Hear this episode and find out more information at theallusionist.org/ladybird
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, am taught by language how to do the bend and snap. Changed my life.
This episode is all about a creature that has so many names. In British English we call a ladybird, American English a ladybug, and that’s just for starters. This episode is a crossover with the podcast Science Diction from WNYC, about words and the science stories behind them, and if you go to their feed you can hear me on their episode It’ll Never Fly, all about the names of fruit fly genes, which are VERY CREATIVE. So hear that on the Science Diction feed, and hear us now talking about ladybugs/ladybirds/ladybugs/ladybirds - I’ll code switch. On with the show.
JOHANNA MAYER: I am Johanna Mayer I host the Science Diction podcast.
ELAH FEDER: I am Elah Feder and I am the senior producer for podcasts at Science Friday.
HZ: Say you had to name a creature. It's little, maybe quarter of an inch long; it's sort of hemispherical; it's probably a bright colour with some dots on it: what would you call it?
JOHANNA MAYER: Alright... Bright hemisphere. Quarter of a - quarter of a centimeter long?
HZ: A quarter of an inch. Spotty...
ELAH FEDER: Wait, wait, have you told us the colour?
HZ: Well, there's a range available, but let’s say like one of the hot colours: orange, yellow or red.
JOHANNA MAYER: I'm going to call it a moon bug.
ELAH FEDER: Oh, that's good.
HZ: That's cute. For the shape and the craters, are you thinking?
JOHANNA MAYER: Yay. Yeah.
ELAH FEDER: Well, mine isn't as good. Maybe like Lil' Tomato, but like Lil, L I L so it's cute. Something like that?
JOHANNA MAYER: It's a scientific name.
ELAH FEDER: Yeah.
HZ: Like a little flying fruit.
ELAH FEDER: Flying fruit. Yes. Winged tomato.
HZ: Elah and Johanna’s names go pretty well in the canon of ladybird names across different languages. Like little coconut, tortoise beetle, spoon insect, patch-sewer, umbrella insect, flowery big sister, celestial path insect, red mother, Ali's mother, coral beetle, good luck bug, child of the sun, little midwife...
TAMSIN MAJERUS: My name is Tamsin Majerus. I am an academic at the University of Nottingham, and my research interests focus around the evolutionary biology, ecology and genetics of ladybirds in particular. Although I do do some work on other invertebrates. But ladybirds are my favourite.
HZ: What drew you to ladybirds in particular?
TAMSIN MAJERUS: I think I was very lucky in that I happened to be in the genetics department in Cambridge, where there was a group working on ladybirds, and an opportunity arose for me to go and work in that lab, and I was instantaneously sucked in. They're so much more fun to work with than drosophila - so fruitflies is what I had worked on previously. Useful as they may be as a genetic tool, I don't find them quite as appealing as ladybirds.
HZ: Fair enough. I think a lot of people like ladybirds in ways they don't like other creatures. Do you think that’s just aesthetics?
TAMSIN MAJERUS: Aesthetics is clearly a big part: brightly coloured, really attractive insects; kids love them; kids can see them, you spot them. But I think also, they're very useful. So they're the gardener's friend, the farmer's friend, all of those things. And I think that's another sort of side to their appeal that makes people love them.
HZ: How do they get to be the farmer's friend?
TAMSIN MAJERUS: So their main diet are things like greenfly, sap-sucking insects. Some of them will eat funghi, some of them will eat plants, but most of them eat these greenfly-type pests on plant crops. So, you have a field of your favorite crop, and unless you spray it with some kind of insecticide, it gets covered in the things that destroy the crop; ladybirds come along and they eat those things for you, and suddenly your crop is OK again. So they've saved billions of dollars of pest damage. So they're used commercially in a lot of places these days.
HZ: Are there any downsides to using ladybirds in that way, as pest control?
