[RADIOLAB INTRO]

ROBERT KRULWICH: Here we go.

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And today ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: What's so interesting about the cicada sounds is when you just hear it for the first time, you just hear white noise. You just hear "shh." It's just noise. But when you learn what's going on, you can hear the different parts of the orchestra.

ROBERT: That's David Rothenberg, composer and professor and writer. And what he's gonna do is he's gonna take that huge wall of insect sounds ...

JAD: Soon to be upon us.

ROBERT: Soon to be upon us, and get really into it, really start to dissect it.

JAD: Ooh.

ROBERT: But what he really loves to do—really!—is he likes to play music with animals. So he goes around and finds individual animals or groups of animals to duet with. And if you don't mind, Jad, I'd like to just introduce you to a few of his strange escapades.

JAD: Okay.

ROBERT: One of the first times he tried this was with a ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Well, that was a white-crested laughing thrush.

ROBERT: A white-crested laughing thrush.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Because, you know, before I met the white-crested laughing thrush ...

ROBERT: [laughs] I love the way you're able to bring that up. Because if you ask an ordinary person like myself to say white-crested laughing thrush, it's hard.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: It should be much more well-known because the white-crested laughing thrush is one of the best ...

ROBERT: You mean the white-crested laughing ...?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Thrush. Yeah. Washington has them, Bronx Zoo has them. They thrive very well in zoos. But what they do is they sing duets, the males and females together.

ROBERT: So that's animals singing with animals. But here's what he did. He went to the national aviary, which is in Pittsburgh.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: First I stepped into the big tropical aviary where you wander and the birds run—are flying freely. It's a big warm, kinda moist space.

ROBERT: He got there ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Before the aviary opened. Like, 6:00 am.

ROBERT: And there were—when he walked into the cage, there were dozens of different kinds of birds flying around.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: And I was walking with my clarinet.

ROBERT: Playing up to the trees.

JAD: Why is he doing this?

ROBERT: Well, he just wanted to see what would ...

[clarinet music]

ROBERT: That's him, by the way. And he wanted to see what would happen.

JAD: All right.

ROBERT: And as it turns out, nothing happened. The birds just more or less ignored him.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: By then, I was kind of—kind of lost interest. Like, nobody's paying attention to this. It's a bad idea. And then all of a sudden ...

JAD: Ooh, hello!

DAVID ROTHENBERG: The laughing thrush was interested.

[clarinet and bird sounds]

ROBERT: That's the thrush. One little guy, brown feathers, dark beak.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Because at that moment ...

[clarinet and bird sounds]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Anyone would say, "Hmm."

JAD: They're, like, doing call and response.

ROBERT: Yeah.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: "This is interesting. Something's happening here. This bird and this clarinet is doing something together."

[clarinet and bird sounds]

ROBERT: So as you're—as you're playing, what's going on in your mind at this point?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: I was just imagining I was sitting down with a musician who I maybe couldn't talk to, who spoke another language besides English. And I couldn't talk to this musician, but I could make music together with them.

[clarinet and bird sounds]

ROBERT: Okay, so that was his encounter with the thrush. Let me take you on another little adventure, just before we get to our big thing. This is a diff—can I just do this?

JAD: Are you asking me for permission?

ROBERT: I am.

JAD: Then no. No, you can't.

ROBERT: Well, all right. Well, I'm not gonna ask you then. I'm just doing it.

JAD: Good.

ROBERT: After a variety of bird duets in which I'm sure he frustrated many a thrush, he then did a duet with an entirely different animal.

[clarinet and whale sounds]

JAD: What the ...?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Well, humpback whales, the best thing about that story is nobody knew they sang until the 1960s, so you can ...

ROBERT: I—don't whales spend most of their time except for the tops of them underwater, so where would you be?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: They do. Good point. I was broadcasting my clarinet through an underwater speaker.

[clarinet and whale sounds]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Listening with headphones to what's coming out of the underwater microphone.

[clarinet and whale sounds]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: And you hear this duet from down there, live clarinet and whale.

JAD: [laughs] This is so bizarre! What does the whale make of this?

ROBERT: I—we—I don't speak whale.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: The thing about humpback whales is, unlike most animals, they change their songs from year to year. They're interested in new sounds, so all the humpback whales in any one ocean are singing one song, and then they change it altogether. No one knows why. Why do they want to change their song if they all want to sound the same?

[clarinet and whale sounds]

ROBERT: Well, when you sung your song with the whale, did the whale react like the thrush?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: I think it's different, but I would say the whale seemed to change what he was doing.

ROBERT: Now, it can be a little hard to hear exactly what David's talking about. It took me a few listens to pick out the distinguishing moment, but here's what the whale was doing when David showed up.

[whale sounds]

ROBERT: It was doing this thing where it would go up and then down, and up and then down. Over and over. And here's what it started doing a few minutes after he'd been playing the clarinet.

[whale sounds]

ROBERT: The whale kind of extends the note.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Whales tend to go "eurgh," and clarinets tend to go "oooh." They play a steady tone, you know? And so the whale was trying to play a more steady note.

[whale sounds]

JAD: Maybe? I don't know.

ROBERT: You can't hear that? Just a little bit of an extended line. It's "ohhh." Instead of "eurgh" it's "ohhh."

JAD: I mean, it's awesome. I love listening to this, but I don't—I mean, I don't—it just sounds like the whale's still doing whale.

ROBERT: Well, David says that when he played the recording to some of the—to whale scientists ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: They all are shocked.

ROBERT: All?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Every scientist I played that to was—did not believe that what I played them was actually a live recording. They thought I'd done something to it, which I didn't.

ROBERT: I mean, they—they never heard a whale make a sound like that, I'm assuming.

JAD: Which implies that the whale was reacting to his clarinet?

ROBERT: Well ...

JAD: Because maybe the whale was just saying, "Shut up! Shut up up there!"

