Insects – making friends of foes

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, insects, entomology, surveys

Books about insects usually focus either on their beauty and diversity, or on problems and pests. Metamorphosis: How Insects are Changing Our World, by Erica McAlister with Adiran Washbourne, introduces us to the mysteries of metamorphosis before focusing on the usefulness of certain insects. (Image produced using Dall-E3, after lengthy negotiations and creative prompting. The text was added afterward.)

More than 80% of insect species undergo complete metamorphosis, in which the life stages are Egg, Larva, Pupa, and Adult. The rest have incomplete metamorphosis, in which instead of a larva (such as a caterpillar or grub or maggot), there is usually a nymph that looks more and more like the adult as it grows, and there is no pupa stage. A major chapter of the book outlines the history of discovery of the stages of metamorphosis. Note that many creatures other than insects have metamorphosis, sometimes with many more than four stages.

Do you get itchy just thinking about fleas? So do I. The way they store energy to be suddenly released in an astounding jump was studied, which revealed resilin, the most elastic protein known. It can release very nearly 100% of the stored energy, very fast. It required numerous advances in photographic technology to develop camera systems that could take images fast enough to record an event that takes just one or two thousandths of a second, so the takeoff mechanism could be studied properly. Scientists also needed to learn how to induce a flea to jump on demand, in the presence of large, noisy pieces of equipment and large, looming humans! Synthetic resilin and resilin-like polypeptides are revolutionizing the elastomer industry.

Where would the genetics revolution be without the lowly fruit fly? The species used for decades now to winkle out the laws of inheritance, Drosophila melanogaster, actually a vinegar fly, has four gigantic chromosomes, rather than the dozens of more tightly-wrapped ones found in other critters. These flies also have the virtue of short lives and tiny size, so you can keep hundreds in a small space and feed them bananas, and do multi-generation studies in months rather than decades.

I'll skip forward to the last chapter, about cockroaches. (Ugh! you say...me, too.) They have a distributed nervous system that (this is my take) seems to act like a meta-brain, which makes a roach quite a bit smarter than other insects of comparable size. They also react faster; in my experience (when I lived in Houston), while I can usually swat a fly, I had no better than 50% success swatting roaches.

And what might we say of blowfly maggots (bigger Ugh from most), which help forensic detectives estimate how long ago a murder victim died; or soldier flies, which don't carry disease and whose maggots are super-nutritious and very fast-growing, so that they are called "ultimate upcyclers" as they turn food waste into food (I don't know about you, but I'd cook them first); or metallic colors on blue butterflies and green beetles (and many others) that have led to the development of color-shifting coatings for autos and dazzling paints that won't fade; or the unique hydrophobic-hydrophilic array on Namibian beetles that can harvest water from misty air?

The usefulness of insects has not been surveyed before in the way I find here. This book is way beyond just "fascinating"!

Insects — worthy of more respect

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, insects, ecology, entomology

To a first approximation, the average animal on Earth seems to be an ant of medium size, a little smaller than a rice grain. According to Steve Nicholls, as he writes in Alien Worlds: How Insects Conquered the Earth & Why Their Fate Will Determine Our Future, ants make up one-third of the total biomass of all insects (p. 439). The total biomass of insects, around one billion tons, equals the total mass of all humans plus all domestic animals.

As these leafcutter ants illustrate, insects were farming millions of years before humans began doing so. Leafcutter ants chew up leaves to grow nutritious fungi. Other insects carry out similar kinds of agriculture. 

Insects, again illustrated by ants, also took up ranching long, long ago. As we see here, these ants guard and "pasture" aphids and drink the honeydew they provide (others care for mealybugs).

Alien Worlds is a heavy book; the paper is supercalendered, meaning it is loaded with clay to make photographs look better. It is also more dense. This 500-page book, which doesn't look much larger than a typical novel, weighs almost three pounds; the novel would weigh a pound and a half. The quality of the images makes it all worth it.

About a third of the "real estate" of the pages consists of eye-popping photos. Mr. Nicholls is a documentarist who has traveled the world preparing programs, and he has a wealth of material on which to rely. I'll resist the temptation to scan a bunch of the pictures, and just tantalize you with one, this Hummingbird Clearwing moth, Hemaris thysbe, feeding. It is a type of hawk moth, and is about this size. This image is cropped from one page of a two-page spread showing two of these moths feeding.

The obligatory historical review in the first few chapters presents the place of insects in the arthropod phylum, a basic history of their development, and discusses some of the reasons that they became the most successful class of animals (basically: extreme flexibility of foods and conditions they can endure).

Those who are familiar with biological classification can skip a few paragraphs to the arrow below. Biological entities are named with two Latin or Latinized words, such as Tyrannosaurus rex or Homo sapiens, and the words are (or ought to be) italicized whenever possible. The first word of the scientific name, the capitalized word, is the Genus, and the second, uncapitalized word is the Species. Homo is a genus of primates that presently includes only the species sapiens, but in the past there were other species such as neanderthalensis and ergaster. A scientific name, the genus and species, must be unique, to avoid confusion.

The plural of genus is genera and the plural of species is species (no inflection); they are Latin plurals. The hierarchy of major groupings is, from top down:

• Kingdom – There are 5 or 6; here we are interested in Animalia, the kingdom of animals.
• Phylum – There are about 40 phyla of animals. Most of the creatures people call "animals" are in the phylum Vertebrata, animals with backbones. Earthworms are in the phylum Annelida. Insects and related creatures are in the phylum Arthropoda.
• Class – In the Arthropoda there are five classes. More on that below. Insect species make up about 70% of the total.
• Order – The class Insecta includes 29 orders. For example, Lepidoptera includes the moths and butterflies, and Hymenoptera includes wasps, bees, and ants.
• Family – Too many to count, and the number changes almost weekly as naturalists find new species and taxonomists (systematists) regroup existing ones.
• Genus 
• Species

The phylum Arthropoda has these groups:

These are not exactly the classes. Chelicerata, Crustacea and Insecta are classes. The myriapods are made up of two primary classes, Diplopoda (millipedes) and Chilopoda (centipedes), plus a few very minor but very distinct classes. The extinct class Trilobitomorpha  rounds out the bunch. All the living classes include members that live on land; the little "pillbugs" or wood lice, for example are crustaceans, related more to crabs than to insects.

