Hunting Fireflies for Fun (and Profit)

From the 1960s well into the 1990s, thousands of children in the United States were actually paid to hunt fireflies. Join the guys as they explore the strange story of Sigma and firefly hunting — and get surprised by an unexpected guest.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome

(00:27):
to the show, Ridiculous Historians. It is a beautiful summer
afternoon here in Atlanta in nineteen in the midst of
what many economists call the gig economy. We're going somewhere
with this. I promise my name is Bett. You would
not believe your eyes. Nate Milion fo your flies, some
young It sounds just like the Postal Service, but it's

(00:50):
a band called Owl City. Are they on wherever that
record label was in the Midwest? Saddle Creek, Saddle Creek. Yes,
I'm trying to okay, I don't think I don't think so,
just felt like they would be well. No, they literally
are like a one to one rip off of the
Postal Service. But they have the song called Fireflies that
was very popular and grocery stores across the country. Wait,
who are you? I'm no great good, You're in the

(01:11):
right place. A resident music snarker who was responsible for
those lovely dulcet tones we heard just a second ago.
Why that was super producer Casey Pegram And you may
be asking yourself, gig economy, fireflies? Are you guys finally
doing that? Weird experiment where you both do one half
of a completely different show. The answer is no, though

(01:33):
that would be fun. Yeah. Have we discussed this, Uh
in my head, we have. I love it my and
we also we also discussed the Nixon episode. Whatever happened
to that? I think it's just sort of a terrible idea.
You thought it was a great idea. I think it
would wear thin very quickly. It would have to be
like its twelve to fifteen minute episode. I think you
would wear thin after about three minutes. Really for me personally, okay,

(01:57):
like as you experience it as I experience it. Oh okay,
But it's not about us. It's about the audience. It's
not you, guys. How do you really feel about it?
All Nix and Impression episodes? And how do you feel
about fireflies? Do you what do you call them? Fireflies?
Lightning bugs, torch bugs? Yeah, little glowy boys, bright butts, uh,
flashlight locusts. I'm just making things up here, uh, strobe skeeters.

(02:21):
These are all very good then? Thanks still? Thanks? So
fireflies are actually beatles, which I think would surprise a
lot of people, and they are the subject of today's episode.
I think anybody who's grown up around these amazing creatures
has at least a few nostalgic memories of seeing them
come out. You know, as as the sun is western

(02:44):
and the night begins, you can start to see them
pop up. And you can because they're very easy to catch.
You can get one in a jar, old in your hand,
squish them and take that bioluminescent juice that drips forth
from their tiny broken bodies and you rub it on
your hands or your face like some sort of weird
ferald jungle child or future makeup artists. Yeah, exactly. Um,

(03:09):
you know, not not not necessarily a nice thing to do,
much nicer to just like hold them and look at
the cupped hand and then release them. But you know,
we all knew those kids that would that would give
them a good squish. And it turns out in nineteen
sixty through the mid nineties, uh, there were a lot
of firefly squishers in the Midwest round about Missouri. Yes, yes,

(03:29):
due to something called the Sigma Fireflies Scientists Club, tens
of millions of fireflies were caught in areas across twenty
five states and shipped into containers not just to have
some got to collect them all pokemon esque thing. But
because there was a big business about let's let's talk

(03:50):
real quickly about what the let's call it the lantern, right,
what makes fireflies glow? It's an enzyme called lucifer as,
and under the conditions this stuff produces that, as you
described it, no bioluminescent gleam. And for this gleam to occur,
the bug has to use a kind of energy called
a t P. So if the bugs but is a lamp,

(04:14):
then a t P would be the fuel and the
enzyme would be like the match of the lighter that
lights it. Scientists figured out how this all worked in
the late nineteen forties, and pretty soon after that biochemists said,
how can we apply this amazing substance? What can does

(04:35):
this have industrial applications? And that's where Sigma comes into play. Yeah,
and Sigma for our purposes today are sort of like
the man, you know, the man that wants to squash uh,
these beautiful creatures on a mass scale because they just
need that sweet sweet enzyme. You know. Because they actually
had developed uh an entire kind of slate of chemicals

