Listener Mail: Atem

Wednesday of this week will be a Monster Fact omnibus, and then, hopefully, if we're able to get ready in time, we should have a new core episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind for you on Thursday. If not, it'll be another Vault and then we'll be with you for Weird House on Friday. But either way, we should be back with new content for you later this week. Okay, I guess let's jump right into messages. We got a bunch of great responses to our series on Cicadas. I'm

going to start with this message from Jim. I made some edits for clarity when read aloud, I hope I did everything here Justice Jim. Jim says, Hey, guys, hope you, your families and your team had a nice break. When I saw the title of this episode, I was excited to hear that you were going to do a two part episode on cicadas. The insect world is one of my passions. By the way, great episode. I really enjoyed it.

Here in Canberra, Australia's capital city, we too experience every couple of years a massive emergence of cicadas in some reserves. If you don't have earmuffs on, it's impossible to work or walk through the reserve. Is The noise that comes from the cicadas is deafening. But halfway through the first episode, I had a flashback of my childchildhood and I wanted to share a memory from when I was about six

or seven years old, some forty years ago. I was raised in Orange, a city in central New South Wales, about twenty kilometers outside of Orange. There is a picnic reserve in the middle of a pine plantation on a creek called four Mile Creek. As kids, we would go out there with the church group and on the way out to four Mile Creek you would also go past the agricultural department. I don't remember the environment that day or the noise, but it must have been one of

those years when we had three species emerging. The most common cicadas were the black ones, then the green ones and the tiger ones, which were rare to come across. Now, someone I think it was older teenagers of the church, told my two older brothers and me that the tiger cicada you could sell to the agricultural department for ten cents. Ten cents in the eighties, that was a lot of money for a kid. I don't remember collecting the higer

cicadas until we came across the white ones. We called them ghosts and were told that they were worth five dollars each, so believing them, I guess the older kids. Believing the older kids, we started to collect the cicadas emerging out of their shells, and they were all white ones. We collected a very large number of them. Through all these cicadas, still in their exoskeleton or half emerged into

the back of our father's Kingswood station wagon. Thinking we made a fortune, we ran off to play and have lunch. Some time passed and we were called time to go home. Running back to the car, we found our very upset father with the front door open. He was not happy. Cicadas were flying out of the car door he had opened. Inside the front of the car, there were lots of black and green cicadas flying around the back of the station wagon, and the back seat had a lot of

empty exoskeletons just sitting there. What a scene it was with a very upset down who made us remove all the live cicadas and all of the exoskeletons from the car. But we were distressed too. Where were all of our ghost cicadas? Our fortune all gone? I paused the episode and had a bit of a laugh. We didn't know then that when insects emerge out of their exoskeletons, they are molting, and newly emerged insects are often ghostly in color, having reduced or absent pigment. Thanks guys made my day.

And then finally, Jim has some notes about the probable species identification of the Australian cicadas from his story, so he says, FYI, the black and most common cicadas are called the red eye cicada or saltota morins the green cicadas are called green grosser cicadas. These are Cyclochila australacea and I looked these up. According to the Australian Museum's info page, they have like different color variants of the species that are called You've got the greengrocer, but then

you get the yellow Monday, chocolate Soldier, and blue moon. Interesting. And then Jim comes back and says, what we called the tiger cicadas were actually called double drummers or sofa cicata. All the best for now and keep up the great work, looking forward to the next episode. Jim. Well, thank you

so much. Jim. You know this really got me thinking not so much about insect biology, but about child psychology and the difference between work and play with your story about trying to collect all of the valuable cicadas for the Agricultural department. So this story is kind of an example of a genre of childhood experiences that I remember from that age. Also that those experiences where you think you have discovered a way to make lots of money

based on one or more mistaken or implausible premises. And I remember these these schemes they often centered around to gathering task like yours did, Like I remember deciding that a certain kind of sparkly rock was actually a valuable gym that you could sell, and I would like go around digging them up and collecting them in a backpack.

