JAD ABUMRAD: Hello, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And we're talking about how scientists think about the world.

JAD: And appreciate.

ROBERT: Yeah. Except appreciation, this is something that scientists do differently from the rest of us. And I think this next story is an act of appreciation so different from the rest of us that it makes me want to ...

JAD: Barf?

ROBERT: Gag.

JAD: Bring it!

ROBERT: Once upon a time, in a rainforest in Costa Rica in Central America, there was a little botfly.

JAD: What's a botfly?

ROBERT: Botflies are hairy flies that live in moist tropical areas on Earth.

JAD: So they're not like New York City flies?

ROBERT: No, no, no. What a botfly does is when a botfly is pregnant—and our botfly was a pregnant female botfly—she has her baby, flies up into the air carrying her baby. She sees a nice, hairy mosquito, actually grabs onto the mosquito.

JAD: Mid flight?

ROBERT: Oh, yeah. And drops her baby onto the mosquito.

JAD: Why the mosquito?

ROBERT: Well, because the mosquito's gonna do something very important for the baby. But the mosquito, of course, is a mosquito, so it's looking to bite somebody.

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: When the mosquito lands on a nice, warm, palpitating mammal so she can have some blood, the botfly baby is programmed to fall off into the mosquito bite and make a little home.

JAD: Wow, that's impressive!

ROBERT: Completely. Yeah.

JAD: That mosquito probably has no idea of any of this.

ROBERT: No idea at all. You got all that?

JAD: Got it.

ROBERT: Okay, so now I want to introduce you to a particular palpitating mammal who happened to be in Costa Rica on our very day.

JERRY COYNE: I guess I was about 24. It was 1973.

ROBERT: His name is Jerry Coyne.

JERRY COYNE: 30-some years, I guess. 35 years. But I remember it like it was yesterday. This isn't an experience that you forget easily.

ROBERT: You were working at Harvard as a grad student at the time?

JERRY COYNE: Yeah, I was. I was doing a laboratory experiment on flies, ironically. And there was a program for Harvard graduate students to go to the tropics for two months during the summer so they could get some experience in the field and learn something about the diversity of tropical nature.

ROBERT: So now we've got Jerry Coyne in Costa Rica walking through a forest.

JAD: Doing some research or something?

ROBERT: Doing some research. And through the air, you hear the distant sound of a mosquito getting closer and closer and closer 'til it bites Jerry right on the head.

JERRY COYNE: Not too far from the crown. And I scratched it. But, you know, it didn't go away. When it got to be about the size of a pea, I consulted one of my fellow students.

ROBERT: This friend of his happened to be an entomologist. She climbed up onto a bunk bed.

JERRY COYNE: And she looked in my head, pulled the hairs back, and she said, "Oh my God, there's something moving in there!" That's when I freaked out completely. I started running around the field station, just physically running in circles.

ROBERT: In his mosquito bite, there was a little hose or something protruding ...

JERRY COYNE: Through the top of the mosquito bite. And it was sort of wiggling around.

ROBERT: A breathing tube like a little straw.

JERRY COYNE: I was really completely freaked out. I mean, I had a worm in my body. Nobody knew how to extract it.

ROBERT: Why couldn't you just grab onto the periscope part and pull?

JERRY COYNE: Because like all marvels of evolution, the botfly maggot has devices to keep you from pulling it out because it makes its living in your body. So it has a pair of hooks on the anal end, the other end, that are dug into your flesh. So if you try to pull the thing out, it just digs in and you'll break it in two. That is the thing you want to avoid, because it can cause a serious infection.

ROBERT: Oh!

JAD: No, you don't want to do that.

ROBERT: No, you don't. But what you could do, however, is you could try what they call the "meat cure."

JERRY COYNE: Put a slab of meat over the wound, strap it to you. I would have to have strapped, for example, a steak to my head, which is not practical.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JERRY COYNE: And then the worm thinks that, you know, the worm's breathing tube, which is through the mosquito bite, gets cut off and it's deprived of air. So it thinks that the steak is part of your flesh, and it burrows up through the steak. And when it comes out almost all the way, you can just remove the steak with a worm in it.

ROBERT: What a clever idea!

JERRY COYNE: Yeah. The idea of toiling in the tropical heat every day with a t-bone strapped to my head was not something that I wanted to do.

ROBERT: Meantime, it's causing problems, this thing.

JERRY COYNE: It was a terrible itch. And from time to time, it would, like, move or twitch, and you'd feel this sort of sharp pain in your skull. Or you could feel it grinding up against there. And when I went swimming or took a shower, it would get sort of freaked out because its air hole would be cut off, and then it would really go nuts, you know, make a lot of pain. So I tried to avoid getting my head underwater. Meanwhile, the lump was getting bigger and bigger until it sort of got noticeable.

JAD: Wait, how does it—what is it eating in order to get bigger and bigger?

