SciShow Tangents - Cicadas

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

This summer's hottest North American bug is without question, the cicada. They've got everything: neon-colored wing veins, bendy-straw-style exoskeletons, an insatiable thirst for tree goo, and after 17 years of napping, they're bursting out of the ground ready to par-tay!SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! Head to www.patreon.com/SciShowTangents to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter! A big thank you to Patreon subscriber Garth Riley for helping to make the show possible!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy some great Tangents merch!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @im_sam_schultz Hank: @hankgreen[This or That: Cicadas or the Beatles]https://www.science.org/content/article/secret-cicadas-chirphttps://cicadas.uconn.edu/behavior/https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/698019Algorithm to measure song changes over timehttps://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/500262https://www.science.org/content/article/computer-charts-evolution-beatlesTest signals in fiber optic cableshttps://entomologytoday.org/2023/12/04/broadband-buzz-periodical-cicadas-chorus-measured-fiber-optic-cables/https://academic.oup.com/jinsectscience/article/23/6/3/7425398?login=falseFemale flies responding to songshttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4932889/https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/cicadas-are-the-barry-white-of-the-insect-world/Eroom’s Law principle related to drug developmenthttps://www.science.org/content/blog-post/eroom-s-lawhttps://iubmb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bmb.21617https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eroom%27s_law[Trivia Question]Bird hunting caterpillars on emergence and non-emergence yearshttps://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi7426https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/24148209/cicadas-2024-periodical-brood-eat-ecosystem-impact[Fact Off]Brown bears digging up cicada nymphs in Japanese human-planted forestshttps://eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/dspace/handle/2115/86161https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/cjz-2020-0222https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy.4266https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1036064Cicadas pee in a very mammal-like streamhttps://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-cicadas-power-spray-their-pee/[Ask the Science Couch]Cicada sound production using the tymbal, stridulation, or wing impactshttps://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-1-4020-6359-6_4279https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/198/4/1001/6996/The-Role-of-the-Tymbal-in-Cicada-Sound-Productionhttps://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0118554https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/151/1/41/5697/Do-Cicadas-Radiate-Sound-through-their-Ear-DrumsPatreon bonus: Periodical cicadas emerge after 13 or 17 (prime numbers) yearshttps://www.jstor.org/stable/2406585https://www.livescience.com/14238-southern-cicadas-emerge-exact-prime-number-cycles.htmlhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2690011/https://cicadas.uconn.edu/[Butt One More Thing]Cicada nymph anal liquid is adhesive and mucus-likehttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0044523104700686https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2rax3CKoj8

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host Hank Green, and joining me this week, as always, is science expert and Forbes 30 Under 30 education luminary Sari Reilly. Hello, I am now 30 so you know I'm not under 30. You still made the list. You slid right under the bar. More importantly though, it's our resident every clone, the adorable Sam Schultz.

That's right gang, I'm sitting down now. That's a new era for me. I'm just reading the show notes and it hadn't updated from the clone episode. So that's why I just called you the resident every clone. I'm still a clone. Right! If you think about it, I am, aren't I? I am not thinking about it too hard.

Am I kind of a clone of both my parents, in a way? No. By definitionally, bisexual reproduction. You are not. Yeah. Oh, shoot. Well... In fact, that is the one thing that makes you not a clone, is when you are the product of sexual reproduction.

Which, sorry for the spoiler, Sam, but your parents did it. That's not the way I see it. What is it? What? What? Hahaha! Which reminds me that I wanted to ask y'all a question for this episode of SciShow Tangents.

Would you, or have you eaten a bug? Oh. Yeah. That's not a segue. I was getting ready for a raunchy question. I'm like, do we talk about this on Tangents? I think I ate an ant once. I bought those bug suckers.

You know those suckers with the bug in the middle? No, but apparently there are suckers with a bug in the middle. There's a they have real real bug in the middle of this. Yeah. And it's a real grasshopper or whatever. But I would eat a bug. I think I'd eat a bug prepared some particular way where I knew it was going to be delicious.

I'd also eat all the bugs I could take if I didn't know it was bugs. You know, if I had a hamburger and it tasted just like a hamburger, but it was bugs, I don't think I would mind. I wouldn't just not mind. I would be over the moon. I don't want to look at a cow and think I'm eating you, but I could look at a grasshopper and think, I'm gonna eat you, you little fool. I kill bugs willy-nilly. I just like, like if there was a cow in my house, I would not step on it. But a bug, absolutely. I don't know if I've ever eaten a prepared bug in any way.

I have definitely as a child eaten a bug as a dare. I think as a worm a bug, no, not really. No, but eating a worm sounds rough. That's way worse. Yeah. Worms are full of dirt. Yeah, worms are full of dirt, but when another kid, when you don't really have very many friends

and another kid says, I dare you, I don't think you're brave enough to do this. Then of course, in an effort to make a friend, you eat a worm. We're such cool people here on Sash with Ange. Actually, I did like, I don't know if it was to seem cool or if it was just to sort of cement my reputation

as a weirdo, but I ate bugs at summer camp purely to surprise and shock. Like regularly? Yeah, like enough that they all called me Bug, which I thought was awesome because I got a nickname. Yeah. What was your favorite kind of bug to eat?

