Farewell, Murder Hornet, We Hardly Knew You

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow. Later in the hour, it’s been 10 years since the sci-fi hit Interstellar. How would it be written differently today? But first, over the past five years, a lot of words have been written about an invasive insect known casually as the murder hornet. But this week, the USDA and the Washington State Department of Agriculture announced that the insect had been eradicated in the US. Our long national nightmare is over. Joining me now to talk about that and other stories from the week in science is Maggie Koerth, science writer and editorial lead at Carbon Plan in Minneapolis. Welcome back.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

IRA FLATOW: You want to give us a thumbnail on this murder hornet? Refresh my memory, please.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Oh, Ira, it seems like just yesterday we were freaking out about that murder hornet together. But apparently, it’s been five years ago.

IRA FLATOW: No kidding?

MAGGIE KOERTH: And now the murder hornets are all gone. Like the bloom of the roses, they have faded so soon. And there would-be reign of terror upon these United States is no more.

IRA FLATOW: [LAUGHS] Was it ever really very much of a threat as the name made it out to be?

MAGGIE KOERTH: Well, I mean, no. The murder part of its colloquial name mostly applied to bees. These things will just absolutely decimate a beehive. And that was actually the way they were first discovered in Washington State’s Whatcom County back in 2019. They’d invaded this beehive. They’d killed everything inside and left these headless bodies in piles. They can be dangerous to humans. There’s the stinger on these hornets. They’re the northern giant hornet. And it’s big enough to poke through a beekeeping suit. It hurts a lot if you get stung. And if you did get attacked by a swarm, it could kill you. But mostly, the murder was other insects.

IRA FLATOW: And how did they go about eradicating it?

MAGGIE KOERTH: Well, what’s really cool about this is that the scientists chalk it up to a community effort. You had average people who were calling in to a tip line every time they spotted murder hornet evidence. They were building bottle traps in their yards and then sending these traps full of dead bugs to the scientists to find where murder hornets were. And they were signing up for what is just this really adorable paper wasp neighborhood watch kind of system, where you would adopt a nest of native wasps and keep an eye on it and report in if it showed signs of being attacked.

IRA FLATOW: Hmm, that’s really cool. OK, let’s turn to a smaller kind of bug, so to speak. There’s a debate going on on how to name viruses. I mean, of all the things to be debating, right?

[LAUGHTER]

MAGGIE KOERTH: Well, you know how animals and plants all have the name we commonly call them, and then they have that big, long, fancy scientific Latin name?

IRA FLATOW: Yeah.

MAGGIE KOERTH: And it turns out that everyone’s been kind of inconsistent with doing that for viruses. And so now there is this group, the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, that is going back and trying to assign formal Latin names to all of these viruses that scientists already call something else. The trouble really happens at the level of species, where, instead of having formal names, we’ve just kind of named them after the organisms it infects or the places it was originally discovered. And that gets messy. And it can stigmatize whole regions or countries. Sometimes it’s flat out incorrect, like the Spanish Flu probably actually started in Kansas.

So in 2016, the ICTV started discussing how to fix this stuff. And this year, the US National Center for Biotechnology Information announced that it’s going to adopt 3,000 of these new names.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. I mean, “to-may-to,” “to-mah-to,” does it really make a difference what things are called?

MAGGIE KOERTH: Well, the scientists are kind of divided on this. Some of them think it’s a really good idea. Others are saying that they find these new names silly and pretentious and add to confusion. So would you call COVID-19 Betacoronavirus pandemicum, or would you rather call it HIV or lentivirus [INAUDIBLE]

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, I’m getting your drift here.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah. It’s also going to be confusing for a little while because you have the US databases that only use the old names. The ICTV databases are only searchable by the new names. And right now, the only way to match them up is to download this special spreadsheet. And the scientists are also a little bit annoyed about that process.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, oh, OK. This next one gets a bit complicated. You have a story about how science and the law intersect in an Ohio court case. Tell me about that.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah, so there’s this really interesting case in Ohio, where their supreme court has ruled that evolving science can count as new evidence and make something worthy of a new trial. Back in 2014, Kenneth Grad was sentenced to 24 years in prison for child endangerment and assault charges after he brought his new baby daughter into the hospital, and doctors found she had 26 different bone fractures.

IRA FLATOW: Ooh.

MAGGIE KOERTH: A medical expert at the trial went through a process of elimination of different disorders and came up with the idea that this could only be caused by abuse. But the baby’s mother had a history of serious bone and tissue diseases that included vitamin D deficiency, hypermobility, and rickets. And in 2014, the medical expert didn’t see any way that would affect the baby. But in the years since, there have been a lot of new studies that have shifted the balance of research toward the idea that those disorders in a mother could lead an infant to having a higher susceptibility of bone fractures.

