The Great Kansas Grasshoppapocalypse of 1874 | Episode 61

What hops downstairs aloner repairs enough to block out the sun? Well, nothing good, I promise you that, and I hope you brought your appetite for destruction because this episode is going to bug you. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and on inspiring, but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, you'll learn the horror of insect biomass. We'll learn that some problems can only be solved with a knife and a fork, and you'll need them because we are facing our very first extinction level event. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating or even a mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. With all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. Let's begin this episode going way back, all the way back to the Old Testament, the first Bible. You know, where God was all I love you Jews, and Moses was all come on Jews. Egypt sucks, let's pounce. But the Pharaoh was all, not on my watch. And then so God was all, well, watch this, and we think it was Pharaoh Rameses the second, but I don't know, because it turns out the Book of Exodus doesn't really have a solid publishing date. Most religious texts don't. The ancient roots of today's episode are said to have taken place somewhere between the fifth and the thirteenth centuries, and far be it from me to poke fun, but they seriously could not pay a date within eight hundred years. Anyway, We're going back to the time of the plagues of Egypt. Ten devastating plagues held back to back, as promised by God as his way of saying, Pharaoh, come on now, just let my Israelites go, and so I'll break them down for you. First, all of the water in Egypt turned into blood. Then the land was overrun by frogs, followed by swarms of gnats and lice, then flies like too many flies. Then all the livestock in Egypt became diseased and died, followed immediately by painful boils that broke out on the skin of all of his people. Then all the crops and the trees were destroyed by a hail slash firestorm combo, followed by a massive swarm of locusts that devoured every other remaining scrap of vegetation, followed by a thick darkness that covered the land for three days. And if you're thinking that you could have walked through all these plagues with some calamine and a broom, you are not ready for the death of the firstborn. This was the most devastating plague. The firstborn sons of all Egyptians and their livestock were killed by the Angel of Death. The Israelites, however, were spared because God told them to crack a lamb in half and make a mark on their doors. Can you imagine how bad this pharaoh wanted to keep these slaves to put up with all this and still say no. Well, eventually the Pharaoh finally relented, and today we remember the event as Passover. In case you are wondering what it was, Passover is as metal as hell. We don't get a lot of blood rivers and angel massacres anymore, not like in the battle days, but we still do get locusts. Not that frightening when you think about it, just a bunch of little weak grasshoppers nibbling on some plants and making some music with their feet. In some parts of the world, people keep them as pets. They consider them good luck. But and this is a big butt, they pose a pretty serious danger for agriculture. They are herbivorous little insects, capable of turning plants into pooh at a fantastic and alarming rate. And we will circle back to that. Insects are ancient creatures. They first appeared about three hundred and eighty five million years ago. They've adapted, mutated, and survived longer than most other forms of life on the planet. Think of it this way. They beat the first appearance of a tree by almost a quarter million years. The fear of insects is insectophobia, but it's properly known as ontomophobia. Some believe it comes from the most primitive and oldest parts of our brain, where memories of our ancient ancestors fighting giant spiders for survival are stored. But you can develop them at any point after a similarly bad enough experience. My mom was attacked by a chicken when she was just young, and she was afraid of birds for most of her life, but she did overcome her fear after years of bird watching. It was exposure therapy in its simplest form. A lot of neurological or behavioral conditions often use exposure therapy as treatment. Now, fear of bugs is pretty common. They sting, they bite, they touch our food, some of them stink, and esthetically they are nightmare fuel. But let's focus on the locusts. For a lot of people around the world, the locust is one of the most dreaded creatures imaginable. I mean, a single locust isn't scary. It's just a fat, little grasshopper. What's terrifying is not the individual, but the numbers, sort of like in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Just one bird isn't frightening, no offense, mom, But an entire flock trying to break through glass to get at you is something else. For centuries, on every habitable continent, farmers have witnessed the horrors of insects forms. And it's not just the event, it's the trickle down effects, like the disease and the famine and the death that follows. If you remember from way back in our Saint Pierre Biostorm of nineteen oh two episode, estimating the total number of insects in the world. That's not easy. Scientists do have rough estimates, but get your head around this. There are over one million unique insects species formally described and cataloged by science, with an