I never really cared one way or the other, though I have also since then had prepared crickets. And I will say taste fine. Textured bad. Yeah. Just way too many things to get stuck in your teeth. It's like, you know, those like pieces of the popcorn that's not the popcorn. It's like all that. That's not good. That's how I feel a little bit about soft shell crab too. It's like good, but a little bit too many bits. You eat the shell of soft shell crab? Yeah, that's the whole point of it. It's like in between a crab molting when its shell is still soft.

You get it at its most vulnerable point. Yep. And then you fry it up and put a little, I don't know, chili on it. What the heck? I didn't know that. It's a normal crab, but just squeak. Squeak. It's a little squishy. Just in its worst moment.

Yeah. It's like, are you kidding me? I'm in the shower. Get out of here. I don't have my hard shell anymore. Please. The indignity. And then you're like,

oh, you have no idea what's coming, my dude. Yeah. Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together and try to one-up, amaze, and delight each other with science. Facts! Also trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for glory, but also for the Hank Buck points, which I will be

awarding as we play. At the end of the episode, there's gonna be a winner. It's gonna be one of these two doofs. But first, as always, we've got to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem. This week is for me. You suck the blood of trees and that's all you eat. You suck and suck so much that you always have to pee. Many of your kin come out every year, but not you.

Oh no, certainly not you, my dear. You are a bug who really likes to scream. You stay under the ground for a many year long dream. And when you emerge with an iridescent sheen, someone asks you how old you are. You say, I'm 17. Hold on, there's more. Oh, how could there possibly be more?

Yes, you are a bug who loves to scream and scream. And you stay under the ground as a function of your genes And when you emerge with a million others on your team, someone asks you how old you are you say I'm 17 It's so aggro You are a bug It's so aggro. I feel like I should be whacking. Yeah. You are a bug. You say, I'm 17. I'm 17.

I don't know what happened. It's what happened. I was writing it and it was like, okay, I guess I have to say it like this anyway. The topic for the day is cicadas. And if you're watching it on video, you should see that my clothes have changed because- Your poem was so good, our clothes all changed. It's amazing. They're gonna go back to normal now. Welcome back.

Sari, what's cicadas? A cicada is a cicada, right? Yeah. That's a long and short of it, isn't it? Animals are nice because, you know, they've drawn some boxes around them for us. And sometimes they're a little weird. I feel like newts and stuff. They can get a little bit like, sure, sure.

That's all. He's got a newt. Anything that's as long and skinny cicada, actual taxonomic group. Very specific. And they've had their name. I'm going to start with the etymology just because they've had their name for as long as they've existed. We just pronounced it differently over time.

existed. We just pronounced it differently over time. I don't know about that. I think that's my guy. I don't think all the time when I say the words, thank you for catching me. This is why it's not a fauna log, it's a podcast. They've had the same name since the Romans, since Latin people looked at them and were like, what is that? A cicada. But if you were in ancient Rome and speaking Latin, then you would have called it a cicada with hard Cs instead.

And then all of this is from a linguist named Ben Zimmer who did a pop linguistics article because the Oxford English Dictionary was very scant, but he wrote that the first C changed to a soft C sound around the time that circle, civil, and other words like soft in their first C's. So then it became cicada. And then after that, there was a middle English to modern English shift where we started changing the ah sound to a sound. So then it became from cicada to cicada. So over time,

it just became the word that we pronounce it like today. But it has always been called the same thing. That's wild for thousands of years. Is there a thing that it means? We don't know. Perhaps it is a loan word from some sort of Mediterranean language, but it was just the thing.

If you saw a cicada on a tree, you were like, kakada, that's what it is. They had to make words up at a whole cloth. They did, at that point, they're just, they went in a separate one. Whatever sounds good. We did at that point. They're just, whatever sounds good. We gotta call it something. Yeah, I mean, we still do that.

I love it. I love people being like, television. But that one's made up of two different other words. It is, it is, but mostly we call it TV. And then eventually people will forget. And telephones, but now we just call them phones. It's like how they called you Sam. They just looked at you as a baby and said, Sam.

They looked at a cicada on a tree and said, cicada. That's right. I like that. So what is a cicada not etymologically? So a cicada taxonomically, it is very specific, but the only weirdness is that when you get into taxonomy, there aren't enough categories necessarily for all the subgroups of things. And then so you start making up different layers in between. So it's in the order Hemiptera, which are true bugs. So you can actually say a

cicada is a bug. And even pedantically speaking, you're correct, because it falls in the category alongside aphids and plant hoppers and other bugs that have... That aren't beetles. ...like piercing. That aren't beetles, that aren't ants, that aren't butterflies, things like that. They all have the same, I think, category of piercing and sucking mouth parts. Oh, cool. So they're in this true bug order.

