oh yeah, Like well they then okay, let like if it's an old colony, and like we're gonna get set to take off on for a new one. And then he goes like, now I'm losing my desire to die because it's not as important anymore, or is the only thing that just increases increases increases, and then they die. No, it goes both ways. That I had a couple of examples I had twenty total colonies, eight of the three days and nine of the nine two days, but I had three that what we called queenless was the queen died for whatever reason, either you know, something happened to an old age. You know, we often don't know, maybe got pinched or something happened. And these colonies have no we reductive potential at all, because again, the workers can't lay eggs, and so they have nothing to lose, nothing to defend except themselves, and they're just gonna live out there their last of their forty days of old age. And you go and mess with those colonies, they won't do anything at all, No way. Yeah, they they're like they're aware of what's going on with the queen. Oh yeah, they know they have no queen, and so they'll go, they'll go. Uh, they were about two percent would come out and defend, whereas I'd have sixty or seventy come out with some of the ones that had the most to defend. So they knew, why should I go and sacrifice myself for my useless sisters when I could just hang out for forty days. Yeah, just hang out and enjoy life as best you can. I mean, what else is there to do? You know everything? Man, that's where you want up. You wind up in these like difficult where you're like, is it that they know it? Or is it just somehow that it is? They certainly behave as if they know it. But there's an even more into honey Bees are fascinating, which is one of the reasons I worked on a lot and everybody else does. He got the males, on the other hand, the males when they mate, they explode their genitary explode into the queen and they fall off paralyzed and die and get hauled away and eaten by the ants. Back up, who does the male honey bees? The drones as they call them, and say, asked the drone. Well, so you gotta colony, it's got the drones. How many of the drones are gonna have the opportunity to go out like this? Well, they'll probably be two or three thousand of these drones per summer in the colony, and they probably get to mate with one or two queens that most each one does well the whole colony worth. And so if you figure a queen mates about eighteen two six times, so let's say fifty males get a chance out of two or three thousands to mate. And so the males, no, this is a very rare opportunity. You know, most of us are just horny and never get a chance to find a mate. And so if you get the chance to find a mate, what are you thinking, I've succeeding. But I'm exploding and I'm rupturing my whole whole system and being paralyzed and falling to the ground. And of course the queen then turns around and kicks the rest of your genitalia. It's like having your your penis stuck inside ripped off and then go on. Then she goes and rips it out and throws it away, and so that's what the man and so his gym till you come off. Yeah, you can actually hear it. It's a pop if you're down on the ground near and they explode. And then she discards it exactly, and someone hauls this paralyzed, dying thing off when it falls down to the ground, and then the aunts say, oh, yeah, I'm nice, fat juicee be let's have dinner, and so they hauled off to them their nest and need it. Wow, So what is the male No, idea. Yeah, but have you been just like you looked at their eagerness to that you looked at you know, species eagerness to die for the cause? Um, have you? Is there any study you can think of it would measure the male's awareness, Like, are there males that get the opportunity and then bail? I don't know. Unfortunately, they're about twenty ft up, going fourteen miles an hour and flying chasing this queen who's buzzing around, and they there, yes, yes, don't say having sex. I don't imagine they're they're mating up in the air. Yeah. See, she's pretty clever. She figures, I don't want to get a reject mail because that makes reject kids. So you want to get the strongest, fittest male. So you're flying fast, and the mail's gotta be able to catch up with you and beat out all the other males that are they all the other drones. So she's intentionally making it hard for him to do it. So I guess he's more thinking about the immediate I gotta catch it, rather than think about, oh, I'm not going to make it be alive much longer. I'm not sure where the beasts think, but you know, that's if you analogize, that would be probably how his behavior would be, that he's more worried about catching the queen and worrying later about you know, we're somewhat the same way with with people. I guess I shouldn't go that way, but there seems to be a lot of interest in the mating part. Oops, I got a kid, Now what you we don't really think about the kid in too many cases. You know, once we're married and that sort of thing, then we do think about that. But before you're married and you're young, you know, you don't really go to that depth of thought. You're you're focused on the immediate. Yeah, in the back of your mind, you're aware that exactly exactly, But that's about as far as you take it. How did you um and doing your work? Why did it become necessary or and did it become necessary that you would start exposing yourself to getting stung by everything? Basically it was late in the scheme where I had had early I wanted to expose just because I was trying to collect enough information from It's kind of a statistical thing. You can't use one example that's an anecdote or five or ten to get the information I needed. I needed dozens and dozens. So each time I've had a new species, I would go after that to kind of collect the chemical and pain information about them. And so eventually I got to us fifty or sixty different different types of of seeing insects that did that. I'd go to meetings and give presentations, a show a picture of a a mud dauber wash dirt dauber washp would to have pretty much around the world. It's a long, skinny thing about an inch long. It's got a really narrow thread like waist, and they're dead, dreadly death, deathly afraid of them in some parts of Texas, Oh my god, these things are awful. And have you ever been stung by one? And I said, well no, why not? I said, well, because there's solitary they just think spiders and paralyzing for their prey. There's they have very few predators that are big, you know, like birds or anything. Doesn't want to mess when they don't really need a stinger for defense, so they probably don't hurt much. And that's very hard to get into stinging, so they probably don't hurt. And they'd say yeah, man, yeah, you're just afraid of these things. It's about the third or fourth time taunted. Yeah, third or fourth time I got those sorts of questions, I said, oh damn, and I guess I had to bite the bullet go test my theory, which said would be about a one on this very very low pain. So I went out to a cattle tank where they water the cattle in the desert of Arizona. There's no water for miles away. Mud dauber wasts need mud. That's where they make their nests out of, so I knew they'd be coming in there. It's again, only the females that do the work. The males just chase the females, so they're kind of useless basically. So the females are all coming in. They could all sting, and they were collecting mud balls. So I grabbed three of them and I'd apply them to my arm. I'd sticking colin and ladies, stay me, please, staing me, stink, stink, come on, you can do it, you can do it, you can do it. And I finally got a couple of stings to to sting me, and they were what i'd call underwhelming, just as I predicted, so like all the Texans are all worked up about it, but then you get stung and you weren't impressed. Yeah, it was basically they're scary looking. I admit that they are scary looking you look at them. And so there was a number of things like that. The cicada killer was another one. This was a little bit of serendipity, foolishness and opportunity. I had never been stung by one, and it was only one recorded literature history of a guy who got stung underneath his thumbnail at the end, and that's one of the more sensitive parts of your body underneath there. He complained that it hurt a lot, but then he said, it really wasn't that bad a thing compared to you know, something like a honey bee or something like that. But it's just this kind of passing thing in you know, really old paper, and I'm not in sure why you put that in. Today they wouldn't even lie to put this chafe in the side in there. But it was nice. We got a little bit of natural history. So then I thought, well, this is probably it's big. It's you know, about two inches long, So how much is this thing going to hurt again. I was asked