0:00

James

0:02

Wan produced the hit horror film Meghan.

0:04

He made the saw movies. He made the

0:06

conjuring. And he can see horror

0:09

everywhere. At nighttime, if

0:12

I hear something or I go somewhere

0:14

and I think that they may be someone out there,

0:17

I actually go Hello?

0:20

Is someone there? I've

0:22

actually found myself to have done that.

0:24

James Wan on why we always want

0:26

to be scared. This week

0:29

on Intuit, Vulture's pop

0:31

culture podcast.

0:37

It's the New Year and for some that means

0:39

resolutions to eat healthy food and get in

0:41

shape. You've probably heard the standard ice

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where scientists are proving that the numbers

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on our food labels are off. Sometimes

1:02

by quite a bit. So is the

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calorie broken? Find gastropod and

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subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

1:13

Rob Dunn used to travel far

1:15

far away from his home in the US. To

1:18

study some of the wildest places on

1:20

Earth. Rainforest.

1:22

I studied rare tropical insects.

1:24

And so

1:25

I got to Bolivia or Australia or Ghana

1:27

or Singapore to try to

1:29

understand the general rules that apply

1:31

to those insects.

1:33

He's an ecologist. So he'd look at

1:35

how ants distribute seeds

1:37

or how insect populations can

1:39

recover after a rainforest is clear

1:41

cut. And then he'd come back to

1:44

the states. And I would give talks

1:46

about those faraway places, about ants, or

1:48

termites, or whatever. And

1:50

always at the end of those talks, somebody would

1:52

say something to the effect of, well,

1:54

you know, that's great. But what do I do about the ants

1:56

in my kitchen? Rob's initial

1:58

reaction was to dismiss those

2:00

questions. And when I heard it

2:02

first, you know, is a like,

2:04

I'm just presented about my life work

2:06

and the things I care most about

2:08

professionally, and you've asked

2:10

how to kill them.

2:11

But over time, Rob started

2:13

to listen more closely. And he realized

2:16

What that question was really saying was,

2:18

I've listened to your boring hour long

2:20

talk and the only way it

2:23

possibly relates to my life

2:25

is in this way, people were

2:28

asking about the biology of their daily

2:30

lives. Rob started to wonder, what

2:32

would happen if he did study? The

2:34

biology of people's daily lives.

2:40

He knew that there were some

2:42

people who were actually studying bugs

2:44

at

2:44

home. I'm

2:44

gonna show you a couple of different things that we use

2:47

to monitor bed bug issues. There are

2:49

decades worth of ads out there. Reminding us

2:51

that pest control researchers have done

2:53

very thorough investigations into pet

2:55

species. So those are species

2:58

that spread disease.

2:59

Look at those mosquitoes go for that unprotected

3:02

arm. Species that destroy our

3:04

stuff.

3:04

Termites are monsters.

3:06

Or just that annoy us

3:09

in some

3:09

way. So it's not like we don't know anything.

3:11

We know what kills them. And a road killer

3:13

kills bugs dead. We

3:16

know if you spray them, like in

3:18

what precise way do they roll over and

3:20

twitch? Like, we know that in great

3:21

detail. But as he was looking around, Rob

3:24

realized that researchers did not yet know

3:27

many of the answers to the kinds of questions

3:29

that psychologists like him like to ask.

3:31

So less how do I kill these

3:33

cockroaches? And more, how

3:36

do these cockroaches evolve to suit

3:38

this environment? Or, like, which species

3:40

are in this home besides cockroaches. Who's

3:43

eating who and and how and why

3:46

and what does this ecosystem need

3:48

to

3:48

thrive? So

3:51

Rob decided to start asking those questions.

3:54

I would realize that all

3:56

of the things I was studying in rain for us like also

3:58

study in houses. And when he

3:59

started exploring houses like they were rainforest,

4:02

Rob discovered just how little

4:05

we actually about our remains.