And then, I'm not going to try to pronounce these things. There's a suborder and a super family where they ran out of space. They needed to squeeze in more categories. And then there are two families of cicada. There are the hairy cicadas. The I'm going to try Teddy. I cannot find a pronunciation for this. So this is Sari made up.

Teddy Gar, Teddy Gar today. I cannot find a pronunciation for this, so this is Sari made up. Tetegarctidae, also known as the hairy cicadas, which are like primitive cicadas, and there are two genuses in Australia. But most cicadas are the true cicadas in the family Cicatidae, or Cicatidae, which has most living species worldwide. And that includes both annual cicada species, which from their name, you see them every year, but their life cycles actually span anywhere from two to five year, but they're not all synced up. So those are most cicadas in the world are these annual cicadas.

But the ones that we talk about and the reason this episode is timely and to make it about the US because we're all in America, we're all in North America are the periodical cicadas, which are all in the genus Magis cicada. We're making a big deal of this year. There are seven species of these. They're only found in Eastern North America. These are the guys that have 13 or 17 year life cycles. So they stay underground for a really long time.

They have these black bodies with red eyes and orange wing veins. They're very striking. And there are so few of them that we have classified them into these separate broods where we know that every 13 or 17 years, a whole bunch of them are going to emerge all at once. And it is weird and they're called periodical because they're so developmentally synchronized. Unlike these annual cicadas that still have these two to five year cycles, not every single member of a species or a lot of members of one species don't emerge all at once. But these periodical cicadas are like swarms coming out

at once that makes them quite unique. And so they got a special name, got a special category. What are they doing down there for 17 years? Sucking. Sucking. Why? Why are they sucked for so long? What happened?

Yeah, cause this takes a long time. It's not very good food. It's just tree goo. They're on the xylem. Yeah, water, sugar. I don't know. I mean, it is weird because like aphids eat the same thing and they they take like 13 seconds to make babies. But cicadas, I guess just got to be beefier.

It just sounds nightmarish to be underground for 17 years. But I guess they like it. But if it's all, you. But I guess they like it. But if it's all you know. I guess so. They don't have TV. Nobody else has anything but us. We're the only ones that have anything.

Doesn't that suck? Yeah, I don't know. There's that caterpillar that wears its old heads as a hat. Some other guys have hats. I feel like some things have toothpicks maybe or something like that. Orcas sometimes wear dead fishes hats. Yeah.

Hat technology is the first thing you unlock on your technology chain. There are some little crabs. I think they're hermit crabs, or maybe they're just normal crabs. They have, they grab anemones as little pom poms. Sometimes you have little... Yeah, they got gloves. Gloves, hats. Dogs have basically everything.

Yeah, but they didn't have to make any of it themselves we gave it We love that shirt they have pants they have cups and then even really like any of it. No All right, I know what a cicada is now so it's time to move to the quiz portion of the show this week We're gonna be playing this or that of course one of the most iconic and annoying sounds of summer is the male cicada song, which the many species make using a part of their body called the timble. The cicada is made up of sections called ribs and bucking those ribs together

and then apart produces the noise. And the cicada could do that motion around 300 to 400 times per second to make its screeching song. Today, we're gonna be stacking up the impact of cicadas on science against another legendary musical insecti group, The Beatles, the actual British band.

In a game of This or That, I'm gonna present to you some kind of science story to go along with two explanations for how it came about. And it's up to you to decide which group is responsible, cicadas or four young men from Liverpool. What the hell? OK. I feel like these have nothing in common. Yeah. It should be easy.

But there's the science. We'll see. Round number one. Researchers reported that they had developed an algorithm to classify the changes in a group's song over time. Was their algorithm one, tracking the evolution of cicada brood songs with each emergence, or two, describing how the Beatles' music evolved over the decades.

I don't think these guys are making up new songs every time they come out of the ground. I bet they're doing the same one every time. I'm gonna say it's the lads from Liverpool. I mean, maybe it's just very subtle changes. Don't finish that sentence, Sam. Very name four Beatle songs, please. Eleanor Rigby.

Hey. Oh, there's one. Here Comes the Sun. OK, sure. OK, OK. We got two, I don't know, Sergeant Pepper's Jugman Christmas. I know I'm in honor.

Now we have to keep it in. That was going to get cut for sure. I truly don't know. Two more. What do they do? I don't know. Let it for sure. I truly don't know any two more. What do they do? I don't know, let it be yesterday. There you go. There's a lot. There's literally hundreds and hundreds of them.

There are a lot of them. All right, so, Siri, what do you think? Well, I see I don't know what the Beatles musical history was like. Did they sound the same the whole time? Probably not. No, they did not. They famously did it. They famously did it?

Okay, I'm gonna trust Sam then. I'm gonna say the Beatles, the group. Well, the algorithm was designed by scientists who had previously developed ways to study whale communication. Their study looked at 11 songs to get the algorithm to compare various Beatles albums and essentially learn the chronological order of the albums based on the audio. And the group also repeated this experiment with other bands like Queen you to ABBA and

tears for fears Oh, I totally believe that that is something an algorithm can learn you can just tell a later bad album by an artist boo Oh, yeah, but sometimes they get better Tom, I think you've done it Sometimes it's just sometimes they look in there like the Beatles did it. Never a rookie mistake. Yeah, the Beatles did it. How much acid are you doing?

