Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness

That bug's in your house. You better kill it!

No, no, no. Not so fast. Are you sure you wanna do that?

That bug messed with the wrong queen!

Parent Nature made that little creature.

Are you sure you're gonna smash him?

I've always thought bugs were absolutely hideous.

I mean, just hittin' the windshield, comin' out from behind a wall,

creepin' and crawlin' all over the place

when I'm not trying to be creeped and crawled all over.

That bug is gonna mate and make more bugs,

and then you're gonna be covered in bugs for the rest of your life.

Is that what you want

while you're trying to get some Zs?

My first instinct when I see a bug

is to smash it!

But what gives me the right to kill this little baby insect?

Is it because my dad told me when I was, like, seven that ants are

actually intruders in our home so they must be killed?

Then I realized,

are they gorgeous?

Is there a symmetry that exists in a bug

that I don't really see anywhere else?

They can actually be stunning, there's sacred geometry.

In the way that there's sacred geometry in yoga, there's sacred geometry in bugs.

There's colors. There's beauty.

Do they love each other, or kill each other?

Do the girls eat the boys

after they do it? Do they have, like, 80 million kids at once or just one?

What's going on? What I want to know is,

are bugs gorgeous or gross?

-They're gorgeous! -Gross!

-Gorgeous! -Gross!

-Gorgeous! La la la la la la la la... -Gross, gross, gross, gross, gross!

I'm gonna have to take matters into my own hands.

How are ya, honey?

-Jonathan! -I'm so excited to see you!

I have an insatiable thirst for knowledge of bugs.

So I know my first call is going to be to entomologist Dr. Jessica Ware.

-Lots of insects like to live in plants. -Let's go.

An entomologist is a scientist who has a special focus on the study of insects.

Once we have insects, we take our pooters...

It's whatever you called it. You said it, not me.

There's a tube at the bottom.

If you suck up... insects--

I'm not understanding why we have to suck them up.

Well, some of them are so small that if you were to

try and pick them up with your hands, or your fingers, you would smush 'em.

Is that normal?

Oh, I got it!

It's incredible that, that you do this.

But, like, why is it important that we, like, study literal insects?

Well, I mean, insects are the wave of the future.

They teach us about different ways that we could fly, medicine.

What could they teach us about, you know, biodiversity or climate change?

And they're kind of the future of our food.

A very little space is required to have a bunch of protein and fat

and nutritious food when you rear insects for entomophagy,

compared to, like, having cows take up huge pastures and such.

So we need to, like, figure out what insects are out there.

You might think, in Central Park,

that everything is known, but that's not true. I mean,

even just like in the last ten years they've found new species of centipedes,

new species of insects, right here in Central Park.

We have a lot of them already in the museum,

that are already pinned and preserved.

Wait, you have like, tons of preserved baby insects?

Yeah, we have like 23 million specimens.

So, let's go, Dr. Jessica Ware! Ah!

I'm so excited.

Yeah, seeing this, the name, the sign, the arch, it always gets me excited too.

Even though I've been coming in these doors for years.

Ah. To your office we go.

No offense to sixth-grade field trips,

but this is not your average sixth-grade field trip, honey.

We've got an all-access pass, and she's got secrets to show us.

And yet they do.

The male mates with the female,

and he wants to make sure that she uses his sperm.

But she can store sperm in her abdomen.

He wants to try and scrape out all that sperm storage.

-She's got a refrigerator in her tum-tum. -She's got--

His secondary penis actually is like a scoop or like a scraper.

And he basically scrapes out the previous male's sperm.

And then he ejaculates that second sperm into her.

I don't know why it's such a visceral reaction to you saying ejaculate.

So if you look, it looks like two little hooks.

-No! No! -I know. He'll scoop.

Yeah, it's scoopy time.

Each of these cabinets is full of drawers, and the drawers are full of insects.

All insects have a head, then they have a thorax, and then they have an abdomen.

And then they all have six legs. And that's what separates them

from things like spiders, or other arachnids, they have eight legs.

And they're actually part of this larger group called Hexapoda,

because it means six legs.

Ah. But what about bugs?

So, all bugs are insects, but not all insects are bugs.

So bugs are just one order within insects.

A fly is Diptera, which is one of the orders.

