They're persistent, irritating and difficult to ignore. Yes, Frazer, Nick and Peter discuss midges.

Things mentioned in this podcast:

• Midge facts https://www.lifesystems.co.uk/news/45-facts-about-the-highland-midge and https://www.highlandtitles.com/blog/midges/
• Parasite strategies
• How successful is terrorism?

For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email [email protected]

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing midges. Nick, go for it, midges.

Well, I've just got back from a holiday in Scotland, two weeks up in the highlands in a camper van, which was great, very good fun. And people had said, oh, look out for the midges, the midges are bad. And I've seen, I know what small insects are like. I was like, well, they can't be that bad, can they? And I thought these people were just wusses until the first, it was like day two, we decided to go for a walk by this cliff. And there was a bit where you could descend the cliff kind of on a very steep path, but holding onto a rope, it was fine. So no one had said to you, mind out for the cliffs, it was mind out for the midges. No, and we got about halfway down when I was suddenly aware of what seems like, you know, someone pressing hot needles all over my face and hands. And this was my first encounter with a fearsome highland midge. And these little bastards are everywhere in the highlands. Well, I'm just itching, that's what you're talking about, yeah. Yeah. And I haven't really experienced mass biting like that. You know, they're very small bites, but they're not exactly painful, but they're incredibly annoying. You know, they're very sort of itchy and sharp, they're sharp little, it is like someone sticking a hot needle on your skin. So anyway, in general, I had a bit of a problem with wildlife in Scotland, horse flies everywhere. The midges certainly wherever you go. I even had a tick, I found a tick on my old chap. No. Yes, I was going to the toilet and I thought, hang on, what's that? And I pulled it off and it turned out it was a tick.

Well, if you're going to rub yourself naked against sheep, that's what's going to happen.

I don't know how it got in there, but I think they do actually make their way to the sort of warm moist areas.

Just after you've brought a kilt.

Yeah, exactly. You're parading through the heather or the kilt. But anyway, I was trying to think of, okay, to me, sort of midges, what are they all about? How do they work? So, you know, they obviously are able to survive by, I've got some stuff about...

I don't really, I mean, on one level, I know what midges are, on another level, I don't really know

basically these tiny flies. The Highland midge is a little tiny fly. They weigh one eighth, a thousandth of a gram, but they nevertheless have these incredibly sharp little rows of biting of teeth, which they use to bite you. They have to do that because apparently they can't lay their eggs until they've had some blood. So they have to get the blood of a mammal and then they lay their eggs. Similar to mosquitoes. Yeah. So anyway, I was thinking, well, I can't destroy these busts. I can't fight against them. At the same time, you know, it's not really worth me trying to spend all my time dealing with them. So I had to just sort of suck it up a bit. But, you know, so that sort of situation where you're kind of very big and you're being annoyed by something very small, you know, what do you do? What kinds of ways can you use to defend yourself? That was what I was thinking. But I did have a look at sort of the economics of it because it didn't add up. Everywhere I went, everywhere, midges, clouds of them. You know, you're walking through a path that nobody walks on all day. You're the first person there. Midges everywhere, clouds of them. And I just thought, well, how can all these bloody midges survive? Like, you know, where are they getting all this blood from? And then I did the maths and I can make it work. So I reckon there is about a thousand midges per square metre. That is sort of roughly, you look at a cloud of these things, they're all over the place. Now, you've got about 25 billion square metres in the Highlands. So I reckon you've got something like 25 trillion midges, which given how much they weigh, that's about 3,000 tonnes of pure midge. It's of that order of magnitude. I think you're off, but anyway, keep going. I reckon that mammals, how many mammals have we got? I reckon the population of the Highlands is about half a million humans and probably about half a million deer. And probably, I reckon, there's no figures on this, but about a million farm animals. So I reckon you could talk about 200 million mammals. So now I reckon, so midges lay about 200 eggs, right? So with a stable state population, only one in 200 midges needs to get that crucial bite. So out of all those midges, per year, they would like one bite each, but only one in 200 of them will get that bite, I reckon. So that's 125 billion bites, 62,000 bites per mammal, but that's about 200 bites per mammal per day. So it's about right. It turns out that, although it seemed like all of these bloody midges, they couldn't make it work. I was like, how do these guys make any economic sense? Where are they getting the blood flow from? And actually, if we're talking 1,000 midges per square metre, what that means is actually only about 40 of them need to bite something a year of those guys to keep it going. So that's it. Yeah, I just thought, well, I don't know how these guys are adding up, how there's so many of them, but actually it works. It does kind of work. And it did make me think, well, who's winning here? So only 199 out of every 200 midges dies without getting this tasty bite, but at the same time, so they're kind of losing, but at the same time, it's bloody annoying for me. It doesn't feel like it when you're also winning. Yeah, it feels like they're all having a go at me and I can't do anything about it.