ROBERT: Well, it's, uh—um ...

JAD: Yes?

ROBERT: Um ...

JERRY COYNE: It's eating my muscles and tissue and my scalp.

ROBERT: It's eating your flesh, then?

JERRY COYNE: Yeah, it is.

JAD: Oh!

JERRY COYNE: It's turning human flesh into fly flesh.

ROBERT: This fly, it's eating Jerry. So it's more and more—well, it is Jerry.

JERRY COYNE: It is. And that's the part that made me like it.

ROBERT: So Jerry and the part of Jerry that is now the botfly leave Costa Rica, and it's time to head back to Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Harvard University, where Jerry's the grad student. And, you know, he has to check things out.

JERRY COYNE: So I went to the health clinic and, you know, in about 10 minutes, there was 20 doctors around me. Nobody had ever seen anything like this at Harvard. They were all curious and poking and prodding and looking at it and oohing and ah-ing but, of course, none of them knew what to do about it. And I just decided, you know, I'm gonna let it come out, make the best of it, you know, enjoy it as much as I could, and marvel at it. I mean, when you really think about it, it is amazing that an animal can take human flesh and turn it, using its own genes, into a fly. I mean, you have to marvel.

ROBERT: This is so weird of you, actually.

JERRY COYNE: You think this behavior might seem weird to the layperson, but to a biologist, it's sort of absolutely normal to be very curious about something. I make my living on flies. I work with fruit flies. I'm a geneticist. And here was a fly making its living on me. You know, I was getting more and more curious. I wanted to see what it looked like when it came out. I didn't want to kill it.

ROBERT: What about girls? I mean, assuming you're dating. So, like, wasn't this, like, a total turn off to say, "Hi, this is me and my maggot?"

JERRY COYNE: Well, I was—you know, I was dating a nurse at the time, and this is the good thing about it. The nurse was actually quite fascinated with this.

SARAH ROGERSON: I thought it was disgusting. [laughs]

ROBERT: Sarah Rogerson was Jerry's friend. She inspected the fly.

ROBERT: Did you give it a name?

SARAH ROGERSON: No.

ROBERT: [laughs]

SARAH ROGERSON: No. Jerry may have felt that way about it, but no, I didn't. This was more of a scientific experience.

ROBERT: Is this something that was okay with you?

SARAH ROGERSON: Well, I don't remember being informed that there were any other options. I thought, this is just what had to happen.

ROBERT: So a couple of weeks pass, and the botfly is just getting ...

JERRY COYNE: Bigger and bigger and bigger.

ROBERT: It goes from jelly bean size to something like ...

JERRY COYNE: The size of an egg.

JAD: An egg?

SARAH ROGERSON: Yeah, it was pretty big.

ROBERT: Like a quail egg.

JAD: Whoa!

ROBERT: He's covering it now with a baseball cap, which is maybe one reason why they decided to go to Fenway Park one particular evening.

SARAH ROGERSON: That is correct.

JERRY COYNE: Yeah, it was a Red Sox-Yankees game. I wasn't gonna miss that. And every once in a while I would rub my head, I mean, throughout this whole gestation of this thing just to check on it. And during the game, when I rubbed my head, I felt something coming out of the lump.

SARAH ROGERSON: Jerry kept saying, "Oh, my gosh! Oh, my gosh, it's coming out! I can feel it!"

ROBERT: So was this a little distracting?

SARAH ROGERSON: Yeah. A foul ball came up where we were sitting, and it hit in one of those wooden seats at Fenway. And we narrowly escaped getting hit because we really weren't paying much attention to the game at all.

JERRY COYNE: But it took a long time. I mean ...

ROBERT: It started at the game, and then it went on?

JERRY COYNE: It started at the game and then continued on until the evening.

SARAH ROGERSON: We went back to Jerry's apartment, and he kept reaching up and checking to feel the lump. We were just hanging out, and ...

JERRY COYNE: It was a bit more risque than that.

SARAH ROGERSON: [laughs]

JERRY COYNE: And I said ...

SARAH ROGERSON: ... he reached up and said, "It's gone! It's out."

JERRY COYNE: We gotta find it. [laughs] I turned on the light, and there it was on the pillow. And it was horrifying.

ROBERT: What did it look like? Is it a wiggly little wormy thing?

SARAH ROGERSON: It's sort of bulbous on one end, and then it tapers down to a little tail. It's white.

JERRY COYNE: Big, fat, white grub worm.

SARAH ROGERSON: An inch and a half long.

ROBERT: Wow!

SARAH ROGERSON: And it has little black teeth.

JERRY COYNE: You know, I thought, "Oh, my God. That's what was in my head. Had I known that, I might have been more freaked out."

ROBERT: When you are greeting your baby there, did you have a feeling of pride or just ...?

