Today, I get to welcome into the warm glow of this zoologist's campfire a medical entomologist
and public health biologist called Marietta Braks.
She is a researcher at the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, the
RIVM in the Netherlands in Utrecht.
She has many, many scientific papers that are mostly on insects as disease vectors.
And they range from what type of sweat mosquitoes like the most, how mosquitoes can take a plane
to get somewhere, and how to map mosquitoes in other disease-garing arthropods in something
called VectorNet.
She's written books about the subject as well.
I think about Lyman about mosquitoes, and she did her PhD at Wageningen University in
exactly the same years that I did my masters there, but we never met.
So she is here today because of her fantastic stories, but also to defend the honor of mosquito
chasers worldwide after the throwaway comment last week by Ruhl Walters that mosquito field
work might not be all that exciting.
Well, let's prove Ruhl wrong today.
Marietta, welcome.
I take up the challenge.
Thank you.
Well, first of all, just to respond to that, snake chasers, they get all the glory, but
you actually chase the most dangerous creatures on Earth by body count, at least.
Isn't that right?
That's the popular saying, but actually, entomologists always say it's not the mosquito
that is to blame, but it's the viruses it transmits.
So actually, we are really very often very willing to not take that credit, although
a lot of people want to be the most dangerous and stuff like that.
But for whatever reason, we get that name very often.
And it's more often that medical entomologists, at least that I'm a favor of, are in the business
of not raising the crisis, but to calm people down because a lot of things are much more
credited to insects.
So I would like to give a little bit of the floor to the nice fieldwork and definitely
exciting, maybe as exciting as a snake investigations and fieldwork, but also to enlighten a little
bit on the fantastic work of a world of insects and not only nasty critters.
Oh, no, no, no.
I'd be the last to say that I love insects.
Actually, if you could see around my room here, I have lots of living bugs.
And I think you're one of those people who are really going for one type of animal.
How did you get into biology?
How did you get into chasing mosquitoes in the first place?
Well, I got this invitation last week and I was thinking, strangely, a lot of people
will not see me as a field biologist.
I'm not a typical field biologist.
And I was looking into why that is because recently I do a lot of field biology and I
did a little bit throughout my career of 25, 30 years.
But I think it started with my dad and it happens to be his birthday or it should be
his birthday.
He would have been 87 this year today, but he already passed away in 87 by chance that
is the similar date.
And I was 17 so way too early.
He was 50.
But he was a farmer.
He's a big farmer and I'm a daughter of him and together with my two brothers and two
sisters, so a big family.
And we all are into biologists.
So my brother took over the farm.
My other brother was doing veterinary science.
And my oldest sister is a biologist and my other sister is a molecular biologist by
training.
So the bug has been put there very early in life.
And I think when I, so my dad took us, we lived in the countryside and it was not an
ecological science or biology view to it, but it was just surrounding us.
So I lived in the countryside.
We would go on Sundays probably to have the wild kids out of the house.
My dad took us for a walk just in the fields.
There was nothing, no mountains, no nothing, a little bit of forest.
And then we would pick flowers and we would see, you know, the Dutch flowers by the Dutch
name.
And then we looked in the booklet, but that was my memory since I'm five till 15 or something.
And we did that a few times a year probably.
We would go to the forest nearby because my grandma lived there.
And I think when I went to the city to study, that was more to do city stuff.
So I left the fields away.
So I was not so used to go to Misiya and doing history and all kinds of things.
And so when I went to go to college, I was much more interested in, I studied biology,
but not to do fieldwork, but to do molecular stuff or do my old masses is in century ecology.
So it's more into neurology, but from animal point of view.
So I was fascinated by the senses that animals had and that humans didn't have.
I started my first year in human nutrition and then I found out that I didn't really
was interested in humans at all.
And I was much more interested in animals, not so much in plants my whole life.
Plants is only now arriving.
But well, judging from your background, you've gotten a little bit of love for plants as well.
Yeah, everything comes a little bit in the slipstream.
It's not I'm definitely not a taxonist.
So I don't know things by name, but I appreciate the nature myself.
So it's a little bit from that background that I thought when I went to study that I
was already from the countryside.
So I thought scouting as such was a little bit for urban kids and not from people from
So I never considered my real biologists never did to work, but much more something that
is there always like a normal thing.
And now later in life, I appreciate it so much more that I found when I go into the
fields that I reconnect with actually the normal that I really, really appreciate.
So I built it in and I got away from the policymaking and I'm actually now much more involved
in arranging fieldwork also in the Netherlands and in the Caribbean.
And so it's so that's the main places you go to for fieldwork at the Netherlands in the
Caribbean or at this moment?
Yes.
Hmm.
