PODCAST · news
The Six-Legged Narrative
by Nathan
The Six-Legged Narrative is the podcast that finds the extraordinary hiding in plain sight — under rocks, in the ocean, on your skin right now. Equal parts science, adventure, and "wait, what?!" — this is nature storytelling for people who think they don't care about insects.Spoiler: you do now.At Reiman Gardens, our passion for the insect world goes far beyond our walls. Home to the Christina Reiman Butterfly Wing, we've spent decades helping people discover that the smallest creatures tell the biggest stories. This podcast is how we bring that wonder to you - wherever you are.
Episodes
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-10-22
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…
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-10-21
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...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-10-20
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...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-10-20
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...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-10-17
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...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-10-16
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...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-10-15
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...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-10-14
A horse fly with a very specific target, a caterpillar that swaps its costume halfway through childhood, and a rare bee that came back after more than a century. Plus a beetle's complete genetic blueprint, a cotton pest led around by its nose, and the winter secrets of the bumble bee queen. Six...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-10-13
Unwelcome passengers at thirty-five thousand feet, a pond building plan for one of Scotland's rarest damselflies, and a wasp nest removal that goes very wrong. Then a tiny fly reveals a surprising link between a young diet and a long life, termites besiege the palaces of Seoul, and a new study...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-10-12
A flower is forging the scent of a fig, and the wasps that fall for it get nothing in return. A snail the size of a pencil eraser turns up in a most unlikely place. Then we dig into a brand new grasshopper, a cow dung puzzle with a surprising twist, and the story of a woman who changed how the...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-10-11
Some young ants refuse to wait their turn. A bee smaller than a grain of rice may vanish before we ever truly meet it. Drones are dropping insects into Hawaiian forests, a one-gram robot is nailing its jumps, beetles are putting a famous gene to a surprising new use, and a familiar invader is...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-10-10
Insects are everywhere, and this episode proves it. An internet trend turns a walking leaf into a star. One lonely streetlamp changes who visits a mountain meadow, in ways nobody expected. Oklahoma has crickets everywhere, except where they're needed. A deep-sea creature turns out to glow, a…
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-10-08
A billion tiny wasps march into battle, lobster shells get a second life on the golf course, and a fruit fly learns to see like a butterfly. Plus, a surgical surprise nobody expected, a small invader eyeing the hemlocks, and a garden tip that lets you do less and help more. Hit play and bring…
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-10-07
What if watching insects became the new birding? This episode of The Six-Legged Narrative starts with a city that is already finding out, then follows a hunter in the air that seems to do math faster than we can blink. From there, we peek into a sloth's fur where a surprising garden is growing,...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-10-06
Ever wondered how an ant builds a boat out of its own body? Or how a locust decides whether a smell is worth chasing? On this episode of The Six-Legged Narrative, Nathan floats down a flooded river on a living raft, visits a snail farmer who has all the time in the world, and tracks a mysterious...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-10-05
Ninety-eight million years ago, a mantis was already wearing the best costume in the forest. This episode, we crack open that amber, find out why a heat wave might help a tomato ruining virus, celebrate a tiny bee's big surprise, tour France's insect farms, and learn why a storm could be good…
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-10-03
This episode of The Six-Legged Narrative opens with a giant staging a comeback, then boards a train line where drivers say they found some unwelcome passengers. You'll meet a water spirit with a built-in grappling hook, a pantry pest that shrugs off the heat, a spider in a wasp costume, and the...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-10-02
A wildlife park turns an invasive caterpillar surge into a competition, and the numbers are wild. Scientists look inside stream insects and find something we put in the water ourselves. A tiny wasp enlists a virus and a very unlucky ladybug to guard its young. Plus fish food made from manure, a...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-10-01
From a school brought to a standstill by tiny jumpers to a beetle whose name honors an island's first peoples, this episode of The Six-Legged Narrative travels from the glow of construction lights to the amber-locked mayflies of an ancient forest. Find out what one state learned by counting its...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-09-30
What happens when a flood forces a city's cockroaches out of hiding? Can a fruit fly really remember what it ate as a baby? And could a mosquito one day help crack a case? Join Nathan for a fast-moving tour through six stories, from a university betting on crickets to a beetle where nobody…
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-09-29
A parasite that talks its host into drowning. A snail with a built in front door. Twenty thousand ants and a mystery at a Japanese shipping port. This episode of The Six-Legged Narrative also visits a campus where fly larvae turn leftovers into fertilizer, a tick-triggered allergy heading for...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-09-28
A dad with a whole family glued to his back, an elephant-sized hole in the insect world, and a suitcase nobody wants to unpack. This episode of The Six-Legged Narrative travels from the Kenyan savanna to a rainforest that hid on the map, then follows an app that wants to name every tick and a…
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-09-26
Today on The Six-Legged Narrative: a caterpillar in Hawaii that broke one of the most basic rules in insect biology, a grasshopper population that changed color to match a landscape scorched by wildfire, and an aphid that grows its own house out of a living plant. Plus, the dogs trained to out...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-09-25
A crustacean rivalry earns a genuinely ridiculous nickname, an entire ecosystem gets judged by its dragonflies, and honey bees might finally be catching a break. Six stories, one surprisingly long-lived fly, and Nathan's usual mix of science, strangeness, and cautious optimism.