ROBERT: [laughs] Well, however you want to resolve it, like, we—we should move on to the real purpose of our gathering here this afternoon, or whatever time you're listening to this.

JAD: 2:00 am.

ROBERT: Which is that he then turned to this sound right here.

[cicadas sound]

JAD: The plague.

ROBERT: This is the sound of lots of cicadas. And when you and I hear it, I mean, it just sounds like an enormous block of monotonal noise.

JAD: Yes, sir.

ROBERT: Just screech, you know? An elaborate screech.

JAD: Annoying.

ROBERT: But David says actually, if you know what's going on in here, if you learn to dissect it, well ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Pretty soon, you can pick out up to nine separate sounds made by the three related species of cicada that are there at the same time.

LYNN LEVY: Can you—can you walk us through the nine different sounds?

ROBERT: Yeah.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Well, at least some of them.

JAD: By the way, that was our producer Lynn Levy.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Okay we have three basic species that come out. Whenever there's an emergence, they're all there.

ROBERT: So now—I didn't, you know, realize that this was—when you're walking through the woods and you hear this enormous white noise, what you're actually hearing are three different kinds of cicadas, three different species singing three very different songs that are all mixed together so you can't tell them apart.

JAD: Huh.

ROBERT: And then each one of those songs—each of those three—has three parts, which is how you get to the number nine. In any case, here are the three species. This is number one ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Magicicada cassini makes the white noise sound "shh."

[cicada sound]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: And they—they swell together, they synchronize, so they'll all go "shh."

[cicada sound]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: And then they fly around a bit. Do that now: jump up from your seat, and you get back in and you do it again.

[cicada sound]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: There you go.

ROBERT: Okay, so that's species number one. Now here is species number two.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Magicicada septendecula is making, like, "ch, ch, ch."

[cicada sound]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: It's kind of irregular.

[cicada sound]

ROBERT: So that's the bebop guy.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Kind of, yeah. And there's fewer of those, and they're quieter so less is known about them.

ROBERT: Can I hear that one again?

[cicada sound]

ROBERT: So we got the white noise one, the bebop one, now here's number three.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Magicicada septendecim. The most popular known sound. And that's going ph—the pharaoh sound: "pha-roah."

[cicada sound]

JAD: Wow!

[cicada sound]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: And the thing is, when you actually hear millions of them, all you hear is "Eee."

[cicada sound]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: If you take one and multiply it hundreds and then thousands of times, its tail disappears. You just hear this tone.

JAD: And I mean, this is what we hear, but what would the cicada hear in all of this?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Ah, well this is the whole story.

ROBERT: Well, see the thing about cicadas is that the cicadas who sing here are the males—just the guys—and they sing for—it's the mating song, really. You know, there are lots of songs you sing, but this is one of those kinds. And the idea being ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: The females hear all this sound and they find the males. Like, the grand mess of music like a disco or it's called the lek by biologists, which pretty much means "disco" anyway. And then ...

ROBERT: If you were a guy looking for a date, you might not join with lots of other guys, but these animals join together for what purpose?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: So the females can find them.

ROBERT: But if you've got, like, a billion cicadas crowded into a disco, then how do you—how does a single male and a single female notice each other?

JAD: They don't have to. They just bump into each other and then it's on.

ROBERT: No.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: 17 years ago, John Cooley and David Marshall discovered things were more complicated than that. They discovered the females make a sound after the male finishes his sound.

ROBERT: So say you're one of these males ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Going "pha-raoh, pha-raoh." And the female has to make a wing flick, this tiny little flick exactly one third of a second after the male stops.

ROBERT: Really? So it's like, "pha-raoh," "dit."

DAVID ROTHENBERG: And then—nobody imagined such a thing was going on. They didn't imagine insects were doing anything this complicated.

ROBERT: Well, for one thing, it sounds like that would be a male-to-female bit of business. One-to-one. When you listen to all these animals you don't think they ever have one of them, they're like so many of them.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Millions of males are making the pharaoh sound, but when you're close to one, you know, the female hears "pha-raoh" if there's one close enough, she makes the wing flick, and the male knows to approach her a little bit and he goes on with his second sound, it's called, by John Coolie, "quart two." Quart-two is like ...

[cicada sound]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: "Pha-raoh, pha-raoh, pha-raoh." And then she makes the wing flick again.

ROBERT: Same one?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: As far as we know.

ROBERT: Okay. And where does that tell mister—mister I love you guy?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: It's time to start mating and make the third sound.

[cicada sound]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Which is more like "da, da, da, da, da, da, da ..."

ROBERT: Let's do that again. So you—your hello is "pha-raoh."

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Yeah.

ROBERT: I'm getting closer, is ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: "Pha-raoh, pha-raoh, pha-raoh ..."

ROBERT: Now we're kissing et cetera et cetera is ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: "Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da ..."

ROBERT: So now you know when the cicadas come, when you hear this massive roar, what you're really hearing is an orchestra of sex. Just think: all these little animals getting ready to do what they were born to do, what they've been waiting 17 long years in the ground to do. And all the while, it's the songs that matter.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: They're, like, following these little rules, simple rules that together shows how very simple organisms can create things of great complexity and beauty. Each individual doesn't have to know that much about the whole, and still interesting things happen. Which—which gives you a different view of human life. You're one little part in this giant thing. You don't have to really know what's happening, but you're doing your little bit for the whole of creation or evolution or life or music, and you do your own little thing and you're not sure where it leads.

ROBERT: But for the individual cicada, for Tommy cicada or Betty cicada, it's all pretty simple: they have their sex, they lay eggs on twigs of trees, the eggs hatch, and then tiny little larvae cicadas will fall to the ground and then they'll burrow into the warm earth.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: And attach themselves to roots of trees.

ROBERT: And then start sucking the fluid from tree roots. And they will do this for years and years and years.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: And they're slowly growing.

