Speaker 1: You're listening to an airwave media podcast.
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Speaker 3: airwave media family, home of such shows as The Daily
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Speaker 3: at advertisedcast dot com. Human beings have a strange relationship
Speaker 3: with swamps. For much of history, cultures have viewed swamps
Speaker 3: as undesirable or even dangerous wastes of potential farmland. Real
Speaker 3: estate built on drain. Swamplant exists around the world, and
Speaker 3: until the latter third of the twentieth century, not many
Speaker 3: tears were shed over the departure of this kind of murky, dank,
Speaker 3: insect and reptile filled landscape. In the United States, our
Speaker 3: national capital was literally built by draining swampland, and it's
Speaker 3: a fairly recent thing for enough concern to collogists to
Speaker 3: try and get us to realize how vital and important
Speaker 3: these habitats actually are. Their campaign even gets down to
Speaker 3: language management, as marketing people have striven to get folks
Speaker 3: to say wetlands preferentially over swamp because so many people
Speaker 3: instinctively either fear, hate, or disregard such places without thought.
Speaker 3: And of course it didn't stop there. We also populated
Speaker 3: our swamps with monsters, and we still do. Cryptid author
Speaker 3: Lyle Blackburn has a whole book dedicated to swamp cryptis
Speaker 3: called Sinister Swamps, Monsters and Mysteries. From the Mayre, from
Speaker 3: Boggy Creek's falk Monster to the Honey Island swamp monster
Speaker 3: to the lizardmen of Skapeo or swamp folks see things
Speaker 3: in those dark and foreboding waters, the vines, the shadows,
Speaker 3: the unrecognized animal sounds, the water so black you can't
Speaker 3: see more than a foot down. Our minds filled those
Speaker 3: shadows and voids with sinister creatures, crawling death in the
Speaker 3: form of real animals like snakes and alligators, And where
Speaker 3: real creatures aren't enough, we make up new things, like
Speaker 3: humanoid swamp monsters of fiction that began in the nineteen
Speaker 3: forties with Theodore Sturgeon's incredible short story It. It was
Speaker 3: the inspiration for the heap for swamp Thing and eventually
Speaker 3: man Thing. Comic books answer to a reading public's desperate
Speaker 3: need for more swamp monsters. But it turns out that
Speaker 3: it wasn't humanoid plant monsters, or oversized reptiles or mandating vines,
Speaker 3: and not even quicksand that was the real danger in
Speaker 3: all those swamps. It was something smaller, something folks forever
Speaker 3: had thought was merely an annoyance, but it was something
Speaker 3: we couldn't escape, and it wanted to drink our blood.
Speaker 3: There's hardly a place on Earth where you could truly
Speaker 3: hide from this monster. It's actually quite unlike anything we've
Speaker 3: ever seen before.
Speaker 2: A giant, hairy creature party parts.
Speaker 4: In Luckness, a twenty four mile long bottomless lake in
Speaker 4: the Highlands of Scotland, in the creature known as the
Speaker 4: Luckness Monster.
Speaker 2: Monster tal.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. I'm
Speaker 3: Blake Smith and I'm Karen Stolsner. It's hard to believe
Speaker 3: just how recently mankind has realized the danger of the mosquito.
Speaker 3: These little insects are hands down the most dangerous animal
Speaker 3: known to man by now. Most people know that the
Speaker 3: primary disease vector for malaria, but that's not the only
Speaker 3: dangerous thing they carry. As we'll hear in this interview,
Speaker 3: when colonialism was the primary driver of the wealth of
Speaker 3: the British Empire. One huge problem that they struggled with
Speaker 3: was that their colonists kept coming down with tropical infections.
Speaker 3: Malaria in particular was devastating. A remedy for the disease
Speaker 3: came from the bark of a tree, which had been
Speaker 3: used by indigenous healers for hundreds of years. While this
Speaker 3: same remedy was used by the Europeans, it was not
Speaker 3: well understood and was the subject of intense scientific research.
Speaker 3: The particular substance in the bark was isolated chemically in
Speaker 3: eighteen twenty by two French chemists, but there was a
Speaker 3: tremendous push to find a way to create this substance
Speaker 3: artificially and to not need to rely on the slow
Speaker 3: life cycle of a tree in order to treat the
Speaker 3: many colonists who had no immunity to this terrible disease.
Speaker 3: That substance we now know is quinine. It is still
Speaker 3: used in malaria treatment today, but because it is very bitter,
Speaker 3: it was usually mixed with other liquids, and the British
Speaker 3: in particular came to mix it with tonic water and
Speaker 3: gin and perhaps a little on the nose. For the Brits,
Speaker 3: a bit of lime juice so even if you live
Speaker 3: in an area with no malaria, you've probably encountered quinine.
Speaker 3: I mention all this because something pretty amazing happened in
Speaker 3: that drive to find a synthetic malaria treatment. A nineteen
Speaker 3: year old chemistry student named William Perkin came home on
Speaker 3: a school holiday and decided to try and synthesize quinine
Speaker 3: from coal tar. This was a bold and perhaps ridiculous attempt,
Speaker 3: given his youth and inexperience, and as you might expect,
Speaker 3: the experiment was a complete failure. But when he went
Speaker 3: to clean up his equipment, he found he'd made a
Speaker 3: big mess, a big, absurdly purple mess. His failed attempt
Speaker 3: to make quinin had produced the first synthetic color, and
Speaker 3: one that was immediately and obviously valuable. Up until this point,
Speaker 3: purple was primarily created through a very time consuming, an
Speaker 3: expensive process that involved killing a particular kind of mollusk.
