Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Buzz, Bite, and Bloom: Exploring Plant–Insect Connections
68 Plays1 day ago
In this episode of Hort Culture, the team is joined by Dr. Jonathan Larson, University of Kentucky Extension Entomologist, for a fascinating discussion on the complex and often surprising relationships between insects and plants. From pollinators that fuel our food supply to pests that challenge our landscapes, Dr. Larson shares insights on how these interactions shape both natural ecosystems and home gardens. The conversation dives into beneficial insects, pest management strategies, and practical tips for gardeners looking to support pollinators while protecting their plants. Whether you’re curious about native bees, biological control, or just want to understand what’s really happening when bugs meet blooms, this episode offers expert knowledge with plenty of real-world takeaways.
Entomology at the University of Kentucky
Arthro-Pod Podcast
Questions/Comments/Feedback/Suggestions for Topics: hortculturepodcast@gmail.com
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Weather Talk
00:00:17
Alexis
Okay, is everybody as chipper as me that there's cooler weather on the horizon? Because I am done with the corn sweat.
00:00:23
Plant People
Is there chipper or what?
00:00:24
Brett
What is corn sweat?
00:00:26
Plant People
to Corn sweat?
00:00:27
Alexis
You've not heard about the corn sweat?
00:00:27
Plant People
and
00:00:29
Brett
No, I've not heard about the corn sweat.
00:00:29
Plant People
that when you eat too much like county fair popcorn? What is corn sweat?
00:00:34
Alexis
you know it's a It's a, listen, you all obviously don't watch the weather.
00:00:37
Plant People
don't know what corn smut is. Is it anything like that?
00:00:40
Alexis
no
00:00:40
Brett
We don't watch the weather?
00:00:41
Alexis
no corn sweat.
00:00:41
Plant People
you're talking about the humidity.
00:00:41
Alexis
so So, yeah. So in areas where there's lots of corn that surrounds you, right?
00:00:44
Plant People
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
00:00:47
Alexis
there Corn, a lot of leaf area is respiring. And so the relative humidity in areas like Illinois and Indiana, where there's just corn everywhere, is significantly higher.
00:00:53
Plant People
one
00:00:58
Alexis
And so they call it the corn sweat because the temperature is higher due to the higher humidity.
00:01:02
Brett
And they're attributing this to the respiration off of corn or the transpiration.
00:01:06
Alexis
Yes, it's a real thing. Look it up.
00:01:08
Plant People
I think that we have specialists, and I won't name names here, but we have specialists that have addressed this. So if, dear listeners, you would like more information on this, you can contact your local county extension office.
00:01:19
Brett
Who addressed this?
00:01:19
Plant People
We do have official statements on this.
00:01:22
Alexis
Corn sweat. see corn sweat
00:01:23
Plant People
What's that, Brad?
00:01:24
Brett
Who addressed this?
00:01:24
Plant People
Yeah, cornwa corn sweat, corn humidity. Dr. Chad Lee had ah some very interesting work on that. He does a lot of work on row crops, specifically on corn, and he had some good information on that.
00:01:35
Plant People
So that should be available through your local office.
00:01:35
Brett
I have to check that out.
00:01:37
Plant People
Yeah, it was interesting.
00:01:37
Brett
I've heard of meat sweats, but I've not heard of corn sweats.
00:01:38
Alexis
I think
00:01:38
Plant People
When I first saw that, i mean, of course, he he didn't call it corn sweat, Alexis.
00:01:42
Alexis
the meat sweats.
00:01:43
Plant People
He didn't call it meat sweat or corn sweat.
00:01:44
Alexis
Look at Google it. Listen, y'all are calling me out and y'all about, i come with receipts, okay?
00:01:47
Plant People
Okay.
00:01:50
Brett
No one's saying, no one's saying you're wrong.
00:01:50
Plant People
Okay.
00:01:50
Alexis
um
00:01:50
Plant People
Okay. We're going to need that for the return.
00:01:53
Brett
any my My wife introduced a new a new ah phrase into the chat, which was, I said something and she's like, no, not really. no And she's like, I wasn't disagreeing. I was just agreeing in my own way.
00:02:06
Brett
just refuting, refuting what I say, but I was just agreeing in my own way.
00:02:07
Plant People
That's like disagreeing once removed.
00:02:10
Brett
So that's what I was doing with the corn sweats.
00:02:11
Plant People
I'm going to have to remember that. That's almost as good as Jonathan's story he started with.
00:02:13
Alexis
Oh, okay.
00:02:13
Brett
Jonathan, have you heard of the corn sweats?
00:02:15
Plant People
Yeah. What's a good corn sweats, Jonathan? Yeah.
00:02:19
Jonathan L. Larson
I believe in the corn s sweats.
00:02:21
Plant People
and Okay. Now, when I've been in fields of corn, like, I've sweated in corn before picking, like, sweet corn.
00:02:24
Alexis
I believe I'm a believer.
00:02:26
Jonathan L. Larson
Hallelujah.
00:02:29
Plant People
So is that a thing? I mean, is that a thing? Or, yeah, just big fields of corn.
00:02:32
Brett
Hmm.
00:02:32
Alexis
What?
00:02:32
Jonathan L. Larson
That's just exertion sweat.
00:02:32
Alexis
Yeah.
00:02:34
Plant People
Yeah, maybe so.
00:02:34
Alexis
Hmm.
00:02:34
Plant People
Thank you, Jonathan, for that plug.
00:02:35
Jonathan L. Larson
Yeah.
00:02:36
Brett
I think if I eat a lot of cornbread, I would get pretty sweaty.
00:02:36
Plant People
you know
00:02:39
Plant People
Yeah. Yeah.
00:02:40
Jonathan L. Larson
That's because there would be ribs next to it and you get the meat sweats and the corn sweats all at once.
00:02:43
Brett
Yeah. yeah yep be
00:02:43
Plant People
Yeah. It's...
00:02:45
Brett
It would be hard to controlled do a controlled experiment of that because I would just be going for everything else.
00:02:45
Alexis
All at one time. Yeah. Jalapenos in the cornbread. Just all the sweats.
00:02:55
Brett
Yeah.
00:02:55
Alexis
Eat it outside today.
00:02:57
Brett
I have jalapeno sweats.
00:02:58
Alexis
when the There's cooler weather on the horizon.
00:02:58
Brett
I can i can i can see that.
00:03:00
Plant People
In this conversation, all I heard was cooler weather, and I've not looked forward on the forecast, but is there cooler weather coming in? I mean, is that a thing?
00:03:08
Alexis
whenre While we're recording, where we are mid corn sweat territory. heat Is advisory is in um and yeah There's cooler cooler Weather on the horizon hence my Chipper attitude ah Like Like eighty like low 80s Yeah 60s at night
00:03:14
Plant People
Yes.
00:03:18
Brett
confirmed
00:03:21
Plant People
Awesome. Yeah, I'm happy about that. nice. Nice. It has been, I guess a the word heat dome was becoming like all too common.
00:03:33
Plant People
ah The word heat dome on the weather forecast, i don't know if it's just a catchphrase the last few years, but it seems like we have lots of heat domes that come.
00:03:40
Alexis
It's the dome that holds in all the corn sweat
00:03:41
Brett
yeah oh yeah
00:03:43
Plant People
It is, I guess so. Yeah.
00:03:45
Alexis
Canada's sending us some cooler weather.
00:03:46
Brett
It's like a high tunnel over the corn sweat.
00:03:46
Alexis
They're like, here, we feel really bad for you.
00:03:49
Plant People
Yeah. Magnifies the
00:03:50
Brett
I see.
Earthquake and Weather Shifts
00:03:51
Alexis
Also, did you all hear about the earthquake?
00:03:51
Plant People
cornstown.
00:03:51
Plant People
Yeah.
00:03:53
Alexis
I know this is hort culture podcast, but I'm just the earthquake in the middle.
00:03:54
Brett
yes, yes,
00:03:58
Jonathan L. Larson
What earthquake? Where?
00:03:58
Brett
yes. This is kind of like calling, having a heck calling and when I'm having a conversation with my mom.
00:04:04
Plant People
Yes.
00:04:05
Brett
She's like,
00:04:06
Plant People
the The transitions are not always smooth.
00:04:07
Alexis
I'm sorry.
00:04:07
Brett
this
00:04:07
Alexis
i didn't know your mom was so cool.
00:04:09
Brett
just rattling off just news events and things that she didn't be like, you heard about that?
00:04:12
Plant People
Oh, by the way. Yeah.
00:04:14
Alexis
You know what? It's because I like you guys and you're just getting all of the info as quickly.
00:04:17
Plant People
Where? Okay. You let in with earthquake and then just, we can't let that dangle.
00:04:21
Alexis
Middle of the ocean and California all along the coast is on under a tsunami warning.
00:04:21
Jonathan L. Larson
Yeah.
00:04:28
Brett
the what the Apparently the waves already hit Hawaii.
00:04:28
Plant People
Oh.
00:04:31
Plant People
Oh, goodness.
00:04:31
Alexis
I didn't see that yet.
00:04:32
Plant People
No.
00:04:33
Alexis
Yeah. Yeah.
00:04:34
Plant People
We'll be checking that out after the recording of this episode.
00:04:35
Alexis
It was like an 8.8 or something.
00:04:36
Brett
See, i'm I'm a participant in the in the bit.
00:04:38
Plant People
Wow.
00:04:39
Brett
i'm just It just reminds me of ah yeah calling checking in with my mom.
00:04:39
Plant People
Okay.
00:04:43
Plant People
ah Family members that have random combos with you. Sure.
00:04:46
Alexis
um Well, ah now you know that if I enjoy your presence, I'm going to say whatever comes to my brain at that exact time.
00:04:53
Brett
Thank you.
00:04:53
Alexis
But you know what's on my brain now? Bucks, insects, how that how them and plants chill together doing things.
00:04:55
Brett
What's that? Oh, Bug Brain?
00:05:02
Alexis
That's what's on my mind, which is perfect because Dr.
00:05:02
Brett
<unk>sis
00:05:06
Alexis
Jonathan Larson is here today. Ta-da!
00:05:08
Jonathan L. Larson
a
Insect Enthusiast: Dr. Jonathan Larson
00:05:09
Brett
we Would we call him a fan favorite? I think we'd call him a fan favorite.
00:05:14
Alexis
he's he He's definitely my favorite. so
00:05:16
Brett
Oh, okay. Okay.
00:05:17
Jonathan L. Larson
Whoa.
00:05:17
Alexis
ah You can't find a better entomologist. Listen, Papa Rick, love you so much, but you're leaving us. so
00:05:23
Jonathan L. Larson
I was going to say, I thought Rick was on the show once upon a time.
00:05:23
Alexis
um Jonathan is the new it it boy.
00:05:25
Plant People
man.
00:05:27
Brett
He was. Alexis can't, Alexis cannot stay away from the controversy.
00:05:30
Plant People
guy, new kid on the block. She is, she is a getting the people going.
00:05:35
Brett
She's back in the, back in the Larson horse.
00:05:35
Alexis
Who are you talking to? Of course it's me.
00:05:38
Plant People
Jonathan, what is this? ah Number three for you on, is this number two or number three with us recording an episode? I think now maybe number three, maybe.
00:05:44
Jonathan L. Larson
ah Is it three? thought was two, but yeah, I'll buy that. I'll buy three.
00:05:48
Plant People
Yeah, we were talking about a cicadas before, but maybe I made up the first one. It could exist only in my head.
00:05:53
Jonathan L. Larson
No, you're right. I did like IPM once.
00:05:56
Plant People
ah Yeah, that's been a while.