about that, and I thought, well, I've worked on for years and years and they don't sting you. So I went out one day. I didn't have a net or anything, and I saw one on a flower, so I'm grab and it stung the poem my hand, which incidentally has more pain than most other areas because we have all the sensory nerves there. Palms are very sensitive to touch and that sort of thing, so we need a very good nervous system and that part of our anatomy. And it hurt about a one and a half, as I called it, less than a honeybee, more than a sweatbee, more than a dirt daub or wass, but not as much as a honeybee. And this is a great big thing. And again that was a prediction. It's just mom doing everything on our own. If you had a colony of things like that. Analogy being the giant hornets of Asia Japan, we have hundreds of them in a nest and they're the same size. Those do hurt you when you say you gave it a one and a half. Explain the scale you eventually came up with. Yeah, the scale, it's kind of it's it's very hard to You can't put an electrode in in the skin or in a nerve or anything and get a like a galvanometer we do in high school physics class with the needle swings over and you can record how far it swings and say, oh, that implies this strange. I can't do anything like that with with pain, so it's just relative. So I made a pain scale of four for one to three and four, and I said, well, we need to have a comparative because the pain you experience might be different from the pain I experienced, saying, maybe you're ten times tougher than I am. So if if you get stung by a honeybee and you call that a two by definition, I get stung by a honeybee, and I call that a two for me. So even though it may hurt me ten times more than you, I'm normalizing it to myself. So next time I get stung by, say a sweatbee, which is the one, I'd say it's a whole lot less than the two. And one of the ways you can tell the differences you hold up the two and ask somebody which one would you prefer to get stung by if you had to, if there's a gun to your head, Oh, I'll take that one for sure, absolutely, that one without indicate a strong recognition that that one hurts a lot less and kind of on the semi quantitative arena. What I do is they say, it's like an exponential scale of a two is ten times more painful than a than a one, and three is tend to the Richter scale for earthquakes, exactly seven is ten times worse than the six. Exactly the same sort of idea, And you say, how you can you can match that? Is? Okay, take a fire ant, which is something that readily stings numerous times. You get one fire it kind of smarts. It's kind of a one. You get ten fire ants. They kind of ladies on on que all sting, and all ten I'm stinging. It seems that's the way they are. They aren't really that way, but that's the way it seems to poor victim. When you get stung ten fire ants stings heard about as much as one honey bee sting. You get to ten honey bee stings they heard about as much as one harvest RNT, which is a three, and you get ten harvest ants, and that's maybe as much as one bullet and or transa hawk, which is a four, so you can see, you know, it's it's not a linear scale like one is half of two, which is you know, half of three, and it's more tenfold difference. When you started subjecting yourself to getting stung by everything, whether did you get to where there were some things you were nerves that you were reluctant to want to go get stung by, or early on in my career, before I actually had concept with the sting pain scale, I was still just working on the chemistry. I didn't really get the pain scale formulated my mind until three So three years later, I was in Japan and they had these huge mandarin hornets. Everybody's seeing them on YouTube and such. They're about two inches long, big boxy, blocky things with a bright orange head and orange stripes in their abdomen. These things are enormous. Now it is studying them for the venom. They've got a lot of venom. And I didn't want to get stung. I mean, who wants to get stung by some saucy on on wings that's two inches long? Boy? I mean, this thing is kind of scary. So I managed to collect two colonies with the help of Japanese who were very protective of me. They didn't want, you know, there their colleague from the US to beginning stung up and say these Japanese mal treated me or anything like that. So they were very covetous and made sure I didn't get stung. And I was all suited up, had all those students. Students are expendable, so they had them behind me. Within the second nets, they're catching anybody cut behind me, could you know, attack me from the back. So the long story shot was I managed to get all all the members of both colonies and never get stung. So in retrospect, I can't say, gosh, I wish I had been stung, because everybody asked about how much does the Mandard hornet has say well, I don't really know. I've never been stung by one. We don't have them in the US or North. So to this day you have been stung by it, that's right. And so I say, well, if somebody wants to fund me for a junk at Japan or China for four thousand dollars to go and get stung, fund me there and I can do that and continue my research on a free trip, and all I have to do is get stung once. But my prediction is, you know, predicting based on the biology and natural history of these things, would be like a yellow jacket, which is a two, except a whole lot bigger than the yellow deck. It's ten times. It was so bigger. So my prediction is it would be about a three, you know, ten yellow ten a little yellow jackets equal to one humongous yellow jacket like relative. So that's what I would predict. Have you traveled to other places to get stung? Oh yeah, I'm just like specifically win there to get stung. Well, no, not to get stung, to collect the venom of whoever was there. I I went to Malaysia. We had a nice study there which was kind of an interesting thing. I found these ants that live in trees and they turned out to be very mild in disposition and they didn't hurt very much. They brought him back to the lab and looked at their chemistry. My god, they're incredibly toxic. They're one of the most most toxic insects I've ever run into. So they're The question I ask is why if you're so toxic do you not hurt? I mean, normally, if you're a big, strong, dangerous thing you want to address, Hey, I'm big, strong danger don't mess with me, and you you'd want it to be painful and hurt, and they don't do this. So that's one of the you know, the more you do research, you have many questions you can answer, and that's one of the ones that I got there. But I went to South Africa specifically to study they have a whole what I call the Big five of of ants. You know, of course into the Big five exactly, hippos and elephants and uh ryanos that's the last when Yeah, so that these Big five they're good whopping sized dance and they were talked about and some of the old literature and the naturalists being really really fierce and scary and all this. So I said, well, that should be a good source of venom chemistry and good good things to study. And so I found all those. It turned out most of them really didn't hurt that much. I think it's just the problem that you relate how much painfulness is relative to your experience, and if your experience is mostly mild, things. Then the least mild of them is really hurts, yeah, whereas the least model is about a third or a half as much as anything in the New World actually has the most painful stinging things by far. We're lucky, yeah, especially if you go to Amazoni's or someplace fun like that. And so the South Africans, relative to their experiences, these things really hurt. But compared to what I'd run into here in North America and South America, they were pretty mild. And so all five of them. So North America has worse stinging stuff than Africa. Oh yeah, as far as insects go, Africa is kind of kind of a little doll actually in some regards when it comes to stinging. Yeah. They have they have these uh what they call them firetail wasps, the long skinny kind of tanny wasps that they have there maybe a two, the most social one that's about as high as they get. And they have the metal belli ant, which is this army like thing that goes out and raids termites and there around it two maybe a little bit less. And then they have the giant stink ant, which is an enormous an. It's about as big as a bullet ant. And that's at most the two of their pretty minor two chicken shit ants, Yeah, exactly, and most of them, well, they will stinging if you mess with them, but you have to kind of mess with them. And and they really weren't all that painful. The uh, the most painful. I ran intos what I call the glossy ants. They're kind of a purply sheen to them. They weren't listed anywhere on the list, but those things really kind of smarted and so I, you know, just