Welcome to Creature Future production of iHeartRadio.

I'm your host of Many Parasites, Katie Golden.

I studied psychology and evolutionary biology, and today on the show, it's a listener questions episode.

You send me your questions to Creature Future pod at gmail dot com, and I do my best to answer them.

These can be questions about animals, about your pets, about wildlife, about evolution, about the environment, and I will try to answer all of your questions.

So let's get right into it with our first listener question by Katie.

I hope you had a great summer.

I'm a seventh grade science teacher.

This year is part of our ecology unit.

I'm planning on having students focus on ephemeral pools, including raising some triumphs under various conditions in our classroom.

I was wondering if he'd be willing to do a show on ephemeral pool organisms, including these adorable, charismatic little guys.

I love the show.

Best wishes, Amanda m I Amanda, so I'm so happy that you're enjoying the show.

That's a fantastic suggestion for an episode that I'm definitely interested in doing.

When I was a kid.

I was given some desiccated try up eggs in one of those little kids, and I managed to bring I think a couple to life for a little while, very briefly, but I had no idea what I was doing.

I used tap water, probably not the right salinity, so they didn't last very long.

And yeah, I think this is an excellent episode suggestion.

I do want to do a full episode on ephemeral pools, including tryops, but for now I'll just do kind of a brief overview.

First of all, what is a tryup?

What is Amanda talking about?

It is a little crustacean.

It looks a lot like a tiny horseshoe crab or some kind of alien.

They have this plate like body and a segmented tail that forks at the very end into these two long tips.

They're called triops because they have three eyes.

Two are these close together compound eyes on the top of their head.

They're so close together they're almost like kind of merged into one another, like Sonic the hedgehog, almost, And then they have a third eye in between them.

And this eye is a simple eye with a single lens.

So triups mature very quickly, and there are many different species of tryops, but in general they only live to be around ninety days, so their eggs, on the other hand, depending on the species, can remain dried out for years.

So let's talk a little bit about ephemeral pools.

It sounds very mystical and magical, and it is so.

Ephemeral pools, also sometimes called vernal pools or informally potholes, are small seasonal pools of water that come during wet seasons and tend to dry out cyclically.

So this means that they generally don't house fish, except that there are some fish like killifish that have specifically adapted to having really brief, fast live spans and produce eggs that can survive desiccation, so they can live in these ephemeral pools.

But generally speaking, usually there's a lot of invertebrate species.

You also have some amphibian species.

So what all these species have in common is that they have to be able to reproduce within the wet season and produce eggs that can survive the dry season.

So they have to hatch quickly when they are exposed to water, and they have to mature very quickly and reproduce and then lay eggs that we'll be able to survive being dried out.

So that's actually why, Like, if you ever got sea monkeys, which are also known as brin shrimp more technically or tryops, and you know, you can buy these kits.

You can get them sent to your house.

I know, back in probably I think like the fifties used to.

They used to advertise sea monkeys and magazines and kids could send in their hard earned cash for a little packet of sea monkeys and a little plastic aquarium and maybe or maybe not have them come to life.

Certainly they did not look like the pictures on the packaging, but they were brine shrimp.

And the reason that you can revive these dried out shelf stable eggs is that their eggs are very hardy.

They survive being dried out.

They go into this sort of like suspended not quite suspended animation because it's an egg, so it is not yet fully matured organism, but yeah, it's in a it's in a state of stasis, so you can keep them relatively easily, and then once you expose them to water, hopefully of the right salinity and hardness, then they will hatch they'll come to life.

So other ephemeral pool residents are amphibians like salamanders, newts, and frogs.

So the nice thing about being an amphibian is you can move around, so as your pool is drying up, you can maybe find another pool that isn't as dry.

But they it is also important for them to lay eggs that survive being dried out.

There's some amphibians that will bury themselves in the mud to survive dry periods as well.

So there are other types of adaptation and ephemeral pools happen all over the world.

So you'll have very different species depending on where you are, but you can have in one ecosystem for one kind of ephemeral pool, like hundreds and hundreds of different species who are taking advantage of the cycle, the dry wet cycle.