So there we are. Well, look, I'm not sure about your numbers, but I think you overestimated the amount of mammals there are around. And I think you've overestimated the amount of times they need to bite. But anyway. Well, it's the right order of magnitude is what I'm saying.

That surprised me because I just thought, I can't work out how these guys. They are mobile, they can smell you out and follow you around. Yeah, I just thought, well, I don't know how there can be so many midges. What are they living on? But actually, it does work.

They can make it work. Well, they exist and they're there. Also, just one thing I remember with midges, I think it's an evening thing more than anything else, if I remember correctly. Is that about

right? Actually, it's cloud. They don't like direct sun. So as soon as it's slightly cloudy and they don't like wind. Which kind of makes sense as well, doesn't it? Any wind they can't deal with. The other key thing, and this was our main defense, was they can't keep up with walking pace. So they can't fly fast enough to catch you. So if you run away. No, if you're walking, they don't land on you. The minute you stop, they go to town. Well, we wanted strategies

for dealing with this. Let's put some out there. First of all, you could eliminate as many mammals as you could. So they would decline in number, but then that just means you're the only mammal around. So they might sort of go for you a bit more. That's not good. What else could you do? You could station throughout the highlands loads of windmills. Windmills do not work that way. So windmill is not the word I want to use. Fans. Fans. There you go. Giant fans everywhere. So you would blow away. To make the highlands an even windier place than it already is. Right. So blow away all the midges. No midges, right? Because you said they can't operate in wind. And you might even need that to do that for a bit because eventually you could get rid of the population. No more midges and they don't come back. So just a temporary solution. What else? They must be allergic to some kind of pesticide.

I used the jungle formulas maximum strength and that seemed to keep a lid on it. But you want something that will kill them. Well, you can't. No. Well, you don't actually. I'm not really interested in killing midges as long as they don't bite me. So if it's extra if I if I've got a choice between a cheap thing that stops a biting me and an expensive thing that kills them, I'm not going to waste the money on trying to kill them. So that's and that's a key thing here.

Maybe not to kill them. Some I'm thinking some kind of national system in place to.

Yeah, I think I mean, that's that's the thing. And I think this touches on why it's a problem is that it's just not enough of a cost. I think they've they've sort of somehow arranged it so that the midges are biting us just enough to be a bit annoying, but not so much that we're going to really kind of go out of our way to murder them all.

Peter, either come in, weigh in with whatever you want, or you could launch a defense of the midge, because I presume they provide a vital part of the ecosystem.

I have no idea, but I imagine they are preyed on. Just yes. So returning to reality from Fraser's mad ideas about massive fans all over Scotland. The day I looked into the sort of biological defenses that have evolved, and there's quite less than very, very interesting. And I kind of I've got an idea for a product. So rather than anti midge spray, what we need is pro bat spray to tell bats that we're being eaten by midges. So that so this is used by various species of plants do this. So if there are some grasses and things, if they're being attacked by mites or by moths or something, release a chemical which tells predator wasps that they're under attack and they come, the wasps come along and eat the attacker.

This is brilliant.

So what we need, yeah, pro bat spray, that's what we need.

Then what do we do about the wasps? Oh no, the bats, then we're going to get besieged by bats.