4:08

Like, how little we even know

4:10

about how many species live with

4:12

us? Let alone what they're up

4:14

to. But he also realized

4:16

how much we might benefit from these bugs

4:18

if we stopped zapping all of

4:20

them dead. Because,

4:22

yes, somehow old bugs really

4:24

are pests, but others

4:26

don't harm us and could even

4:28

be helpful to us. I'm

4:32

Bird Pinkerton. This is Unexplainable.

4:35

And this week, we're exploring our

4:37

rooms as if they were renovated. And

4:39

learning how unlocking the

4:41

secrets of the bugs that live in them

4:44

could potentially change our lives. Rob's

5:01

career pivot exploring homes actually

5:03

involved a lot of different projects covering

5:06

a lot of different organisms around the

5:07

house. And so that's mice

5:10

that live on people's heads, it's sour dog bread

5:12

microbes that live in shower

5:13

heads. But in the early twenty ten's,

5:16

he worked with some colleagues to apply his

5:18

rainforest ecology skills to house

5:20

bugs

5:20

specifically. It's a story

5:22

that starts fittingly enough in a

5:24

home. At the time, Michelle Schottwein,

5:26

a very good friend, and her husband Ari lives

5:28

just on the street from us. And

5:30

so at the end of the

5:31

day, sometimes they would just go over their house,

5:33

have a glass of wine, hang out. Well,

5:35

this is really going back to the beginning.

5:38

This is Michelle trout line,

5:40

an entomologist who specializes in

5:43

flies. We had an idea that we

5:45

were going to go into

5:47

people's houses and collect

5:49

all the insects and their relatives in in

5:51

a person's house. By relatives,

5:53

Michelle means a whole bunch of arthropod

5:55

species that aren't actually insects.

5:57

So spiders, ticks, centipedes,

6:00

millipedes, etcetera. Basically

6:03

bugs And and while the word

6:05

bug can refer to a specific

6:07

subgroup of insects, throughout this

6:09

episode, I'm gonna be using bug and it's it's more

6:11

informal sort of colloquial sense

6:13

to refer to this big group of

6:16

all the creepy, crawly creatures

6:18

out there. So, like, if I would

6:20

use it in a sentence, Michelle and

6:22

her colleagues wanted to collect all

6:24

the bugs in people's houses.

6:26

And they weren't actually sure what

6:28

they would find. Like in a paper that they

6:30

eventually co authored, they explained that

6:32

modern western homes were actually thought

6:34

to be kinda sterile without a

6:36

ton of life. But since they didn't

6:39

know of other comprehensive surveys

6:41

of all the bugs in a bunch of human houses,

6:43

they figured it was at least worth

6:45

trying. So Crawly,

6:48

they work together to sort of make this scheme

6:50

into a reality. And also,

6:52

these endocrinologists seem to just really

6:54

love shouting each other out and giving

6:56

credit. So I will just make sure to mention

6:58

that Michelle led the field research

7:00

with another scientist named Matt

7:02

Bertone. My

7:03

good friend and colleague who's, like, one of the greatest entomologists

7:06

in the world. Sort of a entomologist,

7:08

entomologist, he can empty small

7:11

flies while driving past

7:12

them. So Michelle and Matt

7:15

and the rest of their team decided to look

7:17

at houses in and around Raleigh,

7:19

North Carolina. They tried to

7:21

sample broadly looking at homes of

7:23

people in various socioeconomic brackets,

7:26

and they wound up looking at fifty

7:28

houses.

7:30

Michelle says they originally thought they would do

7:33

more, but going to each house

7:35

turned out to be a huge production we

7:37

had a whole get up. So we had

7:39

kind of field fest filled with vials

7:41

and four steps. We had nets. We

7:43

had headlamps. And so

7:45

even though we were going on these, you know, indoor,

7:48

very tame

7:49

expeditions, we looked like we were ready

7:52

for the middle of the rainforest. Michelle

7:56

and Matt and other entomologists working

7:58

on the project, they would go

8:00

into a house they would collect data

8:02

on how often it was cleaned or

8:04

whether insecticides have been sprayed recently,

8:07

house pets, house plants,

8:09

house layout, And then

8:11

they would go hunting for

8:12

bucks, sort of searching and collecting,

8:15

sometimes for as much as seven hours.