So this is really cool stuff.

I definitely want to do a full episode on this.

So thank you so much for the question, Amanda, and good luck to you and your kids and raising an army of tryops.

I'm very interested.

Let me know how that goes, all right, onto the next listener question.

This one is really really good.

In fact, I would say this is less of a question and more that someone bringing me some research to my attention and a very good summary of it.

So I'm just gonna read you the whole email.

Hi, Katie, I just happen to read the most mind blowing scientific paper I've ever come across, and it's relevant to your interests.

It begins with the statement living organisms are assumed to produce same species offspring and cites two sources, one of which is the origin of species.

So you know you're in for a wild ride.

A bunch of ant species have queens that lay only princess eggs when they mate with their own males.

To make workers, they have to mate with males of entirely different species.

The workers are thus all hybrids.

And this isn't even the key finding.

Apparently this is just a thing some ants do, and it has been known for a while.

No, the finding has to do with Mesor Ibericus, the queens of which have to mate with mesoor structor to make workers.

So these are the main two species that we're going to be talking about.

The problem is that m Ibericus and M.

Structor don't live in the same place, so m Ibericus queens do some crazy cellular jewurry brokery to lay eggs that hatch into M.

Structor males.

Yes, these are queen ants that lay eggs of an entirely different species.

So when it's time to mate, the queen's princesses fly off and mate with both m Ibericus and M.

Structor ants from other colonies.

Then they do something akin to indosymbiosis on the M structor sperm.

Quick note from me.

Endosymbiosis meaning that you have a symbiote, another organism living inside you.

Symbiosis is a non judgmental term of a close relationship between two organisms.

Can range from mutualism to parasitism, so in this case it's not necessarily parasitism.

Probably closer to mutualism all right.

So back to the email.

They do something it can to endosymbiosis on the M structor sperm, taking it into the queen's own cells but not merging its nucleus.

The queen can thus regulate fertilization and mitosis.

She can lay diploid pure strain m Ibericus eggs that hatch into princesses haploid m Ibericus eggs that hatch into m Ibericus males, So diploid and haploid.

Diploid is two sets of chromosomes, usually coming from the mother and the father.

Haploid is one set, usually in this case coming just directly from the maternal line.

So okay, so all so far, very normal for ants.

They lay diploid female eggs with genes from both the mother and the father, but then haploid males with genes usually just from the mother.

But here's where it gets kind of finicky.

So so back to the email.

They have haploid instructor eggs.

So this is the other species we were talking about.

M.

I.

Buricus is the queen, and they're laying haploid instructor eggs that hatch into instructor males and diploid hybrid eggs that hatch into workers.

So these ants can both create basically male clones of another species as well as the hybrid workers.

All right, back to the email.

This is amazing, right.

The authors bring up some important points in the discussion section.

The sexual behavior of these ants means we really need to rethink the whole concept of speed.

She's because kate nature cares not what boxes we put things into.

They also describe such interspecies mating and ants as a form of sperm parasitism, but it's ambiguous which is the parasite and which is the host.

One way to look at it is that M.

I.

Buricus is just using instructor's sperm to make more in my Burcus, not letting their captive instructors mate with princesses of their own species.

But from a selfish gene perspective, one could say that mstructor is piggybacking off the hard work of M.

My bu because using a whole other ant species to perpetrate the M.

Structor genome nature sure is wild and confusing.

I guess I should ask a question, shouldn't I?

Is this the wildest form of reproduction we know?

Or do other species get even crazier?

Are there any other animals that laugh in the face of our attempts to define the species?

Keeping great Chris, M Hi, Chris, so amazing email, great, great detail, an amazing study that you bring out.

So I read the paper you sent me.

The paper is called one mother for two species via obligate cross species cloning in ants.

So your summary, Chris is perfect.

I just want to reiterate stuff because like, there's a lot of a lot of things going on.

These queens of the m Ibericus ants are producing a lot of different offspring.

So this incredible species of ant Mesor Ibericus was found to use the sperm of a different species, mesr structor.