This since 2017, I have a project called mobilecom and that is short for capacity building for
mosquito borne disease control through sustainable mosquito management.
Okay.
And that is the Dutch, the kingdom of the Netherlands have six overseas territories in
the Caribbean, which three are their own countries and three are special communities within the
kingdom.
And I imagine the fieldwork there is quite nice.
I mean, definitely destination.
Yeah.
But the interesting part is that I like that much.
We do it together with public health.
That means it's very much connected to public health issues and it's not so much that we
go alone in the fields, not to comment on, but there's a lot of work in the tropics where
Western people go there, go into the fields, have maybe two field assistants and then take
their data back and there's not a lot of connection with the local people.
This is together with the local vector control and the public health department.
And I work predominantly on the yellow fever mosquitoes there.
So it's an urban mosquito.
So you come to people's homes.
So my fieldwork is actually in the Caribbean when we are doing a gypti work together with
the vector control unit is to visit people at home.
What is very interesting.
So you're very involved in the culture and you have to adapt and see how it goes.
And that's a wonderful way of doing fieldwork, I think, because I depend on local teams and
they invite me to go with them, but I go with them.
And so you're very ingrained in the culture.
And that's very similar to what we did for fieldwork where we were doing my work for
POSOC in Florida.
We went to Brazil.
So a lot of this agency gypti work has been done in urban fieldwork.
Oh, well, that's fieldwork too.
And as you said, you go into people's houses.
I imagine you really get to know a country if you get that intimate with how people live.
Right?
Yeah, they can also not open the door.
So do you knock on the door and you say, I want to catch your mosquitoes or what happens?
It depends a little bit on the project.
So after I did what you mentioned, did my PhD in Wageningen, I went to United States
and I was in Florida for a while.
And for Florida, I was doing a project together with Brazil because I was working on invasion
biology from the Jalafuzian mosquito and the Tiger mosquito.
It's an item that is a theme.
If you stay long in the topic, everything comes back again.
It's a theme very current in Europe because it's Egypt.
I is encroaching on European continent too.
But at that time, it just arrived in Florida, but also in Brazil.
So we were doing an investigation how the Egypt and the Tiger mosquito would meet and
who would be the best competitor.
And we found out that that is very context dependent.
So it's different whether you are in an urban or very slum area or you're in the forest.
And it was actually, we did this project in two cities in Florida, West Palm Beach and
two sites in West Palm Beach and in Rio de Janeiro.
And we had the transects going from favela, so from the slums to the forest.
But Florida doesn't have a real slum area, not a real forest area.
We only did the tree in between that will say that it's rural, suburbia and urban.
And so just for context, the transect is a line you draw on a map that you want to pretty
much sample all across that line, right?
Yeah, we actually had only five points.
So it's not exactly like that.
But in Brazil, we had five points in two different cities.
And the five points was from slum area, suburbia, urban rule and I'm sorry, I'm going the wrong
direct exit.
So forest rule, suburbia, urban slum area.
Wow.
Okay.
And then you go and knock on doors and say, yeah, so you cannot do that as a Dutch citizen
working in Florida and go in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and think that will go fine.
So we go with the local team and that was great.
So yeah, it is actually one time talking about not very campfire like but very exciting.
We had this of course planned in Rio de Janeiro with my local scientists and some team and
the local vector control team.
And we put OV traps in people's home.
That's what our investigation was.
So you need that close to the home.
And in this case, we would put traps there and then we collect them the next week.
And you need approval obviously.
And at one time we could not come because there was a riot and the police effort in the Rosinha.
Rosinha is one of the biggest favelas of Rio de Janeiro.
And then we went the next day.
Like nothing happened.
It's such an intricate thing of a society there that the next day you can come there
and all the fear is gone.
And you are there with people and they know where to go.
So it was actually, you don't have to decide.
You just tangle along.
But then you see people's home, you know how they live.
My Portuguese is not so good that you can have long conversations.
I could only talk mosquitoes.
I have a pretty good vocabulary for mosquito Portuguese.
Not so much for other things.
And then you don't ask too many questions and people open the door for you and you see
in the house and you try to be as calm and as you can be and do your work.
And then you see obviously, especially when this trend is from the favela to the urban
area that is quite a stretch of society.
And I think that's what I found that I like.
I like science, but as a real scientist, I don't really care too much of what the question
is.
Any question is interesting, but I like the work.
I see.
Yeah.
And that I think holds for a lot of things.
And maybe that's why I'm not so much an academic anymore.
I'm a scientist, but I'm not an academia anymore.
Right.
Well, no, and doing very useful work.
So did you ever get any strange responses from people when you go in there and say,
I want to put this thing here so the mosquito can lay their eggs or?