JERRY COYNE: Well, no. Extreme curiosity. The one thing that was extremely striking to me was that its exit was completely painless. You know, it's painful when it's in there, but when it comes out, it does so very painlessly. And that's another evolutionary phenomenon. Of course, if the worm did it painfully and exited, then the horse or the monkey or whoever it's infecting would just slap it and kill it.

ROBERT: So what did you do once you had the baby there on the pillow?

JERRY COYNE: Well, then I decided I was going to try to rear it into an adult fly. You know, I'm a scientist. That's what you do. So I had prepared a jar of sterile sand, and I took the worm and I dropped it into the sand and put the top on with air holes and hoped that it would pupate, but unfortunately it died.

ROBERT: Did you get sad?

JERRY COYNE: I was extremely sad. You know, in the temperate zone in Boston, a botfly is not gonna make it. It just can't live. And so it was doomed from the start. But I wanted to see it complete its life cycle. And unfortunately, it didn't quite make it. So I did the best I could with what I knew. You know, I think it's—it added some richness to my life. It really did. People still get completely horrified when I tell them the story, even though to me it's—you know, it's sort of a nice story. [laughs]

JAD: Jerry Coyne works at the University of Chicago, and his forthcoming book is called Why Evolution is True.

ROBERT: And we have time for one more story. A couple of years ago, I sat down with one of the great bug scientists—insect scientists in the world. His name is Tom Eisner. He teaches up at Cornell and has taught more scientists to love insects than anyone in the world, probably. And I guess I wondered if you spent your whole life having feelings and very sophisticated feelings about tiny, almost alien life forms, how does that happen? We spoke at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.

ROBERT: Your interest in insects, can you remember when it began?

TOM EISNER: According to my parents, when I first stood on my feet.

ROBERT: Really?

TOM EISNER: All I cared about was bugs. And the beetles, caterpillars, ants, termites, cockroaches. I picked them up. I learned quickly not to put them all in my mouth.

[audience laughs]

TOM EISNER: I kept them in my room. My room was a zoo.

ROBERT: You were born in Berlin.

TOM EISNER: Correct.

ROBERT: From a Jewish family.

TOM EISNER: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: You were about three years old when you left, or thereabouts?

TOM EISNER: Three years old. Went to Spain.

ROBERT: So you went from the Nazis in Berlin to Spain.

TOM EISNER: Yes, and the Spanish Civil War. Fled for France. My parents decided we should really start somewhere else, and we went to South America. And that was an entomological paradise.

TOM EISNER: Every living organism has some sort of odor. You can build these up in your memory, and I used to take a whiff of an insect and classify them in my mind's eye according to what they smelled like. Caterpillar? Ant? Beetle?

ROBERT: [laughs] And do you ever dream of insects?

TOM EISNER: Yeah, I tend to dream that I am an insect.

ROBERT: What does that mean, that you dream that you are an insect? You mean, you were scurrying?

TOM EISNER: Yes.

ROBERT: And walking upside down on the ceiling?

TOM EISNER: Indeed. Even escaping swattings. The weirdest situation that I ever got into in a dream was I dreamed that I was an insect, and I was telling another insect that I would occasionally dream that I'm a human.

[laughter]

ROBERT: That's your meta dream.

TOM EISNER: Insects were somehow my great love. I was very much a loner, and if I didn't have a room full of insects, live, I was unhappy.

OLIVER SACKS: No, I— Tom, I wanted to ask you ...

ROBERT: Now at this moment, Oliver Sacks, who was on the stage with us, he asked Tom this question.

OLIVER SACKS: ... whether you feel that insects respond to you? You know, whether—whether you feel them sort of purring, and whether they know that you're gentle and reliable and for them?

TOM EISNER: You know, it's a good question. I don't—I don't presume to read responses on the part of the insects. But the older I get, the more difficult I find it to experiment with them in ways that kill them. Bombardier beetles can live for one, two, up to three years in your lab. You become very attached to them. You give them names. And when they die, it's an event.

TOM EISNER: So you must somehow have moments where you feel that things are going on in that tiny little brain. That they have secrets hidden up their sleeves that they might reveal if you found a common language, I find that I can love nature no matter how distant the individual organisms are from me. But I reach out and hope that I can shorten the distance and create some feeling of co-existence.

ROBERT: Tom Eisner's book is called For the Love of Insects.

JAD: That's really what it's called?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Well, we should go. Check our website Radiolab.org for more information, and you can always send us an email at radiolab(@)wnyc.org.

ROBERT: Radiolab is one word.

JAD: Yes, it is. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Message three.]

[JERRY COYNE: Hi, this is Jerry Coyne. The Botfly Man. Radiolab is produced by Amanda Aronczyk and Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes Lulu Miller, Soren Wheeler, Jonathan Mitchell, Ellen Horne, and Jessica Benko, none of whom are afflicted with botflies. Other help, Ike Sriskandarajah, Hee Chang Lin. Special thanks to Pauline Davies and Kate Edgar.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

 

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