Bugged

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  To my sister Kristen & best friend Tony Bellah

  If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.

  —E. O. WILSON

  All those bugs buzzin’ ’round your head.

  —THE FLAMING LIPS

  Introduction

  I never appreciated insects until I ripped the guts out of one.

  Okay, more like tweezed. In 2011, I had my first insect pinning lesson with a pink grasshopper, aka plains lubber (Brachystola magna), in biologist Nick Gutierrez’s lab. My friend had caught the pink beauty for me during one of his Arizona bug excursions, and I was invited to help stuff it before it could be displayed in a shadow box. Back at California State University in Northridge, Nick set up taxidermy cutlery and pins to maneuver its six limbs on a Styrofoam sheet. He then casually instructed me to cut the underside of the pink bug to remove its innards.

  And it ruined me. For the better.

  After I made the incision, I unpacked the organic briefcase like a magician’s hat as dark, fetid rot oozed out. What I saw wasn’t some would-be windshield splatter. The grasshopper was a micro-miracle, containing within itself this sheer complexity of organs and other bits. Its sleek, segmented body certainly put my bag of skin to shame. Performing this centuries-long tradition of pinning—Victorians loved this stuff—awoke my inner entophile. And with all the curiosity buzzing through my head, I wondered: What is our relationship with bugs?

  This question spurred a global trek: to New York, where I fed my blood to a jar of bedbugs; to a Brazilian slum, where I released Zika-combating mosquitoes from a moving van; to a beetle pet store in Tokyo; to the blackened, maggot-ridden grounds of a Texas body farm; and to sweltering nights on an island in the Aegean Sea where some locals attribute their increased longevity to a rare honey. What also motivated me to undertake this journey was how our views of insects have shifted in the twenty-first century. Recent technological advances reveal more about insects than ever, like 3-D scans that make it possible to understand bug flight with the goal of building better microdrones; dust-sized computers used to track bee die-offs; and machines separating bug molecules for antibiotics. Even Westerners show an interest in doing what they consider a stomach-churning practice: eating bugs.

  All of this potential begins with this invisible force piecing together the planet’s ecology.

  People tend to think a higher, godlike being runs the show. They’re wrong. The real answer is under your shoe. Or flyswatter. Or—parasitically—skin. You know them as the common house pest. But collectively insects are the microscopic lever-pullers calling the shots, shaping our ecological world and plant life for over 400 million years.

  Insects compose 75 percent of our animal kingdom. Put into a dessert analogy, that leaves us to share a quarter of blueberry pie with dogs, kangaroos, sloths, jellyfish, marmots, badgers, cockatoos, and the rest of the world’s living things. Compared to insects, we are merely blueberry pie crumbs. Pie crumbs in a world of a stable regenerative mass of 10 quintillion bugs. Put into zeros, it looks like this:

  Humans:

  7,400,000,000

  Insects:

  10,000,000,000,000,000,000

  Insects beat us at the numbers game. For every one of us there are roughly 1.4 billion insects. In 2013, one Reddit user openly asked, “What if suddenly every insect on the planet made it its mission to kill the humans?” A person with the username Unidan then contributed a humorous account of the “insect Armageddon.” The contributor used only two species as an example—since it wouldn’t take much. Ants, who alone equal our biomass on Earth, could burrow through our nostrils and suffocate us.

  I’m happy to report that insects are unlikely to take us on—at least in this way. Their short, sleepless life span is spent doing a myriad of tasks, including the pollination of 80 percent of food plants and the recycling of dead organic matter and waste. (Imagine the stench otherwise.) These are beneficial, multibillion-dollar services keeping life on this planet humming along. The opposite side of that fated coin is a litany of charges: agricultural destruction, home invasion, forest evisceration, and millennia-long diseases and fatalities totaling in the millions across both humans and livestock.

  So if we live in a world run by bugs, shouldn’t we know how and why they have the influence they do? And, just as importantly, who among our sadly outnumbered lot has had the courage and the smarts to look to them for the grand answers?