→OK. The author, having brought the evolution of insects and their arthropod kin up to date, dwells for a chapter on the co-development of insects (and some other arthropods such as ants) and flowers. The rest of the book works its way up the ladder of social organization, finishing with bees, wasps and termites. A major aim of the author is to show how insects are integrated into every aspect of life, and how much of our "civilized" lifestyle depends on them. A few tidbits:

• Do you like almonds, a trendy superfood? Honeybees pollinate them, and the almond groves of central California need to have millions of beehives trucked in to provide a sufficient number of bees. Although other species of bee are good pollinators—sometimes working five times as hard—only honeybees exist in numbers sufficient to pollinate the almond crop. About half our plant foods require pollination by bees.
• Dung beetles and related beetles and other insects keep us from being awash in cow poop.
• Burying beetles (sexton beetles) and other members of the "cleanup squad" dispose of the bodies of little animals that die "out there", and the remains of larger animals after vultures and coyotes have picked their skeletons almost clean.
• In many cultures insects or their larvae are a necessary food item.

Another couple of interesting items: Firstly, tool use. Some insects use pebbles or bits of twig, though these behavior probably evolved and don't seem to be learned as cultural attainments the way tools are used and learned by various birds and mammals. Secondly, language. I think most of us know about "waggle dancing", a communication method among bees, to indicate the direction and distance to a productive patch of flowers. Many insects also communicate by sound, although none have a humanlike vocal apparatus. Most insect sounds are stridulation, the rubbing of legs or wings against other body parts, which makes sounds that are often amplified by resonance. Apparently, bess beetles in particular use different sounds for different purposes. These beetles are 1-1.5 inch (25-40 mm) in size, usually shiny and black, but they are seldom seen because they tunnel in rotting wood. One North American species, Odontotaenius disjunctus, makes seven distinct sounds, combined into as many as 13 utterances for different contexts (such as "food here" or "danger"). The beginnings of language? The author doesn't mention if these "words" are learned, but does tell us that each species has its own dialect.

Many have noticed that taking a drive in the countryside can now be done without the need to clean your car's windshield every 50 miles or so. When I was a child this was not so. This is often decried as an indicator that insects are in steep decline. They probably are, but I wonder to what extent we killed off all the low-flying ones, and if cars were 20 feet taller, maybe there are still plenty of critters in fight to run into. However, cars and their windshields aren't much of a culprit. Habitat destruction and overuse of pesticides take a much greater toll. I find it quite distressing to see farm after farm and orchard after orchard being sold to developers, who build housing developments or even mini-towns complete with apartments and retail outlets and office plazas. In my view, turning agricultural land into hardscape is criminal. Mr. Nicholls probably believes this also, though he doesn't state it the same way.

Besides the visual appeal of hundreds of photos, the discussions and explanations are enjoyable and impel one right along through this briefest of summaries of the vast subject of insect lore.

================

If you don't care about errata, you can stop already. I am a compulsive proofreader, so I noticed a few things, a few more than I find normal:

First and foremost, discussing insect sizes, which range from 0.129 mm for a species of fairyfly (a tiny wasp) to 110 mm for the largest species of goliath beetle (stick insects can get 2-3 times this long, but they weigh much less), he states in page 45, "The size range of insects covers only three orders of magnitude, small compared to fish, for example, whose size range covers eight orders of magnitude." This is just nuts. Eight orders of magnitude is a range of 100 million to one. If the smallest fish is 1 mm in size (it's larger than that), then is the largest fish 100 km in length? He seems to have used the lengths of insects, but the weights of fishes. Let's investigate.

• Fairyfly length and weight: 0.129 mm and 25 micrograms (0.000025 g).
• Goliath beetle length and weight: 110 mm and 100 g (larva) or 60 g (adult).
• Dwarf goby length and weight: 7.9 mm and 60 g.
• Whale shark length and weight: 18 m and 20,000 kg (18,000 mm and 20 million g)
• Orders of magnitude for these insects: log(110/0.129) = 2.93, which is close to 3 for length; log(100/0.000025) = 6.6, so between 6 and 7 orders of magnitude for weight.
• Orders of magnitude for fishes: log(18,000/7.9) = 3.4, or something over 3 for length; log(20,000,000/60) = 5.5, so between 5 and 6 orders of magnitude for weight.

All this indicates that the extrema for length are in the range of three orders of magnitude for both fish and insects, and the extrema for weight are in the range of six orders of magnitude for both, with the insects having a greater range of weights! I have no idea where "eight" came from. This is worse than a simple cross-category error.

Lesser items that ought to have been caught by a copy editor:

• p125: The word for a gripping tool is "vise". The word "vice" was used, an error I see frequently, but "vice" is a sinful tendency such as over-drinking.
• pp200 and 305: At the beginning of a sentence, the starting letter was not capitalized.
• pp211 and 432: The footnote is a copy of the one on the prior page.
• p422-3: The phrase in parentheses "(soccer against)" should be "(soccer again)", as he'd made a comment about soccer a few sentences earlier. 

No bugs, no us

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, ecology, insects, polemics

I've been reading a lot of natural history lately. It is one of my great loves. Having read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson when it appeared in 1962 (I was 14), when I saw Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse by Dave Goulson, I just had to read it. Goulson's message is as timely and urgent for our generation as Carson's was for its time. Perhaps it is more urgent.

I think to most people, all the little creepy-crawlies—insects, spiders, centipedes, and so forth—are "bugs", to be squashed or sprayed with something immediately upon detection. The primary impetus and funding for research about insects and related animals is aimed at killing them, mainly supported by the pesticide industry.

Dr. Goulson wants to reset our understanding of insects (et cetera). Perhaps some large number of people realize that bees and other pollinating insects are "good". Their understanding of insect benefits stops there. I wonder, though, how many stop to think what we would miss if the bees vanished.

I got this image from a page at Izismile.com titled Imagine Our World Without Insects. They have short pieces about 8 kinds of insects, including cockroaches (most roach species speed up the recycling of nitrogen in forests) and ants (although many ants eat seeds, many of the seeds they carry are dispersed, spreading plants faster).

Fun fact: According to Dr. E.O. Wilson, the world famous "ant man", ants are the only major group of insects that don't carry any diseases. They are so beneficial, he claims it is OK to let them invade your kitchen; they will kill and eat many other kinds of small insects that DO carry disease, making your house a healthier place to live.

At the end of the Izismile page, they picture mosquitos, saying they can't think of anything good about them. I can: Food for bats and fireflies and many, many species of small bird. Some species of hummingbird eat mostly mosquitoes and gnats. They are not all nectar-sippers.

