Transcript: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bug
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Jimmy Gutierrez: Hey Sam…
Sam Evans-Brown: Jimmy Gutierrez!
Jimmy Gutierrez: I know you’re not a movie buff.
Sam Evans-Brown: I am not a movie buff.
Jimmy Gutierrez: Have you ever see The Fly?
Sam Evans-Brown: I have not seen the fly
Movie trailer: There is a limit even to the imagination… [fades down]
Jimmy Gutierrez: It was like sci-fi/horror. It opens up with the eccentric, and devilishly handsome scientist, Jeff Goldblum…
Sam Evans-Brown: Wait is this why he was the scientist in Jurassic Park? Was because he was the scientist from The Fly
Jimmy Gutierrez: I mean the lineage is there. He’s at this press event and it’s kind of like cocktail hour, and he’s trying to get the attention of a journalist, Geena Davis who is looking fine…
Geena Davis in Movie Clip: I have three other interviews to do before this party’s over.
Jeff Goldblum in Movie Clip: Yeah but they’re not working on something that will change the world as we know it!
Jimmy Gutierrez: So they leave the party, he wants to show her the project he’s working on. And to get right into it, Goldblum has figured out a way to transport inanimate objects from one place to another.
Sam Evans-Brown: Teleportation!
[Music]
Jimmy Gutierrez: So he’s built this teleportation device… eventually he figures out how to teleport living things. One night he gets a little drunk and decides to try it out on himself.
Jeff Goldblum in Movie Clip: What are we waiting for lets do it!
Jimmy Gutierrez: But little did he know… that when he transports, there’s a fly is in the teleporter with him… Him and the fly fuse on a molecular level and at first, all is bueno. He’s got fly super powers... he's got more clarity... he's got fly super strength, and he also can go all night, apparently…
Sam Evans-Brown: Like… when we say go…
Jimmy Gutierrez: We’re talking go.
Geena Davis in Movie Clip: You can’t have any fluid left in your body, we’ve been doing this for hours.
Jimmy Gutierrez: But then he starts to change in not so great ways...
Geena Davis in Movie Clip: Everything about you is changing. You look bad. You smell bad.
Jeff Goldblum in Movie Clip: I’ve never been much of a bather.
Jimmy Gutierrez: And it becomes a classic horror film with peak horror makeup, peak Goldblum and the best metamorphic scene of all time… and that’s when he goes full fly… and it’s disgusting.
[Sound effects of Goldblum turning into a fly]
Sam Evans-Brown: Jimmy, as fun as this… why are we talking about the Fly?
Jimmy Gutierrez: We’re talking about the Fly, Samuel...because I want to know how you feel about insects
Sam Evans-Brown: I wish I was a better person, who could. So you know, like, you’re host of a podcast about science and nature, like you should be trying to get people excited about them… but I have never been good with them. I find them unnerving… and I hate the feeling of them on you, in particular… the like bug leg feeling. Really really, unsettling to me.
Jimmy Gutierrez: I will co-sign everything you just said. That’s why we’re talking The Fly. I find them disgusting. I feel like they were made to kill. Like that feeling… it’s like WAP! Right?
Sam Evans-Brown: My feeling is that my fear is irrational… that’s how I feel about my fear.
Jimmy Gutierrez: I think it’s very rational. There was this story that came out last year — I mean there are a lot of reasons to hate bugs but there was this story that came out last year about this woman in Taiwan who had a bunch of bees in her eyes...DRINKING HER TEARS? I mean what kind of monsters are we dealing with here?
[Music]
Jimmy Gutierrez: If I told you about how many flies I’ve killed in my life I think you’d want to end this conversation, unfortunately.
Jenny Angus: Well you know insects re-produce at a tremendous rate so I suspect your devastation of those flies is just a drop in the ocean.
Jimmy Gutierrez: This is Jenny Angus. She’s an educator, artist, and so-called ‘insect ally.’ And she wants people to imagine bugs leading lives just like ours with families and curiosities and just trying to make it.
Jenny Angus: Maybe they don’t deserve that swat with the fly swatter or the rolled up newspaper or worst yet the blast of Raid, that they could perhaps be gently ushered out of the house. After all, who was here first, really?
Jimmy Gutierrez: Jenny’s been sourcing and collecting bugs for 20 years from all over the world - and she says, she came to them through their “beauty”
Sam Evans-Brown: [laughing] Air quotes.
Jenny Angus: I was doing research in northern Thailand, and upon a garment I discovered a fringe. And upon that fringe, metallic beetle wings had been strung. They were so beautiful, I really had trouble believing they were real.
