You might feel a spark when you talk to your crush, but living things don’t require romance to make electricity. A study published October 24 in iScience suggests that the electricity naturally produced by swarming insects like honeybees and locusts is an unappreciated contributor to the overall electric charge of the atmosphere.

“Particles in the atmosphere easily charge up,” says Joseph Dwyer, a physicist at the University of New Hampshire in Durham who was not involved with the study. “Insects are little particles moving around the atmosphere.” Despite this, the potential that insect-induced static electricity plays a role in the atmosphere’s electric field, which influences how water droplets form, dust particles move and lightning strikes brew, hasn’t been considered before, he says.
Scientists have known about the minuscule electric charge carried by living things, such as insects, for a long time. However, the idea that an electric bug-aloo could alter the charge in the air on a large scale came to researchers through sheer chance.

“We were actually interested in understanding how atmospheric electricity influences biology,” says Ellard Hunting, a biologist at the University of Bristol in England. But when a swarm of honeybees passed over a sensor meant to pick up background atmospheric electricity at the team’s field station, the scientists began to suspect that the influence could flow the other way too.

Hunting and colleagues, including biologists and physicists, measured the change in the strength of electric charge when other honeybee swarms passed over the sensor, revealing an average voltage increase of 100 volts per meter. The denser the insect swarm, the greater the charge produced.

This inspired the team to think about even larger insect swarms, like the biblical hordes of locusts that plagued Egypt in antiquity (and, in 2021, Las Vegas (SN: 3/30/21)). Flying objects, from animals to airplanes, build up static electricity as they move through the air. The team measured the charges of individual desert locusts (Schistocerca gregaria) as they flew in a wind tunnel powered by a computer fan. Taking data on locust density from other studies, the team then used a computer simulation based on the honeybee swarm data to scale up these single locust measurements into electric charge estimates for an entire locust swarm. Clouds of locusts could produce electricity on a per-meter basis on par with that in storm clouds, the scientists report.

Hunting says the results highlight the need to explore the unknown lives of airborne animals, which can sometimes reach much greater heights than honeybees or locusts. Spiders, for example, can soar kilometers above Earth when “ballooning” on silk threads to reach new habitats (SN: 7/5/18). “There’s a lot of biology in the sky,” he says, from insects and birds to microorganisms. “Everything adds up.”

Though some insect swarms can be immense, Dwyer says that electrically charged flying animals are unlikely to ever reach the density required to produce lightning like storm clouds do. But their presence could interfere with our efforts to watch for looming strikes that could hurt people or damage property.

“If you have something messing up our electric field measurements, that could cause a false alarm,” he says, “or it could make you miss something that’s actually important.” While the full effect that insects and other animals have on atmospheric electricity remains to be deduced, Dwyer says these results are “an interesting first look” into the phenomenon.

Hunting says this initial step into an exciting new area of research shows that working with scientists from different fields can spark shocking findings. “Being really interdisciplinary,” he says, “allows for these kinds of serendipitous moments.”

Aye-ayes are true champions of nose picking.

A new video offers the first evidence that these nocturnal lemurs of Madagascar stick their fingers up their noses and lick off the mucus. They don’t use just any finger for the job, either. The primates go spelunking for snot with the ultralong, witchy middle finger they typically use to find and fish grubs out of tree bark.

A reconstruction of the inside of an aye-aye’s head based on CT scans shows that this spindly digit probably pokes all the way through the animal’s nasal passages to reach its throat, researchers report online October 26 in the Journal of Zoology.
“This is a brilliant example of how science can serve human curiosity,” says Michael Haslam, a primate archaeologist based in London who was not involved in the new work. “My first take was that it’s a cool — and a bit creepy — video, but [the researchers] have gone beyond that initial reaction of ‘What on Earth?’ to actually explore what’s happening inside the animal.”

The new footage stars Kali, a female aye-aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis) at the Duke Lemur Center in Durham, N.C. “The aye-aye stopped eating and started to pick its nose, and I was really surprised,” says evolutionary biologist Anne-Claire Fabre, who filmed the video. “I was wondering where the finger was going.” An aye-aye is about as big as a house cat, but its clawed middle finger is some 8 centimeters long. And Kali was plunging almost the entire digit up her snout to sample her own snot with dainty licks.

“There is one moment where the camera is [shaking], and I was giggling,” says Fabre, of the Natural History Museum of Bern in Switzerland. Afterward, she asked her colleagues if they had ever seen an aye-aye picking its nose. “The ones that were working a lot with aye-ayes would tell me, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s happening really often,’” says Fabre, who later witnessed the behavior in several other aye-ayes.
This got Fabre and her colleagues curious about how many other primate species have been caught with their fingers in their nostrils. The researchers scoured the literature for past studies and the internet for other videos documenting the behavior.

Unfortunately, “most of the literature that we were finding were jokes,” Fabre says. “I was really surprised, because there is a lot of literature on other types of pretty gross behaviors, such as coprophagy,” or poo eating, among animals (SN: 7/19/21). But between all the bogus articles, the team did find some real reports of primate nose picking, including research done by Jane Goodall in the 1970s.

Aye-ayes are now the 12th known species of primate, including humans, to pick their noses and snack on the snot, the researchers found. Others include gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and macaques. Nose pickers tend to be primates that have especially good dexterity and use tools.

“The team [has] given us the first map of nose picking across our primate family tree, which immediately raises questions about just how much of this behavior is happening out there, unseen or unreported,” Haslam says. He remembers once seeing a capuchin monkey using a twig or stem to pick its nose (SN: 9/6/15).

“I’m surprised that there aren’t more reports on nose picking, especially from zoos where animals are watched every day,” Haslam adds. “Perhaps our own social stigma around it means that scientists are less likely to want to report nose-picking animals, or it may even be seen as too common to be interesting.”
The fact that so many primate species have been spotted picking their noses and eating the boogers makes Fabre’s team and Haslam wonder whether this seemingly nasty habit has some unknown advantage. Perhaps eating germ-laden boogers boosts the immune system.

For now, untangling the evolutionary origins and potential perks of nose picking will require a more complete census of what species — primate or otherwise — mine and munch on their own mucus.