Behavioral Ecology (REPRODUCTIVE TRADEOFFS) with Amy Worthington

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Oh hey, it's that guy in third period who's always drawing in a notepad but never lets anyone see it. Ellie Ward back with another episode of Ologies. So behavioral ecology, what ding dang cake is it? Well, it's why animals such as worms and bugs and your cousin do what they do. And what's a better window into this world than the steamy porthole of cricket boning. So before we

Worthington.

Okay, there we go, doctor Worthington, of course, and so here we are.

We're in Omaha.

I have just completely bulldozed into your workday. They're so sorry all.

The right ways.

Thank you so much for being on Twitter and available for me to like just bust into your university.

Well, thanks for being responsive to my fan tweeting you and trying to bull you into coming to Creighton instead of the Omahazu.

Well, I am very obviously familiar with what you do because your Twitter banner is two crickets in an tender intimate moment they are having sex. Ye, and so now you study cricket sex, but in a wider outlook. It's reproductive physiology, behavioral ecology, tell me about what you do.

Yeah, So a lot of the research that we do in my lab is we focus on the concept that there are what we call life history trade offs.

Again, life history trade offs. Everyone from crickets to squirrels to you has to make trade offs.

So there's kind of every organism has a limited amount of resources in terms of energy that they can allocate towards different physiological processes, and if you overinvest in one, it means that one of those other physiological processes doesn't have the energy needed to fuel it. So our big trade off that we look at is the trade off between the immune response and reproduction. These are two of the most energetically costly processes of any individuals.

So for some individual animals it comes down to remaining alive or having shorties. But sometimes I guess animals can't decide should I mate and die? Should I literally fuck off and die.

Or live fast, die hard? Yeah?

Or should I stay alive and maybe not reproduce as much?

Yeah, and postpone reproduction until you're healthy and you've recovered from some type of illness or parasite.

Absolutely are like finishing school. I don't know ps. Speaking of which, Amy got a bachelor's and a master's in biology at the University of South Dakota and PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology from iOS State University. And she says she grew up obsessed with Bill nye Hey and her dad always set up science projects like rockets and

Yes to all of the above. Okay, so crickets. You know, I didn't grow up loving insects. I was, like most people, terrified of them. Huh. I worked in a pet store for a long time, and crickets were my first insect that I had an intimate relationship with to get them to feed their or their animals. So I became really familiar with them then. And when I started my PhD, there was a project in a lab at Iowa State

Access to them.

And they're easy to handle, they're easy to rear, they're cheap to feed. They eat special Katie cat food from Walmart.

They do. I didn't know that. And so they're just fabulous organisms to work with.

And each lady cricket can have over two hundred children, which smokes the birthrate of both of my Catholic grandmas. I asked Amy if her lab said objects ever serenade her.

The male sing oh, yes, okay.

So the males rub their wings together, not their legs, which is a common misconception.

Yeah, that's a flim flam right there. Yeah.

Yeah, So they rub their the males rub their wings together, and it's a mechanism to attract females.

So they have several different calls, both ones that attract females from.

A long ways away, and then when females get close, they change into a different type of song that essentially displays how sexy they are.

You are so friggin' sexy right now.

At what point did you start to really like embrace the cricket and get excited about doing research with them.

Yeah. So when I first started my PhD, my first year my PhD, I went out.

In the field and collected these crickets.

And one of the things that will always stick with me is collecting these crickets in the wild is insane, really, because you're out at night in a field and you're trying to collect these crickets and find them. And half the time, when you think you find a cricket, you get close and you see one and about two inches away there is a spider or a scorpion, some type

Yeah, and so what are the biggest challenges that you've encountered or how do you study that in the lab, because I'm going to guess at your lab doesn't have like scorpions and spiders everywhere like an obstacle course, no, like a Halloween like horror house for the cricket.

That would be fabulous.

But we actually study the effects of this long lived parasite called a horse.

Hair worm, and they are fairly.

Large parasites that infect crickets as one of their hosts. They also infect cockroaches and pragmanteds and things like that.

All right, so one of the factors of immunity is do y'all get parasites? And we're just gonna put our blankety blinker on. We're gonna merge real quick onto a side street about horse hair worms, because they are bananas and they're more nightmarish than any sci fi cgi and crickets have to contend with them. But first off, how rare are these things?