estimated ten million insects species out there just waiting to be discovered. Insects count for over seventy five percent of all described animal species, and they're found in every type of habitat, from the open ocean to the highest mountains. They're even found in Antarctica. But calculating insect populations is really one of those how long is a piece of string kind of questions. There are trillions upon trillions of individual insects worldwide, so have you ever heard of the term insect biomass? Because of their numbers and their small size, insect populations are often calculated by weight on a colossal scale, with all of the world's insects on one side and all of the Earth's animals combined on the other. Insects would tip the scale. It's a really disturbing But this is not an ethnobiology podcast, so let's momentarily leave the realm of nightmares and travel to the fertile plains and rolling hills of Kansas, the Sunflower State. You know where Dorothy hitched ride on that tornado, where Superman landed as an alien space pod baby, and the home of the world's largest ball of twine. Yep, that's Kansas. It's also known as the Wheat State. They got about one fifth of all the wheat grown in the United States harvested right there in Kansas. No single US state produces nearly as much wheat as Kansas does. They harvest enough to make about thirty six billion loaves of bread every year. That's nine million Dodge caravans worth of bread. Of course, it wasn't always that way. During the dust Bowl of the nineteen thirties, Kansas and most of the Great Plains suffered through severe drought and dust storms that devastated agriculture and made Kansas real estate kind of an afterthought. Relined about sixty years further, and the Civil War just ended, and the government wanted to fill Kansas with settlers, so the Homestead Act of eighteen sixty two granted public land to anyone willing and able to settle and farm there, well, anyone but the original native population. They kind of found themselves excluded from the offer and ethical considerations aside, this was a pretty good deal on paper, and Kansas became the most attractive destination in the nation. Our story begins in the spring of eighteen seventy four. During the spring and early summer months of that year, the state caught the kind of rain that gives farmers dollar sign eyeballs. It was more than enough to support crops and maintain good soil moisture, so the farmers ran around sowing seeds like candles burning at both ends. They were already calculating their profit from a bountiful harvest, at least until summer came, along with other ideas. Abundant rain was replaced by non stop heat that evaporated the soil moisture, eventually resulting in drought like conditions. This pretty extensively damaged the crops, and in the time before industrial farming, families depended on those crops to eat as much as to make a living, and they depended on eating to survive through the rest of the year, you know, like in the story of the grasshopper in the ant. Well, here's where our story gets buggy. If you see a grasshopper, that's no big whoop, that kind of look like a flying clothes peg. They're solitary creatures. The simple grasshopper is among the oldest group of chewing herbivorous insects on Earth. They date back about a quarter of a million years to the early Triassic period. The farmers may not have been loving these conditions, but they were ideal for grasshopper eggs. Grasshopper eggs are small and usually laid in underground burrows or in the soil. They prefer sand areas they lay their eggs, and then they just lay their dormant waiting for just the right conditions, and boom they hatch and from a simple egg, a nymph e merges and then molts and molts and molts, until eventually wings appear. And it's not the wings that make them interesting. Lots of insects have wings, and lots of insects have legs, but not like these. They have a special folded up looking gam made of extensor and flexor muscles strong enough to fling them at a speed and acceleration that would turn you into an unrecognizable mass. Imagine you could flex your legs as fast as a catapult can jump twenty times the length of your body with twenty g's of force. Normal humans can't take more than nine gs, and even that's only for a few seconds. All this overbreeding led to overcrowding, and overcrowding in the grasshopper brain creates a bit of a jackal and hide effect. All those busy grasshoppers bumping and jumping around into each other releases serotonin into their brains, which causes a phase change in behavior and appearance. They change from a lovely cartoonish green to more of a brown yellow. They get super horny, and their appetite for destruction quadruples, kind of like feeding magua after midnight from gremlin. I explained all this to my wife and she immediately made the connection between grasshoppers and the Hulk. Serotonin is the gamma radiation that transforms them into monstrous versions of themselves and even worse. In times of drought, prairie grasses tend to concentrate their sugars in their stocks, so as the grasshoppers become hungrier, the grasses, for reasons, defend themselves by becoming more delicious. When you hear the term gregarious, you're picturing some outgoing tuxedo gentlemen at a party, captivating everyone with their sparkling wit. While grasshoppers have a gregarious phrase, but it's not like it sounds. They begin to self align and automate into a destructive, almost robotic swarm that picks a direction and