00:05:56
Brett
Yeah.
00:05:57
Plant People
So been then you did a very popular episode on the periodical cicadas.
00:05:58
Jonathan L. Larson
Yeah.
00:06:02
Plant People
So yeah, I got you back again.
00:06:02
Jonathan L. Larson
Yes.
00:06:03
Plant People
so
00:06:04
Jonathan L. Larson
I love the cicadas. I got to talk a lot about them this year with the the brood that came out here in Kentucky. And it sounds like lots of dogs and everybody else were enjoying snacking on them and stuff. So I hope it was a ah popular item for other people in the hort culture community.
00:06:17
Plant People
think it was, and I believe there was talk of recipes and things, and that really got the folks going, the listeners going. So yeah, that was ah that was a ah good episode.
00:06:25
Alexis
Did you eat cicadas this year?
00:06:28
Jonathan L. Larson
Me?
00:06:29
Alexis
Yeah.
00:06:30
Jonathan L. Larson
Unfortunately, I did not get the opportunity to. I pushed real hard with the Lexington Herald leader for a local chef contest where we would get them to cook cicadas in various forms.
00:06:39
Alexis
Mm-hmm.
00:06:40
Jonathan L. Larson
And me and a reporter and like the food critic for town would all sort of chow down and and do it. And they they told me they'd get back to me. And I think that was a very polite, like, go away.
00:06:50
Jonathan L. Larson
We've done enough with you on this.
00:06:50
Plant People
and
00:06:51
Alexis
yeah you know No, thank you.
00:06:52
Plant People
We are not going to assume the liability of this ah this endeavor.
00:06:55
Jonathan L. Larson
Yeah, yeah.
00:06:56
Plant People
Yeah. Yeah. But it's amazing.
00:06:58
Jonathan L. Larson
So sadly, no, I didn't.
00:06:58
Alexis
That's unfortunate.
00:06:59
Brett
you So cicadas are responsible for for your primary insect media interactions. Is that right?
00:07:08
Jonathan L. Larson
This year for sure. Yeah. And last year too, I got to do a lot because of the double brood emergence. And now I guess I have to wait maybe 13 more years until brood X returns and I get to return to the airwaves.
00:07:17
Brett
Hmm.
00:07:19
Jonathan L. Larson
But the ticks and the the other things have been kind of backfilling. So i did a lot of fireflies this year. There was a lot of firefly chatter.
00:07:25
Alexis
ah
00:07:25
Plant People
Yeah.
00:07:27
Jonathan L. Larson
So I got to do a lot of media on fireflies too.
00:07:29
Plant People
I would say those two things probably take up a good amount of your time because it's incredible the increase in the number of phone calls we've gotten in the offices over the last two or three years on, well, fireflies are more recent, but on ticks, especially with alpha-gal and associated issues, other health issues with that.
00:07:45
Alexis
Mm-hmm.
00:07:47
Plant People
But it's it's amazing to me ah how many calls we get on those things now.
00:07:49
Brett
What's the what's the firefly thing? People are worried there's not enough of them.
00:07:53
Jonathan L. Larson
So for the last couple of years, it's been talk of where are they?
00:07:53
Plant People
I don't know how that goes from
00:07:56
Jonathan L. Larson
Why are they dying? Did my neighbor kill all of them when they sprayed for mosquitoes? What happened to all of my childhood memories? Why are you taking them away? That kind of stuff. And then this summer, there was some stuff that came out actually with a researcher here on campus, ah McNeil over in forestry.
00:08:13
Jonathan L. Larson
and some of his compatriots that have done work in Illinois, and they seem to be showing that firefly numbers were going up relative to the last few years.
00:08:20
Alexis
Mm-hmm.
00:08:21
Jonathan L. Larson
But I would say broadly, they're still a part of the insect apocalypse where insect life is in great decline. We may be helping the fireflies out in sort of scattered areas, but we're trying to also tell people like it's still...
00:08:32
Jonathan L. Larson
tough to be a bug out there. And there's all these different ways that we're harming them. ah One thing with fireflies that we teach people about is light pollution. it It hurts people that want to do stargazing, but also fireflies, they communicate visually through these flashes with one another in order to mate.
00:08:40
Plant People
Mm-hmm.
00:08:48
Jonathan L. Larson
And if they can't see the flashes, then they can't get to the the the mating. I was going to use a different F word, but this is a family show. So they if if there's too much light,
00:08:59
Jonathan L. Larson
ambient light from a baseball stadium, leaving the lights on all night or what have you, that's going to harm local populations. So there's a lot to talk about with them.
00:09:05
Alexis
Mm-hmm.
00:09:06
Jonathan L. Larson
And people are very passionate about fireflies or lightning bugs, whatever they call them, um because they're they're just ah ah really nostalgic piece of summer for most people. I think a lot of people associate them with childhood.
00:09:18
Jonathan L. Larson
So there's always lots of passion when we talk about those.
00:09:21
Plant People
Jonathan, have you been contacted with any, it seems like I've seen a couple of ah events around the state that are sort of Firefly viewing events on like these agritourism top locations.
00:09:32
Plant People
ah Do you know anything about that?
00:09:34
Jonathan L. Larson
I haven't done those yet. I know that it's some of it's here, but it's really big in Tennessee. You can go to the Great Smoky Mountains and you can see the the the simultaneous firefly emergence where they all come out and they flash and then they go away.
00:09:39
Plant People
is that where it's coming from?
00:09:40
Alexis
Thank you.
00:09:46
Jonathan L. Larson
But people yeah are driving around Kentucky looking for different populations. There's some folks who want to find the blue fireflies, which are not supposed to be very common here.
00:09:54
Plant People
Oh, wow.
00:09:55
Jonathan L. Larson
ah just trying to collect them all like Pokemon and and see them and experience them.
00:09:57
Brett
Yes.
00:09:59
Jonathan L. Larson
I did get to do a Firefly family event in Davis County in Owensboro at the Western Kentucky Arboretum. And about 200 people came out to do little tours for Fireflies and see them.
00:10:12
Alexis
Yeah.
00:10:12
Jonathan L. Larson
And I was supposed to give this like little 30 minute
00:10:12
Plant People
Oh, wow.
00:10:15
Jonathan L. Larson
presentation a couple times that people could filter through, but there were so many of them. I ended up having to do it four or five times. I can't remember. And so it was a lot of fun just to see how how passionate people.
00:10:22
Plant People
Wow. A lot of interest.
00:10:25
Jonathan L. Larson
Yeah, exactly. They really wanted to talk about them.
00:10:26
Alexis
yeah
00:10:26
Plant People
and that's a that That's amazing. I see all about the synchronicity, like you said, of Firefly synchronizing. Maybe it's just my media feeds. I've made the mistake of putting in the word Firefly or lightning bug, and now I'm seeing all of it, but I'm starting to see events like you just described and very well-attended events, apparently. Yeah, so that's very cool to have a themed events like that. It's pretty pretty neat.
00:10:49
Plant People
Pretty neat.
00:10:49
Brett
is
Insect Popularity and Pollination
00:10:50
Alexis
Are you all...
00:10:50
Brett
there is there an in Is there an insect that if you could wave your wand and it would have the level of visceral support from the public from the public that you would you would give it that?
00:11:01
Brett
Like you would be like, yeah, let's give this their lightning bug, their monarch, their honeybee moment. What would you, you got you got one in mind?
00:11:09
Jonathan L. Larson
That's a tough question because yeah, you just picked picked out like the three micro fauna that we would call the most charismatic. Like everybody loves a monarch. Everybody loves a lightning bug.
00:11:17
Plant People
That's why Brad excluded them. Yeah. Yeah.
00:11:18
Jonathan L. Larson
People love a honeybee. The ladybugs, they often get lumped in there.
00:11:23
Alexis
Yeah.
00:11:23
Jonathan L. Larson
And then you can sometimes see mantises.
00:11:23
Brett
Oh. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.
00:11:26
Jonathan L. Larson
Some people really love mantises. Some people really hate them, but that's about the five insects that people are willing to accept.
00:11:27
Plant People
yeah
00:11:32
Jonathan L. Larson
If I could wave my wand and let, um maybe periodical cicadas. Cause like I, to me, they deserve love. They don't deserve the scorn that they get. They're very charismatic in that people notice them, but I would prefer that people not say, Oh, I want to destroy them all.
00:11:47
Jonathan L. Larson
I would prefer that people be like, this is amazing. These ticking biological clocks in the ground emerging and screaming in trees and really just admit that they're jealous that they can't work out their own problems in that fashion by screaming for a couple of weeks during the summer in a tree.
00:12:00
Alexis
I mean, i can I can give them some tips, but...
00:12:03
Jonathan L. Larson
ah
00:12:04
Plant People
Provide some case studies. Sure. Yeah.
00:12:06
Alexis
but I feel like i'm i'm ah my people have emerged and with the periodical cicadas because I'm like, we're just we're just going outside to scream. like
00:12:14
Plant People
Yeah.
00:12:16
Alexis
ah These are my people.
00:12:16
Plant People
We've had, we've discussed before. It's very interesting how society views, different insects, a cockroaches ah versus a butterfly and how we kind of beauty is all tied up into that. But, uh, I don't know. What is it, Brett?
00:12:29
Plant People
Is it just, uh, is it just the beauty that some things get their day or, or what? Yeah.
00:12:35
Brett
Well, I mean, flashing bioluminescent thing on your belly is a pretty cool trick to like.
00:12:41
Plant People
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if I could do that, I'd be more popular.
00:12:42
Brett
You know, like that's that's pretty, that's pretty tough. And then like the honeybee, I think, you know, obviously the honey is pretty, pretty sweet and cool.
00:12:45
Plant People
Yeah.
00:12:50
Brett
Honey, Winnie the Pooh connection.
00:12:50
Plant People
True. True.
00:12:53
Brett
I don't,
00:12:53
Jonathan L. Larson
so
00:12:53
Brett
ah don't
00:12:54
Plant People
and Hey, this is what we came for.
00:12:54
Alexis
The original crop, Tom.
00:12:56
Brett
I don't necessarily understand exactly why the monarch among butterflies. yeah Maybe Jonathan, you have some thoughts on this. Like why it.
00:13:06
Jonathan L. Larson
Oh man, I have so many thoughts on what you're talking about.
00:13:08
Brett
Yeah.
00:13:08
Jonathan L. Larson
Uh, uh,
00:13:08
Brett
Why it captures the imagination.
00:13:09
Plant People
This is what excites me.
00:13:10
Jonathan L. Larson
what wow
00:13:11
Plant People
Yes.
00:13:12
Jonathan L. Larson
why people accept certain insects and not others, basically. ah
00:13:15
Brett
Yeah.
00:13:15
Jonathan L. Larson
With insects, I mean, you're talking about a group of animals that they seem the most alien out of a lot of life. They look the least like us. I think that the insects that we're talking about that seem to be accepted, there's often something about them that we recognize.
00:13:30
Jonathan L. Larson
So with a monarch, I think it's that migration, that that really speaks to people, this idea of going great distances. and kind of having this sequential ah order of of reproduction and then going back and forth to these different spots that we really, we don't do that necessarily, but we recognize that behavior of going and and coming and returning all the time.
00:13:49
Jonathan L. Larson
With lightning bugs, I think it's that they're talking with their butt flashes. Ogden Nash said there is nothing eerier than walking around with a glowing posterior. But for some reason, I think it speaks to us that they're talking to each other, that we we key in on that and see it as communication.