go to place, and I went to Australia to study their jack jumpers and their bulldog ants and got stung by all of those. Of course, it's hard not to mess with them. Were they pretty nasty? No, they were kind of a sharp, clean pain, kind of like a needle stick or a small knife stick. But they weren't burning. You know, burning is like a match or an ember from fire pops explodes your your fire blows an ember on your this hot, fiery feeling. This is more of a clean piercing, you know, almost chemical feeling that I had. What were the circumstances when you went and got stung by a bullet A well, basically it was again desperation. That's when most of my stings occurred. I was in Amazonas and near Bay Lange. What is the word you're using amazonas the Amazon? Yeah, Amazon, it's just a territory around where the Amazon base. That term maybe maybe it's Latin or Spanish or Portus, I don't know. I just kind of used up in Amazon area and it was getting near nightfall is about five o'clock and I was on half a degree south latitude. So if you ever been in the tropics, when the sun goes down, it goes down ten minutes. It goes from light to black. You can't know nothing, like if you're in northern you know, Montana or Alaska or northern Canada. Yeah, twilight sometimes for hours, not so they're so here was. I had an hour to go and I finally found this, this bullet ant colony, and I had an assistant Himarrow Hemorrow, was the toughest guy I'd ever run into. The Hemorrow would stick his hand into fire ant colonies and grab mounds them and stuff them in a bag because because you know, we we were collecting venom. I was with my professor and we were collecting venoms and ants of anything, those stinging We didn't care what it was pretty much. And I had this little kind of trowel that i'd care along, little plastic thing that's light and easy to transport, you know, overseas. I'm digging up this colony and trying to get these these bullet ants to come out. I'd run into a root or something like that where I couldn't dig two, and I said, hey, Marrow, where is Merrow? Where is her arrow? He's back there twenty ft behind me, and I'd say here, I get up here and get this root out of here. He'd run up and give a whack or two and then retreat. What is wrong? Hemarrow is a man of steel wise anyway. So then I was a little bit in my naivete. I had this glass jar about it, a court jar. I'd put telcum powder around the top so the ants couldn't crawl out. They'd slip and fall back down. Yeah. It works pretty much until they wear off all the telcom potty and then they get out. But man, that's a hot tip. Yeah. But then I had these long tweezers. Theyre foot long. I was grabbing them and trying to get them in. I found out first of all that bullet ants are very fast, and they're very sticky legg They could stick to two chromed tweezers and crawl up. So the next thing, I got four or five of them attacking you all once, and you're trying to say, how am I going to fend off all the They have a colony with three thousands, so a lot of a lot of ants there. And when you get them kind of rolled up, they take umbridge at this and come after you. And so I'm trying to get these things in and it's getting dark and we're having to leave soon, and I thought I may never see these things again. I don't know this the first time I've seen them. So I got again. So I speed it up. Sure enough, the faster you go and the more careless you get, the sloppier you get. And yes, you will get nailed. And that's what happened. Have you uh been z by a Transula wasp? Oh? Yeah? Is that is that a whopper? Definitely? Absolutely? What can you explain their life history a little bit? Yeah? Transla hawks are they're a big spider wasp and what they do is they they catch a trantula. They hunt one down and they sting it and paralyze it in a permanent paralysis. Is the thing will never die until it dries out. It will eventually die of either dehydration or starvation, but it doesn't kill it to the venom the keeps of fresh meat. It's kind of like having your venison in a cooler. You can keep it over winter, and as long as you keep it in a cooler, you can feed your family for months on end. So the same principle that they have there. You have a paralyzed tranchling the one egg on it, just one, and that that egg hatches into a larva, which ends. Doesn't you got stash that transl somewhere? Oh yeah, which she forgot that part? Yes, I mybody most that he was camping one time and said he saw one fly past. I don't want to ruin his story. I feel like this is what he told me, he saw one fly passed. Then in a while later here comes out something bit dragon, a trangeler back the way he'd come from. Who could be it might have been the same one or a different one. But what happens is they paralyze him and then they either put them in a burrow that the trench la hawk wasp makes digs a burrow down and puts in the bottom of the cell, or if it's near where the trench as a burrow. They haven't naturally dig a hole in the ground his own hole, yeah, and then just put it in its own hole, which is a lot less work. I mean, I would do that if I were the wasps being lazy, but they do. You know, those two different things got one egg on it, you know, one egg. So what happens is the egg then hatches and it starts eating the blood. They have an open system, not like us with veins. They just have a open cavity and you can just keep sucking the blood. And then when you get a little bigger, you start eating the fat. And when you get a little bigger, you start eating the reproductive system and the gut. Yeah. And of course none of these things are life support systems for the tranches, so it's still alive. When you get to the fifth mold, fourth mold into the fifth end star. Each each different larva doubles or triples the size of the previous one, so you can see the last one is many times bigger than all of the four younger ones together. When the last one gets it, goes on this ravenous gluttony and just eats everything, the nerves, the brain, you know, yeah, finally eats everything and it gives one. Doesn't want to make a live action movie. I heard how they're going to remake bamb We feel like they should remake a do a live action movie about this exactly and kind of nature kids. You can imagine, you know, the larger than at that point gives one big earth. But really, rather than that, it takes one big dump and then becomes a pupa and spinds a cell and then molds into the adult, goes out and kills one, or goes out and catches one. But it's even more interesting than that. Their life has to be quite fascinating. The trans is come in various sizes, you know, just like people who have some of that are big and some that are little. Males are scrawny and runty. They spend all the time chasing females. There's not much meat on them, whereas the females are big and fat and juicy because you know, they have to lay a bunch of eggs and all that so the Transla hawk not being particularly fussy. If you find a transla, you want to capitalize on whatever translor you find. So a little scrawny thing you say, uh, well, you are what you eat. So if you're a little scrawny thing, you're getting a little scrawny transla hawk. Wath A little scrawny female transla hawk is worthless. She can't overcome a big, fat, juicy transla. It's not big enough, strong enough. But a male. All a male does is transmit sperm to the female. He does not be bigger, little, or anything else. So then she'll pick a male for her offspring if it's a little one and she she can do this, which fortunately we can't. And how they do that is a male is haploid. It's it's like half the chromosomes, whereas the female has is a double chromosome as twice as many. So she fertilizes the egger she wants. A female. She has a sphincter which lets two or three sperm out as the egg is passing down the over duct hold. She's able to put her own sperm on her own egg that she got from a male before she Yeah, she has a storage she mates and holds that sperm, and it releases that sperm out onto the egg when she wants to, yeah, and set a choice around her body. Yeah, So what she does is it's a little scrawny one, then she makes a male because they're worthless. They can mate with just as well as the big one, more or less, and she saves the females for the big, juicy ones. Me, it's a good thing we don't have that ability yet. I mean, we'd end up like China. For a while, I was having a shortage of women because they were well disposing, I guess putting nicely, too many female babies, and they're getting like ten or more boys than girls. And they found out then they weren't enough wives for them. So the problem there is you have all these males running without mates. They get pretty disruptive and started messing up society. So it's a bad idea to have in balance of sex is at least in our society. Man, I would love the bow if you could just know the