There's an interesting thing about these like kid conceived cash cow schemes, which is that the way I remember them, in most cases, you're able to really believe in them in the early stages, like it doesn't feel like you're just playing pretend. You really think you're going to get the money. But then at some point later on in the scheme, it starts to feel less real and you don't keep pushing forward as if you believe in it.

So Jim, in your story, if you hadn't gotten in trouble with your dad and had to release all the bugs, would you have actually insisted that your parents stop at the agricultural department on the way home so you could

collect the bounties. I don't know in your particular case, but my memory of these types of schemes is that by that point later in the day, like the magic of the idea probably would have worn off, And if I'd been in a similar situation, I probably would stop caring or believing that it was possible to get the money by the time I was heading home. But what

causes that change? Why did I believe the rocks were valuable gyms in the first place, and what changed my mind about it by the passage of a few hours. I don't know anyway. Now that I've got a toddler, I think about this kind of stuff a lot, and it's interesting and kind of mysterious to remember those states of mind that you could get into as a child,

where you're like fully engaged in a task. It's taking all of your effort and attention, but it's actually not clear to you whether you're doing serious, goal directed work or just playing a game. But either way, thank you, Jim Okay. This next message comes to us from Sierra. It is about our Vault episodes on the Moons of Uranus.

Cer says, hello, longtime listener and big fan here. I'm loving the episodes about the moons of Uranus, especially the discussion of its proper pronunciation at the top of the show. It made me want to share a mental image that was conjured years ago and linger still. In some astrology book I read once, Uranus was referred to as a planet that rules rebellion, flippancy, revolution, perhaps due to its

odd rotation, Oh yeah, sideways rotation. Cira says it made me picture Uranus as the iggy pop slash sid Vicious of the planets, proudly rocking his name with green hair and double birds to the audience laughing emoji. I hope you can enjoy that thought too. Thanks for sharing the good humor, wit and wisdom over the years, Sincerely, Sierra, Thank you, Sierra. All right, this next message comes from Chelsea.

This is another response to our series on cicadas, and specifically this is about the etymological digression we took in the episode looking into the history of the word bug, which in its earliest use is in English referred to a scarecrow. This is in an early English translation of the Bible, or actually to a sort of deuterocanonical book

associated with the Bible. But so there's a scarecrow, or it also referred to a hobgoblin like creature, a monster of some kind, and then only later came to refer to actual biological insects, and then later still came to have this connotation of general problems like computer bugs and

so forth. Chelsea says, hi, guys. Fact, the use of the word bug to describe a computer bug dates from nineteen forty seven, when the Harvard computer science team found a moth trapped inside the Mark two, which was messing with the electronics. Early computer programming language. Pioneer Grace Hopper was a member of the team. So computer bugs are named for the creepy crawleys. Keep up the awesome work, Chelsea.

Thank you, Chelsea. Well, so I did some looking into this story, and one thing I came across is you can actually look this up. There is a picture of it on the National Museum of American History website. There was a log book that was used by the computer science team at Harvard while people were working on the Mark to computer, and they actually physically taped the moth found inside the computer into the logbook, so it's taped

there on the paper. You can see images of this, and then they write underneath it first actual case of

a bug being found. I was also reading some articles about this historical incident, and apparently there are some common misconceptions about it, Like, Chelsea, you certainly did not say this, but a lot of people say that this was Grace Hopper's personal log book, and from what I've read, that seems to be not true, that it doesn't look like her handwriting, and it's probably just said that because she's a famous person who was there at the time working

with this kind of working with this technology. Another misconception I've seen written about this was that this was the first ever use of the word bug in a sort of technical engineering context, which is certainly not the case. There are instances of this going way back back to Thomas Edison wrote about bugs in some of his inventions and so forth. But it does appear that Grace Hopper was a very enthusiastic early user of the term bug

in a specifically in a compute context. So it is it's not the case that this was the first use of bugs in engineering or in technology, as some people have said. But I was reading about this misconception in an interesting article for the for the I Tripole Annals of the History of Computing. There was an article in that journal by an author named Peggy Aldrich Kidwell, a historian of science and technology. I just want to read a paragraph from her paper. Kidwell writes, quote in summary,