00:14:04
Jonathan L. Larson
And that's a humanistic element that we can touch on. With honeybees, it's I think it's even simpler. It's just we look at their society and we see our own reflected back in some ways with a 1% at the top, the queen laying all the eggs and running the show, and then a huge workforce that's doing all the tasks in the hive.
00:14:13
Plant People
and
00:14:23
Plant People
Yeah.
00:14:24
Alexis
Wow. I thought you were just gonna be like, cause they're pretty.
00:14:25
Plant People
It's interesting.
00:14:25
Brett
drone Drones who only have one thing on their mind, you know?
00:14:28
Jonathan L. Larson
Drones, yeah, they play Xbox all summer. They're on battlefield ah drinking nectar up and honey up in the colony, and then they either get to mate and have their genitals ripped off, or they're kicked out of the colony to freeze to death at the end of the growing season.
00:14:31
Plant People
Yeah. Hmm.
00:14:40
Alexis
Bye.
00:14:41
Brett
Tale as old as time.
00:14:42
Plant People
There's no joke in that society of honeybees. No jokes.
00:14:45
Jonathan L. Larson
No, it's it's all business.
00:14:45
Plant People
yeah It's serious business.
00:14:46
Jonathan L. Larson
Chemical. Maybe when they talk, since they dance, they they kind of do the the dance in a circle or in the figure eight to communicate with each other. ah was trying to think of what's that song where it's from Australia?
00:14:59
Jonathan L. Larson
If they don't dance, then they're no friends of mine. Who sings that?
00:15:02
Plant People
Can you dance if you want to?
00:15:03
Jonathan L. Larson
I can't remember.
00:15:03
Brett
You can dance if you want to.
00:15:04
Jonathan L. Larson
Anyway,
00:15:05
Brett
you can leave your friends behind.
00:15:05
Jonathan L. Larson
yes
00:15:06
Plant People
Yes, that one.
00:15:07
Jonathan L. Larson
that's the one time that they kind of goof around is that they dance to talk to one another.
00:15:12
Plant People
Which is pretty cool.
00:15:12
Brett
and
00:15:13
Plant People
Maybe that should be part of the marketing. I mean, that's, that's pretty cool. I mean, that's a, that's a feature in itself, but, uh, yeah, you know, it's like they can sting you.
00:15:19
Jonathan L. Larson
Bees get too much marketing.
00:15:19
Alexis
Thank you.
00:15:20
Jonathan L. Larson
They got too much PR. We need negative BEPR.
00:15:23
Brett
So interesting that you say that because I have seen multiple things now on the internet that are like bees, like honeybees, man, like forget about them.
00:15:36
Brett
They suck or like blah, blah, like that kind of thing. And I was just like thinking in practice, in practice, what are the things that you're going to do to exclusively help honeybees versus something else?
00:15:47
Brett
And so it was just this like little slight distinction of like, just so you guys know, I liked pollinators back before the bees took over and went mainstream.
00:15:47
Plant People
but
00:15:55
Alexis
Everywhere they were cool.
00:15:55
Jonathan L. Larson
Right.
00:15:56
Brett
ah was more of a...
00:15:56
Jonathan L. Larson
They are like the pop stars of the of the pollinator world. You want to really follow the indie bands like the squash bee, ah these other kind of like little micro rock stars that people don't appreciate.
00:16:03
Brett
Mm-hmm.
00:16:07
Jonathan L. Larson
the The solo acts, I think, a little more. The way that we help honeybees is just beekeeping. People will say, oh, the honeybees are fine because beekeeping gone up 200% in the last decade. It's like, that's great, but it doesn't do anything for the wild native bees.
00:16:20
Jonathan L. Larson
But we also can't just say, nah, forget the honeybees because we're kind of reliant upon them for most pollination services at this point.
00:16:25
Plant People
Yeah.
00:16:26
Jonathan L. Larson
point.
00:16:27
Plant People
Well, yeah, it's a, Is there any, I know for bees, I mean, that's big business moving those around when you pollinate things, particularly down South on these huge, you know, horticulture fields. But is, what about native pollinators as, as a service?
00:16:40
Plant People
Is there any such thing? I know bees are well-established and put them on trucks and move them around and it's being done. But I mean, is that, is that a thing with any kind of native pollinators?
00:16:50
Jonathan L. Larson
Yeah, if you go to the Pacific Northwest, you can see a lot of efforts with alfalfa bee and making sure that they've got ah all the the kind of clear airways that they need to get places.
00:16:50
Plant People
Yeah.
00:16:59
Jonathan L. Larson
There's little signs about when they're flying across the road and people will take effort to not hit them. I wouldn't say that they're collecting them and releasing them necessarily. You can see that somewhat with the the blue orchard bee. I think that you can buy those. People will rear those up and you can release them in an orchard.
00:17:14
Jonathan L. Larson
But it's much tougher because with a honeybee, you kind of just feel like, yeah, I'm the beekeeper, but really they're they're doing it all themselves. With all these native independent pollinators, there's a lot more effort that goes into trying to rear those up, unfortunately. So it's not as popular.
00:17:30
Plant People
Yeah, it seems like there's, of course, pollination. That's a whole thing Brett mentioned. honey earlier, you know, we all know know honey and most of us really enjoy honey, but the pollination and farming, you know, the importance of that is well established. I mean, if you like food, you're probably a fan of pollination.
00:17:46
Plant People
um But somebody gave an incredible talk and it was years ago that I attended and talked about all of our native pollinators and they do a lot, a lot of work. And I did not realize here in Kentucky, i mean, I'm sure it's true of other places, but the, just the sheer amount of other pollination, uh,
00:18:04
Plant People
other pollinators that are out there ah besides just bees. Like you said, theyre they are the absolute superstars of that world. um And then, you know, folks with greenhouses and high tunnels, I guess bees what don't always work in those situations.
00:18:20
Plant People
ah It's a little bit bumblebees.
00:18:20
Jonathan L. Larson
You can see bumblebees dropped into there. You can get hives from different companies and you pop them in there and they'll do some vibration pollination for you. Bumblebees are very vibratory and so they'll help shake some pollen loose.
00:18:28
Alexis
Mm-hmm.
00:18:32
Jonathan L. Larson
It's not necessarily that the plants need obligate insect pollination, but it's more of a, it helps to increase the the pollen that's getting spread because they're so big and fluffy and kind of buzzy that they help with it.
00:18:45
Plant People
Yeah.
00:18:45
Alexis
There is nothing I love more than finding a sleepy bee on a flower.
00:18:45
Brett
So you're telling me.
00:18:49
Alexis
It is just chef's kiss.
00:18:50
Jonathan L. Larson
Yeah.
00:18:51
Alexis
Like, it doesn't matter what kind. They're adorable, especially when they're just like pollen drunk and you're like, hello. That is living right there.
00:19:01
Jonathan L. Larson
Yep.
00:19:01
Brett
Like he said, they're running.
00:19:01
Jonathan L. Larson
We see fall asleep there.
00:19:03
Brett
They're just running on vibes, baby.
00:19:05
Alexis
ah Yeah, I'm so jealous.
00:19:05
Jonathan L. Larson
see
00:19:06
Plant People
Literally Bumblebee's running on all the Bob's.
00:19:08
Brett
Yeah,
00:19:08
Alexis
that's That's my next life.
00:19:09
Brett
that's such a yeah, that's yeah, i I can see that.
00:19:09
Alexis
I just want to be a sleepy flower bee.
00:19:13
Plant People
I mean, I wondered why like the native pollinators aren't more popular. I guess once you really do a deep dive into like the interactions and what they need and what they pollinate and the intricate systems that they pollinate in, it's all kind of different, isn't it?
00:19:28
Plant People
I mean,
Plant-Insect Interactions
00:19:29
Plant People
they're either super specific to a certain plant or it's a specific process. I mean, it's pretty incredible.
00:19:34
Brett
are you trying to lead us Are you trying to lead us into plant plant insect interactions, Ray?
00:19:36
Plant People
No, I am not. What are you talking about?
00:19:40
Plant People
It's my obvious segue.
00:19:41
Brett
Because I like it.
00:19:42
Plant People
It's only kind I have.
00:19:44
Brett
Well, I feel like I was resisting you and I did not realize it until until just now.
00:19:49
Plant People
no you it's what we do
00:19:49
Brett
I was like, Ray, I keep asking these questions. Yeah, so you're talking about like like plants that have plants where there's a specific insect with a specific plant? Is that what you're talking about, Ray?
00:20:00
Plant People
oh yeah just ah the insect world in itself i mean i maybe my honey i shrunk the kids is where my interest started all those years ago i was like wow is that really what they look like ants and other you know insects but yeah it's it's just fascinating um And the relationships, you know, sometimes it's a mutual kind of thing and sometimes it's not.
00:20:18
Plant People
And sometimes it's some weird mixture of chemical signatures that go back and forth.
00:20:20
Jonathan L. Larson
Mm-hmm.
00:20:23
Brett
class like Classic relationships.
00:20:23
Plant People
And it's just a pretty incredible. Yeah.
00:20:26
Alexis
I was like, we could be talking about anything right now.
00:20:28
Plant People
Yeah, we could be.
00:20:29
Brett
Sometimes chemicals, sometimes it's mutual.
00:20:29
Plant People
We could be.
00:20:29
Alexis
Not just plants and insects.
00:20:33
Plant People
All the things.
00:20:34
Alexis
What bar did you go to? That's dependent.
00:20:36
Plant People
Yeah, well, we were pheromones. I mean, you know, we talked about the bee culture, the, you know, the colony of honeybees.
00:20:41
Brett
But I think like for for me, one of the things that comes is coming to mind with what you're talking about is like certain butterflies have very unique relationships with certain plants. um The monarch, we've already talked about the monarch and given it to Eric, given it its airtime.
00:20:51
Plant People
Yeah.
00:20:54
Brett
But I feel like the monarch and the milkweed as part of a butterfly station both had like a glow up in the public consciousness as a result of their
00:20:59
Plant People
yeah
00:21:03
Brett
curious interactions.
00:21:04
Alexis
Thank you.
00:21:04
Brett
what What is the, like in that or other, if there's another one that you want to again, give to the punk rock in pollinators out there, Jonathan said the monarch, ah like, are there other ones that come to mind in that kind of obligate, you know, special relationship?
00:21:11
Alexis
just
00:21:20
Jonathan L. Larson
Sure. I mean, when we're talking about plant and insect interactions, I think we'll probably talk mostly about the negative ones as we kind of go through the show. But pollination is the sort of positive mutualistic ah view of plant insect interactions, where there's been this evolutionary period where now these insects are specially adapted to feed on specific flowers and visit certain plants.
00:21:42
Jonathan L. Larson
And those plants are now reliant upon them. And everybody's winning. Everybody's getting pollinated. Everybody's getting nectar and pollen and getting ah the food resources that they need. So it's all good all around.
00:21:53
Jonathan L. Larson
This has been going on for a long time.
00:21:53
Alexis
Hmm. Hmm.
00:21:55
Jonathan L. Larson
We have different, I would call them pollination syndromes. It's the term we tend to use. So this kind of suite of traits that specific flowers are going to have that attract specific pollinators. And it's not usually as species specific as kind of you were alluding to with the monarch necessarily.
00:22:11
Jonathan L. Larson
but it's more about like a broad category of pollinating insects or other pollinating animals like a bat or a bird. So with pollination syndromes, if you see something that's white and night opening and it's very fragrant, it's most likely pollinated by moths because of all that suite of traits, the moths are most likely to encounter it and therefore pollinate.
00:22:25
Alexis
more
00:22:30
Jonathan L. Larson
They're going to be the the the pollinators for it. If it's flat, like a platform and kind of bowl shaped and open, think like a sunflower or maybe ah a coneflower or a black eyed Susan, that kind of stuff.
