It's Monday, September 23rd, 2019, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds. I'm Indrae Viscontas.

Each week, we bring you a new, in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.

We endeavor to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it all matters.

You can find us online at inquiring. Show, on Twitter,

at Inquiring Show, and on Facebook. You can also get an ad-free version of the show by supporting

us at patreon.com slash inquiring minds. And you can subscribe to the show on iTunes or any other

podcasting app. As our listeners know, we said goodbye to our longtime co-host Kishore Hari last week. So we're

going to be playing around with a few different formats. And one thing that I thought would be

interesting is to take an in-depth look on a particular topic spanning across multiple episodes. We've done this in the

past and our listeners have liked it, so hopefully you'll like it this time too. For the next two

episodes, we're going to talk about the world's smallest things. Well, not quite so small. We do

have Sean Carroll coming up in a later episode talking about quantum world, but small enough where it either bothers us

in the case of little insects or that we don't even see and yet can have a profound effect on

our behavior like parasites. So this week I interviewed Anne Svedrup Thuygesen. She's a professor

at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences outside

Oslo and a scientific advisor to the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research. She recently wrote a book

called Buzz Sting Bite, Why We Need Insects. And in this interview, I have to say, I learned a lot,

including that I didn't even know what an insect actually was.

And Svetrupp Thuygens, welcome to Inquiring Minds.

Thank you.

So I want to start out with some definitions, because it was about a third of the way through your book that I realized that I really don't know what insects are because I would have thought a spider was an insect.

That's a very classic misunderstanding.

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