Much of Silent Earth records what we have been doing with insects. Mostly, killing them. As a matter of fact, the number of insects on Earth today is about 1/10th what it was when I was a child. And the use of DDT had already reduced them, as Ms Carson outlined in Silent Spring. Have you heard of the "windshield indicator"? In the 1960's and before, taking a road trip required a stop every 50-100 miles to wash the dead insects off the windshield, and sometimes out of the grille. Not any more.

The core conclusion of both books is the same: There is no "focused" insecticide. Every insecticide kills every kind of insect. DDT was intended to kill flies. It also killed bees, and even birds, indirectly. Modern pesticides may be less lethal to birds and mammals, but they have already gone a long way towards making many beneficial insects extinct. Sadly, flies and other "more pesky pests" seem to develop resistance to pesticides more rapidly than wholly beneficial insects. If we manage to make all insects extinct, the last ones to go will be flies.

Further, if we manage to make all insects extinct, we are next on the list. Their "ecosystem services" are not well known, but they are worth tens of trillions. Maybe much, much more. We truly cannot exist without insects.

Can this juggernaut be turned? Possibly. In time? possibly. There are no guarantees.

Too few of the little things

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, insects, invertebrates, conservation, rewilding, polemics

I have read that there are about 1/4 to 1/3 fewer insects on the Earth than there were half a century ago. For some insect groups, the remaining amount must be much lower. I remember driving cross-country in the 1960's, when we needed to wipe or clean the windshield of the car, and the grill, at the end of the day, and sometimes at midday also. That doesn't happen much anymore.

It's harder to collect butterflies than it was when I was a kid. I grew up in several places across the country. Whether in California, Utah, or Ohio, during the warmer months there were always several different kinds of butterflies in view. I just had to pick which one(s) I might like to add to my collection. 

Once, at age eleven, I picked up a praying mantis that was on a tree, where we were taking a walk in the forest. It was more than five inches long. It fought back a little—those spikes on the front legs can draw blood! But when it was warmed by my hand it settled down. I wondered if I could make a pet of it, so I tied kite string to it, just a bit loosely in the middle of the thorax where it wouldn't slip off. I tied the other end to my bedpost that night. In the middle of the night I awoke. Hearing a small noise I sat up, and nearly jumped out of my skin when the mantis flew right into my face. With wings and clawed "arms" outspread, it looked the size of a dinner plate! When I regained my composure, I untied it and let it out my window. Whew!

Children have a natural affinity for insects and small animals, if their parents and others don't drive it out of them. That affinity is the first emotion Vicki Hird draws upon in her book Rebugging the Planet: The Remarkable Things That Insects (and Other Invertebrates) Do – And Why We Need to Love Them More. While insects are the main "stars" of the book, the author expands the common term "bug" to include earthworms, garden snails, and other small, invertebrate animals.

Perhaps you know that most almonds are grown in California's central valley. Did you also know that keeping that almond crop pollinated every spring requires the services of most (some say 80-90%) of the honeybees in the U.S.? Millions of beehives and billions of bees are trucked to and from California every year. That by itself may have a lot to do with "colony collapse disorder", which leads to ever-increasing losses of honeybees across the country.

For several years I participated in the Great Sunflower Project, growing a certain species of sunflower each spring and counting how many native bees, and what kinds, would visit a particular plant during a daily 15- or 30-minute viewing session. Near the end of the season, when most of the flowers had ripening seeds, I had the added bonus of seeing goldfinches come for the seeds; I seldom see goldfinches otherwise. This endeavor is important because, if our honeybees fail, native bees must take up the slack! Fortunately, most sweat bees and mason bees and bumblebees are even more diligent pollinators than honeybees. There just aren't as many of them. One of the suggestions in Rebugging has to do with making homes for mason bees and other native bees, to increase their numbers in our gardens. In our case, we grow garlic chives, which has white flowers that draw bumble bees and at least 15-20 other species of bees (and hoverflies and certain wasps) for 2/3 of each summer.

Going through the book, one learns that pollination is not the only "service" provided by insects. Another has to do with rot. You may know that fungi work at breaking down fallen plant matter, from tree trunks to leaf litter. Fewer know that fungi are just one part of the "cleanup crew", which includes insects, slugs and snails, and earthworms. Some years ago I learned why, in pre-Colonial America, the natives ("Indians") were so famed for moving silently through the forest. There were no earthworms in North America before the 1600's, when some arrived in soil brought with plants from Europe. The forests before about 1650 were deep with leaf litter, which was only slowly decomposed by fungi and native snails and beetle grubs. Modern forests are almost litter-free because of European earthworms. The soil in my garden has one or two dozen per shovelful of dirt.

Another "service" is that insects in particular are "served up" to birds and mice and other small animals. A Little Brown Bat, for example, eats 1/4 to half its body weight in insects each night. Some portion of those will be mosquitos, though the bats prefer moths and "meatier" flies when they can get them. I've observed on farms that chickens will run down grasshoppers and crickets, which are big, fatty and calorie-rich.

Much of the book is advice about "rebugging" here, there and everywhere. So much so that it has a preachy tone that grows more and more intense. That's unfortunate, because nobody responds well to nagging. The last chapter or two are so exhortation-dense that I could hardly stand to read them. I remember reading Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, the quintessential environmental polemic. It was so very influential because it exposed the huge problems with pesticide use without adopting a nagging tone. Vicki Hird is tilting at the "windmill" of the big pesticide companies and Agribusiness. So was Rachel Carson. Ms Hird will have better success if someone with Carson's sensibility helps her produce a major rewrite of  Rebugging.

All the little six-legs

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, insects, surveys

Let's get some technical stuff out of the way first. There are 28 orders of insects. After the graphic, I'll explain a bit:

We all are familiar with most of the kinds of critters in the upper third of the diagram, and some of those in the left half. The "big four", that encompass about 80% of all insect species are the beetles, the butterflies and moths (butterflies are specialized moths), the true flies (including mosquitoes), and the wasps and bees and ants (bees and ants are specialized wasps).