TAMSIN MAJERUS: There are, and they've had quite a lot of negative publicity, again in the last, perhaps 10 years, five to 10 years, because particularly the thing, harmonia axyridis, which is the ladybird I've worked on most closely, I guess, otherwise known as the harlequin ladybird , and it's been used widely for bio-control. So introduced in the States, all across Europe; came to England, and spread, so it's the fastest spreading invasive organism, it spread across the UK very rapidly. And it has out-competed many of our native species, so it went from being not even a resident to being the most populous species within a couple of years of its arrival. And in other places, although it does a lot of good on crops and protecting crops from pests, in things like vineyards or fruit farming, it's been named as a pest because it can contaminate the flavour of whatever you're making. So particularly in a vineyard, if you're harvesting grapes and you don't get rid of all the ladybirds, ladybirds contain these chemicals which taste disgusting and that can taint the wine. So you get this thing called 'wine taint' where there's a horrible - and then they have to throw away the wine because it tastes of ladybird chemicals.
HZ: Wow. How many ladybirds do you have to get in it to ruin it?
TAMSIN MAJERUS: Well, that's a good question. I imagine quite a few, in terms of volume.
HZ: So it's not like one ladybird ruins the whole barrel.
TAMSIN MAJERUS: No, I don't think so, but if there were plenty of greenfly for them to eat, there'll be more than one ladybird.
HZ: Historically, though, ladybirds' wine crimes have been overlooked in favour of their helpful properties, which earned them such exalted names; for the lady in ladybug or ladybird is Mary, Mother of God. She's also there in other languages' terms for ladybird: such as Spanish, 'mariquita', little Mary, in German 'marienkäfer', Mary's bug, in Catalan 'volamaria', flying Mary; in Norwegian 'marihøne', Mary's hen. In Swedish, 'jungfru Marias nyckelpiga', Virgin Mary's servant in charge of the keys - because Mary or her servant had the keys to heaven.
TAMSIN MAJERUS: And the Virgin Mary reference seems to stem from early paintings of the Virgin Mary often have her in a red cloak, so there's this link with the colour. And then people have said that the seven spots represent her seven pain and her seven virtues, or her seven joys and her seven sorrows, depending on which, whose version of the event you're listening to.
HZ: They're always backwards-engineering things to represent something from the Bible, like passion flowers and peacocks and such.
TAMSIN MAJERUS: Yeah. There were other saints, the ladybird names translated to other saints.
HZ: In Argentina, vacquita de San Antonio, St Anthony's little cow. In Finland: Red Bridget, after St Bridget or Birgitta. I don't know whether it's also saints that are referred to in the the Portuguese 'joaninha' and Mexican 'catarina' and the various other Catherine-derived ladybird names. In some parts of Italy there is 'lucia' - and also 'porcoletto de Santa Lucia', Saint Lucia's little piglet.
ELAH FEDER: And Hebrew it is Moses's cow. The Hebrews love Moses. So it's a compliment.
HZ: In other religious ladybird names: in some regions of Britain, they're known as Bishop Barnaby.
TAMSIN MAJERUS: Bishy bishy Barnaby! So I think he was a real person, and I believe he also wore black and red a lot.
HZ: Maybe he had wings and ate a lot of bugs.
TAMSIN MAJERUS: Maybe, yeah. I think maybe he had a black cloak.
HZ: There are so many divine names! Indra's shepherd, a tribute to the Hindu deity of storms. Freyafugle, 'Freya's bird', after the Pagan goddess Freya. Heavenly path insect. God's little cow, god's little lamb, god's chicken, god's horse, little messiah, little animal of our Good Lord, Our Lord's ox. Ark of God. God's grain of food. Shepherdess of Christ.
TAMSIN MAJERUS: My favorite one is ‘heaven's little beast’, so same sort of idea. There's one, I think one Italian one - and only one - that refers to the devil. So out of all the hundreds of names, there seems to be only one that suggests something bad. I think it roughly translates as ‘devil's chicken’.