8:17

It's exhausting work. So a lot

8:19

of it it's like hands in these along the

8:21

kind of baseboards, windowsills.

8:24

They went under beds. They went behind

8:26

toilets. And they used a

8:28

tube to suck dust and grime

8:31

into vials. It was an intimate,

8:34

sometimes horrifying. Process.

8:37

Michelle studies bugs for a

8:39

living, but even she can appreciate

8:41

that it is pretty gross

8:43

to stumble across, for example,

8:46

carpet beetle larvae munching

8:48

on Fingerprints. Like,

8:55

But once they had collected everything they

8:57

could, they took it back to the lab

8:59

and then they had to sort

9:02

and sort and and sort some

9:04

more because it turned out that these

9:06

houses were far from devoid

9:08

of life. In fact, each house had

9:10

so many arthropods in it

9:12

that it was kinda shocking. Michelle

9:14

remembers an ant scientist popping

9:16

by for a visit. And when

9:18

he saw a collection of vials from one

9:20

house laid out on the table, he was

9:22

like, oh my

9:22

gosh. You know, was this a house out

9:25

in the woods that had, you know, left the windows open

9:27

for years or something. And the truth

9:29

was no. It was a house

9:30

and, you know, suburban Raleigh with a weekly

9:32

house cleaner. And not only were there

9:34

lots of bugs, but also the diversity

9:36

of species was pretty amazing.

9:38

Rob, for example, thought that he had

9:40

a pretty good idea of the kinds of spiders

9:42

living in his own home. As far as

9:44

he knew there were two species,

9:46

a fat one, and a skinny

9:48

one. But then when the results came back

9:50

from his own

9:50

house, it would turn on and had like

9:53

eleven spider species, including this spider

9:55

species that just walks around and spits

9:57

silk on

9:57

things. And only comes out at night.

10:00

So they were

10:02

finding all this cool stuff. And then

10:05

after many months of work, they

10:07

pulled all their findings together and

10:09

were able to compare the diversity of

10:12

bugs in each house. And these

10:14

results were also surprising. Like, they

10:16

found that in almost every house,

10:18

there were about a hundred different

10:20

species of bugs, even if

10:22

people were tidier or they sprayed

10:24

insecticides. It seems like nothing made

10:26

a difference. And this finding is

10:28

actually roughly held up as

10:30

Michelle and her colleagues have

10:32

explored more homes all across the

10:34

world. Like, some places do have a little

10:36

more diversity or a little less

10:38

the layout of houses or or kind

10:40

of the plant life outside can affect

10:42

the bug life indoors. But

10:44

the houses they've looked at always

10:46

come with a wide array of insect

10:49

roommates. It's like this

10:51

whole hidden world kind of

10:53

flourishing indoors just waiting

10:55

to be explored. And

10:57

it is a world that is worth exploring

11:00

and understanding because

11:02

they found that Many of these bugs are not

11:04

just sort of blowing in from outdoors.

11:07

They're making themselves at

11:08

home. They're forming ecosystems. And

11:11

so there's a basement ecosystem, an attic

11:13

ecosystem, a bathroom ecosystem.

11:17

Rob says you can actually kinda

11:19

draw a parallel between the

11:22

ecosystem in a bedroom and the

11:24

ecosystem on a forest floor. So

11:26

on a typical forest floor, you'd find a bunch of

11:28

dead leaves, and then there be bugs that

11:30

would eat those leaves and then

11:32

other bugs that might eat the leaf eaters.