(04:56):
that were able to use this bioluminescent stuff to light
things up, right, And here's the thing Sigma for our
purposes today. Um, they're sort of like the big the
big bad of this story. I mean, they didn't necessarily
weren't all bad, but they were definitely the enemy of
fireflies everywhere because they figured out that that enzyme could
actually be used to detect bacteria in environments that were

(05:20):
meant to be sterile. So it was something that really
came in handy and was valuable to make sure there
was no contamination in labs for example. Right. Yeah. Additionally,
these chemicals can detect contamination and milk and water, and
they can determine how much cancer is in a tissue.
This next one reminds me of the old school Adam
West Batman because people even attempted to use it as

(05:44):
a shark repellent, and according to Sue Hartwick, a supervisor
at Sigma, it was once sent into outer space as
a way to test for extraterrestrial life. We're getting a
lot of this information from an author named Sarah Was,
who was a firefly expert at Tufts University. She wrote
a book called Silent Sparks The Wondrous World of Fireflies.

(06:07):
I love the title and The story is worth an
entire book here because, as we said, Sigma realizes there's
tremendous potential in capturing all these all these bright butts, right,
And their problem is that you only get a little
bit of this enzyme per bug, and you have to
gather a massive amount of them, when we say earlier,

(06:29):
tens of millions. And so they said, how can we
collect these We can't necessarily get all the fireflies together
in one place, so we have to we have to
enlist the help of people who are around fireflies when
they occur. They literally needed to establish a supply chain,
and they did so in the form of I don't know,

(06:50):
it's some really clever marketing, that's for sure. I would
almost argue they are tricking kids into doing this. But
they formed this thing we talked about the top of
the show, which was the Sigma Firefly Scientists Club. Doesn't
that sound fun and nerdy? It sounds like a good,
healthy summer for a growing tyke. And here's what they did.
They started publishing advertisements and then articles that were really

(07:17):
just longer advertisements disguised as news in local papers all
across the Midwestern United States. These would be classified ads
with all cap lines like catch lightning bugs and then hey,
kids join the Sigma Firefly Scientists Club. It's fun, it's profitable,
handed opportunity to make a valuable contribution to science. And

(07:42):
so they say, you know, we're appealing to youngsters throughout St. Louis,
for example, and you get thirty cents in cash for
every one bugs you catch, or one dollar in ride
tickets at three local amusement parks. It's genius. And I
maybe mischaracterized earlier on the show saying they were tricking

(08:03):
the kids, but it was definitely, uh a way of
getting pretty cheap labor, right, Oh sure, absolutely, thirty cents
per hundred. I mean that's I don't know, what is it?
What is that like good money for kids? Like, I
don't know. I think definitely the company is saving a
lot in their supply chain, right because it's not like

(08:25):
they're only making thirty five cents in cash, thinking how
we're going to keep this operation afloat. They did, however,
form a pretty effective community. People were writing into Boys
Life the boy Scout magazine about how this was a
great way to have fun, get outdoors and make money.
Adults approved of it because they said, you know, these

(08:46):
kids are getting exercise, they're having fun, they're learning the
value of hard work. And Sigma kept all these all
these kids that were collecting fireflies for them in the loop.
They would send out news. You know, you would get
these collection kids, but then you would also get information
on what Sigma was doing with what they were catching,

(09:09):
you know what I mean. So it wasn't a black box.
You weren't just sending fireflies off into the void and
getting a dollar's worth of rides at an amusement park. Yeah.
But they also like they really built a culture around this.
They had all kinds of swag like T shirts and
the special catching nets or whatever, and they had buttons
UM and of course you got that kind of candy money.

(09:30):
I guess you could call it UM. And it absolutely thrived.
Eventually it had thousands of members and it wasn't just
in the Midwest. It was across twenty five different states UM.
And actually we don't really have exact data on you know,
where they were dispersed, UM. But what we do know
is that the club members brought in over three million

(09:53):
fireflies each year UM. And this really was quite a
massive operation that was pretty loosely run. At first, it
was right yeah for a while, and then they said, okay,
this sustainable, this is growing into a national phenomenon. Now
we need to we need to invest a little in
our communities. So that is why by the middle of

(10:15):
the nineteen seventies, club members could pay a small deposit
and then they would get their official firefly hunting kit.
The firefly hunting kit was pretty neat. It's the kind
of thing that I would be into as a kid,
and probably a lot of us listening would be as well.
You would get a pamphlet telling you what a firefly is,
what you're supposed to do, how you catch them, custom