00:22:43
Jonathan L. Larson
If it's kind of in that shape, it's usually an insect that needs to land. in order to feed. So that you're talking about bees, maybe some beetles mixed in there. ah Bees really like blue and white and kind of yellow colors.
00:22:55
Jonathan L. Larson
ah They don't necessarily need the great odor. They just need those visual cues. Some flowers have nectar guides at the center that tell them, hey sister, like this is where the good stuff is.
00:23:02
Alexis
Mm-hmm.
00:23:04
Jonathan L. Larson
Come in here and get it and then get all coated in my gooey pollen. And we'll move this around. If you look at something and it's kind of reddish in color, insects don't see red very well. That's the end of the visual spectrum that they're not very familiar with.
00:23:17
Jonathan L. Larson
So that's probably something that a bird or a bat goes to. ah Those will be usually bigger flowers with more resources in them as well. ah There's things that flies like. Some flies sunfl flies are are pollinator pollinators. They look like bees and act like bees, so they visit the same kinds of plants.
00:23:33
Jonathan L. Larson
Others are tricked into pollination. ah These are the flies that are usually going to look for rotting meat and decaying things out in nature. I don't know if any of you have ever smelled the dead horse arum, but it smells like what it's named.
00:23:48
Jonathan L. Larson
Yeah, corpse flower, skunk cabbage, these kind of nasty smelling things that also will be kind of reddish or purple in color.
00:23:51
Plant People
hmm
00:23:56
Jonathan L. Larson
This is kind of the exception to that rule that I was mentioning before because they look like a big pile of dead meat. And then the flies will go over there and be like, oh, yeah, i'm going to lay so many eggs here. And then they wander around. They're like, this isn't right. i don't like it.
00:24:09
Jonathan L. Larson
And by the time they figure it out, it's too late and their hairy bodies are covered in pollen. And then they'll fly to the next one and and get tricked the same way.
00:24:15
Plant People
and
00:24:16
Jonathan L. Larson
But then they may they may help spread that pollen around. So there's lots of these different syndromes, but they're kind of broader than the monarchs, the milkweed.
00:24:23
Alexis
it is insane it's insane to me to think about the way evolution has made you know you you see these insects that look like flowers like um the one that came to mind that we don't have here but is the mantis that looks like orchids the orchid mantis orchid mantis is
00:24:41
Jonathan L. Larson
Yeah, orchid mantises. they're Ghost mantises, orchid mantises, yeah.
00:24:45
Alexis
I mean, it's insane. And then in the reverse, you've got flowers that look like, you know, the you're saying like the corpse flower. Not only does it have the smell of rotting meat, but it also has the color.
00:24:56
Alexis
But it also, like most of them have like almost these little, they look like muscle tissues or something. Like when you look at them. And so it's like visually or ones that look like the plants that look like the, you know, male or female version of the insect that wants it to plant.
00:25:12
Alexis
wants to pollinate I'm like, what?
00:25:12
Jonathan L. Larson
Right. Yeah. yeah
00:25:16
Alexis
Plants don't have eyeballs that we're currently aware of. Like how, you know, how is this possible to just, it blows my mind.
00:25:23
Plant People
Just the ones that looked like that were the ones that carried forward.
00:25:26
Brett
lot of reps.
00:25:26
Plant People
Yeah.
00:25:27
Alexis
Like, how do you get like, you know, you get so specific, you know, i mean, like the orchid mantis, you can't even find it.
00:25:27
Brett
lot of reps.
00:25:27
Plant People
lot of reps. Yeah. a lot of reps. Yeah.
00:25:34
Alexis
If you're, look you can look at the blooms and be like, I don't see a bug. That's how much it looks like it. And that's just to think about all of how much time it took to get to that point is just mind boggling to me.
00:25:48
Jonathan L. Larson
I think about that and the fact that you were saying all those reps that have to occur in order to drive that species to that appearance.
00:25:53
Alexis
Yeah. Yeah.
00:25:55
Jonathan L. Larson
I mean, the time scale is mind numbing for a human to consider the hundreds of millions of years that must have took. But then also to think about the fragility of that setup. to think about the fact that, okay, what happens when that orchid goes away?
00:26:08
Jonathan L. Larson
Well, that mantis is cooked.
00:26:09
Alexis
yeah
00:26:10
Jonathan L. Larson
ah We've been able to use this in weird ways.
00:26:10
Plant People
Yeah, done, done, yeah.
00:26:10
Alexis
Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah.
00:26:13
Jonathan L. Larson
Darwin had this plant that it had this exact length of corolla. And so he's like, well, there's there's definitely a moth that's out there that has that long of a tongue. And it turned out to be true. But once that plant goes or that moth goes, it's just a very fragile setup.
00:26:27
Jonathan L. Larson
That kind of specialization, while beautiful and elegant and interesting,
00:26:30
Alexis
ah
00:26:32
Jonathan L. Larson
It's also not the best plan long term to keep your species around.
00:26:36
Alexis
Yeah, it's, I don't know. I'm just like thrown every time I think about how these like super specific, I'm just like, this just doesn't, this just doesn't like the science.
00:26:47
Alexis
I know it's like, obviously the science is there, but the science isn't science in my brain for it to be so, so identical and so specific. And like you said, you get, you know, a disease that knocks out that plant and that insect is screwed.
00:27:02
Jonathan L. Larson
Yes.
00:27:03
Alexis
And that's just crazy.
00:27:04
Plant People
All a sudden.
00:27:04
Jonathan L. Larson
This is why I was so excited when you asked me to do this particular topic, because when we talk about plant-insect interactions, I think that can sound very, like too big, right? It can sound like very philosophical, like people are thinking, I'm going to come on here as this gray beard professor and be like, it's a beautiful ballet of nature and and we should appreciate it.
00:27:23
Jonathan L. Larson
And that's true and right. And I believe that, but there's also the practical side of it, which is what I live in most of the time.
00:27:25
Alexis
Yes.
00:27:26
Brett
Thank
00:27:29
Jonathan L. Larson
Somebody's got a caterpillar on their tomato. They want to know what to do about it. But then to get to that point of having a human with a tomato plant and having a caterpillar that specializes only on that plant is a fascinating geological evolutionary history.
00:27:46
Jonathan L. Larson
Like the way that we've arrived at today's moment, this this frozen piece of time that we live in.
00:27:51
Plant People
Mm-hmm.
00:27:52
Jonathan L. Larson
is crazy. Like to think about why is that caterpillar only eating your tomato? There's a squash plant right next to it. Why doesn't it eat all of that too?
00:27:58
Alexis
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:27:59
Jonathan L. Larson
Why doesn't it eat the entire plant? ah Why does it sometimes get these parasitoids that land on it? Like some of those caterpillars on your tomato plant have all these little white cocoons sticking out their back. How'd they find that?
00:28:11
Jonathan L. Larson
And you just start to think about how much everything in the insect world is wrapped around this relationship between plants and insects. And it becomes this beautiful ballet. It becomes this weird, crazy thing that's actually delivered us the world as we understand it.
00:28:25
Jonathan L. Larson
If you think about the color of the planet, you know, people, it's blue, but then there's all this green tissue around us as well. If you believe a lot of the entomological literature, that's us, baby. That's because of bugs.
00:28:37
Jonathan L. Larson
Like we've driven the plants to do that in so many ways. And the plants have driven the insects. We're talking about the two titanic groups of life on on Earth, the multicellular life is insects and angiosperms. These are the two big groups.
00:28:51
Jonathan L. Larson
And the reason for that is because they've been pinging off of each other for 400 million years, trying to figure out what to do about each other. And it and it gives us what we consider our planet and our home. and I think that's amazing.
00:29:05
Plant People
I know it's, it's why the scope and the scale of time is what's wild to me thinking about that.
00:29:06
Alexis
I'm just...
00:29:10
Alexis
Mm-hmm.
00:29:10
Plant People
If you could kind of fast forward through all those strata of differentiation and take slices, like you said, we're living in a slice right now and it's, and it's happening currently. I mean, as we sit here, there's, you know, all of these um adaptations and counter adaptations going on and it's not always mutualistic.
00:29:20
Alexis
Mm-hmm.
00:29:26
Plant People
I mean, there's, the you know, chemical warfare going on in the insect world and between plants and insects and Sometimes it's mutual, sometimes it's not. I mean, it's pretty incredible. And then you throw us in there with all of our so-called advanced interactions. And yeah, that makes it really interesting. I always think in my head, what's it going to look like, you know a thousand years from now, 10,000 years from now?
00:29:46
Plant People
mean, what's our impact on these interactions? I mean, is there there going to be some insect that looks like a ray that people won't bother it because it's weird out there? And it's still, I don't know. It just, you know, it's it's happening now, you know, as we speak. So it's pretty cool.
00:30:00
Alexis
It's a very large exoskeleton.
00:30:00
Plant People
Pretty cool. Yes. Yeah. it's a
00:30:02
Jonathan L. Larson
but
00:30:03
Plant People
What was the movie? There's a movie about that, that a planet actually adapted to look like a person. I forget it was a horror movie. It's 15, 20 years old.
00:30:09
Alexis
Was it men in black?
00:30:11
Plant People
i think it was Mimic. It was actually the movie is Mimic, Jonathan. If you've not watched that, was that not?
00:30:14
Jonathan L. Larson
Oh, yeah. Del Toro.
00:30:17
Plant People
Yes. Was that not a cool movie? But that also got me interested in the insect world. I'm like, that's a pretty incredible concept.
00:30:25
Jonathan L. Larson
Yeah, the roaches look like people, right?
00:30:25
Plant People
It was. yeah Yes. Yes.
00:30:27
Jonathan L. Larson
Yeah, yeah.
00:30:27
Plant People
It was pretty incredible. Yeah.
00:30:29
Alexis
I think know some of them.
00:30:31
Plant People
Yeah, well, you know, that's the interactions that are not beneficial.
00:30:35
Brett
The roaches look like people.
00:30:37
Plant People
Yeah.
00:30:37
Alexis
Or like, um we, you know, we didn't even talk about bugs that look, insects that look like other insects. So like the Viceroy, right, is Kentucky State ah butterfly.
00:30:44
Jonathan L. Larson
right
00:30:47
Plant People
So why is that?
00:30:47
Alexis
and
00:30:47
Plant People
do yeah Why is it a lookalike there?
00:30:49
Alexis
why is Why is it Kentucky State butterfly?
00:30:50
Plant People
and
00:30:51
Alexis
I actually can't answer that question.
00:30:51
Plant People
No, no. is it ah Is it a lookalike? I mean, is that through some mechanism?
00:30:56
Alexis
Yeah, right?
00:30:56
Plant People
I've often wondered, but I've never looked it up.
00:30:57
Alexis
And Jonathan, please correct me, but my understanding was that it looks like the monarch so that it ah tells predators that it doesn't taste very good. Right?
00:31:07
Jonathan L. Larson
Monarchs, yeah, they have a warning system, an aposematic coloration that that advertises their distasteful nature.
00:31:08
Plant People
Oh.
00:31:13
Jonathan L. Larson
We'll talk about milkweed and monarchs as we go, but they're absorbing the cardiac glycosides as they feed as larvae on the milkweed. They're able to sequester those compounds. There's lots of famous research showing the results of feeding on monarchs.
00:31:27
Jonathan L. Larson
um There's this picture, it's a blue jay, and they feed it a monarch caterpillar and it starts throwing up like a freshman.
