Hi, welcome to Thoughts That Bug Me, a Gen Z science podcast all about the weird and wonderful
world of insects and the people that love them.
My name's Zofia and along with my friend Clarisse, we're your very enthusiastic hosts.
So we're going to dive into all sorts of questions this season.
Why does Gen Z like Franz Kafka's roach so much?
How many beetles does it take to eat a dead kitten?
Do stick insects even have maternal instincts?
But for now, here's an interview that we did on ABC Radio National on The Science Show
with Robin Williams.
So this interview was a little bit special because back when I was in year 9 in high
school, the folks at The Science Show gave me my very first opportunity to write real
science communication pieces that people would actually get to hear.
I ended up writing a bunch of stuff for them over the years and it was so awesome to try
and present important scientific topics in a fun, exciting way that stayed true to myself.
And I'm very grateful that I was supported by them to be able to do that.
So in kind of a full circle moment, here's Clarisse and I talking to Robin Williams about
this new podcast and what we're trying to do here.
And so to some of our or science show history, one of our guests while she was still at school
in Melbourne was Zofia Witkowski-Blake.
She presented talks about the bionic eye and a cosmic dog.
And she's back with me now with a friend and colleague Clarisse Sawyer to talk about bugs.
But let's go back to one of her poems when she was still 15 in 2017, all about Laika,
the first big animal in space in 1957, a dog who would be 70 today had she lived.
A multi-stage rocket with a fuel more powerful than anything the West has installed puts
its final stage into around the world orbit.
Two things are astonishing about Sputnik the second, its weight more than half a ton and
its live passenger, a dog.
shows how this flying dog kennel is probably arranged, radio, food and oxygen
supplies and Laika, the most famous husky in the world or strictly speaking out of it.
Laika's elliptical orbit varies from a hundred to a thousand miles above the earth's surface,
where observatories listen eagerly for the coded radio signals, which tell the space
scientists how Laika is standing up to her lonely journey.
These signals give information on the brain, respiration and pulse of the first living
being to leave earth for outer space.
We've sent a lot of animals into space, jellyfish, beetles, bees, cats, mice, dogs,
hares, frogs and fleas, guinea pigs, chimpanzees, positively a menagerie.
Can you imagine the cacophony of a zoo in the sea of the sky?
The lifeboat of Pi, but the tiger is 800 ants and the orangutan times by 32, 32 monkeys.
But before them came a dog and her name was Laika.
Laika didn't come from lofty places.
She knew only of the rough streets and the faces of those who tested and trained and
put her through her paces.
Although she couldn't really pace, she was kept in tiny cages, smaller and smaller as
the weeks grew and simulations of the acceleration she would go through.
Who knew that the intrinsic eccentricities of sending a dog into space would include
nutrient gel and playing with the children of your trainers?
Under Laika a column of fire ignited that sent her up in a spire of heat and smoke and
danger.
A hundred thousand meters might have sent her out of sight, but Laika's flight brought
her above the tears of night and a hundred thousand kilos of frenzied roaring rage lifted
a bitza onto the world stage.
And a hundred thousand rubles spent could have been a futile attempt to launch this
noble mongrel, propagate the feudal craze to launch the human race, the intrinsic eccentricities
of sending a dog into space.
Now Laika might have been the one to take the flight, but I'm the one who doesn't
know what's right because she didn't come down alive.
She was never meant to.
Did her fur stand on end as gravity grew then fell away?
Did her nose twitch as her craft plunged into the cold abyss?
Did the starry cosmos reflect in her colourblind eyes?
Probably not.
No windows.
But we only know what we know and we know the data that was slowly thrown back into
the muddy earthen day.
Laika's blood pumped through her veins and that we know.
Laika's chest rose and fell as she breathed and that we know.
Laika an organic creature, much like our own frail human bodies with sinew and muscle and
bone had flown and in her capsule throne had survived and that we know.
And from what we know, we grow.
Wasps, worms, turtles, dogs, spiders, fish, rabbits, frogs, urchins, newts, crickets,
mice, snails, ants and butterflies, brine shrimp, moths and rats, roaches, scorpions
and a cat.
The cat's name was Felix.
He was sent by the French, of course.
Without knowing it, Laika is telling man whether in the years to come it will be safe for him
to follow her.