The bats are okay, they're all right. They're kind of cute and cuddly. Anyway, so yeah, lots of mechanisms that nature has evolved to deal with parasites and parasite like behavior. But it's an arms race, right? It's always an arms race. So the species may involve thicker skin. So the midge will involve longer teeth and that sort of thing. So yeah, it's, but I think the problem with us is we sort of, we have, we suffer potentially more than their primary, their primary target, which would be the animals that would normally graze there, evolve to graze in Scotland. We've got quite thin skin compared to large herbivory type things. So we perhaps potentially feel it more. But what's interesting though with parasitism is, parasitism is, parasitism by definition means that you as a species, you're a parasite if you gain benefit from another species at their cost. But as Nick said, the midge is found like a little niche where it's not so bad that it's, that it's, for example, it's not like a malaria-carrying mosquito. So we would probably invest in widespread extermination things and big fans. It doesn't really do much harm. So in fact, it's become part of the charming thing of the midge. And it's inspired the whole industry of anti-insect creams and things. Yeah. And I think

they, but the, from an evolutionary, obviously the midges haven't evolved in an environment where we have the technology to be able to deal with them, you know, so mosquitoes haven't evolved with our technology in mind as it were. But I think it just from an evolutionary standpoint, is it worth evolving defences against the midge? Well, a bit, but not totally. I mean, that's the point. It's like they, in order to get better anti-midge defences, you have to get worse at something else. And I think that's where they're exploiting, exploiting, okay, well, getting thicker skin is expensive. It's going to reduce your mobility. Presumably if our blood changes so that it tastes bad or contains, contains some kind of pesticide in it, well, that's, we're going to have to, you know, that's going to involve some new metabolic process that we'll have to pay for in calories. So yeah, I mean, I think, I think it seems like there's always going

to be a gap for something like a midge. Is there, I mean, can we talk about, is it, does it make sense to talk about big things versus little things and little things versus big things?

Is that helpful at all? Yeah, well, this is interesting actually, because if you look at predator-prey relationships, prey and predator are almost always about the same size. I mean, obviously, you know, cheetahs are smaller than the things they eat, but only by a tiny bit, really. It's the window talking orders of magnitude. By and large, predators have to be about the same size as their prey. And the reason is that, you know, if it's too small, if the prey is too small, it's not going to be worth the effort trying to catch it. And if the prey is too big, it's just going to be physically impossible to kill it. But parasites are always tiny in comparison to their hosts. So it's almost like there's two business models. If you want to exploit another animal, you can either be more or less its size and try and hunt it down and kill it, or you can be tiny and try and effectively sort of invade it and irritate it. And that is not, I don't think it's stretching things too much to say, actually, that's pretty similar to what you have in quite a lot of fields. So for example, in businesses, something we've talked about before, like with restaurants, you more or less, you either have to be a little independent restaurant and be very agile. And, you know, based on personal relationships and have a fairly flexible management system. Or if you want to be big, you've got to be really big. And you've got to have a logistics network and, you know, lots of regulations and training. You know, militaries, if you want to have a big military, like the US, you are going to need things like headquarters and diversity policies. If you're, but if you're, you know, a weak country, like, you know, if you're the Taliban, or if you're the Viet Cong, you know, you have the alternative model, which is to effectively like guerrilla warfare or terrorism, which is almost like a whole new business model, it's very hard to do both. And so I think, you know, we're always going to find that we're predated on by things about our size. And we're parasitised by tiny, tiny things. But you know, in between, there's things we can be friends with, like cats and mice. So we should make friends with those guys, because they can deal with the parasites.

If only they would make friends with each other.

Yeah, I know. The love that can never be.

Well, look, where does that take us? I think that was quite a nice sort of summation of things. I want to talk about wasps a little bit. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's just one of those things that apparently, there's probably about one living being on Earth, which I will more or less happily dispatch and end its life. And that's wasps. Actually, probably mosquitoes.

It's more of a species than one. It's not a particular wasp you've gone in for.

You haven't met Teddy the wasp, have you? He's horrible. Yeah, one set of living beings. Yeah. Wasps. But actually, if possible, I do try and let them live. But if it's an enclosed space and there's not much choice, I will be ruthless. However, something has actually given me pause for thought in this, which I read somewhere, which is a bit like the example you were giving, Pete, that when a wasp dies, it gives off a pheromone that encourages other wasps to come. They invite their mates. Yeah. Which, first of all, on the face of it, may not seem like a good idea because it just, you know, one person got killed here. Hey, everyone, let's go where that thing got. But of course, it does make me think about killing them twice now. So I try and not do that. So that's sort of.