So the science changed over time. And the state had argued that Grad’s legal representation was adequate from the time, that he wasn’t entitled to a new trial just because science shifted. But the Ohio Supreme Court disagreed and pointed out that there’s this tension in the law. The law wants disputes solved quickly and finally. And science doesn’t necessarily work that way.

IRA FLATOW: So science wins one here?

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah.

IRA FLATOW: Does this potentially mean that other cases can be reopened with new science?

MAGGIE KOERTH: It could potentially open the door for that, yeah. It establishes some level of precedent that things could work differently in other places.

IRA FLATOW: Cool, all right. Let’s go back in time for a moment. New research into our early ancestors and how they intersected with the Neanderthals, I find this interesting.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah, so there’s this genomic study of ancient humans. And it’s narrowed down the time frame for when Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis could have interbred. But the results are producing a lot of questions, a lot of new questions, as well as a couple of answers.

IRA FLATOW: Such as?

MAGGIE KOERTH: Well, so we know that humans and Neanderthals interbred. And in fact, basically everyone that lives outside of Africa, from Europe to the Pacific Islands, has some small amount of Neanderthal DNA that’s floating around in their genome, usually like 1% to 2%.

IRA FLATOW: Right.

MAGGIE KOERTH: But there is this big spread of time when interbreeding could have happened. So scientists published two studies recently that were aimed at narrowing that down a little bit. And they did this by essentially tracing Neanderthal genetics through time. They were using samples from modern living people who have very little Neanderthal ancestry. They used some samples from ancient humans who lived thousands of years ago in kind of the area of the Czech Republic is now. And they used samples from some well-preserved Neanderthals.

And the results were basically able to give them an understanding of how Neanderthal genetic contributions sort of fizzled away over time. And you can use that to back-calculate an origin date. And the two groups used different ways of running those calculations. And they came up with slightly different results. But basically, they narrowed down that fateful romance to somewhere between 45,000 and 50,000 years ago. And that’s a lot more recent than people thought.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, yeah, that certainly is. All right, let’s skip forward just a bit to about 4,000 years ago, to the Bronze Age and a story that’s a little less friendly. It’s sort of ghoulish here. Tell us about that.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah. There are 3,000 human bones and bone fragments in a pit in a cave system in Somerset, England. And they were all part of this single massacre of at least 37 people that happened about 4,000 years ago. And what is more, those bones that were originally found 40 years ago, back in the ’70s, they turn out to show signs of cannibalism. There is cut marks on the leg bones that you’d normally see from where meat is being butchered, fractured ends on long bones, like the kind that scientists find when people have been sucking the marrow out of animal bones, and even little nibbly human teeth marks on hands and feet and ribs.

IRA FLATOW: Wow.

MAGGIE KOERTH: And the scientists think these people were captured and held prisoner before being killed, because the bodies don’t show evidence of dying in a fight.

IRA FLATOW: OK. Let’s move onto something just a little bit more pleasant and something completely different. And I’m talking about a story about the importance of earwax as almost a medical test. Tell me about that.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah, so scientists are using sheep earwax as an easy way to know when those sheep had been eating toxic plants. Sheep are out grazing in these big pastures. And you don’t know exactly what’s out there. And there are some common plants, like this toxic relative of the lily, called a deathcamas, that, if the sheep eat enough of them, they can get really sick and die. So instead of having the ranchers spend a bunch of time tromping all over their land, looking for these plants or spending a lot of time and money doing blood tests to look for signs of poisoning, these researchers show that a better alternative is just to clean out those little sheepie’s ears, because sublethal doses of the deathcamas poisoning show up in the earwax before the sheep get sick.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. So they could detect the sheep poison in the earwax of the sheep, which– you know where I’m heading with this, Maggie. If this works in sheep, are doctors going to be asking people for earwax samples, perhaps, in the future?

MAGGIE KOERTH: Possibly. So some researchers think that human earwax could also contain signals of illness, including for diabetes, cortisol levels, metabolic changes, maybe even cancer.

IRA FLATOW: Wow, that is interesting. I can see the home test now, right? Put the sample in–

[LAUGHTER]

Maggie, it’s always great to have you. Thank you for all the stuff you bring us.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.

IRA FLATOW: And a happy holidays to you.

MAGGIE KOERTH: To you as well.

IRA FLATOW: Maggie Koerth, science writer and editorial lead at Carbon Plan in Minneapolis.

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