Speaker 3: With Perkins's new process, a bright, long lasting dye had
Speaker 3: been created, and he'd made his fortune. Not only that,
Speaker 3: but his discovery kicked off to the synthetic color industry
Speaker 3: that would be picked up by the German chemists and
Speaker 3: would literally change the way the world looks that in
Speaker 3: turn allowed the new science of color microscopy, improving the
Speaker 3: ability to see detail in microscopic samples by applying dyes
Speaker 3: to reach new insights and see amazing new details, which
Speaker 3: in turn led to an even more amazing discovery when
Speaker 3: it was found out that these dyes would sometimes kill
Speaker 3: some nasty microbes and leave other cells undamaged, which kicked
Speaker 3: off a new science we now call chemotherapy. All of
Speaker 3: this happens, and people still didn't know what was causing malaria.
Speaker 3: It wasn't until the very late eighteen hundreds, the last
Speaker 3: couple of decades, that convergent discoveries concluded that there was
Speaker 3: a parasite at the root of the disease and that
Speaker 3: the mosquito was what was spreading the parasite. It's been
Speaker 3: a little more than a century that we've known about
Speaker 3: how dangerous mosquitoes are, and in that time a huge
Speaker 3: number of quack cures, wacky theories, and dubious products have
Speaker 3: tried to alleviate the mosquito problem. So where do we
Speaker 3: stand today? How dangerous are these creatures now? Is there
Speaker 3: anything we can do to protect ourselves? Stick around and
Speaker 3: find out, as we're joined by doctor Louisa Messenger, who
Speaker 3: knows quite a bit about the world's most dangerous animal, monstrutal.
Speaker 4: So my name is doctor Louisa Messenger. I'm currently an
Speaker 4: assistant professor in the School of Public Health at the
Speaker 4: University of Nevada in Las Vegas. Now, I'm also the
Speaker 4: co director of the Powasitology and Vector Biology Laboetry. But
Speaker 4: my specialties are I'm a medical entomologist and parasitologist, and
Speaker 4: I spend most of my time working on improving methods
Speaker 4: of control and surveillance of insect born diseases, both regionally
Speaker 4: here in the United States as well as worldwide.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for coming on the show. And
Speaker 1: the reason that I invited you on was that, I
Speaker 1: guess my son and I go for a walk every
Speaker 1: day it's summertime here in Denver, and we are just
Speaker 1: getting eaten alive by mozzies as we call them in Australia.
Speaker 1: But so I was just thinking about mosquitos in terms
Speaker 1: of being monstrous because they drink blood and because they bite,
Speaker 1: and they carry diseases like malaria, and so I just
Speaker 1: looked up mosquito experts and you kept coming up and
Speaker 1: I read the article that the Washington Post had where
Speaker 1: they spoke with you about this topic. So yeah, we
Speaker 1: wanted to bring you on the show. And as a
Speaker 1: first question, could you tell us some interesting information about
Speaker 1: the biology of mosquitos, So maybe what they eat, although
Speaker 1: we know that to some extent, but there are some
Speaker 1: surprises there too, I guess, and describe them, and some
Speaker 1: info about their distribution as well.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, well, you're not wrong. Mosquitoes definitely are monsters. One
Speaker 4: of the things I always ask my students when we
Speaker 4: first start talking about mosquitoes is what's the most dangerous
Speaker 4: animal on.
Speaker 2: The planet to humans?
Speaker 4: And a lot of the times I'll say sharks, you know, lions,
Speaker 4: bear attacks, or even other humans. But statistically it's the mosquito.
Speaker 4: The female mosquito kills them as humans every year. So
Speaker 4: you're definitely not wrong about them being monstrous. So the
Speaker 4: words of mosquito, and basically mosquitoes are just a family
Speaker 4: of small flying insects. There's about three six hundred species.
Speaker 4: But the word mosquito itself, it's Spanish or Portuguese, it
Speaker 4: just means a little fly, so musca and then ito
Speaker 4: means little fly.
Speaker 2: That's why we call them mosquitos. You're not wrong, oh yeah.
Speaker 4: About them being especially prevalent in the summer. But I
Speaker 4: guess the bad news is that mosquitoes occur all over
Speaker 4: the planet. There's only a very few number of isolated
Speaker 4: islands and Antarctica where we don't get mosquitoes. We get
Speaker 4: them down at sea level, you get them at elevations
Speaker 4: of over five thousand meters. Mosquitoes are really adaptable for a.
Speaker 2: Very broad range of environments.
Speaker 4: Most of the time we think about them in terms
Speaker 4: of the tropics and a lot of disease when it's
Speaker 4: hot and humid, but you also get plenty of mosquitos
Speaker 4: in deserts, in the Arctic, tundra, salt marshes, different ocean
Speaker 4: and tidal zones as well. So I guess that's the
Speaker 4: bad news is there's very few places on the planet
Speaker 4: that you can go to escape mosquitoes. And in terms
Speaker 4: of their actual diet. So it's the female. She's the culprit.
Speaker 4: She's the one who is adapted for blood feeding, and
Speaker 4: now she takes a blood meal approximately every three days,
Speaker 4: and every three days she's going to digest that blood
Speaker 4: using the nutrients to grow eggs.
Speaker 2: And then she's going to lay those eggs, and.
Speaker 4: She's going to do that for about three to four weeks,
Speaker 4: depending on the species. The male mosquitos their only role
Speaker 4: is to mate with the female once she emerges as
Speaker 4: an adult, and then they'll just sugar feed for the
Speaker 4: rest of.
Speaker 2: Their life cycle. The females will also take sugar.
Speaker 4: This is usually from plants, from flowers, from other vegetation,
Speaker 4: but she really needs that blood meal regularly to be
Speaker 4: able to survive and to reproduce the next generation.
Speaker 1: My nine year old son just told me that I
Speaker 1: had no idea. I don't know how he found out
Speaker 1: about that either, but yeah, that was news to me
Speaker 1: after getting bitten for decades and just not knowing it
Speaker 1: was the female the species that did that.
