[Roden] Mr. Acherontia styx.

Scalp leeches.

Not the bees!

I'm lost!

Hi, I'm Dr. Sammy Ramsey.

[bell rings]

[Narrator] Sammy's an entomologist.

I'm back.

Today, I'm going to break down clips

from movies and TV about bugs.

We are including spiders, centipedes, millipedes.

They're not technically bugs, but we do study them,

so we're going to include them today.

Let's get into it.

Spider bite, Spider-Man.

[suspenseful music]

While you can actually identify a lot of organisms

by the specific constructs of their venom,

it is not them injecting their DNA into your body

that's going to wrap around your DNA

and change your own genetic code.

That's called lateral gene transfer.

Doesn't happen between spiders and people.

I would like to dispel this myth right now.

The vast majority of spider bites

are not going to present as these two dots

on an upraised section of flesh on your body.

That's impossible.

Spiders tend to have mouth parts

that are really close together.

If a spider did actually bite you, though,

rather than you expecting to see

those two very distinctive puncture holes,

it would probably just look like one dot,

and that's because it's very difficult to resolve

just based on how close together their chelicerae are.

What makes you think I would want to know that?

Who wouldn't?

Butterfly close-up, SpongeBob SquarePants.

[fly buzz echoing]

[SpongeBob and Patrick screaming]

What you're looking at there

is Haematopota pluvialis,

and it is a type of fly,

specifically the common horsefly.

Butterflies have a much more adorable face,

totally fuzzy, huge eyes.

They've got this rolled-up straw

that's from two different sections

that are sort of zipped together

with a zipper-like mechanism.

It allows them to reach deep into flowers.

For most of these butterflies,

that mouth part is substantially longer than their body.

[Patrick whimpering] [fly buzzing]

[Patrick screaming]

But that is not even remotely

the sound that butterflies make.

Butterflies are a lot more graceful

as they're moving through the air,

kind of hang-gliding back and forth.

The sound that you hear from those flies

is because they are beating their wings

much more quickly than these butterflies,

and that's what creates this rumbling, buzzing noise.

[SpongeBob and Patrick screaming]

Morphological analysis, The Silence of the Lambs.

It's practically mush.

It was found behind the soft palate of a murder victim.

It may seem kind of strange

that she brings something

from a murder case to an entomologist,

but turns out this is something

a lot of entomologists deal with

on a rather consistent basis.

There's even an entire field in entomology

that's called forensic entomology.

Let's check morphology.

This was from a murder victim's body.

No forensic entomologist is going to sit around

and do this kind of dissection without gloves on.

Secondly, it's just good protocol.

You don't want to contaminate the scene.

If I may, they went a little bit too heavy on the goo.

So, they end up opening this organism's pupal casing.

It is a creature going from a larva

that has pretty much none of the structures

that it needs to be an adult-

Practically mush.

To an organism with wings and eyes,

and you would expect cutting open a pupa

to find a good deal of liquid.

Not at this point.

This organism is very clearly a more mature pupa.

A lot of that goo has already

clearly coalesced into a creature.

Agent Starling,

meet Mr. Acherontia styx.

The morphological analysis here is spot-on.

When you're looking at the morphology of an organism,

you're looking at all of the odd bits and pieces,

the obscure facets of their anatomy

that all fit together to make this creature

the unique organism that it is.

Only live in Asia.

Asia? Somebody grew this guy,

fed him honey and nightshade.

So, what I love here is that they did get it right.

That is a sphingid,

and that type of sphingid, Acherontia styx,

is specifically from Asia.

They even got it down to the food.

[Etymologist] Honey and nightshade.

With the one caveat being

they feed on nightshade as larvae,

but they feed on honey as adults.

And this one is still transitioning into an adult.

It would have never tasted honey by this point,

Hollywood loves to use swarms of bugs.

[actress screaming]

[woman shrieking]

[man shouting]

So, I got to roll my eyes at a little bit of this

because it has left people with the impression

that insects are out for their ill,

that they're lurking around every corner,

looking for the opportunity to do something nefarious to you

and everyone that you love and everything that you love.