All right, next. Scientists wanted to measure how fibrocopic cables can be used to measure acoustic signals. And these signals are generally limited to sounds that are nearby or loud. So to test these signals, did scientists one measure the sound of an emerging cicada brood or two play a recording of fans cheering the Beatles?

I feel like this has to be a cicada. There have been more cicada broods around since fiber optic cables were around. Yeah, but you also know that scientists are total idiots and are like, how do we get a high pitched noise? Oh, I don't know what the beetle's thing is. Yeah, but scientists are also dorks and I feel like on hand would be a cicada brood hatching more readily than fans of the beetle screaming.

So I'm gonna say cicada. I'm gonna say cicada too. Also, because fiber optic cables are just around and cicadas are just around and the beetles, you'd have to bring it to the cable. You have to look for them. That's true. Well, fiber optic cables can be used as a sensor

for a number of things through a technology called distributed fiber optic sensing. With this technique, scientists can look at how small imperfections or disturbances in the fiber cable cause tiny bits of an optical pulse to bounce backward toward the source The disturbances include acoustic pressure waves and by looking at back-scattered light Scientists can calculate different aspects of the disturbance in the cable including the volume and frequency of the sound which is

Wild can they hear what I'm talking about if I'm walking past a fiber optic cable So using fiber optic cable scientists were able to detect the buzzing of Brood X in the summer of 2021, reporting signals similar to what traditional audio sensors reported. They could also see the peak frequency of the buzzing change alongside the temperature. These results indicate fiber optic sensing

could be a useful way to detect the prevalence and existence of certain insects in areas. Great. That's what I always wanted to know. Well, you know, there's like, it's hard to do insect censuses. Nobody's like sending in the data on the apps. There's 50 ants over there. Great. Yeah, exactly. Well, and there's so many like solitary bees and wasps and everything just digging in the ground.

Maybe I don't want to know how many. If the fiber optic cables tell us that they're just like fewer and fewer crickets every year, then we'll have that data and we can all just cry and feel like, well, there's nothing I can friggin do about it. I guess it's nice to know another bad fact. Sorry. Oh no. A bad fact you just made up, kind of of right? It's true. The crickets might

be fine. You're right. You just want to be sad. There's enough bad about the world we don't need to catastrophize the crickets. That's what my therapist told me. Round number three. Scientists track the behavior of female flies in response to the music of one of these groups. Were the scientists curious? One about how the flies use cicada songs to guide their own mating, or two, were they observing how music from the beetles impacts memory formation in flies? Well, I know there was some study at some point that a song helped with mosquito repellent or something like that.

I don't remember if it was true or not or if it was apocryphal, but playing loud music over a speaker of a specific genre means it's like a mosquito repellent, which could either be the basis of a lie for this fact. True. Or mean that bugs love to groove also. I don't think flies are concerning themselves

with what cicadas are doing though. And I think learning about memory formation in them is more useful. So the beetles. Sam's beetle boy. I'm gonna say cicadas, just to be different. You mean that or? No, I truly don't know. It's done.

It's done. It's done. I've chosen. So this is a parasitic species of fly and the females of the species will deposit their young into cicadas so that their young can feed on the cicadas. So that's why the flies are concerning themselves with cicadas.

While it was known that the female flies were drawn to cicada songs, less was known about how the male flies responded. But in 2016, a scientist reported that he had put them to the test by setting up speakers that played audio of host cicadas and then seeing how the male and female flies responded. They found that both female and male flies

were drawn to the calls and they would show up there to mate, demonstrating that both male and female flies used the cicada songs to guide them. And they don't care about the beetles. I guess that makes sense. Yeah. Round number four. To describe the way the discovery of new drugs

has become slower and more expensive over time, scientists described what they called Aeroom's law, which is connected to four main causes. Is one of those observations. One, the periodical cicada emergence problem, which describes the need for long periods of quiet research before a discovery can emerge. Or two, the better than the Beatles problem,

which describes how new drugs will need to be able to compete with past major successes. Man, both of those sound legit to me. Those do sound so real. What would Aeroom say? Yeah. What does he care about? Does he care about the Beatles?

Does he care about cicadas? I feel like it's cicadas again. You gotta take a little nap before you have a discovery. That's how I feel more intensely in my life. I gotta rest. Yeah. I feel like if you were worried about really blowing the lid off of it every single time you invented a drug, you wouldn't get into inventing drugs. Is that what we're talking about? Inventing

drugs for that one? Yeah. I think you'd be a little more humble. I think you'd take a little more naps, and I think it would be the cicada one. Well, in 2012, a group of scientists wrote an opinion for Nature Review's drug discovery titled Diagnosing the Decline in Pharmaceutical R&D Efficiency, where they introduced the idea of Aeroom's Law. It's Moore's Law spelled backward, so if you were wondering where that came from. I was going to say, it sounds like a wizard. What is Aeroom care about? He cares about his orb and that's all.