The number of people I've had come up to me and be like, Okay, I have a question.

I stepped on a cricket the other day and then I say, and a giant worm came out, and they're like yes. And so my yoga teacher did that to me, and she was surprised that I knew what was coming, because she thought it was the most bizarre and I wasn't going to believe that it happened.

Yeah, and I'm like, well that's what I study. Oh my god. So they're actually fairly common.

I mean they're in those streams that you're driving over and that you're kind of ignoring, and so they're they're everywhere.

Yeah, I had no idea.

I thought they were super rare because it's there, it's disgusting and weird. So I was like, oh, this has got to be like one in a million, like finding a finding a pearl and an oyster something. So how are crickets getting these?

Have they been cursed by a witch?

Did they anger a magic troll?

But they essentially get eaten in a cyst form by the crickets, and then these cysts develop inside of these hosts for a month and sometimes more, and they when they emerge, can be, you know, twenty times longer than the length of their host. Oh so it's actually pretty impressive. I brought one in justice.

The horse hair look like she.

Just produced a vial from her blazer pocket and in it it's just this like gunar, This is amazing. This looks like my hair all over like car seats and in the shower. But it's a thick It's like a thick wiry.

How long is this thing?

I mean my guess is that one's probably about nine to twelve inches long and it came out of a you know, like a one inch cricket.

How does it happen?

This looks like something that if you found it in your omelet, you would definitely sue the diner. This is gnar le. So how do they grow so much bigger? And what's the difference in mass?

Yeah, So this is what's kind of crazy, is that these parasites grow from something that you have to basically see under a microscope into a warm this large. They do it over about the course of a month, which is a significant portion of the cricket's life.

Yeah.

Crickets generally live.

From maybe two to three months in the wild and that's it.

So for half to a third.

Of a cricket's life, they have this terrible parasite that's growing like crazy inside them. And the only thing that these parasites can rely on for their own growth is essentially eating up the fat reserves of their host.

No so quick aside. Not only that, but certain species can zombify the host's brain, making them seek water, fling themselves in and drown so that the horsehair worm can make a graceful exit out of its dead anus to

So getting back into what I generally study in terms of these life history tradeoffs. Obviously, in this case, the host cricket potentially would like to have an immune response and mounta an immune response against these parasites to kill them off. And we've been trying to figure out how it is that the parasites actually avoid being detected by the immunier's response of the cricket. And then on top of that being that it looks like the crickets aren't

The animal in the animal kingdom. Really they're giant, very large. Why And it's because they have a lot of sex. Oh my god, they do so much sex.

So on average, some recent studies have shown that individuals mate up to like seven or eight times per night.

Oh boy, with the same cricket or just like.

Usually it can be the same.

And they also will go out and actively find other partners to mate with.

Why are they so horny? So horny? They get a lot of benefit out of it.

So obviously, for males, the more they mate, the more tickets in the lottery so to speak, they have for you know, providing sperm to fertilize the female's eggs. And for females, some of my PhD work actually showed that females that made early and often actually have higher fecundity, so they're able to lay more eggs and have more offspring themselves.

Like a use it or lose it kind of a thing.

Yeah, So both males and females mate at high rates and they get fitness benefits from doing so.

Oh my god.

So then is this also like we're going to need more baby crickets out there if we're going to have scorpions trying to hunt us when we're out doing our songs, Like, is this also just strengthen numbers?

Yeah, it's a bit of that, you know. Like animals in the wild, their main goal is.

To produce the maximum amount offspring as possible, and individuals that can produce more offspring than other individuals of their same species have higher fitness, they pass on more of their genes, and in terms of evolutionary time periods, they have a bigger effect in terms of which genes are a part of that pool.

So provided they have the resources themselves to survive, animals are typically wired to pass along more of themselves. But even Charles Darwin was like, why though he wrote in eighteen sixty two, we do not even in the least know the final cause of sexuality, why new beings should be produced by the union of the two sexual elements.

Oh?

Yeah, so we've got some pretty crazy evidence from my PhD. And this is actually one of the coolest things that I came across. And why I am now like so unbelievably passionate about crickets is that during my PhD we were trying to look.