So the m Ibericus queens are able to use the DNA of their own species to produce both male and female offsprings, but they cannot produce workers.

So their free male offsprings are future queens and the male offsprings are their own species and used for mating for producing more future queens.

Ah.

But they need the inmstructor DNA this other species DNA to produce workers.

But they don't only use it to produce workers.

They use this DNA to produce clones of males from this other species, haploid males that are only getting their DNA from the instructor DNA, as well as hybrid females that have both m Ibericus DNA and in instructor DNA, and those hybrid workers are essential to the functioning of the colony.

So the ability of the m Ibericus ant to produce workers has become entirely dependent on instructor DNA.

The researchers found that worker hybrids primarily had the DNA of cloned instructors, although some were wild types.

So it means that sometimes the queens had directly mated with instructors they found in the wild and produced produced workers from these matings.

But a lot of these workers are entirely produced by clones of this other species.

So the queen kind of becomes like a clone factory where she's producing clones of this other species that are then used to meete with to produce hybrid workers.

Meanwhile, she's still doing normal ant things where she's producing future queens as well as males of her own species.

So the high amount of workers who are fathered by clones means that, very uniquely among ant species in my Bericus, queens create a steady supply of clones.

You know, like in Man.

I didn't watch all the prequels to Star Wars, but you know in Star Wars they make a bunch of a clone army.

It's what these queens are doing, and then they use these clones to father worker ants.

And the study authors liken this to domestication.

Definitely very strange, very very weird dynamics going on.

I think this study is really really cool Chris, As you pointed out, the concept of species is more of an art than a rule in nature.

The most simple definition of a species is the biggest category of organism in which the individuals can mate and produce fertile offspring.

This definition is definitely lacking.

What about asexual organisms?

Right, So you could say, like, ah, but so then a species also includes those that individuals can asexually reproduce.

But again, this definition isn'tcomplete given that hybrids exist, and while most hybrids like mules, are not fertile, you can sometimes have hybrid species that are fertile.

So often biologists use other markers, either DNA, morphological differences, evolutionary history to help refine the definition of species.

So like in this case of these ants, these two species diverged a really long time ago, millions of years ago, and then it seems like this symbiotic relationship developed after they had diverged.

So that's kind of why they would say these are different species, even if they're incorporating these other ants regularly into their mating.

But it's definitely a fuzzy category.

There's a lot of gray area, just as there is for most things in biology.

But yeah, of course, there's so much debate when it comes to species, particularly differentiating between species and subspecies.

There are a whole like species complexes where you have things often things like butterflies or frogs, where you have a huge diversity of species, and then some of them are morphologically genetically extremely similar and can even potentially mate with each other, but they have a few differences.

So the question is, at one point are they a different species who can just kind of mate with each other and produce fertile offspring, and at what point are they different.

It's very hard.

It's very hard to kind of make these categories.

There's much a lot of thought that goes into it that I don't I don't quite understand.

I'm certainly not the authority on what exactly counts as a species.

As for Chris's other question about whether this is the wildest form of reproduction we know, I'd say it's really subjective.

To me.

This study is really really cool.

It's very exciting that you have an ant species that is basically producing clones of another species that they're using as a farm for genetic material to create worker ants.

That's incredible.

But there's so many examples of really weird life cycles, super super strange, lots of cases of sexual and asexual reproduction, assisted reproduction from like other species, sexual parasites, that all get pretty freaky.

I would say, I think that the what is strangest is going to be subjective.

But I'll offer up an example of an extremely strange form of reproduction.

So I cannot recall if I've talked about this on the show show before, but this is the Adactylidium, which is a microscopic arthropod whose entire life cycle is extremely messed up.

So these are mites.

These are teeny teeny teeny tiny mites.

Their microscopic you really can't see them barely at all, I doubt with the naked eye.

So let's start with the pregnant female.

She has up to eight embryos inside her, all female, and then she has one male embryo.

These develop into reproductively mature mites inside of her, and the male mates with all the sister females fertilizing them, So all of this is already happening inside the pregnant female.