decision making process, so it could be a transla hawks that maybe one nobody has actually done the numbers. It might not be a one to one ratio. It might be there's a lot more squawny trance as this, which would bias you towards too many males. Or it could be maybe there's a lot of big, fat, juicy ones, but you get a lot. I mean, it's a long lifespan out of tarantula, and so it kind of makes me very interested to know after a couple of seasons dealing with tarantula hawks, if you're older, tarantulas have developed a little more defense towards those that That's the funny thing about the trancellor, which doesn't make sense of the human mind. We cannot grasp at least I cannot grasp this concept. Here, this huge spider often eight times heavier than the Transla hawk wash. You're a big whopper. You have these huge, massive fangs which are really strong. Have you ever seen a Transla catch, say a nice juicy American cockroach. You hear this craunch snap and it just shatters the the cockroach, and then of course it becomes dinner. And you say, well, this equipment, why doesn't it fight back, Why doesn't it try to actually kill the trench La hawk wasp? It doesn't, And and one or two percent of the cases they will try to fight back, and almost all those they lose anyway, But you think if you have a one or two percent chance of winning, that's better than a zero pert chance. What they do is they try to run away, and they try to hide, so they'll run out of their burrow. The trans kwas will go down in the borough where the translas chase, the trench l out because it's hard to maneuver in a tight burrow like that. We can get your stinger underneath and paralyze it. So some our other the trench is a dumb enough not to stay there. It would be difficult for the wasp to get it. It goes roaring out and it tries to hide someplace, and the wasp of course comes out and finds it. Because all trenches have a smell of you can detect if you're a wasp. I mean, we don't smell them that. We're not making a diet of translates, so we don't we don't have that that ability, and so the trans is very, very passive, and it's always one of these things that you know, to my sense of logic, I would you know, fight to the end, you know, hope the heck that I'm I'm that lucky one that gets a bit to think that that's what we would do. Yeah, you know you might be able to get right behind the neck. There's a yeah, exactly. I haven't done the tests. I probably should have because it didn't really relate to what I was doing of seeing if the transer can tell the difference between a male and a female transla hawk because of course the male can't sting and represents no risk, but it does represent a dinner if you can get to punch him, which you probably could. I haven't done that, just too many things to do in life. That's a good project for one of the young budding junior high listeners who wants to do a science. That's exactly what came to mind was was junior high, like, how much of your career has just dropped? And two bugs and a container they're like, okay, which one's gonna win exactly, and that that could be something you could. You could test a few of the trances with males first, because if you test them with the female, you may not get to repeat it with a male. Yeah, and then do your X number ten of each or something and see see if the transer behaves differently. I don't know. I had to add a question for you on bald faced hornets. Seems to be something I run into um And I could be totally misidentifying these these um they're pretty hard to miss identify. They're big in black and white. Yeah, and uh run into them on trails all the time, oftentimes on horseback. And then they come out and horses don't like them. No, they do not know they do not. But we have this big mule and she we tied her up at the end of a very long ride, and she kicked a nest. It took took me a while to figure out was going on. The mule was freaking out. I ran over there. Of course, there's hornets everywhere, and I'm tighter and ran her over to a different treaty to get her away from the nest. And then I was watching and trying to remove hornets, and it appeared to me that some were burrowing through the hair and biting, and others were stinging, biting with their mouth their mandibles. They have pretty sharp mandibles. They can they can shred a most any insects. Just cut them up kind of like meat cleavers. They they're really pretty good at that. I haven't actually heard that I was seen that, but I would guess if I had to speculate just in what was going on, that it could be the ones that were biting had already spent most of their venom stinging them, so they they It's kind of like if you're a soldier and you have a have a your rifle and you have a bandet on the end, you're gonna try to shoot the enemy first until you run out of bullets. They're gonna try to stab him with the band at I've seen the movie The Alimo. Yeah, exactly, exactly, Yeah, so you can imagine the same sort of thing is again the bald faced hornet. She has no reproductive ability to herself, the individual workers. She's defending mom, the queen, and so biting helps. Honey Bees will do that too. Once they have stung and lost their stinger in you, we know they've lost At that point, they'll come and they'll bite on your eyelids or your eyelashes and try to pull on them, and they'll try to crawl in your ears and bite your ears or try to Yeah, exactly, and they Yes, I had one. I had wondered if I was witnessing observing two different some were stinging and some were eating. We have another project for junior high kid. You know, when you're talking about the way the trans a little hawk, you know, paralyze the transl and keeps it around for a long time. How many days go by? Like like how many days that thing alive? The translate was alive for well, there have been a couple of cases where people have had them in the lab where they either the egg died or the experiment or removed the egg, and I lived two or three months. In one case, a fella was artificially trying to rehydrate the translate. I'm not quite sure I did that. Whether he was just injecting water into its mouth or whether it's into its body, I don't I don't remember that trying to keep it alive. I just try to keep it from drying out to see how long it would last. I think he got like five or six months something like that, hopefully really intention of seeing if it would come back. Well, yeah, that's the whole idea man, when he made it back, if that trans made it back out there where he's from. And Pete were like where are you been? Yeah, dude, what a story to tell. I'm guilty of doing that to a certain extent myself. I was studying the green and knolls, you know, the little a little what they call chameleons. They're actually in Annoala live in the southeast. I was stinging them to see if they're more resistant then say mice are, because they're a lizard, which is a different physiology and metabolism than than say a mammal. And I got a couple of individuals that were completely paralyzed, but I could tell they were alive, and it's still the gloss on their eyes, and they could move their tongue a little bit. And I said, well, is this harvestrant? Then I'm gonna wear off eventually. How how irreversible is it? And so it went on for weeks and I would open its mouth and put water in the mouth to keep the lizard hydrated. In this case, it succeeded. It could manage to drink it, and slowly, after two or three weeks it started getting a little flick flicked on its legs, and then a bunch of about a week later, it got so it could completely recover. And you know, live happily ever after. So so it isn't it is possible, except the tranchula doesn't have that good luck to be a lizard than a transla. I guess does the transila have like a pain index for itself? Like does the translate? We like? And then and then while it's while it's feel I don't know. It's hard to tell. It's sort of like, you know, if we're under anesthesia in a coma and we're slowly rotting away, are we feeling pain? And you know why I need jerk reaction to be since I'm not conscious, I'm not feeling pain. But of course, how do you know what the tranch is conscious or not? I now this opens up so many like this discussion opens up so many ethical questions. We need to get electrodes into the primary gangley on the brain of a transition and have a normal one where we can see whatever the wave patterns like what we have in our brains, so we know what a normal tranch is like. And then do this same thing and one that's being paralyzed and pinched leg or something like that, and see that we get a spike and some kind of signal in the electrodes in the brain. Have you watched the film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I think that's when I miss I'm not sure. It sounds like a good movie to see though. Oh, it's Phenomenal's about a man who's