What is an order? An order is a broad classification in the middle of the scale of taxonomy, which is the hierarchical "tree" of relationships. In brief, according to a structure first set in place by Carl Linné (Linnaeus) in 1758, the primary categories are these:

• Kingdom (the main ones in our experience: plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria. There are others)
• Phylum (all vertebrates are a phylum. Insects are in the phylum of arthropods, or "joint-legged")
• Class (major categories within a phylum. Insects are a Class. So are all the mammals, among the vertebrates)
• Order (mid-level categories within a class; differentiated by broad similarity of form and lifestyle. So all the beetles are in one class, Coleoptera)
• Family (lower-level categories within an order)
• Genus (a category for one or more similar species. One genus of butterflies is Danaus, and one genus of human-like apes is Homo)
• Species (the lowest category. A species is always appended to its genus, and such a binomial is always italicized. A human is Homo sapiens, and the monarch butterfly is Danaus plexippus. You probably know Tyrannosaurus rex, the big meat-eating dinosaur)

Now to the book: In 2918 the American Museum of Natural History published Innumerable Insects: The Story of the Most Diverse and Myriad Animals on Earth, by Michael S. Engel, a Research Affiliate of the Museum. It's a kind of coffee-table book, not quite as large as the usual coffee-table book. While there are lots of illustrations, there is plenty of explanatory text. The pictures are a treasure. The American Museum also houses one of the great collections of rare books on natural history, and this volume is illustrated with a few hundred selections from the past few hundred years of "insect literature".

For example, the artist Jacob Hoefnagel illustrated one of the first books devoted to insects, Diversae Insectarum by Claes Jansz, published in 1630 (The book's full title is very much longer).

This image is from the frontispiece of that book, showing just a hint of insect diversity. You can see about half the currently-known orders of insects represented here.

Innumerable Insects begins with a brief history of entomology, the study of insects. "Entomology" is sometimes used to cover related small many-legged things like ticks, spiders and scorpions, but they actually have their own fields of study.

There are about 1.6 million species of insects so far described. Depending on what is known about a species, the "description" is anything from a one- or two-page "letter" in a journal such as Nature to a many-page monograph that describes not only the morphology of the animal but its life stages and habits. It takes me about a minute to read the abstract on the first page of a journal article or letter. Just reading 1.6 million abstracts, so as to familiarize myself with all the known species, would take every waking moment (assuming 14 hours so I have time for meals and pit stops: 840 minutes/day) for 1,905 days, or 5 years and 11 weeks. I wonder how much I would retain… And this would only be possible if I had an army of assistants to run hither and yon, finding all of the descriptive letters and articles!

More than a third of insect species are beetles (the numbers in the tree above are a few years out of date). This illustration of sand beetles is part of a page from Biologia Centrali-Americana (An electronic version is available at the Smithsonian Institution). The volume on Insecta:Coleoptera was published in two parts in 1884 and 1887. The second chapter of Innumerable Insects puts this immense diversity in perspective. 

Moths/butterflies, flies, and wasps/bees/ants make up another third. Several chapters are used to introduce us to all the 28 insecct orders, one after another, grouped roughly by ecology and habit.

I was forcibly reminded upon seeing all the amazing illustrations that, prior to photography, a naturalist had to be an artist. The tradition continues, and it is still true that the best illustrations are drawn or painted rather than photographed. I particularly appreciate the Roger Tory Peterson Field Guides, with drawings that bring out the important features of every creature in a way a photograph cannot match.

The latter chapters introduce some special topics: social insects (ants, bees, termites, etc.); insect "languages", whether by sound or dance; camouflage; and pollination. It's well accepted now that pollinating insects—not just butterflies but also certain beetles, flies, and several others—co-evolved with flowering plants, and that this "collaboration" led to the very great diversity of both.

I had not expected so much fascinating information to be packed into a 200-page book that is about one-third pictures. Author Engel did a great job, presenting this all to us in such a digestible way. I am reminded of a much older book, Broadsides From the Other Orders by Sue Hubbell (1994), also about the insect orders. It has a bit of a different emphasis. The two books make great companion volumes.

And I could not close this review without showing at least one butterfly. This is Ornithoptera priamus, one of the bird-wing butterflies that enhance the beauty of the tropics. The illustration is from Natural History of Insects of India, by Edward Donovan, 1838.

Why we need insects

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, insects

I suspect that the subtitle was the author's original choice for a title, and that the punchier title came via the publisher's marketing arm. In Buzz, Sting, Bite: Why We Need Insects by Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson (translated by Lucy Moffatt), we find nearly nothing about buzzing, stinging or biting, and a great deal about the role of insects in nature, and most particularly that vast portion of nature that we humans appropriate for our use.

For example, we are familiar to the point of boredom with the need for honeybees to pollinate many crops. And you may be familiar with the giant industry of trucking millions of beehives to central California to pollinate almond flowers—and of the need to truck them right back out again to somewhere they can get food when the almond bloom is over. But I didn't now that tomatoes taste much better when pollinated by bumblebees, which are big enough and rough enough to do a thorough job of it; nor of the few species of midges that are the only pollinators of cacao flowers—and that they are endangered so, if they go, so goes chocolate. And if you think you'd never, ever eat a wasp: you do, every time you eat a fig or fig bar. Tiny fig wasps are essential to fig production, and they die in the fig after laying their eggs, but I'll let you off the hook on this one, because the tiny bodies are mostly (but only mostly!) consumed by the fig as it matures.

Insects are the vanguard of the clean-up crew worldwide. Without dung beetles the plains of Africa would be knee-deep in the dung of elephants, rhinos, wildebeests, giraffes, and antelopes, to say the least. Similar beetles feed dung to their young in the steppes of Asia and both South and North America. Insects also lead the way when disposing of carcasses, or their remnants when the bigger predators have eaten their fill.

There is something worth learning on nearly every page.

• That the most colorfast red dye, carmine or cochineal, is produced by a bug that feeds on cactus. Fortunately, prickly pear cacti are in no danger of extinction. Not only were those old, red 1¢ postage stamps made with carmine, so were and are the red coats of British soldiers, the "redcoats" of revolutionary-war-era fame. We still use tons of carmine yearly. 
• That certain fly larvae excel at cleaning wounds, removing dead tissue and bacteria but never touching live tissue—and that Genghis Khan (probably) had a "maggot wagon" along for his armies' battles. 
• That insects may be the food of the future even in the West; they are already on the menu in many parts of the world. To produce a pound of protein, certain insects require much less feed and produce much less methane and carbon dioxide than beeves or swine.

The key takeaway: we cannot get along without insects, but they can get along very well (or even, much better) without us. Rather than wax long, I'll leave it to you to read the book. Much recommended!

A nemesis of museum collections

kw: natural history, natural science, insects, museums, research, photographs

Behold the dreaded Carpet Beetle. This species is the Varied Carpet Beetle, Anthrenus verbasci Linnaeus, 1767, the bane of natural history collections everywhere.

