Dr. Elske Tielens

That's right.

It is quite a lot.

And it adds up to 100 trillion if you sort of extrapolate across the entire surface of the contiguous United States.

100 trillion insects on a warm, nice summer day.

You know, those days when you yourself see an insect out because it's nice and it's good conditions.

100 trillion insects above the U.S.,

That's correct.

Raider are great for seeing what's up in the sky.

And so we're not even really talking about what is at your eye level.

We're talking about what is much higher when you look up into the blue of the sky.

It looks like maybe there's nothing there, but actually there's 100 trillion insects up there.

Yeah, that's right.

It's a tool that folks have been developing for tracking birds.

That's the first place that people went when they realized, actually, we see a lot of biology on these weather radars.

And as a meteorologist, you say, oh, that's not what we're interested in.

Let's throw that out.

And as biologists, we said, oh, what if we throw out all of the meteorology and we throw out all of the weather and instead we take this part that the meteorologists are not so interested in?

the biology and it makes sort of sense that you would be able to see insects when there's more of them in the air because raindrops themselves are not particularly big right but when you get a cloud of raindrops suddenly we start to see that on radar and so in the same way that you can use a weather forecast and look at the radar to see when rain is going to come into your local area you can see on the weather radar when there are lots of insects in the sky.

Not so much too small, but maybe too few, right?

And part of that is sort of the radars are very sensitive, but there's a lot of noise on the signal.