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-24-2026
Six legs, six stories: an insect that runs so fast it briefly goes blind, the genetic detective work behind pesticide-resistant bedbugs, and a sneaky earwig with a taste for termites. It's the week's strangest science and nature headlines, six-legged and otherwise, on The Six-Legged Narrative.
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-09-23
This episode: a German suburb fighting back against a supersized invasive ant, a pile of house dust that turns out to be its own tiny ecosystem, caterpillars beating the heat by sticking together, a scythe-wielding answer to the modern lawnmower, spiders doing detective work they don't even know...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-09-22
Six legs, six stories: a stick insect that fooled scientists for years, an uninvited dinner guest that went viral at a five-star hotel, a mysterious egg predator off the California coast, and the volunteers, professors, and tiny beach-dwellers proving that small creatures do some of the biggest...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-09-21
Six legs today, plus one very memorable exception. On this episode of The Six-Legged Narrative: a honey bee heist with a six-figure body count, a caterpillar hiding a secret light show, a massive new look at whether insect farming could help feed a continent, a strange little predator with a…
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-09-19
A first-ever insect intercept at an airport, a dam that turns a river into an all-you-can-eat buffet for bats, and a lab result that complicates dinner for anyone with a shellfish or dust mite allergy. Then wander the forest floor with Virginia's leggy millipedes, cheer a rare butterflies return…
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-09-18
Insects have been busy. A simulated fruit fly is learning to parallel park, a package labeled as a toy is hiding something far rarer than it should, and a tiny fly can pinpoint a sound with ears so close together they shouldn't work. Then we dig into a cave where insects rewrote history, find out...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-09-17
A doorbell camera catches an insect in a full standoff, and a ladybug once got sent to space to test the limits of gravity itself. A researcher offers an unexpected defense of a controversial academic habit — using termites, of all things. This episode also digs into a governor's new plan for...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-09-16
A Pennsylvania road disappears under a carpet of wriggling legs, an eleven-year-old turns his neighbors' worst nightmare into a side hustle, and termites get an unlikely promotion from pest to farmland hero. Then Nathan shares something he witnessed firsthand that he's never seen at this scale in...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-09-15
Every fall, one incredible migration crosses entire continents right over our heads, and almost nobody talks about it. This episode of The Six-Legged Narrative uncovers that overlooked journey, plus a wasp frozen in amber for ninety nine million years, an arachnid about to take on the tumbleweed…
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-09-14
From a hidden hornet nest tracked down with GPS to a snail shell that's been secretly recording ancient storms, this episode of The Six-Legged Narrative jumps from a Colombian rainforest to the middle of the Sahara Desert and back again. Six stories, five insects and one seriously overachieving...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-09-12
A newly named true bug turns up in a Missouri pond, a two millimeter snail brings a massive construction project to a standstill, and a historic library fights back against an enemy hiding in its own walls. Then: high-tech eyes on aphids, a wasp with one of the most ruthless hunting strategies in...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-09-11
From something crawling where you'd least expect it, to an insect that crossed an ocean in someone's luggage, to a grasshopper plague that vanished after a single prayer, this episode of The Six-Legged Narrative digs into six stories spanning medicine, history, and old-world color chemistry.…
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-09-10
This episode of The Six-Legged Narrative digs into a pop star's surprising new namesake insect, a flower that's playing a very convincing con game on unsuspecting wasps, and a mysterious tarantula so elusive it's only ever been caught twice. Along the way: an unexpected second wave of southern...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-09-09
A customs bust with an insect twist, a fossil that rewrites the origin of insects, a summer of citizen science in the middle of the city, a global rethink of who gets to study the tropics, an award-winning discovery hiding inside a cockroach, and one closet that became a battlefield against…
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-09-08
A parasite-fighting breakthrough for honey bees. A dung beetle hiding in a specimen drawer for years. A forgotten village that sealed itself off to stop a plague. This episode of The Six-Legged Narrative digs into six stories spanning insect defense, ancient engineering on a continental scale…
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-09-07