00:31:28
Alexis
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:31:33
Jonathan L. Larson
So I think that there's a lot a rich history of literature of people pointing out why they they will then associate these colors with, oh, that's bad, I shouldn't eat it. So then, yes, there are suites of butterflies that will then look variously similar to the monarch and they gain some of the same protection.
00:31:50
Jonathan L. Larson
That's somewhat controversial. There's some people, I think, that argue the Viceroy does also have its own chemical protection.
00:31:55
Alexis
and
00:31:55
Jonathan L. Larson
And so it's not a case of that type of mimicry, but it's also good that then all of the things that are orange and black, that means that's bad.
00:31:56
Plant People
um
00:31:57
Alexis
Okay.
00:32:02
Plant People
Synergistic.
00:32:03
Jonathan L. Larson
Yeah.
00:32:04
Plant People
Yeah.
00:32:04
Jonathan L. Larson
It's synergism, brand synergism.
00:32:05
Plant People
Yeah.
00:32:05
Alexis
Right.
00:32:05
Jonathan L. Larson
You're, you, you're saying don't eat any of us.
00:32:06
Plant People
Yep.
00:32:07
Jonathan L. Larson
Like just trust that brown, black, and orange mixed together means don't eat it. But somebody has got to die for that to work.
00:32:13
Alexis
big negative.
00:32:14
Jonathan L. Larson
Somebody has got to get eaten first to prove it to the new blue J's.
00:32:18
Alexis
The sacrificial butterfly.
00:32:19
Jonathan L. Larson
Exactly.
00:32:19
Plant People
ah Wasn't it the red color in nature?
00:32:19
Jonathan L. Larson
Exactly.
00:32:21
Plant People
It's like a warning color. And that's why people were reluctant to eat tomatoes at first. There's like some of the, all these anecdotal stories that red's the danger color. And i often wondered if that gives things like, um, Oh, boxed elder bug nymphs, like an advantage because we'll get people calling into the office and in kind of a panic because mean, these things are very red, red, red.
00:32:37
Alexis
Mm-hmm.
00:32:41
Plant People
I mean, I don't know if that's some sort of advantage or not, but yeah, the red, the danger color. Yeah.
00:32:46
Jonathan L. Larson
It's also the color of our blood. And if blood is on the outside of something, that's not good. So I think there's lots of psychological aspects to the color red about why it's the color for the stop sign, why it's the color of danger, why it's the color of of pain and math.
00:32:55
Plant People
Yeah.
00:33:02
Jonathan L. Larson
I've always used red for my math folder because I didn't like that class. So yeah, danger, I think, is is tied up to that color.
00:33:06
Plant People
It's a danger. yeah
00:33:08
Brett
why all the light in vampire bars is always red in the movies, you know?
00:33:13
Jonathan L. Larson
Yeah.
00:33:14
Plant People
True.
00:33:15
Jonathan L. Larson
At first I thought you meant like a real vampire bar and I wanted to know what you got up to on the weekends, but yeah.
00:33:16
Brett
It's bad.
00:33:16
Alexis
it's
00:33:20
Plant People
It's like bread.
00:33:20
Alexis
I was mostly like, where is it? Yeah.
00:33:23
Brett
Yeah.
00:33:23
Plant People
I noticed which color you're wearing, Brett.
00:33:24
Alexis
In the movies that he takes with his phone.
00:33:24
Brett
Underground.
00:33:24
Plant People
and
00:33:26
Brett
It's only open at night.
00:33:32
Brett
So you mentioned the like kind of like the the idea of the the monarch takes in these chemicals from the plant and then in turn has some – that has some value to the to the plant.
00:33:32
Plant People
But I did not realize that about the last one.
00:33:32
Alexis
Really?
00:33:44
Brett
I'm sorry, to the to the ah the butterfly. Are there other kinds of examples of that where there's kind of ah like a special nutrition or a special something or other that that insects can take in from the plant material that then is advantageous to them one way the other besides your vitamins and nutrients and things that my mom wants me to eat plants to get?
00:34:02
Alexis
Well done.
00:34:03
Jonathan L. Larson
Oh man, you have you have used the skeleton key to kind of unlock this whole discussion, I feel like, with that question of yeah of of what's going on.
00:34:08
Plant People
The box is coming open.
00:34:10
Alexis
but
00:34:11
Jonathan L. Larson
So why would milkweed produce something that then benefits a butterfly, right? like That's kind of the key question there of what is at play.
00:34:18
Alexis
Thank you.
00:34:19
Jonathan L. Larson
And the truth is, is that if we look at plant and insect co-evolution, the monarch is taking advantage of something that the milkweed produced to protect itself from herbivores writ large.
00:34:31
Jonathan L. Larson
So not everything can eat milkweed. If your cows eat milkweed, it's not good for them. If you eat milkweed, that's not good for you. But monarchs as a group, as in addition to the tussock moth that feeds on milkweed, oleander aphids, milkweed longhorn beetles, these are things that have evolved and adapted to be able to key in on traits of the milkweed and are able to use it to find their host and then to choose their host.
00:34:55
Jonathan L. Larson
So it's a secondary plant compound that at some point in time helped the milkweed to avoid other predators or other herbivores, I should say, other things that want to eat it.
00:35:06
Jonathan L. Larson
But then these other insects figured a way out to get over that and then use it to their advantage. So it's this kind of, I'll call it a cold war. It's this insect plant cold war that's been going on for about, I would say this one that we're referring to, maybe about 200 million years, where the plants and insects are just trying to outsmart each other, not to put too much sort of like intelligence behind it, but they're trying to figure out a way of avoiding the insects, which causes irradiation in life.
00:35:35
Jonathan L. Larson
And then the insects figure out a way to take advantage of that, which then causes another radiation of life. And that's why we have so many plants and so many insects crawling around the world is because of these co-evolutionary processes that they're going through together.
00:35:50
Jonathan L. Larson
That's slightly controversial. I am a believer in co-evolution as we talk about it. But there are other questions about which came first, the chicken or the egg. Some of the adaptations that we might talk about may predate certain angiosperms or the plants that the insects specialize on.
00:36:05
Jonathan L. Larson
But it's still a trait that allows them to then take advantage of it and further specialize. So if I was going to get to like the root of what you're talking about, we would have to go back to a discussion that Richard Southwood started in like 1973-ish. He has a publication that came out on the er the hurdles to herbivory.
00:36:24
Jonathan L. Larson
So the other question I think that comes up is, well, if insects are so good at eating plants, why don't they just eat all the plants? Why do we have plants still if insects are so good at this? And the truth is is that it's kind of hard to eat plants for a variety of reasons. And insects have to overcome the three hurdles, which are attachment,
00:36:41
Jonathan L. Larson
desiccation and nutrition. So they have to be able to hold on to the plant and attach to it in some fashion to get to the food that they want, the leaf, the flower, the wood, the tree root, whatever it is.
00:36:52
Jonathan L. Larson
The desiccation part, they were already kind of pre-adapted for. Insects have their exoskeletons, which means that they're coated in this layer of wax, which helps to seal their moisture in.
00:37:02
Jonathan L. Larson
So they're already kind of pre-gamed to be good at avoiding desiccation. But there are other things that you can do to avoid desiccating on a plant. You can construct a silken nest like a tent caterpillar.
00:37:13
Jonathan L. Larson
You can be a bagworm and live in your little bag and be out in the sun. You can even feed at night or close your spiracles. And that helps to reduce moisture loss. And then the nutrition part, which you were getting at, yes, your mom wants you to eat broccoli because it's full of vitamins and minerals.
00:37:27
Jonathan L. Larson
And insects need those vitamins and minerals as well. But there's also some things about plants that make them sort of poor choices as food. And the big one is they're nitrogen limited. Most plants aren't going to provide a lot of free nitrogen to an organism that exclusively feeds on plants.
00:37:44
Jonathan L. Larson
And that's why you see things eat so much when they're herbivores.
00:37:44
Alexis
Hmm.
00:37:47
Jonathan L. Larson
There's compensatory feeding. They have to eat more or they may have a prolonged development time.
00:37:50
Plant People
Yeah.
00:37:52
Jonathan L. Larson
With cicadas, we see that. They don't get a lot of nitrogen through the tree sap that they're sucking through the roots. So they take at least a couple of years to develop. The periodical cicadas took that to an extreme where they're now 13 and 17 years.
00:38:04
Jonathan L. Larson
But that is because their food is so bad. If you just drank root beer mixed with ale ate every morning, noon, and night, and that was the only thing you ate, you wouldn't grow very fast either. But your diabetes medication bill probably would.
00:38:18
Jonathan L. Larson
ah These are the things that that limit the insects. So they've got adaptations for that too. So they might eat more themselves. You see caterpillars eat a lot. They'll consume a lot of tissue. Other insects, they have special chambers in their gut that allow them to extract all the nitrogen from the food.
00:38:33
Jonathan L. Larson
Some of them have special chambers in their guts with endosymbionts, things that help them to strip more nutrition from their food.
00:38:33
Alexis
Mm-hmm.
00:38:40
Jonathan L. Larson
That adaptation is taken to its extreme with termites. Termites now have special gut bacteria that help them to eat cellulose, which should not be very nutritious at all, but they're able to do so because of the this special adaptation.
00:38:45
Plant People
Thank you.
00:38:53
Jonathan L. Larson
So those are the three things that insects had to overcome in order to get onto the plants and eat them.
00:38:55
Brett
Thank you.
00:38:59
Jonathan L. Larson
And then after that, it gets into all of this other stuff like you were referring to with milkweed. I
Challenges in Insect Adaptation
00:39:05
Jonathan L. Larson
don't want to keep talking if there are questions or comments or anything, but I can rant for longer if you want me to about what's going on there.
00:39:12
Brett
So the, like I got, I got a couple of questions for like, so you're about the desiccation part.
00:39:15
Jonathan L. Larson
Yeah.
00:39:17
Brett
um Is that, is that sort of just like the idea that in order to eat a plant, you kind of have to expose yourself to the air and to the wind and to the sun and all those things?
00:39:27
Jonathan L. Larson
Precisely. If you're on a leaf, you're out in the sun. If you're feeding in the daytime, insects are small, and so they don't lose water at the same rate necessarily that we would. But yeah, if you are a cow and you're outside eating plants all day, you know you're getting hot and sweaty too. So desiccation or or just moisture loss, I think, is is an hurdle to herbivoree.
00:39:49
Brett
Yeah. And that's interesting too, the part about the, the nitrogen availability. Cause I, I mean, I, I sort of, you know, in as rough proxies to each other, I've sort of come to think as nitrogen is kind of like this analog to protein for us of like building structures. And it's, it's this, the building block of like amino acids, which didn't build to proteins. And then, um,
00:40:12
Brett
So the idea of like, yeah, you're you're trying to bodybuild or grow quickly and all you can eat are, yeah, those things. and Like I could say if I was on Alate and um ah Root Beer, I would not have very much energy to build my silken nest that I build every day for myself just to stay moist.
00:40:24
Alexis
Root beer.
00:40:29
Jonathan L. Larson
That's right. Well, and insects, they can't boil chicken and broccoli and then eat that and go go pump iron. So yeah, they are limited to what they can get access to.
00:40:37
Brett
right.
00:40:40
Jonathan L. Larson
Some of them will chase the nitrogen. They may go from parts of the plant to other parts of the plant, like aphids and scales. You can see this with where at certain times of the year, they exist in the leaves. At certain times of the year, they're on the stems and trunk because That's where the nitrogen is. They're able to to locate it.
00:40:56
Jonathan L. Larson
I don't want to give it too much directionality. They're not smart enough to know like, oh, my sons and daughters need to go to where the nitrogen is rich.