Speaker 3: Well, that's interesting is that is the blood meal particularly
Speaker 3: useful because of like the protein content or something else
Speaker 3: about it, as opposed to I didn't actually know they
Speaker 3: did sugar content. That makes sense. I was literally just
Speaker 3: telling my kids the other day. Almost every life form
Speaker 3: can enjoy sugar they need to, but other stuff not
Speaker 3: so much.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, it's because to produce eggs, it's very energetically expensive
Speaker 4: for a female mosquito I mean it's the same for
Speaker 4: reproduction in almost all organisms.
Speaker 2: It takes quite a lot of.
Speaker 4: Nutrients and energy to produce the next generation, and so
Speaker 4: she will digest the proteins and the components of the
Speaker 4: blood to produce vitilogenin it's a type of egg yolk
Speaker 4: that she then produces her eggs with.
Speaker 2: She will take.
Speaker 4: Sugar though, because that's important for flight, for dispersal, for
Speaker 4: matine as well, So she does need other types of
Speaker 4: energy resources, but that loo's crucial for egg production.
Speaker 3: Well, if you don't mind, another follow up this is,
Speaker 3: have you have there been experiments done, like if you
Speaker 3: provide them with plenty of protein, like a liquid diet,
Speaker 3: would they still prefer blood or would they not need
Speaker 3: it therefore not seek it.
Speaker 2: That's a great question.
Speaker 4: I don't know to my knowledge off the top of
Speaker 4: my head, but they have so evolutionarily adapted for blood feeding.
Speaker 2: I would be surprised.
Speaker 4: I think that's still always going to seek out At
Speaker 4: least the female mosquitos are going to seek out blood
Speaker 4: as that ultimate sort of nutrient.
Speaker 3: Rich evolution is hard to fight.
Speaker 4: And her mouth parts are so well adapted, essentially like
Speaker 4: a hypodermic syringe, the perbosters, her mouth parts, they're just
Speaker 4: perfect for blood feeding. Again, that just reflects many millennia
Speaker 4: of evolution. So, like you said, it's hard to fight that.
Speaker 3: So they're vectors for lots of diseases. Now, my understanding
Speaker 3: is that this is actually, all things considered a relatively
Speaker 3: new discovery, maybe like the eighteen nineties early nineteen hundreds
Speaker 3: that but what diseases do they carry? And I guess
Speaker 3: I'm curious. It's like how the world adapted to finding
Speaker 3: out this is such an important vector for these diseases.
Speaker 4: I guess it depends where you are in the world,
Speaker 4: will depend exactly what mosquito disease you're most at risk at.
Speaker 4: In terms of the statistics and in terms of human health,
Speaker 4: malaria really is the number one killer in terms of
Speaker 4: mosquito borne diseases because it's an acute infection and it
Speaker 4: can be fatal very quickly. In fact, the very worrying
Speaker 4: statistic we all throw around a lot is that a
Speaker 4: child under the age of five dies of malaria every minute.
Speaker 2: So there's more than six thousand deaths.
Speaker 4: From malaria and two hundred and forty nine million cases
Speaker 4: worldwide now historically, though malaria has been a global issue.
Speaker 4: It's largely concentrated now in parts of Sub Saharan Africa
Speaker 4: and small pockets in parts of the world like Venezuela,
Speaker 4: Papua New Guinea, and India. But we used to have
Speaker 4: malaria here in the United States up until the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 4: That's the very reason that the CDC exists in Atlanta
Speaker 4: was to try to combat and eventually eliminate malaria. But
Speaker 4: in places that malaria isn't the predominant mosquito borne disease,
Speaker 4: we've got plenty of others. So malaria is a type
Speaker 4: of parasite. But then the ones that we're dealing with
Speaker 4: globally and also in the United.
Speaker 2: States are arboviruses.
Speaker 4: So these are viruses that are transmitted by mosquitoes species
Speaker 4: than the ones that transmit malaria. And you'll have heard
Speaker 4: of these. These are like West Nile Dengi virus. We
Speaker 4: may remember the Zeca virus in twenty sixteen, chicken.
Speaker 2: Gunya yellow fever.
Speaker 4: There's plenty of these viral infections which are quite difficult
Speaker 4: to diagnose. A lot of them don't necessarily have a
Speaker 4: vaccine or any good treatment options. But they can be
Speaker 4: quite severe and sometimes fatal as well.
Speaker 1: So you mentioned different species, and in the articles where
Speaker 1: you were interviewed, you'd also mentioned it a new species,
Speaker 1: So that's a worrying thing. Can you tell us about
Speaker 1: this new species of mosquito?
Speaker 4: So that's only a new species here where we're based
Speaker 4: in Las Vegas, In Nevada, we're basically a desert and
Speaker 4: historically haven't had as many populations of mosquitoes and species
Speaker 4: of mosquitoes as we do now. But what I was
Speaker 4: referring to is Adies egypti, which is spread all across
Speaker 4: the tropics and subtropics, and it's the major vector of
Speaker 4: chicken gunya zeka yellow fever as well.
Speaker 2: We're concerned about it here because.