ROBERT: And then for some reason that nobody can quite fathom, at the exact same moment it's party time.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: There are different broods of them, so different years you can go somewhere in the country and maybe there's some coming out.

JAD: And why is it that the one that's about to come out here in the northeast, why does that happen only every 17 years? Why 17?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: The honest answer is we really don't know. We do have some evidence of how they keep track of the years, which is that the cicada monitors the temperature. We don't know how, but that's what they pay attention to.

ROBERT: So in the ground, they're not just eating tree juice, they're also—they've got a little thermometer.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Somehow they're pinging—they have a little counting thermometer. They count the number of years, then they know when to come out. A few years ago at my parents' house, I did see one in the wrong year. You know, every year a few of them wake up, "Where's the party?"

ROBERT: Oh, really? You have Rip Van Winkle ones?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Yeah. Not—they don't always count correctly, you know? [laughs]

ROBERT: Oh, really? That must be a lonely experience.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Yeah, the lonely cicada, looking for its kind, the wrong year, the wrong place.

ROBERT: Can they go back down, and go back to the ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: I don't think so, no.

ROBERT: Or the jig is up?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: They change. They come from their larval stage and the wings had come out. They can't crawl back and lose the wings.

ROBERT: Oh.

LYNN: Did it sing? That lone cicada?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Yeah, it was singing.

[cicada sound]

LYNN: To no one.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: To no one. To me.

ROBERT: And you can kind of imagine David picking up his clarinet ...

[clarinet and cicada]

ROBERT: ... and joining in.

[clarinet and cicada]

ROBERT: Thanks to John Cooley and to David Marshall. And now Jad wants to say something.

JAD: What do I want to say?

ROBERT: About Lynn Levy's favorite song?

JAD: Oh, and if you go to—yes, and if you go to Radiolab.org, you can download a song from David Rothenberg's album chosen by our producer Lynn Levy. It is her favorite song. You can download it for free. Also, David Rothenberg has a new book out called Bug Music. I'll be frying 'em up, making some tempura.

ROBERT: No you won't. No you won't.

JAD: I'll be makin' tempura!

ROBERT: No, because the little guy will come up to you and go "ticka, ticka, ticka" on your leg.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: So you'll drop to the ground and burrow into the earth, and we won't see you for—I don't know. It'll be, like, either 13 or 17 years.

JAD: Thanks for listening. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

MOLLY WEBSTER: I'm Molly Webster.

ROBERT: This is Radiolab. We've decided to offer you guys a little treat. It's gonna be part prose, part musical in a hip hop sort of way, with some extremely cool guests.

MOLLY: Really?

ROBERT: Oh, I promise you. Yes. At the end of the show. And it all grows out of a tale we heard about a very small animal, which begins appropriately with a very small noise.

DAVID GOULSON: Yeah. So in days gone by, people tended to die at home. This is—go back a couple of hundred years before there were hospitals and so on.

ROBERT: This, by the way, is David Goulson.

DAVID GOULSON: I'm a professor of biology at the University of Sussex in the UK.

ROBERT: And he told this tale to producer Latif Nasser and I.

DAVID GOULSON: So you imagine that, you know, grandpa's ill and looks like he might die soon. [laughs] Sorry, I don't know why that's funny, but—and so he'd be lying in bed upstairs, and everyone would be—out of respect, would be very quiet. You know, they'd be creeping around the house. It was a time called the death watch. And when everyone was really quiet, they'd hear these faint drumming noises coming from the timbers of the house. I can try and do an impression of the noise, actually.

ROBERT: Yeah, I'd love to hear you.

DAVID GOULSON: May not work very well, but bear with me.

ROBERT: Yeah.

DAVID GOULSON: [tapping] Did you get that?

ROBERT: Yeah.

LATIF NASSER: Yeah.

DAVID GOULSON: So five or six identical beats. And legend has it that this was the devil drumming his fingers impatiently, waiting for the soul to depart the body so that he could claim it.

ROBERT: Ah!

DAVID GOULSON: But turns out, actually it's the mating call of a tiny little beetle. The deathwatch beetle. That's where it gets its name.

ROBERT: So Dave became a kind of a fan of these beetles.

DAVID GOULSON: Oh, yeah. It's a widespread species and ...

ROBERT: And in fact, he's got a house that's full of them.

DAVID GOULSON: It's pretty decrepit. It's slightly falling down, the roof leaks and whatever, but it's home to a whole host of these little beetles.

ROBERT: And in the quiet, he can hear them. So a while ago he found himself wondering, what's this noise really all about?

DAVID GOULSON: Which, you might not think would be a great mystery.

ROBERT: But what he discovered is it's all about love—or at least sex. So today, a story that reminds us how difficult, lonely, how hard the mating game can be.

MOLLY: Perfect Valentine's Day.

ROBERT: No, it'll get better. So we will begin at the beginning.

DAVID GOULSON: The life cycle. Yeah. So the female beetle lays an egg on a piece of dead wood.

ROBERT: And Dave said he would watch them, and the moms would just drop their babies randomly, some here, some there, usually into a hole in a log or into a wood beam.

DAVID GOULSON: And it hatches into the little tiny white grub. So imagine this little thing, pitch black, you know, in its own little tunnel on its own. And it starts chewing. It chews away at the wood very, very slowly. And eventually about 10 or 15 years later ...

ROBERT: What, years? It's gonna chew for 10 to 15 years?

DAVID GOULSON: Yeah, for a decade or more. Poor things. And eventually, it reaches the magnificent size of about a quarter of an inch, at which point it pupates. So it turns into a little chrysalis. And a few months later the adult beetle hatches out of that.

ROBERT: And so finally it crawls out of the log and onto the surface.

LATIF: Is that the first time they see light?

DAVID GOULSON: Yeah. Yeah, that would be it.

ROBERT: Oh, wow!