unresponsive. It's about like the inner life of an unresponsive man. Yeah. That that's the same guy that made Before Nightfalls. Um, what's his name is? He used to be like Julian Schnabble. I think, wasn't it good job down there? Philis on it? You just do that off the top of your top of your head. Um. Have you read a book, uh, in the Heart of the Sea. No, I guess I'm pretty pathetic in that these are completely different realms. But the reason I'm bringing it up is the trantula suffering away there or not? Um in the Heart of the Sea. It's a it's a book about the whale ship Essex. The tragic the whaleship Essex. But when they would go out whaling, they would stop at the Galapagos and well they would stock up. They just flip them over down in the hold of the ship on their backs keep alive for months, ma'n. Pretty barbaric, Yeah, well, or or they're like a trench lock. There were no different than trange locks. Of course, we we pretty much assumed the tortoise was conscious at that point because it wasn't paralleled just on its back. No, keep him in the hold for months like that. But then you know, um they got their come uppings and that because that ship was sunk by a whale, good for the whale, and um, you know, all kinds of cannibalism ensued. There's a there's a great line, my favorite line in that book, as there's later as someone's you know, meet someone meets a guy who was on the Essex and he asked him, you know, I can't read the guy the guy's name. He says, Oh, did you know Dale Johnson? And the man replies, UM, no him, I had him. I'm gonna say it wasn't very tasty, but it's a great book. The movie, man, do not waste your time. So chemically, what's going on? Like what's the most like a yellow jacket. I used to have a mild yellow jacket allergy, and I was looking why does it hurts damn bad? Like like what is it doing to you? And basically what it is as kind ins wasp kindons they call him or or hornet kindons, and it kind of is kind of like Brady kind in, which is a uh hormone that affects the heart and it makes extreme pain and it also causes stronger contractions and various things that it does to the heart. But the thing I focus on is that it causes extreme pain. So the wasp just hijacked the chemistry. I don't think they. I think they independently evolved it. Basically, it just kindons make pine, so they have a lot of kinds in their venom and that's what causes the pain. It's just a hormone. No, it's just a polypeptide in other words, about eleven to nineteen amino acids, whereas Brady kind in the original one I forget, it's something around ten, maybe off one or two. So they're the Brady kind is a hormone in us and in mammals, but wast kinds are just the similar structure. Get a little bit longer protein, which probably makes it more stable, so it hurts longer and lasts longer, and that's what causes the pain. But there's things they could deliver it to you that it might not hurt probably, yeah, like if they stung an insect or something like that, because it probably wouldn't hurt that we don't know, you know. That's it's one of the things. There's so many questions out there and there's so little time to work on all of them. But we know in your case kind is don't cause allergy. So they have other components in their phosphor LIGHTPAS, which is a great, big enzyme, huge monstrous enzyme, which is again a protein. What it does it breaks up the lipid membrane around cells. Cells have a kind of a fatty membrane around them and they're mostly liquid and the inside, and it breaks up that membrane. So phosphor lightpase helps destroy and do damage. And so that's what the main allergy and that that you would probably have for your allergic to them. They also have, how you want, a dase, which is a a spreading agent kind of like a detergent that helps loosen up connective tissue and make a path so the the goodies of the venom can get into their So it's like a lot of complexity. Yeah, And and those are the two main ones that are being a wasp or yellow jacket. So what what's a like when you get bit by a fire ant? Like, chemically, what's happening to you there? You know? The fire answer are really the the odd ball of all odd alls of the stinging insects. They have propuritine alkaloids which are very similar to the the water hyacinths or whatever it was called that Socrates had to drink to commit suicide, hemlock water hemlock. That's why I knew as close something was wrong there and their relative to that, and they're neurotoxins, they're cytotoxins, they're they're hemorrhagens. There, they do a whole lot of really nasty things to you. But it's a strictly simple alkaloid, which is a organic molecule, has nitrogen, and it's not a protein, it's not amino acid, it's not a fat, it's it's an alkaloid typical of what most bitter things are alkaloids, And so it's very unusual in that it has these these alkaloids which are very effective against prey. And again you ask the question, what's going on when you get allergic to them? Because alkaloids are not allergenic. They don't cause allergy. What happens they have one or two percent again a phosphorlite base our old friend and how Rana is just tying it a little bit to this, and that's what you get allergic to. Why they're in there, who knows, Probably just a legacy of their their father genetic history. They came from some ancestor which had these components of their venom. They inventor evolved a new system, which is the alkaloids. So it's probably just the residual leftover, which probably does no functional use anymore for the fire in but it does of course cause allergy. And so so they're they're an unusual situation. It's it's you got into this in your book a little bit. And it's a thing that's kind of puzzling to me. Is let's say you grab like I'm just finally getting over a burn I had in my hand. Okay, I want to grab a thing on a wood stove, and those hot so burns like holy hell, and it's damaging you, like the pain is telling you that you are damaging your skin, and you pulled away and the skin blisters and scabs. It gets infected and it's like lo and behold, like wow, good thing. I got the pain signal to alert me that I was destroying skin cells. But a lot of the insects things, there's it's all bark and no bite, like it's not actually doing anything to you. That's basically correct unless you're really tiny. So if your a mouse for beast, things will kill you. If you're you know, human being. It takes about eight to ten per pounds. So if you weigh a hundred pounds, your little person takes about a thousand stings before it kill you. It eventually would. But who gets a thousand stings? You know, not very many people, do you know? Most I've ever had is about fifty. And that was in a kind of an accident where a high fell apart and I didn't wasn't wearing proper equipment, and you know, things get out of hand. You got start by fifty honey bees. Yeah, and I got a little bit of swelling on my hand and that was about it. No, none the worse for the damn rates. You know, two or three days later when the swelling went away. And so it depends on you know, most of these venoms are designed for a whole suite of predators, anything from a mouse or shrew or more, you know, something smaller or small lizard to somebody as big as an elephant. And that that's what I was missing in this, to be honest with you, is that you know, you want to relate everything to humans. And I was sitting there going why it would why does a bullet ant need venom that lasts for three hours? Like isn't that a little greedy? Like what needs three hours to hide or three hours to run away? Like that's a little bit much. Yeah, the bullet ants venom didn't evolve in the presence of humans because we've been here for they were fourteen thousands or thirty thousand years, depending on who's arguing and fighting over when they came to the New World. Yeah, exactly. They're great fun. But that's relatively you know, as the Germans saying, organ blick, a blink of the eye, and the evolutionary time scale and and so obviously bullet ants, which have been unchanged for a hundred million years, have evolved their venom a lot earlier than we were there, so that it wasn't intended for us. I think it was more intended for the monkeys up there in the canopy, the lizards, the frogs and the birds. Yeah, it'd be nice to know what what considered the bullet ant one on the pain index. Well, there was something so bad ascid just just brush it off when there's nothing that I know of. The closest I ever came to that was that I had what I called the toad project, which I wrote about in the book. We were just what we've had a couple of too many beers and the tummies full of a nice Costa Rican dinner, and we were kind of relaxing in the evening after a hard day's work, and we had this great big bouffo marine as the marine coat of the cane toad they call him in Australia, and they're about the