The adult beetle, seen at left, is typically less than 3mm long, and can be as small as 1.5mm (1/16 inch). The larvae are larger, to 4mm long. The two molts at right are typical of what we find when something organic, such as remnants of a dried snail or clam left in a shell, has been eaten. I've never seen living larvae, just their molted skins, and it is rare to find an adult beetle that has died in the shell box. Most frequently, a couple of molts and a lot of "frass", or dustlike beetle feces, are the only indication that a specimen's flesh has been consumed.

This is a species of "dermestids", members of the family Dermestidae, which also includes a group called Hide Beetles, because they are efficient consumers of leather and traces of meat. A natural history museums typically keeps a colony of Hide Beetles to use for de-fleshing skeletons. There is no better way to remove all soft tissues from the bones. I suppose that Carpet Beetles could work as well, but by using a larger beetle, they are better able to keep them contained in the "bug room"!

I recall one day a couple of years ago coming in to the research section on a Monday, to an awful smell. The curator of birds and mammals was there, cleaning up after a freezer that had broken down over the weekend. Most of the contents of the freezer had been small birds and smaller mammals such as mice, undergoing the usual treatment for pests before being skinned or otherwise prepared for storage. They were sufficiently freeze-dried that they didn't rot too badly over the weekend. A beaver carcass was another matter!

The beaver weighed 30 pounds, and the curator asked one of the volunteers for the day to help her prepare it. Wearing masks and gloves, they took it to the lab, returned to finish cleaning up the freezer room, then went to work: they skinned the beaver carefully, refreezing the skin until they could prepare it as a specimen; they removed and discarded the organs and cut most of the flesh from the skeleton and discarded it; then they carefully cut the skeleton into pieces "for the bugs". Only a portion at a time was put in the dermestid chamber, so as not to overwhelm the larvae. Portions not in the chamber were kept frozen. Eventually, they had a study skin, preserved and cotton-stuffed, and a beaver skeleton fully cleaned and washed and ready to be put in the collection.

Managed carefully, beetles and their larvae are quite useful. They're only a pest when they get somewhere you don't want them.

Delaying crunch time

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, insects, natural selection

We once lived near a field that had much milkweed. One day in early spring I noticed some chrysalises of Monarch butterflies hanging on milkweed stems. I went out the next day with a box and gathered more than twenty of them, by cutting a substantial part of the plant so they would stand upright in the box. I left the box on the front porch, which was enclosed but was nearly as cold as outside. When a warm day came, I took the box out into the sun. Soon I could hear rustling from inside it. I opened the lid and watched as the butterflies struggled out of their pupa cases and stretched their wings. They all rested there, drying and moving slowly. Then they all took flight at once. For a minute or two I was surrounded by their beauty. We saw Monarch butterflies in the area for several weeks before they migrated out. I suppose at least some of them made it to Mexico. Near the end of that time, I saw a few orange butterflies that were a little smaller. I netted one, and thus made the acquaintance of the Viceroy butterfly. My "bug book" informed me it is a Batesian mimic of the Monarch.

Why does the Viceroy look like a Monarch? The Monarch tastes bad to birds, so a bird that has tried to eat one will avoid them. I don't know if birds learn from each other, but even if they don't, there are many more butterflies than there are birds. Once each bird has had a taste of Monarch, both Monarchs, and the Viceroys, that so resemble them, are pretty safe from being eaten.

Later I learned about another kind of mimicry. Many whole genera of tropical butterflies are inedible (or at least taste very bad), and look so much alike that naturalists have a hard time determining which species a particular specimen belongs to. Not only so, but other species, also inedible, look very similar to them. This is Müllerian mimicry. A bird that eats any of these species will avoid them all. By the way, this goes for mice, toads, snakes and other insectivores, as does the former principle.

The fate of nearly all insects is to be eaten. They aren't going to live very long in any case. Even in the tropics, adult insects seldom live a year, and in temperate climates, most overwinter as eggs or pupae. But the most insectivores prey on adults or larvae. For a species to survive, then, at least some individuals need to avoid, hide from, outrun or otherwise fend off predators long enough to reproduce. It must be hard to be a fly or moth in southern New Mexico. The millions of bats that live in the Carlsbad Caverns are estimated to eat a few tons of insects every single night.

Naturalist Gilbert Waldbauer relates the various ways that insects put off the inevitable in How Not to be Eaten: The Insects Fight Back, a highly informative and entertaining book. Of course, the author discusses mimicry of both kinds, and a few others lesser known. He also tells us of the ongoing debates about just how effective mimicry is. It turns out that trying to prove such a thing is close to impossible. How do you catch, mark, release, and re-capture hundreds of insects, so you can figure out how many are left? A few very clever experiments have been performed, with ambiguous results so far. In my view, the existence of mimicry, plus the known mechanism of natural selection, prove that it is effective.

The bulk of the book relates a number of other strategies insects use: hiding, fleeing fast, mimicking twigs and bird droppings and flower parts, using noxious chemicals either in their tissues or as sprays, making startle displays, and even literally fighting back. This last is not just the province of stinging insects, the ants, wasps and bees. One anecdote describes a fight between a sparrow and a praying mantis. The mantis put up a good fight, but was eventually killed and eaten.

Then there is the other side. A great many insectivores are insects. Robber flies consume bees; dragonflies captures bees, flies and moths; and fireflies eat mosquitoes (so don't let your kids catch them all to make light jars!). If a new kind of fly evolves that is twice as fast as the fastest dragonfly, it will multiply until most flies can outrun their predators. Dragonflies will be hard pressed to survive unless they evolve greater speed in return, and perhaps get more crafty also. Certain tropical mantises resemble orchids, only partly to fool birds, but even more to fool pollinating insects that they eat. Some species of moth and other bat pray have ears, not to hear one another but to hear a bat's sonar clicks so they can hide or fly erratically to avoid the bat. If the moths get better at this, the bats have to improve also, or die out. It has been called an arms race.

Of course, the primary reproductive strategy of most insects is to lay many, many eggs. They attempt to overwhelm the opposition. If an average female moth lays enough eggs so that two offspring survive to reproduce (one to replace her and one to replace her mate), the species will live on. If they somehow were to average three surviving offspring each, the population would explode, increasing by 50% per generation. For some insects, the population could easily increase by a factor of ten or more in a single season. Then, they'd be likely to outgrow their food supply, and many would starve. Starving insects are easier prey than healthy ones, so keeping the balance is also a way "not to be eaten."