At, Okay, well, why what.

Benefits do females get from mating. We know that if they mate more, they lay more eggs and have more offspring. But males don't provide anything. They give like this teeny tiny little spermataphor, which is just a capsule containing sperm and some seminal fluids, and.

Then they're off. There's no parental care.

They don't give anything to the females. In fact, sometimes they can injure the females because they're kind of jerksy. Females are having more babies when they mate more, and so we started looking at what exactly is in that spermatophor aside from sperm, and one trend that had been building not only in crickets but across a variety of different taxa are that females that mate more or that have made it have stronger immune systems.

Oh my god.

Which there's a lot of explanations for that, but when you get down to these crickets that are basically just passing seminal fluid and that's it, we don't really know why they would have a stronger immune response and essentially have increased survival. And so for my work, I ended up looking into that and found that there are part twoular chemicals that are passed on in that seminal fluid that are both major modulators of female reproduction.

So secon thing in the sperm capsule. What is in the sperm capsule is pixie dust? Is it a do drop of red.

Bull So as males provide they're called prostaglandins. As males provide prostaglandins. It helps females produce more eggs and it stimulates them to lay more eggs.

But this chemical is also one of the major modulators of the immune response.

Oh so, if you are out there you're getting more cricket tail and you're a lady, does that mean that you're less likely to get like a horse hair worm?

Potentially?

Okay, definitely seems like you're less likely to dive from some of the other diseases such as like bacterial infections.

Uh huh. You might also be able to fight off ectoparasites.

More ooh yeah, and so there's all of these things that go together in terms of you know, as individuals mate, they gain fitness and they can lay more eggs and have more offspring. But it also seems you know, we generally think of okay, if you overinvest in reproduction, well, now you don't have as much energy to invest in immune response.

Which would make sense because making other beings is expensive, and more so when you're not a cricket and you can't just bury a hundred of your babies in loose soil and be like me're bye, good luck, gonna go find some new dads, But how does it affect crickets?

And yet here we are finding females that are having increased fitness and laying more babies and also having a stronger immune response.

So it goes.

Against the ideas of these trade offs that we kind of innately think exist.

What about the males, Do they lose anything by mating more? Are they gaining anything other than better chances of having more bibiz But are they gaining anything from an immune standpoint at all?

No, And that's one of the things that I was trying to look at, and I never quite got to answer this question yet. Okay, but if males are providing this this prossegland in to help females lay eggs and to help them survive better potentially until they lay their eggs, is that taking away prosseaglandin that males need to modulate their immune response.

Yeah, I'll regulate that.

And so that's something that is a current question that we have and that we're still interested in looking into.

So not only do males compete to be like I'm the best, trust me, Look how hard I will sink for you, I will find a scorpion, but also female crickets can be choosy, not just at the time of the bonking, So during mating, males insert this spermatophor into a female's reproductive track and it drains into her for the next forty or so minutes. But there's also something called fertilization bias or directional post mating female mate choice. This is also called cryptic because it's like, what's going

Now.

In a study titled Female Crickets Assess relatedness during mate guarding and bias storage of sperm toward unrelated males, this boiling hot tea was spilled, okay, So it says that while sperm are being transferred from the spermatophore to the female's reproductive tract, the mated male remains with and guards the female because females often attempt to leave unattractive males and go remove the spermatophores before the sperm drips in and it has been transferred, and then the guarding males

Interesting? Do you ever apply.

Any of your cricket knowledge to your own love life or your friend's love life?

In terms of this, when I give this research talk, I do make it clear that prostaglandin.

Is a component of seminal fluids.

Across all animals, and it was originally given its name because it was found in the human prostate. Oh so prostaglandin mediates reproductive physiology in humans and immunophysiology.

In humans as well. So it has kind of.

Conserved functions from crickets all the way up to humans.

And is it easier to study it kind of in a model with crickets and then perhaps other you know, going on up the food chain, it'll be looked at in a different way because of what you can kind of prove or detecting crickets.

Yeah, absolutely, So what we learn in crickets is, you know, creates are a very basic model, but they're super easy and incredibly cheap to work with, and so we can learn a lot about them, and we can do a lot of manipulations experimentally that are unethical when you get

Yeah, what do your experiments look like? Are there cages of different crickets and they're checking each other out, like, how do you sex a cricket?