Jimmy Gutierrez: She’s talking about bug clothes. You...believe...this...woman?
Sam Evans-Brown: Bugs on clothes, I cannot believe it.
Jimmy Gutierrez: Anyways, she’s out here to remind people that however disgusting, repugnant, unlovable these little freaks may seem, they make the world go round. And she makes that point In her latest exhibit. It was part of the Fragile Earth exhibition at the Florence Grisworld Museum in Old Lyme Connecticut. And she’s got hundreds of insects, really beautifully preserved, multi-colored beetles, grasshoppers and katydids. They’re pinned in these patterned designs on the walls of this historic home and it looks like insect wallpaper. Over the years she found it more and more difficult to get certain bugs. Bugs that were always in available to her. So a focus now in her work is to make people aware of what’s happening in bug world.
[Music fades out]
Jenny Angus: A really important study came out in 2017 that was a study in Germany that discovered that over a 27-years period, 75% of winged insects were gone. Which that is incredibly fast and that is a lot of insects and I don’t think the situation is unique to Germany. Really what is happening is a kind of apocalypse; annihilation of insects and it’s going to have severe repercussions.
Jimmy Gutierrez: The insect apocalypse…
Sam Evans-Brown: The insect apocalypse…
Jimmy Gutierrez: BUT...if it’s true, someone needs to explain to me why no flies is a bad thing!
[More sounds from The Fly and Outside/In Theme music]
Sam Evans-Brown: Today on Outside/In, producer Jimmy Gutierrez takes a microscope to the so-called “Insect Apocalypse” to see if it’s got any legs. What would the world look like with no Bugs Life?
Jimmy Gutierrez: And I have to know how in the world does someone become an insect ally?
Sam Evans-Brown: Can Jimmy go from bug squasher to bug buddy? Can he learn to love the fly?
[Outside/In Theme music fades]
Jimmy Gutierrez: Sam, I want to start with a little context why this journey is gonna be tough...and I hope we’re all sitting down...in a well lit room... So, when it comes to insects, there are an estimated 10 quintillion worldwide — that’s 10 with 18 zeros after it — and that DOESN’T include arthropods like spiders and mites. If you’re going strictly off total mass, insects and arthropods outweigh all humans a combined 17 times over. But like you heard earlier, things have been changing.
Sam Evans-Brown: I think I first heard about this story a year ago, right?
News Clip: Insects may be low on the food chain but they are of course essential and a growing body of research has set off alarms that the world could be in for big trouble.
News Clip: A recent article in the New York Times reports some startling and disturbing news. Across the globe, whole insect populations are crashing.
News Clip: The scientists who study insects, entomologists, are worried and they say everyone else should be too.
News Clip: The insect apocalypse is here…
Jimmy Gutierrez: There are really three beats to this story. Things first picked up in late 2017 with that German study Jenny talked about [clip]...The big finding was that the mass of flying insects — measured in the national parks all over Germany — had fallen by 80% in three decades. Right after that, the New York Times magazine came out with a brilliant article. The headline asked: “What does this all mean for the rest of life on earth?”
Sam Evans-Brown: Yeah that’s the one I read
Jimmy Gutierrez: So the pump is primed for us all to freak out over this. And that’s when a couple of researchers go over 70 studies across the globe. And they came to the conclusion that within a century all insects could be gone.
Sam Evans-Brown: Within one century?
Jimmy Gutierrez: Within the next century.
Sam Evans-Brown: That seems…
Jimmy Gutierrez: Great.
Sam Evans-Brown: [laughs] I was going to say unlikely.
Fransisco Sanchez-Bayo: Of course it’s true that many insects can be a nuisance for us, can be, but on a larger scale the majority of them are not.
Jimmy Gutierrez: This is Fransisco Sanchez-Bayo. He’s an ecologist and scientist working at the University of Sydney in Australia. We caught up via Skype.
Fransisco Sanchez-Bayo: And they play the role in life, I believe, like everything else in life.
Jimmy Gutierrez: Ok, deep breath here… it is time to defend the bug. The first thing to note in the defense of bugs is the role they play in ecosystems and how it affects humans. An example of this that I learned sir, Samuel… are the dung beetles… who save US farmers an estimated $380 million a year. Do you know how they do this?
Sam Evans-Brown: I assume it has something to do with rolling dung away, ‘cause that’s all you ever see them doing.
Jimmy Gutierrez: Rolling dung and also eating dung.