the phrase computer bug has served several functions. Talking about bugs rather than flaws appeals to the wit of programmers and computer users. In the early days of computing, the phrase was used primarily by a relatively small group of experts marking their special status. At the same time, having a short, general term that covers a wide variety of flaws has been useful, particularly because the exact source of

the error was often unknown. Calling such problems bugs rather than failures suggests that they are small faults that can be corrected, not a general in thinking, and not a general failure in thinking or design. This usage had long been a refuge of US inventors and served the optimistic

nature of computer designers and programmers. So I think that's kind of an interesting point about the psychology of engineering, or the psychology of invention and technical work, that even the language you select to describe the problems you face in your work can color your emotions in how in how you have to go about addressing it, and that by using cute little terms like bug, which implied that the problem is external, implied that the problem is small,

implied that the problem is you know, it's not something that is wrong with the general approach or design of the system. But it's just like a little little thing that got in there and went wrong. Kind of helps you maintain a positive attitude in addressing problems and fixing them. So anyway, thank you so much, Chelsea. All right. This last message is also in response to cicadas. This is one that sent me down a bit of a research trail.

So this comes from Jeremy. Jeremy says, hello, Robert and Joe, with reference to the recent rise of the cicadas episode and the volume of their mating call. We thankfully don't get cicadas in Europe, but we do have a contender for the loudest insect and winner in the volume generated in proportion to size category, the lesser water boatman or micro necta. This is spelled scholt Zi. I don't know

if that's sculptz or schultzy. I'm gonna say schultze. The micronecta Schultze is only zero points zero seven inches or two millimeters long, yet can generate ninety nine point five decibels, with peaks up to one hundred and five decibels. And although this sound is created underwater, it can be heard on the banks of the streams, rivers, and lakes where

it lives. Now, that in itself is amazing, and I want to go into some more detail about that in just a minute, but I've got a note on what Jeremy is about to say in the email some context to remind listeners. In the first Decade episode, we talked about how insects like crickets and grasshoppers make sounds mostly through a process called stridulation, which means rubbing, rubbing one part of the body against another. So, for example, mail crickets rub the edges of their four wings together their

front pair of wings. They rub those together using what's called a file and scraper system. So basically, one wings surface is like a stick and the other has a series of ridges like the teeth of a comb, and rubbing them together against one another produces a scraping sound. Male cicadas, on the other hand, do not use strigulation.

They have dedicated sound producing organs called timbals, which are these corrugated kiteness membranes kind of like drumheads, connected to muscles and rib like structures underneath, and these are on either side of the body under the wings, and the cicadas make their sound by rapidly flexing and buckling these organs and then allowing them to snap back into place anyway.

With that context back to Jeremy's message, Jeremy rites, in contrast to the leg, wing or rib based sound generation methods used by insects like cicadas, the lesser water boatmen stridulates its penis against the ridged surface of its abdomen to create the sound. And then Jeremy and some references and also a paper, and he summarizes the paper by saying, quote, it is theorized that a trapped bubble of air is

used to amplify the volume. Best regards Jeremy. Well, thank you Jeremy for writing in and bringing up this amazingly interesting animal. Now a couple of things to address at the top here, I had to mention something from the earlier part of your message about not having cicadas in Europe. I double check to be sure, but there definitely are

cicadas in Europe. For example, multiple species in the genus Cicadeta, like Cicadeta montana that's also known as the new forest cicada is just one of the species found in Europe. It's in England in places throughout continental Europe. But from what I've been able to dig up, all of the species of cicadas found anywhere in Europe are annuals, the kind that emerge every year, as opposed to the kinds we have in North America with broods on those thirteen

and seventeen year cycles. But also, I love your note bringing attention to the lesser water boatmen, and it's incredibly loud, stridulating penis. I had to know more, so I did some investigation on this insect. So again, as Jeremy says, the species is Micronecta schultzy. Like cicadas. The lesser water boatmen are of the order Hymiptera, so they are also the true bugs. Remember that's what the hymipterns are, the true bugs, with the most distinctive body features being they're