And there's a bunch of different causes, but one of them is indeed the better than the Beatles problem, which is about the fact that drugs being introduced today are gonna have to compete against the hits, the biggest hits we've had in the past. For example, the generic Lipitor is cheap, it's successful, it lowers cholesterol,

which makes it hard to replace it with any new kind of cholesterol lowering drugs. The same thing goes for common drugs like aspirin and ibuprofen. Like you just have to be better than the hits and it's hard to be better than the hits. There's others though. There's the cautious regulator problem, the throw money at it tendency, and the basic research brute force bias. So you can go read about those on Wikipedia. Interesting. Wow. Yeah. It go read about those on Wikipedia. Interesting. Well. Yeah.

It's hard to beat the hits. Hard to beat those hits. Hard to beat those hits until you get a GLP-1 inhibitor and then it's easy to beat the hits. You become the largest company in Europe. Congratulations to Novo Nordisk. Sam got two points, Sarah's got three. Next up we're gonna take another short break. Then we'll be back for the fact off.

["The Last of Us Theme"] Welcome back, everybody. Now it's time to get ready for the fact-off. Our panelists have brought science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind, and after they've presented their facts, I will judge them and award Hank Bucks to the most mind-blowing fact. But to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question. The emergence of periodical cicadas can have a huge impact on the ecosystem through direct and indirect effects.

For example, birds apparently really love eating cicadas, which means that some of their other prey, like caterpillars, can thrive during a cicada emergence. Huh. One group of researchers tested this reprieve by using fake clay caterpillars to see how many of them were targeted by birds during a cicada emergence. And the researchers looked at their strike marks on the clay and found that during Brood

X's emergence in 2021, less than 10% of the clay caterpillars were struck during some weeks in June, which is when the adult cicadas were prevalent. So during 2020 and 2022, the non-emergence years, what was roughly the lowest percentage of clay caterpillars that were struck in a week versus the 10% that were struck in 2021? I always wonder how many animals are out there getting eaten. A lot. All of them? Like when you see a deer, how likely is that deer to get eaten? Well, it can't be all of them because then there would be no more. Well, but they all eventually get eaten, but they don't get eaten.

Yeah. And I think that, yeah, most deer probably, I don't know, die first and then get eaten, at least in town. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. at least in town. Yeah. Yeah. So I was like, I could really show my ass here and say like 80, and it could be 10. Or I could say 10, and it could be 80. There's no way for me to win, except if I say 50%.

OK. 50 is good. Yeah, 50 is good. It was also what I was going to say, because I had no freaking clue. 51 or 49, Sari. Let's say, no, I'm gonna, I'm not gonna price this right, Sam. I think less, I think like 40%.

40%, the actual answer is 25%, about 25%. They also found that in 2021, the population of actual non-clay caterpillars went up and that larger, more visible caterpillars seem to be surviving better than normal. Trade-off is that this created problems for trees because there were more caterpillars around to eat the leaves. Dang, you just can't win.

Cicada's just messing everything up. I want to know how they make little clay caterpillars look exactly like caterpillars. What they look like, yeah. That'd be very cute. Did they like make them... There's gotta be a picture. I think I found one. Oh yeah, there's a picture.

That's pretty good. I was gonna say it's not. It's just like green. It's 100% green. Or are those the strike marks? Those are the strike marks. Yeah, it's just a tube. It's just a tube. They just floored it.

That bird was probably so embarrassed. Yeah. Compared to like the actual plump caterpillar, slightly further down in the article, that looks like a juicy morsel. That green tube looks like a green tube. So that means Sari gets to go first. Like we just learned about, plenty of animals eat insects.

So a cicada emergence means it's time for a feast. We talked about birds crunching down. And there's also documentation of mammals like shrews, mice, and voles eating cicada nymphs and adults too. But since the year 2000 or so in northern Japan, another hungry critter was observed not only eating Lyrestes behometis cicadas,

but also digging up the nymphs in summertime before they emerge. And this critter is the brown bear. So brown bears are actually omnivores and eat all kinds of things from plants to insects, to animal carcasses. And even though Winnie the Pooh taught us that bears like to eat honey, a lot of the time when they go after social insects, they want to eat the nutritious protein rich larvae and bugs themselves.

So it's not too much of a stretch that they would want to eat a bunch of cicada nymphs, especially if birds think they're really plump and delicious too. But what's weird about it is the recency of this trend, at least in this bear population that's being studied. A paper published in 2019 compared bear scat from 1985 to 1986 and 2018 from the Shiratoko World Heritage Site

to see what bears have been eating and the differences seemed pretty stark. So the mid-1980s poop was from 56 samples and contained around 93% herbaceous plants with just 4% ants and 3% fruits, while the 2018 poop was from 60 samples and contained only around 49% herbaceous plants. And it was 25% ants, 14% cicada nymphs, 8% litter and pebbles. So like trash and 3% deer. So like ants, that's a crazy amount of ants.