Speaker 4: It invaded the Las Vegas area in twenty seventeen. Initially
Speaker 4: it was just reproducing in maybe five or six ZIP codes,
Speaker 4: but last year it became explosive and it spread all
Speaker 4: across the valley to more than forty six ZIP codes,
Speaker 4: and we're trying to understand exactly what events triggered that,
Speaker 4: and now, unfortunately the community are being bitten during the
Speaker 4: day's a day biting mosquito and a lot of us
Speaker 4: react quite badly to it as well. You'll get quite
Speaker 4: nasty welts. It's unpleasant. It's not transmitting any disease here
Speaker 4: in Vegas that we know about yet, but we have
Speaker 4: had DENGI in nearby Arizona quite recently, so we are
Speaker 4: concerned that because our mosquito species here are changing and
Speaker 4: adapting and spreading, that's also then going to change our
Speaker 4: risk of disease here as well. But dengis a eadies
Speaker 4: Egyptian about massive culprit worldwide. I don't know if you've
Speaker 4: been following in the news that there's been more than
Speaker 4: five million cases of dengy in Brazil already. Large parts
Speaker 4: of Central America and South America are like Peru, are
Speaker 4: also experiencing really severe outbreaks this year, and that's vectored
Speaker 4: by adies adipty. So while it's not necessarily causing disease
Speaker 4: in my back garden, yet we're worried about it, and
Speaker 4: then the rest of the world is already having to
Speaker 4: deal with this as an issue.
Speaker 3: You really surprise me because when I think about mosquitoes,
Speaker 3: I always think about the needing standing water. When I
Speaker 3: think about Vegas, I don't think about standing water. But
Speaker 3: it must be there somewhere.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 2: No, Well, that's the.
Speaker 4: Problem with adies agypty is it can breed in incredibly
Speaker 4: small containers. It breeds in artificial containers. It can be
Speaker 4: as small as the you know, cap on a bottle
Speaker 4: of Coca cola, for example. It lays her act she
Speaker 4: lays her eggs just above the water line, and then
Speaker 4: when the water rises, those eggs will then begin to hatch.
Speaker 4: Those eggs are also desiccation and drought resistance. You can
Speaker 4: eggs that have been around for nine plus months, and
Speaker 4: we do that quite frequently in our laboratory. But that
Speaker 4: makes it a perfect insect vector to spread all over
Speaker 4: the world. It needs such a small amount of water,
Speaker 4: and it can persist over winter or during periods where
Speaker 4: there isn't necessarily any available standing water. But unfortunately we
Speaker 4: do have plenty of artificial water bodies. We kind of
Speaker 4: bring this on ourselves a little bit in our golf
Speaker 4: courses here, in some of our more elaborate water features
Speaker 4: in our communities on the Vegas Strip as well.
Speaker 2: So you're right, we're a desert.
Speaker 4: We shouldn't really have that much standing water, but we
Speaker 4: we make them ourselves. And then we also had abnormal rains.
Speaker 4: For the last few years, we've had more rainfall here
Speaker 4: than we have had historically, so we're definitely seeing the
Speaker 4: effects of climate change and our kind of macro environment
Speaker 4: here in Suddn, Nevada.
Speaker 3: As much as possible, we like to help people minimize
Speaker 3: nonsense and you know, increase their's sort of scientific awareness.
Speaker 3: And I know science is always provisional, like we're always
Speaker 3: learning new things, but I can't think of a pest
Speaker 3: related feel that's as full of nonsense as mosquitoes and
Speaker 3: how how to repel them and folkal or around what
Speaker 3: attracts them and what doesn't. And you know, there's all
Speaker 3: these ideas out there about people think they know mosquitos,
Speaker 3: and obviously there's many species that even if some of
Speaker 3: these are treat they may not be true for everything.
Speaker 3: But in general, what sort of things attract mosquitoes? And
Speaker 3: here I'm thinking about human hosts and what sort of
Speaker 3: things actually repel them.
Speaker 4: So we get asked this question a lot, and I
Speaker 4: I have to debunk quite a lot of sort of
Speaker 4: hearsay and anecdotes.
Speaker 2: But in general, female mosquitos, she's basically after your blood.
Speaker 4: So what she's going to do is try to locate
Speaker 4: you as easily and efficiently as possible, and she'll do
Speaker 4: that using olfactory receptors on her antenny. She's going to
Speaker 4: use that to try to smell you. She's going to
Speaker 4: be picking up things like carbon dioxide in our breath,
Speaker 4: human sweat, lactic acid, skin volatiles, octanal phenols, and sometimes
Speaker 4: your body heat.
Speaker 2: Some people.
Speaker 4: Also, if you have very sweaty, smelly, cheesy like feet,
Speaker 4: she may also use that to try to locate you.
Speaker 4: And she's going to do that essentially to try and
Speaker 4: get a blood meal as fast as possible. The best
Speaker 4: thing that you can possibly do, which is what I
Speaker 4: always tell everybody, and that's not really what they want
Speaker 4: to hear, is to try to use some kind of
Speaker 4: effective repellent, some kind of topical insecticide that you apply
Speaker 4: to your skin. These ideally should be approved by some
Speaker 4: regulatory agency like the US Environmental Protection.
Speaker 2: Agency, the EPA.
Speaker 4: But these chemicals they're not that nice. There will be
Speaker 4: chemicals like deet picaridin Citronella IL thirty five thirty five.
Speaker 4: You can have some slightly nicer ones like oil of
Speaker 4: lemon eucalyptus. But people always tell me, I don't want
Speaker 4: to use chemicals. I don't want to put something noxious
Speaker 4: or toxic on my skin. What about if I eat
Speaker 4: some garlic or I, you know, have some cinnamon and maybe,
Speaker 4: anecdotically sometimes that can potentially repel mosquitoes or have a
Speaker 4: slightly interfere with her ability to find you. But the
Speaker 4: problem as a scientist is if it's not robust, reproducible
Speaker 4: data that's really backed up, we really I can't advocate
Speaker 4: for you to do that. If you think it may
Speaker 4: work for you, okay, that's fantastic, but we know that
Speaker 4: these tried and true insecticides do work.
Speaker 2: That's why they.
Speaker 4: Are approved, and they're really easy to get hold of
Speaker 4: over the counter.
Speaker 2: In terms of what can alter.