What does lab work look like?

Yeah, so when we are doing mating type trials, which is something we'll be doing a lot of this summer to look at the effects of these ridiculous horse hair worms and whether they makes males unsexy to females.

Can you imagine watching The Bachelorette and a dude is eliminated for having a giant, eighteen foot long worm coming out of his ass? I can. I can imagine it, and it's riveting.

But we essentially go into this very warm, humid dark room and we turn on the red lights and pair crickets together and watch them have sex.

What kind of notes do you have to make on a clipboard?

Like, are you like how long it lasts? Like how many partners?

Like, yeah, how long it took may so? How long it took females to mount their males?

How long it ladies?

Yeah, that's another really cool thing about crickets is a lot.

Of animals you find. You know, males get.

A lot out of mating. They have a really high reproductive capacity. So the more females they mate with, the higher their fitness. And that's generally not the rule with females. So females can mate with lots of males, but they generally don't can't ever obtain as high as fitness as males because they have a limited number of eggs. Well, a lot of animals will. Males will coerce females into mating. Essentially, that's like the non anthropomorphic way to say that they rape them.

Yeah.

Science sometimes pretty awful, and by science I mean life.

And male crickets can't do that. So males have to all to females if you're ready. Females have to accept them as a mate, and females have to mount them in order for males to transfer their ejaculate. Oh and so that gets to why are females mating so frequently If they don't necessarily have to, there's nothing forcing them to do it, so there's obviously some benefit for that.

Do you think that there's anything innately that they can sense themselves getting stronger because of their immune response.

Yeah, so there's definitely going to be different propensities to remate, and that might be dependent on, you know, previous mate experiences. So if you've mated before and your previous mate was kind of low quality, you probably.

Have a higher propensity to mate again.

Also condition so depending on if you have a lot of resources and a lot of eggs available, you're probably likely to mate to make sure you have enough sperm to fertilize them, Whereas if you're kind of in the process of deducing eggs and there's nothing to lay, you might avoid it. Because mating is pretty costly, females frequently get injured late, they lose eggs, they get sexually transmitted diseases.

Making babies pretty costly in so many ways.

So one of the more common ones are there are these little nematodes that essentially kind of get passed around, and so they kind of hide up by the genitalia and they can get passed from one cricket to the next.

Jenny Worms are the worst, just the worst. I wonder if their tinder bios have to be like ps I have jenny worms. It's not a big deal. So when you're watching them, how do you know which female is which?

Are they wearing different colored vests? What's the Oh, if.

We have multiple females that we're watching, we just use little paint markers so we can mark their promotem pronotums and they can have different little colors associated with them, or we keep them in different deli cups, so those things that you bring all your leftovers home the restaurant.

That's what we do wear cricket matings in.

Do you put one on one together at a time or do you like put several together and see what happens.

Yeah, usually, if we're trying to actually do behavioral essays, we will put one male one female in together.

So heteronormative, poor crickets. Just another reason to be glad you're not a cricket and you can be who you want to be, love who you want to love, you get to eat snow cones and ride in fast trains staring at the horizon, and your life span is longer than three months. And then does how do you know if that couple mates and then they're like, okay, I'm onto the next one, like I'm ready to Oh, it's actually really easy.

So if you say like look away and you write a note and they quick do it, you can check. Because males when they transfer their kind of spermatophor, it's retained externally, so it kind of.

Gets glued on.

It gets like threaded into the female's genital track, and then they like glue it on and so it sticks out and you can see this tiny little hardened white capsule sticking out of the rear end of the female.

Yep, this up and it's like a big old white butt glob, kind of like if you were wearing a clear Fannie pack full of mayonnaise.

And then does she kind of absorb that?

Yeah, yeah, so she'll essentially like pump her abdomen, so she'll use her muscles to kind of start sucking that out and move that seminal fluid and sperm from the spermatophore into her spermatica, which is her sperm storage organ.

And then how long does she store that. She can store it for quite a long time.

I haven't done tests to see exactly how long it stays in there, but there's evidence that she can use the sperm contained in the spermathka for at least two weeks, potentially a little bit longer.

Give me a fool night.