00:40:59
Alexis
yeah
00:41:03
Jonathan L. Larson
It's just the way they are. It's the way their biological machinery is programmed.
00:41:08
Brett
Hmm.
00:41:08
Jonathan L. Larson
ah Kind of beyond what we're talking about with this introduction to how they did it, the I think other question becomes, why aren't all insects eating all plants all the time?
00:41:19
Jonathan L. Larson
So like, why aren't they all polyphagous?
00:41:19
Alexis
Mm-hmm.
00:41:21
Jonathan L. Larson
Polyphagous insects are not the norm. If you've not heard the term polyphagy, it just means you're able to eat lots of different things, polyphagy. And we have polyphagous insects. A lot of them tend to be invasive species ah because they're brought into a naive environment.
00:41:37
Jonathan L. Larson
Something like a Japanese beetle is able to ride roughshod over all of these plants that have no defensive adaptations to it because it's a new player in the game and they don't have something that can stop it.
00:41:48
Jonathan L. Larson
There are other insects that are always sort of polyphagous. Think of locusts historically, ah biblically, even locusts are able to eat just about anything That means that grasshoppers, which is where locusts come from, they also are tend to be polyphagous.
00:42:04
Jonathan L. Larson
Polyphagy is good because it means you can find food wherever you go, basically.
00:42:08
Alexis
Mm-hmm.
00:42:09
Jonathan L. Larson
It's also kind of an evolutionary advantage. I alluded to with the fireflies before that we're kind of in this insect apocalypse. We're losing a lot of insect life. The bad news about that is that it includes mostly the insects we like the and the ones that we would consider beneficial.
00:42:24
Jonathan L. Larson
And the polyphagous insects, it's not happening to the pests, it's not happening to. And so they will actually become the last standing survivors. And then they'll be the things that radiate out into new life.
00:42:36
Jonathan L. Larson
So instead of having all the butterflies and fireflies that we love, they'll be the descendants of Japanese beetles and locusts and things like that in the future that continue that polyphagous transition into specialization.
00:42:45
Alexis
wait
00:42:48
Plant People
Do those tend to be higher order insects, I guess, or more complex?
00:42:52
Jonathan L. Larson
One thing that we see with insects that are herbivores is that they are more concentrated in the higher orders. So just to describe what we mean as a higher order of insects, higher order means more recent in evolutionary history, basically.
00:42:59
Plant People
Mm-hmm.
00:42:59
Alexis
and
00:43:06
Jonathan L. Larson
Or sometimes it can be to talk about like bigger orders of insects.
00:43:10
Plant People
Mm-hmm.
00:43:10
Jonathan L. Larson
The lower orders would be things like Odonata, which are the dragonflies and damselflies, which we consider to be more primitive insects. Right now, I would argue the highest order of insects is Hymenoptera,
00:43:22
Jonathan L. Larson
which includes the bees, ants, wasps, and sawflies.
00:43:22
Alexis
Mm-hmm.
00:43:25
Jonathan L. Larson
And that's because we see degrees of of ah socialization there, where they are becoming social insects ah more and more pointedly as we talk about wasps to bees and things like that, and ants.
00:43:37
Jonathan L. Larson
So those are the that's the high order of insects. There's also beetles. There's also hemipterans or the true bugs. ah You could even throw the flies in there. So this is a group that we consider the the kind of the newest bugs, the new money, the the big bug groups that are dominating the planet right now.
00:43:55
Jonathan L. Larson
And yes, a lot.
00:43:55
Brett
What you, what you described with the, the idea that are the things that we like might go away and they might be replaced by these other things that we don't like, it feels, it feels reminiscent of what ah has happened, what, what Joe Rogan has done to my internet.
00:44:09
Brett
You know, i used to have this lovely place of just, just these, these organisms that didn't really have a self-preservation instinct or really, you know, just, they were just vibing for a while.
00:44:09
Plant People
I
00:44:10
Jonathan L. Larson
Ha ha ha ha one
00:44:19
Brett
And when the rise of these particular new players and, how that shift has happened. I'm feeling, I'm feeling a little pain of loss for the internet ecosystem I used to know.
00:44:30
Jonathan L. Larson
Okay, I didn't know that we could do this on this show, but yeah, like I'm a podcaster. I do a couple of different podcasts and I'm ashamed of like admitting to my hobby nowadays because yeah, podcasting has jump been Joe Rogan-fied to the point where people think that means you're like a person in the manosphere talking about why you should eat steak every morning, noon, and night and then lift and wait.
00:44:50
Brett
That's right.
00:44:52
Jonathan L. Larson
It's like, no, no, i talk about I talk about bugs. Like I'm a weirdo in a very different way.
00:44:55
Brett
ah then's like No, no, no, but we eat nitrogen here.
00:44:55
Alexis
No
00:44:57
Brett
We don't do that.
00:44:58
Jonathan L. Larson
Yeah, yeah.
00:44:58
Brett
That's not what we're...
00:44:58
Plant People
in rigor research. Yeah.
00:45:01
Jonathan L. Larson
yeah
00:45:01
Alexis
more protein.
00:45:01
Plant People
Yeah.
00:45:01
Alexis
No more protein.
00:45:03
Jonathan L. Larson
It is cool. I think I love what you're talking about, though, were talking about like the evolution of an information sphere, the Internet and podcasting and stuff. It does have similar pressures that we see in the biological world and survival of the fittest rules in all situations, it feels like.
00:45:19
Plant People
Well, i'm I'm thinking that the cockroach someday will be beautiful because if it continues to be besieged by higher higher order of life forms, it'll have to market itself in such a way that we'll find it beautiful at some point.
00:45:30
Plant People
or so i mean
00:45:31
Jonathan L. Larson
that' will be That'll be very tragic when the cockroaches discover marketing. That'll be a different a different world.
00:45:37
Plant People
yeah that That'll be the day that we lose.
00:45:40
Jonathan L. Larson
but
00:45:40
Plant People
Yeah, maybe so.
00:45:40
Alexis
Let's hope it doesn't follow CCD's social media accounts teaching about marketing.
00:45:41
Plant People
I don't know.
00:45:45
Plant People
Yeah, but that that's why all of this is so fascinating.
00:45:47
Brett
Uh-oh.
00:45:48
Plant People
that You know, the life cycles, but also the pressures and the code of element or, you know, the communal nature of some insect orders versus the solitary nature of others. And all of this just really changes kind of the population, doesn't it?
00:46:01
Plant People
I mean, just huge impacts.
00:46:03
Jonathan L. Larson
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just to kind of thread the needle on what I was saying before about why we don't have all these polyphagous insects. There are polyphagous ones, but then we are more commonly going to see oligophagus and monophagus insects, things that are more specialized.
00:46:18
Plant People
Mm-hmm.
00:46:18
Jonathan L. Larson
And that's because of this pressure that you were just alluding to is It's good and great to be polyphagous, but it's also good and great if you can specialize and then create a radiation of life.
00:46:29
Jonathan L. Larson
So as you focus in on one particular genus of plants, you can become the thing that specializes on that plant, you face less competition, and you're able to
00:46:39
Alexis
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:46:40
Jonathan L. Larson
create new life forms as you go through that. I don't want to attribute an intelligence to evolution. I keep doing it just because it's easier to converse about.
00:46:48
Plant People
Yeah.
00:46:48
Jonathan L. Larson
But that's what we're talking about here is that there's this degree of specialization, usually on closely related plants. So think of a cabbage looper and cruciferous plants. It's able to take advantage of all of them.
00:47:00
Jonathan L. Larson
Some of these, the hand of nature is at play. Some of these, the hand of of man is at play where we breed a plant and then the insect figures out, oh, well, that's the same thing that I usually So I'll eat Brussels sprouts and cabbage and everything else because it all tastes the same to them.
00:47:16
Jonathan L. Larson
The monophagous ones, that's when they feed on one plant species. That's the most specialization that you can have. Think of things like a holly leaf miner or what have you. These are things that they don't but they don't cross boundaries.
00:47:25
Plant People
Mm-hmm.
00:47:27
Jonathan L. Larson
They stick with one plant, which is great.
00:47:28
Alexis
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:47:30
Jonathan L. Larson
You have a lot a lot less competition, but as we alluded to before, it's a very fragile system as well because if holly goes away, holly leaf miner goes away. We've seen this in the United States. If we go back to the time where we lost the chestnut,
00:47:42
Jonathan L. Larson
There's an untold number of insects and other things that specialized on the chestnut that all went away at the same time. And then the things that specialized on those herbivores went away as well. So you're talking maybe 50 or 60 different species that all, poof, were gone with the the advent of chestnut blight.
00:47:59
Jonathan L. Larson
So it's it's great and cool, but it's also a very precarious situation that you're putting yourself in evolutionarily.
00:48:02
Plant People
Yeah.
00:48:04
Brett
Well, so as you're talking here and you're talking about the, the idea of eating plants, these things that the insects are eating plants and the, the difficulty associated with that, what, you know, you're, you're making me think a little bit about.
00:48:16
Brett
So one of the coolest parts about cows and other ruminants is that they can take
Insects in the Ecosystem
00:48:22
Brett
sun powered cellulose heavy grass, and they can convert that into energy.
00:48:30
Brett
themselves. And so, so, I mean, yeah i didn't even really think about it this way, but, but insects are doing that too. This is kind of what you were mentioning with the termites and with some of the other Like that, that because i'm I'm thinking like, what is that what are the things that that plants can do that they can't do?
00:48:44
Brett
Like, so plants can photosynthesize. They've got us all beat in that regard. And then like insect the the plants can't really move in the same, with the same regularity that that insects can.
00:48:49
Jonathan L. Larson
I don't know.
00:48:49
Plant People
Amen.
00:48:54
Brett
And I mean, we can't do either of those things. So we just sort of watch and and become entomologists, I guess, in the process because of how cool that is.
00:49:00
Jonathan L. Larson
ah
00:49:01
Brett
But it's just making me think about that, like that that step of converting solar energy into animal life and the role that that they play in that is really interesting.
00:49:08
Alexis
Thank you.
00:49:10
Brett
It just kind of went off for me as you were talking.
00:49:13
Jonathan L. Larson
Yeah, it becomes the thin patina on top of plants, the base herbivores that then are consumed by other things to create the intricate webs of life that we exist around. ah This kind of complex machinery that makes up nature.
00:49:27
Jonathan L. Larson
Insects are the bottom line. They're the the front door to a lot of this. You get from them to bigger insects, to insects that are eaten by bigger animals, all the way up to to people.
00:49:37
Jonathan L. Larson
ah cows, they enter there and at a different matrix, I guess. But yes, they start with the primary producers and moving up. So it is a ah beautiful and weird thing that at some point, just like Superman, we are collecting solar energy, but we do it through our mouth and our stomach and the insects do the same thing.
00:49:54
Plant People
Mm-hmm.
00:49:55
Brett
Yeah, and like I'll eat a tomato, but if I were to eat the tomato leaves, I wouldn't get a whole lot of out of that as ah as a as a not not adapted for that.
00:50:01
Jonathan L. Larson
Right.
00:50:05
Brett
um Yeah.
00:50:06
Jonathan L. Larson
And the question becomes not only how are the insects extracting the the the nutrients that they need from the plants, but also how do they find the plants? You mentioned that plants don't move, but plants do sort of migrate around with seeds and wind and the a yada, yada, yada.
00:50:15
Alexis
e
00:50:21
Jonathan L. Larson
And insects, they live in a complex world that's much bigger than them. So this is where we start to get into the secondary plant compounds, which have driven a lot of the evolution of insects and then therefore plants.
