The Six-Legged Narrative

Six stories, plenty of legs, and one fossil with way more than it should have. A tiny band of butterflies makes a stunning comeback, ant colonies seem to have found the secret to never growing old, and a spider quietly holds one of the biggest titles in biology. Plus, a surprising case for saving parasites, an inside look at an ant colony's cleaning habits, and a museum drawer that hid a 324-m...

Could a plastic dragonfly on your hat really keep biting insects away?  This episode, Nathan takes you from a road crew's strange experiment to a Maine school shut down by tiny hitchhikers.  Then it's on to grasshoppers carrying more DNA than you do, and a spider hunt with a surprising tool.  Find out what happens when allergic people skip treatment and get stung again.  We finish with an...

A shiny beetle wins a nation’s heart, and the fans might be what saves it. Miners uncover wings from giants that ruled the skies before the dinosaurs. Rainforest spiders owe their comebacks to a hidden food source, a beetle in amber carries one of music’s most recognizable names, and a brand-new batch of plant bugs fills in a map. Then we close with the scientists on the front lines against the sm...

What do a museum drawer, a vineyard, and a rocky forest in India have in common?  Fungi, farming, and some seriously surprising small creatures.  Ants beat us to agriculture by millions of years, a crumpled moth turns out to have a famous secret, and swarms of butterflies have a whole island looking up.  Come get curious with me.

Giant larvae are quietly killing blueberry bushes from below, young termites pay a steep price for adulthood, fruit fly pupae pack a hidden raincoat, ants may carry lingering pain, mayflies hide a surprising family tree, and a mistaken 'ancient oven' turns out to be something far older and stranger. Six stories, all six-legged.

Firefighters in South Korea are swamped with wasp nest calls, butterflies and fruit flies share a surprising genetic blueprint, and a cicada that was hiding in plain song finally gets its own name. Then it's off to Peru for a smuggling story with eight legs and a lot of socks, a hopeful look at the insects nobody counts, and a journey to the ancient seas of the Atlas Mountains. All that, in ab...

Sixty thousand species and counting! In this episode, we tally the insects of an entire state, find out which fruit flies need ambiance, meet a beetle built like a tank, and crack a nearly ninety year old millipede mystery. Plus, a wasp with a nasty trick and a moth that gets a mascara makeover.

Bats have sonar. Hawkmoths have a very surprising answer. This episode of The Six-Legged Narrative opens with a nightly arms race above our heads, then heads to a German field experiment where doing less doubled the insects, a milkweed mystery where honey bees avoid their own dead, wings that fight bacteria with pure physics, and a study showing kids can fear spiders and still love the wild. Grab...

A bee that manufactures its own plastic. A pair of eyes that daddy longlegs were never supposed to have. A surprising role for beetle droppings in the history of yeast. And a rare ant colony that vanished from its last stronghold. Join Nathan for six stories that will change how you see the small creatures around you.

Fossils are singing, fruit flies are being spun like laundry, and someone just released a whole concert of crickets in a centuries-old cathedral. This episode starts in a Jurassic forest, and ends on the orange shores of Saturn’s largest moon. Plus, you can send your name along for the ride!

A praying mantis climbs a mountain where it has no business being, a scientist keeps tens of thousands of bed bugs as roommates, and a robot moth grows a brand-new sense. Then, ladybirds make headlines for all the wrong reasons, cockroach milk gets a serious look, and a Costa Rican court case puts tiny stingless bees in the spotlight. Six stories, six legs, zero dull moments.

A famous fossil that may have fooled scientists for decades. A twenty-dollar wasp on Facebook Marketplace. Flies being bred for bigger bodies, a spider mystery about where heads come from, a golden butterfly staging a surprise invasion, and a tiny predator that knows exactly how to wait out the cold. Nathan rounds up six stories from the world of insects and their many-legged relatives. Press play...

Three tiny butterflies, one powerful storm, and an open-water flight nobody saw coming. Then meet a trapdoor spider with a famous name and a genome that outsizes ours, a moth with a taste for blood, and ants that know which organ to save when the pantry runs empty. Plus a boost for honey bees and a peek at the tiny circuit that keeps a fly's six legs in step. Six stories, lots of legs, zero du...