Well, interestingly, I did is that I was in, we did this also in Florida and we were in
West Palm Beach and West Palm Beach.
It was about two days after the scare of the toxins that was the anthrax scare in Florida.
And of course, that's not a very good point to knock on people's door and put something
outside their door.
So there was a lot of fear that they.
So we got rejected.
And I was doing it together with my Brazilian colleagues.
So you can imagine that you're in West Palm Beach with two ladies who speak funky English,
putting a pot outside when there was a scare that there was anthrax attack.
So that was an interesting time and then that is what we till work and urban areas.
Then people would say, don't enter.
And we always found out that suburbia is the worst to work at.
Really?
Oh, urban areas.
It's nice.
People are welcoming, especially slum areas.
They're super happy rural areas also.
Suburbia, they like to keep the door closed for air conditioning air come out, straight
people coming in.
So we would get water through the door and then never invited in.
It's interesting.
Okay.
Well, and is that the same in Brazil as in Florida?
Yeah, I think it does, of course, a little bit of difference in that.
That there's a little bit more human interaction.
It's a little bit of warm South American attitudes.
So in general, Brazil is a little bit more exciting to work in than in suburbia, Florida.
Yeah.
More riots, I imagine, at least back in the day.
No, no, no, but also welcoming people interested in what you do.
But also in Florida, we had, for example, in Florida, we came one time in the urban slum
area.
It was a neighborhood in West Palm Beach and we entered there and I see that one of the
guys have a ankle band.
And my Brazilian colleague says, like, oh, that's very fashionable.
What is that?
I'm like, well, it's Traca.
So I had to tell her that I'm never afraid for that.
But of course, nothing is going to happen there.
But that's something you run into in.
It's not a very campfire kind of story, but that happens all the time.
If you visit 15 houses a day behind every house is a new story.
So yeah, that's very interesting.
You must have met a lot of people.
Well before we get into the campfire stories, as you say, I have to ask because I don't
speak to many mosquito experts.
And so as one of the greatest mosquito experts, what do you do to avoid getting stung by mosquitoes?
I've heard stories, people eating a lot of garlic, people spraying all sorts of things
on themselves, washing, not washing.
What's the trick?
First of all, they don't sting, eh?
They bite just for a little, since you asked me.
That's what we say.
I think one of the reasons I'm still in mosquito science is because mosquitoes don't bug me
that much.
So I don't get big bites.
During my PhD, I have, I wanted to be tough and I fed my own mosquito colony one time
because our lab personnel did that and you want to be blood brothers with your personnel.
So I thought I will do it myself.
So hold on.
Feeding means giving your own blood, right?
By the arm.
Okay.
So you stick your arm into a cage full of mosquitoes.
Okay.
So we did, in Wageningen University, we did olfaction.
We studied olfaction by mosquitoes.
So you can also blood feed mosquitoes with man brains and stuff like that.
But of course, there's a little bit, a bottleneck in which of the mosquitoes can do that or
not.
Well, if you feed them the normal way, there's no selection in whether they can find you
or if they can pierce through a membrane.
So the Wageningen University fades all their breeding.
They breed mosquitoes by feeding them on human blood unless they do virus experiments.
At least that was in the time that I was studying there between 95 and 99.
I did it once and then the next day I had no problem.
But the day after, there were like 30 mosquitoes bites and it became one big heart.
Oh.
So I was a little bit too enthusiastic about it, but it might be possible that I did something
with my system because after that, my body doesn't even make bombs or even doesn't
reach anything.
Really?
Yeah.
So I don't do anything.
So that's the trick then to get stung a lot and then after that, hopefully your body is
used a lot.
Bitten a lot?
Ah, bitten a lot.
Well, they do inject something.
So what we say in Dutch, it rhymes in Dutch, but not in English, is that you sting with
your butt and you bite with your mouth.
And that's the difference.
Yeah.
It is.
It's not what comes out, but it's actually what you take in.
And when you sting, you usually don't take anything.
No, that's right.
That's right.
So it's feeding.
I see.
Anyway, that's different.
We did it in Florida again and I did an experiment, what the difference between chicken blood
and human blood is for the progeny of Ades Egypti and Ades Albopictus, the yellow fever
mosquito and the tiger mosquito.
And I did it a little bit more controlled.
So I had mosquitoes in a small tube and I would feed them and I would count how often
they fed and how many eggs they laid and if there is at the end at a lifetime, whether
they die early or not.
So again, this is feeding with your own blood or I put my arm on the tube where there's
mesh and they bite.
Yeah, not for the faint of heart.
All right.
Well, I had one of my students breathing headlights on their arms for about two months.
Really?
Yeah.
How do you do that?
Do you have to walk around with a box all the time or really?
No, another box.