Meanwhile, he watches her progress with envious eyes, wondering to what adventures this little
pioneer is blazing the trail.
The beeps of Sputnik II on which Laika died, Zofia Witkowski-Blake.
Zofia, what made you write that poem?
I was obsessed with space like I think many young people and honestly it's truly the piece
of writing that's been the most long lived because I read it out at a poetry night with
Clarisse not that long ago.
Very rare to still like something that you wrote at 14.
It didn't embarrass you?
Amazingly, no.
No, amazing, it's a wonderful poem and it got to the fact that Laika was, if you like,
a rescue dog because she couldn't have someone's nice pet or something like that.
It wasn't looking at the universe out of the window because there was no window, it was
just locked in.
It's something deeply poetic and deeply sad about that fact and yet it's just another
little bit of our science history that we sent dogs up before humans.
And what was the response of the audience?
Well, ask Clarisse because she was there perhaps.
Tell me.
Raukka's applause, everybody loved it.
Definitely the highlight of the night, yes.
And they could remember the nature of Laika, it wasn't regarded as too old fashioned and
gone.
No, I think it was very well received because I think the story of Laika resonates very
well with people across generations.
It's very tragic.
Well, this of course is one of the reasons I'm interested in your work now, having graduated,
and that is whether there is an appreciation of not only history, but also the idea of
doing old fashioned things like collecting.
What made you look into insects of all things to illustrate your love of nature?
I think the passion started for me when I was a child.
I was a massive nerd.
I was obsessed with Charles Darwin and his collaborator, Alfred Wallace.
Alfred Wallace was a butterfly collector and I wanted to be like him.
So I got into insect collecting because the barrier for entry was so small.
Insects are everywhere, even in a highly urban landscape.
My mom helped me out a lot with that.
I remember trapping a wasp with a picnic basket and putting it in my freezer to kill it for
my collection, which is pretty macabre for an 11 year old.
But that's how I started.
And then I realized selling insect taxidermy would be a more interesting alternative to
working at KFC.
So that's how I got started with my current job, basically.
Selling the insects, you're preserving them so that they can be kept.
Yeah.
I get my insect specimens from conservation farms overseas, so principally in Indonesia
and Peru, and they're all non endangered species and they're all farmed.
So it's a sustainable practice.
And then I do the taxidermy in Melbourne and I sell them to whoever wants them, which is
a very diverse crowd, I find.
Very interesting.
There's a very famous entomologist in Stanford University called Paul Ehrlich, famous for
the population bomb and concerns about having too many people on the planet.
And he is an expert and huge collection of moths and butterflies and said, don't tell
the public that that's what I do because they'll think I'm soft, loving butterflies and such
like and they won't take me seriously.
But Zofia, do they take you seriously given the fact that you collect these insects?
Well, I've only just started dipping my toe into collecting insects through Clarisse and
actually through a project we did together where we preserved insects that had been on
display as art in the Science Gallery.
And it was an artist who's a friend of ours, Laurie Pavlovich.
It was their work about bugs breaking binaries, but they passed away because they have fairly
short lifespans.
And the process of taking them and preserving them and turning them into art, I would say
that it's probably not soft because it's a little bit gross.
There's a little bit of guts that you've got to pull out and you've got to come to terms
with the fact that you're preserving these creatures that were alive and now they aren't
anymore but their beauty can continue to go on and we can continue to appreciate them
for what they are.
What do you mean breaking binaries?
Aha, so there was a fantastic collection of art at the Science Gallery, Melbourne called
Break the Binaries about all different ideas of crossing over binaries.
This particular one was bugs against the binaries because there are so many bugs that break
our preconceived notions of societal roles in many different ways.
So you have tarantulas who are very maternal and beautiful and take care of the young for
a long time.
And then you have Australian stick insects who sort of just drop their young on the ground
and then they head on off and have a great life and leave ants to do the work of looking
after those young and letting them hatch in a safe place.
And so we think a lot of the time I think that ideas of binaries can get very, very
hot topic but in nature we can look to nature and see that there's just an explosion of
different ways of being which is so exciting.
What made you decide to make radio programmes about your enthusiasm?
Well I think Robyn I can thank you a bit for that because you gave me a real opportunity
when I was younger to talk about science on the radio and have the chance to do that and
I love radio, I love it as a medium, I love listening to shows, I love listening to podcasts.