I think if we could just take a moment to recognize

insects have motivations

that are not even remotely foreign to our own.

They want food.

The vast majority of them do not eat people.

We see this with bees in Candyman.

[actress screaming]

And in The Swarm.

[picnicker screaming]

So, honeybees are legit vegetarians.

They are not going to be eating people,

chewing away at someone's rib cage.

And we see this with moths in The Possession.

[suspenseful music] [wings flapping]

With the sheer number of tobacco hornworm moths

that she has in her room,

somebody got some wacky tobacky around there somewhere.

We also see this with hornets in Case 39.

[hornets buzzing] [man shouting]

His reaction to that was not overblown.

Cockroach sound and movement, WALL-E.

[bug chirping and skittering]

[WALL-E trilling]

The chirping noises are a bit odd and totally unnatural.

Cockroaches do actually make noises,

and unlike most insects,

they make noises to communicate, which is quite fascinating.

But for most of these noises,

it's just the rubbing of parts of their bodies together

or the movement of air through their body

being forced out under pressure,

creating a hissing noise

as you'll see in hissing cockroaches.

[bug crackles] [WALL-E shouts]

[WALL-E groans]

Something else that's also really interesting in this scene

is that you'll see the cockroach seems to have the ability

to flatten and just be fine.

A cockroach is able to flatten his body

because it is a thigmotactic organism.

Thigmotactic organisms love being wedged

between two flat objects.

So, think of things like bedbugs, cockroaches.

They like to wedge themselves in cracks and crevices

because they feel the most safe

when there's a flat thing touching them

on both sides of their body.

[liquid squishing]

They know that they are in an area

where creatures are going to have

a very difficult time dislodging them and consuming them.

Their heart, their digestive system,

all of it can flatten quite substantially,

and this is the reason why

if you were to step on a cockroach and then lift your shoe,

it can just pop back up and run away.

[roach squishes]

Pretty crazy stuff.

Insect feeding, The Fly.

How does Brundlefly eat?

Brundlefly breaks down solids with a corrosive enzyme,

regurgitates on his food, it liquefies,

and then he sucks it back up.

That was actually pretty accurate.

It's almost second nature.

Flies feed through a process called extra-oral digestion,

where as a result of the fact

that they cannot consume solid matter,

they have to feed on things that are fluids.

So, flies have what's called a sponging mouth part,

sort of like a mop.

They have to regurgitate some of their digestive contents

and bits of their last meal

onto whatever it is that they want to eat.

Those enzymes will break down this food into a fluid,

and then they'll suck all of that back up,

and that is how they get their sustenance.

[Brundlefly belches]

[woman groans]

What they gave you here was very viscous, very gooey.

Not quite with the flies.

There's not going to be as much color to it.

It won't be quite as opaque,

so you wouldn't notice it.

It's not something that you're going to see

looking at this object to inspect

for whether it has been corrupted.

Ugh, that's disgusting.

Living in harmony, James and the Giant Peach.

I'm a vegetarian.

I eat dirt.

No one will be eating you, James.

Nah, she'll just puncture your head

and suck out the brain.

We're sitting a lot of bugs

that you would not expect

to see altogether in the same place.

While the insect world is all very connected

and really interesting in how

all of these facets fit together,

a lot of books don't really live with each other

because they eat each other.

[spider hissing] Oh!

Most of the creatures

that they have on-screen are predators,

from the spider, even the glowworm.

The lady bug is a veracious predator of other creatures.

My life hangs by a thread every day.

So, out of this group of bugs,

the spider would be the least discriminate

in what it consumed.

Anything that it could catch, it would grab and eat.

♪ Bright lights, big city ♪

♪ That's where we got to go ♪

The centipede, however,

would be running around munching

on much everything in the room.

Such rude behavior.

And the ladybug, those guys,

they'll just walk around

and munch whatever is in front of them.

♪ That's the life ♪

♪ That's the life for me ♪

This particular ladybug

is very clearly representative of Coccinella septempunctata.

It's a species of ladybug with seven spots

and it is from Europe.

And so this accent that they've given her,

which is actually pretty heavy on and off...