Then the offspring eat their way outside of their own mother, who's only a few days old herself, which kills which kills her.

So this is not the only form of matrophagi in the animal kingdom.

There are other animals that will eat their own mothers, but this is certainly, I think, the only case where you have already pregnant females inside the mother then eating their way outside.

You think this sounds really unfair for the females.

The males don't have much of a life either.

After impregnating all of his sisters inside his own mother, he has no further purpose.

Even if he gets outside of the mother with the sisters, he doesn't have any instinct to feed or to mate.

He just patiently waits for death to come.

The females, meanwhile, will find a thrip EGGA thrip is another teeny tiny art pod, So they find an egg of this other species to feed on, and they are already pregnant because they were fertilized while they were still inside the mother.

So they feed on an egg and after a few days the same thing happens to them.

So it's a pretty thankless existence for these mites.

Life is an endless genetic production line and little else.

Thankfully, their microscopic they do not have many brain cells around, not much neural like, they do have neural cells, but it's not I wouldn't feel too much existential horror on their behalf because probably they're not super aware of what's going on.

So really it's us who get to ponder the existential ramifications of the existence of these Adactylidium mites.

So there you go.

I don't know.

I wouldn't say it's cooler than the ant study.

I think producing an army of clones of another species that you harvest their DNA from for your own workers is also pretty messed up.

Nature's very, very creatively messed up.

There's lots of examples.

Here's just another one.

Hope you enjoyed that, all right, So we'll take a real quick break and then get back with another listener question.

So here's another listener question.

Hi Katie, longtime listener, first time questioner.

Could you discuss the management of invasive species and non native species?

I find myself torn due to my love for animals.

I understand that invasive species can negatively impact or even devastate native species, but I have a hard time with calling them.

I suppose it just upsets me that animals have to suffer due to human errors.

I know that invasive species have to be managed in some way, but what goes into the decisions on how to manage them?

Who typically has the say and how they're managed?

Are the management strategies usually successful?

What happens when a species is not native but also not harmful?

Would they just be left alone?

Are there examples of non native species being beneficial?

Interested in any information about this?

Really, I'd love to know your thoughts so I can understand it all a bit better.

Thank you, Ashley from Kalamazoo.

Hi, Ashley, So this is a great question, and I totally get where you're coming from.

Invasive species aren't evil.

It's not their fault.

They usually had no real say and where they ended up, and they're just trying to survive.

Controlling them is usually very important in protecting ecosystems.

But what about when they simply adapt to their new home without wreaking havoc?

That's a great question.

So we know that certain species like cane toads, cats, black rats, zebra muscles, longhorn beetles, these are all examples of animals that are invasive that can be incredibly dangerous to native species.

You'll notice that I mentioned cats I'm talking about the same type of kiddies that we have as pets.

Feral cats can indeed be considered invasive where they freely roam, breed, and kill native species, particularly birds.

Usually, though we're less comfortable hunting and killing cats because we love them.

They're pets, so controlling them usually involves spaying and neutering campaigns, though we do also sometimes trap them and euthanize them.

That does certainly happen either way.

I think people are more squeamish about being the idea of colling feral cats, right even though we do to a certain extent do it, although we do it humanely with euthanasia.

Yeah, rightfully, So, we were uncomfortable with the idea of calling these feral pets that we're the ones who introduced them, and we also kind of have a more personal relationship with them, so we understand we frankly like see them more as an animal with emotions, even though there's plenty of invasive species that we call that are similarly you know, animals that have feelings, right, So, like it's just it's kind of a matter of perspective.

Because these are pets, we empathize with them more even though there's plenty of perfectly complicated, intelligent animals who are also invasive species.

So unfortunately, like doing a lot of spain and neutering or trapping in, euthanasia isn't always an option.

Uh So, for instance, on islands, rats can be really really dangerous.

So rats are extremely fertile, they produce a lot of offspring, and so in some places, if they are not controlled quickly, they can very effectively wipe out native island populations, and so usually conservationists will use lethal methods in these in these cases, like using poisons, which I think is it's sad, right, Like, I think rats are intelligent little animals.