Opus 1601 is for the pollinators

kw: natural history, insects, pollinators

Today I took a day off to do yardwork, leaving more of the Labor Day weekend free. It was easy to notice that the small flowers had plenty of pollinators. I have been watching the news about honey bees and colony collapse disorder, so I am alert to the level of "alternative pollinators". This collage shows that there are plenty of them.

I took pictures of quite a variety of insects that were coming to these flowers, but only these six were in good focus. The first four (the top row and the lower left) were all on the chives. The small, dark bee at lower left was the smallest variety I was able to get a picture of. There was a multitude of smaller bees, but they are too quick to photograph without better equipment. The wasp at upper left apparently has a sweet tooth. A close look showed it was lapping nectar. Other varieties of wasp visit the flowers to capture small bees; they paralyze them and bury them for their larvae to eat. I was happy to see very few of such wasps today. The skippers at bottom center are shown just over life size. They are on a blue, finely-divided composite flower I haven't identified. The fritillary butterfly at lower right is on a pink flower, another one that grows in fine clusters. This is also close to life size. These pink flowers were mainly visited by skippers, and there were also some small, dark bees flitting about. A robber fly would occasionally make a pass at a skipper, but I never saw it catch one. It was also too quick to get a picture of.

Connections in the sky

kw: observations, nature, insects, birds

We just returned from a walk in a nearby schoolyard. It rained this morning, and the air is humid. When we walk there we sometimes see a few dragonflies zooming over the grass, catching small insects we usually don't see. This time, at one end, we saw dozens of dragonflies canvassing a small area of a couple of hundred square feet. As we made our rounds, we watched them. Then, we saw that there were many small flies, brown and a little larger than fruit flies. They were probably having a mating flight, triggered by the rain, and they were the prey of the dragonflies. At one point, my wife saw a dragonfly snag one of the little flies right in front of her.

On our last go-round, we looked up to see that there were actually a couple of hundred dragonflies filling the air, to a height of thirty or forty feet. In the top reaches of this insect abundance, three or four swifts were zooming back and forth, taking the occasional dragonfly. There we had it, three links of the food chain on display.

Ants, flies and bees, if you please

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural science, insects

An ant colony in an acorn. A bedbug with a penis that is more of a spear. Talking bees. Crickets that sing, and some that don't. If we really make the effort to get down and look, we find that insects are even weirder than we could imagine. Marlene Zuk, arthropod amateuse extraordinaire, has done us all a great favor with her book Sex on Six Legs: Lessons on Life, Love, and Language from the Insect World. I must say she has also produced the champion of provocative titles!

Indeed, in matters of sex, we vertebrates must seem quite prosaic and limited. One fly has a penis longer than his body, so he can mate with a female that is still in cocoon. Many of the "organs" of male insects are quite elaborate, with spikes, scrapers and spoons for rummaging around to dig out other males' sperm before depositing his own. You could call it sperm competition with weapons. Half of one chapter investigates same-sex courtship and its implications for our understanding of homosexual behavior. Even the insect variety elicits strong political statements from most proponents or opponents of human homosexual freedom. But the big lesson here is that, in sex as in all things, insects exhibit more variety by a huge factor than is found in all the rest of the animal world.

This is true of communication. When finding a new colonial home, some species of ant reach a partial consensus by "quorum sensing" of signals that are still not wholly known to us, then picking up their nestmates and carrying them ignominiously to the new digs. Swarming bees, on the other hand, may have a dozen or more competing selections to choose from, each supported by one or more "waggle dancers", and the entire swarm will grow toward consensus until they are in full agreement, upon which they all head straight for their target. Other means of communication seem to guide the swarm, as led by faster-flying "leaders".

Is such communication really a language? Let's not be too chauvinistic about our own language abilities. As means of conveying emotion, our words are rich and evocative, but as means of conveying information, not so much. We need lots of reinforcement, not unlike the ants that need to be carried. This is why it takes four to six years to get a B.S. or B.A. degree by attending lectures, when the same material can be learned via correspondence about twice as fast. My father enrolled in course after course through ICS (International Correspondence School) while my brothers and I were growing up, earning certificates galore; the school was not accredited to offer degree diplomas, but companies knew that a suitable collection of certificates was worth more than the degree any day. If insect communication gets the job done, what more can one ask?

Why is the sex ratio of most mammals about 50:50, while for social insects females outnumber males by thousands to one? This is no utopia for the guys, though. After a single sex act, they die. Further, that means that popular conceptions are typically wrong. The film Antz portrays male worker ants; all worker ants of all species are female. An ad for an antihistamine spray portrays a male worker bee courting a flower; all worker bees are female. So are the wasps that sting you when you tread on their nest or knock it out of the tree. And the spiders you see are nearly all female; the males are so small they are easily mistaken for offspring. The big exception to this is tarantulas. The migrating tarantulas are nearly all male. The females, which live ten times as long, stay in their nests awaiting males to find them and court them.

The book is filled with many more examples behavior of insects and other arthropods. Their range of behavior exposes their range of genetic diversity. Genetically, two species of beetle may be as diverse from one another as horses are from hummingbirds. And there are about a million known beetle species. But do any of them think? The opening chapter discusses "bug smarts", and the answer is, we don't know yet, but the more we study it the more likely it seems to be. Bees and wasps can recognize faces, and some kinds are reliable enough that it has been soberly suggested that a wasp in a cage could indicate when it sees a familiar face on a security monitor. Trouble is, you'd need to train a lot of wasps, and somehow overcome their impulses to do things like hunt caterpillars while they were watching the screen. We are probably closer to a reliable computer solution to this dilemma; viz. Picasa and other image-recognition photo album programs. They do a surprisingly good job picking out a person photographed at a new angle or even at a different age.

The author's primary interest is crickets. She has a cool story about them also. In one place, she could easily find crickets, but could not hear any. Usually, if there is a cricket within a half mile, you know it is there! It happens that parasitic wasps were using the cricket's songs to locate them. So the crickets had quit singing and were using other means to find one another. No matter what you think you know about insects, there is a species somewhere doing just the opposite. Learning their ways could occupy a lifetime, which is why there are entomologists, of course.

Bright beetles

kw: observations, insects

I lived west of the Rockies until I was thirteen. Then we moved to Ohio and my brothers and I first saw fireflies. We were enchanted. We found them easy to catch, but staying out during "firefly hour" required that we brave the mosquitoes, a fearsome prospect. DEET hadn't been invented yet, so bug sprays were rather ineffective.

I've noticed little kids in our neighborhood at dusk, the three and four year olds, very excitedly chasing fireflies. By ten or twelve they are pretty jaded and seem to prefer staying in with video games. I guess it was the newness; I stayed out as long as I could stand it, just watching and watching.