Peter? Yeah, I'd be interested to explore this, the analogy between evolution and the species that is produced, and the idea that businesses are similar, that there's a sort of game in which there has created these different types of entity within it. I think it's a good analogy. But in evolution, there's no winner per se. So there's no like, single pot of money that everyone's after. It's species, although prey and predators seem to be at odds with each other, they are, in fact, in some form of symbiosis in that predators keep the numbers of prey down, which stops the prey from overgrazing. And likewise, as the species numbers are sort of in balance. And as soon as you notice that when balance, when a misbalance occurs, and there are too many predators, they eat too many prey, predators start dying off. And it kind of, it finds its balance, it finds equilibrium again. Whereas business, there is no artificial construct of a game, there's no sort of winner. Whereas in business, there is, business is not entirely a zero sum environment, but there is like, a certain pot of money out there, which they're all competing for. And a winner would be the person who got all of the cash.

Yeah, but it seems that there is no way of doing that. You know, there is, you know, in almost every, except when you have sort of edge cases, like perhaps natural monopolies or whatever. Most of the time, as soon as a company starts being very successful, someone will come along and sort of start nibbling away at them. You know, the new industries, once you've got, you know, once you've got your, your sort of blockbuster, along will come a Netflix to sort of, you know, start taking them down. And, you know, every time you have a monolith, someone will at some point come up with a way of, but I'm not sure I totally agree that you, that you can't have winners and losers in evolution. I mean, in a sense, like there is, it's the same thing where everyone's trying to capture energy and, and, you know, use it for metabolism. So I think you could think about something like biomass being a proxy for success, you know and which case I think the bacteria are winning or something, but, but it, you know, if you species where there's like 10 members, 10 members of that species left, and they're living in an isolated part of a rainforest. And then if it's not exactly that bit of the rainforest, they all die. I think that they're, they're probably, we can say that their evolutions losers, you know, whereas the winners are things like, I mean, I know we're not meant to think this. I know we're not meant to say there's a right answer, but humans have done pretty damn well. I mean, our biomass is gigantic compared to other mammals. It's orders of magnitude higher. And, you know, we've gone everywhere in the world. There's not an ecosystem where we haven't got humans hanging around. So I, I don't know, I don't know if it's, but evolution is not

trying to do anything. And if it, but if it was trying to do something, it's trying to replicate the genes that the species has. Yeah, it doesn't make sense to say it's trying to,

but at the same time, it doesn't mean you also can't speak of sorts of success in the sense

success, but the success in evolutionary terms would be longevity of a particular genome. Yeah. You mean like, yeah, well, I agree. And, and, and, and humans aside, cause we've, we've sort of broken the mold slightly. But it's sort of, and without wanting to sound too much like a vegan, the world is kind of imbalanced and the species, A, would not exist without the species C, D and E around it. Um, uh, so there, there, there's a sort of unofficial cooperation between the species because they're all interdependent on each other. I've come up with a phrase for this.

I call it the circle of life. I'm thinking of trademarking that.

No, I, I see. I'm not sure I would agree with that characterization because I, species are not trying, no species keeps alive. Um, you know, uh, other species, uh, for the greater good, you know, we, we all, every individual in an ecosystem is attempting to claim as much as it can, but it, but it just, you know, it just so happens that we're, we're able to evolve defenses against, you know, a predator, for example, at more or less, you know, the same, in the same sort of way that, um, you know, that, that the, I mean, if, if, okay, if a lion could sort of go out and kill all the sheep, it would, it just so happens that the sheep are the ones stopping it from doing that. Lions aren't magnanimously going, well, I better keep some of

these sheep alive so that, so that I can. No, no, the, so the individual's behavior is driven to maximize its own energy intake, but the, the species that surround it have evolved such that it can't take that to the extreme. Yeah. Yeah. But I'd say it's a bit like the market, you know,

that all individuals are attempting to maximize profit. Um, and, but actually it turns out that, you know, we will end up, we end up with an ecosystem which actually has quite a lot of different thriving businesses in it rather than one big business, which is, which is one, you know.

Yeah. Um, okay. Um, yeah, no, I think we better, we better wrap up there. That's midges covered then. That's midges covered. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We sort of strayed a bit there, or did we? Um, before we wrap up, anything you want to say? Well, pre-order your, your pro bat spray with Aleph Insights. Indeed. Indeed. Okay. Um, well look, thank you as always for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights. Until next time. Goodbye.