goes. They join together in bands, and those bands slowly join together and build into bigger and bigger swarms. And when you get a swarm large enough, they call it a plague. The grasshopper variety we're going to spend our time with is the rocky Mountain locust or millenniplus sparatus. If you've ever wondered what the difference between a grasshopper and a locust is, well, grasshoppers are non migratory little fellas with a song in their feet and a pocket full of wisdom to share, like something out of a Disney film. It's only once they become migratory and destructive with a high density concentrated population that we start to call them locusts. And they've got thoughts about group playing. They seem to have figured out the concept of security in numbers, and part of this means they will lay about a thousand eggs in every square meter of ground, increasing their numbers and moving together as an ever expanding mass. So imagine it's late on one July morning in eighteen seventy four. You're fetching water as a whirring, rasping sound builds around you. You look up and you see something like a huge and shapeless dark mass moving between the sun and the earth. Imagine this cloud of darkness is at least forty kilometers or twenty five miles wide. And imagine in every square where kilometer or mile, there's almost two hundred million insects. Imagine watching as the sunlight dimmed and the sky darkened before you, and then small moving objects began falling from the sky, pelting like hail, squirming, crawling, and landing on everything as far as the eye can see. They hit you in your face, They pelt your body, They crawl into your clothes, onto your window screens, blowing in like waves, just piling up against your house, piling a foot or more deep. So many locus that roads and railway tracks became unavoidably slick with squished goo Rocky Mountain locus had invaded the Great Plains, and not just Kansas. This horde was so vast they cover parts of the Dakota Territory, Montana Territory, Wyoming Territory, Colorado Territory, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Indian Territory. We call it Oklahoma today and Texas. And the only thing more frightening than the sight of them in the air was actually seeing them on the ground. Get a big enough swarm of ravenous little vegetarians, and you can kiss all your plants, your flowers, your fruit and vegetables goodbye. It's said that even a small swamped locusts could eat as much food as thirty five thousand people in a day. And the locusts soon scoured the fields. They find the devoured cornstalks and picked clean whole orchards and fields of grain. Sometimes tree limbs broke under their weight, and they only re announce each No more crops, no more leaves on trees, and no more blades of grass. It's just all bug food. They ate the wool of sheep, they ate the paint off wagons, the ate the harnesses off horses. They even ate the bark off trees and the handles off pitchforks, and all people could immediately think to do was cover their wells and throw blankets and quilts over their gardens, which were also eaten. Imagine watching the green pasture reduced to something more like the remains of a brush fire. Before your eyes. Nothing was left but stops of stalks. And as the vegetation one place began to run out, locus release a pheromone that tells the others it's just time to move on, and the steady roar of a billion beating locus wings will once again be replaced by nothing more than the sound of desert wind. And they travel with the wind. It helps them expand their reach and it's the most energy saving way of flying. Following the flow of wind means that they're always heading towards areas of low pressure, and those are the places where wind meets rain and vegetation starts to grow. Yeah. I mean, maybe they're lazy, but they're certainly clever. Locus don't have jaws like humans. They have what we call mandibles, which kind of move from side to side in the front. Think of it. Look now, an old fashioned typewriter eating an ear of corn. The air was literally alive with them. To give you an idea how much so, a physician named Albert Child became famous for doing a little math. He watched the swarm pass overhead for five days, and using telegraph reports and a slide ruler, he estimated the swarm to now be about one hundred and ten miles or one hundred and eighty kilometers wide and eighteen hundred miles or twenty nine hundred kilometers long, which, by my math, is a swarm of about a half billion Dodge caravans worth of locusts. It was a literal blizzard of locus, and Albert's conclusion was that the swarm covered about two hundred thousand square miles or about a half a million square kilometers. That's about one third the size of Alaska, or the size of California and Maine, just squished together. And as long as you're trying to understand a visual that defies understanding, now is the time to tell you that, by scientific estimates, this play consisted of twelve and a half trillion with a t trillion locus. The swarm was estimated to weigh a combined twenty seven and a half million tons. So imagine apollo insects that weighed as much as seven thousand dodge caravans and capable of eating twenty seven and a half million tons in a day. So yeah, people did what they could to try to fight them, and I mean everything. At first, you just try waving them away, but if gunshots and explosives weren't going to scare them off, farmers mostly just started raking them into piles and burned them like leaves. But the thing is, you've