piercing and sucking mouthparts. So hymipterans usually have a sort of hinged needle called a rostrum on their mouth which they used to puncture a food substrate which could be a plant or an animal and suck nutrients out. In the case of water boatmen, it seems they generally they're not predatory. They generally suck nutrients from algae. So I looked up the original paper that reported this stridulation miracle

and it goes back to the year twenty eleven. So the paper is by Rome Sewer, David Mackie and James F. C. Windmill, published in Plus one in twenty eleven, and the paper is called so Small, So Loud extremely high sound pressure level from a pigmy aquatic insect carrixiity micronectiny. So the authors here begin with some context for their research and noting some common difficulties in sound based communication among animals.

Sound producing animals often want to reach as many receivers as possible with their sounds, and they also want their sounds to contain as much information as possible. In order to reach more receivers, a very simple strategy is make your signal louder. But making a louder signal comes with some difficulties. One problem, in the words of the authors is that quote when considering acoustic communication, the production of a loud and intelligible signal is not an easy task.

Even for human built sound systems. The system can be overdriven, distorting time and frequency parameters and consequently impairing information transfer. So in other words, selecting for loudness can harm the clarity of the information being transferred, and you can think about this like you know, turning a speaker up until it gets distorted and it's hard to understand what's being said.

Another problem is that how loud you can get is usually constrained by what the authors call morphological characteristics, the size and the shape of your body and sound producing organs. In short, a small object usually cannot produce a very loud sound, and this is why if you look at lists of the loudest animals, most of them are also the largest animals, so you get like whales and elephants

as the largest animals. However, there's another way you can look at sound production, which is not just purely what is the loudest sound achievable, but what is the ratio of sound production to body size. Animals are able to produce the loudest sounds with the smallest bodies and the smallest sound producing organs. So here the authors turn to freshwater insects, many of which can communicate by sound. Since sound is a useful way of transmitting information when visibility.

Visual visibility is low, such as in murky water Micronecta schultzi is an example of an insect that uses sound based communication for pair formation in mating, for males and females to find one another, for males to attract females, and to attract females to initiate mating. It's possibly also used for male male competition competition between males for access

to mating. The authors of this paper collected specimens of this insect from a river and from a pond, both located near Paris in France, and measure their sound production in controlled conditions. Apparently a lot of the research here was just aimed at making sure they were getting accurate readings about the sound production, and so, just as Jeremy said in the email, the authors did indeed find that these tiny insects were able to create shockingly powerful sounds

for their size. When measured at a distance of one meter, the intensity of the sound was roughly a seventy nine decibel sound pressure level, with peaks of ninety nine to one hundred decibels. A BBC report writing this up compared this to the approximate loudness of sitting in the front row listening to a loud symphony orchestra, except that's kind of hard to make as a comparison in your mind, because the symphony orchestra is a large like composite system

with many different sound production points. I guess the case here would be like you're listening to an orchestra that is a hair sized sexual organ of a two millimeter insect about a meter away from your head. The author is right that while this is by no means the loudest in the animal kingdom quote, when scaled to body length and compared to two hundred and twenty seven other acoustic species, the acoustic energy produced by Imschultzi appears as

an extreme value, outperforming marine and terrestrial mammal vocalizations. So, according to these calculations, it is the loudest animal relative to its body size. So, as the title of the paper says, so small, so loud, if that's true, I was wondering why don't we notice hearing them more often? Like why do even if you know you don't necessarily

have these around where you live. Why don't you read things of people just commonly talking about the sounds they make, the way people talk about the sounds made by cicadas. I think the answer is probably because they make these sounds underwater and people are usually above water, and from what I was reading, about ninety nine percent of the intensity of the sound is lost when it crosses the air water inner though, though that doesn't mean you can't

hear it again. People on the banks of waterways where these animals live are still sometimes able to hear them, which is just a pretty incredible thing in itself, given how much reduction in the sound there is from crossing up out of the water into the air above. So it just indicates how loud the original sound is that people ever hear it at all. Couple more questions, how exactly does this animal make the sound? In one sense the authors know the answer, and in another sense they

