The Crazy Science Behind Insect Plagues | Answers With Joe

this video is brought to you by curiosity stream and nebula check out the teaser to my new nebula original series at the end of this video remember the show silicon valley i thought it would be fun to start this video off by talking about what is probably one of my favorite scenes in that entire series except for middle out of course it's in the first season when the peter gregory character was still on the show which uh by the way they they killed off that character because the actor died in real life i didn't realize that it's pretty sad anyway in the episode a couple of guys who run a business that peter's venture capital firm had uh invested in were coming to them trying to get some kind of loan because they had hit a problem and they were going to have to lay off some people if they didn't get some extra money so they're in there they're desperate for money they're trying to save their business and and he can't stop talking about burger king or as he referred to it burger king apparently he was driven by a burger king on the way to work and he'd realized he'd never eaten at once so he sent an assistant off to get one of everything on the menu so then he goes on to like spread it out over his entire desk and he's and he's getting all weirdly obsessive in his little neurodivergent way about it and the guys are over here freaking out and then he narrows in on the sesame seeds and then starts mumbling about cicadas cicadas anyway the point is he connects the dots in his head to figure out that there are only three micro climates around the world where sesame seeds grow and two of those three have cicada populations one of which broods every 17 years and one of which brews every 13 years and he figures out that next year in the show anyway both of these were going to line up leaving only indonesia as the only place in the world that has sesame seeds to put on the billions of burger king buns that would go out around the world so he invested in indonesia and sesame seed futures and was going to make enough from that to be able to give these guys the money that they needed it's just such a brilliant solution and it's a great scene and of course it got me curious if this was something that had ever happened because there are definitely 13 and 17-year cicada species so i started to think like has that ever been a thing where those came up at the same time and disrupted agriculture in some way so i nerded out on cicadas and started doing a lot of research online just because i wanted to know the answer to this and i found a website that holy god if i was nerding out on cicadas this guy is a cicada super nerd it's called cicada mania and it tracks different broods of cicadas all around the world it has a little feature here where you can enter your location and find out when cicadas are going to brood where you live it has entire pages on different species and their characteristics oh and when you scroll over a link the cursor becomes a cicada this might be the most adorable website i've ever seen in my life but i can kind of see how somebody can get sucked into this because insect swarms are kind of fascinating according to the book of exodus in the bible god unleashed 10 plagues in the egyptians to convince the pharaoh to free the jews from their captivity water turning into blood raining frogs lice boils all the greatest hits and one of them involved locus they covered the face of the whole land so that the land was darkened and they ate all the plants in the land and all the fruit of the trees that the hail had left not a green thing remained neither tree nor plant of the field through all the land of egypt that was dramatic but from a scientific perspective this may have actually happened molecular biologist cyril trevisonato is the author of the plagues of egypt archaeology history and science look at the bible he blames it on the volcanic eruption on the island of thera now known as santorini in the year 1600 bce he told the telegraph in 2010 that the ash fallout could have caused weather anomalies leading to higher humidity and more precipitation that would lead to more locusts although i feel like i should point out that the theater eruption has actually been blamed for a lot of things over the years everything from the end of the minoan civilization to the bronze age collapse to the end of atlantis i actually went to santorini a couple years ago it was the last big trip that i took before covet hit it was it was great i [Music] remember traveling but weather anomalies have definitely led to locust plagues before in fact they're still dealing with the fallout of a swarm last year in 2020 in east africa and western asia in 2018 cyclones dumped a ton of water on the horn of africa oman and yemen and this created breeding grounds for locusts that caused all the swarms that happened last year in fact the 2020 swarm is one of the worst outbreaks in over 100 years it was reported that one swarm was 40 kilometers wide by 60 kilometers long that's big enough to cover the city of paris 24 times over desert locusts are basically a type of grasshopper what sets them apart from other types of grasshoppers is that they have a tendency to go from a shy unremarkable animal to a freaking destroyer of worlds what does that sound over the top because it's not desert locusts as the name implies are used to dry conditions they live sparingly they just kind of are in survival mode most of the time until it rains when the rain starts