Sam Evans-Brown: Oh they eat it. How does that save money?
Jimmy Gutierrez: By removing all that mess, they’re also removing habitats of the things that would live in that mess that destroy animal and plant life. As well as enriching the soil with their rolling techniques.
Sam Evans-Brown: Well and their leavings too, I’m sure.
Jimmy Gutierrez: Back to Francisco, he’s one of the authors of last year’s study that pretty much said insects like the Dung Beetle will be gone gone in a century, and our farms could be overflowing with shit.
Jimmy Gutierrez: Are you kind of surprised just how much media attention the report has gotten since you’ve put it out there? It’s not like you’re talking about polar bears or honeybees, for that matter.
Fransisco Sanchez-Bayo: Yeah, we were quite surprised, in fact. We knew that we were goin have some impact because our review study is not an experiential study it’s a review of papers. It’s simply going through the literature, digging up what some people have written.
Jimmy Gutierrez: So just for a little breakdown of how their process worked... him and his team went through 73 different papers worldwide, and they searched for keywords: “insect”, “survey” and “decline.”
Sam Evans-Brown: Ok… So… I was immediately skeptical of the headline conclusions, and what you just said really cements it for me, because I think searching for the keyword “decline” and finding studies that show a decline feels like a fishing expedition.
Jimmy Gutierrez: Yea so that has been pointed out, by a bunch of critics, and they don’t question if insect populations are declining, they just think the study overestimates how fast it’s happening.
Sam Evans-Brown: So then… what’s the culprit here?
Jimmy Gutierrez: There are four main focal points to this paper: one, duh, climate change. Another is biological factors, like pathogens and introduced, or invasive species. Third is chemical pollution. And finally, and most devastating, is habitat destruction.
Sam Evans-Brown: This is one of these things that I hear all the time from ecologists that… we’re all freaked out about climate change, but that if you look at the actual drivers of species loss today it is not climate change… yet. It is still just Old Fashioned Disruption of Habitat.
Jimmy Gutierrez: For Francisco he sees that most in his field of study, agriculture.
Fransisco Sanchez-Bayo: And I realized wow, insects are so important because they are the base of the ecological pyramid together with the plants. Both plants and insects are essential for maintaining all the eco-systems on earth and other animals depend on them.
Jimmy Gutierrez: In particular, Francisco wants us to talk about pollinators, because… that’s where it starts to get people like us…
Sam Evans-Brown: Like you…
Jimmy Gutierrez: Like me… that’s where he starts to get people like me aboard the bug bus.
[Music]
Fransisco Sanchez-Bayo: And for us pollination is the most evident without them we wouldn’t eat most of the fruit we eat these days. We’d come back to only eat bread and water and maybe some meat and that’s it. We wouldn’t have strawberries, blueberries, pumpkins, all these plants need pollination by insects.
Jimmy Gutierrez: Wow that is the prime selling point to get people to care about insects right there – no more fruit only bread.
Fransisco Sanchez-Bayo: Yeah exactly, I think that’s a very good way of putting it.
Jimmy Gutierrez: Yo, he’s talking about us going back to the Bible diet!
Sam Evans-Brown: You mean just like bread and water?
Jimmy Gutierrez: Bread, water, meat....we wouldn’t even have wine… we wouldn’t even have grapes for good wine!
Sam Evans-Brown: So Jimmy… as somebody who is fond of a fruit smoothie in the morning… is this getting you on board with bugs, finally?
Jimmy Gutierrez: If I had to switch to the meat smoothie?? Ok, I will be out on the corners saying save all the pollinators!
Sam Evans-Brown: Well I think we have a solution to this already is we just pay workers to go around with Q-tips and pollinate by hand, isn’t that happening already?
Jimmy Gutierrez: Capitalism! Solve all our problems!
Sam Evans-Brown: Right! [chuckle]
[Music]
Jimmy Gutierrez: What Francisco’s findings lead to is a huuuge shift in our world, how we eat, live, interact… I asked him, thinking about all of that, if he was ever concerned that your language here might be too alarmist?
Fransisco Sanchez-Bayo: I have no qualms about the language we use and if there’s some criticism from some quarters maybe they don’t grasp the problem as they should.
Sam Evans-Brown: Ok I’m really glad you asked him that question about alarmism, because… I have to say… environmentalists don’t have a great track record when it comes to predicting the future of really complex systems… especially in cases where there’s a lot we don’t understand… and I KNOW, there’s a ton about bugs that we JUST DON’T KNOW.