(10:37):
shipping canisters that were lined with desecant a net that
get This had some branding and it was silk screened
with the official insignia of the Sigma Club. It was
a bug with a bow tie and white gloves. And
then they also got buttons with a little glow in
the dark paint where the fireflies but would be. He

(10:59):
was made of fireflight guts. They probably had to use
all that stuff just for the cancer research. They didn't
want to waste. That's an interesting question. And of course,
although it's I'm having a great time saying the word,
but repeatedly on the air. We should point out that
the fireflies light emitting organs are in most of most cases,

(11:21):
they're on the lower abdom so the rot where like
your lower abs. Dirty V would be Can I say
dirty V on the air? I don't know what that is.
It's not like a happy trail. It's kind of it's
happy trail adjacent. It's where like, Casey, you know what
I'm talking about. I mean, I do, but I've never
heard the term before. Maybe I actidually made it up
possible Casey. On the case. They also had some pretty

(11:51):
clear standards about how they preferred the fireflies to be shipped.
They said, look, we'll take them dead or alive, but
we prefer them refrigerated and sent to us within five
days of capture because the chemicals that were after are
more active if we get them alive. And these kids

(12:13):
were I mean cutthroat in the way that they competed
with one another. Um. Sure, this was kind of just
like a fun thing to do, like as a hobby
or whatever, but it for some people it was a
serious business, right, and Sigma actually had a sliding scale system,
so you would actually get paid proportionately more um as

(12:37):
you know, you sent them bigger loads, So you would
start at fifty cents for a hundred flies. I think
we said thirty yearlier was somewhere between thirty and fifty cents,
but once you reached twenty thousand, you were up to
one cent per bug, right um. And so there were
these like almost factions that would emerge where entire towns
where groups of kids would pool of their resources to

(13:01):
maximize right Uh. The Allison Firefly Club in Iowa actually
brought in one million fireflies over the course of five
years and they used that money to build a pool
for their community, which is great. And there were other
things that we could we could kind of describe as

(13:21):
firefly Mafia's still in Iowa and vent in Iowa there
was a kingpin and a queen pin of of the
firefly game. One kid, it was, it was not identified,
it was ten or eleven years old. He said, instead
of going straight to Sigma as a single operator, I'm
gonna rent a ton of firefly nets, I'm gonna hire

(13:43):
a bunch of kids who work for me at a
lower rate, and I'll take their bugs and I'll give
them to Sigma and he was making about a penny
apiece according to experts. But remember I said there were
two dons. Venton was home to another quite successful young entrepreneur,
Judy Would, also known as the Lightning Bug Lady. Such

(14:06):
a cool nickname. So the Lightning Bug Lady. Uh, she
spent um an entire school year by her teacher's side,
and she used her free summers and this network of
kids that she was kind of controlling and turned it
into this like bug kind of like industry. I guess

(14:27):
you could say she had over four hundred kids that
brought her their spoils every night from like as far
as forty five miles away. I mean, this is like
a serious operation. She's almost like the marm Mandel Bomb,
which we did an episode on on stuff that it
wants you to know recently, the first mob boss of
New York who acted as like a fence. But this

(14:48):
is exclusively one product and she it's absolutely fense. I mean,
it's not illegal, but she's like this kind of go
between um with all of these folks that are going
out and doing the actual work. Yeah. So when Judy
Wood wrote to the Chicago Tribune. She said that she
was bringing in about thirty five thousand fireflies to St.

(15:09):
Louis every other day, and she did this every summer
for over twenty five years. Her firefly money put her
kids through college. Jeez, that is commitment right there. That
is a real racket. I love it. I gotta respect
that entrepreneurial spirit. Um, it's true, twenty five years enough
to put her kids through college. So we have uh,

(15:31):
folks improving their local communities, building pools, fun stuff. We
have someone actually putting their kids through college. Um. But
here's the thing. It wasn't so good for everyone in
this equation. And by that, I'm referring to the fireflies themselves.
So this is a firefly expert from Toughs University, Sarah

(15:53):
Lewis calculated the Sigma Firefly Scientists Club probably killed in
the name borhood of one hundred million fireflies during its time,
and firefly population data, according to Louis, is pretty sparse.
And you know, little kids with nets probably isn't their