Does she get to choose like, okay, this is Harold, this is like you know, Jeffreys, Like does she know who's is who's.

We don't really have evidence of that in crickets because there's spermathika is like one large balloon, So all the sperm goes into this one large area and then it kind of gets mixed, so it's more of you know, who has more sperm there they get to fertilize that proportion of the eggs.

But yeah, things like dungflies have a variety of.

Different sperm storage organs and they can store sperm in different compartments.

Oh my gosh, so yes, in crickets, once it's in her lady balloon, perhaps it's fair game. But she may get to pop it out first, like spitting some grizzly meat into a napkin at dinner. But other insects have internal dad pockets and they can mix and match depending on who they dig the most. What a beautiful thing. Now, speaking of beautiful things, each week we donate to a charity of the ologists choosing, and this week doctor Worthington

There are bank Holidays savings waiting this week at dumb stores. Find a refreshing deal with Coke zero and Diet Coke eighteen pack now only ten euro. Stuck up on snacks with selected sprinkles range now half price, or enjoy our great value on selected bird's eye potato waffles, fish filets and batter chips and Good Fella's pizza mix and match Annie two for six euro plus save more with your

Okay, we're back. Oh, I should need to ask you Patreon questions.

Here we go.

Connie Snow wants to know what's the best way to get rid of crickets that come into your house.

Let's not leave cat food out.

Okay, Yeah, that's hard because I try so hard to attract them. Yeah, I generally don't try and get rid of them. Okay, yeah, I don't have a good answer for that.

Okay, So I look this up and apparently crickets love molasses. Who knew. So you can set out a bowl with a few teaspoons of molasses covered in a cup or two of water, and they'll be like, m some molasses, and they'll come and hop in, and I'm guessing that they die in bliss. I don't know what you do about the ant infestation you might get afterward. Maybe you like ants more than crickets. I don't know. You could also make sure to seal all your windows and doors

I also have them keep me up at night, more so for me because when I hear them calling, it reminds me of all the research I have to do.

Oh God, do you ever to take some home in your backpack and be like, huh, how'd you get out?

I frequently have empty Deli cups that I can around in case I come across crickets in the wild that I need to catch. And then yeah, when we're doing collections out in the field, I frequently will accidentally have crickets that like, somehow we're in a Deli cup and they got like stuck in the bottom of.

My backpath pack.

And then I'll come across them a couple of days later and they're just hungry, And it's very surprising when that happens.

You're like, oh, hello, buddy, is there a particular species that you tend to do your research with.

Yeah, so, I mostly work with species from the southern half of the United States. So currently we're working on Grillis Firmas, which is a sand cricket. But I've also worked on the field cricket, which is the Texas field cricket, so Grillis tex sensus. Oh.

I want to ask how you feel about eating them, but someone may have asked that already.

They're fabulous.

I actually have some suckers up there with crickets on them if you'd like one.

Okay, So for more on this, see the entomophagy Anthropology episode, which is all about bug eating as a sustainable protein source. Mariko Shane wants to know, I'm really interested in getting into behavioral ecology. What should I expect with school and jobs in the next few years.

Yeah.

So, actually, there's a lot of opportunities in terms of the field of behavioral ecology, and it's really just about finding your interest, So you know, going out there reading papers, figuring out what really piques your interests, and then digging in and contacting those labs.

Okay, if you really love behavioral ecology.

The more you get into it, the more passionate you become, and so everything just generally kind of falls into place.

I feel.

On top of that, you know, like the field of behavioral ecology. The people who are a part of this field are awesome. So there's a really strong community and people are very pretty, they're you know, accepting, and they're very friendly.

They're very laid back.

So you know, the conferences that you go to as a behavioral ecologist, rather than everybody dressing up in these suits and ties, you know, you got keenes with socks underneath, and everybody's wearing a Hawaiian print T shirt.

So's it's a very friendly field, I think.

Oh so yes, and yes to behavioral a cology. Yes, Oh it's fabulous, Oh yay ps.

Behavioral ecologists can study all kinds of things, from why birds fly information to why meerkats pop up all cute, to parental care and penguins to frog calls. So much more. It's a study of why do you do that and how does it help?

And it's rad.