Some people keep them as pets.

I'm sure people who own rats as pets will kind of really sympathize with this, right because you see, like, yeah, they they they're they they have they they have a brain, they have a mind.

You know, they're they're simple creature.

But they that doesn't mean that they don't have emotions and they don't have a level of social intelligence.

So the control of rats is I think always for me at least, been kind of an uncomfortable an uncomfortable thing to reckon with, right because in terms of protecting ecosystems and also protecting human health, controlling rats is pretty important.

But on the other hand, you know, poisoning them rat poison has a lot of problems, one being that it is not necessarily very humane way of killing an animal, right, And then the other is that if you do have rat populations where they're also predators, you can cause ecological damage if the predators are eating rats who have been poisoned.

So I really only think in cases where you are very time constrained, right where rats could easily overtake, say like an island with a lot of vulnerable bird species, and you have to control their population really quickly.

I do see why conservations and will sometimes use this, but yeah, it's certainly not ideal, but at this point, right, logistically, sometimes it's what has to be done.

But that doesn't mean that humane options are always inconvenient or more expensive.

In fact, I'll bet that at some point more humane methods will become like the standard.

So there are some wildlife advocates who point out that hunting right, like one method of colling, is really ineffective.

At this point, right, we don't have there's just not enough people who need sustenance from huntings that are going out and say like colling wild boar populations, So it's it's expensive then to like actually set about trying to purposefully coal and hunt wild boar.

So, uh, there's got to be a more effective and also more humane option for being able to control their populations because wild boar can be very destructive to their ecosystem.

And that's also an example of an animal who I think is intelligent.

I'm not against hunting them, right, Like, I think that that's certainly in a lot of ways no more if less inhumane than factory farming.

But if you have to cull a bunch of wild bore, right, that's just more you're and it's not for using their meat, right, it's just because they are an invasive pest.

It's not a great situation.

And I think it would be really good if we came up with more humane options, and we are so.

Researchers and a college's conservationists are coming up with more humane methods of controlling populations, and they've already tried this on gray squirrels.

So in the UK, conservationists are trying to control the gray squirrel population, which is an invasive species from North America.

So you know, there you go, Britz, you got you got a lot of our movies, but you also get our terrible squirrels.

So these squirrels are really not a benign invasive species.

They may be cute, but they're devastating the native red squirrel population in the UK as well as other species as well as vegetation, so they're not They're not great in terms of their presence in the UK.

Not the squirrel's fault, but they're there and they're causing problems.

So controlling the squirrel population with hunting not very effective.

Poisoning them not very humane.

But also if you have wild species, like say foxes that are native to the region hunting squirrels and they get a squirrel that's been poisoned, that's not good for the fox.

So it's like there's not a great solution there.

So what they're coming up with is oral contraceptives.

So this is not a completely new idea.

The idea of basically baiting animals with contraceptives so they are rendered infertile has been used in a lot of different cases to try to control populations.

It's even on the genetic level, for mosquito control, creating genetically modified males that are infertile to reduce the mosquito population.

But this is something that is I think being put into practice more so for these gray squirrels.

What they'll do is they will lace this hazel nut spread that apparently the squirrels really love with an oral contraceptive.

They put it in bait boxes that are specifically designed to be accessible mainly by the gray squirrels.

They try to make it specific so it's really only the gray squirrels getting at it rather other than a different species or you know, a different type of animal that they don't want getting to this contraceptive.

So then the squirrels go and eat the hazel nuts and instead of being killed and poisoned, they are rendered infertile.

This trick would definitely work on me, by the way, I love hazel nuts.

Hazel nuts spread in a box that's free, Yes, please glad it's not poison.

But yeah.

So this is a potentially very effective way of controlling their population that is already being used in some instances, and I think probably especially as we if we put more research into it, and we're able to maybe even like create contraceptives that are really specific to a species of animals, So even if another animal eats it, they're not going to become infertile.

Only the targeted animal will.