(16:14):
biggest predator. I mean, they've got other problems to deal with.
But uh, Louis says, a hundred million fireflies is nothing
to sneeze at and it's really, in her estimation, kind
of the principle of it, right, Yeah, it's sort of
the tragedy of the commons, or at least tangentially related
to that concept. If we consider these fireflies and the

(16:35):
beauty they provide the world to share natural resource, then
according to Louis, it should be for everyone, and it
doesn't make sense to her that people would go out
and harvest vast numbers of this, you know, especially for
personal gain. And as you said, like these insects are
facing a ton of other issues habitat loss, light, pollution,

(16:57):
pesticides everywhere. But despite the misgivings of of of some folks,
some folks who did have a problem with this, the
industry was booming until the nineteen nineties. And here's a
bit of a mystery. We don't know why, but the
Sigma Firefly Scientists Club closed down, you know, they're in

(17:18):
the nineties for undisclosed reasons. And people people guessed at
a couple of different things. They said, well, maybe the
world is more environmentally minded, or the U s is
maybe child wages are too inflated for this to be profitable.
Maybe the patent on synthetic lucifer as expired. Write a

(17:40):
company named am Gin had control of that patent for
a long time. The company responsible for the firefly harvesting
craze is now known as Sigma Aldrich and they're valued
at seventeen billion dollars. That's a lot of dollars. Company
built on the backs of on the butts. That's that's

(18:00):
that's good. Then built on the butts of a little
glowy boys um. And thankfully they came up with a
synthetic version of this stuff. They didn't have to keep
doing that anymore, right, right, with a patent on it expired,
so they didn't have to collect the natural stuff. But
still that speculation there is a synthetic You're right, there
is a synthetic version of this. Uh. You can, still, however,

(18:21):
buy a whole jar of fireflies from Sigma, pulled from
the huge amount of fireflies they caught over the decades.
You can write to them today and buy a jara
jar fireflies. Let's see up, let me correct that I
was looking for fireflies whole desiccated. That product has been discontinued,

(18:44):
so until recently you could buy a whole jar of fireflies. However,
you can buy firefly lantern extract. It's the powder. It's
just the powdered version of the glowing chemical, and it
will set you back two hundred and twenty four dollars US,
which seems kind of expensive. But I am not uh,

(19:04):
you know, I'm not an expert in that market, you
know what I mean. I think that kind of sets
up the story part of this. It was sort of
a happy ending for the creatures. Didn't decimate their entire population.
You can still go out on a on a twilight
night in the woods and see little glowy boys sparkling

(19:25):
everywhere like tiny, tiny fairies. But Ben, we haven't answered
the most important question in all of this. Is there
a difference between a firefly and a lightning bugs? Of
the two? You know, we added some other names in
the mix there, but these two are the ones that
have always stuck for me. Are they its regional names
for the same thing? Are there scientific differences? Yeah? I
was wondering about that too, knowl It's it's to rephrase

(19:48):
the question. It's sort of like our our lightning bugs
a distinct species or just this distinctly different thing from
a firefly? Or is it more like the way people
in different parts of the country described soda, right. Is
it a pop? Is it a coke? Is it I
don't know what the other slang names for soda are.
But there are over two thousand species of fireflies that

(20:11):
we know of, and according to Bert vox H, University
of Cambridge linguistics professor, the answer is probably something more
along the lines of regional terms. Most people in the
US use both terms interchangeably firefly and lightning bug. So
thirty nine point eight percent of us in the United

(20:32):
States will use both of them. Thirty something percent, thirty
four say firefly exclusively and twenty nine point one percent
say lightning bug exclusively. And I'm wondering, Uh, I'm wondering
if that Southern lightning bug feels like a Southern thing
to me. Here's one. This is the weirdest one in

(20:56):
this study. Again, ten thousand people point zero to two
percent or two people total in the study called these
bioluminescent bugs peeny wally? Did they know each other? Was
it the same guy? That's very strange. Nobody called him
little glory boys No, no, glory boy and bright But

(21:17):
those are those are things that I think we discovered today.
That's unfortunately, it could be a great T shirt. I
think it could. Well, I guess that at no, we
got soft. It's time, gentleman Jonathan Strickland, a k a.
The quister you got. You've got a lot of nerve

(21:39):
come in here, mr. Yeah, I mean you had plenty
of advanced warning today. That's true. We did hang out
and talking about this earlier on base camp. We're talking
about it. You also totally tipped your hand on the
message board. I did. Yeah, no, well, I mean they
I didn't tell anybody what I was going to talk about.
Watch that. I think I thought I out. It was great.