A lot of ants. Yeah. This is a cicada fact, but a lot of ants. Yeah, I did. I did know that that bears love ants, but that's a lot of ants. Yeah, I did know that bears love ants, but that's a lot of ants. The bugs have increased so much in the past, whatever, 30, 40 years. And the authors guess that maybe Cicada deer are eating all of the plants that the bears were eating in the 1980s, so now they have to look for food in other places. And or at some point, bears stumbled upon yummy cicada nymphs when they were digging for ants or other things. And now digging for them is a socially learned

behavior taught from mothers to cubs. And what's maybe a little weirder is that a 2021 study from the same team found that cicadas were breeding and bears were digging for them, mostly in human planted parts of the Shiratoko Forest, which has been going on since around 1970 to restore the forest from no longer used farmland. It was happening less frequently in the natural trees that had been left relatively undisturbed. These trees that are growing and have cicadas and bears digging have stunted growth or more limited growth, and the root biomass was lower. For some reason, the cicadas are more prevalent in these reforested areas and bears are eating

them, which is also affecting the trees that we've been trying to nurture. All of this is happening in one North Japanese ecosystem where there happen to be a lot of brown bears. We've just been studying them for decades. Otherwise, we might not have noticed. So I guess the lesson of this fact is that ecosystems are really interconnected, but there's so much we don't know when it comes to our conservation efforts. Like you plant a tree and the cicadas come and the bears eat them. And then your trees aren't planted anymore. And it's just nature. Also, just save every piece of poop you find for 30 years. Because I mean, it'd be better if we have more, because then we could really see the ramp up or down

or if there's like spikes of cicada from year to year. But we only we just got the it sounded like we just had the two poops. Yeah, we have the two two clusters of poops when people are interested in. Yes, not just not just the two poops, but like 50ish, 50 to 60 poops from two points in time. That's a lot of that's plenty of poops. There's a lot of poop, but we don't have them for every year. It'd be a lot better if we had 50 to 60 poops

from every single year. Kind of suspicious when we have them from those two years. What was going on? Maybe we have them from all the years, but they don't want to destroy the poops just for this one study, like a moon rock. They're a valuable precious resource. The ancient, the poops just for this one study, like a moon rock. They're a valuable, precious resource. The ancient the poops from the 80s.

That particular year was a bad vintage for bears. Well, I love I love that we can tell just by looking at poops. What was what was in a bear's diet? That specifically. Yes, those crunchy bits, you know, that's probably what our poop would look like if we ate a bunch of cicadas too. Just see the crunchy bits and go, well, there they are. That's what I always say.

Well I guess I guess I did that again. Yeah. Okay, Samuel Schultz. In a world where a few things are certain, there is one thing that you can depend on. If you drink a bunch of water, you're gonna have to take a whiz. This applies to basically every living thing from the humble ant to the mighty blue whale.

However, though peeing is a universal truth, the way different animals do it is all over the place. Birds and lizards don't have specialized urinary tracts, so their pee comes out with their poop in a goopy mess from their cloaca. Fish do have a separate pee hole, but they live in water, so you don't really gotta think about fish being too much. They just put it right back where they got it. Mammals famously tend to shoot their pee out in a fun stream, and the lowly bug tends to do it pretty boring style, just sort of squeezing out a little droplet because they're so tiny

So you might assume that cicadas fall into this boring droplet based peeing category But I wouldn't be talking about them if they did cicadas diet consists of as we've mentioned xylem sucked out of trees and xylem is about 95% water so they need to drink about 300 times their body weight every day to get the nutrients that they need. And that means these little fools have got to pee all the dang time. And when you have to pee that bad, a tiny little drop ain't gonna do it. Instead, in a paper published in March 2024, scientists revealed that cicadas, much like

mammals, pee in a stream, even though they're just little guys. Or, as the paper put it, cicadas form fluidic jets using some of the smallest known orifices, averaging 350 micro-meters. So they have a tiny little pee hole. So that makes cicadas among the smallest animals to pee in a stream alongside bumblebees and butterflies. And I'm picturing all those guys standing at a urinal. Isn't that fun?

Isn't that funny? The researchers think that cicadas shoot pee instead of just do droplets, mostly because they just have a massive amount of xylem to process every day. So I think that they just need to be able to get rid of more water than your average bug. But also, xylem is energy inefficient. And because of the physics of how cicadas are put together and like the larger size of their pee hole compared to other bugs, it's small,

but other bugs are smaller. It's more energy efficient to shoot the pee for some reason than it is to squeeze out a droplet. The scientists also made a really fun chart comparing cicadas pee stream strength relative to size to various mammals. And they mostly come up really short compared to like dogs and people and cows. But bugs are new to peeing, so maybe they'll get there with practice.