11:34

And in our bedrooms, humans

11:37

are kind of like the the

11:39

trees, and then our hair and our

11:41

dead skin is like the

11:43

leaves. So

11:47

if your body sheds tons of

11:49

skin cells a day, the dust mites eat the

11:51

skin cells, there are these

11:53

other slightly larger mites eat the dust

11:55

mites especially because the dust mites gather if

11:57

they get dry and do a little clump.

11:59

And they're like it's like wildebeast. And

12:01

when they're there, these other

12:03

mites ease down. And

12:04

then something like a a house centipede

12:07

can come along and and eat those mics.

12:09

And the researchers also found that

12:11

house bugs have the kind of

12:12

weird, fascinating parasitic relationships

12:14

that you see in the wild. For

12:17

example, in many houses, we found this

12:19

wasp that lays its eggs

12:21

in the bodies of specific cockroach

12:23

species. And

12:25

it's teeny tiny. It's

12:27

there carrying out this ancient

12:29

ritual of laying its eggs and

12:31

living babies of cockroaches, which they

12:33

then eat alive. And it's

12:35

happening all over North America right now. I mean, if

12:37

you could hear it, you would hear the screams and

12:39

the crunching.

12:44

Now, at this point, you might be feeling

12:46

disgusted or fascinated

12:49

or, you know, like an

12:51

intense desire to never ever touch

12:53

a surface at a house ever

12:55

again, and if at all

12:57

possible, to, like, upload your

12:59

consciousness into a computer, so as to

13:01

discard your, like, skin shedding,

13:03

bug feeding, corporeal

13:05

form, and you may not be feeling

13:07

any less inclined to view these

13:09

parasitic wasp larvae and

13:11

and dust might wildebeast as anything

13:13

except kind of gross, but

13:16

these studies are just the

13:18

beginning. They

13:20

show us how little we really

13:23

know about the bugs all around us, like who

13:25

they are and and what they are

13:27

doing. And figuring out

13:29

answers to those questions, that's worthwhile

13:31

kind of on its own, like as Rob puts

13:32

it. If we're going to understand any

13:35

place on Earth well. It

13:37

seems as though we should understand the place we

13:39

spend ninety percent of our time.

13:42

But also, Rob says that

13:45

once we start exploring the bugs that are

13:47

right under our noses slash

13:49

under our beds, we can start

13:51

learning from and and borrowing

13:53

from them and, like, maybe

13:55

even finding ways to surround ourselves

13:57

with better bugs that can help us

13:59

lead healthier lives.

14:09

Support for this episode comes from HelloFresh.

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15:09

Music

15:10

pop quiz time. Can you identify these

15:13

three sounds? That's an

15:15

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15:17

distorting the sound of a kick drum, and

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15:23

Petras. Okay. Number two. That's

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15:28

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15:30

drenched in reverb, and made totally

15:32

ubiquitous through the hands of EDM producers

15:34

like Alright. Last one.

15:36

That's a Reese'space. It's

15:38

a sludgy synthesized baseline

15:40

created by producer Kevin

15:42

Reese Saunderson in May eighteen

15:44

eighty eight. You can hear it in a genre like

15:47

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15:49

and it's even featured all

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over Taylor latest record. The

15:53

sounds of popular music are always

15:55

evolving. If you want to be able to

15:57

know all of its sounds, the switched

15:59

on pop podcast will break it down for

16:01

you. I'm Charlie Harding, the cohostess

16:03

switched on pop. And if you can name

16:05

this sound, honestly,

16:07

you should come on the show and tell us about

16:08

it. Switched on pop comes out every

16:11

Tuesday wherever you get podcasts.

16:13

Wait.

16:15

What? That's insane. That's

16:18

a bug. That's a bug. That

16:20

is a bug. So we

16:23

know that we are surrounded by bugs.

