AI Summary
5 min readThe first animals to fly were not birds, bats, or pterosaurs. They were dragonflies, and they took to the air roughly 400 million years ago — long before any dinosaur walked the earth. That is the kind of fact Jessica Ware, a curator and division chair at the American Museum of Natural History, carries with her. In this conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-host Negin Farsad, Ware does not just celebrate insects; she clarifies what they actually are, how they work, and why their decline matters more than most people realize.
What Is a Bug, Really?
The word "bug" has a precise meaning that most of us get wrong. According to Ware, a true bug belongs to the order Hemiptera. What unites them is a specific mouthpart: a straw-like structure used for sucking. True bugs suck up plant juices — or, in some cases, blood. Bees, by contrast, do not suck. They have a long tongue that laps up nectar. "They're little cats," Ware says. Dragonflies are not bugs either; they are odonates. Beetles are coleoptera. The common impulse to call any small, many-legged creature a "bug" is a human convenience, not a biological fact.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (03:22) **What Is a Bug?** - Jessica Ware, an entomologist from the American Museum of Natural History, corrects the common misuse of the word "bug."
- 2 (10:04) **Why Insects Are So Successful** - Jessica explains the deep evolutionary history and adaptability that makes insects Earth's most dominant animal group.
- 3 (11:42) **Dragonfly Brains and Vision** - Jessica describes the specialized anatomy of dragonflies, focusing on their massive eyes and tiny brains.
- 4 (17:52) **The Origin of Insect Wings** - Jessica discusses how insect wings evolved and why early fliers were so large and clumsy.
- 5 (20:51) **Why Giant Insects? Oxygen vs. Air Sacs** - Jessica challenges the long-held belief that high oxygen levels alone caused giant prehistoric insects.
- 6 (22:48) **Insects in the City** - Jessica explains how insects adapt to urban environments like New York City, even evolving unique city-dwelling species.
- 7 (28:22) **Cockroaches and "Water Bugs"** - Jessica debunks landlord myths about cockroaches and explains their true diversity and origin.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Guests on this episode
Show Notes
How big can bugs get? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Negin Farsad sit down with entomologist, Jessica Ware, to dig into the extraordinary world of bugs, insects the size of navel oranges, how they invented flying and so much more.
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