got a million locusts flying by while your a few hundred just sit there burning meaninglessly in a pile. One farmer wanted to protect his home and he dug a medieval style moat around his property and he set it ablaze, but the flames were actually snuffed out by the weight of the swarm landing on it. Necessity is the mother of invention, and people fashioned horse or human pulled devices that scoop them up. They would trap them a tar or just mechanically crush them. But no matter what they built, all of these devices became completely clogged by crushed insect glorp and stopped working. And I know what it feels like. The powerlessness of having things taken away unavoidably, So I can kind of understand farmers who just stood there emptying their shotguns and furiously cleaving the airs with axes and boards, and for everyone that you killed, three thousand would instantly replace it. People were forced to seal every entrance and crack in their homes to prevent them from breaking in and clearing out every cupboard and shelf. I mean, these things even ate their curtains and clothing. One girl had been attacked while wearing a green striped outfit and had it devoured right off her body. Green stripes first, I mean, these things are the ultimate opportunists. And at night, families had to clear their bedding before going to sleep and then pray that they wouldn't wake up sheetless or just not wake up at all, suffocated in their sleep. The farmers like to joke that these things ate everything but the mortgage, and on that newer settlers of the state had staked everything on a good harvest, and now they found everything that they had was gone and starvation was staring at them in the face. So did they just give up and sit there slowly turning into grasshopper coated snowmen, well, not exactly. There were other ideas and Tomopheiji who you've never heard of it, Okay, that's cool. It's just that in many cultures grasshoppers are considered a delicacy. Grasshoppers are full of protein, and you can find them on menus in countries like Thailand and Mexico and parts of Africa. They're often cooked or fried and seasoned, and they're even becoming a thing here in North America. I did some marketing work for a cricket farm a few years back myself. In fact, if your game fire me, an email or a DM and I will try to figure it away to send you one to eat. Speaking of hunger and despair, starvation has followed locust plagues throughout history. The most elegant description for those who had died was that they had died for want of food to keep the body and soul together. Simply put, eating bugs was proposed as a way to call their numbers while feeding the hungry, which is a little like drowning in tapioca and being asked to eat your way to safety. Newspapers noted that chickens and horses had been eating the locusts without complaint and offered some tasteful suggestions locus soup, baked locusts, locus cakes, locusts with honey, and just plain locus by the handful. Crickets are said to have an agreeable nutty flavor once their legs and wings are ripped off in their fried in butter. But lots of farmers who had watched their farms destroyed by these things were very much in the camp of find that the suggestion may have been sincere, but to those affected it was unspeakably insulting, and a lot said they would rather starve than eat these things, And the barnyard animals that had been eating them became bloated, and their meat was said to taste terrible. Not just that these little apples also left behind fouls smelling excrement which turned ponds and streams brown, which poison the water for man and animal. Others were all that's a lot to think about, and then quietly packed up all their stuff and returned to live with families back East Kansas quietly lost as much as a third of its population, and westbound immigrants heading to the plains fell by as much as twenty percent. So you're listening to a podcast about a bug apocalypse, and then it tells you that, according to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, locus still represent a threat to ten percent of the world's population. Would you know what to do? Is there any chance that we could somehow prepare for a plug of locus? Well, if a locust swarm came to a big city in the US or Europe, it's hard to say. If we did catch a lucky break and we were warned of the incoming swarm, we could begin a mass spring of chemicals and pesticides over the green spaces, which would kill the locusts when they arrive, along with everything else. A biological control for locus is a fungus called Metarezium acronym. It acts like a kind of a natural pesticides and it kills a locus from the inside out. But it's not one hundred percent kill rate. So what are we supposed to do? Well, Ducks, Yeah, you heard me. They might be cute, but they are ravenous monsters and a plague amongst bugs. All by themselves. Locus are a delicious treat to waterbirds, and ducks will eat more than two hundred in a day, so in some parts of the world they are the frontline warriors against invasion. Of course, once the ducks win the insect wars will have a huge amount of ducks running around. But across that bridge when we come to it, I mean, what eats ducks? Right? So I'm going to use the rest of this safety segment to give you a quick one oh one on duck care. If you're going to be taking care of a duck, it's not going to be as easy as setting up a bunch of lights and live streaming every little quack and shaking tail feather. These things need their own safe