We made it under a bandage where I put a little arena from bombing paper, just like a thick
piece of paper.
I put an arena and then I put it on so it was not a box.
And then with a tuft of hair and then we had one, two, three, four, five, six lights in
there.
I always tell my students that to know something about your animal, you have to spend some
time with your animal.
Absolutely.
And I think that's for anything, but with, of course, blood feeding insects, they're
notoriously hard to breed on something else because they need, I mean, you can feed them
sugar, but they have to reproduce.
Yeah.
The point why they are blood feeding is because they use, obviously, the protein to make eggs.
Okay.
So they need it.
Yes.
They're very hard to have a colony and no blood feeding for blood feeding insects.
So there's always an issue.
And very often these vectors are very host specific.
So they like you, like catalyze.
You cannot put it on a rabbit.
No, I see.
So you have to walk around.
It is Egypt.
I doesn't feed on chicken either, preferentially.
Okay.
So you really have to use humans, I guess.
I was keeping land leeches for fun.
Yes.
And they didn't want to feed on me for some reason.
I don't know why.
And so I fed them goat's blood that I got from a befriended vet.
Yeah.
But it contained heparin and they all died.
Blood feeding is, you can imagine that the digestion is, preference is just a co-evolution.
The co-evolve together.
So you cannot be good in everything.
So you are specialized.
So this was the experiment also about because the yellow fever mosquito prefers humans above
anything and the target mosquito is a little bit considered as overfield, meaning that
it also bites other mammals than only humans.
And there is of course a different cow blood and human blood is not the same.
And the enzymes to digest it is not as efficient than for your preferred host.
So you can imagine that your progeny is the amount of eggs you can lay or the quality
of eggs is different, which blood you take.
Very often they can, but it's not as efficient.
And yeah, if they're hungry, they will take something less tasty than what they really
like.
Well, some don't.
Some will refuse.
So the specialists, the 3500 plus species of mosquitoes in the world, so they have their
own thing.
So some will eat anything.
Some are very specific.
Some probably can't.
But there's a difference.
Yeah.
That's what I can just imagine.
So these technicians that you mentioned in the lab, so they feed the mosquitoes every
week or so by putting their arm in there.
Yeah, we had, I think that was a schedule maybe twice a week and it was hundreds.
Oh, so that's dedication.
We really appreciated them.
Yes.
Ah, wow.
I can not imagine.
But I imagine they don't get any more bumps, right?
Their body.
No, no, no.
Their body is, some people obviously can't.
So you will not do that when you will have like this big histamine outbreak the whole
time.
So yeah, it's amazing.
So that's what we do, dedication for our science, right?
Definitely.
Does anything ever go wrong in the lab, like escapes or?
Well, these were non-infected.
When I was working there, we were much more interested in the insects themselves because
it was all faction, we didn't do infected mosquitoes.
Now I left there in 1999.
So now they have whole Beasel 3 lab where they do infection experiments and then it's
important that they don't escape.
Usually the mosquitoes we worked on are tropical mosquitoes.
We tried not that they're the escape, but they are not going to survive.
In Florida, both the Tiger mosquito and the Yellow Fever mosquito were present.
And so it's also not so important that you just worked with a local mosquito species.
So it becomes very important when it's an invaded mosquito that is not there or it's
an infected mosquito.
You definitely should not want to lose them.
No, but it's not like when you're in the lab or in the cafeteria near the lab, you're
suddenly attacked by some exotic mosquitoes.
Oh, I will not guarantee that there might be more mosquitoes at the entomology lab, but
that's not the intention.
So you keep them in the cage and they're fine.
Well, you know, thinking about my lab, we've had a few scorpion breakouts here and there.
And they're a lot bigger.
So I imagine flying things that are really small like that.
Yeah, you don't become very popular.
So you mentioned before we start recording whether we can find someone or trap someone
in the mosquito cage.
Actually when we were in Florida, we were with four ladies from Europe and we were just
starting our early 30s, but we were 30 year old.
And Florida at that time, it was before 9-11, there were a lot of flight schools there.
Sure.
And flight schools are generally inhabited by 21 year old guys who are sent there by
their parents to have a career.
After 9-11, that whole plummeted, but at the time that I was there in 2000, that was all
up and running.
And so we, this was two Belgian ladies, one, two students from Belgium, me and an English
lady who was working there, was run with these young guys because that's the only, because
Florida is known for being a retired state, except when you have a field station.
So we were about the only 30 year old ladies from abroad and then 200 pilots.
And Sabine was, I was not hanging too much with pilots, but Sabine, my colleague was
and at the moment, they had practical jokes at some point, she had this huge velvet box
and she gave it to someone and we just put hundreds of mosquitoes in there.