00:50:33
Jonathan L. Larson
Secondary plant compounds are are really cool and delicious things that we all enjoy. What's your favorite one, Alexis? Caffeine?
00:50:41
Plant People
Yeah. Yeah.
00:50:42
Alexis
Yes.
00:50:43
Jonathan L. Larson
Yeah, that one.
00:50:43
Brett
For the sake of the podcast, we'll go with caffeine.
00:50:46
Jonathan L. Larson
Okay. yeah Other people might enjoy nicotine. Some people might enjoy tannins if they like a good wine. I'm a big fan of capsaicin. I like hot stuff.
00:50:55
Plant People
yeah
00:50:55
Jonathan L. Larson
And so these are all compounds that the plant makes that ostensibly it doesn't need to.
00:50:56
Alexis
Yeah.
00:51:00
Jonathan L. Larson
That's why they're secondary. They're not primary factors in its success for life. but they become defensive compounds that protect it from greater herbivory. So nicotine, caffeine, THC, cardiac glycosides that are in milkweed, all of these things ostensibly are supposed to stop the plant from getting eaten.
00:51:17
Jonathan L. Larson
We often utilize these things. ah There's all kinds of web comics about this, right? About like, oh, I evolved this so that I won't be eaten. And then there's this picture of people like enjoying all this stuff
00:51:27
Alexis
Humans might bet.
00:51:29
Jonathan L. Larson
Yes, exactly.
00:51:29
Plant People
yeah
00:51:30
Jonathan L. Larson
We will see about that. And then we invent cigarettes and hot sauce, and it's a very different world for that plant.
00:51:35
Plant People
But then they perpetuate that plant population by growing more of it.
00:51:36
Jonathan L. Larson
But, right, so who's who's the real victor in all of this?
00:51:39
Plant People
So there you go. is
00:51:41
Alexis
Who's farming who?
00:51:41
Plant People
I don't know. I don't know.
00:51:43
Jonathan L. Larson
ah The question of what this does does to insects, though, that really started to get pulled apart in the early 60s, late 50s. There's a paper, a really foundational paper by Gottfried Frankel called the raison d'etre. I can't speak French, so I'm butchering it, of secondary plant substances, where he argues that these are foundational elements in the history of co-evolution between plants and insects, where the insects were at first repelled by these secondary plant compounds,
00:52:13
Jonathan L. Larson
But then through random chance in mutation, as argued by another paper, Ehrlich and Raven in the 60s, some insects are able to turn back around and then successfully colonize a defended plant and then radiate on that plant species and become multiple forms of life there.
00:52:30
Jonathan L. Larson
And then the plant has to do the same thing again to try and avoid them.
00:52:33
Alexis
Mm-hmm.
00:52:33
Jonathan L. Larson
And that's how we get these explosions of life in the fossil record up to today. And so that's what we see with insects that focus on specific plants is that they are able to smell those cardiac glycosides. They're able to detect the thing that makes Brussels sprouts taste bitter to some people.
00:52:51
Jonathan L. Larson
And they're able to say, that is my host. That is my food. I'm going to fly to that. going to lay my eggs on that. My babies are going to eat that. I ate that. It's a great system. There are other things at play when they arrive there to select certain plants.
00:53:04
Jonathan L. Larson
I don't want to discount that. Some plants are going to have higher sugar ha sugar or alcohol contents or what have you. So they're a better host. but at the core, they're using something that the plant has produced to protect itself, oftentimes against the plant in order to colonize it and f feed on it. And then Alexis gets really mad because all of her cut flowers are getting attacked by these specific kinds of insects.
00:53:27
Plant People
I mean, it's a summary here, moves and counter moves.
00:53:28
Alexis
The evils.
00:53:28
Brett
So it makes them
00:53:30
Plant People
I mean, goodness gracious.
00:53:31
Jonathan L. Larson
It's the Cold War. I love the it's a Cold War analogy.
00:53:32
Plant People
It is. It is.
00:53:33
Brett
um
00:53:33
Plant People
it's a
00:53:34
Jonathan L. Larson
It is Khrushchev and Kennedy.
00:53:34
Plant People
It's a stalemate.
00:53:36
Jonathan L. Larson
It's it's all, yes, like it's,
00:53:37
Plant People
It's like band but what it was a Band of Brothers, where there's that at one field where nobody would cross because it's a stalemate. Yes, it's that.
00:53:43
Jonathan L. Larson
Yes.
00:53:44
Plant People
Yeah.
00:53:44
Jonathan L. Larson
And at some points we get to look around us and see the stalemate, that things are at this equilibrium, that the insects aren't winning and the plants not winning and all looks fine. And we say, oh, you know, that's not bad. It's fine that that oak tree has 300 different species of gall insects on it.
00:54:00
Jonathan L. Larson
They're not hurting it. But at some point in history, that might not have been true. And it may not be true again in the future where those galls may become more problematic. Everything is evolution in evolution is this snapshot in time and we can never speak with as much certainty as we would perhaps like to.
00:54:16
Alexis
Or some people do.
00:54:16
Plant People
Yeah.
00:54:18
Plant People
Well, by the time it changes, we'll be gone.
00:54:19
Jonathan L. Larson
Right.
00:54:20
Plant People
Hopefully.
00:54:21
Alexis
Yeah.
00:54:21
Jonathan L. Larson
Right.
00:54:21
Plant People
Yeah.
00:54:22
Brett
I have i just have a quick vibe check question.
00:54:22
Plant People
Yeah.
00:54:22
Alexis
Yeah.
00:54:24
Brett
Does anyone else think think that when you squash stink bugs that it kind of smells like cilantro?
00:54:24
Jonathan L. Larson
Okay.
00:54:31
Jonathan L. Larson
It does.
00:54:32
Plant People
I've never gotten that personally, but I don't like cilantro.
00:54:32
Alexis
yeah
00:54:32
Jonathan L. Larson
Yeah.
00:54:35
Plant People
So maybe that's.
00:54:35
Jonathan L. Larson
Right.
00:54:35
Brett
People, people, people look at me like I'm crazy. Okay. Thank you, Jonathan.
00:54:38
Alexis
No, there's an actual, there's like a compound, right?
00:54:38
Brett
I'm going to I'm going to expert.
00:54:41
Alexis
Like it's this the same smell compound.
00:54:41
Plant People
Yeah. It's a known thing in it or something.
00:54:42
Jonathan L. Larson
Yeah.
00:54:44
Plant People
Yeah.
00:54:44
Jonathan L. Larson
Bed bugs are also often described as coriander smelling.
00:54:45
Alexis
It's real.
00:54:47
Jonathan L. Larson
So it's something within the Hemiptera that they they often smell like coriander because, yeah, cilantro is gross.
00:54:54
Brett
why they're so delicious with lime.
00:54:55
Plant People
it's It's nasty. I cannot stand cilantro. Sorry, Brad.
00:54:58
Alexis
Okay, so I have a question that might not be any, like, I don't know. I don't know where where you might take it.
00:55:04
Plant People
Oh, man. She's been saving this one.
00:55:05
Alexis
Maybe it's a whole other episode, but what you were talking about led me into it. So there's this, um and I think I've, like, chatted with you a little bit about this before, but in the flower world, especially, there's this... um idea going around that, you know, um using molasses, like a diluted molasses on plants to raise the BRICS content, which is the sugar content of the plants, will keep um certain orders of insects from feeding on them because the the sugar is too high and they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, my diabetes diabetes medication hasn't come in yet and I can't feed on that.
00:55:40
Brett
and You're applying it through the irrigation?
00:55:41
Alexis
So it's No, um well, irrigation, but a lot of the time it's foliar.
00:55:45
Brett
Like through the roots?
00:55:46
Alexis
It depends on, i think, the type of insect, but foliar is what I've seen the most of.
00:55:47
Brett
Oh, okay.
00:55:51
Alexis
And it it just, when you were talking about, you know, how the plants, maybe, you know, the capsaicin or whatever that they're developed to push them away, is that humans do helping the plant to, the plant's not doing it, but we're basically doing it for them?
00:56:00
Plant People
Thank you.
00:56:06
Alexis
Or is
Ecosystem Sensitivity and Human Impact
00:56:07
Alexis
that all a load of capooey? Yeah.
00:56:10
Jonathan L. Larson
So we have talked about this and I'm very intrigued by the idea. And I will say at like a base evolutionary level, like we've like we've been talking about, I could see where it would work.
00:56:14
Alexis
Yeah.
00:56:18
Alexis
Fundamental level.
00:56:22
Jonathan L. Larson
So as I was alluding to, there are host finding mechanisms within insects. So they find their host based on some of these secondary plant compounds. Sometimes there's a visual level of it looks like the leaf looks like this or the flower looks like that.
00:56:36
Jonathan L. Larson
And so they know it's their their particular food source. But then they are making decisions on a plant by plant, maybe even leaf by leaf level of this is the best part to bite. This is the best place to feed or this is the best place to lay eggs.
00:56:45
Alexis
Mm-hmm. Are Mm-hmm.
00:56:49
Jonathan L. Larson
So if you change the taste of the plant in terms of the sugar content, I could see where it would confound an insect and they would be like, this isn't right. Everything else says this is food.
00:57:01
Jonathan L. Larson
But now that I'm getting to this part where I actually sample it, the signals are wrong. And when we talk about insects, they are kind of computational. They are taking data from nature and then their brain is unlocking a series of behaviors based on the information that they're receiving.
00:57:17
Jonathan L. Larson
And if they bite a leaf or insert their needle-like mouth part into a leaf and they receive an insane amount of sugar back, there may not be that unlocking mechanism that induces the further feeding behavior.
00:57:28
Alexis
Mm-hmm.
00:57:31
Jonathan L. Larson
When we see Japanese beetles, for example, fight or attack a plant, what they do is at first they bite the plant. It's like, okay, this tastes like food. But then there's something about specific trees or specific genuses of trees that says, oh, this is tastier. It's got the right sugar content and all these other compounds.
00:57:49
Jonathan L. Larson
But if we can alter that, it might mean that they get confused and it their brain isn't induced to continue biting that plant. So I could see where it would work. I don't have any data in my in my breast pocket here that proves that.
00:57:59
Alexis
Yeah, yeah.
00:58:01
Jonathan L. Larson
but So I'm not going to like so ah publicly endorse it.
00:58:03
Alexis
No, totally. i was
00:58:04
Jonathan L. Larson
But I would say, no, no, that's fine.
00:58:05
Alexis
didn't want to put you too much on the spot, but... Interesting.
00:58:07
Jonathan L. Larson
That's my life.
00:58:09
Alexis
Right.
00:58:10
Jonathan L. Larson
But I will say that there it makes a certain amount of sense why that might work against certain insects, particularly chewing insects.
00:58:10
Alexis
Yeah. and again
00:58:18
Jonathan L. Larson
I don't see how that would impact an aphid.
00:58:19
Alexis
unduing
00:58:21
Jonathan L. Larson
An aphid would drink that and be like, heck yeah, sugar.
00:58:21
Alexis
right
00:58:23
Jonathan L. Larson
All right. All the time, sugar. I don't know that a biting pest would feel the same way, though.
00:58:26
Alexis
yeah
00:58:29
Plant People
you know, if these ecosystems are...
00:58:29
Brett
So is it the molasses on the surface that's the...
00:58:31
Plant People
Hmm.
00:58:34
Brett
Or is it like taking it into the...
00:58:36
Alexis
so yeah it's um So when you're spraying them down with the diluted molasses, they are taking in some of that through the stomatas, right? So they are taking in, and you you can, of a surface that has been hit with molasses, raise the bricks down.