Odonata, which is my beloved dragonflies and damselflies, that's an order.

And then Hemiptera, which includes cicadas,

are the bugs, they're called the "true bugs."

This is a termite.

You can see how tiny the actual termites are

in here. They're teeny tiny creatures that have different castes.

So there's reproductive castes,

which are the ones that mate, which are king and queen.

And then there's soldiers and there's workers.

The queen is this.

That's a termite?

Yeah. Her little teeny-tiny head is right there.

She mates with the king, she gets the sperm,

she stores sperm,

and then she just becomes an egg factory.

And this is her body stretched full of eggs.

And all she can do is lay there and just pump out eggs.

She can no longer feed,

she can no longer groom herself, so the workers have to care for her.

They have to groom her, they have to feed her.

And if an intruder comes, they actually will drag her away

to a place of safety.

That's really cool.

Yeah, that's what I study in my lab, is female reproduction

'cause I feel like it's been like all

penis, penis, penis, penis, penis for like 200 years.

But there's all these cool in-- internal anatomy that females have,

you know, for mate choice, or for sperm selection.

They can, like, secrete stuff that would kill some sperm and not others.

Like, females actually have a lot of control...

-That's fascinating. -...but it's just been overlooked.

That, I think, is actually really incredible when you think about it.

'Cause females were literally not, like, welcomed into, like, institutions to study

in the rates that men were, like, for hundreds and hundreds of years.

And then depending on your race, that's like a whole other thing.

In grad school, I was the only Black woman in my program.

When I was a post-doc, I was the only Black woman in my program.

When I got my first job as a professor,

I was the only Black woman professor in my department.

And now I'm the first Black curator here at the American Museum.

I feel like, there are jobs, come join us.

You know, I feel like-- I wish, I wish

we weren't always just being the first, you know what I mean?

Now we need some seconds, we need thirds,

we need fourths, we need, like...

I did think in your story, like, it was gonna,

like, I thought you were gonna be like, "And now, there's tons--"

But no, that was like, that was not, it wasn't what--

This is a huge

universe to explore and to learn about.

Studying entomology allows you to unwrap the mysteries

of 400 million years. They've been around a lot longer than we were.

I want to see a living, shunting, breathing insect.

-Do you wanna go to my office? -Yes.

This is a leaf insect,

which is in the order Phasmatodea.

And they have this behavior to try and look like a leaf.

Some of them look like sticks.

They will sway, to look like a leaf, kind of swaying in the wind.

Oh, look at her, just blowing in the wind.

Ha. She's trying to fool you into making you think

that she's just a swaying leaf, nothing to see here, folks.

Gorgeous!

Okay, this is a millipede.

-And this millipede is actually... -Boy, oh...

...not an insect, it's a myriapod.

They just kind of crawl and explore. See, she's starting to warm up.

She's feeling you.

Ooh! It's shitting on me!

I can say I've been shat on by a millipede.

Gross!

It did.

Feels like water, mixed with poopy, mixed with my worst fears.

It's okay, it's your friend. It's, it's, it's like, um, like a friendly poop.

It's fine, I'm fine.

You know how when you thought that your colorist

and your hairstylist were the same person? No!

And it's the same thing with insects and spiders.

So, I want to meet an arachnologist, which is someone who studies spiders.

Are you afraid of spiders in any way, or...

Well, I'm not the president of the fan club. But I'm on my way.

Maybe like, like is ten the most comfortable?

-Yeah. -I'm probably like a three.

-Okay, I'm gonna work on bringing that up. -Okay. I love your haircut.

Thank you. So right in the window there...

-Oh! -...I have two garden spiders.

Oh my gosh, look at her. And they both, like, built little webbies?

-Yeah! Want to feel what an egg sac... -Oh, yes.

-Oh yes. -...is like?

Just feel the egg sacs with my-- Remember now...

-That's an egg sac? -...a spider made this

by herself, with her silk.

Touch it, it's very soft.

Spider sacs feel strong like steel wool,

but soft like a baby cotton.

It is the most interesting texture I have ever felt.

The green color is a combination of-- The spider makes it,

but they, they're getting the raw ingredients from the food they eat.

So, mostly insects. It's camouflage.

Isn't-- like, what, like medical advantages could silk have?

It's very strong. It's also pretty stretchy.

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