size of a platter, you know, a plate. There's this one sitting there wolfing down everything, three inch long grass offers, and my assistant tossed a three inch long scorpion there and the thing got the scorpion in the mouth and the front end and the mouth and the tail was stinging in between the eyes went down the hatch. He said, we got these things are tough, so then I had nine bullet dances. I'm not sure why didn't kill it. No, I had these nine bullet ants that I brought over from the Caribbean side, because Coast Week has a Pacific and the Caribbean side, and the bullet answer only on the Caribbean side. So for some reason I brought nine over. I don't remember why hadn't used them all when I was on the Caribbean side. Anyway, I had these nine bullet ants, so I said, well, let's toss one and see what the toad does with this. It's obviously naive. It's never seen a bullet d and because they don't live here and ain't the same with loop loop and eyes popped in and out, mouth gate and tongue came out and said, well, I get the impression it responded to the son. So then I thought, well, the other hypothesis is that just does that normally when it eats anything. So I threw it something about the same size down the hatch. No hiccup ng, no eye popping or anything. Okay, that suggests to me that it got stung. So let's try another ant. See how dumb this this toad is. So we did another aunt who eye popping the same thing. We did this through all nine ants. He never never learned, but was consuming them exactly and getting stung and suffering. Obviously, it didn't seem the like I thought it was too spicy, but it didn't seem to stop. And and so the the question is, you know, why, why was the thing? I assume it still lived through it. I didn't follow the toad to see if it but he. And the funny thing is we've we've never seen in toad stune makes and you know any of the herpetology literature where they, you know, catch these things and say what are they eating? And they open up and see what's in there. We had to do that in tenth grade or whatever. I opened one up and found a mouse in it. Man, it's kind of the I'm still a little bit trauma traumatized by it was a bullfrog with a mouse. I'm not surprised now eat anything. Bull Frogs the North American equivalent of the cane toad pretty much, and so none of the literature ever reported bullet dance in them. So I don't know whether that's because the bullet dance aren't down on the ground near water, usually where the toads are there up in the canopy, and they go from their nest at the base of a small tree or sapling up to the canopy. They don't forage out on the ground. I got stung about one out on the ground. Well, I guess they should modify. They don't start out that way. They go up and they may go thirty ft over, fifty over, then down another one and forage on the ground there. And the reason they will do that is they're fiercely territorial and colonies will kill each other, so they're not randomly distributed. Their evenly distributed because of this constant warfare. So they don't want their nests to get discovered by a nearby bullet ant nests. So that's why they go up and down, and so they get discovered someplace further away, but they can't find the nests. The nest is safe. But usually kane toads aren't on that an area. They're usually you know, around the water. So I don't know. Maybe it's so the absence of bullet ants and cane toad guts is not necessarily an indicator exactly. They don't like them. So we have another junior high project for a nice Costa Rican got some busy junior high people. Yeah, Costa Rican star students know, if they were giving away these ecology degrees, I feel like there'll be a lot of folks being ecologists. The thing we hated most and we were kids was horse flies. Yeah. You'd be out swimming, like on the raft or whatever, out in the middle of the lake and you get found out by a horse fly and everybody like you'd be underwater and everybody group effort trying to kill it, and you know you eventually get it killed. Nob we could breathe easy and then comes Yeah, like they're like a slash and lap feeder exactly. They take a chunk of flesh out of you. They open you up and suck your blood. You tell me, Yeah, they're kind of like a couple of Chinese meat cleavers, hacking away your skin, getting it all nice and bloody and messy, and then they can drink the blood. Why is that hurts the damn bad man? Those things hurt I think because they haven't evolved to be a better system. Like a mosquito doesn't hurt much at all? Does it? On the sly, Yeah, they are necessize, and they're sort of sneaky about that. Or kissing bugs, which are one of the things I work on, their blood sucking, you know, like a stink bug type thing, except they suck blood. They don't hurt at all, whereas some of the things that do hurt of the sloppy feeders, like the horse flies or the deer flights, which are just like smaller varieties of horse So that hurts because of what he's doing to you, because of what he's applying to you. It's because what he's doing to you. Yeah, my minus maybe the application of anesthesia exactly. Yeah, So that's what it feels like, just to have something to give you a bunch of real small cuts all of a sudden. Yeah. And and some other ones that hurt. If you go to Africa, the tetsi fly had never been personally bitten by one, but I'm I'm told that they really hurt too. And it's again kind of a sloppy feeder. And the last one and they and they, they're the ones that are responsible for a certain sleeping sick sleeping sickness which is which is gotta be some kind of like bacterial infection or whatever. You get from it's a protozome and it's related to chaugus disease, or it's it's a protozome, which is why it's so hard to treat, because the dog on thing is that you carry out just like we are. The cells are similar. So if it's a bacteria, they have a different biochemistry and we can zap them a lot more easily than we can something that's similar to us, because if you kill them, well you're sort of killing us too, which isn't a good idea. The last one that really hurts that I know of, which is very familiar to anybody around Montana or the northern areas, or what we call stable flies look like a small house flying. They bite and take a hunk out of it it. Oh yeah, we love those in with deer flies and horse flies. Yeah yeah, the stable flies. I would, uh, I would, I guess I'm an entomologist. I would look at this fly of lands on me if it's a house fly, won't be bothered to shoot it off because it's not doing any dam So I look at its probositive because this floppy mop like thing in the bottom, it's a house flying. It's safe if it's pointy, there's the stable flying whack. I gotta kill it right away. And that's what's so funny though about the horse fly. As on some of these stable flies too, I think they can really take a beating. I whacked, like you score a good hit and it doesn't pay off. You're the legs tuck up and it tips over and it falls on the river rocks, and then you look at the thing right itself. Second, or if you're biting in horses and horses have tails that are whipping around, they kind of hit you, but they don't really squash you. And so what you do is you hit them and then ruby. That's right, So glancing thing. Do you think you'll do a book someday about how best to squash bugs? Probably? Rub Probably not, But I actually do mention that in the book that I talk about if you get a honey being in the hair, stuck in your hair, I say, don't whack at it, because in order to squash the thing, you have to hit it so hard you'll give yourself a minor concussion or at least the headache. And so I say a better thing to do is take a comb and try to comb out or if you insist that you want to kill it, then it and smash it as you're rubbing and turned into juice, which gives you a good excuse to have a shampoo shower. Uh, I want to ask you explain the word of thinker pronounces is correctly apple semantic apple apple sematic. The apple sematic is basically the technical term saying that you have a warning coloration. The classic example people think of as a coral snake. You see that red and white and yellow or red and black and yellow reather Red on black, You're okay, jack, Yeah, red on yellow you're a dead feller exactly. That's it. And and because most of you look at it, you like, watch out exactly, you say, you look at this. And there's been some tests that have been done with naive predators of snakes that have never seen a coral snake or any dangerous thing, and to give them saying a gray snake or a black snake or some other color green snake, and then you give the pattern that's similar to the the coral snake, and they kind of look back and they have this innate, genetically programmed apprehension of this appop sematic warning coloration, and I think that relates to anything that's warning. Colors are basically