Jimmy Gutierrez: That is reassuring. I will say that within the scientific community, and people that are studying bugs and bug life… this is not consensus…
[Music]
Jessica Ware: When you start looking more closely at the data one of the things that kind of jumps out at you is that a lot of the claims that have been made about the insect Armageddon, or insect apocalypse, are based on very small amounts of data.
[Music swells]
Jimmy Gutierrez: You knew this was coming!
Sam Evans-Brown: O/I listeners wouldn’t forgive us if we just took this hook line and sinker…
Jimmy Gutierrez: We’ll talk about the data… about what we CAN say about bugs world-wide… when outside in continues
[AD BREAK]
Sam Evans-Brown: Hey we’re back… I’m Sam Evans-Brown and producer Jimmy Gutierrez and I are talking about the so-called insect apocalypse and spending more time with bug folk.
Jimmy Gutierrez: And I’m taking this time as an opportunity for personal growth… to see...if I can learn to at least appreciate our… many-legged companions.
Jessica Ware: I think that most people that spend time with an entomologist it’s hard not to catch the bug – catch the bug bug – ohhh, haha!
Jimmy Gutierrez: This is Dr. Jessica Ware. She’s an entomologist working at Rutgers.
Sam Evans-Brown: Kinda Famous!
Jimmy Gutierrez: Kinda famous, yeah. Something I’ve learned about people that do this work, is they end up finding “the one”...that special bug that speaks to them. With here it’s dragonflies and damselflies - which I have to admit sound pretty raw.
Jessica Ware: Dragonflies and damselflies are 6,000 species of them and they’re colorful and charismatic and they’re near fresh water… Actually if they’re around you there’s gonna be fewer nats, fewer mosquitoes, fewer black flies, fewer horse flies, they’re the ones consuming the things that are plaguing us.
Sam Evans-Brown: If this were a movie this is where the montage of you being remade into a better person would start…
Jimmy Gutierrez: What can I say I’m a work in progress...I asked Jessica what she thought of Francisco’s paper - the fact that 40% of insects could be extinct in the next couple decades and within a century they could all be gone
Jessica Ware: Like any human who reads a report like that my first instinct is to feel oh goodness, this is something we should panic about and certainly as a scientist I know from my personal work or the work of my colleagues that there’s not enough of us out there to collect baseline data on insect populations.
Sam Evans-Brown: Right so, there’s just like not people looking for bugs. So really ANY scientific claim is going to be based on really thin evidence…
Jimmy Gutierrez: And that’s kind of the big critique...there aren’t enough people doing the work. Like let’s say the insect Armageddon, was the MOVIE Armageddon, we still can’t detect that asteroid. Now that doesn’t mean it’s NOT happening...or that we don’t have to worry about the bible diet coming back.
Sam Evans-Brown: Right… we just can’t say for sure what IS happening. We’ve got some worrying signs.
Jimmy Gutierrez: Right, and while Jessica did say that while the framing might not be ideal for her, people are paying attention. And that IS a big deal!
Jessica Ware: It’s wonderful. Many of us who are entomologists have been portrayed as being off on the sidelines, not really mainstream, so the idea that you can open up a newspaper or log onto your phone and have insect stories as your top stories is exciting. If the discussion of insect apocalypse sparks the average person to read an article about insects and learn about insects on their day that’s good, I wouldn’t deny that. I worry about having everything be so sensationalized in order to get people to learn about it. Of course...
[Music]
Jessica Ware: On the other hand I wonder whether if there is any benefit kind of squabbling about it at all. Whether we have enough data right now or not, most scientists would agree that something’s happening, anecdotally we see changes.
Sam Evans-Brown: Do you remember Car Talk?
Jimmy Gutierrez: Sam this is public radio, who doesn’t remember Car Talk?
Sam Evans-Brown: There was a call that someone made to Car Talk at one point where the listener was like: hey how come I don’t see so many bugs splatted on my windshield anymore, are all the bugs dead? And the Car Talk guys were like nononono it’s just that cars are more aerodynamic now… And I think about that a lot because… you know because… in the absence of really good comprehensive data, all we’ve really got… each of these 73 papers that Francisco Sanchez Bayo reviewed… each of them is kinda like a windshield… and so we’ve just got these little glimpses… each of which might have their own explanation and might not be representative… or maybe they are… we just don’t know.