16:25

Pretty much all the time. But what can

16:27

we learn from them? If we stop treating

16:29

them only as pests, then instead explore

16:31

them like ecologists. To

16:33

help answer that question, Rob told me

16:35

the story of his work on something called a

16:38

camel cricket. A camel cricket

16:40

is It's

16:42

like a cricket that is that a cartoonist

16:44

would You know, it's it looks like a normal

16:46

cricket except its legs are too big

16:48

and it's any, like, they're, like, longer

16:50

than the animal's body. People

16:52

most often encounter them when they walk into their

16:55

basement, and it's dark and that one

16:57

of these jumps out because that's their

16:58

defenses. They just jumped straight into the air.

17:01

In one of his many

17:03

projects studying the home, Rob accidentally

17:06

discovered that a species of Asian

17:08

camel cricket had spread all

17:10

across the eastern US and and parts

17:12

of the Midwest. Almost unnoticed.

17:14

And he thought this was kind of, like,

17:16

wild and exciting that that

17:18

a creature could literally jump out

17:21

at people and still spread without getting spotted by

17:23

scientists. It felt him like a

17:25

metaphor almost for how little

17:27

we know about our own

17:28

homes. And so once

17:31

again, he went to give talks about

17:33

his new discovery. When I would talk to the

17:35

public about your camel crickets and

17:37

houses, I was super excited And so enthusiasm

17:39

is spilling over. I assume it's

17:41

spilling over into the audience. It's

17:43

sometimes it was, and sometimes I would have people

17:45

say, well, what good are they? History was

17:47

basically repeating itself. Like, yes, Rob had

17:49

made a a whole career pivot from studying

17:52

rainforest to studying homes. He

17:54

he was giving people the biology of their

17:56

daily lives, but some of

17:58

those people were still not sure how

18:01

relevant his research was to

18:03

them. And Rob

18:04

did the same thing he'd done that first

18:06

time around. Like, he listened to the

18:08

people asking how this camel cricket could

18:10

be useful to

18:12

them. And

18:12

he started to think. Okay. What good

18:15

could they be? Well, you know, what good two humans

18:17

could they be? That's not their job, but,

18:19

you know, maybe we could

18:20

look. Rob started to think about what he

18:22

knew about camel crickets, not as an annoyance

18:24

to be eliminated, but as an

18:26

organism to be studied. And specifically,

18:28

he started to think about what was known

18:30

about chemo cricket biology. One

18:32

of the

18:32

things we started to see is that

18:35

whatever it was eating, it was terrible

18:37

hard to digest

18:38

stuff. It was bits of paint, bits of

18:41

shoe, you know, bits of

18:43

cockroached plague,

18:44

And so

18:45

that made it very likely that either it

18:47

had gut enzymes that could break

18:49

down those things or it had microbes that

18:51

could break down those

18:52

things. What

18:53

I didn't know is where that would

18:55

be useful. Fortunately,

18:57

Rob spends a lot of time talking to his

19:00

colleagues. And so at that time, I bumped

19:02

into Amy Grundon who was an

19:04

applied microbiologist in the building next to mine. Stephanie Matthews

19:06

was a student working with

19:07

her. I really was not

19:08

lying when I said that Rob loves to shout

19:11

people out. And

19:12

at the time Amy working on black liquor. Black

19:14

liquor is a waste product that comes from

19:16

making paper. And it has a bunch of stuff in

19:18

it that is hard to break down so

19:20

it's often burned or dumped into

19:23

rivers, which means that

19:25

Rob was looking for something that camel cricket

19:27

guts might be able to break down Amy

19:29

had a weird thing that needed

19:31

to be broken down. So

19:33

Stephanie Matthews, Amy student,

19:36

wound up looking for microbes in

19:38

chemical crickets that could break

19:40

down the stuff in black

19:41

liquor. And long story short,

19:43

she found them. And so she basically found in the

19:46

first individual camel cricket she

19:48

studied, one camel cricket

19:50

for science, microbes that could

19:52

break down black liquor and turn

19:54

it into energy. Right