said they did not. So the known part is that, as mentioned in Jeremy's email, the male water boatman rubs a sexual organ against a part of its abdomen to generate the sound. This organ is in many articles about this called a penis, but the paper clarifies it is actually the male's right side peramere rubbing against a lobe on the eighth abdominal segment. Perameres seem somewhat equivalent to a penis. They are paired sexual organs on either side

of the abdomen. The paper calls them genitalia appendages, which I was reading about it seems like they often serve as clasping devices during copulation. The unknown part, according to the authors of this paper in twenty eleven, and people have commented since then, was how exactly this genital sound emission system, which they point out is no larger than fifty micrometers, which is again about the width of a human hair on the small side of the range of

a width of a human hair. How that was capable of producing such a loud sound. I'll come back to that in a second. Another question is why is the sound so loud in an evolutionary sense. According to this twenty eleven paper, a possible answer is sexual selection unconstrained by predation risk. So the males of this insects species make the sound to attract females and possibly compete with and drown out other males. So if louder sounds lead

to more chances to mate, evolution will keep selecting for them. Now, a normal expected limiting principle on the loudness of that sound would be that it would also attract predators and parasitoids, so you know eventually you're going to be putting out your ringing a dinner bell when you're making that sound

saying come eat me. But the authors say, we don't know that much about what predators and parasitoids are associated with these water insects, and as possible, water boatmen just don't have many natural aquatic predators or parasitoids, and thus there is little external limitation on the selection for loudness of the scraping penis or paramere. But the authors say that basically not enough is known about the associated predator guild,

so this should be something study you know, needs further study. Now, coming back to the question of how mechanically these insects make such a loud sound, This has been looked at in subsequent research. Some other insects that produce underwater mating calls, such as carrixidy and microonectiny, have a strategy of resonating their stridulation. So they like rub something underwater and then they resonate it through a trapped air bubble that they

carry with them when they dive to breathe from. I believe so a study by read at All from twenty eighteen, which was linked by Jeremy in his original email, creates a model suggesting that Schultze does the same thing resonates through an air bubble, but with some efficiency improvements. And I admit I tried my best to understand this paper, but I was not able to decipher all of the

technical stuff about acoustics in play. I believe if I'm understanding it right, I believe their claim is that the specific orientation, size, and distance between the insects sound producing surface and its air bubble resonator create what they call a high coupling efficiency, allowing for a huge gain and power.

So according to these authors, it seems to be something about the sort of the distance between and relationship and physical relationship between the air bubble and the striated surface. So anyway, I'm not sure I follow all the technical details on that, but nevertheless, this is a fascinating animal. It is amazing to think about how such a tiny

creature can produce such loud sounds. And yeah, if you're interested, you want to read more, you go look it up Micronecta Schultzi, And thank you Jeremy for writing about this. We love to get emails like this, emails that build on our episodes with sort of related but new trails to run down. Okay, I think that does it for today. If you are new to the show, Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a sign night's podcast with core

episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We do listener mail like this episode on Mondays, a short form episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays we do a sort of subspecies show called Weird House Cinema, where my co host Rob Lamb and I watch and discuss weird movies. They can be good or bad, big or small, well known or obscure,

as long as they are weird. To remind you all about the rest of this week, we're going to be back tomorrow with a vault episode, Wednesday with an omnibus, and hopefully Thursday we will have a brand new core episode for you. If not, we'll have another vault episode then and we'll have Weird House Cinema for you on Friday. But we're shooting to get you that brand new core episode on Thursday. In the meantime. If you are not subscribed to Stuff to Blow your Mind, the button's right there.

Press it get everything we do delivered straight to your phone. If you are already subscribed or think you are already subscribed, might we ask that you just check in on your podcast app to make sure you're still getting all of our new episodes downloaded. We hear some platforms have been turning off auto downloads if people like let a few days go by without listening or something, so just check and make sure. If you want to get new downloads, make sure that you are set to get them just

checking your app and make sure you get them. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.