  These people, it turns out, can be as unusual as the insects they investigate. It’s a subculture composed of compelling human beings—an elite few who don’t flinch when a bug nears. They see beyond bugs’ aforementioned negative attributes—issues, we’ll learn, that have been largely influenced by us (human migration, insecticide proliferation). Whereas most of us despise these mini-monsters and get trigger-happy with Raid, the characters I’ve met are the unique types who, in a way, converse with bugs to better define our insect-human ethos and reveal the mysteries of the seemingly mundane. Consider them obsessed.

  Frank Krell, a German scientist and walking filing cabinet of information, is one of the key entomological mediators between man and insect. Primarily he deals in excrement. Or, rather, the best traders of scat known as dung beetles. When I visited him at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, he took me two stories below the museum’s ground level and opened a double door into a brightly lit collection center. Rows of sleek white cabinets stacked high, each of them 20 inches deep, brimmed with colorful insects like an archive of hard-shelled candy. Krell slid out a drawer from one to reveal a number of black dung beetles taken from my own backyard of Colorado. He looked at his collection with admiration. “I get paid a little bit,” Krell said about his vocation. “So I’m a professional entomologist.”

  What he meant is that entomologists, people whose profession is to squint at these tiny specks to study their nuances, are largely underappreciated and are driven by passion. Krell’s research focuses on how bison turds influence the fauna in grassland ecosystems. When I asked how he found so many beetles, he jovially described his trap and bait system. It comprises a paper plate propped up by a wooden stick going through it, off which dangles a teabag over a cup of water. Picture a patio over which hangs an alluring open bar. The beetles gravitate toward the teabag and get stuck.

  “And what’s in the bag?” I asked.

  “Shit,” he smiled. “Human shit, because it’s especially smelly.”

  And just like that, I was sold. My first encounter with an entomologist absolutely delivered. Frank Krell was by far the most intriguing scientist I had yet spoken to in my career as a journalist. And my investigation would only get weirder—but also more awe-inspiring. The point was this: entomologists do things you and I wouldn’t typically do in order to decode the marvelous inner workings of insects.

  The cha
racters of this story are hardworking, highly intelligent professionals making a difference. I, however, am a geek. Until 2011, my only “interaction” with bugs was a 1990s board game I played as a kid called Splat! So, semantic gods forgive me, I’ll sometimes say “bug” when referring to insects or arachnids or worms or myriapods (which includes millipedes, for those Nine Inch Nails fans out there).

  Above all, this book is a hand-carved cabinet of curiosity. These people, their research, and their stories offer a glimpse into the insect world. The number of scholarly papers written about insects can fill a library, the jargon of which can warrant eyelid-propping specula. But I’ve parsed through plenty, and I hope you will enjoy whatever has struck my peculiar mind. Like bees, I’ve foraged the pollen and nectar across this odd little journey, returning to the hive that is this book.

  One

  A Cabinet of Curiosity

  The corpse-colored door hides in plain sight among Soho’s posh boutiques. I pass by it at first, missing the “107 Spring” address plaque in tarnished brass. Peering at the buzzer to verify the tenants, I spot the name Stevens. Written below in all caps and in Baskerville font, I spot the word ENTOMOLOGY.

  Through the safety glass, a dark lanky figure appears at the top of a steep staircase. As he comes closer, I can see he’s wearing camouflage cargo shorts, an octopus-emblazoned T-shirt, and strappy hiking sandals. This is Lawrence Forcella, or Lorenzo, who has invited me to this sequestered spot in Lower Manhattan. His stylishly bald head, beard, fat silver earrings, and charisma evoke a modern-day genie—an apropos reference given his daily feats. I say this because after he greets me, we go upstairs to the 400-square-foot room where Lorenzo and a handful of artisans breathe life into dead bugs.

  “We process thousands of insects a year,” he says as we walk past giant shadowboxes filled with “alive-ish” specimens in the former apartment. This shrine to biodiversity has an inherent ick factor. Gentle taxidermists—insect morticians who unfurl the insects’ wings and reposition feeble antennae as if to gain clearer radio reception—display butterflies, centipedes, and katydids. In one day they get more intimate with exoskeletal body bits than you and I would in a lifetime.