red, black, yellow, and orange, and those there's one exception for color blind animals. The skunk is a warning appos sematic because there's jet black and brilliant white. See white and black. That's as contrasting as you can get. Most people know not to pounce on a snake for you, not a snake, Hey, skunk for dinner. Yeah. I imagine for that system to work, appop sematic, right, I'm saying it right, Yeah, that's right. For that system the work, like there has to be um, a bite and bark exactly. But there's probably some species i'm guessing exploited where they they resemble the trouble things but don't have the bite exactly. That's the king snake example. King snake can't do anything to really hurt you. Perfectly tasty and yummy, but you don't want to take the chance because you don't know whether he's a cheater or the real thing. We see the same thing with you know, a lot of other monarch butterflies have what's called the viceroy, which was originally thought to be a cheap mimic. It looked just like it and it wasn't toxic. It turns out there mildly toxic. So it's a scale from being total cheat to total true truth, with a gradation of things in between them. But I think there's some innate apprehension of bright things, like, for example, in the southeast of the US, they have these things called the cow killer velvet and black and black and red. You almost never hear of anybody who's ever been stung by one. And I say, you know, juniors out there are salies out there, two year old kids playing in the backyard, cute little fuzzy was he let's pick it up? You think that would happen all the time, and you'd know if they picked him up, they come squawking in Mama or Dada, whoever is there, would would you know, be cuddling them and see this thing running around. It's quite bright, so you you'd know if there's a case of that happening. Yeah, we've never heard of any of those, with one exception, Famous EO. Wilson reported in a story when he was about three that he picked one up. But then he's an in them alogist like me, so you have to make exception for people like us, but most you know, normal people. E. O. Wilson, the guy that popularized the term biophelia right exactly, an island, biogeography, and about a dozen other terms. Pretty amazing guy. He was an entomologist. Yeah, he's basically an aunt man. Really, yeah, that's that's his true love. But he's an overall general biologists. You name it, its living and it's animal. He's pretty good at it. But yeah, he's the only one I've ever heard of who ever got stung as as a youngster. And of course once you get older, parents you don't mess with that thing. So now they're communicating, But as a two or three year old, you're not being told, oh that that red and black thing, don't don't mess with that. So you're completely naive, yet you don't pick them up. And and that's the interesting question. I think we have this innate fear of it. You see similar sorts of things and people having an innate fear of snakes because we evolved in Africa, and in Africa, almost every snake there are at least a good chunk of them. Bite you and you're dead. So you learn if it's snake or snake, like, don't take a chance, it isn't worth it. Avoid the thing. And there's extreme phobia of people which persists even to people who are nowhere near where there's dangerous snakes, like northern Europeans have no dangerous snakes anymore. People's phobia snakes or northern parts of China and that sort of thing. Asia or there are no Yeah, that's why always would be like a really interesting if you could time machine back and watch the first human um after coming from Asia across Burringia, and they've been generations and generations removed from snakes because they've been in the Arctic um that all of a sudden someone penetrates down into the mid continent and there's a rattlesnake. Did they just like go to grab it or did they have that thing like, I'm generations removed from snakes, thousands of years removed from snakes, but there's no way I'm touching that thing that that would be my feeling. Is that what had happened? But they carried that. Yeah, we need a time machine to do that, the same thing all kinds man. Yeah, when I get a time machine, get into the movie, but do that first and then I got some other stuff on to take care of. And we have the same phobia of spiders, you know, it's a rachnophobia technical term for people are dreadfully petrified of spiders in general, translers in particular, which is kind of interesting because tranchers never bite people and they don't hurt if they even if they did, that's our trend. But you're definitely afraid of them, exactly I was. I didn't know until recently how harmless they were. I just assumed there must be something bad about them. I mean, look at them, you know. I mean I I do a lot of classroom displays where I hold of transfer taking up the classroom with third or fourth graders. And the funny thing is the girls always come up first and hold their hands out. The boys, the big brave boys, are sitting in the back, you know, watching and you know, acting tough and brave. About the fifth time a girl holds the tranch and the boys are realizing they're embarrassed and they got to show that they're boys, and they come up and start holding the transulum. But it's not just me. I've had other people report the same sort of thing. So I don't. I don't know what that tells us about it, but it makes an interesting story. No, it is interesting to understand, like biologically what could have happened there? I got, I got one last question for you. They're not gonna then see if colnt uh Corean or Phil have anything for you, and then I'm gonna plug your book. But can you talk about the drink the Spanish fly you mentioned in your book? It's an afergy, it's an afrodisiac, right, well, sort of? What is it? Spanish fly? Is? Can there? Then? Which is a again one of these small molecules in chemistry. And what it does is it it rots away tissue of a body. It's it kills a lot of horses. It's particularly bad in Oklahoma and areas like that, where it gets into alfalfa, blister, beetles. They bail it up in the hay. Horse eats as few as a dozen a few of these things. The stomach kind of rots away and you lose your horse. Horrible pain. Back up, So a guy bails up a beetle inadvertently exactly, the horse eats the hay with the beetle, The dried up beetle, the dead beetle. Yeah, it's just like it's just in its carcass and then he just inadvertently eats some of these and that can be fatal exactly from a toxin. It's in the beetle, exactly. In the Spanish fly was one of these things that we presume was in Europe, presumably in Spain, I'm not sure where the came. Yeah, that sounds reasonable. And the guys would put it in and the drinks of the food of the gals and they'd grind up a small part of this beetle. What it's supposed to do is it's a general irritant, so it irritates everything, including your your genital system, so you want to scratch, and you aware of it, and it's painful and whatever. If you get the right dose, the story goes that, then then you'll become much more susceptible to being um sexually appreciated by whoever put this. I buy that totally. I'm not sure that's all wives tale or not, but that's that's sort of the folk. That's what that comes from. And in that amount doesn't rock the inside of human no, they well, if they get it wrong, then it's bad news. Yeah, you're like, hey, maybe check it out. Like, I'm not gonna put so many of these in here that it rots your insides out and kills you. I'm just gonna put a little touch in and this is gonna put you in the mood. It's kind of like a like all night to puffer fish. You have to you have to eat just enough of that that's really tasty, not enough to kill you. So that's what that comes from. That's what I'm told. And don't call me the world expert, but that's what the general you know, rumor has is where it came from. Its being called Spanish fly. Of course it's not a fly at all to beetle, but technicalities, you know. I said that was my last question. I have one more question. You run around the snow in uh sandals exactly? Now? Okay? Uh? We have we we have just like you know, among our circle here, we have an ongoing debate about whether it's responsible to wear sandals or flip flops. Because if there's like a like my buddy Rownie likes to point outlets da, there's a volcano and there's lava everywhere, are you prepared to defend your family? So he doesn't like. Not only is he not like sandals, he doesn't like people who wear sandals. Um, but here you are and there's twelve inches of snow on the ground, and it's snowing, and you show upen sandals. Can you share with us your what you what went through your head when you dressed well? I check the weather report first. If it gets below ten degrees, I won't wear sandals off. Yeah, ten or fifteen degrees. And a nice