A flashy invasive insect sparks a squash-or-don't debate, a pantry pest turns out to hold ancient genetic secrets, a rewilded farm becomes a caterpillar paradise, cockroaches push into new territory, beekeepers face a brutal season, and we close with one of the wildest caterpillars in North...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-09-06
A backyard menace with a five-figure population, a sea scorpion that would have made the ocean a lot scarier four hundred million years ago, and a conservation program four decades in the making finally paying off halfway around the world. Plus: the genetics of who runs toward danger, and why the...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-09-04
A fungus with a truly diabolical game plan, a misunderstood giant spider clearing its name, and a desert river that's staging one of the fastest comebacks in recent memory — this episode of The Six-Legged Narrative covers all of it. Plus: a common household insect that's more misunderstood than...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-09-04
Five eyes and thirty thousand lenses walk into a pond. A fossil the size of a grain of rice rewrites part of the ant family tree. A prize-winning discovery hiding in the last place you'd expect to find dessert. And a butterfly that exists on exactly one stretch of coastline anywhere on Earth. Six...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-09-02
A spider gets named after a college mascot, and it might be the only one of its kind on the planet. A moth crosses a border for the first time in recorded history, literally. And by the end of the episode, one suitcase is going to make you very glad it wasn't your carry-on. This time on The...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-09-01
This episode of The Six-Legged Narrative dives into the secret chemistry hiding in something you've probably stepped past a hundred times, then heads out to open water to meet a creature with the most misleading name in the ocean. From there we cross into a centuries-old temple tradition, a half...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-08-31
Dragonflies quietly pull off one of the most underrated migrations in North America, ants moonlight as movers for some of the most indestructible animals on Earth, and one insect has figured out how to survive full time underwater on a host that dives for a living. Then things get personal, a...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-08-29
A fossil insect with two dozen legs blurs the line between water and land. A rare, color-muted monarch turns heads in a Midwest backyard. And the single most well-traveled insect on Earth gets tracked across two thousand years of hitchhiking. Add in a California tarantula trek, a marine insect…
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-08-28
A stick insect just taught a robot how to walk, a spider nobody's ever seen before turned up on a barrier island, and one wrong step on a hiking trail ended in a helicopter rescue. Today on The Six-Legged Narrative, we're making the case for jumping spiders as pets, giving some seriously…
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-08-27
A stinging rampage fueled by fermented fruit, a bumble bee showing up someplace nobody expected, and the single toughest insect on the coldest continent on Earth, this episode of The Six-Legged Narrative covers a lot of ground. We'll also look at a predator insect doing quiet pest-control work,...
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The Six-Legged Narrative EPS 2026-08-26
What did the age of dinosaurs actually sound like? What happens when ants lose gravity? And why did a spider get named after a ten-year-old? This episode of The Six-Legged Narrative jumps from a hundred-fifty-million-year-old soundscape to the International Space Station, down to a quietly-lit...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
The Six-Legged Narrative is the podcast that finds the extraordinary hiding in plain sight — under rocks, in the ocean, on your skin right now. Equal parts science, adventure, and "wait, what?!" — this is nature storytelling for people who think they don't care about insects.Spoiler: you do now.At Reiman Gardens, our passion for the insect world goes far beyond our walls. Home to the Christina Reiman Butterfly Wing, we've spent decades helping people discover that the smallest creatures tell the biggest stories. This podcast is how we bring that wonder to you - wherever you are.
HOSTED BY
Nathan
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does The Six-Legged Narrative have?
The Six-Legged Narrative currently has 197 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The Six-Legged Narrative about?
The Six-Legged Narrative is the podcast that finds the extraordinary hiding in plain sight — under rocks, in the ocean, on your skin right now. Equal parts science, adventure, and "wait, what?!" — this is nature storytelling for people who think they don't care about insects.Spoiler: you do now.At...
How often does The Six-Legged Narrative release new episodes?
The Six-Legged Narrative publishes regularly with 197 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to The Six-Legged Narrative?
You can listen to The Six-Legged Narrative on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The Six-Legged Narrative?
The Six-Legged Narrative is created and hosted by Nathan.
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