to fall they basically turn into grim ones and multiply by the tens of billions they gather together in what's called the gregarious phase and this helps them to produce a hormone that causes all kinds of different transformations they change color from green or tan to a bright black red or yellow and their bodies get smaller their endurance increases and their brains grow along with our appetites by the way this ability to change in response to environmental conditions is known as phenotypic plasticity the females lay eggs together that all hatch in sink so the one million desert locusts can turn into one billion in just a few days and then once they take flight they're practically unstoppable locusts ride the winds and can migrate across great distances and just one day they can fly more than 200 kilometers eating all the green vegetation they find along the way they can eat their own weight and food every day now granted that's only two grams each but when you're talking about 50 billion of them in these swarms that can add up to as much food as 35 000 people per square kilometer a swarm in west africa from 2003 to 2005 resulted in 2.5 billion dollars in harvest losses according to the u.n food and agriculture organization in fact they called the desert locust the world's most dangerous migratory pest affecting the livelihoods of one in 10 people on the planet so why talk about insect plagues that that's why now swarming behavior is pretty common around the world fish ants bats even snails get their swarm on but a handful of animal swarms stand out above the rest not only affecting people's livelihoods but decimating crops around the world so let's start with everybody's favorite parasite the mosquito some fun facts about the mosquito there's more than 3 000 different species of them 176 species are recognized in the united states some can transmit diseases like dengue west nile encephalitis filariasis malaria and yellow fever and they contribute to almost 1 million deaths worldwide each year now not all mosquitoes actually bite you it's only the female ones they suck your blood for a blood meal so they can get protein to make eggs and mosquitoes have been around since the triassic period so much like cockroaches they're probably not going anywhere and like lucas heavy rainfall can increase their numbers for example the inland flood water mosquito can lay up to hundreds of eggs at a time and those can stay dormant for up to 10 years and if it's sometime during those 10 years there's some extra rainfall and the lakes and rivers rise up enough to cover those eggs in water they can all hatch it once releasing millions of mosquitoes all at the same time fun oh and do you know which state has the worst mosquito problem it's it's not what you think and it's not texas even though we love to complain about our mosquitoes here all the time no it's alaska which kind of blows my mind i always think of mosquitoes as being tropical but yeah alaska has over 35 mosquito species and their swarms are so huge they can actually disrupt animal migrations caribou especially because the swarms can actually cause them to go away from their normal feeding grounds which can lead to malnutrition and extra stress which reduces their population mosquitoes have actually lowered the population of caribou in alaska now why are there so many mosquito species in alaska and other arctic regions two words climate change in a study published in the proceedings of the royal society b in 2015 researchers found that mosquitoes are very responsive to environmental temperature changes they said quote a warmer spring and earlier pawn thaw in 2012 resulted in mosquito phenology that was advanced by two weeks relative to 2011. in fact they found that for every one degree celsius increase in temperature the amount of time the mosquitoes need to grow decreases by 10 percent and that means less time exposed to predators the faster they go through these life stages the better off they are one of the researchers lauren kohler told national geographic if you're only exposed for 20 days instead of 24 that's good for you that's four days you don't have to worry about being eaten not so much good for the caribou though depending on where they are they might run to higher ground or they might run to windier areas or areas with more snow and ice coincidentally areas that have less vegetation to eat and also the earlier arrival of the mosquito because of the warmer weather actually coincides with the birth of new caribou calves and yeah this is how bad the mosquitoes are up there they can swarm a caribou calf and drain it of all of its blood make sure you pack some off next time you go to alaska or louisiana after a hurricane yeah last year in 2020 along with every other disaster that we had going on hurricane laura unleashed massive numbers of mosquitoes enough to kill deer cattle and horses an agricultural expert named jeremy hebert claimed that he'd never seen anything like it in his life and that quote as soon as you would walk outside your legs would turn black from the sheer amount of mosquitoes mosquitoes are the worst sort of on that same note here in texas every year we get swarmed with crane flies which are harmless but they look like giant mosquitoes in fact sometimes they're called mosquito hawks they're also often inaccurately called mayflies but mayflies are something else entirely in june of 2019 meteorologists noticed a massive dense storm on their weather radar on top of lake erie even though there weren't