I've had to send all 300 of me children

to save the passages.

It's very clear that they went

in the right direction with her character.

That goes without saying.

Bee stings, The Wicker Man.

Ah, no, not the bees.

Not the bees!

[screams]

All over my eyes.

My eyes!

It's actually the case that bees

tend to be on chill mode most of the time,

but if you show some level of aggression towards them

or something they perceive as aggression

towards their queen or their babies,

they can get pretty hype.

[cage screaming]

Swelling in the neck region can constrict your airways

and can lead to some serious complications.

This is the reason why you'll see a lot of beekeepers

will typically wear a veil that comes down

to protect the region of their neck.

[suspenseful music] [bees buzzing]

People seem to be under the impression

based on a lot of movies that insects

desire to cause ill to human beings.

If you were to remove the hood with a bunch of bees in it,

they're not all just going to fly away as if, oh,

we've done our job.

Everything is done here.

That's not how it works,

and movies like this where they lift the helmet off,

and they're like, Oh, is he passing out?

We're good now, bye,

doesn't really work out too well.

Killing me won't bring back your [beep] honey.

Dino DNA in mosquitoes, Jurassic Park.

[Jurassic Park Narrator] A hundred million years ago,

there were mosquitoes, just like today.

The mosquitoes definitely existed

during prehistoric times.

Life finds a way.

Mosquitoes are a lot better

at biting things than you would expect.

People will hear me say that they bit dinosaurs,

and you think,

how are they going to get through the hide of a dinosaur?

They still get through things like crocodiles now.

So, there it is.

Parasitoid and host, Alien.

[victim crying out]

[bystander shrieking]

[Witness] Oh God!

Okay, so this technically isn't a bug,

but we still need to talk about it,

specifically because it is based

on the lifecycle of a real insect.

There are wasps, Ichneumonids, Braconids, Eupelmids,

several different groups

that are considered to be parasitoids.

You may have heard of parasites

and gotten them mixed up with the concept,

but parasites actually don't want to kill their host.

You are their house, their incubator, their source of food.

They want you alive and well as long as possible.

Parasitoids need to kill their host

in order to complete their life cycle.

[alien whines]

These are the stuff of nightmares.

There are parasitoids that lay eggs in caterpillars,

and the babies burst out of the caterpillar's back

in a pretty dramatic scene

and then spin a cocoon on the caterpillar's dead body.

There are others that are capable of

controlling the mind of their hosts

such that even though they've eaten away

most of the internal structures of that creature's body,

they have left compounds in there

that control the behavior of the organism,

such that it protects the creature that killed it

for the rest of their animated life.

There are no parasitoids that go after human beings.

[bystander screaming]

So, you know,

you can rest easy at night knowing

that that is not something

that we have ever discovered in this world.

No, don't. Don't touch it.

Don't touch it.

If you notice there, everyone just gathered around,

they were freaked out.

You hear the, oh God.

[Witness] Oh God!

But they just kept watching.

You got to document this stuff.

This is observational data that we would have lost

had not Sigourney Weaver and her colleagues

stayed around and watched what occurred there.

Yeah, I cannot guarantee you

that if something like that were to happen

around a bunch of researchers,

we wouldn't take a lot of notes.

Lice infestation, The Office.

Hey, Meredith, I need to tell you something.

Yes, Pam, what do you want?

Oh my God, Meredith, what are you doing?

Baking a cake.

What does it look like I'm doing?

Getting rid of the lice.

You probably won't hear this a lot,

but Meredith was right.

One of the best, most sure-fire ways

to ensure that you have fully gotten rid of the lice

is to shave your head because they do need the hair

in order to complete their lifecycle.

It's where they lay their eggs.

It's what allows for a protective structure for them.

They do not like hanging out on just naked flesh.

Sha-boom.

How do you like me now?

[coworkers murmur]

Take a picture, it'll last longer,

But it's a little extreme

because there are other ways you can go about this.

If you just take a very fine-toothed comb to the hair

and consistently comb away all of the lice

as well as their eggs, which are called nits,

this is where we get the term nitpicking,

because it is very annoying.