DAVID GOULSON: So it's only the adults that you ever really see. And they're possibly the most boring looking insects you could imagine.

LATIF: Really?

DAVID GOULSON: They're about a quarter of an inch long, bullet shaped, dull brown. They're really easily mistaken for mouse droppings, actually. And the adult only has really one job, and that's to mate.

ROBERT: So the male beetle ...

DAVID GOULSON: Has to find himself a female. So he's got his work cut out.

ROBERT: For one thing, as an adult, he doesn't eat.

DAVID GOULSON: He can't feed, so he's gonna starve to death in a couple of weeks or so.

ROBERT: On top of that, he's nearly blind.

DAVID GOULSON: Yeah. And that's where this strange drumming noise comes in. That's their way of finding each other in the usually rather dark places where they live.

ROBERT: That's your way of saying "Hello? Hello?"

DAVID GOULSON: Yeah. And they make it by drumming their head. So the male beetle, he kind of braces himself and then he whacks his head five, six times.

ROBERT: Oh, you say drumming the head, you mean banging the head?

DAVID GOULSON: Yeah, it's like headbutts the timber he's sitting on with his kind of forehead, if you like. So that's what makes the drumming noise. He's basically whacking his head against the wood.

ROBERT: So he comes out of his hole.

DAVID GOULSON: Just wanders about, and does his little drumming noise.

ROBERT: Now if a human happens to hear him ...

DAVID GOULSON: People these days, they tend to spray their houses with insecticides, and that's the end of the beetles.

ROBERT: Oh.

ROBERT: But let's assume ...

MOLLY: Yes, let's assume.

ROBERT: ... that he doesn't get fumigated, okay?

DAVID GOULSON: He just keeps wandering about, banging his head, and then he pauses for a second kind of listening to see if anyone replies. And if there's no reply, he wanders on.

ROBERT: Unfortunately, according to David ...

DAVID GOULSON: Deathwatch beetles are quite rare these days, so there is a distinct chance the poor male will never find a female.

LATIF: Oh, this just gets more and more depressing.

DAVID GOULSON: [laughs] Well they—sorry, I'm laughing again.

LATIF: [laughs] And can you tell the same story from the female's perspective? So she just sort of is—she just waits in silence for three weeks, and if no one comes she just ...

DAVID GOULSON: Keels over and dies. Yeah.

LATIF: Oh, God!

DAVID GOULSON: She wanders around a little bit, I suppose, in the hope that she might encounter a male, but that is all she does. Tedious life I'm afraid.

ROBERT: But let's imagine again for the sake of argument, that after the 15 years of chewing and no fumigations for them at all, let's then think, wow, they get really lucky!

DAVID GOULSON: He gets a reply.

ROBERT: They find each other.

DAVID GOULSON: She makes the noise immediately after she hears the cry of a male, and he then gets very excited because he may have been wandering about banging his head for days. And this little duet gets going. He starts to run around.

ROBERT: Banging his head over and over again.

DAVID GOULSON: You know, this is his moment. And eventually, by a lot of trial and error—and occasionally they got it wrong and fell off the edge and were never seen again. But more often than not he would eventually find the female, and the males will immediately jump on top of her. And he then continues to drum his head, but this time he's not headbutting the timber, he's whacking her, which I mean, each to their own, you know? Presumably that works for a female deathwatch beetle. But because they're very short sighted, they will often jump on the wrong way round, and that's not so good because the females can actually control. He can't force them to mate. So he has to persuade her to cooperate, or else he's going nowhere.

ROBERT: Can humans tell if it's going well?

DAVID GOULSON: Well, so usually she carries on replying. So he's banging her in the back of the head, and she's then drumming her head on the wood underneath. And that's usually a good sign, that if she carries on banging her head on the timber, that means she's probably gonna mate with him within the next minute or two.

ROBERT: But Dave says when he has watched this happen, he's noticed that ...

DAVID GOULSON: Quite often, the females wouldn't mate, even though, you know, they'd maybe been sitting there for days waiting for a partner to come along. And then when one finally does and he finally gets to them, they're not interested. You know, it's not good enough.

ROBERT: I thought that they were—they only have three weeks.

LATIF: That is so shocking to me!

ROBERT: This is a very discerning lady, that she chooses death over an ugly mate.

DAVID GOULSON: Well, I guess she's not, actually. She's hoping that she'll get a better mate. There's another fish in the sea.

ROBERT: Another fish in the sea.

DAVID GOULSON: Hopefully. But I thought, well, what's the difference? Why are some males successful and some not? And it quickly became clear that the heavier the male, the more likely he was to be successful.

ROBERT: So is there some explanation for why?

DAVID GOULSON: So actually, these things, they produce quite staggering amounts of sperm, it turns out.

LATIF: Wait, what is staggering? What do you mean by staggering?

DAVID GOULSON: The average was 13 percent of his body weight.

ROBERT: 13 percent.

LATIF: What?

ROBERT: So if that were us, like, what would that be like?

DAVID GOULSON: We were talking about three or four gallons. So, you know, think about that from—it's best not to think about that too much, really. But ...

LATIF: Because that's just so gross.

DAVID GOULSON: It's slightly disturbing.

ROBERT: So the deep tragedy here would be to be a member of this species and to be born ...

LATIF: Scrawny.

ROBERT: Scrawny.

DAVID GOULSON: Yeah.

ROBERT: I mean, just out of curiosity, just how big are you?

DAVID GOULSON: I'm moderately skinny, so if there's a difference, I'd be in trouble. Anyway, so what I really wanted to know was were the females actually just weighing the males, or was it something that was correlated with being a big male? You know, maybe they were stronger or made a louder noise or something. And so the obvious way to try and find out was to artificially change the weight of the males.

LATIF: So make tiny fat suits for the ...