I think that we could really have very humane ways of controlling invasive species that are really efficient and you know, in the long run, if you invest in the short term, in the long run much more cost effective.

So I don't think that being humane about it is at odds with efficiency with cost effectiveness, and so I definitely see this as hopefully being the future of controlling invasive species populations.

All right, So let's talk just some of your other questions because those are also really interesting.

So, like you mentioned, who basically gets to say and how invasive species are managed.

That's a very complicated issue because it's going to differ depending on your country, your locality.

Even when you look at one country, the management of it is going to depend on the administration.

So for an example, in the US, there are a few federal agencies who are involved in controlling invasive species.

Generally speaking, this as part of the National Invasive Species Council within the US Department of the Interior.

It's a it's a bunch of it's like kind of a group of people from various federal agencies who oversees what to do about invasive species, monitoring them and then actions taken.

In twenty nineteen, during Trump's first administration, he effectively disbanded the National Invasive Species Council by defunding it.

So for a while it was kind of disbanded, and then under Biden it was reinstated.

Currently, I have not seen.

I mean, there's so much news that's constantly happening, so it's pretty hard to keep up with everything that's going on.

But I don't think it's been officially disbanded.

I imagine it's definitely been affected by government budget cuts, right, So I don't know if it is as functional as it was.

I think it still exists, but yeah, the cuts to funding for a lot of these programs, I would imagine also has an impact on the National Invasive Species Council.

So I my point in bringing all this up is that invasive species are typically managed by government agencies, but those are subject to the policies put in place by leaders.

So it's a very it's a it's a pretty complicated political question that you bring up, like who is actually monitoring this, who is managing it, who decides what to do.

And again it can also just depend locally, right, you may have uh, state agencies or city agencies who have their own their own like monitoring species monitoring, and so they might come to separate decision.

And so let's address your question of like, are there invasive species who are beneficial or benign?

I looked into this, I think that there usually uh, it's it kind of depends on what you how you define a benefit, right and who who is benefiting.

So, because you could argue that say, like the European honeybee in the US is beneficial to humans because we get honey from them, right, It's a big agricultural industry of honey, and certainly we enjoy having honey.

There's a lot of crops and so on that are that we grow intentionally, and so in terms of beneficial there are certainly arguments to be made that certain invasive species, right of crops and animals benefit human beings.

Now, in terms of the environment, I think it's a little harder to make the case for invasive species being beneficial for the local habitat.

I think often there may be some there can be some trade offs, right, Like it can benefit certain species, especially.

I'm going to talk mostly about plants here because it's usually the ones that are more benign.

Are plants not always the case.

There can be some really nasty plants that choke out local plants, So plants are not Just because it's an invasive plant does not mean that it's going to be benign, But a lot of the benign species happen to be plants.

And you know, I think it's like, in some cases, an invasive plant may benefit y some of the wildlife there, right, Like you maybe have honeysuckle or something that benefits certain birds in the area, but then the downside is that that might outcompete some other kind of plant, right, So saying it benefits it's a little tricky because, like there's certainly invasive species that do not cause the collapse of a local ecosystem.

Saying it's beneficial to the local ecosystem is usually a little more granular, where it might benefit some species and actually be a detriment to other species, and so making a determination of it overall, like improving an ecosystem is usually a little bit more complex.

But in terms of there are some cases where an invasive species is much less harmful then we fear when it first arrives on the scene.

And an example of this is the spotted lantern fly.

If you live on the east coast of the US, you've probably you're probably pretty familiar with this.

It's a black and red spotted flying insect.

It's actually a species of plant hopper.

It's invasive.

It's from South Korea.

Initially, conservations were very concerned that it would kill a lot of local hardwood trees because plant hoppers are they there.

Their big thing is they go onto plants and they suck out the juices, and so researchers were rightfully, in my opinion, very concerned that these could have a really negative impact on trees, given that in their native homes they will attack trees, and these trees that we have in the eastern US did not co evolve with spotted lantern flies, so they don't have the same defenses as trees in their native environments.