19:56

now, Rob says it's still

19:59

cheaper for paper companies to dispose of

20:01

things in other ways. So the

20:03

industry has not adopted these

20:05

microbes yet. But still researchers

20:07

traveled to the rainforest looking for

20:09

insects and other animals that could

20:11

produce useful compounds. And

20:13

research like this shows that The

20:15

creatures living much closer to home could

20:18

offer similar insights if

20:20

we, you know, paid attention to them

20:22

instead of to find ever more

20:24

inventive ways to zap them out of

20:26

existence. In fact,

20:28

the the pesky ants that people

20:30

wanted to eliminate from their

20:32

kitchens They're another example of

20:32

this. People who actually study ants in

20:35

detail know that ants

20:37

produce their own antibiotics and some

20:39

species grow bacteria on

20:41

their exos eletons that produce

20:43

antibiotics. And so

20:45

in studying some of the most common ants we find

20:47

in houses, Omar Jalalani was a

20:50

master student, was able to show that those ants have

20:52

some compounds that their bodies are

20:54

producing that are highly

20:55

antimicrobial, including against some

20:58

species that are problematic pathogens of humans.

21:01

And

21:01

so that was just, you know, it's a small study,

21:04

but it but

21:06

it the potential there is

21:08

great.

21:09

Rob also sees potential beyond just

21:11

like studying house bugs for cool

21:13

bacteria or

21:14

antibiotics. He thinks that if we

21:17

learned more about the bugs around

21:19

us, we could potentially change the

21:21

bugs around us by bringing in

21:23

more

21:23

helpful bugs. What would it look like to

21:26

to manage our houses, to favor

21:28

species that benefit

21:29

us? It turns out that people around the

21:31

world are already doing this.

21:34

Both in South Africa and Mexico independently,

21:36

people discovered that they could bring

21:38

these webs of social spiders into

21:42

their kitchens and the spiders

21:44

would eat their flies, and they would also

21:46

reduce disease transmission. And

21:48

so in two separate totally

21:51

unrelated cultures, different social

21:53

spider colonies were brought into the

21:55

home to have this control

21:57

effect. I kind of think of this as

22:00

like, pest control from an oncologist perspective

22:02

where you figure out what

22:04

all the bugs in your home are up to,

22:07

so that you can encourage the beneficial ones and

22:09

use them to keep the annoying ones

22:11

in check. And actually,

22:13

this approach might end up being

22:15

more effective than constantly trying

22:17

to kill everything. Like,

22:20

there's a species of jumping

22:22

spider that specifically loves

22:24

to feed on mosquitoes right after they've

22:26

sucked up

22:27

blood, including blood that's carrying malaria. And

22:29

so that

22:30

spider eats the mosquitoes when they're

22:32

most dangerous. So these are

22:33

spiders that you might wanna have

22:36

around.

22:36

of the things people have seen is if you

22:39

go and then spray that house with

22:41

pesticides, it kills all

22:42

the spiders. It does also

22:45

kill the mosquitoes that were in the house,

22:47

but eventually new mosquitoes

22:49

fly back in looking for

22:51

blood. And the spiders don't

22:53

necessarily return with them. Which

22:55

means by trying to achieve a totally sterile

22:57

home and and blanket spraying

22:59

pesticides, a homeowner might

23:02

actually eliminate a

23:04

potential line of defense against the very

23:06

creatures that they were worried

23:07

about. So Rob

23:10

doesn't think that we should never spray

23:12

pesticides like, especially if someone has

23:14

a huge infestation of

23:15

something. I'm not against pest

23:18

control and houses.

23:19

But as Michelle and Rob surveys

23:21

of of houses show, the dream of

23:23

a perfectly sterile home without any bugs at

23:25

all just isn't

23:27

realistic. And when we over spray

23:30

or overkill, We're

23:32

not doing ourselves any favors. And

23:34

so how do we think about, you

23:36

know, we're not gonna stop using pesticides,

23:38

but using pesticides in the most

23:41

controlled

23:41

ways. So they kill what we kill.