DAVID GOULSON: Well, exactly. Yeah. Not quite, but I wish this worked for people. It would be hilarious, but I don't think it does. So we have this stuff called Blue Tack in the UK. Do you have Blue Tack over there? I don't know.

LATIF: Like Sticky Tack?

DAVID GOULSON: Sticky Tack. I guess you use it to stick posters on the wall.

ROBERT: So Dave went to the store, bought some of this stuff, and then just bead it up into little bits.

DAVID GOULSON: And stuck them on the back of males to make them a little bit heavier.

ROBERT: And for the skinny males ...

DAVID GOULSON: It worked an absolute treat, these males. But I do feel slightly mean that those poor females obviously were getting a bit shortchanged, but hopefully they managed to produce some eggs anyway.

ROBERT: Because in the end, Dave finds these beetles, the males and the females, surprisingly charming. And after all, he does live with them. A lot of them.

DAVID GOULSON: They're still in my house. They're still chewing away at the beams. I've been—I'm torn. You know, part of me knows that if I don't spray them with some insecticide, then eventually the roof will start to collapse, but it's gonna take decades, and I kind of quite like having them there. So for the moment, they've been spared. And I kind of quite like listening to them tapping away in the springtime.

ROBERT: So you're sitting in bed at dawn or dusk, and you hear the quiet banging and you think ...

DAVID GOULSON: Yeah. Yeah. It's funny, isn't it, that people thought this was a sinister noise and actually it's all about love.

MOLLY: Thank you to Dave Goulson who wrote a book all about these bugs, A Buzz in the Meadow: The Natural History of a French Farm.

ROBERT: Oh, I didn't mention to you that it's a French farm. He has this little place in France that he goes to one month a year, and that's where he communes with his beetle friends.

MOLLY: And has one of the saddest months thinking about that.

ROBERT: Do you find it terribly sad?

MOLLY: I found it—it made me think that dating in New York was pretty easy.

ROBERT: [laughs] All right. For people who are feeling—if you're feeling sad, we want to end that problem right away. In the next part of this show, we're going to revisit this story in such a crazily new way for us. The guys from Hamilton, the hot Broadway show, I told some of them this story that you just heard, and they have decided to musicalize the tale. This is Act Two, in which I—you know, when I put together these—any story, as you know, I just wander around and tell it to every single person I know. So yeah, it could be strangers. So I was talking to a friend of mine who's in the theater, a guy named Tommy Kale. I'm talking to him and I'm saying, "I'm wondering what's going on in the minds of these little—assuming that they have minds, these little animals." Because it seems so unfair. 15 years of chewing and then this? So he said, "You know, we could be those beetles."

MOLLY: Wait, who's the 'we?'

ROBERT: The 'we' is an improvisational freestyle group called Freestyle Love Supreme. And it's—now this I should tell you. Tommy goes to Lin-Manuel Miranda.

MOLLY: Who's no joke.

ROBERT: Who is Hamilton in the hit musical Hamilton. And he writes, he says, "I'll be one of the beetles." And then they go to Utkarsh Ambudkar, who was in a movie called Pitch Perfect where he played a rapper.

MOLLY: Oh, yeah!

ROBERT: And by the way, this is all guys. This is like—you have to think of yourself as in an Elizabethan beetle situation.

MOLLY: This is Shakespearean deathwatch beetles.

ROBERT: That's right. All the lady parts will be played by males. So Lin's gonna be a woman, and Utkarsh is going to be the man. So here is the male beetle being the beetle that he hopes he can be.

UTKARSH AMBUDKAR: [rapping] Hey, ladies, I said the wait is over. Get ready for the beautiful beetle Casanova. He is I and I am him. The most masculine beetle by the name of Slim. Now evolution made me small so I could slip through the cracks. I'll be the first one to jump on a lady beetle's back. But it's hard out here, and I'm not playing. The human beings hear me, and then they get to spraying. They think that I'm the devil, so they get to fumigatin'. They don't understand that I'm only procreating. But I'm slimmer, so I'm a winner. I finally see the sun, peep a shorty and I know that she the one. So I'm like, beetle baby doll, let's get involved. I want to give it to you all right here on this log. [singing] I've been chewing through that wood for my entire life, and it feels so good to finally find a wife. Yeah, I guarantee I'm your chosen, but can you remind me which end it goes in?

ROBERT: This is hard!

MOLLY: Yeah, it's hard out there for a beetle.

ROBERT: But for the female, played by Lin-Miranda, I mean, she's gonna have her own agenda. She needs to find a guy. It has to be—she hopes it'll be the best guy. But I don't know.

LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA: [singing] Somebody's knocking. Could this be the beetle I've been waiting for? Somebody's knocking. Bae, is this a mate worth waiting for? My mama told me to never settle. I always did as I was told. I'm looking for a hottie with a body full of sperm and deep down a heart of gold. But when you hear that knocking and it's a sound so rare, is the grass always green or is there a heavier beetle somewhere? Somebody's knocking. But I am a beetle worth waiting for. Somebody's knocking. I'm gonna wait for something more.

MOLLY: The power of the female.

ROBERT: And the sadness for the guy. But this is a Valentine's Day ...

MOLLY: [laughs] You never feel sad for the lady. What if she gets some lame dude and she's like, "Oh my God, I've waited 15 years for this, and I can't do it with you." And she has to move on and fall off the table.

ROBERT: Okay, okay. But now you know that Professor Goulson is our cupid here after a fashion.

MOLLY: Right. He's gonna save both of our sad souls.

ROBERT: Yes, with the sticky tack. So here is the—this is kind of a lame, Valentine's card when I'm thinking about it. But here is our finish to our own Valentine's tale. A little Romeo and Julietish, actually.

UTKARSH AMBUDKAR: [singing] Against all odds, I'm gonna make you mine at the end of the day. Wait, I'm half blind. Where are you?

LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA: Fine.