any reports of any rain there that's because it wasn't a cloud it was a mayfly swarm there are more than 3 000 species of them worldwide with more than 700 species in north america alone mayflies hatch from their water larva state in late spring and continue over the summer hence the name mayflies and when they hatch they do it all at the same time creating a massive mayflies so we experience mayflies as these massive swarms that only happen for a few months at a time but they actually live most of their lives in water once they hatch from the water out of their larval stage they only live for a short amount of time usually just a few days they live for such a short amount of time outside of the water that most adult mayflies don't even have mouths they just exist off of the stored nutrients that they have in fact females of the delania americana species only live for about five minutes and what are they doing during that five minutes shagging lots of shagging i mean if you only have five minutes to live what would you be doing mayfly swarms are basically colossal orgies orgy's so big that sometimes i've had to close down roads cars have been damaged and some cities have to turn off their lights it's like your mom's in town after mating is completed the male dies the female then goes off to lay her eggs in the water up to 3 000 eggs at a time and then she dies too talk about going out with a bang but enormous swarms of mayflies are actually a good thing it's basically an all-you-can-eat buffet for birds and other wildlife a study published in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences in 2020 found that quote a single emergence event can produce 87.9 billion mayflies releasing 3078.6 tons of biomass into the airspace over several hours yay massive orgies it's also good news because it means our aquatic ecosystems are healthy since mayflies spend most of their lives in the water they're really sensitive to pollution which can compromise their ability to reproduce in fact you can kind of tell how clean the water is by the size of the mayfly swarms unfortunately it appears that the mayflight populations are getting smaller it's actually gone down by 50 in some areas oh no smaller orgies a couple of suggested reasons include of course climate change it's thought that the warmer temperature might reduce the oxygen levels in the water and fertilizer runoff from farms triggering algal blooms that put toxins into the water whatever the cause it's not looking good according to that study i just mentioned quote if these population trends continue persistent environmental changes could threaten to once more extra hexagenia mayflies from north america's largest waterways making this ephemeral spectacle and its vital ecological functions a thing of the past hashtag save the orgies next up let's talk about midges midges are kind of tiny little flies most of them are harmless but we're going to talk about one specific family sara tapagana day also known as the biting midge for the various reasons you can probably figure out there are more than 4 000 species of them with more than 600 species in north america also known as no cms five o's and punkies biting midges may cause itchy skin lesions and allergic reactions and they primarily develop in wet or marshy soil because like mayflies they spend their larvae stage in fresh water but unlike mayflies they spend their time outside the water much longer from up to two to seven weeks and they do have mouths like mosquitoes it's the females that do the biting again for protein for egg production and some species pick certain other species to feed off of and some of them are more general the feeding periods are different among the species too examples include the lepticonops species feeds during the day the coolicoidis species starts at dusk and continues throughout the night and certain species in the cool aquarius genius which like to bite humans are often attracted to light will enter homes to feed and what drives those midges to swarm you guessed it frank stallone it's probably just like five people that are old enough to get that but i don't care no they do it for reproduction it's that whole thing again according to dr henry disney from the university of cambridge males will produce a sound and a smell signal to attract the females and they'll usually swarm around a certain object so they have a point of reference according to dr disney sometimes they gather in such numbers that they make huge towers so many midges once swarmed the salisbury cathedral that a fire brigade was called because it looked as if the spire was swallowed in smoke and it turns out there's some really interesting math involved in midge swarms other swarming animals like birds and fish or herding mammals exhibit something called global order that means that most of the members retain a uniform distance from each other and their changes in direction and velocity are common but midge swarms are different this was brought forth by u.s researcher akira akumbo back in 1986 akubo showed that midges move randomly in direction and acceleration in a swarm still the swarm remained a swarm because of the nature of randomness akubo also showed that image's inward acceleration increased an inverse proportion to how far it was from the center of the swarm he described the swarms as self-gravitating systems uk physicist andy reynolds added to that work in a paper in 2018 where he used the langevin equation of the framework that equation is used to describe brownian