I think that it's a beautiful medium but it's also accessible for us as two non-professionals
to start making stuff because we didn't have to set up a whole set, we could just get out
there go to the insect expo and talk to lots of people.
And in some ways I think having a microphone in front of people it's a little scary, maybe
less scary than having a camera in some ways because you know you don't have your face,
you've just got your voice and you can tell your story that way.
Clarisse, what's been the response from your listeners?
Well we don't have any yet because it hasn't aired but the response from the people we
interviewed was very positive.
I think everybody was really happy to share their love for insects and how insects have
impacted their life and their career.
I've been really surprised by how interested our friends have been in our podcast.
A lot of people who weren't interested in bugs before we both started working with them
in different ways, so me through taxidermy and Zofia through working for a period of
time at a biotech insect based start up.
It's been so surprising how people have been really interested in learning more and have
learnt to appreciate insects.
I had a friend who was definitely afraid of spiders up until very recently but I've just
been sending her pictures of tarantulas as like exposure and over time she's actually
grown to really love them.
I've got the same sort of situation with a colleague of ours, one of our top five scientists
who's now based in Queensland and she's a specialist in snakes and she did a broadcast
actually proving that snakes are basically cowards.
If you leave them alone they don't want to attack you and what you should do is just
have a look at them and realise suddenly they're not slimy at all, they're wonderful and smooth
and attractive and interesting.
So this goes for most of nature does it not?
Yes, absolutely and I think what's really inspiring from our interviews that we did
at the insect expo was the number of people who keep spiders in particular as pets and
who actually grow to really love spiders.
Maybe there's a bit of anthropomorphisation there because they sometimes believe that
the spiders have personalities and I'm not sure exactly how accurate that is but they
are incredibly intelligent creatures and definitely their behaviour does vary per individual.
So it's so incredible that these people who are not scientists, they learn so much about
spiders from actually keeping them and perhaps someday that will actually contribute to the
body of knowledge we have about spiders.
And you're still studying are you?
Yes, so I just finished a honours in genetics so that was on genetically engineering frogs
to be resistant to chytrid fungus which has been a global pandemic which has been incredibly
horrible for amphibian populations.
Currently I'm taking a break but I have plans to start a PhD in the nearish future.
Zofia talking about binaries, you've chosen to call one of your episodes queer insects
or entomology, why?
Well the word queer is a term that's been embraced by the LGBT community as a reclamation
and also as a term that can encompass a lot of different people in a really beautiful
way.
I'm no expert on it but I'm lucky enough to call myself part of that community and
I think there's a really beautiful correlation with how we hear the word queer, it has meant
weird and it has meant...
Different and unacceptable.
Exactly and you can apply that in a way to insects and a lot of people look at bugs and
insects and they feel disgust or they look at them and they feel fear.
And part of what we talk about here is building empathy towards insects.
At the expo some of the communicators there had the idea of gateway bugs.
So these are bugs like ladybugs which are cute, they're colourful and they're easier
for people to start to care about.
What about Jiminy Cricket?
Jiminy Cricket, a little before my time.
And so you start with these bugs and you start with maybe bugs in stories and then you work
up to caring about bugs which are just as important, spiders, other insects and you
can then care about them and love them for what they are and also appreciate the role
that they play.
So thinking about using that word queer in that context, thinking about Laurie's artwork
about bugs breaking binaries, we just thought it was a great combination of empathy.
And finally you are not necessarily studying at the moment, you're at ScienceWorks?
I am at ScienceWorks, I'm learning facilitator at ScienceWorks which means I do shows but
I'm also studying, I'm doing a Masters of Science in bioinformatics.
What is bioinformatics?
So bioinformatics is applying computing technologies to biological problems.
And I do a bit of crossover because a lot of it is genetic data.
So using algorithms to look at genetic data, at sequencing data is a massive part of what
I'm studying.
Thank you both.
Thank you.
Zofia and Clarisse return next week with their first insect feature with Trades also saying
how much they love those bugs.
That was an interview that aired on ABC Radio Nationals The Science Show.
Next week at the same time they're broadcasting our first episode.
It's all about insect collecting and we're going to release it here with some bonus content
at the end.
Hopefully you'll join us then.
Bye.