Jimmy Gutierrez: Well, but the bigger point is that this is a moment of anxiety, right? We’ve had decades of complacency on environmental stuff now we see people taking action with the nationwide climate strikes…
News Clip: Now to the global protest that is underway right now, students and workers all around the world are flooding the streets…
Jimmy Gutierrez: ...you see it in youth-lead movements...
News clip: We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money…
Jimmy Gutierrez: ...you see it with folks suing their own governments for not taking action,
News Clip: I’m a fifteen-year-old climate warrior spokesperson for my generation… and I’m suing the United States Government for violating my constitutional right to a healthy atmosphere…
[Music Fades]
Jimmy Gutierrez: Remember Jenny Angus...the insect ally and artist from earlier?
Sam Evans-Brown: Yes.
Jimmy Gutierrez: She’s hoping this moment, with all this momentum for creepy crawlers, leads to increases in funding for exhibits, museums, the science. Because if we want to know what’s happening with bugs, we need more people out there studying them - I mean damn, I didn’t even know what a taxonomist was before this story or that there was such a shortage of them...
Sam Evans-Brown: How do you even work on this show?
Jimmy Gutierrez: That’s a great question!
Sam Evans-Brown: They study taxis, right?
Jimmy Gutierrez: Ahh, it’s someone who groups and classifies different kinds of insects… Samuel… well, not just insects but here we’re talking about insects.
Sam Evans-Brown: Poindexter Jimmy.
Jessica Ware: The benefits of funding more taxonomists, more long-term ecological and evolutionary studies of insects, the benefits would be amazing. It would be stupendous. It could transform what we do as humans. I can’t underscore how much funding basic research, training systemisits and taxonomists, training evolutionary biologists from around the globe, it would change everything.
Jimmy Gutierrez: I can say I’m a convert to championing WHY we need bugs - and that the bug apocalypse would be terrible. But we also need more people to like bugs. To want to work with bugs...to want to classify, ID and count them. I asked Jessica - as someone who wants to keep dung beetles around even as nasty as they are - how can I get on her level? How can I love The Fly? For her, she said, she grew up in Canada she spent a ton of time outside. And a lot of that time was spent with her grandparents, her grandma in particular, and they would just explore nature together.
[Music]
Jessica Ware: She would always point out dragonflies and damselflies that were near Lake Miskooka, which is the lake near where she lives. And she would point out snakes and encourage us to pick up frogs and just not to be afraid of the natural world. And she really feed this innate curiosity that we had she really encouraged it. And so I think by seeing her, when children see grown-ups who aren’t afraid of insects it makes them comfortable to explore the things they’re curious about.
[Music swells]
Jessica Ware: I’m a parent and my kids learned so much at school about barnyard animals, they know exactly what a pig says, or what a lamb says but they didn’t learn anything about dragonflies. And I find that so perplexing when there are over 6,000 species of dragonflies and damselflies... and that’s more than the total amount of mammal species on earth.
[Music fades]
Jimmy Gutierrez: So I think I see the light. This isn’t just about me liking The Fly, it’s about we liking The Fly. And I’ve got an idea for how we level up our bug love…
Sam Evans-Brown: yeah?
Jimmy Gutierrez: Pack your bags, buddy. We’re going to Boston!
Sam Evans-Brown: Boston?!
[Music]
Jimmy Gutierrez: There’s a six-story, red brick, building on Harvard’s campus
Sam Evans-Brown: Like all of them
Jimmy Gutierrez: Head in, walk up a few flights of stairs, past a makeshift gift shop sporting beetle-themed throw blankets, turn a corner, and you’re there…
Sam Evans-Brown: Bug World.
Jimmy Gutierrez: Harvard’s Museum of Natural History
Harvard Employee: We don’t always have the live bugs, as long as people know that.
Jimmy Gutierrez: Well I’m both terrified and grateful that you do.
Jimmy Gutierrez: This is the arthropod gallery. It’s filled with color-less corpses of spiders, scorpions, giant ass lobsters...
Sam Evans-Brown: Arthropods which is the overarching taxa right, and then there are insects, arachnids… hexapods? Are there more than that?
Jimmy Gutierrez: I hope not but probably...
Sam Evans-Brown: Your dread is like giving me a lot of joy right now.
Jimmy Gutierrez: I’m happy I can provide that for you Sam.
Jimmy Gutierrez: To help us makes sense of this nightmare… I’m sorry, “learning experience” or “moment for growth”... was Crystal Meier
Crystal Meier: One of my earliest memories was of my great grandma and I found this huge woolly bear caterpillar and I was so excited, I was like 3 years old or something like that. And I run up to her with this caterpillar and she knocks it out of my hand, she steps on it, and she says little girls don’t play with bugs. And I was like okay, my life will be dedicated...