It's very time-consuming, but it does work.

Scalp leeches.

Skull vampires.

Follicle gypsies.

Hair lawyers.

So, at the end of the day,

I enjoy telling people

that they shouldn't freak out about insects.

Insects are wonderful creatures

and they shouldn't be so worried.

But I also understand that

you have to freak out to your comfort level.

No!

Actually, now that I look at it,

it really looks like Dwight

has pulled up a picture of a pubic louse here.

Let's talk pubes, people.

I'm very confident

he's pulled up a picture of a pubic louse here.

I hope that that's not what they have running around

in their head hair right now.

Cockroach habitat, Joe's Apartment.

♪ Boing, boing, boing ♪

♪ Boing, boing, boing ♪

♪ Ah, blah, blah-blah-blah ♪

♪ Blah, blah, blah ♪

You can say what you want about this movie, but this jam...

♪ Funky towel ♪

This is a bop, y'all.

It's a certified bop.

♪ Towel's got the funk, huh ♪

As revolting as this scene is,

they spent time getting the texturing

of the wings for the cockroaches right,

the pronotum is absolutely perfect.

This is very clearly Periplaneta americana.

They did a great job with these cockroaches

in their morphological design.

[Spaghetti] He don't wash, he don't clean.

He don't vacuum.

He don't get a crap.

He's the dirtiest freaking slob on the planet.

I think I'm in love.

I don't want to perpetuate the stigma

that if you see cockroaches in your home,

you are a dirty human being.

At the end of the day, they like food.

Bon appétit.

And we as human beings love food.

So, how's about a live and let live philosophy?

Smoker, Bee Movie.

Hey, check out the new smoker.

Oh, sweet.

That's the one you want.

The Thomas 3000.

Smoker?

Couple breaths of this knocks 'em right out.

First of all, we do not use smoke to knock the bees out.

We don't do that.

Twice the nicotine, all the tar.

[both laugh]

This idea that we're all running around spraying nicotine

into colonies to get the bees to calm down,

we are not drugging our bees, guys.

That was a little weird.

There are some who will actually

use leaves from tobacco plants.

They swear by it that the bees

are calmer under those circumstances,

but it is not the norm in this system.

[ominous music] [smoke spraying]

[bees coughing]

As you puff smoke into the colony,

the bees think, is something burning?

Maybe we should, just in case,

go and get as much of the honey as we can,

move some of the honey into their honey stomach,

just in case they've got to do something else with it later,

just in case they have to fly off with it.

The other fascinating quality of it is if you do get stung

while you have smoke in the air,

it is more difficult for that stinger to signal

to other bees that they should come to that locations

and sting you, too,

because the stinger releases an attack pheromone

that solicits more attacks from bees.

[Barry] Our honey is being brazenly stolen

on a massive scale.

First of all, male bees don't lift a hand

to produce any honey in a colony.

If anybody should be outraged

about how honey is handled in a colony,

it should be the worker bees,

who are all female.

Members of the jury,

look at what has happened to bees.

Our bees haven't been doing wonderfully lately,

and you've probably heard about this.

We have been losing between 1/3

and sometimes close to half of the honeybee colonies

in the U.S. every single year.

It is concerning.

It is disturbing.

Whose side are you on?

The bees'.

Mosquito bites, Jumanji.

We're fine.

[children screaming]

We're fine.

They can't get through the glass.

We're safe.

[mosquito knocking]

The way that you see them

kind of pecking at the glass like a woodpecker,

that's not how they do things.

That was much more woodpecker-y than it was mosquito-y.

The mosquitoes actually have these ratcheting needles

that make up their mouth parts that allow them, over time,

ratcheting back and forth,

to push their way through the skin of an organism.

[mosquito buzzing]

I would imagine that it wouldn't be that difficult

to get it through the ragtop roof of a vehicle,

especially since there are all kinds of little gaps

already present that you can sort of push aside

as you're ratcheting that proboscis through.

Under the skin, The Mummy.

[bug slithering ]

[holder shrieking]

All right, there is no way that's possible.

