Hey everyone! It’s Inés from Draw Curiosity! Firstly,
sorry for being gone for so long without much explanation! I don’t really want to go into
too many details and don’t think I should need to go into them anyway, but a concise
summary would basically be I was very burnt out after my PhD, I was quite stressed, this
made me relapse with my OCD, and I felt it like the best decision was to take a step
back away from the Internet and YouTube and try and reduce stressors in my life, get everything
in order and basically do what I needed to do to be less stressed. Now, sadly I wouldn’t
say I am totally better and honestly, I’m still pretty stressed, but I am definitely
doing a lot better than I was and I'm in a much better frame of mind to come back and
make videos about science and curiosities and bugs and all the other things which I
am really enthusiastic about and which I hope you will enjoy too - so here I am!
Secondly, there have been changes - I know you’re all looking at the hair! It has indeed
all gone! For me this is quite old news now, it’s been like this for a while now and
I really like it. However, I'm determined for the comment section to not be about my
appearance, so if you do have any questions, I actually preemptively already made a few
videos on my second channel explaining why I cut my hair, so please go watch those if
you have any questions because I have hopefully answered any question you could possibly have
had about it. I do have a challenge for you though - and if you haven’t done this already,
because I have posted about this on twitter and instagram, but I would love for you to
go to this link, bit.ly/BraidWeight and guess how much you thought the braid that I cut
off weighed - please do weigh in with your best guess, I will be weight-ing ;) all that
I ask is that you don’t write your guess in the comments, otherwise it might bias and
influence other people’s guesses, and we want to be scientific as possible here!
And anyway, if you felt that the meagre 1 metre change in hair length was a big deal,
wait till I tell you all about the eleven thousand kilometer difference I’ve made
to my life! A couple of months ago I finally moved out of Oxford back to my hometown Seville,
and then about a month later I moved continents to Malaysia, so now I’m living on the island
of Borneo, in the city of Kuching, capital of Sarawak state. I will probably also make
a video on the second channel explaining why, but today’s little story is set right here
in this apartment in Kuching.
[Raw Curiosity intro (yeah, I don't know why I made it like this)]
So if you know me well, you’ll know that I love my insects and I will fully admit to
the fact that one of the main things for which I was most excited about moving to Malaysia
was the wildlife, specifically the insects. Tropical regions have a much higher biodiversity
than temperate regions, and I’m here for it. Also I really love the heat, and apparently
the humidity as well, so I haven’t even used the aircon in this place yet and instead
I usually just have my window open for ventilation and also in the secret hopes that maybe some
insect from the outside will make its way indoors for me to have a closer look! I know
it probably sounds like I have a deathwish, but there are actually these really giant
wasps, maybe hornets, I don't know, and they fly around outside and I secretly really want
one of them to grace me a visit. I really want to see one of them up close - I know,
you can call me nuts.
Anyway, indeed, ask and you shall receive, and in my case perhaps I received a little
bit more than I bargained for. Now, I’m living in a high-ish rise building in the
middle of a city, so it probably shouldn’t surprise me that the vast majority of invertebrates
that I have allowed to trespass on my premises, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, were
not cool tropical bugs from the depth of the Bornean jungle… but household pests. And
today’s story is no different. In fact, I propose we play a little game, I am curious
to know how long it takes you to figure out what mysterious arthropod swarmed my flat,
because as an entomologist I am personally ashamed by how long it took me to realise
what these insects were.
So let’s set the scene. It’s a weekday evening at the beginning of monsoon season,
and the storms from the day had finally died down. I was working in my office, so like
most days, I opened the window to allow a gentle breeze to come through whilst I sat
at my keyboard. As the sun began to set, I noticed that a UFI, an unidentified flying
insect, had made its way into my room. The first two seconds I saw it, I thought
it could be a wasp, as its body trailed behind it - but I noticed that it seemed to struggle
a lot with flight and Hymenopterans are relatively skilled flyers. My next thought was this might
be a Neuropteran, because from what I could tell it had roughly four equally sized wings
that seemed quite large and membranous. However, this insect was also flying quite haphazardly
and whilst Neuropterans might not be the most agile of flyers, they are generally quite
graceful when they do fly. In fact, because it was flying with quite a nosedive, and desperately
spiralling into the ground, at first I thought it might have something wrong with its wing,
and whilst this was happening, I noticed that another identical insect flew into my office
- I had been graced with not one, but two, and then three and four and five - - and by
this point there were quite a few of them flying manically around my office, so I decided
to quickly slink out into the kitchen, turning on a couple of lights along the way because
it was actually quite dark now that the sun had already fully set, to quickly grab an
empty bottle and a glass to see if I could contain these insects.
By the time I got back to the office, which was only about 10 seconds later, there were
over 10 of them in the room, so I quickly closed the window and put a glass on the top
of one of them to see if it would encourage it to stop flying and settle down so I could
take a closer look. I tried to use my bottle with the other one, and it’s wing fell off
which actually made me feel quite guilty so I decided I needed to brainstorm a safer way
to catch them. I did notice that one of them got stuck in a drop of water that had fallen
out of the bottle, so I decided to fill the bottle with water and just pour it all over
my tiled floor. Because they were flying intentionally into the ground, and their wings were so big,
the water actually did a very good job at pinning them to the ground without drowning
them. I briefly wondered if they were flying ants, because honestly this swarm reminded
me of a nuptial flight, where many reproductive individuals will fly out at the same time
on the same day in order to find a mate and found new colonies. So I did briefly think
that they could be queen ants attempting to nest in the ground. However, when the mystery
insects were trapped in the water, I could clearly tell that these were no Hymenopterans.