23:42

What what

23:43

also not killing the species that are

23:45

helping us? And

23:47

in crops,

23:47

you would call it integrated pest management.

23:50

We don't have a word for it in houses.

23:53

But Rob says that if we wanna do a

23:55

kind of integrated pest management for

23:57

houses and and do it

23:59

well, We need do lot more exploring

24:01

first. Like, we need to know more about who

24:03

to invite in to to find species like

24:05

these helpful spiders. And

24:08

we also need to know how to invite

24:10

them in, like how to help them

24:12

thrive. And Rob has had

24:14

conversations about what that might look

24:15

like, but it reveals our ignorance

24:18

because it it reveals the fact that, like, we

24:20

don't know enough about what these

24:22

species do for us, and we don't know

24:24

enough about what they need and

24:26

how they move among buildings, we

24:28

don't quite have enough information

24:30

yet.

24:33

And

24:33

honestly, maybe it's okay if we have a ways

24:35

to go before we start managing our household

24:38

bugs. Because

24:39

I know I could

24:41

could use a little time to get used to this idea.

24:43

Like, I actually first

24:45

found Michelle Trapani's research

24:48

because I was reading up on a crawly really

24:50

frustrating beat all that had invaded my

24:52

home and ruined a bunch of

24:54

my stuff and kinda ruined

24:56

my life for a few months

24:58

there. So, like,

25:00

I'm not sure I'm ready yet to

25:02

actively invite more bugs

25:04

into

25:04

my home. That being said,

25:07

just talking to Robin Michelle,

25:09

I'm a lot more comfortable with

25:11

the idea that There are probably a

25:13

bunch of bugs fairly close to me right

25:15

now. And

25:16

it's actually kinda nice to think that,

25:18

you know, if I got to know them a

25:20

little bit better, I might find that some of

25:22

those bugs are actually pretty

25:25

good roommates. If

25:33

you wanna

25:36

learn more about the bugs close to you

25:38

right now, recommend digging into

25:40

Michelle. Trote headlines research and and

25:42

also reading Rob Dunn's excellent

25:44

book, never home alone. It'll

25:46

also explain why if the international space

25:48

station smells kind of funky, it's a

25:50

very enjoyable read. And if you

25:52

want to help researchers who are

25:55

doing this work, go to I naturalist

25:57

dot org and look for the never

25:59

home alone project. That'll

26:01

let you upload pictures pictures

26:04

of species in your home so they can

26:06

be used for for science. And

26:08

we would also love to seed the bugs

26:10

in your home. Like, if you send pictures of bugs

26:13

into unexplainable at

26:15

vox dot com, you will you'll

26:17

make my day but we

26:19

also might share them on

26:21

Twitter or a piece on the site

26:23

potentially. So it's unexplainable at

26:25

vox dot com, send me pictures of

26:27

bugs. But now, It is my turn act

26:29

like an endocrinologist and and shout

26:31

out my colleagues. So this episode

26:33

was reported and produced by me

26:35

or Pinkerton, but it would

26:37

not exist without the editing that was done by

26:39

Katherine Wells, Meredith Hoddenott and Brian

26:42

Resnick. It would not sound nearly as

26:44

good without music

26:46

from No. I'm Hasenfeld, or

26:48

just the incredible sound design work that

26:50

Christiana alla does week after

26:52

week. Like seriously, Christian is just like

26:55

a a

26:55

wizard, was sound, and the

26:57

whole world should know. Neo

26:59

Danisha helped me think through the outlines

27:01

of the episode. And,

27:04

mending when makes me laugh,

27:06

which is arguably the most important

27:08

and helpful thing of

27:08

all. Unexplainable is a

27:11

part of the Fox Media podcast network. We

27:13

will be back next week.