and clean home, like a duck coop or a shelter. They do better outside than in, and not just because they're messy and not poop trainable. They need clean water for swimming and drinking and exercise, and they will eat all sorts of crazy stuff, But what they really need is water, fowl feed, and fresh vegetables. You're also going to probably want a vet on call who understands wild fowl, just in case they eat the batteries out of your remote. Another thing to consider is why just have one duck when you can keep two for just twice the price. See, ducks are social creatures, so consider keeping at least two to prevent loneliness and insanity. And as Lindsay from the Old Crime Podcast so emphatically reminded me, ducks can be super aggressive sexually, so you're going to need to keep your head on a swivel. So what happened, Well, we saw what happened. Wrong place, wrong time, bad circumstances. But it wasn't all bad news. After the fact, some crops actually matured late, which was incredibly lucky. These crops missed the whole thing, and the swarms had already passed on. The rest of the nation sent money and supplies, including railcars full of barley and corn to assist Cansons with next year's planting, and the railways even haulted all free of charge. And all of this generosity helps some very lucky families avoid starvation. We don't know how many people died. It's almost as if records weren't kept. And we'll come back to that. Damages to the crops alone cost over two one hundred million dollars, and that was in the eighteen seventies. Today that would be almost five and a half trillion dollars in damage. The federal government exempted farmers from residency requirements, enabling them to briefly leave their land and relocate their families so they could work and recoup their losses without fear of losing their claim to their original land. The Act even provided an extended leave should the locus return. In eighteen seventy five, and as summer ended and colder weather started to set in, the locusts became stiff and unable to move. They desperately collected on anything metal, like railway tracks, which retained the heat from the sun well into the night, and kind of set themselves up to be made victims of the relief trains. So the locusts died as they do, and now the countdown was on to spring and the expected hatching of billions more. You know, second verse worse than the first. But when spring arrived, it still felt like winter, including ground frost, which was enough to damage and kill eggs. The farmers had already taken to their knees and prayed, fearing for the worst, But then against all odds, a late snowstorm pair with the harve frost killed most of the immature insects, which allowed farmers time to actually replant crops before harvest. It was a post Christmas miracle. The Rocky Mountain locust would plant eggs on the plains during the swarm years, but in regular years it was really dependent on a few narrow breeding grounds along the slopes of the Rocky Mountains, and as settlement moved west, people ended up farming that land. They plowed it, they deforested it, they irrigated it, and they replanted it. And all this human activity destroyed their breeding grounds, and otherwise these things would have just sat there for twenty years before hatching. There was also an inflect of insect eating birds, and farmers had been switching to heardier and more resilient crops like winter wheat, which matured in the early summer while locusts were still learning to walk. Everything came together for the worst possible effect. And perhaps the most surprising twist out of this entire story is that the last example of a Rocky Mountain locust was found in nineteen oh two. Yeah, somehow, between eighteen seventy five, when there were trillions of them and nineteen oh two, the entire species had become extinct. People could not believe that a species that prolific could possibly even go extinct, But it was true. If you're wondering how that's even possible, I remind you of a little something called the Great Plains Bison. Commercial hide hunters sought to profit from the booming bison hide market in the eighteen sixties using rifles and other firearms, and they did this every day for twenty years straight until there just wasn't anything left to shoot. Tourists even used to blast away at them from trains just for entertainment. They didn't even use them, They just shot them and then let them to rot meaninglessly. The Great Plains bison just barely survived extinction, but only thanks to the establishment of protected areas like Yellowstone National Park. The whole idea behind the slaughter was just to rob the native populations from being able to use them by any means necessary. It was all part of a broader strategy to force Native Americans onto reservations. The plains would be free for settlement and agriculture by Europeans. Why. Yes, the same plains that we've been talking about today and about the Rocky Mountain locusts. Compared to other locust plagues throughout history. No other species had ever responded as quickly and dramatically to the good times as the desert locust. It was the largest and most ravenous swarm in recorded history, way larger than any other locust species. I should point out the original name given to them was calef spritus, when the word spritus meant despised. Nowadays we rarely see grasshopper hordes due to all the contributing factors we described, including the rise of human population and the introduction of modern pollution. And