Why do male mosquitoes listen so closely to the females they chase? What do you find when you peek inside a hornet nursery? And what in the world do fireflies eat? In this episode of The Six-Legged Narrative, Nathan hunts down answers, meets a spider that catches up on lost sleep, stands up for some misunderstood cockroaches, and follows a moth that traded its wings for a very different strategy....

What do medical maggots, century-old butterfly sketches, desert mayflies, and a lacewing frozen in dinosaur-age amber have in common? They're all in today's episode of The Six Legged Narrative! Nathan takes you from the wound-care lab to the slopes of the Himalayas, where a giant fly with a fantasy-novel name has finally been caught, and into the tiny honey pots of stingless bees whose swe...

Hundreds of tiny mantises pouring out of a Christmas tree. Ants that break one of biology's most basic rules. A feast of beetles most of the world has never heard of. Plus a brand new antlion, a clever trick for feeding hungry locusts, and an artist whose insects fool customs officers and the real thing. Six stories, six legs, zero boring moments.

Some of the most familiar creatures turn out to be the most mysterious.  This time on The Six-Legged Narrative, a famous tropical butterfly has been keeping a secret for over two centuries, a common house fly proves it's more than a pest, and a fly's genetic blueprint opens a window onto how plants end up wearing round swellings.  Then moths step into the spotlight as both muse and field s...

A famous painting, a wasp-inspired sneaker, and a whole lot of six-legged surprises. This time on The Six-Legged Narrative, cicadas might be rewriting the date of a masterpiece, a seventh grader puts fruit flies to work on a big medical question, and drones go after nests nobody wants to climb to. Plus, a tiny biting fly makes a sobering first, and butterfly wings inspire tech that could reshape a...

Ten quintillion insects, one famous missing plane, and a hangingfly with a junk drawer full of extra chromosomes.  In this episode of The Six-Legged Narrative, Nathan tries to count every insect on Earth, heads into an Alabama cave to meet a silverfish science has never seen, and sails to Greenland with some very unexpected stowaways.  Then it's on to Panama, where a tiny stream insect is quie...

Today on The Six-Legged Narrative, Nathan hunts down six stories that prove nature has a sense of humor and a mean streak. An ant turns its stinger into a glue gun. A snail that has never seen daylight turns out to be named for a faceless god. Giant wasps surface from a museum drawer, and artificial intelligence takes a swing at scorpion venom. Then a tiny weevil gets a very big assignment, and a...

Radio listeners name a brand new species, beetles sprint toward wildfires, and a bumblebee impostor resurfaces near Paris after a very long disappearance. Then a fly with eyes on stalks enters a national popularity contest, a museum's century-old labels start spilling secrets, and scientists race to bring lost butterflies home. Six stories, and not a dull one in the bunch. This is The Six-Legg...

Honeybees are throwing elbows in the flower bed, a fungus family gets a twist nobody saw coming, and a restaurant in southern China has found a very unusual job for a diving beetle. Plus moths with a parasitic secret, a tiny mantis settling into new territory, and a desert traveler that rides the wind across a sea. Six stories from the insect world, and one very wild ride.

Cows in zebra costumes, a mantis that never lived, and a tarantula shake-up in the misty cloud forests of Ecuador. This week on The Six-Legged Narrative, Nathan takes you from the Swiss Alps to the streams of the Midwest to uncover creatures that were hiding in plain sight, plus a warning that might change how you post your next nature photo. And an earwig family tree gets a surprising new branch,...

A smell strong enough to empty classrooms, beetles smaller than a grain of rice living above the clouds, and a firefly story that happens entirely in the dark. This episode of The Six Legged Narrative follows hungry fly larvae, curious chromosome caps on water bugs, and a farmer who recruited termites to help grow a forest. Six stories, all insects, and a few surprises along the way.

A mantis wanders onto a playoff field and steals the show. Bees turn out to be surprisingly good swimmers, a pond insect carries its own scuba tank, and artificial intelligence takes a fresh look at the veins in a wing. Then a tarantula shows us the strangest dinner table in nature, and a student trades campus for glaciers, grizzlies, and one of the rarest insects on Earth. Six stories, plenty of...