Jimmy Gutierrez: Today, Crystal is a Coleopterist, did I nail that?
Sam Evans-Brown: That’s a beetle expert…
Jimmy Gutierrez: Yes, that means she studies and collects beetles. AND, she’s also the entomology collections manager at the Museum.
Crystal Meier: Well do we want to see some cockroaches?
Jimmy Gutierrez: I mean, are you up for this, too?
Sam Evans-Brown: Of course!
Shoyo Sato: These are my personal cockroaches.
Jimmy Gutierrez: Shoyo Sato was also there with us. He’s a grad student studying spiders who just happens to collect cockroaches...I don’t know just for fun?
Jimmy Gutierrez: Okay, um. Sam! I need some moral support here.
Shoyo Sato: So these are Madagascar hissing cockroaches. They’re native to Madagascar. So let’s see if I can make them hiss.
[Cockroach hissing]
Jimmy Gutierrez: It’s like biting you. Why is he doing that to you?
Shoyo Sato: So they hiss when they’re annoyed. You can see that they’re not like your cockroaches that you have at home… they’re very slow… they just sort of sit there. These guys are actually very clean, they spend a lot of time grooming…
Jimmy Gutierrez: So Sam, how are you feeling right now?
Sam Evans-Brown: I will confess that I feel bodily a little queasy when I feel its legs on me. I’m habituating. As he’s moving around it’s like okay I’m no longer feeling actively queasy. Are you ready for this?
Jimmy Gutierrez: Um. No.
Shoyo Sato: I can transfer it.
Jimmy Gutierrez: there’s something crawling on my hand. Mmhmm, it’s going somewhere…my toes are curling that’s tight.
Sam Evans-Brown: How are you feeling? Are you habituating?
Jimmy Gutierrez: I think I am habituating. I’m not shaking as much which is good and actually I think watching her be curious of me and the antenna go, I feel like –
Sam Evans-Brown: A little bit of kinship?
Jimmy Gutierrez: Yeah like we’re figuring this out together. Still gross as shit.
Jimmy Gutierrez: Do you remember even seeing like the kids jumping in!
Sam Evans-Brown: Yeah.
Jimmy Gutierrez: Here are brothers Johan and Raynor Deeth checking out Crystal’s beetle collection
Jimmy Gutierrez: What do you think about these beetles?
Brother 1: Small.
Jimmy Gutierrez: Are you afraid at all?
Brother 1: No I’m just curious.
Jimmy Gutierrez: How about you?
Brother 2: Yeah I’m definitely curious about new species of beetles because it would be cool to see what changes they have...
Jimmy Gutierrez And there was one kid, Praveen...
Jimmy Gutierrez: Do you think you could ever hold it? Do you want to try?
Jimmy Gutierrez: ...who held the cockroaches
Jimmy Gutierrez: How do the legs feel?
Praveen: It’s tickly on my nails!
Jimmy Gutierrez: And even got his dad Shreedon to hold one!
Shreedon: Sure I’ll try. Oh wow, it’s ticklish! It is so ticklish!
Jimmy Gutierrez: It was really different to be around people who were pro-bug, like please put this in my hand, opposed to “hey we’re on the wrong floor please get me out of here immediately.
Sam Evans-Brown: It’s infectious… it rubs off.
Jimmy Gutierrez: It did rub off. Hopefully that’s all that will rub off. Feel like we’ve been exposed to A LOT. And I asked Crystal, like for folks who can’t get down to the museum, or talk with insect allies, how can they try and love The Fly?
Crystal Meier: Go outside and catch bugs. They’re everywhere – they’re in your backyard, they’re on the street, they’re on your lawn, they’re on campus and it’s not like a snake or a bird, you turn over a log and there’s a whole eco-system waiting to be discovered. And there’s probably new species in there, too..
Sam Evans-Brown: Yeah… so… Insect Apocalypse: the jury is still out, but if you’re worried, get over your irrational fears and start pitching in to the great international bug count.
Jimmy Gutierrez: yeah… I’ve got to admit I kinda feel like I’m turning into a giant fly…
Sam Evans-Brown: Starting to feel a little Jeff Goldblumy
Jimmy Gutierrez: I mean I would tak the Jeff Goldblum...
Sam Evans-Brown: But what is scarier turning into a giant fly or world without fruit?
JG/Gina Davis: Nooooo!
[Outside/In Theme Music]