  The department is owned by, and catty-corner to, the Evolution Store—a Victorian naturalist’s Shangri-la. Want to buy a fly’s life cycle suspended in resin? No problem. In need of an African penis gourd? Pick a size. The clientele ranges from magazine photographers and preppy eight-year-olds spending birthday money on a human skull to Japanese businessmen brusquely pointing at bugs and purchasing the entire lot. And if Lorenzo oversees his team well, nature enthusiasts like filmmaker James Cameron will shell out upward of $10,000 for a display of beetles.

  The Evolution Store established a stand-alone entomology department thanks to Lorenzo. Six months after beginning at the shop in 1997, he offered to pin insects instead of Evolution continuing to outsource insect displays. Lorenzo and his taxidermy crew operated in-store. Then Damien Hirst began buying thousands of pinned butterflies in 2005 to create kaleidoscope mandalas comprising a smattering of colors. That same year, Hirst ordered around 24,000 for what became compositions of stained-glass window mosaics. This required nearly 16 butterfly morticians working around the clock; instructions, costs, fumigation, and due dates are recorded in a “Bug Log.”

  Gradually, taxidermy employees relocated across the street to the store owner’s apartment—where I’m standing now with Lorenzo. At some point Hirst, possibly their biggest client, began outsourcing butterflies elsewhere for cost efficiency; still, Evolution maintained its own separate entomology department for 10 years. But when Lorenzo sent me an e-mail about our planned insect anatomy lesson, he hesitantly alerted me that the room would shut down soon due to budget cuts. So I booked a flight. I wanted to know what exactly a bug1 was.

  * * *

  A taxidermist grabs her time card and punches out as Lorenzo preps this evening’s specimen for pinning. The floorboards intermittently creak as I tour the dimly lit space. Metal cabinets near the front door contain plastic shoeboxes of unprocessed raw stock, each with a taxonomic label like ORTHOPTERA, PHASMATIDAE, or HOMOPTERA. The subdivisions and subsets for classification go on and on, and I’d rather not bore you with terms that sound like Hogwarts wizard spells.2 A rolled yoga mat lies in a shower-stall-turned-supply-closet. Ice in the kitchen’s refrigerator usually has to come from a liquor store so it doesn’t share the freezer occupants’ “dead bug taste.” And Lorenzo hunches over a workstation in a room fingerprinted by years of eclectic employees: a curled alien fetus in a jar, a sealed Insect Warrior action figure by Funtastic, Langstroth beehive frames with lived-in honeycombs, and a late-nineteenth-century “Quick Death” pesticide poster.

  Under a cone of table lamp light, Lorenzo removes a giant water bug from a take-out food pan its been soaking in overnight. Originally dried, packaged, and shipped from a village in Thailand, the brown, ovular thing no larger than a plump kazoo is now limber and ready to be mounted for purchase. Working for almost 20 years at the Evolution Store has imbued Lorenzo with the acumen of a furniture salesman. He knows what you want to buy before you do. Collectors appreciate bug mechanics in wonderfully geeky ways, but your average Evolution customer goes for aesthetics, says Lorenzo. Are you an oak man or do you like walnut? Mahogany? What does your home look like? Someone with a “strong design sense,” he says, might go for the India ink lines drawn on the egg-white wings of a rice paper butterfly. Whereas a customer with tattoos and a nose ring might be interested in a blood-sucking giant water bug.

  Should the limbs on tonight’s specimen stiffen, Lorenzo’s pinning toolkit includes a syringe for injecting warm water to loosen said body parts. He’s also equipped with a razor blade to slice underbellies for gut removal and a snuff spoon he finds especially useful for hollowing out goo from tarantula butts. Piped into his computer speakers is riot grrrl band L7, an ’80s grunge precursor better known for throwing a bloody tampon at a rowdy crowd. “I admire their grit,” Lorenzo says casually as he rubs alcohol over the water bug’s back, blotching a paper towel with brown excess grease. Otherwise, the bug would “look like someone put cooking oil on it.”