And so he opened the box and thinking we had a present and that his whole house was full
with hungry female mosquitoes.
So if you, it's a very good, they were bugging her for a long time for just having practical
pranks.
I can imagine.
Yeah.
Anybody will want to do, I think everybody can imagine somebody, they would want to send
a box like that.
Yeah.
So and you cannot get them back in the box.
So he probably was really bugged with that for considerable time.
How long would they survive if you have a hungry mosquito in your house?
How long do they live?
Oh, in general, these mosquitoes, they probably on average live three weeks.
Okay.
That's a terribly long time.
If they feed on you, then you have your surrounding invested with newborn mosquitoes too because
they take anything, they love it around your house.
So now that, that they probably bombed it in the sense like they just bought probably
some closed doors and went to the grocery store and got some inside.
I would not do that, but probably they did.
Sector side bombs.
Yes.
I would do that.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Oh, wow.
That's, that's a terrible practical joke, but yeah, it's a good one.
She came home one time and the whole house was covered in cell phone.
So now it was totally accurate.
Oh, right.
So it was going over and back with the practical jokes.
This was definitely defense.
Very good one.
Absolutely.
And in the field, well, you say you are in exotic places, Brazil, the Caribbean.
What have you encountered there that was funny, dangerous, maybe scary?
It started a little bit.
I got actually a lab job for my post-op, for my PhD, but during my interview, they asked
me, would you mind going to Tanzania, Africa to do some fieldwork?
Yeah, that was my reaction too.
And I came from, I had never been with my family on travels.
We were a farmer family, so we would stay in house and not in the area, not go on flight,
holidays or to Spain.
And I always had this really big urge, but till I was 18, I never traveled abroad.
Okay.
By that time, I had been twice or three times with friends in Europe.
So when they asked me if I wanted to go to Africa, that was when I applied for the job
after my masses, it was like, oh, great.
And only fair enough because you cannot get a PhD in malaria mosquitoes.
I never have seen a real malaria mosquito, right?
I thought I would just not be honored.
That would be ridiculous.
So they gave me the opportunity and I went to Tanzania and that was, I think I was, that
was in 97, I think.
And I was 25, 26.
And all by myself and that was quite interesting.
I only stayed there for two months, but in the two months I had, first of all, the child
of my supervisor passed away from malaria.
Oh, for pneumonia.
Ponemonia, he already lost a child of malaria.
So this is an educated person who even in Africa cannot manage to keep your child safe.
That was quite a wake up call because he was a vet.
He was a personal vet, but worked in factor control, factor stuff.
So that was very intense.
I went to the funeral in Tanzania and that was obviously an intense thing.
And I had to travel from that place with my electric nets in the bus to go, I think 700
kilometers to the other side of the country because I was going to go with him.
I was going to pick him up and then we would travel together to the southern part of Tanzania.
Okay.
Actually, he could not do that because he had a morning period and had to stay in to
his family.
So I had to go to the other side of the country by bus train and I arrived there and people
asked me so.
But it was in the middle of the night.
I had been there two months before, but that was during daylight and now I can go there.
So I arrived there, pitch black train station and people came to me and I said, who are
you?
I'm your doctor and I thought I was picked up so I go into their car and I was brought
to my colleague.
I knock on his door and he says, are you here?
He had no idea that I arrived.
They were not his drivers.
They were just random people that put two people together and it happened to be okay.
And I'm like, wow.
Great.
So that was fantastic.
And then he applied for a job in Kenya.
So we were going to the field and I was there by myself with two Swahilian speaking Tanzanians
who I totally trusted but not very communicative.
No, I can imagine that's a problem.
And then we were catching mosquitoes with electric nets.
Yes, you mentioned them.
How does that work?
Just briefly.
Well, it's like your mosquito, it's your fly catcher that you have and then they get
electrocuted and it's a certain voltage on it and then they fall in soap under the thing
and then you collect it.
Right.
And we added some odors that we got from myself, my tent or other places and see some difference
if they, some infection research.
One time we found a bat in there who was going to the mosquitoes attracted to the odors but
yeah, caught itself into the electric net.
And then we got, it's very strange when you look for mosquitoes and then you look like,
what is that?
And then you focus out like, oh, it was dead.
It was electrocuted itself.
That's very sad.
Yeah.
So that's already sad.
But at one point we had to make these electric nets with spark boxes and they make high
voltage low amperage.
Sure.
Yes.
And then we got into the situation that you are there as a foreigner, the local government
want to act appropriately.
And we were hosted, we were intense in the beginning, but then we moved up to a little
village and then at night we heard some screams and we didn't know what was in there.
We found out that they were beating the shit out of local guys to find out where the park
parks came from, where the park box came from.
So here you are.