This picture, which is all over the web, is from a guy named Steve Irvine, in Ontario, Canada. It is apparently a one-hour time exposure, capturing most of the 90-minute activity period for the local fireflies.

I suppose the streaky flashes that fill the scene are the flying males, and the band of dots in the background was made by the stationary females. My Dad tells me that when he was growing up, the females were called glowworms, because the local species in Missouri has flightless females that look more like caterpillars than the beetles that they actually are.

When my wife and I take a walk, we usually go at dusk this time of year to avoid the heat earlier in the day, so we usually see fireflies. Tonight, at first we didn't see any, and I wondered if they'd perished in the extreme heat we have been having. But soon we began to see them, and it made our walk a little happier. The little stream that runs past the end of the street is nearly out of water, but there is sufficient for the needs of small creatures such as these. I don't know what fireflies eat, though I've heard they eat mosquitoes. There are very few of those this year, but I reckon they have other prey, for they have been as plentiful as ever throughout June, and there are still quite a lot of them. Seeing fireflies is one of the things that make it worth taking an evening walk in the summertime.

Caught a pic of the bee

kw: photographs, wildlife, insects

My sunflowers don't follow the sun. I have been collecting bee data for the Great Sunflower Project this summer. The first four flowers produced by my plants have all faced East, so that they are backlit by the sun in the afternoon when I can do my data gathering. I've wanted to photograph the variety of small bee that is the most frequent visitor, but I couldn't get a good picture until today.

A flower opened a couple days ago on the West side of a plant, and I have been able to take usable photographs. I think this is a variety of mason bee, but I'm not sure yet. It is smaller (less than half the weight) than a honey bee, about the size of a sweat bee or even smaller, but not as small as the tiny all-green bees that show up on occasion.

Visible at the top of the image is some damage to the flower's seed head. Goldfinches have been eating the immature seeds. That is OK. I have seldom had a chance to observe goldfinches before. Another side benefit to growing sunflowers is that they draw the occasional hummingbird. Even though this variety, Lemon Queen, has no nectar, it is big, bright and bold, so hummingbirds will come, buzz the flower for no more than a second, then zoom away.

I have observed mostly this kind of green-and-striped bee and bumble bees at my sunflowers, plus a few of the tiny green ones, and just two (so far) very small bees that are colored like a honey bee. Not a single honey bee as yet. In fact, I've looked for bees in lots of places this Spring and Summer, and have seen no more than three honey bees all season.

Big bug and memories

kw: musings, insects, photographs

We found this large Praying Mantis, about 10-11cm, perched on a window frame. They are fearless; this one let my camera get less than a foot (30cm) away, and did nothing more than cock her head a little.

The species in Ohio, where I lived from age 12 to 18, is all green, wings and everything. I caught one about this size at age 12, attached a string to her elongated thorax and took her home. She was good at catching flies, so I tied the string to my bedpost for the night. Hearing a fly in the room after dark assures I won't sleep.

She didn't do much, there were no flies this night, and I did fall asleep. But sometime later I awoke and sat up. This startled her enough that she took off flying, hit the end of the string, and came zooming back right into my face! There was just enough moonlight for me to glimpse her coming just before she banged into my forehead (I think she was aiming for my hair but was weighed down by the string).

That scared me thoroughly awake! You ain't seen anything until you've seen an adult mantis with wings and clawed "arms" outspread flying right into your face. I took her outside, untied the string and let her go. Even a five-gram insect is too wild a pet to keep indoors.

The bugs will always win

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, insects, history

My brother Mark is probably the best writer among my brothers and me. After a twenty-year career as a working calligrapher and freelance historical lecturer, he returned to school to earn a Doctorate, the credential he needed to gain a position as a curator. Calligraphy, based as it is in the history of written language, is a necessarily historical enterprise. He achieved a Masters' degree in History without difficulty, but was blocked from entering the doctoral program by jealous professors of history. He was already a published author, and his writing style put them to shame. He lucked out in another way, though; he'd been illustrating books for a prominent archaeologist, and was asked to join the doctoral program in the archaeology department. He got his doctorate in that. He is a college professor now.

The fact remains that it is hard to find a historian who is a good writer. James E. McWilliams is a bit better than the middle of the pack in that regard. I managed to read all of American Pests: The Losing War on Insects from Colonial Times to DDT, but it was a bit of a slog most of the time. I picked up the following:

• Prior to the American Civil War, farmers were the primary students of insect ecology and control. The methods were mainly those that are now called "sustainable": adjusting the timing of plowing to destroy insect larvae or pupae, and of planting to miss their hatching, rotating crops so no one set of pests gains a year-upon-year advantage, planting decoy crops, and fostering plant enemies such as birds and parasitic wasps. Professional entomologists were few and worked closely with the farmers, helping them spread new knowledge mainly via farming journals.
• From the Civil War to the 1930s, mainly stemming from the influence of Thaddeus Harris, pesticidal chemicals became increasingly popular, and agricultural entomology became increasingly organized under government control. Professional journals began to replace farm journals. The chemicals of choice were mainly arsenates, and the deadliest was lead arsenate. Paris green, a copper arsenate, was a favorite, being moderately effective and slightly less poisonous to humans than lead arsenate.
• DDT was discovered in 1939, and synthetic chemicals, mainly organochlorides, enjoyed a twenty-year heyday. DDT is much less harmful to vertebrates than the arsenates, in comparison to the harm it does to insects, so such chemicals are safer, but not safe enough. The publication of Silent Spring in 1962 brought together scientific knowledge and public concern at just the right time to cause a revolution in public and political sentiment toward chemical pesticides.

The story the author doesn't tell is the continuing trend toward pesticides that are safer to use and less harmful to vertebrates, including ourselves. But some of the difference is window dressing. I remember as a boy sitting in a cherry tree with the orchard owner's son, eating cherries on which we could see the film of DDT. We knew when we got a headache, that was enough. I am not sure it is safe to do that with any modern insecticide.

I read recently, as an unsupported statement, that for several years the world has produced less food than the amount eaten, that we are using up our reserves. If this is so (I intend to find out), we need to increase production, and at this point, the "green revolution" of super-grains that need super-fertilizers has just about ended. Now we need to reduce the depredations of insects, which still consume a third to half of all crops in most of the world. The use of pesticides is certain to increase as human population increases.

