ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:
Entomologist Akito Kawahara was on vacation in Mexico when he felt a sudden thirst for more knowledge.
AKITO KAWAHARA: We just ordered some local mezcals and tequila. And we realized when we started to drink the drinks that, you know, there's this little worm in the bottom of the glass. And we said, oh, I wonder what this is.
FLORIDO: Entomologists study insects and their relationship to the environment and people, mostly chasing down the creepy crawlies in their habitats, not a cantina. But science happens where science happens.
KAWAHARA: We've never had a project like this in which we had the worms preserved, like, in a bottle already.
FLORIDO: Kawahara is a researcher at the Florida Museum of Natural History, part of the University of Florida in Gainesville. He wanted to know what kind of worm was in his drink - not easy on first glance because of how the alcohol alters their appearance. So of course, he had to bring a bunch of bottles home.
KAWAHARA: We got all these bottles. We lined them up. We took pictures of all the bottles. We took the specimen out of each bottle and then took a photo. So we had a digital image of each specimen. We had to take a little piece of the tissue out, and then we spin it down. We crush it. We isolate the DNA from the tissue itself.
FLORIDO: Kawahara and his team used DNA sequencing to identify the worms, which are actually moth larvae.
KAWAHARA: And that species was Comadia redtenbacheri, and that is the agave redworm moth.
FLORIDO: The agave redworm moth lives on one specific type of agave plant in Oaxaca. On a return trip there, Kawahara tracked down the agave fields where these specific worms come from. It turns out that to collect these worms and plop them into a bottle of mezcal, producers don't just pluck them off the surface of the plant. They have to burrow them out, often killing the agave plant itself. There are concerns that as demand for mezcal and mezcal worms grows, the worm and the already endangered agave plant it lives on could be at further risk.
KAWAHARA: So these are the kinds of research questions that we need to be asking, especially in a time when a lot of the agave plants are disappearing, and potentially, the insects that are associated with them are also disappearing.
FLORIDO: Identifying these worms - a first step in trying to figure out a more sustainable way to harvest them - a little discovery with possibly big implications worthy of a toast.
KAWAHARA: (Laughter) Yeah. We've had a lot of parties after that, but yeah, it was all for science.
FLORIDO: Sure. All for science. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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