Speaker 4: Because I also get a lot of people asking me, well,
Speaker 4: I'm a mosquito magnet, or mosquitos never touched me, but
Speaker 4: they touch my you know, they'll eat my husband, you
Speaker 4: know that kind of thing.
Speaker 2: There's definitely some evidence that people smell.
Speaker 4: A little bit differently to different mosquitoes, but it's usually
Speaker 4: just what's happening physiologically with you. So are you particularly sweaty?
Speaker 4: Are you running a bit hot that day? Maybe you've
Speaker 4: had a beer, increased body temperatures, and indicator for mosquitoes
Speaker 4: to kind of find you the surface microbiome, whatever's on
Speaker 4: your skin at the moment. That will also influence just
Speaker 4: how good you smell to the insects, particularly mosquitoes.
Speaker 2: I'll read these articles.
Speaker 4: I wash with this soap and that will prevent a
Speaker 4: mosquito from biting you. Or apply this type of coconut
Speaker 4: smelling cream and that works well as well. But some
Speaker 4: of those things can work to an extent, but what
Speaker 4: they're really doing is just changing your microorganisms on your
Speaker 4: body at the particular time.
Speaker 2: But the problem is that's not consistent.
Speaker 4: You know, we don't consistently smell the same at the
Speaker 4: same time every single day. It just depends what we're doing,
Speaker 4: what we're eating, what the weather's like, you know, what
Speaker 4: we are.
Speaker 2: Wearing on the surface of our skin.
Speaker 4: So really, the best thing you can do, at least
Speaker 4: for the type of mosquitoes we have here in the US,
Speaker 4: is really good robust repellent.
Speaker 1: And I find that interesting that you mentioned citronella, because
Speaker 1: we grew up burning citronella candles and you have them
Speaker 1: everywhere outside. If you are having a barbecue or whatever.
Speaker 1: So that's interesting that that does work.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's definitely one that can interfere and people. Yeah,
Speaker 4: that's a nice sort of more friendly way to especially
Speaker 4: in your community. If everybody is not necessarily wearing long
Speaker 4: sleeves or able to apply repellent, you can do things
Speaker 4: like that which should have a little bit of an impact.
Speaker 2: The other things you can.
Speaker 4: Do, at least in and around your back garden is
Speaker 4: make sure your house is appropriately screened, so you've got
Speaker 4: screens on your doors, screens on your windows, and you
Speaker 4: keep those shut. That's one of the main reasons why
Speaker 4: we were able to eliminate malaria in the US as
Speaker 4: a public health problem is simply better house construction so
Speaker 4: mosquitoes can't fly in. The other thing you can do
Speaker 4: is dump out any standing water that you may have.
Speaker 4: If your pool isn't chlorinated orf it's not running. If
Speaker 4: you maybe have a bird bath or a water feature,
Speaker 4: any small amounts of standing water like I mentioned, even
Speaker 4: a small bottle cap, if that's hidden under one of
Speaker 4: your bushes, then that contains water. Any of those can
Speaker 4: be potential mosquito breeding sites. So you can't really control
Speaker 4: what your neighbors necessarily do, but at least in your
Speaker 4: garden you can do some kind of environmental management as
Speaker 4: well to try and reduce mosquito breeding.
Speaker 3: I don't know much about the life cycle of say malai,
Speaker 3: for example, and you said it's a parasite. So is
Speaker 3: it the sort of thing that a mother passes to
Speaker 3: her children through the process of birth or is it
Speaker 3: something that they have to be infected with as baby mosquitoes.
Speaker 3: How does that life cycle work?
Speaker 4: So for malaria, there isn't any transmission from the mother
Speaker 4: mosquito to the eggs. There is for some of the
Speaker 4: other viruses like Dengi virus and West Nile virus that
Speaker 4: we have here in the US as well as globally.
Speaker 4: With malaria, it's an interesting life cycle that one. Because
Speaker 4: the adult mosquito, she will take a blood meal within
Speaker 4: about twenty four hours after she emerges from being a puba.
Speaker 4: She needs to feed quite quickly, and if she feeds
Speaker 4: on somebody who is already infected with malaria, she will
Speaker 4: acquire that parasite. But it then takes about two weeks
Speaker 4: for her to develop that parasite first in her midgut
Speaker 4: within the blood meal. It then migrates back to her
Speaker 4: salary glands. Takes two weeks for her become infectious, so
Speaker 4: she'll be continuing to bite people every three days because
Speaker 4: she needs that blood to make her eggs, but she
Speaker 4: won't actually be an infectious mosquito for about ten to
Speaker 4: fourteen days. So that actually means in a community, it's
Speaker 4: the older mother mosquitos for malaria that are the ones
Speaker 4: that are transmitting. So in places where it's very humid
Speaker 4: or very very hot and mosquitoes aren't able to actually
Speaker 4: live for two four weeks, maybe they're dying at more
Speaker 4: of a rapid rate because the environment is really hostile
Speaker 4: and very harsh, there won't be as much malaria transmission
Speaker 4: because our mosquitoes are becoming infected, but they are not
Speaker 4: becoming infectious, if that makes sense to you.
Speaker 3: It's a parasite and we know it has some pretty
Speaker 3: nasty effects on humans. Does it harm the mosquito substantially?
Speaker 4: No, So mosquitoes again have really co evolved with the
Speaker 4: power sites and the viruses that they can transmit such
Speaker 4: that they have really good immunity against that infection that
Speaker 4: allows them exactly to be the perfect insect vectors. Essentially,
Speaker 4: to be perfect flying syringes containing these different patterns.
Speaker 3: Well in malaria in particular. So they've just evolved to
Speaker 3: not be affected by the particular I guess the things
Speaker 3: that bother us. I guess I'm wondering do they have
Speaker 3: any immunity? Is there anything genetically we could steal from
Speaker 3: them that?