UTKARSH AMBUDKAR: Oh, there you are. I've been chewing all my life long trying to put the work in. Beetle baby doll, don't let me die a virgin. I'm certain that love will burn like embers. I'll be the one and only love you remember. Keep banging your head on the timber. I agree it'd be easier with Tinder, but let me loose inside your caboose so I could give you some of my beetle juice.

LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA: Somebody's knocking.

UTKARSH AMBUDKAR: Okay, I know I was playing it cool before, but seriously, I got no clue what I'm doing. So if you could help me out, you'd be doing me a real solid.

LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA: You found your way to me.

UTKARSH AMBUDKAR: Little did she know. Before I beat it, the doctor helped me. I cheated. [laughs] Slim wins are good. I'm dead.

LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA: But what a way to go!

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD: Hello. Jad here. This is Radiolab. Coming to you now with a conversation for you now which is more on the falling in love side. Robert Krulwich, my esteemed co-host, who you will hear in just a moment, recently interviewed maybe one of the greatest scientists alive, really, E.O. Wilson.

JAD: He is a biologist, he is an entomologist, meaning he studies bugs. He's an author, a world-famous conservationist. He recently started the Encyclopedia of Life, which tries to make a list of every single species on the planet. He discovered so many things about how animals communicate, which you will hear in a moment. Particularly ants. And if you heard our "Emergence" show, you will recognize a bit from that show that repeats in this conversation. But it's really cool to hear the whole conversation without too many edits, which is what we're gonna play for you now.

JAD: So here it is. Here's Robert Krulwich speaking with E.O. Wilson at the 92 Street Y here in Manhattan.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Let's see. For starters, I'm just curious, did you know—do you remember the moment when you said the words, "Scientist, I want to be one?"

E.O. WILSON: Not scientist. I guess, entomologist. You know, I just wanted to work on ...

ROBERT: You said "entomologist?"

E.O. WILSON: Yes. Bugs. Oh, yes. When I was about eight or nine, I discovered that there were people that actually made their living chasing bugs. And, you know, I—every kid has a bug period. I was just set down never to grow out of mine. You were right about what you said. And I—down in Alabama, we had people who were driving around in green trucks for the Department of Agriculture, and some of them were exterminating insects. And they made their living by finding and studying bugs, and I said, "Well, that's what I want to do." Never mind being a fireman or anything like that. I want to do that.

ROBERT: Kill bugs?

E.O. WILSON: I was—yeah, I was frozen in that—in that ambition.

ROBERT: At the age of seven?

E.O. WILSON: Eight or nine.

ROBERT: Eight or nine.

E.O. WILSON: When I really settled for—with the ...

[laughter]

ROBERT: [laughs] Now did—did science seize you or did science rescue you? Because you were—how many schools did you go to before you were the age of 14 or whenever it was?

E.O. WILSON: Yeah, it was about 13 or 14 schools in 11 grades. I skipped one grade, but that made me always the runt of the class, which didn't help ...

ROBERT: So you were the runt kid ...

E.O. WILSON: ... with my social skills.

ROBERT: ... and the new kid every time?

E.O. WILSON: I was always the new kid in the neighborhood, yeah.

ROBERT: So that means what? Now you have a choice here: you could be the class clown or something, or you could go off into the forest and make friends with a worm or something like that.

E.O. WILSON: Well yeah, I guess that's a way of looking at it. I turned to nature and the woods and so on, and then I discovered that this eccentricity made me socially acceptable in an odd way. So I had the nickname "Bugs" when I was ...

[laughter]

E.O. WILSON: ... in my grammar school. But then I had a snake period.

ROBERT: A snake period?

E.O. WILSON: And this was in Southern Alabama. I guess I was about 15 or 16 by that time. And there were about 40 species of snakes found down there. And in a period of time, about a year, I managed to find them all. I kept a lot of them in the backyard alive, and so I was now known as "Snake" Wilson. It wasn't because in this intense football culture, I went out for football at this point at the Bruton High School in Alabama. And I weighed 112 pounds.

[laughter]

E.O. WILSON: I was the second-lightest kid.

ROBERT: There were probably a couple of snakes heavier than you.

E.O. WILSON: Hold on, I'm gonna finish the story.

[laughter]

E.O. WILSON: You're a tough competitor. Anyways, so it turned out, you see, there were 23 people on the squad, and I was the entire third string.

ROBERT: [laughs]

E.O. WILSON: But anyway, I got respect in part because I was doing all these strange things, and—and Alabamians are really—they're really very tolerant of eccentricity. They kinda like it. You know, the old—the odd aunt that lives up in the attic. You know, that kind of thing.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

E.O. WILSON: I got along very well both as a naturalist, you know, fanatical collector and naturalist at the same—and in high school, too. At any rate, so at the age of 16, I decided that the time had come to get serious about professional entomology, and so I decided to select a group of insects to study. And I said, "Flies. They're marvelous. Tremendous diversity." And so I would start collecting flies. I wanted to become the world expert on flies. But the year was 1945, and in order to study flies, as many of you understand, you have to have insect pins, special pins to put through the body of the specimens.

ROBERT: Hmm. Steel.

E.O. WILSON: Insect pins are—were available at that time only from Czechoslovakia. And the supply had been cut off in the United States. Insect pins were unavailable, so I said, "What's my favorite group of insects, you know, that I don't have to stick pins through?" And that's the ants. So I got started my collection by going down to the drug store and collecting these little pill bottles. And that, with rubbing alcohol, which is isopropyl alcohol, that's how my collection started. I built a large collection of—of ants that I took with me to the University of Alabama.

ROBERT: Could you say that ...

E.O. WILSON: And I was launched.

ROBERT: ... that but for the lack of pins and for the availability of rubbing alcohol therefore ants? Or was ants always going to be it, and you would've gotten to it by whatever route?