thing about sandals is they're very comfortable. I never get blisters with them. I do everything. I get good sandals. Flip flops don't cut the mustard in my mind. You got chockos on? Yeah, I get chocos there. You know, they're sort of the best that I can find, other than South Africa makes rockies, which don't import here. They're they're pretty good too. And today it's thirty four degrees with six inches of snow. The heat way freshne. My wife complains that I have no feeling in my feet. But we did a test the other day and we had one of these infrared guns that tells you, you know, the temperature of what you're pointing out. Her hands were hot like eighty six degrees or something like that. In my hands were like sixty one or sixty two degrees. I said, I bet my feet are warmer. So she shot my feet and they were like three degrees warmer. Do you have like a tolerance to increased tolerance to pain now that you've been stunt? I don't think so. The one case, you know, I get asked this, how do you know that you're just not nerve dead and you no longer respond to these So the first adventure that I had in in in Australia, I was with a group of social insect people and other AUNT people watch people and be people. They're fair game is guinea pigs. They they're not edgible. They should know what they're doing and if they don't, don't blame me. I'm not exploiting somebody who's completely naive and ignorant. That's my justification. So then I we got that out of the way. What the experiment was. I had been stung by them when I was Oh, it's sharp and it's clean, and it's chemical like to me, not burning or anything, but it's less than a honeybe it's you know, like one and a half something like that, which kind of surprised me. I had an expectation from the literature this would be like a three or really really hurt a whole lot. So I thought, well, maybe I'm just nerve dead. We can test this. I was on this bus load we were in Kangaroo Island, which is burned up last week, and the bus driver said, we see a bull ant colony and alongside of her, anyone want to stop? Yes. The whole bus just screamed, so it all got out. I being sneaky and knowing what I'm doing, I had this jar and I was picking up an one flip flip into the jar. It was about a tenth of a second for reach, and I picked him and flipped into the jar. They didn't notice that speed. These things are very fast. I was just faster, and so someone would They try to catch them with tweezers, and they can't catch them. They're too big and too agile, and they can't suck him up with aspirators. And there trying trying to trap them in the short time we had, and they were getting frustrated. So then they do like they saw, Oh Schmidt, he's the expert, and all that sort of stuff. He's just picking them up. So they picked him and get stung. And I would kind of saunter over and say, how how does this sting affect you? Is it like more than a honeybe lesson honeybe about about like a honeybee or whatever? I managed to get five of these people that I sort of sneakily got is my volunteer controls on my own nerve deadness, if that's a word. And they all said, well, surprising, it hurts less than a honeybee, a little bit less. All five of them agreed basically what I said, So I said, ha ha, Schmidt is not nerve dead You know what I like about what you're saying, though, is you're you're pointing out um as a way to measure pain. You're not applying an absolute number to it. It's like it's a relative thing. Yeah, Like someone might be someone might um think that a hunting bee is like crippling and they can't do anything for an hour after getting it, but they could still tell you that that's not as bad. Or someone might be a honeybe they don't even think about it, but they could still relatively tell you, you know, Yeah, the one. One case where I have a little bit of trouble with that is there's beekeepers and there's people who collect a lot of them actually around the Montana area, who collect yellow jackets for collecting the venom for allergy shots. Oh and so if you make your profession as a beekeeper, you asked them, you've ever gotten stung by a yellow Yeah, those daring things, they really hurt. They heard a lot more than a honeybee. You go, well, and then you ask the yellow jacket people who collect them for a living, and they say, what about a honey v versus your yellow jack That was bloody honey bees? They really really like they've lost some of their Yeah, I think it's a bit psychological psycho. They both hurd the same. I don't like either one of them. You guys got any more questions? I kind of thought you were gonna applaud Dr Schmidt's um. You know, he wasn't willing to take advantage of naive people. And I've kind of heard you say that in in certain circles where you're like hiking a little too fast, And he said, all those folks knew what they were getting into. Oh yeah, which different views on it. Yeah, yeah that works. Uh No, I I like the book and uh I really do enjoy your adventures also. And and something you said at the very beginning of the podcast, when Steve said he was bit by bullet Anton, he said, oh you're lucky. Um do you feel that way like you do? You appreciate your experience. I'm glad to happen. Yeah, yeah, I think one of the things is acute pain. When you have this, you obviously don't like and you wish you didn't have it. But then did you get to regale this story time and time again, particularly to your children and your grandchildren? You know, Graham's can't tell me a story about your child, and you can tell them about the bullet an. The kids will be enraptured with this seeing later on in life, you know, good joy out of this. So I say, that's why you're lucky. If you never had this, you have one fewer stories to tell. And maybe that's just me, you know what, what to me is interesting and what maybe to other people isn't. But yeah, I I certainly didn't like it when I got stung by it, but well I got a book out of it, so um, not to make this too much longer. But for people who will die from a beasting, what happens there is it? Is it that it's the kind in is it that bees have kind in and in some susceptible people that immediately will affect their heart or am I totally off base there? While you're you're close. What happens is these these have melatant, which is another one of these small peptides, in other words, twenty six or so amino acids. And what they do is they cause extreme pain. And that's what causes the hurt. But that's not what we would kill you an allergic reaction and allergic reactions our old friend phosphol lippase a or how you wanted, is it's usual phosphol lippase a. What it does is it causes a massive release of masts cells or basulfills. These are specialized cells in our body that release endorphins not endorphins, histamine, slow reacting substance, and replaxus which are now called luco tryins us um a whole bunch of other enzymes and things. What they do is they cause a dramatic lowering of blood pressure and people if they get enough of this reaction, they can actually die of asphyxia. With two ways, they cause it's swelling in your throat and you can die asphyxia, or they can cause cardiac you know, insufficiency where you can actually you know, have brain dead because you're not getting enough enough oxygen to your brain. In the third way they can do it is actually cause the heart attack itself. And so it's it's it's our body killing us, not the venom. I was just gonna say, it's our own processes, yeagers triggers your body to attack itself exactly. And of course the bees like, oh, I didn't mean that. Yeah, And you say, why do why do we have Why do we have this dumb immunogloby in an e system that causes us? The reason is that's our our system that protects us against macro parasites, worms and big pathogens and things of that sort. And if you notice people in places that are very poor hygd and have a lot a lot worse parasite problems usually don't have allergies because their idea is busy fighting off the worms and these sorts of things. Interesting, we're just too clean. We have the hygienic theory that came out of Japan. Words. We have all these immunizations of childhood disease in our immune system just gets lazy and that's what causes you know, arthritis and mortivele sclerosis and you know all these autoimmune disease. None then it acts out. Yeah, just choose off our own body because we don't give it something useful too to a to work on. Yeah, all right. The name of the book again, The Sting of the Wild by Justin O. Schmidt, creator of, among many other things, the Schmidt Pain Index, which you next time you get stung by something, you look it up. The subtitle of the book, so it's The Sting of the Wild, the story of the Man who got stung for science and uh, Mr Schmidt, Dr Schmidt, thank you very much for joining us. It's in my place here and uh and thank you for the beautiful song.