(22:00):
We got to dual old school shout out to our
companies continuing deep seated beef with Wikipedia. Yes, yes, the
ongoing rivalry. No, there's no rivalry there. It's just we
aren't allowed to We were never allowed to use it
as a source. But are Yeah, so now back to
back to my my nemesis. Yeah, that's right against you guys. Yeah,

(22:26):
you're you're speaking of rivals there. Well, you are not
here today to give any of us a gift, ne necessarily,
or to to wish this happy birthday or pay a
social call you're not here to borrow a cup of sugar. Europe.
You're up to your old tricks again. I am up
to my old tricks. We are going to have another
attempt to see if you guys can determine whether or

(22:48):
not the the scenario I present you as real or
if I made it up seas as as is always
the case for those of you who are not familiar, Yes,
this is the most cringe worthy segment at all the podcasting,
where I come in and I present our beloved hosts
a scenario. They have to figure out if it is
a true thing or a fake thing. They get three
minutes to do it, and they also can ask me

(23:11):
a question if they follow an arbitrary rule of my choosing.
And uh so, I'm going to read out the scenario
for you. I will give you the rule, and then
we will start the clock. So here's the scenario. Now, First,
the following is absolutely true. I'm establishing a prologue. This

(23:33):
is something I never ever do, so be grateful for it.
In eighteen seventy four, the Great Plains the United States
was devastated by a plague of grasshoppers, or more accurately,
the Rocky Mountain locust. There were literally trillions of the bugs,
and they ate pretty much everything except peas. There were

(23:58):
stories of them eating wool off of sheep in the
fields or the clothes off farmers backs. All of that
is true, but is this part true. Different communities tried
battling these things in various ways. They put together hopper dozers,
which were essentially pals that would scoop up locusts by
the thousands. They would set fires to try and discourage

(24:20):
the bugs, which the locusts would simply extinguish by landing
on the burning heaps and smothering the fire. One way
communities tried to deal with it locusts was to offer
bounties for dead grasshoppers. For example, in Nicolett County, Minnesota,
the county government offered one dollar for every bushel of
locusts brought in. The final total came in at twenty

(24:44):
five thousand, fifty three dollars, and it didn't even put
a dent in the problem. On top of that, John S. Hillsbury,
governor of Minnesota at the time, passed laws stating that
every able bodied man would have to spend one day
a week for five weeks destroying grasshopper eggs. Now, if

(25:07):
you want to ask a question, you must proceed it
with the phrase, what's the buzz? Tell me what's happening? Okay,
hang on, I have to write the clock. Oh man,
one day this clock is going to be worth it. Okay,
and begin, Hey, Hey, what's the buzz? What's that happening? Why? Shoot?

(25:27):
Do you want to go ahead? Tell me? Okay? Okay.
So the part that is established is true is the
fact that there was a locus plague in the Great Planes,
plague of locusts in the Great Plains. And what we're
attempting to determine the veracity of is whether or not
the methods of trying to uh to attack these locusts

(25:51):
are true. Exactly, buzz buzz, what's happening? What was this
area of the country known for sinful? I mean it's
the Great Planes. It's a flyover states. I never pay
attention to them. Wow, that's that's a hot take from
No No, But for serious, I have no clue. I mean,

(26:11):
it's eight it's a plague of locust that just kind
of made a figure. They had it coming amblically, be fair.
I mean, the whole nation in eighteen seventy four was
sort of in a kind of healing pattern. That's true. Hey, hey,
what's the buzz? What's that happening? Uh? Not big Android
Webber fans here and there from Jesus Christ Superstar go ahead,

(26:33):
So yeah, hey, hey, what's buzz? What's that happening? Is
this is scenario where in most of this could be true,
but one thing could be untrue. And sink us I'm
asking because I'm not doing something where out of all
the stuff I told you, one little thing has been changed.
I think. I think what's in question here is whether
or not the bounty existed. And you know, the response