E.O. WILSON: I think I eventually would've ended up with ants, but I would've been retarded there. I don't think I would've been able to do serious research until maybe I was 18.

[laughter]

ROBERT: Now let's get onto the joy of—this may not be obvious to a lot people, the joy of ant studies, because, you know, if you think about it, they do seem like somewhat indifferent to anyone who's observing them and so on, and you might wonder exactly why somebody would get delight out of looking at ants. But I want to take you back to one moment which I think is one of my favorites ever. The question is: how do these little ants communicate with one another? The year is 1953, and you're considering the problem. We know that, at least for us, most of our communication goes because of things we hear or things we see. This does not seem to be the habit of ants.

ROBERT: So you have some fire ants, and the question is: you notice that they—that a scout will go find a piece of food and somehow tell the other ants, "Look what I found. Come here and get the food." How do you figure out how the scout ant tells the other ants that A) there is food, and where it is?

E.O. WILSON: We had the idea even back then, people did, or biologists, that the ants were somehow laying a trail down, and then they were telling the other ants, "Go out and follow that trail." But nobody knew where the trail came from, and they didn't know really how it worked. And they didn't know how ants communicated otherwise. And you're perfectly right, human beings are really unusual, along with birds. They—we are audio-visual. And—and that puts us in a tiny minority of all of the creatures on Earth, which are primarily chemical in their communication.

E.O. WILSON: It wasn't understood or appreciated at that time. Pheromones. Many of you have heard the word "pheromone." Pheromones are the key to understanding communication of the vast majority of animal species. We didn't know it then. And so one day I set out. I was culturing fire ants in the laboratory at Harvard, and I said, "I'm gonna get to the bottom of this." And the way I did it was to dissect these tiny, tiny ants. Very difficult to do, but I dissected them.

ROBERT: Now wait a second. Wait a second. So you're watching the ant going along, and it's laying its abdomen or some part of its body, laying it on the ground?

E.O. WILSON: That's right. I can see the ant running along, and under magnification I can see that it's sticking out its sting and dragging the sting. Something's coming out of that sting.

ROBERT: Like, kind of like a fountain pen or something?

E.O. WILSON: A little bit like that, yeah.

ROBERT: Yeah.

E.O. WILSON: And so I proceed to—believe me, folks, this is the way science goes. I mean, it really is simple-minded.

[laughter]

E.O. WILSON: It's only later when you're doing the technical paper, you know, and you're producing the mathematical models and you're describing the micro-analysis and so on that it looks tough. It's really—this is the way you're thinking when you're doing science. So I said, "I'm gonna find out what the organs are inside this ant, and I'm gonna track down where that stuff is coming from." So what I did was to do anatomy, and then, you know, just dissect it. I knew approximately what the different glands were and so on.

ROBERT: I mean, you snipped—you snipped off the parts where the glands were?

E.O. WILSON: Well, you just dissect open ...

ROBERT: Oh, you opened it.

E.O. WILSON: Yeah, an ant. And just the way you would any animal, although it's exceedingly difficult when it's about the size of a grain of salt. That's the tough part. But anyway ...

ROBERT: [laughs] Aren't your hands going [shakes]?

E.O. WILSON: Well yes, your hand is vibrating. And in fact, it was down at the limit. I didn't go to a micro-manipulator, you know, which is when you're doing it with controls. I did it raw, manually. But it was right at the limit. So the way I did it was I got these very fine needles in, and because there was this inevitable vibration in your hand, you can see it when you put it under the microscope, it's—everybody has it. It's a little vibration. But highly magnified, it—it allowed me to use the needle like a jackhammer.

ROBERT: Like a jackhammer?

E.O. WILSON: I could do it if I did it just right. I just opened up the ant. Anyway, I took out the various organs one after the other, and I made a preparation, and I made an artificial trail.

ROBERT: Wait a second. Make sure I follow this.

E.O. WILSON: Yeah.

ROBERT: You've now got, like, six organs and you've smooshed each one of the six organs, and then you're gonna take—let me just see if I can remember this. You're gonna take a—hmm—a sharpened birchwood applicator stick.

E.O. WILSON: Yes. And then I smeared out one organ after another. No effect.

ROBERT: Well, wait a second. Where are there ants? Are there ants yet? You brought ants?

E.O. WILSON: I'm—I'm leading my artificial trails from the colony that I have in the lab.

ROBERT: Oh, so there's ants over here.

E.O. WILSON: Yeah.

ROBERT: And you got your birch stick here, and you're drawing lines of gut stuff, I guess.

E.O. WILSON: That's basically what it is, yeah. Just different organs. I've washed each one in turn and then smeared it out. And finally I came to a little finger-shaped organ which we didn't know the function of. It's just a tiny little thing tucked down there. And I smeared that out and it was incredible. It wasn't—I didn't have to tell them to follow that trail, they exploded out of the nest running along that thing.

ROBERT: [gasps] Does that mean, like, if you'd taken the stick, could you go doop-de-doop-de-doop-de-doo, and all the ants would go doop-de-doop-de-doop-de-doo?

E.O. WILSON: Yeah, well what I actually—I started playing around with this. It was so effective. For demonstrations I would write my name.

[laughter]

ROBERT: [laughs]

E.O. WILSON: And a column of 100, 200, 300 ants would come pouring out back and forth, and they'd actually write my name in ant.

ROBERT: [laughs]

E.O. WILSON: Well, that was the beginning, you know, just to show that there is some seriousness to this. That was the beginning, and we were ...

[yelling]

ROBERT: An offended ant lover somewhere in the room.

E.O. WILSON: [laughs]

ROBERT: All right, now I want to finish this little section because this is my favorite story of all. When you get bad, you get bad. This is—once you begin to figure out how these chemicals and the phero—and the smells that they give off become communicating devices, you discover that when an ant dies—this doesn't happen to be exactly in that category—when an ant dies, ants not being the smartest creatures around, it just sort of dies and it just sits there. And for the first day or two, all the other ants just don't even notice it. And then when it begins to decompose, it begins to give off a smell, and then the first time it gives off a smell, I guess the next ant that passes by goes, "Oh!" And says, "We have a dead ant here."