So, you know, environmental experts were quite concerned and there was a lot you probably heard a lot of news about like you're supposed to kill them on site, and these are going to be a menace Fortunately, at least as far as the research has shown so far, they're not as destructive as they originally had feared.

I'm going to make a distinction of like, this does not mean they're good.

They're not good or even benign.

But they're not killing off the trees in the way that initially had been feared.

That doesn't mean that the conservationists the experts were wrong to sound the alarm.

I think it's much better to approach an invasive species with a lot of caution, try to nip it in the bud if you can.

Obviously we weren't able to stop there from being this invasion, but you know, I think the caution was definitely warranted.

But it's simply the nature of science and research that you when something novel happens, right like an invasive species comes to an ecosystem.

You can guess about certain things that might happen, but you can't know until you get the data.

And once you get the data, you revise your understanding of the situation.

In this case, local hardwood tree populations where these spotted lantern flies have been around I have not been dying off as was feared.

That doesn't mean the lantern flies are benign, they still damage the trees.

The trees are able to withstand the damage a lot better than what had initially been feared.

You still have the problem of these things damaging trees, right, So, like if a tree is stressed from a lantern fly, can imagine if say there's another invasive species, or say there's a fungus or disease that attacks these trees, you could in the future still see some kind of really serious consequence to the invasive spotted lantern fly.

So I wouldn't say that this is enough to say like, ah, we don't really need to control their population because they're not killing trees as had been feared.

The fact that they injure and stress the trees is already not great, and it could be you know, there are it could be one factor that in the future, in some kind of event where the trees are put under some other kind of stress, that could be really devastating.

So uh, it is.

It's of course new information and data that I don't think should be ignored, but it doesn't necessarily change the calculus that spotted lantern flies still are not necessarily a benign invasive species.

Now this is an interesting thing, and people were instructed to kill these on site, and I think still are so.

As an individual killing lantern flies, or even as like a collective of everyone when they see one, killing one is probably not going to do a whole lot to the lantern fly population.

There's just too many of them, and just by stomping the ones you see is not gonna probably make much of a dent in the lantern fly population.

I mean, if this were the case, we would since we all, I would imagine, try to kill as many mosquitoes as we can that would somehow have an effect on the mosquito population, and it just does not really have a significant effect.

So certainly lantern flies may not be quite as numerous as mosquitoes, but still they have a healthy population.

So killing them on site, given their ficundity meaning they have a lot of offspring and their numbers, is not probably going to really do much of a dent to their numbers.

The reason that experts were saying to kill them when you see them, the reason that was the instruction was the more serious potential problem is that a lantern fly could hitchhike with a human and go somewhere else like into another region where they're not they have not taken hold, so like for instance, getting in your car, getting on your clothes, in some of your property, that's you know, moving as humans, we like to move around the country.

And then if that happens and you have a hitchhiker and then they start to invade a new region in the US, that could be quite consequential.

So the killing them on site is more of a way to prevent them from Like when you encounter one and it's near you and you kill it, that reduces the chance that you're going to have a hitchhiker lantern fly that you bring with you to another region in the US.

I think, honestly, like I know that public sort of communication, science communication, public health communication, all these things are really complicated.

I always think that it's better to explain everything to people.

Maybe you can do the simple flyer of like kill these guys on site because they're invasive, but having some explanation as to the why.

Right, these aren't going to be dangerous to human beings, They're not going to bite you, and you're not necessarily on a crusade to stomp out the lantern flies.

Maybe like at the very beginning it might make a difference.

Honestly, I'm pretty doubtful that as well.

I think that there's only a few cases in organisms that don't reproduce as quickly, like the giant Asian hornets.

We were able to control their population before they got a foothold, but they're just not as they don't lay as many eggs.

They don't they don't have the ability to reproduce that lantern flies have.

So anyways, so that's why you are instructed to kill them on site.

It is to prevent you from having them as a hitchhiker.

So if you're not planning at all to move outside of your you live on the eastern coast of the US, and you're not traveling anywhere, and you just see one in your backyard and you don't really feel like killing it, you're not doing anything wrong.