HZ: They are not ladies, and they're not birds. They're not even technically bugs. So what are ladybirds?
TAMSIN MAJERUS: So they are beetles, coleoptera beetles and that name comes from two Greek words, so κολεός, which means 'sheath', and πτερον with a P, which means 'wing'. And so they have these wing cases that cover their wings, so they do fly, like birds, but they have the special design where they have hard wing cases that protect the wings when they're not flying. And then within coleoptera, ladybirds are coccinellidae. 'Coccinellidae' means 'clad in scarlet'. When they were first named in Latin, they were known because of their red colouration, which is probably the commonest colour of ladybirds, but absolutely not the only one.
HZ: Have we got about, what, 40 odd types of ladybird in Britain?
TAMSIN MAJERUS: In Britain about 46, I think, current count. But only 26 of those are what they call conspicuous, so only 26 of those are colours other than black or brown. The remaining twenty are what we call little brown jobs or little black jobs. They're fairly indistinct. I certainly can't tell them apart.
HZ: Dowdy.
TAMSIN MAJERUS: Yeah, exactly. Very, dowdy.
HZ: 'Dowdy cow' is a name for ladybirds in some parts of Britain, which I think way off the mark given how attention-grabbing ladybirds’ colours and patterns are. But aside from being visually arresting, what are the colours and patterns for?
TAMSIN MAJERUS: So they have a couple of functions actually: most frequently warning colouration, so a warning to a predator that they're not nice in some way. So for ladybirds, it's because of the chemicals they're full of, so they have these chemicals that taste disgusting and may even be poisonous to some predators. And the idea is you have a colour pattern that's very memorable, very bright, very colourful, very memorable, so the one predator may try one ladybird once and they're never going near another one. And so you get this learnt avoidance of things with the same colour pattern.
HZ: I guess wine wasn't able to register that danger.
TAMSIN MAJERUS: Grapes don't run away, so that's no good. The other thing they can do is mimicry. They can be cunningly designed or camouflaged, they can be cunningly designed to blend in with a background, or to pretend to be something else.
HZ: Are there any other reasons why ladybirds are historically so highly feted, aside from eating the pests off the crops?
TAMSIN MAJERUS: So there were old tales of how ladybirds have medicinal benefits and they can cure measles and colic. Grinding a ladybird up and rubbing it on your tooth was supposed to cure toothache. Folklore, if you like, but they seem to be quite widely spread. And actually, very interestingly, some more recent research has shown that the harlequin has a chemical which only the harlequin produces, which is called harmonine, and that seems to protect against malaria. So it actually stops the plasmodium, the parasite that causes malaria from infecting mosquitoes.
HZ: Incredible!
TAMSIN MAJERUS: It was absolutely incredible. And so there's a suggestion that maybe, maybe these people knew something we didn't, even if they didn't know how it worked, it was a genuine benefit to health.
HZ: In case ladybirds need even more names, how about 'the flying medic'? Or 'malaria buster'? God's little flying malaria-busting cow.
HZ: I would assume the cow is because of the spots.
JOHANNA MAYER: A very logical jump.
ELAH FEDER: Going from spotted to cow'seems like a leap. There's other spotted animals. Like we don't call cheetahs 'killer cows' or like, I don't know, what else has spots - dalmatians? They're kind of cow-like, I would buy that.
JOHANNA MAYER: ‘God's little cheetah’ just didn't have the same ring to it.
HZ: Cheetahs didn't help with pests.
ELAH FEDER: Cows don't help with pests!
JOHANNA MAYER: What about the chicken?
HZ: Yeah, what about the chicken? It's not like it's a flying bird.
JOHANNA MAYER: Yeah.
ELAH FEDER: The chicken really seems like the most out of left field.
JOHANNA MAYER: And the chicken doesn't seem like a helper, like a benevolent helper, the way that we see the cow, I guess.