E.O. WILSON: That's right.

ROBERT: And he takes the ant and puts it in the dead place. I guess the ant dead place.

E.O. WILSON: Yeah. I'll tell you about the experiment because I had a lot of fun with it. But first—but let me say that my chemist colleagues and I quickly worked out the chemical code of the ants. We found somewhere—or a good part of it—we found that the ants were communicating somewhere between 10 and—10 to 20 chemical signals. They have glands all over their bodies that the function of which were unknown, and many of these glands produce pheromones. Some for—to alarm, some to recruit, some to identify themselves as a member of a caste and so on.

ROBERT: And one of them says, "I am dead?" The "I am dead" smell?

E.O. WILSON: I'm coming to that, yeah.

[laughter]

E.O. WILSON: Well, how does an ant—when it dies, how does it identify—how does it let the others know? When an ant dies, then for a while it just lies there. You know, if we saw—if we saw one of us just lying on the ground like this we'd probably do something. Maybe not in New York, but I mean ...

ROBERT: [laughs]

[laughter]

E.O. WILSON: But usually we'd do something because, you know, we're audio-visual. But in the case of the ants ...

ROBERT: That's an interesting idea: New York, most ant-like city in America.

[laughter]

ROBERT: Anyway, go ahead.

E.O. WILSON: Anyway, the—so the ant begins to decompose, and I was really going crazy with this—we were so successful. I mean, we were making one discovery after another. It was wonderful. And I was going crazy with this, so I said, "How does an ant identify a corpse?" It's got to be in the substances that are being produced by decomposition. It's gotta be—and in those days, we had just hit upon—animal behaviors generally had just hit upon the idea of sign stimuli, that animals don't grasp a whole lot of stimuli the way we do. You know, and assess the gestalt in a variety of signals. They usually work out of one substance or a very small number of substances or a site, and then that releases their complex behavior. So I was gonna find that. What's the corpse substance?

E.O. WILSON: It turns out well, this is how science works: across. It turns out for some reason I never found out a chemist had already identified a large number of decomposition substances in rotting insects. And so with that as my guide, I gathered in pure form on my laboratory shelf a whole variety of them. And the place for a while smelled like a combination between an outhouse and a charnel house.

ROBERT: I'll list you some of the smells: you have rotten fish smell ...

E.O. WILSON: That's trimethylene.

ROBERT: ... feces smell, rancid body smell.

E.O. WILSON: Yeah, that's—that's the fatty acids that you have in body odor.

ROBERT: So when people were walking up the corridor at your—in your building, what—did they, like, stay ...

E.O. WILSON: I never tried to explain to them.

[laughter]

E.O. WILSON: But there were—it was a very strange-smelling place. You know, skatole, that's the essence of feces.

ROBERT: Yeah.

E.O. WILSON: Well at any rate, I then started with my, you know, typical experiments. I started daubing dummy ants with tiny, tiny amounts of these different substances and observing. And nothing happened until finally I came to one of the substances, oleic acid.

ROBERT: Oleic acid.

E.O. WILSON: Yes, it's a fatty acid of a particular kind. Bingo! The ants then picked it up, and the dummy, with nothing but—the only signal he had was oleic acid, and they took it and dropped that dummy on the refuse pile. And so I had it. I essentially had it.

ROBERT: Now here's where you get bad.

E.O. WILSON: Ah, yeah. That's right. Okay. Well, you know, you get to play around at this point, so I said, "What would happen if I put oleic acid on a live ant?"

[laughter]

E.O. WILSON: What happens is that nothing this ant says, if they said anything, you know, nothing the ant does does any good because now it is a corpse. And the other ants pick this live, kicking ant up and out it goes and it's dropped on the refuse pile.

ROBERT: So it's a wiggly, obviously alive ant.

E.O. WILSON: Oh, perfectly healthy.

ROBERT: And the other ants' thinking, "You're dead. You're dead. You're dead." All the way to the grave.

E.O. WILSON: Yeah, goodbye.

ROBERT: Goodbye.

E.O. WILSON: What happened then was that ant would proceed to clean itself. Ants are always cleaning themselves. And finally—but if it didn't clean itself enough, when it got back, it got picked up and brought out to the pile. Until finally it's clean enough, and then it can re-enter the realm of the living.

ROBERT: You have sometimes described the process of science as you do it as a form of storytelling.

E.O. WILSON: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: What did you mean by that?

E.O. WILSON: Well I mean, I think as everyone here understands that human beings are the storytelling species. We—the way we think is in narrative. You know, we build—we build scenarios forward, and when we're making a decision, we're running one scenario after another. Well, we're telling a story to ourselves. "I'm going to do this, then that will follow, and so and so. We'll probably do this" and so on. "And I will lose that or I'll gain this or I will finish that."

E.O. WILSON: And they tell stories of real past—what happened to me. And then, of course, this allows them to make fictional stories. The scientist tells stories, and he hopes they will be true stories. He's thinking, "Oh, there's this, there's that. This creature is doing this, that creature must be detecting this or have evolved in such a way." And then you make a series of stories. And these are called "hypotheses." And the fancy term then for doing science by storytelling is "The method of multiple competing hypotheses." And then you figure—you do the experiments to find out which of the stories is true.

[applause]

JAD: That was a conversation between E.O. Wilson and Robert Krulwich, my co-host. And let us know what you thought: Radiolab(@)wnyc.org is our email address. I want to thank the 92nd Street Y for making that available to us. I'm Jad Abumrad. See you in a couple weeks.

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm David and I'm from Baltimore, Maryland. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad, and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Rebecca Laks, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]

 

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