motion which is basically how colliding particles appear to move randomly in a fluid and he discovered some interesting results for example that these swarming systems actually behave the same way as star clusters and gravitational systems his research also showed why weather conditions don't disrupt a swarm displays a swarm with a gust of wind and it behaves like a solid despite all of that empty space reynolds told cosmos magazine the swarm consists of a dense inner core in an outer vapor phase with strange thermodynamic properties so why do species swarm there's a few different reasons including protection grouped together offers the appearance of a larger entity helping to reduce the risk of any one individual being harmed by a predator it also saves energy moving in the same direction helps to share the effort when fighting against air water resistance and of course reproduction because it's easier to find a mate in a group setting swarms also accomplish tasks that are difficult for an individual to perform and what happens is you get sort of an emergent swarm intelligence out of it and this collective intelligence can often achieve results and and goals that one individual wouldn't be able to do by themselves so if any point during this video you were wondering you know why somebody would study why midges swarm like who would dedicate their lives to this why would they do that well that's why because there's a lot that we can learn and apply when we study how emergent intelligence comes out of very simple creatures following simple directions for example learning about swarm behavior could help finesse drone or robot behavior maybe even help control how information is spread through social networks according to dr maria orsogna bats can teach drones how to navigate confined spaces without colliding fish can help design software for safer driving and insects are inspiring robot teams that can assist search and rescue missions and with seven billion interconnected people on this planet it's kind of hard to argue that we're not swarm animals ourselves especially when it comes to our sharing of information collective swarms of human behavior can lead to destructive mobs or spreading of misinformation or our collective behavior can produce breakthroughs in science and technology that can improve the world in a myriad ways understanding swarm intelligence can give us a better handle on which direction we could go as a species so maybe there's something we can learn from those little bloodsuckers by the way i mentioned at the beginning of this video the locust problem they're dealing with in africa they're still recovering from that big swarm from last year well if you would like to learn more about that i can highly recommend the show look a swarm on curiosity stream part of the bright now series that covers all kinds of global topics locus swarm looks at the issues around the desert locust and the horn of africa and the middle east as farmers scientists and um bureaucrats work to combat swarms of up to 50 billion locusts that can consume as much as the entire nation of kenya in one day and how they're relying on ancient as well as modern techniques to turn the tide this is of course just one of thousands of documentary series that you can find on curiosity stream from some of the best documentary filmmakers around the world it was created by the guys behind the discovery channel so you know it's legit plus when you sign up for curiosity stream you get free access to nebula the streaming service i'm a part of as well as many of your other favorite science communicators it's where you can watch our videos ad free and it's also the home of exclusive nebula originals that you can't find anywhere else including drum roll please my own nebula original series that i can finally reveal to you guys it's titled mysteries of the human body and here's a sneak peek a human body chances are you have one and you probably think you know it pretty well but if you looked inside some weird stuff going on in there from our earliest days we've been trying to understand the human body what makes it work how we can make it work better why do things go wrong and yet there's still so much we don't know stories from the past that we can't explain unknown maladies that popped up infected a whole bunch of people and then disappeared without a trace even very common conditions that for some reason we just can't cure it it's not as horrible and tragic because it just made it sound i promise so grab your morbid curiosity and a snack and join me as we take a tour through the biggest mysteries of the human body [Music] it's a six-part series that we'll be officially launching in just a few weeks and the only way you can see it is by signing up for curiosity stream at curiositystream.com joe scott that's because by signing up for curiosity stream you get free access to nebula and right now they're offering 26 off that bundle that makes it 14.79 for an entire year for two streaming services it's it's just insane but yeah it's seriously the best streaming deal on the planet and it's the only way to get access to this new series i'm putting out there so go check it out curiositystream.com joescott i think you'll like 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 242,980

Rating: 4.941803 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott, Insect plagues, Desert locust, Swarm intelligence

Id: wtE9Mkodi48

Length: 19min 43sec (1183 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 22 2021