But some cicadas are a little bit better at peeing than certain species of rats and bats. What I learned is that bats are really bad at peeing. It just dribbles out of them. They don't have any. There's no strength to their stream. They're upside down. That's true. Well, yeah, they should shoot So that's gonna make it to their freaking get in their nose is mouth So the question is of course can a cicada fly over you and whiz on your head

I'm not positive but I bet they can. So if you're living somewhere. I mostly do it while they're laying down. But I guess if you could do it while you're just standing there, you could do it while flying. You might want to pack an umbrella despite what Hank just said. Be careful. I went to go look at the website that has this video. And it seems that not all cicadas do it this way. Some of them form a little droplet and then fling the drop off really hard. Yeah, there's like a different kind of bug too that also fling, yeah, there's a flinging option as well. They like fling the drop, which is great

because they don't want it to land right by them, I guess. But yes, the peeing videos are amazing. The peeing videos. And these scientists at Georgia Tech have really got their macro lens focused on it on the hole Tiny hole I wrote this before I watched the video and I was like you couldn't be that cool And then I watched and I was like they just take a big piss They sure do

They really do Sam was behind by one coming into this, but I'm feeling like, I don't know. Bug pee is a great fact. Poop is also good. Is poop is also good. And it's, I mean, if it was definitely a learned social behavior, but it's just maybe, it's just maybe they don't have access to the good things because of the Sikadir

or whatever you said. And this is the problem with being Ceri. I feel like Ceri is oftentimes your facts are a little less good because you're a little more sort of like have a stronger, what is it called? Like alliance with the truth than Sam likes. Oh, come on.

Oh, come on. Yeah, research. But I'm going to give it to Sam because I like it. The secret is there aren't that many cicada facts out there. Yeah, it's true. We really scraped the bottom of the barrel for them. Sam found the good, recent study of the piss. They're so weird that all their weirdness is very apparent and everybody knows that.

Yeah, we already know that. And they're really cool. But it is like, well, what the heck? What else do we write about? So Sam, I'm going to give you just a bunch of points and you're going to beat Ceri. Congratulations to Team P on your win today. I know. It's time to ask the science couch where we ask a listener question to our couch of

finely honed scientific minds Steph loves to sleep on Twitter asked Evolutionarily speaking why are they so loud are they not affected by the loudness? Oh, that's an interesting question. No, I assume they are affected by the loudness in that when they hear it. It makes them Want to have cicada sex? Horny? I don't actually know if that's why they do it, but why else would they? It is the, I was gonna say the horn.

That's not the way to describe it. No. They are horny little fellas because it is the males that make the really, really loud noises. And then the females are like, good job. Yeah, I think they do some like gentle wing clicks or whatnot, but the cacophonous roar of cicada noises are from the males.

I don't think we know why evolutionarily they are so loud. We know the mechanisms by which they are so loud, which I guess is, I don't know, splitting hairs. Again, the... That is two different things. You know, like knowing how something does something versus the why. But I mean, in general, one would assume

that females are drawn toward the sound of male cicadas. And so if you make the sound louder, then a female will arrive at your doorstep and then your babies will be louder. Like it's like being selected for by evolution. Yes. Wouldn't be, I mean, like that's just like the basic guess that I'm sure all scientists roughly have, but it's hard to test for.

And cicadas, their whole emergence thing, emerging all at the same time, is that there are a bunch of them all at once. And so you're competing with a lot of other sounds, a lot of other males. If your sound stands out from that crowd, somehow a female will be drawn to you. And then- If it was me, I'd just come out on the off year and be like, yeah.

You have to hope that there was one lady that also came out on the off year. Otherwise it'd be screaming into the void. But the, I guess the how they are so loud, we talked about one of them, the timbal organ, which is kind of on their abdomen. The Nature Museum of the Chicago Academy of the Sciences described it as a bendy straw, which I think is kind of good of like squeezing a bendy straw in and out. I'm not sure I like stared at a lot of papers

trying to figure it out. It seems to me based on where the muscles are in the cicada body, it's more like sucking in your stomach a little bit, like you tense inward, and then the ribs on the timbrel kind of buckle in, and it's that action as opposed to like a stretching and compacting.

They're not rubbing nothing against anything else? So I don't know, I think it's like, it's either like a buckling I think. I think it's going from concave to like a V shape is how the papers describe it. So could be some rubbing, could be some buckling, either way the timbrel, the sounds radiate outwards. And we've noticed that as these tymbal organs make sound,

there are a couple ways that that sound gets amplified. There are plate-like structures on the abdomen that can resonate or modify the frequency of those clicks, those really rapid clicks that turn into the song. There are abdominal air sacs that make the entire abdomen cavity kind of like increase the intensity. And the other thing that is weird with male cicadas is that their tympana,

which are the thin membranes on their abdomen that functionally act like their ear drums, also get pulled in and kind of like crinkle up. And there's something about their ear drums that also echoes and resonates the sound alongside the air sacs and whatnot. And so instead of blasting out their own eardrums, they get kind of crinkled up. They help amplify the sound outward, but presumably they're not detecting sound at that time. Something about the way auditory signals are processed gets cut off while they're making

this sound so that they're not making this like really, really loud yelling and blowing out their own eardrums. They're just like calling out to the females that exist in the world. There's this protective mechanism and I think it was last described by someone in 1954 of like suggesting that this is like how these eardrum drums work and how this production mechanism works. So I think it's a very open-ended question of like how their ear drums aren't damaged. We know that they aren't, we know that they crinkle a little bit.

