(car driving by)
- [Narrator] You know
that thing when you're
driving down a country road,
singing along to John Denver,
'cause you're kinda obvious like that,
when all of a sudden...
(laughter)
a big bug explodes across your windshield.
(laughter)
- That was a big one.
- Oh, god.
- It happens.
You go for a drive,
you get bug splats on your car.
- What do we got there?
- It's usually an annoyance.
- It's so gross.
- But here,
we're collecting splats intentionally.
Partly because we're doing
an absurd and gross experiment in Ecology.
And partly because
windshields might be a window
into something mysterious and disturbing
in the insect world.
- This bug splat is like...
It goes all the way up here.
- It could be a grasshopper.
- We actually got into insect
splats because of an app.
It's called That Gunk on Your Car
and it's the brain child of this guy.
- Mark Hostetler,
Professor,
Department of Wildlife
Ecology and Conservation
at the University of Florida.
- Mark studies how urban
areas effect biodiversity.
He's also looking for ways
to get non scientists thinking about bugs.
A few years back,
at a gas station in Florida,
he found a new way to do that.
- This guy pulled up next to
me covered in insect splats,
a lot of love bugs.
You know,
and he just kind of exasperated looking.
Like, "What is this anyway?"
And he asked the right person.
- Somehow this compelled Mark to catalog
all the splats he could find
and match the splat to
the bug that produced it.
He collected his findings
and wrote a book with
very detailed instructions
for identifying splats.
This is a nice creamy one
with some blood in it.
Weird as it is,
the project took off.
Mark won the Ig Nobel Prize,
which is sort of a joke Nobel
for the strange and gross.
Or more formerly,
for research that "cannot or
should not be reproduced."
Maybe a dubious honor,
but it got him onto The Tonight Show.
- How many times do you look
at your windshield and say,
"I would love to know what that is
smashed against my windshield?"
Is there any body?
Up to this point there was
no one that could tell you.
This man can tell you!
Professor Mark Hostetler is here.
(exuberant intro music)
- And earlier this year,
Mark's son Jamm adapted
the book into an app.
- I'm a computer science student
at the University of Florida.
- Truly, the family went
all in on the splats.
- I think I'm the only splatologist
in the world right now.
- And we decided to to try
some amateur splatology ourselves.
(airplane whirring)
- Step one was to meet up in rural Texas.
Lots of bugs in rural Texas.
Step two,
turn our rental car into
a bug collection mobile.
The catch was that not all bugs
just smoosh on the front of the car.
Some ricochet up and over the roof.
So Mark suggested we build
a little contraption he
calls a carcass catcher.
Take a heavy metal wire
and loop it in through the
car door here and here.
- And then there's a bottom wire
and then you put an aluminum screen there
and that screen kinda wraps around
the top and the bottom.
It forms like a little trap with a net.
- Then we can just
run some twine down to
the windshield wipers.
(twinkling music)
And we drive it around for a little while
and we see if it stays on.
- And finally,
step three: drive.
(upbeat music)
(car going by)
- This whole set up,
not the most rigorous science.
All of the locals have a lot of opinions
about where we can find the most bugs.
(twinkling music)
- But, it did give us a random sampling
of all the flying insects in the area.
We took back country roads
between Austin and Houston
and along the way we smooshed bugs.
- Less watery.
- We checked the carcass catcher.
- Its like a beetle or something.
- And we consulted the app.
- Cream, elongated...
- Midsized.
- Love bugs.
- Love bugs.
- The weirdest data point might
be the shape of the splats.
Mark says that basically
comes down to physics.
- So if you had a hard shell,
like think of a beetle,
it would hit and roll right off,
but the softer abdomens like Lepidoptera,
like butterflies and moths,
they would hit, stick,
and the wings and the
acceleration of the air
going up the windshield would
actually throw them up there,
the windshield.
It all kinda gives you a different splat.
- The carcass catcher got
us some good samples, too.
Some kind of fly,
a honey bee,
and love bugs.
Lots and lots of love bugs.
It was love bug season in the south.
- These ones are cute.
- Oh god there's one
flying by me right now.
- Yeah these one's are connected.
But all in,
we didn't get nearly as
many splats as we thought.
It was weird.
And we started to wonder
if it was because of this
other thing we'd read about.
A mystery in insect circles
that's actually called
"The windshield phenomenon."
- What you're referring to is
this idea that people thought,
"Wow, I used to get
a lot more insect splats on my windshield.
About 10 years ago or 20 years ago,
30 years ago.
I'm not getting as much nowadays."
- It's easy to ignore
the millions and millions
of insects all around you.
Often, you only notice the annoying ones.
The bugs that sting you,
eat your food,
or splat on your car.
But anecdotally,
there's a feeling that bug splats
just aren't as much of a thing these days.
Mark's noticed this himself.
- [Mark] Thinking about traveling
across country 20 years ago,
I just notice,
using those bug removers
at the gas station
a lot more than I do nowadays.
No one's quite sure,
but there's just enough
smattering of evidence out there
that'd make people think,
"You know,
we should be really looking at this."
- The phenomenon gets creepier
when you consider all the studies
that point to real trouble for insects.
Around the world,
insects face threats like habitat loss,
climate change,
pesticides,
and invasive species.
A couple recent studies
put numbers to the problem.
One paper looking at nature
preserves in Germany,
found a 75 percent decline
in all flying insects since the 90's.
And earlier this year,
a big meda study of insect research warned
that 40 percent of all insect species
could go extinct within a few decades.
Some news outlets called
it an insect apocalypse.
And we wondered if we might
of seen evidence of that.
(chiming music)
Back in the office,
we cataloged our samples,
and we asked Mark about the
existential threat to insects.
He's concerned,
but he also thinks it's really hard
to paint a broad picture
about the health of
all insects everywhere.
It's been hard enough to figure out why
honeybees alone have been struggling.
- [Mark] It took years and
years and years and years
of research to really say,
"Ah, it's probably pesticide,
it's probably some habitat going on.
There's...
You know."
That was focus concentration.
We're talking about hundreds,
thousands,
millions of different species
of insects across the world.
- For that reason,
there's been pushback to the
insect apocalypse narrative.
Critics argue that we
don't know nearly enough
to say one thing or
another about all insects.
There are roughly
one million identified
insect species in the world,
but scientists don't have a clue
how many species are really out there.
It could be a couple million.
It could be 30 million.
And really,
the windshield phenomenon just
isn't studied enough either.
Our bug splats and collections
make for interesting anecdotes,
but without a measured baseline,
it's not evidence of anything.
It's not science.
But Mark says it could be,
if someone really got serious
about driving around
with a carcass catcher.
They could put the windshield
phenomenon to the test.
- You could,
on a general level,
say hey,
if you get me this many splats
and do the same route
year after year after year
you could get at least a
monitoring protocol going
that could give you some
good scientific results.
- Mark says that would
come down to funding,
and he's not holding his breath.
For now,
he's content to hold court
as the world's foremost splatologist.
- [Narrator] You wanna
talk about unusual splats?
- [Friend] Sure.
How weird does it get?
- [Narrator] So,
you get a number of different splats,
but you can (speaking fades off)
(car wash sounds)
- This is all of our hard work.
Still waiting for this sucker.
(car wash whooshing)
- Like and subscribe.