Now less rad to some people is the appearance of a certain type of cricket, long, wispy legs, like if Slenderman had been turned into a bug, let's unpack it. Sidney Brown wants to know why are cave crickets so frightening to so many people?

Yeah, I would They're a bizarre shape. I think, yeah, they've got they're pretty spindily.

Yeah, so I think that that does a lot.

I think anything unfamiliar is hard for people, especially when it comes to insects. The more spindily and insect is, the more fear it generally and kind of creepy Crawley's it instils.

Yeah, but the Jerusalem cricket is as rolling poly boopeddupe and people.

Oh but they're huge and like bulbous and yeah, they're they're larger than people want to look at.

Yeah, I know, I love them and Cydney Brown also asked what's the most common parasite of crickets.

Oh, I would say that that's probably I imagine most crickets.

There's there's a lot of different.

Types of parasites depending on what type of or what SPECSI of cricket you're looking at.

Ectoparasites are very common, so there's kind of.

These large red parasites that kind of stick onto the soft parts on the outside of crickets. But then there's also you know, nematodes are fairly.

Common ps and nematode is how you formally address around worm like mis nematode, No, please call me roundy dubes.

Gregorines are another type of kind of intestinal parasite. Those are incredibly common as well. Where cently finding out that hairworms are more and more common.

So Chrispurer wants to know do crickets have a mating chirp? And obviously that's a yes. The males do, and it's different species to species.

Yeah. Yeah, so in a lot of cases there's kind of overlapping species nearby and they are able to identify their mates using their particular calls. Oh well, yeah, so they're very species specific and it helps prevent hybridization in closely related species that overlap in geographic area.

Can you tell the difference of different chirps or is that like a completely different field.

I have not spent a lot of time comparing one species to the next.

I can definitely tell the.

Difference between the species, like the ground crickets that we have in the area versus myfield crickets that I work on.

Huh. They have very different calls.

They're different pitches, and they're kind of different frequencies, and so the ones nearby go really kind of fast and high.

They also were calling during the day.

Oh, and my.

Crickets generally are calling either you know, like immediately after dusk or right before dawn.

Oh, so they're crepuscular.

Yes, Oh, and that's is that when they are out just feeding in general, or is that with their mating time.

That's generally when they're trying to attract mates.

Is that because it's a safer time for them or in part?

Yeah, so there's not as many birds out and about, which are our major predators, although they're definitely starting to get up and moving as well. Because they rely on acoustic calls, they don't have to have light available in order to attract mates, and so that makes it a little easier for them to make use of those nighttime hours.

Oh that's so smart.

This next question is one that's on all of our minds, probably.

All the time.

J Anathos wants to note what behavioral ecology principles are as true with humans as animals.

Oh goodness, you know, so I will say that like in terms.

Of what I study.

I study these life history trade offs, and my lab gets together and we read all these papers together and kind of look through them. And at the beginning of the semester we read a paper about these life history tradeoffs in humans and how there's trade offs within the between the immune response and these different reproductive hormones and other processes of the body. And so we have those

Birth rates in the US side note, had a little peak in two thousand and seven, just before the recession hit, and they've been dropping for ten years, which is maybe not a co Winky dink And do you notice that trends maybe with people waiting to have kids until they're older, until they have more money to pay for the kids college or is there anything trend wise that you look at where like you see millennials aren't having as many children and you're like, well, economy or like, does that ever.

Happen with you?

Yeah? Absolutely, I mean you think about the amount of debt that millennials have nowadays in terms of college or trying to buy a house or pretty much anything, and earning potentials way down, and so yeah, there's just fewer resources. And so I think that cultural changes have allowed for there to be a shift away from this immediate kind of push to reproduce early and fast, and so that has contributed to this. But there's also resource trade offs,

And what about with second and third wave feminism, perhaps with women being like, no, I'd like to have a job and not just make bibies. Is that behavioral ecology as well?

I mean yes in a respect.

Right, So it's behavioral ecology is kind of the study of individuals and how they interact with their environments. And so yeah, there's going to be different pushes in terms of when to reproduce and how much to reproduce.

But yeah, it gets a little tricky.

It's not as easy to kind of directly relate everything to humans, at least not as easy as we'd want it to be.

Yeah, exactly, but it is a good thing to start talking about.