There is a substantial amount of connective tissue

involving quite a bit of collagen that holds you together,

such that organisms can not burrow into your body

and just run around that way.

Even things like screwworms

that do go under the surface of your skin,

they remain in that one place.

They grow and they expand out

the region where they're living,

but they don't run around.

[bug hissing]

When you're looking at scarabs,

they may look pretty fearsome.

Many species of scarabs have at least one horn,

a couple of horns going this way or going that way.

Those horns are not used as a means of defending themselves

against potential threats like human beings.

Those, well, those are used

in the process of mate selection.

Also, the horns are frequently used

as a means of fighting with other males

to defend the lady that you already have.

[scarabs hissing]

[man with torch yelling]

Chain of command, A Bug's Life.

The sun grows the food, the ants pick the food,

the grasshoppers eat the food.

There is no chain of command

where if the ants are not picking enough food,

such that there is excess for grasshoppers

they're going to be beaten up and have to have an uprising.

Come on, it's a great story.

Grasshoppers don't store up any food

because they don't need to survive during the winter,

They lay eggs that are cold hardy enough

that they're capable of surviving the entire winter.

They hatch in the spring

and that allows their lifecycle

to continue every single year.

Why am I even talking to you?

You're not the queen.

You don't smell like the queen.

That is a really cool comment.

It makes me very happy every time I hear it.

Now, that's funny.

Hopper is smelling the queen,

and the best way to distinguish between the queen

and the rest of the individuals in the colony is smell.

She releases just this cocktail of chemicals

that create a pheromone

that allow other individuals in the colony

to know the queen is present.

She's learning to take over for me, Hopper.

Oh, I see.

Under new management.

You see an heiress who is being trained

to be the new queen.

That doesn't happen.

There can be only one when it comes to queens.

They release a pheromone

that sterilizes the rest of the individuals in the colony.

You can't really have two queens at once

in the vast majority of ant colonies in close proximity.

Guys, go shade someone else for a while.

So, it is an impressive life to live,

but it is one where you are constantly dependent

on all the other ants around you, and it can turn on a dime.

The moment that that queen is no longer producing eggs,

all the rest of the ants in the colony panic,

so then she has to be replaced.

One of those circle of life kind of things.

Spider attack, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

Hagrid never opened the Chamber of Secrets.

Then you're not the monster.

[Spider] No.

Judging by the distribution of this spider's eyes

and the ways that his legs are structured around his body,

it's very clearly that they based it on a wolf spider.

[Spider] I cannot deny them fresh meat

when it wanders so willingly into our midst.

So, it doesn't quite make sense,

considering wolf spiders don't have social structures

in which they hunt together.

You get this many wolf spiders together,

and eventually you just end up with one really big,

really full wolf spider.

I think not.

They do eat each other.

They do seem to very much enjoy cannibalism.

For a lot of spider species,

it just doesn't really pay to invest heavily in sociality.

When you are social,

you have to be willing to share resources.

You can make a web that allows you to easily capture food

without putting in much of any work.

You can just walk over and eat it.

[Spider] Goodbye.

Working ants, A Bug's Life.

[Flik gasps] [bright music]

Oh no, oh no.

I'm lost!

It's actually pretty accurate that ants follow each other,

that they need to maintain connection with the other ants.

Watch my eyes.

But it's not through a line of sight.

They don't need to see the other ants

in order to continue trailing behind them.

It's actually through a set of chemicals.

There's a chemical trail that each ant is laying down.

As more ants lay down this chemical trail,

it becomes stronger and stronger,

and that makes it easier

to follow the ants to the next locations.

And here's the line again.

Thank you.

Beehive, Piglet's Big Movie.

[bees buzzing] [bird screaming]

[suspenseful music]

In order to be a bee,

you've got to have six legs,

and these guys definitely have four.

So, hmm.

It's a little questionable as to what we have here.

You know bees are sneaky like that.

They actually look a lot more like European hornets.

The head and the thorax

is typically how European hornets look,

and then the striations on their abdomen,

the yellow and black alternations that you see there,

also pretty characteristic of your European hornets.

Did you hear something?

I'm afraid I've got some honey in my ears.