it has been said that part of the reason that the Midwest to this day remains less populated a developed than the coasts is at least in part due to the Great Locust Plague of eighteen seventy four and eighteen seventy five. The Reading Times of Reading, Pennsylvania said in November eighteen seventy four, it was a calamity that no human foresight could have guarded against, no human skill could have hurt. It was as if the land had been directly smitten by the Almighty. And yeah, it sounded grim, obviously, but that's a thing about blaming God for stuff. It's just so easy easier still when you've got human pr agents willing to throw them under the bus. California alone faced plagues of locus in seventeen twenty two, forty six, fifty three, fifty four, sixty five, and later on in eighteen twenty seven, twenty eight, thirty four, thirty eight, and forty six. These things covered entire territories of Washington, Oregon, Utah, Iowa, Colorado, Nebraska, the Dakota's, Minnesota, and New Mexico. So clearly, losing your crops to locus in this part of the world was kind of a coin toss, and it was all God's fault. But after an eighteen sixty drought in Kansas, locals were left with more than just crop damage. This whole thing had wrecked their faith in the land. They had zero reason not to believe that they had been tricked by the scum into settling a drought and bug plague territory. So what did the officials do to calm their nerves. Well, they burned the records of historical droughts in the area. They made it a pier of paper that Kansas was as safe as it was back home in the East. For new settlers, more than that. To some, it would look like Kansas was the safest bed around, a land seemingly protected by God against the ravages of nature and her armada of insects compared to her neighbors, a land that would never experience an event so profound that it would shape the very history and population density of an entire country. In eighteen seventy seven, Nebraska passed the grassoper Act, requiring every able bodied man between the ages of sixteen and sixty to work at least two days smashing locusts at hatching time or face a ten dollar fine. Other states offered bounties for dead locusts by the pound. By the eighteen eighties, Kansons had recovered enough to be able to send carloads of corn to flood victims in Ohio. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, what happened here remains the largest concentrations of animals ever. The Locus plague of eighteen seventy four would long be remembered as the single greatest and most frustrating natural disaster in Kansas history, until it was all but forgotten. You want to hear something particularly weird. A few years before this, the state of Kansas had adopted a new seal in a state motto add Astra per aspera to the stars through difficulties I mean Jesus, be careful, I mean be careful of what you will into the world for yourself. There Kansas. Some scientists warned that global warming is increasing locust populations worldwide and changing their migration patterns. Specifically, they expect that it's going to drive swarms of Central American locusts in North America migrating to more urban areas in search of food, and a number of species are already being found as far as Canada. We didn't really need another reason to think that climate change sucks, but yeah, this will do. So maybe give a cricket a try. If you are a regular listener, consider becoming a supporter. It would really help fulfill my dream of fortifying my locus bunker and doing this full time. If you and a few thousand of your friends could spare a buck or two, you would really help keep the show alive. And as a tease, if you had been listening to this on Patreon, you would have heard as we discussed whether Aesop was a thieving jerk, we found out Maripovich never loved you. We met the loneliest and most extreme insects in the world. We found out of having grasshopper superpowers would kill you. We looked at the weirdest historical plague ever. We discussed the most disturbing regional delicacies in the world, and we shared a recipe for cricket protein energy balls. And to me, I think getting episodes a little early, with no sponsor interruptions and with additional ridiculously interesting material is worth it. And if you agree, you can find out more at Patreon dot com, slash funeral Kazoo, and now I want to put out a quick baheartfelt shut out to Sean Partload, Julie Miihan, Alexeia Gordon, Rebecca Willoughby, Gruslav from Poland, Aaron Veleezuela and read Mayo for helping support me on Patreon. I always thank my Patreon listeners, new and old, for their support and encouragement. You can reach out to us through Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or just fire an email to Doomsday Pod at gmail dot com. Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one. And while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends. But if you can spare the money and had to choose, we always ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistants around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They are often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over three point six million people across seventy seven different countries. You can learn more and donate at globalmedic dot ca. On the next episode, Ah, we are heading back to Bella, Italia, but it's not gonna be so Bella after this. It's the Savezso disaster of nineteen seventy six. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off and thanks for listening.