If an aunt or a grandma asks you when you're going to start having children, you can just go into a whole big reproductive physiology behavioral ecology ran.

Just for her more not asking And are.

There any movies about crickets, any any characters that you're or do you see things like Jimmy Crickett, You're like, stop rubbing your legs together at number one, Jimmy Crickett. If you're if you see a cricket cartoon calling, essentially that's a cricket with a boner being like anyone out there?

Yes, yeah, so no, there's I will have to say, like, Disney does a fabulous job of getting the biology right in a lot of respects and a lot of those other animated films. So I'm still completely in love with A.

Bugs life, my friends, is the sound of a.

You know, all the things that those individuals do are just awesome, and yet I just I love seeing real science in the films, especially for.

Young kids, especially now that I have.

I have a two year old daughter at home, and just watching her learn and pick up on these things from movies makes me realize how important it is to have everything right because kids learn from there.

Yeah, they're picking it up. I mean, stop with the male bees for you know what. I Oh, my gosh, the b movie just kills me. I can't do it. I know, how dare they? And even in ant Man it was like a male ant I think, and You're like, this is it basic? This is such an easy get Just.

A side note, y'all could have named her antonia so easy. My god, As long as I'm pissed, let's just stay negative for a second. What is the shittiest thing about crickets or about your job? What's the suckiest thing?

Well, dead crickets smell worse than rotten potatoes. No, I don't have any metric for rotten potatoes. Don't ever forget one in the bottom of your pantry.

No, Dead crickets are terrible, and they're juicy and they're just disgusting.

So that's the.

Worst is when you're cleaning out cricket bins and you accidentally touch one that just.

Like explodes in your hand. But other than that, I mean they're great.

They rarely bite, so you don't have to really worry about that, but they do bite.

They can bite, Yeah, they can draw blood. Normally you have to be doing something to deserve it, Okay, like you're trying.

To like knock them out and give them an injection or tear out their testes or something like that.

They buy you You're like, well played, Yes, yeah, they're like I deserve it. It's fine.

What about the best thing about your job or about crickets.

I would say the best thing about my job is I get to do work with a bunch of undergraduate researchers, and the vast majority of them come into my lab saying, you know, they want to go into prehealth professions, so they want to go into be you know, a dentistry

It's a bit of a badge of honor.

Yeah, that, like they can pick them up and just throw them in We're whatever bins they need to. There's you know, they're not using gloves, They're fine using their hands now. I mean, it's really fun. And then watching them explain their research in like the most engaging and amazing way. So I should say this because my current one of my current students is giving her first oral presentation on her research in over the horse hairworm and crickets.

Her name's Emily Harder's and.

She would kill me if I didn't mention her on here because she is your biggest fan.

Oh hey, shout out to at Emily Harder on Twitter. You can follow her for more ghastly information on horse hair worms. It's really a sight to behold.

We still scream and glee when we allow the horse hair worms to emerge from the crickets and you just watch as like three or four of these emerge from a single cricket, and it is still like you're in the movie Alien.

Yeah, I can't believe it. It's real. It's amazing.

It's like watch out, doctor pimple Popper, because that's pretty cathartics.

I'm so much much better.

Yes, this has been so informative. I'm never going to hear a cricket song quite the same. It's essentially I'm being.

Like anyone to have sizeady. That is absolutely my goal. Thank you so much, Yes, thank you. I love this.

So. To follow doctor Amy Worthington find her on Twitter at worthington Lab, or you can check out her blog Amymworthington dot WordPress dot com. To find ologies, We're at ologies on Twitter and Instagram. Come say hello, I'm at ali Ward with one L on both and to submit questions via Patreon. Join up for as little as one dollar a month. My heart is very cheap and usually I get to ask way more questions. And say way more names, but this was so rush just san okay.

Now.

If you stick around the end of the episode, you know I tell a secret, and this week's secret is that I sobbed so hard this week in Walmart after losing my wallet and it's still missing, and let's just say it's spit a rough week, giddos, But I have canceled my cards and I have blocked off a date in the next few weeks to go to the desert and just stare into space. So maybe that'll fix me anyway, what you want to do, keep singing and hopping around.

Lithology, new technology.

Meteorology, rotology, ethology, seriology, philology.

Where