You mentioned that something is stolen and they have their own way of getting the information
back and it feels so extremely bad.
But you mean really beating?
I was not there.
I just said, yeah, I'm physically, yeah.
And they just rounded up the 18 year old kids to figure out if they knew something.
They're horrible.
So and I was 25 like, oh, I don't want this.
I'm a member of Amnesty and this is like, oh, no, it's very uncomfortable.
And then the next day suddenly a spark box appears on the side of the road, completely
covered with mud and sand.
Okay.
It's probably hidden in the ground somewhere.
And did it still work?
Yeah.
So despite not having your supervisor there and you got your equipment back so you were
able to finish your research.
Yeah, they're done a very unpleasant way.
I'm not sure at that point whether they were there, but that was at the time that a lot
of these things happened.
One was gone, one had to come.
And so my supervisor from the north, he had, we didn't know if he was coming.
It was before cell phones.
We had faxes.
Yeah.
I feel like I'm grandma now.
But so it was not so easy to communicate.
And after a few days or maybe weeks, he suddenly arrived at his land for over the other side
of the country and they just joined us.
So at the end we were with all together.
And we had a very good time.
And but we also, that was in a small village.
We had to put bed nets up.
We did some experiments also with bed nets and catching mosquitoes.
And then another story was that we visited person and he was very apprehensive to let
us in, but we selected that house.
So we were persistent and things like that.
And then we found this lady in the back of this hut and all covered by, she was well
covered.
And then we found later on that it was someone's daughter who had had epileptic attack, but
she had was was carrying hot water and she had burnt herself.
Oh dear.
Yeah.
And that was months ago.
And the parents had given her to someone who was going to prove her to witchcraft her to
cure her.
And it was an old man who was now living with this young lady.
All kind of like.
Oh yeah.
That's quite a, quite a shift from the Netherlands.
Yeah.
So you come there and luckily I was not responsible for this whole thing.
We had a local someone from Tanzania and there's a lot of probably talk about this that I don't
know of.
But I remember this was my field, my first real field experience that was quite intense.
Quite a culture shock.
Yes.
That's what I wanted to say.
The fieldwork has very often nothing to do with the topic you're investigating.
Yeah.
That's the despite your best attempts to plan everything, things happen all the time, right?
Yes.
Especially with people.
This is probably not the best, these are not the nicest experiences where you like fieldwork.
But it is definitely the only way you experience these things and you never know what happens.
So you have to be a little bit adaptive, flexible and try to get out it without too much harming
anyone or yourself.
I never felt really afraid there but in hindsight when you come back home and then you tell
like, oh yeah, this happened.
Yeah.
Oh, that was weird.
Usually it's in hindsight.
So that's in the context of being there, it doesn't seem so extreme as then when you
come back.
Yeah.
That's usually the case.
Yeah.
Or for me at least, yeah.
It feels, I think it's the, if you're good in fieldwork, you do what you have to do and
you get out of it.
You are innovative.
I'm very much not so good in being in the desk and doing policy.
But so I definitely have a lot of things I'm not so good at.
But I found now I'm nearly 54.
I think I'm very good at that in taking it in, find a solution and try not to put yourself
in danger too much and just get with the people and figure it out and always think that you're
winning.
And now you take students into the field to share that experience, I imagine.
Yeah.
I have actually come back what I work, I do now.
This is my students, they go, I've sent three or four groups to the Caribbean.
Yeah.
It was an urban setting and it's not the most, definitely not sending people to Tanzania.
But there's quite some history between the Caribbean and the Netherlands.
So it gives other challenges and it definitely needs some adaptation from the student side.
I'm sure.
I mean, these are all young students.
It's always a culture shock, right?
Yeah.
So I very often, that's a good, I found out that useful advice I gave it last week also
to someone who's going to a Rubai.
It's like, I asked them what they're going to do and that student says, well, I arrive
on Wednesday at five o'clock at night, I take a good sleep and then eight o'clock I will
be at the department and I'm going to give them the agenda and figure out the schedule.
And I said, hold your horses, you're not going to do anything this week anymore.
You're going to arrive and figure out where you are and spend Thursday, Friday and the
weekend to figure out where you are.
Maybe say hi, but leave your efficiency, the Dutch efficiency behind.
And then on Monday you make an appointment.
When on Monday it feels nice and then you are in the right set and you're not a time
lagged anymore.
And I got students back who said like it was very hard not to do anything.
The first three days, but it gained at the end so much.
Yeah.
You have to get into the speed of the locale.
Yeah.
And they are so used to what we call a fish.
It's very, well, it's a problem with the fitters, right?
It's very fit for the Netherlands.
Very unfit for many other places.
It's not that they are slower or anything.
It's just very different.