  For those who haven’t had the pleasure of meeting one, a giant water bug resembles a cockroach with flexing biceps. Its forelimbs have a finger-pinching function used to latch onto frogs and other aquatic animals in ponds or streams and occasionally onto human feet, hence their “toe-biter” sobriquet. Lorenzo prepares one now for today’s lesson because New Yorkers tend to refer to cockroaches as water bugs, and it might sell during the summer. “Specifically in New York City they call them water bugs,” Lorenzo clarifies, somewhat agitated. “I think people don’t want to be reminded of the fact that they have gigantic-ass cockroaches living in their apartments.” “Water bug” does sound prettier, I guess. And Floridians call roaches palmetto bugs. “A rose by any other name,” as they say …

  My host, like many entomologists, is stereotypically peculiar. It’s a profession held by people as strange and diverse as the bugs they study. Lorenzo stands out because he’s equally brazen and charming, and unlike most in the field, he’s completely self-educated.

  “I’m not doing this for scientific purposes,” he tells me. Certified individuals in the field focus on a specific branch of entomology. For example, a medical entomologist might find ways of stopping disease vectors like malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Or an agricultural specialist might find natural pesticides to combat the forest-decimating mountain pine beetle. “My own specialty,” Lorenzo says, “is that I don’t specialize.” His passion goes beyond ecology. The bugs’ intrinsic beauty takes precedence.

  Lorenzo’s fascination began at age four when he found a dead stag beetle as big as his hand on his friend’s driveway in the Bronx—“one of those things burned into memory.” When he showed his mom later that day, she took out a box that had a rhinoceros beetle his dad collected while stationed at a Virginian military base. “I realized the
se guys are all around us … From then on I wanted every bug on the planet. Any time I saw bugs I just went crazy over them.”

  His collection ebbed and flowed for years, eventually falling victim to dermestid beetles. “The great irony of insect collecting,” he laments, “is that if you don’t properly store your insects, your insects will be eaten by insects.” It’s aggravating.3 A proper collection denotes the date and location of where insects were caught, so, borrowing Frank Krell’s analogy, it’s like finding your diary eaten by moths. (Although destruction of such evidence of the past may be welcomed.) After his bugs disintegrated into dusty mounds, he was discouraged for five years while in art school until he learned about a blow-out sale on bugs by New York–based insect dealer the Butterfly Company. Currently, Lorenzo possesses about 500,000 specimens he keeps in a separate apartment from his own in Hastings-on-Hudson.

  Combining his skills as an illustrator and years observing live insects in their natural state, Lorenzo’s pieces now seem to pop off the table—were it not for the meticulous outline of pins around their exoskeletons. You can’t help but admire the symmetry and anatomy.

  On the surface, insect bodies share a three–body segment structure, top to bottom: head, thorax, and abdomen. This makes sense, as the word “insect” also means “cut into.” Three pairs of legs attach to the thorax. One pair of antennae perform important tasks like feeling, tasting, smelling, and hearing. And a respiratory system consisting of interconnecting tracheal tubes suck in air through body-segment openings called spiracles. I am not going to go deeper here, but if you did, you’d find a universe of intricacy.4

  “The first step with mounted specimens is the pin,” Lorenzo says, bare-handedly sticking a pin through the giant water bug’s thorax shield, aka scutellum. The average spring steel pin used for mounting is 0.45 millimeters in diameter, with a black enamel finish to prevent rusting and a rounded nylon head. Pushing said nylon head usually requires meager force, but when handling a tarantula specimen with urticating hairs—needlelike defense bristles—it gets painful. Lorenzo learned the hard way. While drying out tarantulas in a 150-degree oven5 for prep, he jabbed pins into cardboard without protective gloves, not realizing he was grinding urticating hair splinters into his flesh. He shakes his head. “My thumb itched for two years,” he says. “Two fucking years!” He rubs the spot on his thumb. “It looked like there was pepper under my skin from so many broken hairs.”