They didn’t have the narrow waist nor the elbowed antennae that are characteristic of
queen ants. So I still didn’t know what they were, and at this point I actually had
to leave quite quickly as I was going to go to a dance class, so as I opened the office
door to go and get changed I was greeted by a swarm of around 300 of these insects that
had gathered in my living room after I had carelessly turned the light on less than 10
minutes earlier. So what did I do? I very quickly refilled my water bottle and I just
chucked it all over my floor and surprisingly in 30 seconds flat every single one was glued
to the floor. This was a surprisingly good method, because the water creates a thin film
on the floor, shallow enough such that the insect won’t drown in the water, but because
the insect’s wings were so large, they are actually unable to unstick them from the water
due to the surface tension. It is also reversible, because if you remove the insect from the
water and you allow it to dry, it will actually just be able to fly and live exactly as it
did before ending up in water - and to be honest I expect no less of an insect living
in a tropical rainy country. Additionally, also because it is so humid in Kuching, I
believe it is actually the most humid city in Malaysia, the water shouldn’t be evaporating
any time soon, so I was hoping it would keep them glued in place whilst I bought myself
some time and went to enjoy my dance class, and you know, just delay dealing with them!
So, the whole area of the city seemed to be covered in these insects, as the stairway
that lead up to my dance class was also peppered with these mystery insects. On my way back
two and a half hours later and still none the wiser as to what these non-Hymenopteran
insects were, I remember I asked the guard at the apartment gates what they were. And
he said something like "sempoh" or "sempah", not for lack of trying, I have not been able
to find any word in Sarawak Malay or related dialects that matches with any type of flying
insect that sounds like that. The closest I can think of is sampah, which means rubbish,
so I don't know what he was referring to sadly. I saw quite a few on the ground and some were
missing their wings and they were clearly being chased by their mates in a behaviour
known as tandem run, where several males chase a female and the female chooses the one she
wishes to mate with, so it was clear to me that this was definitely some sort of nuptial
flight. Now, going up in the lift I encountered two of my neighbours, and I also asked them
what these mysterious abundant insects were. They spoke in Chinese about it, but sadly
my Chinese wasn’t - and still isn’t - good enough to pick out the name, but basically
they said they didn’t know the name in English but they swarm occasionally in the early evening
after there’s heavy rain and they smell really bad. I’m ashamed to say I actually
verified that claim. When I finally opened the door home, Malaysia’s humidity didn’t
let me down and thankfully I wasn’t received by another swarm but instead by the insects
still being mostly glued to the ground. However, some giant versions of these insects, almost
like the boss of a videogame, they suddenly materialised out of nowhere, but when they
finally landed in my water trap they seemed to almost purposefully shed or yank their
wings off in order to continue being able to move - and the dealate insect honestly
looked very similar to a cockroach. And this is when the penny finally dropped for me!
What insect has a life cycle very similar to that of ants, in that they engage in nuptial
flights in huge numbers and shed their wings soon before or after mating and they seem
to attempt to bury into the ground to found a new nest but aren’t Hymenopterans and
are closely related to cockroaches? Ding ding ding! Termites!! and termites are never good
news, so we entered DEFCON-3, time to terminate the termites, say bye to the 白蚁, chuck
out the cekeler, termuerte a las termitas, shiroari wa mou shindeiru and the termites
promptly went from reversible floorwater quarantine to swift death by summer footwear compression
and disposal via the sewage system. Anyway, admittedly there is a very high chance
now that some of the several hundred termites that invaded could have shed their wings and
for there to have been a pair of the opposite sex who used their strong smelly termite pheromones
to find each other somewhere in my flat and mate and found a colony… but so far I have
thankfully not found any evidence of termites and neither have the termite experts that
I paranoidly brought around - but I will keep you posted in a few months, because you know,
it takes some time. I did keep some of the wings and corpses for
identification purposes, and I’m quite convinced - although I’m also very prepared to be
wrong and to be corrected, termite experts please do weigh in, but I think the small
ones sadly, do look like Formosan termites, or Coptotermes - which is bad news because
they are basically one of the most invasive and destructive species out there. The big
ones might have been a separate species altogether because they were unusually large, maybe they
were physogastric, I'm thinking maybe Macrotermes gilvus based on their size and coloration
and wing shape, but who knows, maybe they were just mutant alates of those smaller termites,
which were probably Coptotermes.
Anyway, there goes my story on how I’m adjusting to life halfway across the world and how my
naive love of insects is going to land me with some household pest infestation. I really
hope you enjoyed this, and I would love to know if you guessed they were termites before
I did. I'm still actually quite ashamed it took me that long, although in my defence
I've actually never seen an alate termite before! And honestly, I feel I've filled my
lifetime quota of them, so I hope never to see one again.
Anyway, I will be posting regularly from now on, so it would be a great time to the notification
bell if you do enjoy my content and my ramblings. I would love to be posting weekly, but I do
still currently do everything myself, so research, present, edit, design, animate, the thumbnails
and jump through all of the youtube publishing hoops, so unless I make more videos that are
little bit more like this which are a little bit more vloggy and require a little bit less
post-production, honestly it might still just be 2-3 times a month, and also I obviously
still work on other things on the side and one of the most recent things is I worked
on the new Edge of Science series that the BBC and YouTube Originals are releasing on
the 10th of December (AKA today), and of course, I’m also determined to try and maintain
a healthy work-life balance which is the whole reason I stepped back in the first place.
ANYWAY, I hope you’re doing well, and as ever, thank you so much to my wonderful patreons
for supporting me - which also, patreon has now reopened after the hiatus, and as always
thank you so much for watching me and I’ll see you in the next one! Bye!