And you have to figure out what the fit way to do.
So I usually ask them to do that.
Right.
And I mean, we talked about the snake people before and I'm a scorpion guy, but I have,
you know, dozens of my favorite species of scorpions, but do you have any favorite mosquitoes
or doesn't it work like that in mosquito world?
No, I think I'm actually an anthropologist that uses mosquitoes to get everywhere.
No, actually on my WhatsApp, I have a picture of Sabete Siena, Sienese.
I see I'm not even pronouncing it right, but this is the most beautiful mosquito in the
world which has purple, blue flags on their legs.
Oh.
So it's very beautiful.
It's a forest.
It's an American forest mosquito.
And I actually never saw it in real life, but it's definitely beautiful mosquito.
We recently had a project with someone in Sweden who actually can make pictures of live
mosquitoes because I think a lot of people that work with beetles think they're so pretty
that they have a whole history in having all catalogs of pretty beetles or butterflies,
but mosquitoes are horrendously ugly dead.
Yes.
Yeah.
I know.
So collections are things break off.
So you cannot pin them.
It's keep them fresh.
So I have, of course, some taxonomy friends who teach taxonomy, so they have to renew their
collection the whole time because otherwise you cannot see this.
So I'm not into that neighbor at all.
I, of course, appreciate that all mosquitoes are a species are different than doing different
things.
That's my job, but I'm not so good in the taxonomy.
But yeah, I did work with Aida's mosquitoes, with anophilus mosquitoes, with cutyx mosquitoes.
So I did my fair range.
Usually only because they transmit diseases, what is the treat of them, obviously.
Well they can't help it.
Does it make them sick?
I mean, the first person's first creature to get sick, I imagine is the mosquito, right?
It's a trade-off.
If they get infectious diseases, it's always an end.
We all know what an R0 is, right?
Since Corona, you have to be efficient to spread, to give something to more than one
other individual.
Anything that doesn't do that, dies out.
So there's probably a lot of very inefficient viruses that attack the mosquitoes that never
survive.
So the ones that we have now, obviously, I've never tested, and there's some research on
putting a lot of malaria parasites in mosquitoes and they do suffer from it.
In the natural range, there's a trade-off because especially the mosquito still has
to fly to be helping the virus.
And of course, it's not consciously, it's how evolution works.
But all the viruses that get into a mosquito that kills it or being less efficient or whatever,
has not very efficient.
So over the evolution, there's a relationship between certain viruses and certain mosquito
species.
And that's why AIDS is not transmitted by mosquitoes or malaria is only transmitted
by anopheles and not by AIDS mosquitoes because although they're all mosquitoes and a very
narrow family of 3,500 worldwide, apparently, you have to realize that the mosquito doesn't
want it, right?
They're not the male man.
They're not paid for it.
So they try not to carry them, but the pathogen escapes the defense mechanism.
So it's not actually, I like to, instead of calling it vector competence, this is the
competence of a vector to transmit a pathogen.
Is it a vector?
Is it a defense failure?
It's a very different way of looking at, so the malaria parasite has find a error in the
anopheles mosquito.
What is not too big for anopheles to not survive anymore, but can carry it around.
Everybody wants to be the carrier of pathogens.
It's not in their...
No, for one thing, it would endanger their host species, right?
If all the people die out, mosquitoes have nothing to eat, so they don't really want
to transmit, I imagine.
But usually things are not so black and white, so the chance that the whole...
So that's a good point.
Obviously the longevity of humans are still not selected in that part.
It's too long, so it would not have an evolutionary trait on the mosquito parasite relationship.
There has to be a backfiring thing, of course, but if you're still around, that will not
backfire.
But it is definitely intricate between the vector and the host.
The famous story is about the worms, the Eugiria bankrosi, that only it's a small worm where
you get elephantiasis from.
People with big legs.
Quite a horrible disfiguring disease.
Also a very interesting Tanzania story on it.
I will finish the...
Oh, please.
So these salarial worms, they are only in the blood when the mosquito is active.
So they come in the blood when it's crupuscular, so it's in the transition from light to dark
and because they also have other things to do in your body.
But then it's selected for the night active worms because they can be picked up when the
mosquito is blood-feeding.
So there's a lot of intricate adaptations or evolution between these interactions.
That's amazing.
So they come to the surface to be picked up by mosquitoes.
Yeah, periphery.
Actually, the blood, they go from your tissues into the blood and in your bloodstream.
Wow.
When we were in Tanzania, we were actually going to a place to put the...
So we put electric traps next to someone's home.
Yes.
We were talking to the person.
My colleague was back from Funeral.
They were talking to each other and I found out that this was a very small man who had
a very big skirt on.