The author didn't make much mention of resistance. This is an increasing problem. Just in twenty years, flies developed sufficient resistance to DDT that they could almost live off the stuff. Fortunately, mosquitos are still susceptible, and it is DDT and related chemicals that are staving off mosquito-borne malaria in much of the world (Yes, Virginia, DDT is not banned everywhere). The tropical regions that are still plagued by malaria are too poor to afford even cheap DDT, which is almost free, but costs quite a bit to apply. How will anyone ever drain all the swamps of Africa? Particularly now that draining swamps is considered an ecological no-no?!?

The primary reason insects are such a problem is our reliance on monocropping. The author makes it clear that many formerly rather innocuous insects became monsters when they were enabled to spread over acre after acre, upon plants that they seldom would eat before, but the new abundance allowed quick evolution of critters that could take full advantage of the "amber waves of grain." Today's world requires monocropping.

The author makes no mention of Malabar Farm, which I remember visiting in about 1962. Louis Bromfield's visionary sustainable farm, begun in 1939, is still a model of agriculture carried out to build the soil instead of depete it, and of using crop rotation and multicropping and other measures to minimize insect damage without resort to pesticides. I just don't know if a world of Malabar Farms can feed nine billion people. By 2050 we may know.

Flawed heroes of Twentieth Century entymology

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, insects, collecting, naturalists, biographies, autobiographies

Two memories from my childhood hint at the range, just of size, found in the family Ichneumonidae, the largest family of parasitic wasps.

This poor hornworm, such as I find on my tomato plants, is the victim of a tiny wasp no more than 3mm long (about 1/8 inch). She inserted one egg into the caterpillar's body. In a feat of self-cloning that puts to shame our practice of "embryo splitting" to produce eight calves from one egg, as many as 700 larvae resulted, eating first the hornworm's fat reserves, then emitting a hormone that causes it to crawl high on the plant, then finishing off its insides before burrowing out to form pupae in the little cocoons seen in this image.

This painting, which shows the "giant ichneumon" better than any photo I could find. The artist, Caroline Bochud, has copies of the painting for sale here.

I saw many of these on the Box elder trees during the years we lived in Utah. They are huge, about 7cm long (almost 3 inches), with a "stinger" (ovipositor) longer yet. I usually saw one in the midst of "drilling" into the tree. If I watched patiently, it would drill deeper and deeper, perhaps using more than half the ovipositor, pause, then gradually pull free. It all took half an hour or so. I learned later that this scary little lady had located a grub eating in the wood, perhaps 5cm (2") deep. She has excellent hearing. She then drilled and deposited one egg into the tunnel nearby. The larva hatches almost immediately and burrows into the grub. Sometime the following Spring, the young wasp would burrow out of the tree. Fascinating and yucky!

Ichneumoninae is the second largest subfamily of ichneumons, and includes the tiny parasite of the hornworm, but not the giant. All subfamily members parasitize caterpillars of the moths and butterflies. Most are small, around one or two centimeters long. As it turns out, very many of the known species of this subfamily, primarily those of Europe and Asia, were described by one unusual man, Gerd Heinrich, who labored forty years to get his life's work into print. Altogether, he described more than 1,500 species and subspecies, and the Zoologische Staatssammlung München has produced an on-line index to his work.

The Snoring Bird: My Family's Journey Through a Century of Biology by Bernd Heinrich—Emeritus Professor of Biology at the University of Vermont—is a biography of Gerd, the father, and the autobiography of the author, the son.

In every family where a stong-willed, obsessively focused father raises an equally powerful son, the dynamic relationship results in a son fighting, seemingly for his life, to outstrip the trap of his father's character. This is particularly true where there is much to deplore. Yet it is equally true that the son repeats most of the father's history, both successes and mistakes, though there are glaring areas of oppositeness. This comes out in spades in Snoring Bird

Oppositeness first: Gerd fought in two world wars, on the German side, and was proud of his military heritage (though his WW2 service was a matter of self-preservation, not loyalty); Bernd began as a loyalist, volunteering to enlist during the Vietnam War, but was 4-F, "unfit for service" due to a bad back, and later became a pacifist.

A milder contrast: Gerd worked with academics, but was not one himself, and could not have been one by temperament. Bernd is an academic with a distinguished scientific career only now approaching a close after forty years.

Similarities: Both did their life's work with insects, specifically Hymenoptera, Gerd with parasitic wasps, and Bernd mainly with bees. Both collected throughout the world. Both were primarily naturalists, though the son is more of an experimenter. Both became very attached to rural homesteads, Gerd to Borowke (now in Poland) and Bernd to a farmstead in Maine. Both are exceptionally stubborn and brook no argument. Both were singularly focused on their scientific passion, to the neglect of their families.

This last point is particularly painful to read. Both men had no trouble attracting women, and both seemingly without remorse discarded relationships, or forced one woman to accept another, almost on a whim. They tended to fall in lust (they only thought it love) on sight. Neither ever learned that love is a decision...but few men really do.

And what is the "snoring bird"? In 1931 Gerd was sent by investors to Celebes (a large Indonesian island) collect a specific bird of which only one specimen was known. After more than a year, during which he also collected new specimens of Wallace's Rail, nearly as rare, he heard a new sound, like a large man snoring. Creeping up, he saw it was the target bird, so he shot it. While there, he collected hundreds of insects, mostly Ichneumons, and also many, many other birds and small mammals. He had his wife along, and her sister (his preferred bedmate). His wife had become an excellent taxonomist. The skins were sold for added finances.

Many of his expeditions were like this. He was usually sent to find birds or shrews or whatever, but collected wasps as he went. He also took one, two, or three women along. Once only he took Bernd, who spent a year in Africa in between his first and second years at UCLA. (You must read for yourself who Bernd's mother is. She is now the surviving "Mrs. Heinrich"). Once many of the holotype specimens he collected and described were ensconced in various institutions, and his work in print, his fame gradually was made. He's be gratified to see the ZSM web site.

Bernd's fame was made by being the man to show how bumblebees can fly. He first found that hawk moths (like the one which hatches from the hornworm that escapes wasply attention) have warm flight muscles, as warm as 42ºC (108ºF), and that they keep a constant temperature during flight by shunting more or less blood through the abdomen, their "radiator". Bumblebees were found to "shiver" to warm their flight muscles before flying, and to use similar blood shunting depending on air and sunlight temperatures. This work was presented to a public audience in Scientific American in 1988, an issue I remember reading.

Two men, more similar than different, who made their mark on 20^th Century biology. This book portrays them, warts and all. Not exactly heroes to emulate, not all cautionary tale: two men who did science the best they knew how.