And it makes a lot of sense.

Hornets don't make honey.

If anything, what you have in your ears is VAAM,

Vespa amino acid mixture.

It is actually this fluid produced by the larvae of hornets.

Now, hornets are fascinating creatures and as adults,

they're vegan, actually.

They consume only nectar from plants

and the fluid of some fruit and sometimes tree sap.

When they collect other insects,

when they chop up other bugs or collect meat,

they feed it to their offspring who have jaws

that allow them to actually be able to consume solid matter.

They have a digestive system

that allow them to break down those meats,

and then they produce this amino acid mixture

that is actually really, really potent,

apparently quite healthy stuff.

Oh, there is nothing better-er. [chuckles]

Multiple studies now have shown

that it can be really helpful

for keeping muscles very active, very healthy.

It's sold in some countries as a supplement.

[Pooh] Rabbit will lure the bees with beautiful music,

then Eeyore tempts to bees until their new hive

The Winnie the Pooh movies typically have the colony

being this bunch of golden lumps

that are hanging from a tree branch,

and that is how these colonies are typically depicted

in most movies, in most representations,

even in artwork,

and it's just not accurate.

It's just a drawing in a scrapbook.

One of the reasons why this happens

is because colonies used to be kept

in something called skeps.

They were these baskets

that look exactly like the things

you see hanging from trees,

and I don't think that enough people

have recognized that those aren't natural.

People wove those baskets

and put the honeybee nest inside of it.

Great new hive.

Eating bugs, Snowpiercer.

[water sloshing]

So, they discover that the bars

that they were eating are actually bugs,

and I'm pretty good with that, actually.

I eat 'em too, you know.

I think that we need to be quite realistic

with the way that our world works.

We are on a planet right now

that is careening towards climate disaster.

The meat that we choose to consistently eat

and eat very, very, very, very frequently

is from animals that are not very efficient processors

of the food that they consume, but insects are.

They are really good at processing.

Crickets are six times more efficient

at processing the food that they consume than cows.

Medium rare?

Now, there are some caveats here.

Insects have chitin in their exoskeleton,

and as a result of that, if you are allergic to shellfish,

the protein that typically triggers those allergies

are the same proteins that would trigger those allergies

if you were to eat a cricket, if you were to eat a mealworm.

No way, man.

There are several insects

that are chemically defended.

In the insect world,

it is considered proper etiquette

for you to signal to other organisms that if they eat you,

they would die, or at least be very, very unhappy about it.

And so there are warning colors.

It's called aposematic coloration,

black and yellow,

black and orange alternating,

or black and red signal to other creatures

if you eat me, it's not gonna be a good day for you, fam.

Brain-sucking bugs, Starship Troopers.

[creature squeals]

[Zander yells]

So, that was upsetting.

[clears throat]

There are no insects that do this.

I don't feel like I need to do any defending

of what you just saw there on-screen.

Like, that just, it doesn't happen.

Bugs don't do this,

but they've been rumored to for quite some time.

I don't know how I know, but I know.

There was an organism called the earwig

for which a lot of lore would revolve around

this creature crawling out of your wigs at night

back in the days where guys used to run around

in powdered wigs all the time.

The idea was that the earwig

crawled out of your wig at night

and burrowed into your ear and laid eggs

and fed on your brain.

They sucked his brains out.

Turns out they don't do any of that.

They just live under rocks and eat detritus.

You know, dried-up dead leaves and things of that nature.

[creature squealing]

[Zander wheezing]

It's also really difficult to get in there.

It's a whole set of apparatus in place

to keep stuff from getting into your skull

and eating your brain.

It's actually far more difficult to do

than these movies would make it seem.

Big bad bugs, huh?

[bell rings]

[Narrator] Conclusion.

Regardless of how Hollywood portrays things,

the most important thing that you can bring

to any of these films or movies is curiosesity and skepticism.

There will be things that will look too strange to be true.

Sometimes, they'll be real.

A lot of times, they won't be,

so be willing to do your own research

and don't let that curiosesity die.

Stoke it.

Keep it going.

Thank you so much for watching.

[crew applauding] [bright music]