Speaker 4: Yeah, just amounts enough of an immune response to tolerate
Speaker 4: the infection such that it's not going to necessarily kill
Speaker 4: the mosquito. Infection may have small fitness costs to the
Speaker 4: female mosquito. She may lay smaller egg batches potentially, or
Speaker 4: may not fly around as much. But like I said, again,
Speaker 4: just those thousands of years of coevolution together have made
Speaker 4: it such that the infection can establish and she can
Speaker 4: tolerate it, and then she has to essentially vector that
Speaker 4: disease onwards into humans.
Speaker 1: Amazing. So you've really proven to us always that mosquitoes
Speaker 1: are seen as a nuisance. But is there any way
Speaker 1: to we can possibly learn to like them a little?
Speaker 4: I mean, yeah, unfortunately, with most with most monstrous insects
Speaker 4: and other animals, they do play quite vital roles in
Speaker 4: our ecosystems. It's again we get the question a lot.
Speaker 4: You can we just eliminate whole species, and that's a
Speaker 4: bit of a tricky question to answer. Mosquitoes are great
Speaker 4: food sources for other insects, especially when they're breeding in
Speaker 4: the water bodies in the aquatic environment. There'll be plenty
Speaker 4: of other insects and animals that will predate mosquito larvae,
Speaker 4: like dragonflies, beetles, amphibians, fogs and toads, small fishes, birds,
Speaker 4: and bats will also eat adult mosquitos. They may also
Speaker 4: be quite substantial food resources for those types of insectivorous animals,
Speaker 4: so again we don't necessarily want to eliminate that food
Speaker 4: resource for them either. There's some data to suggest that
Speaker 4: mosquitoes may also pollinate flowers and different types of vegetation,
Speaker 4: especially male mosquitos, since they'll be sugar feeding predominantly and exclusively. Now,
Speaker 4: when we think of pollinators, we're usually thinking of bees
Speaker 4: those kinds of insects, but mosquitoes may also play a
Speaker 4: role in that. They're also a really good indicator of
Speaker 4: biodiversity and environmental changes as well. So that I mean,
Speaker 4: those are just my sort of in support of why
Speaker 4: we shouldn't necessarily want to be wanting to eliminate mosquitos entirely.
Speaker 4: But what right medical entomologists and public health professionals want
Speaker 4: to do is eliminate the diseases that they potentially transmit,
Speaker 4: or at least try to interrupt and safeguard human health from.
Speaker 2: That point of view.
Speaker 1: Right, So they have their place.
Speaker 4: They have their place, but we don't want that place
Speaker 4: to be in essentially the global burden of human disease.
Speaker 3: Right, right, And I don't I mean, I prove lots
Speaker 3: of defense against eliminating species of insects. For just as
Speaker 3: you're saying they have you know, they're little, you know,
Speaker 3: they harm usk. They're also a great pile of calories
Speaker 3: through their life form, so and you know we all
Speaker 3: need our calories. But I'm just wondering a little bit
Speaker 3: about the way that you study the populations of these insects.
Speaker 3: So I'm guessing you there's traps involved, But I wonder
Speaker 3: you're using things like DNA and all. I'm just fascinated
Speaker 3: by the ways you can sort of test an environment
Speaker 3: to see what's out there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so we use plenty of different types of surveillance techniques.
Speaker 4: It usually depends on what your research question is or
Speaker 4: what you're interested, essentially in investigating the kind of gold
Speaker 4: standard way to collect mosquitos, both here regionally as well
Speaker 4: as internationally, is using exactly that different types of traps,
Speaker 4: and these traps will target different parts of the We
Speaker 4: call it the gonotrophic life cycle. So essentially what that
Speaker 4: female or the male mosquitoes are up to. One of
Speaker 4: the gold standard types of traps comes from the CDC.
Speaker 2: It's a light trap.
Speaker 4: Essentially, it's a UV light that the mosquitos are attracted
Speaker 4: to and then a fan that essentially stops them. Once
Speaker 4: they've fly into the trap, they can't escape back out,
Speaker 4: and we'll hang that at the base of a bed
Speaker 4: that somebody's sleeping under, potentially indoors. Let's say in Sub
Speaker 4: Saharan Africa, that person will be sleeping under a bed net.
Speaker 4: They've got a light trap hanging at the foot of
Speaker 4: their bed. Mosquitos are hungry, She's trying to take a
Speaker 4: blood meal because she's starving and she needs that nutrients,
Speaker 4: and she will get potentially diverted into that trap, attracted
Speaker 4: by the light and then the smell that are emanating
Speaker 4: from the individual.
Speaker 2: Here in the.
Speaker 4: US, we may use gravit traps we may use traps
Speaker 4: that smell like an aquatic body that a mosquito may
Speaker 4: want to come and lay her eggs in, So she'll
Speaker 4: come in to try and lay her eggs in an
Speaker 4: artificial trap and again become unable to escape. But in
Speaker 4: places where we suspect when you may have invasive species,
Speaker 4: so species that may not necessarily be targeted by some
Speaker 4: of these traps. Most of the time these traps are
Speaker 4: optimized for different genre of mosquitoes, so maybe anop lees
Speaker 4: ulex or eighties or maybe even different types of species.
Speaker 4: But we can use environmental DNA. It's essentially like forensic science.
Speaker 4: It's sampling DNA from the soil from the water and
Speaker 4: then extracting any nucleic acid and using different molecular essays
Speaker 4: to try and detect new species of interest. We've been
Speaker 4: trying to pilot that here in Las Vegas, especially in
Speaker 4: relation to eighties agypty, which I told you has invaded
Speaker 4: quite recently. But there's also an invasive vector species in
Speaker 4: Africa called an off lea Stephen's eye that's invaded from India,
Speaker 4: and it's an urban vector, which the malaria vectors in
Speaker 4: Africa haven't historically been urban. They've been predominantly rural, and
Speaker 4: we're trying to use the same techniques to survey cities
Speaker 4: areas where people aren't usually at risk of that transmission,
Speaker 4: so they're at risk of quite severe disease. But again,
Speaker 4: we like the concept of doing that kind of environmental
Speaker 4: DNA sampling because you don't need to be a trained entomologist.