(26:55):
to the locals how much the bounty was. It's it's
either it's either all true or it's all I made
it all okay because I didn't want us to get
pink on something where it's like ha ha it was
dollar Yeah that's what that's what think? You know, Ben,
I'm going true. I'm going big time true on this.
All right? Well it in block it in three to

(27:17):
one true curses, Casey, can we get some celebratory music. Yeah,
it's been a hot minute. We were reaching out to
the internet to see if someone was keeping track, maybe
because we certainly aren't, but I'm pretty sure we are
miles behind. You managed to make up a little bit

(27:39):
of territory. Here. We'll let me give you a little
bit more insight, at least because this is exact. So, Yes,
there was a grasshopper plague a locust plague in eighteen
seventy four. Yes, people made hopper dozers, which were essentially
these plows that had been adjusted to collect locusts in
various ways. People did issue bounties for bushels of dead grasshoppers.

(28:03):
A bushel, by the way, in case you're curious, is
a about equivalent to nine point two gallons. So one
bushel of dead grasshoppers is about ten gallons of dead grasshoppers.
And so you get a dollar for that, and I
also adjusted for inflation, just for the heck of it,
that's about twenty two dollars fifty cents perfect up top.

(28:23):
And it also means that that the entire payout from
that one county in Minnesota was nearly was slightly more
than half a million dollars total just for bushels of
dead grasshoppers. Uh, there were multiple places that would issue
these sort of bounties. Uh, Missouri had a dollar bushel
bounty that started in March of eighteen seventy five, I believe,

(28:46):
and then it went down to fifty cents the next month.
Then it went down to the next month, and it
went down to ten cents next month. So diminishing returns
for your dead grasshoppers. I'd like to point out something
for the listening to audience. Uh, the quister is wearing
his own T shirt. AM. He's like one of those
guys in the band which you you know what, I
really I still really like that T shirt. And to

(29:09):
be fair, you did say that you were going to
wear that for anybody on ridiculous his stories. Really, yeah,
I committed interestingly. John S. Pillsbury, the governor of Minnesota,
was also co founder of the Pillsbury Company, named after
his nephew, Charles Alfred Pillsbury. So the two of them

(29:29):
were the co founders of the company. Where's the dough
boy thing come from? I mean it was whenever you
pushed John Pillsbury's tummy, he went he and then locus
would fly out of his mouth and swallow you hole.
You know this guy sounds like a good time. That
might have been a lie. Also, interesting fact, something that's
truly the stories of these locusts is something that will

(29:50):
make your your blood just chill in your veins. They
talk about the sun going dark because of clouds of
these things, and that they literally were eating the clothes
of people's backs as they were trying to get inside.
They ruined the economy to two hundred million dollars worth
of damage in the Great Plain States. There was actually
a Missourian scientist who recommended eating them, and a lot

(30:13):
of people said you gross, and they didn't. But it
probably wouldn't have mattered anyway. You never could have eaten
as many as we're out there. Interesting fact, though, despite
the fact that there were trillions of these things devastating
the middle of the United States, today they're extinct and
there's not really a good scientific explanation for exactly what happened.

(30:36):
There are a lot of hypotheses, but we don't actually
know what led to them going to extinct. I mean,
did they serve a purpose other than just decimating crops?
And do humans serve a purpose apart from flying over
the Great Plain States? We make all sorts of snacks.
Also true, we we all also are the only creatures

(31:00):
that seemed to hold abstract, at times contradictory belief systems. No,
have you ever talked about to a grasshopper about like
any like really deep philosophical question, because they will will
fle waffle all over. It always goes back to grass though.
With them, that's the thing. It's probably that they could
constantly jump to conclusions. Also, I feel like hopper dozer

(31:22):
is a cool, fake, anachronistic insult. I I when I
came across that line, as did I write this hopper
dosers this me that wrote this thing? No, it was,
But it is interesting that this was a problem that
was devastating the United States. Uh, there were real efforts
to send disaster relief to those states from other parts

(31:44):
of the US because there were entire economies that were
completely devastated. It sounds like literal hell on Earth swarmed
and like having your clothes eaten off of your body.
They're eating the wool off of sheep in the fields.
And they said that you could actually hear them choo wing,
and that it could reduce acres of corn in just
three hours, which to nothing, just chew it all the