HZ: I'd also seen both 'clocklady' and 'ladyclock', which I'm assuming is another spots related
TAMSIN MAJERUS: I think - is that a Scottish one? I think that's probably a corruption of the word ‘cloak’.
HZ: Oh, okay.
TAMSIN MAJERUS: ‘Lady cloak’, again going back to Mary and her red cloak, perhaps.
HZ: ‘Golden turtle’.
TAMSIN MAJERUS: Ooh, that's a good one. I haven't heard that. But there are orange ladybirds, there are yellow ladybirds; that could be golden couldn't it?
HZ: Do you think that people would be less squeamish about bugs - let's use ‘bugs’ in a very general way - if their names were more cute? Like ladybugs' names are cute.
ELAH FEDER: Hmm. Could we trick people into loving cockroaches and spiders if we called them like ‘mini muffin’?
JOHANNA MAYER: Fluffbugs, or… I feel like there is discrimination on bugs based on their name - like there's positive discrimination based on their names. Like dragonflies, feel like those have a very nice reputation.
HZ: Great bit of branding.
ELAH FEDER: And damsel flies. How do you feel about pill -what are they called, pill bugs? They're found often in basements.
HZ: Yeah. Woodlice.
ELAH FEDER: Woodlice; roly polys, it looks like is another.
JOHANNA MAYER: Oh yeah! The roly poly!
HZ: They have so many fun names.
ELAH FEDER: Yeah, for some reason. Oh, doodle bugs. And slaters?
HZ: Woodpigs, granny pigs, crunchy bats, billy buttons, nutbugs, monkeypeas, cheeselogs, butchy boys, grandads: I promise I'm not making these up.
ELAH FEDER: You can like dress it up as cute as you want; I still find them creepy.
JOHANNA MAYER: I don't know. See I'm the opposite, I don't get - like bugs just don't freak me out. I think that they're very cool. So the name, I guess the name doesn't really matter to me, but I love calling them roly polies.
ELAH FEDER: And you're not bothered by them?
JOHANNA MAYER: I'm not bothered by bugs. I'm not even bothered by cockroaches. I know that that's like a big thing for a lot of people, but the cockroach does not destroy me.
ELAH FEDER: I think we need to give people more credit. I think that they can see past a PR stunt to the inherent creepiness. No?
TAMSIN MAJERUS: We should mention that the collective name for ladybirds is a loveliness of ladybirds, which just goes to prove that they're lovely.
HZ: Take that, ravens.
TAMSIN MAJERUS: Exactly.
HZ: In this episode, you heard from Tamsin Majerus, ladybird expert at the University of Nottingham. Find her on Twitter @dr_ladybird.
Elah Feder and Johanna Mayer make the WNYC podcast Science Diction, about words and the science stories behind them. There’s so much good stuff: how introvert/extrovert categories resulted from a bust-up between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung; why linguistics makes Rocky Road ice cream sound tastier; and where the word ‘quarantine’ comes from - also their latest episode, called “It’ll never fly”, is about fruit fly gene names, a really fascinating subject, and in it they set me a quiz to see whether I could guess what these outlandish names were about. I’m not a fruitfly genetics expert, but I gave it my best shot. Hear that and all the Science Diction episodes in the pod places and via wnycstudios.org.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
anaclitic, adjective, psychoanalysis: relating to or characterised by a strong emotional dependence on another or others. Origin 1920s: from Greek anaklitos ‘for reclining’.
Try using ‘anaclitic’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. Thanks Steve Cross. The music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com. Our ad partner is Multitude. To sponsor an episode of the show, contact them at multitude.productions/ads - and hurry up, because there are not many spaces left for this year.
The show will be back in a month; I’m taking a little break to get going on episodes for the rest of year and - what’s that? A new live show? Keep the afternoon of 4 September free and await further details? During that time, I’ll also be finishing up my other podcasts, Answer Me This and Veronica Mars Investigations, then it’s just you and me, Allusioning unto infinity.
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