Speaker 4: I don't need to train you how to collect a
Speaker 4: fifty meal water sample. I can just give you a
Speaker 4: tube and ask you to please bring me a sample
Speaker 4: from your back garden. I don't need to teach you
Speaker 4: how to set a trap or how to identify a
Speaker 4: particular species of not just mosquitoes, but any other flying insects.
Speaker 4: So we think it's got real potential for citizen science
Speaker 4: and community type surveillance, which also then has the clateral
Speaker 4: benefit of raising mosquito awareness. Like I said here, the
Speaker 4: rhetoric I get is that we've never really had mosquitos.
Speaker 2: Why am I suddenly getting bitten this year? What can
Speaker 2: I do?
Speaker 4: We want the community to be asking those kind of
Speaker 4: thoughtful questions, and if we can get them engaged in sampling,
Speaker 4: engaged in what's happening in their own back gardens or communities.
Speaker 4: Then we can kind of tackle these diseases together us
Speaker 4: as the academics, and then also with the members of
Speaker 4: the community who are the most affected.
Speaker 1: Fantastic. Yeah, this is all so interesting. I've just got
Speaker 1: a little side question before we start to wrap things up.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure that sometimes I think I'm hearing mosquitoes.
Speaker 1: So maybe at night when the lights are out and
Speaker 1: I'm hearing a little buzzing sound. And I don't think
Speaker 1: we've covered this yet, but do mosquitoes actually buzz? Is
Speaker 1: there any way aside from feeling them on you to
Speaker 1: tell that they're around.
Speaker 4: They absolutely do buzz, And there are some other fine
Speaker 4: insects that we are also going to make a similar sound,
Speaker 4: But in all likelihood, if it's near your ear, it
Speaker 4: probably is.
Speaker 2: A mosquito that's trying to find a blood meal.
Speaker 4: So what happens is the mosquito so she's beating her
Speaker 4: wings at a particular frequency. And the way they mate
Speaker 4: is the mosquitoes the males will swarm, usually around lights
Speaker 4: in the kind of early dusk and early evening, and
Speaker 4: then a female will fly into the male swarm, and
Speaker 4: the males will recognize that she's a viable female of
Speaker 4: the same species as them by the sounds of.
Speaker 2: Her wing beat frequency.
Speaker 4: So different species will of mosquitoes will beat their wings
Speaker 4: at different frequencies, so then the males will know, Okay,
Speaker 4: that's the same species as me. Let's go mate, or
Speaker 4: no it's not. Let's ignore that and wait for another
Speaker 4: potential mate to fly into our swarm. And there's been
Speaker 4: some other academic groups that have been interested in developing
Speaker 4: apps for your phone where you can take a sound
Speaker 4: recording and then your mobile phone can potentially tell you ah, yeah,
Speaker 4: that was eighties a gypty or no, that was kudex
Speaker 4: quinkerphaciators that flew by again using our quiet advanced mobile
Speaker 4: phone technology that we have and our ability to record
Speaker 4: sound on our phones. So we're not working on that,
Speaker 4: but there are groups out there that are trying to
Speaker 4: do exactly that to understand how the mosquitoes sound to
Speaker 4: us and to one another.
Speaker 3: So it's like shazam, but it can let you know
Speaker 3: if somebody's walking like an egypty yep, I.
Speaker 1: Should have warned you about his parents. But Lois, your
Speaker 1: work is really interesting. Can you tell us a bit
Speaker 1: about what you're working on at the moment.
Speaker 4: Absolutely so, like I said, we try and mainly spend
Speaker 4: our time working on more creative ways to kill mosquitoes
Speaker 4: or at least to stop them from interacting with humans.
Speaker 4: That's what I always tell my students. I'm basically just
Speaker 4: really good at killing bugs. That's my whole career. At
Speaker 4: the moment, we're trying to We've have a really unprecedented
Speaker 4: amount of West Nile here in the Las Vegas area,
Speaker 4: which has never happened here before, so we are quite
Speaker 4: concerned about the risk for increased human transmission. So we've
Speaker 4: got several projects in our laboratory at the moment. We
Speaker 4: do a lot of whole genome sequencing to try and
Speaker 4: understand the genetics of the mosquito and then the genetics
Speaker 4: of the pathogen that they transmit, so we can track
Speaker 4: where are these coming from, Where are mosquitoes moving around,
Speaker 4: how are they moving around? Are there any environmental or
Speaker 4: ecological risk factors? And with things like West Nile, is
Speaker 4: it invading every year from say Arizona that does have
Speaker 4: quite a significant problem nearby, or do we have endemic
Speaker 4: populations of the virus here in Las Vegas. As soon
Speaker 4: as we can kind of get a better handle on
Speaker 4: how things are spreading and how we can predict where
Speaker 4: they're going to spread. That then off opportunities for control
Speaker 4: and targeted control measures. So that's some of the work
Speaker 4: that we're doing here in Vegas, as well as also
Speaker 4: testing our populations for resistance to insecticides because we may
Speaker 4: want to start doing some chemical control.
Speaker 2: We are doing some of that environmental DNA monitoring, trying.