(32:07):
way down to the ground. The still, the most insane
part to me is this mysterious extinction. You know what
makes you think this country. I I don't want to
sound like a performative environmentalist or something, but that's the
most chilling part, the fact that this, this entire life
form disappeared. Like the passenger pigeons that also used to
blot out the sky right, yes, yes, yes, they would

(32:30):
also pick the clothes off of people's backs when they
were trying to run into the farmhouses. That can hear
the picks in the distance, that's the other thing, because
you could probably hear the swarm coming. Oh yes, no,
they said that it sounded like a really terrible storm
because they were just they're just hitting against the walls
and rooftops. And yes, apparently the the Rocky Mountains area

(32:51):
where the grasshoppers when they're by the way, when they're individuals,
they're crasshoppers. It's only when they're in mass that you
call them locusts, which is also kind of interesting. So
they but they apparently had a just a very good
year for their for all the eggs survived, more eggs
survived than normal, but there was a food shortage in

(33:12):
their native habitats. So then they migrated down from the
Rocky Mountain area across the Great Plains, and it was
from the Dakota's down through Texas that was just absolutely
affected by this. Kansas was really hit hard. Missouri was
hit hard. Today I learned something I had no idea
that grasshopper by itself is a grasshopper, a grasshopper, and

(33:35):
mass its locust. People don't have anything that cool yet.
You know where you got like a one one dufus.
It's just a dufus and a whole bunch of dufaces
is Congress. Okay, here we go, there we go. We
got the button, we got, we got there. Jonathan Strictly
a k the Quister, thank you so much for coming

(33:57):
onto the show. It's been too long. You know. We
had a in the audience who were asking us, uh
they were they were asking us where the heck you
were at? And then we read, uh, you actually showed
up in some of the reviews that we foolishly read
on our listener mail episode. Sorry about that guy, true, No,
we uh we took How bad was it? Like? Boy?

(34:18):
When the Quister comes on, I just have to hidn't
even name you by name. They just referred to some
annoying component of the show, and that's fair. We knew
which one was. I knew it when I pitched it. Well,
we were pretty sure that we were the annoying components
of the show. No, no, no, it was it was.
It was very specifically. Other than us, we were also
identified as annoying components, but it was the third comp

(34:42):
am somewhat consoled by the fact that at least one
person said they think that the Quister should start showing
up on other shows too. But I have I like that,
I like the in universe tie in. Let's let's talk
about this. Let's talk about this offline. Let's see we
can figure out a way to have you appear and
like crash some one else's podcast. We have to figure
out someone would be a good sport about it. Let

(35:04):
us know what podcast do you think the Quisters should
crash next. You can tell us at Facebook. You can
let us know on Instagram, you can let us know
on Twitter. We highly recommend our Facebook page Ridiculous Historians,
where you can meet our favorite part of the show,
your fellow listeners. Also let us know if you have

(35:24):
ever been in the firefly catching business. Just interested I
would say, let us know if you live through that
uh locust swarm in the locust plague in the eighteen hundreds,
But if you have lived that long, I think you
probably won't confess it, just honestly. So thanks as always
to the part of the show we all love to

(35:45):
hate but mostly just love to love, Jonathan Strickland, the
the Notorious Quister. I gotta give you props for finding
such a similar story to the story that we talked
about today. That was very well done. I really wanted
to do that, you know. The original story I picked
was one that you guys have already covered in a
previous episode. It was using fleas as weapons in World

(36:05):
War Two. But then you guys did a full episode
we did. We also uh did another episode about a
similar situation where uh school kids were encouraged to shoot
squirrels and send their severed tales to the governor's office,
almost like cereal box tops. Golly that I I'm going
to have to listen to that show. Uh. So thanks

(36:25):
as always to our super producer Casey Pegram, Alex Williams,
who composed our theme research associates Gave Luzier and Ryan
Barrish yes, thanks of course as well to Eve's Jeff
Coat and Christopher Hasciotis, friends of the show and friends
of ours. Thank you for tuning in, and thanks to

(36:46):
uh all the bright butts, all the glowy boys out there,
and no, thank you to you for for yet another wonderful, whimsical,
ridiculous journey through history, and you as well, sir. We'll
see you next time, folks. Yeah. For more podcasts from

(37:08):
my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.