We think that they're related, but no one's really dug deep into it. And maybe it's a hard question to answer. And we know they can hear otherwise, like a male's euda? Yeah. Okay. And we know they can hear otherwise because of this like clicking, yelling communication, singing

communication between males and females. So stuff loves to sleep had like a sort of correct intuition here that they're very loud and wouldn't that affect them? Wouldn't that be like unpleasant to be that loud all of the time? But they have a way of protecting themselves. Yes. Yeah. It is a correct question that scientists are also asking. And the best guess we have

is that they protect themselves somehow. Besides that timbal organ, there are a couple cicadas. Some of them use stridulation, which is kind of like how crickets or grasshoppers work, which is rubbing one body part against another body part to make a noise. So they generally use like a wing or back area, They have ridges and rub that against each other. Then there's also crepitation, which is a very few number of species of cicadas. They're often called mute cicadas, but this is snapping wings together, banging their wings on the trees themselves to produce sound. I'm sure if you heard the different sounds of the different cicadas, I didn't have sound clips of all of them. They're probably slightly

different, but apparently they're all about equally loud. So there is something unifying in cicadas that they are, regardless of how they make the sounds, they're loud boys and they gotta woo the ladies that way. Can you imagine trying to podcast while these guys are going on? Good thing they don't live where they are.

Could be a nice ambiance for this episode, but cut together horribly. I do find it very relaxing. When it's far enough away, it is kind of a nice sound. I don't think I've ever heard them. I don't think I've ever lived in a place. What? Sure you have. I lived in Chicago when a bunch of them came out and it was crazy. It was kind of fucking annoying. I grew up in Florida, so it was always happening all the time. I don't know. I didn't even

realize. I thought they were everywhere. I don't think Massachusetts, but maybe I'm... Gotta go out, gotta go listenin'. Yeah, maybe you're just not an outside person. I go on little walks every day around the same park. Good, good, good. We're doing a new thing this episode. For our listeners on Patreon,

we're answering a bonus Science Couch question. Sam, what is the second question? FluteSalute on YouTube asked, Why do non-annual cicadas only emerge after prime numbers of years? If you want to hear the answer to that question, or maybe you did because you're a patron, as well as enjoy all of the new episodes totally ad-free, head over to our— Oh my gosh, all of our episodes? All of our new episodes totally ad-free, head over to our—oh my gosh, all of our episodes? All of our new episodes totally ad-free? Oh my gosh. I didn't know what was happening. It's happening!

You can go over to our Patreon. That's patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents. At our $8 a month tier, you get new episodes ad-free and extended shenanigans as we answer a bonus Science Couch question every episode. You'll also get a link to join our private Discord server and maybe also some goodies in the future. Who knows? Our patrons are the best and we are so grateful for their support of the show. Also, I learned a bunch from that Science Couch question

and I feel bad that I'm not showing it with everybody, but I guess that's how it works. It's capitalism, baby. If you wanna ask the Science Couch work question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents or check out our YouTube community tab where we'll send out topics for upcoming episodes every week or join us on the SciShow Tangents Patreon, ask us on our Discord. Thank you to Corey on Discord and at Peyton Rifley on Twitter and everybody else who asked

us your questions for this episode. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's super easy to do that. First, you go to patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents. As we said, you can become a patron. Thank you very much to Liss Aker for their support. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen, which helps us know what you like about the show and helps other people find us.

And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Jess Stempert. Our associate producer is Eve Schmidt. Our editor is Seth Glicksman. Our social media organizer is Julia Buzz-Bazile.

Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our executive producers are Nicole Sling and me, Hank Green. And of course, we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you, and remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But, one more thing. Instead of poop, cicadas excrete a sort of anal liquid. And while cicadas are still in their nymph stage, their anal liquid contains mucopolysaccharides, which are sugar molecules that are found in mucus. They use the sticky anal liquid to reinforce the walls of their underground burrows, clean themselves.

They make their houses out of it. Yeah, and to adhere their exoskeletons onto trees as their adult form bursts out. This is so handy. But this adult form has a different but their excretory glands stop making the mucus and their anal liquid doesn't work like glue anymore. That's too bad. They just shoot it out in the pee streams. I feel like that was such a ripoff if I couldn't make my house with my poop anymore.

Yeah, they're like, they're like, oh, it is, I'm moving out. I've got to get out. I've got to be a man. That's kid stuff. You real adult. Yeah, I'm not a kid anymore. I don't build my house out of anal mucus. I'm a real man. Just fly around and pee on people. Yeah, I'm not a kid anymore. I don't build my house out of anal mucus. I'm a real man.

Just fly around and pee on people. Yeah. Just take a big whiz everywhere. Yeah. And you're in your Honda Civic because you got a driver's license. That's what it is. 17 freaking years old. That's true. They can at least get their learner's permit in most states.