00:58:52
Alexis
like the internal bricks of it right it's just not it's not like a long-term thing like you're doing it every week um to keep that up uh but yeah and foliar feeding in general is kind of a weird thing we could do a whole episode on foliar versus soil feeding um
00:58:52
Brett
Inside the leaf. Mm-hmm.
00:58:57
Brett
Sure.
00:59:01
Brett
and
00:59:05
Brett
It's very weird. Yeah, I've done some. I would love that. you could i would learn a lot from you about that because I, yeah, it's a whole nerd.
00:59:12
Alexis
Well, i I want to learn more, so that could be my excuse to like really deep dive into that. But yeah, there's a big thing in the insect world about people saying, oh no, I just spray my plants with molasses every week and I don't have any insect problems at all.
00:59:27
Alexis
And I'm like...
00:59:27
Brett
It feels good.
00:59:30
Alexis
It feels like there's something there, right?
00:59:30
Brett
Like it's a feel good thing, you know?
00:59:31
Alexis
like Just like Jonathan said, there's like a fundamental thing there, but it's like...
00:59:32
Brett
Yeah.
00:59:35
Plant People
There's so many levers that may be being pulled both known and unknown.
00:59:37
Alexis
Yeah, and it's right. And you know how much of that I feel like it's the the scenario we hear in extension all the time.
00:59:41
Plant People
Yeah.
00:59:43
Alexis
Well, you know, well, I did it and it works for me, but the person my neighbor did it and it didn't work for them. Well, yeah, what's the soil like, you know, what was the temperature out? What was all these other things? Is it replicable?
00:59:55
Alexis
And that's what like
00:59:55
Brett
And sometimes the feel good things, that's like danger territory because it's like, oh, it just feels like it would make sense.
01:00:00
Alexis
Yeah.
01:00:01
Brett
And so you're just led to like exactly Jonathan's point of like.
01:00:03
Alexis
Right, right.
01:00:04
Plant People
Little do they know
01:00:04
Alexis
You're certainly not going to hurt your plan besides, you know, yeah.
01:00:04
Brett
Did
01:00:05
Plant People
I mean, I love molasses, so I'd just be out there drinking irrigation water.
01:00:08
Brett
I talk over Ray? Were you going say something else?
01:00:09
Plant People
So
01:00:10
Alexis
What? Okay.
01:00:12
Brett
Ray, were you going to say something else?
01:00:12
Alexis
what
01:00:12
Plant People
love.
01:00:13
Brett
Did talk over you earlier?
01:00:14
Plant People
No, no, not at all. I was just going to say it's just insane. The sensitivity level of ecosystems that we're talking about and and all of the interactions that are at play. And I just think, you know, ah I was trying to think of the book I mentioned it to you the other day, Alexis, I think it's the drowned world or something.
01:00:31
Plant People
that you know talked about a period in the Earth scenario in this particular book, like it had gotten warmer and the plants had gotten bigger and the insects had gotten huge. But these tiny little changes...
01:00:43
Plant People
led to all these differentiations, these different interactions, and it had just had all of these impacts because these systems are so fragile and they're so, the web is really a web. It's so interconnected and it's just fascinating. Like you're saying, you know, this one practice is done, but what we're observing, how do we attribute that or can it be? i mean, it's just, it's all pretty fascinating, the connectivity between all of these systems.
01:01:06
Plant People
I mean, it's pretty, pretty daunting, pretty incredible.
01:01:11
Alexis
It's fine.
01:01:11
Jonathan L. Larson
Well, we're just always like, we're poking dominoes at all times, right?
01:01:11
Plant People
Ed.
01:01:11
Alexis
Everything's fine.
01:01:14
Jonathan L. Larson
We're like, we're always out there just like, we are the masters of our domain.
01:01:15
Plant People
Yeah.
01:01:17
Plant People
Yeah.
01:01:18
Jonathan L. Larson
We get to do whatever we want. And then, yeah, people get to do decades worth of research on the cascading effects of that and say like, well, we probably maybe shouldn't have done that.
01:01:25
Plant People
um what um On hindsight, you know, maybe not such a good thing.
01:01:28
Jonathan L. Larson
Right. Yep.
01:01:29
Alexis
Yeah.
01:01:31
Jonathan L. Larson
right
01:01:33
Alexis
I love that. I've been seeing it go around. It's like we owe our entire existence to, you know, an inch of soil and and the fact that it rains.
01:01:39
Plant People
nothing
01:01:40
Jonathan L. Larson
yeah
01:01:40
Alexis
And I was like, oh yeah, that's right. but You're like, I'm just something floating around on a rock in the middle of nowhere. Like nothing's that serious. Yeah.
01:01:51
Jonathan L. Larson
Is email really important
01:01:54
Alexis
is
01:01:55
Jonathan L. Larson
in comparison?
01:01:55
Alexis
Is AI really the answer?
01:01:58
Jonathan L. Larson
Yeah. Yeah.
01:02:00
Alexis
Just topsoil, really.
01:02:01
Brett
Well, I think we have to have a second ah second episode on on plant interactions because this was just way too much fun. And I was just thinking ah my my brain and and was just spinning. Yeah.
01:02:14
Brett
Yeah.
01:02:14
Alexis
You just got like a billion more questions and you realize we've been doing this for an hour.
01:02:16
Plant People
we were yeah We were on the epic scale. I mean, the kind of, know, this grand scale and I love it. Yeah, it's good stuff. The genesis of processes and differentiation of branches and trunks. and Yeah. Yeah.
01:02:30
Jonathan L. Larson
Well, like I was trying to say at the start, it's it's weird.
01:02:30
Brett
Well, a reason it's same favorites.
01:02:33
Jonathan L. Larson
like I'm a very applied entomologist. I amm not i don't do basic research. I just talk about bugs to people. And i I read and learn everything I can about what happens with insects and how they impact humans. And I try to help people out.
01:02:47
Jonathan L. Larson
But that doesn't mean that I don't appreciate the basic science.
Understanding Bug-Plant Interactions
01:02:50
Jonathan L. Larson
Like this is very basic stuff of like, why do bugs eat plants? Why do plants exist?
01:02:55
Plant People
hmm
01:02:55
Alexis
I do bug plant.
01:02:56
Jonathan L. Larson
And why why do bug plant?
01:02:58
Alexis
Why plant bugs?
01:03:00
Jonathan L. Larson
Why not more bug on plant?
01:03:01
Plant People
so
01:03:02
Jonathan L. Larson
All these kinds of caveman-like questions, I guess, where yeah if we don't drill into that, if we don't understand these mechanisms, we don't understand our place in the system as much even.
01:03:02
Brett
laughter
01:03:13
Jonathan L. Larson
Like I know that sounds very grandiose, but... I think it is important to figure out why bugs and plants, why insects feed on plants. And then what does that mean? What does it mean for us? And by understanding that more, we get better defenses against some of it.
01:03:27
Jonathan L. Larson
Maybe it does come down to like, just make the plant taste different. And then the the insects are like, oh, this isn't my food anymore. ah Rather than chasing these highs of more and more insecticide applications or what have you. So, I mean, these basic questions are important and i hope people recognize their value and hear how it leads to these more applied fronts that we all work in and exist
Exploring Entomology Podcasts
01:03:48
Jonathan L. Larson
in and and try to help people with.
01:03:48
Plant People
Yeah. It's very practical.
01:03:51
Alexis
Awesome.
01:03:54
Alexis
Well, Jonathan, can you tell us yeah these other sweet bug podcasts that you do so that people can go follow you?
01:04:00
Jonathan L. Larson
Oh, this, I get, I get to plug my pluggables.
01:04:02
Plant People
Absolutely. Absolutely.
01:04:03
Alexis
Look, look, look, look.
01:04:05
Jonathan L. Larson
I am ostensibly on blue sky. i am at bug man, John there. I've never posted, but I am there and you could follow me if you wanted to, but I'm more online as Kentucky bugs on Facebook.
01:04:16
Jonathan L. Larson
ah That's our social media feed for the department. And then also I have a podcast, arthro dash pod. That's arthro dash pod. Blogspot.com for a lot of our archive pages.
01:04:27
Jonathan L. Larson
but we're on all your favorite podcatcher apps. you always have to include the dash between our throat and pod or you won't find us. But that's a show about the weird world of insects. We do lots of different deep dives.
01:04:38
Jonathan L. Larson
ah We talked recently about specific types of insects in specific video games. We've talked about the pilgrims and cicadas.
01:04:45
Plant People
centipede
01:04:47
Jonathan L. Larson
ah we did all kinds We do all kinds of different episodes. And so if people have any questions about insects, we might cover it on there. And you can always tell us what you're interested in, and then we will do it. I've got a few up my sleeve that I want to do soon. ah I'm trying to figure out the history of imported fire ants in the United States.
01:05:04
Jonathan L. Larson
And I've got a really grand one about ah the father of and American entomology. His name is Thomas Say. He was a part of a utopian cult in southern Indiana. And I think that would be interesting to examine ah why why he was led to New Harmony.
01:05:14
Plant People
Fascinating.
01:05:16
Alexis
Immediately, yes.
01:05:17
Jonathan L. Larson
Right.
01:05:18
Alexis
Immediately, yes. Like those are, those are two of my favorite things, like being combined into one episode.
01:05:24
Jonathan L. Larson
right
01:05:24
Alexis
Absolutely. How do I support you in this?
01:05:26
Plant People
Anything that sounds like X-Files, I'm here for.
01:05:27
Alexis
and
01:05:28
Plant People
Anything. Anything.
01:05:30
Jonathan L. Larson
Oh, we did we did do a Mothman episode last year, so that's kind of X, Y, Z.
01:05:31
Alexis
And,
01:05:32
Plant People
a And when was that last year, you say?
01:05:36
Jonathan L. Larson
Yeah, last last July or August, so yeah.
01:05:37
Plant People
I'm jotting down notes as we go. I'm going to look at a mothman.
01:05:43
Alexis
You need to do a spooky episode on
Cultural Impact of Insects and Wrap-Up
01:05:46
Alexis
spooky bugs or...
01:05:46
Jonathan L. Larson
We try to do a Halloween episode. We usually watch a movie. So Mimic is actually on the table for this year's Halloween episode.
01:05:52
Plant People
Perfect.
01:05:54
Jonathan L. Larson
Last year, I think we did The Fly with Jeff Goldblum.
01:05:57
Plant People
Perfect.
01:05:57
Jonathan L. Larson
um
01:05:57
Plant People
I love it.
01:05:58
Jonathan L. Larson
That was a lot of fun. ah But yeah, we try to we try to touch on the cultural impact of insects as well as the the insect history and insect evolution.
01:06:07
Alexis
Well, it's perfect that you came on Hort Culture Podcast today.
01:06:10
Jonathan L. Larson
That's right.
01:06:10
Alexis
so
01:06:10
Jonathan L. Larson
we We both are very clever with our names. Yeah.
01:06:15
Alexis
Well, I know I ah follow Arthropod and listen throw them in my earbuds when I'm outside. So encourage all of you all to do that. you know After you listen to our weekly episode, you go listen to their weekly episode and it's a win-win around here, plants and insects.
01:06:30
Alexis
So
01:06:30
Jonathan L. Larson
Thank you.
01:06:30
Alexis
ah Thanks, Jonathan, for being on today. You can follow us at Hort Culture Podcast on Instagram. You can send us a DM. You can shoot us an email. And that is in our um show notes. And we'll put Jonathan's info in our show notes as well. So you can just click and easily do that because we like simple around here. But we thank you all for being here with us today. And we hope that you will join us next time.
01:06:51
Alexis
Have a great one.