Speaker 4: To test these tools out and engage our citizens in
Speaker 4: some science activities. But we also have some projects over
Speaker 4: in Sub Saharan Africa because, as I said, malaria is
Speaker 4: such a significant problem there and we're currently supposed to
Speaker 4: be eliminating malaria by the year twenty thirty and we're
Speaker 4: eighty nine percent off track in terms of the technical
Speaker 4: strategic goals set by the World Health Organization. And one
Speaker 4: of the main problems that we have is that our mosquitoes,
Speaker 4: at least in Africa are very intensely resistant to the
Speaker 4: chemicals that we can use in bed nets and for
Speaker 4: public health there. So we participate in lots of clinical
Speaker 4: trials that are testing new types of bed nets, new
Speaker 4: different insecticides, different modalities for deploying these chemicals in communities because.
Speaker 2: As I said, malaria.
Speaker 4: In the last sort of thirty one minutes since we've
Speaker 4: started talking, thirty one individuals will have died from malaria.
Speaker 4: It's such an egregious public health problem, and so we
Speaker 4: spend a lot of our time also trying to support
Speaker 4: research activities out there too.
Speaker 3: I thank you for doing this work because it's very important.
Speaker 3: It is so important, and it affects everybody. I mean,
Speaker 3: I remember as a kid learning that they have mosquitos
Speaker 3: in Alaska and thinking, oh no, It's like, how can
Speaker 3: they have them out there? But I guess it gets
Speaker 3: hotter there. Yeah, they are little nightmares. But thank you
Speaker 3: for taking the time to talk to us about this today.
Speaker 3: I thank you for the important work you're doing. If
Speaker 3: people want to learn more about these programs, is there
Speaker 3: a particular website or location you'd like to refer people to.
Speaker 4: I can give you our lab website, maybe you can
Speaker 4: include it in the podcast information and then anyone who's like,
Speaker 4: we really need anyone who's interested in this kind of area.
Speaker 4: You don't need to love bugs, you don't even need
Speaker 4: to touch or handle insects, which a lot of my
Speaker 4: students don't want to go anywhere near them, But we
Speaker 4: need everybody to fight against spectavorn diseases. You know, maybe
Speaker 4: you want to look at it from the disease surveillance
Speaker 4: point of view, or maybe clinical diagnostics. Maybe you want
Speaker 4: to work in the communities understanding the populations. There are
Speaker 4: so many different roles and important data that we need
Speaker 4: to be collecting to essentially work towards the control and
Speaker 4: elimination of these diseases. You don't need to just play
Speaker 4: with insects all day long like I do. But there's
Speaker 4: a role for anyone who's potentially interested in this kind
Speaker 4: of field, So please reach out to us. We'd love
Speaker 4: to talk to anybody who's interested.
Speaker 3: Fantastic We will definitely check the show notes. There will
Speaker 3: be links there for all of that. Now, I believe
Speaker 3: Karen warned you that we like to finish up our
Speaker 3: first interviews with folks with a signature question. And this
Speaker 3: could be whatever you want it to be, but what
Speaker 3: is your favorite monster?
Speaker 4: So as a medical entomologist, I feel like I would
Speaker 4: be really remiss if my favorite monster wasn't the Legend
Speaker 4: of the Mothman.
Speaker 2: You know, the America.
Speaker 3: Yes, nice, I mean, come on, it's.
Speaker 4: A moth right perfect. So I grew up in the
Speaker 4: UK and I had never heard about this. I mean
Speaker 4: you can tell that probably for my accent, but I
Speaker 4: had never heard about this until quite recently when I
Speaker 4: was listening to I think another podcast more of like
Speaker 4: a murder true crime type podcast, and they told the
Speaker 4: story the Legend of the Mothman from Point Pleasant, West Virginia,
Speaker 4: and it was a comedy. It was very funny the
Speaker 4: way they presented this. But I think what amused me
Speaker 4: the most was this large sort of black, seven foot
Speaker 4: tall creature with glowing red eyes that would just scream
Speaker 4: at cars first thing in the morning, and it just
Speaker 4: reminded me of.
Speaker 5: What I think I probably said in the morning, boy
Speaker 5: I've had my coffee, and I just enjoyed that kind
Speaker 5: of mystery of it being a harbor bringer of doom
Speaker 5: and a warning omen as a gigantic insect.
Speaker 2: So I think for me that's probably my favorite monster.
Speaker 1: Very suitable it is.
Speaker 3: I like hearing that too, because you know, we tend
Speaker 3: to go really deep on all of this stuff, you know,
Speaker 3: learning about the historical context, but these stories evolve over
Speaker 3: time and so you know, as someone who comes into
Speaker 3: this material fresh. I love hearing how it's coming to you,
Speaker 3: like are you getting it through podcasts or movies or
Speaker 3: you know, radio or whatever, and how it's how it
Speaker 3: varies over time. It's just fascinating to me because I
Speaker 3: think these stories sort of evolved in the same way
Speaker 3: species evolve. You just never know what's going to come
Speaker 3: out the other end as fascinating.
Speaker 1: So yeah, well, thank you so much for your time,
Speaker 1: the ways that this is just all fascinating, and just
Speaker 1: a lot of things that I haven't known, haven't thought
Speaker 1: about either.
Speaker 3: Yeah, raising awareness.
Speaker 2: So thank you so much for the invitation. Guys, this
Speaker 2: has been great.
Speaker 1: I'm glad I found you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, fantastic, all right, and good luck out there in Vegas.
Speaker 3: That's a damnly joke. You take care, Bye bye, thank.
Speaker 1: You, have a good day. Byebye bye.
Speaker 3: Monster You've been listening to Monster Talk, the science show
Speaker 3: about monsters. I'm Blake Smith and I'm Karen Stolsner. You
Speaker 3: just heard an interview with mosquito expert doctor Louisa Messenger
Speaker 3: discussing the dangers of mosquito born diseases and the myths
Speaker 3: and facts of mosquito management. Check our show notes for
Speaker 3: links to her research and the photos that she kindly
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