It is pretty much exclusively the purpose is, like, you know, it gets in your car, on your stuff, and then you travel somewhere.

So yeah, it's I think that it is.

Really there's a lot of nuance and to this phenomenon of invasive species.

I think it's tricky communicating with the public about it because usually the efforts are focused on trying to prevent the most serious harms that could happen due to invasive species, which might leave little room for subtlety in public messaging.

Right Like you're saying, like, look, lantern flies are a really cool animal and cool insect and plant hoppers are amazing and interesting, but also like, you know, kill them.

You know, it's a complicated thing, right, So I do think that we can both control invasive species understand the harms that they cause, while also appreciating life, right Like, I kind of sometimes feel like I get where I've had this question a few times, and I get where you're coming from.

This discomfort of sometimes it feels like when there's an invasive species and sort of an effort to call them, it gives people this like almost permission maybe to feel like, I don't know, like there is like an evil enemy to destroy, right, sort of like in Starship Troopers, right like, Ah, these are insects that we can destroy and stamp out and with a relish, And I don't necessarily think it's like really really bad, right Like, I don't think it's you know, like wanting to stomp on an invasive insect makes you a bad person.

But I think in general, uh, the kind of like the way that we view invasive species as almost like malicious, right, Yeah, I think that that is a little odd, right, it's ascribing a moral system to them that these insects they haven't they they didn't decide to accidentally fly over to the US and some ship shipment of goods, so you know, to kind of like have this this idea of them as being evil invaders is certainly not the case.

And I think like the way that the best way really.

I think obviously we can just ignore invasive species because they can be really devastating.

And also I really don't think it's wrong for conservationists and in collegists to be very cautious at the beginning of noticing that their invasive species around, right, So like if they have a really strong primary response to it, right, and then it turns out that it's not as devastating as they had feared it would be, it's not because they're stupid, it's not because they made some kind of mistake.

It's that it's a huge question because like we simply may not know what exactly the consequences will be of an invasive species.

It could be a little bad but not super bad, or could be something like cane toads that are just this really really insidious force of kind of the worst type of invasive species that really destroys things, are really hearty, really tough to get rid of.

Again, the cane toads don't know what they're doing.

They're not evil, they have no intention of driving other animals to extinction.

They're innocent in this situation, but they are really devastating, And so it makes sense, I think, to have this really strong response to invasive species.

But I think that like having a full understanding of the situation, being really open to new information and data as it comes in, which means funding researchers.

Like the more funding that we put into research, not just in monitoring, but also new techniques of controlling, like the what I mentioned with the gray squirrels contraceptives.

That's going to be the kind of thing that I think not only will make this more humane and will prove our understanding of invasive species, but I think ultimately is going to be more effective than a lot of the methods that we currently use.

Right So, I I do not think ecologists conservationists are are in the wrong on this at all.

I think, if anything, we need to be putting more funding into it so that we can refine the tools that we use in controlling invasive species, and I think those do those will become more humane.

The high the more technologically advanced that we become, the more humane in this case, I think things will be.

So yeah, I think I don't think it's incompatible the respect for life, but also the understanding of how to control invasive species and just for goodness sakes, we have to research it.

It's really important.

So thanks you guys so much for listening.

I will answer the guests who squawking Animal sound guessing game next week.

Until then, please do send me your questions at Creature Future podu at gmail dot com.

I really enjoy answering these questions, and also if you guys point out cool researcher stories, always welcome.

I learn a lot from these emails too, so I really appreciate that.

Thanks to you guys so much for listening, and thanks to the Space Classics for their super awesome song Exo Alumina.

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I'm not your mother.

I can't tell you what to do.

I don't even feel confident in telling you whether or not you should kill spotted lantern flies.

But don't let them hitchhike with you, all Right, If you see a spotted lantern fly and it's sticking out, it's a little proboscis and sort of a hitchhiking gesture.

Ignore them, leave them alone, don't let them in your car, don't bring them down to another US state.

It's it's not going to be a good situation.

See you next Wednesday.

Mm hmm