Very thick cloth and it's not a Muslim area, so guys wearing skirts, what you sometimes
see in Indonesia or other things.
It was not a cultural thing for males to wear skirts.
So I asked my colleague and I said, what happened?
Oh, the man has elephantiasis in his testicles.
So I was culturally well aware that I should not mention it to the man as a white woman
investigating asking whatever.
You don't want to say, can I see it?
No, obviously not.
But also not the story on it, but we had been...
Since you cannot save the world, there is a little bit, how we call it, a custom to take
care of the people when you're there.
So if you work at people's home and you see an illness or you can help something out,
there is an ability to do that, not to take care because you're gone in two weeks, but
that's a little bit the favor you can give to someone.
So I asked him what to help it.
And anyway, long story short, we took him to the capital and he has been in surgery
and he was still in surgery or waiting for surgery when I left the country.
But I found out that he has been...
We paid for his surgery and he had been 11 years with this.
That's fantastic.
But we went to the hospital with him and I will never forget that the nurse asked him
to sit on a stool, but the weight of his disease would just push the stool away until he would
put it to the back wall so we could sit on it.
And these were his big.
And that was already 11 years and that was caused by elephantiasis where it's a worm
that is clogging, I think, the lymphatic system.
And then you get a kind of an autoimmune...
I'm not mad, but there's something that Udim collects where this is...
And that happens to be legs in India and it happens to be on the different parts of your
body in Africa.
That's interesting.
How that goes, maybe it's a different solar wall, maybe a different mosquito.
But we helped him, but it's amazing that someone...
It doesn't cure itself.
What a life.
So he was able to sit down but barely, I think.
Yeah, and then you have those jokes, you have Landro, he's in the middle and I ask him to
sit away a little bit from my rear mirror, but he had to sit that wide on the bench because
there's so...
I mean, I'm not a man, but I can imagine that is not good.
Not just the amount of mass pulling on that fairly small part of the body.
Yeah, I know that I don't have to explain to any other person that guy that that is
something you don't want.
And he had that since his last daughter was born and his daughter was 11 years.
Wow.
I actually have seen a person with the same affliction on a bus in Germany and all the
seats were full and people were standing and it was empty seat and we were wondering, okay,
why is that seat empty?
And then we sat down and then we saw that the guy sitting across from us had a gigantic
something, something between his legs that must have been elephantitis, I imagine.
It's not a good look.
I had to bring...
We brought him to the hospital and we were guarding it and I think it was like a few
tens of dollars.
It was really not enough for us to pay it.
And then I walked around with the form and it was written because Tanzania, they speak
Swedish, but it is in English, the medical terms.
Extremely huge balls was on it.
Or maybe extremely huge test because I will refrain from it.
But it was, yeah, it was very...
It's not very common to become that big.
So it was...
Yeah, I had my fair share of poor Tanzania then because it's definitely a poor man's
disease.
It's probably anti-worm treatment in an earlier stage and it probably would have been resolved.
He has of course no active worms anymore.
So this has to be different.
I mean, this is a secondary effect of an early infection.
But that doesn't...
So it's a secondary effect.
So even when he doesn't have worms anymore, this is not going to go away and it happens
more often because I think he had been treated for the worm infection, not for the consequence
that came from it.
Okay, well, it must be a nice feeling to be able to do something back.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It was very nice.
Also very topic, very...
Yeah, so in 2025, you're in a strange country, then you're a bump into this.
It's...
Yeah, you have to go out of...
We have to deal with what lies in front of you.
Yeah, fantastic.
And it's a really nice story that you were able to give something back to the people
that you were...
That were helping your research in fact, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, Marietta, it's been almost an hour, I think.
So let's...
Yeah, I'm sorry.
No, I could listen to your stories for much longer, but maybe we should do that another
time.
That's fine.
If you're up for it, if you have more stories, I would love to hear them.
It's very interesting for me.
It's mosquitoes and medical things are a bit of an exotic field, because I'm usually hang
around with bearded herpetologists and people like that.
See, that's one hand back to rule as a young bearded herpetologist.
Exactly.
So, yeah, in fact, biology is...
Besides being kind of having a purpose, we don't have to do anything about valorization.
It's much more easier to write that, but it is also really hurting people sometimes.
So we do it for purpose, and these are just one of those stories.
So it's...
Yeah.
As rule said, it's probably much more to do with people.
And I mentioned, I started it saying that I really was not so interested in people.
So full circle.
Actually, I do factors, and it has to do with animal and human health.
So it's funny how...
Turns out people are the interesting ones.
Yeah.
Sometimes I want to get away with it, and then we really do full work out in the end.
Okay, thank you.
Thank you very much, Marietta, and hopefully see you again sometime soon.
All right.
I'm looking forward to it.
Bye.