Bugged Read online

  In the 1970s, Smith and Secoy examined the Geoponika as well as other ancient writings. Their 1975 paper “Forerunners of Pesticides in Classical Greece and Rome” yielded interesting comparisons. Hellebore contains insecticidal alkaloids. “Certain animal fats,” Smith and Secoy write, could have prevented diseases transferred by knives. Olive oil could “mask the scent of the fruits.” But the benefits of amurca were hard to see, although, they say, “the principles of fumigation involving evil smelling compounds may have had some temporary effects in driving away insects.” A more recent study of plant-based repellents examined the volatile substances in leaves. The same leaves continue to decorate rural villages today as they did millennia ago. Odor receptors in the southern house mosquito respond to a chemical found in spice plants called linalool and properties of eucalyptus oil just as they do DEET. Same with citronella. The only difference is, unlike DEET, the natural substances’ odors evaporate faster. That rate, however, can be slowed today by advanced nano-sized emulsion techniques.

  When it comes to the Greeks and Romans, though, questions of effectiveness remain. For this reason, I decided to replicate four control remedies. While I did not manage to acquire bear’s blood, by doing a little scrounging around, I found enough crude ingredients for some hands-on experimentation with hopefully beneficial results. Here’s the list of treatments I was able to compile with the help of University of Georgia entomologist Jason Schmidt:

  • Olive oil mixed with crushed chrysanthemum flowers.

  • A pretreatment of cabbage seeds with a sprinkle of ground deer antler.

  • Venison blood–soaked seeds.

  • A spray application of ox urine and amurca.

  The first thing I do is visit a local tannery, where I find a box full of antlers and one very perplexed taxonomist. He replies with a puzzled “Oh” when I tell him about the experiment. I’m greeted by the same confused wariness at a butcher shop, where I buy the bloodiest meal possible: prepackaged venison for a stew. Living in an apartment with no garden space, I make a couple of calls to local farmers who respectfully decline to host these ancient methods. That’s when I beg my friend and the illustrator of this book Michael Kennedy to go Greek with me. Amused to the point of giddiness, Michael agrees, and I drive up to his home in Kearney, Nebraska.

  We run into a problem. Oxen, it turns out, are difficult to find. Ox urine is even rarer. (At first I thought olive oil sediment was hard, but with the help of UC Davis’s Olive Center and Corto Olive producers, I have two cups ready to sow.) As a compromise, Michael and I spring for a cow. However, even then we have an issue: how do we source urine exactly? You can’t simply sneak up on a sleeping cow and dip its hoof in warm water. So, we compromise again. We go for deer urine instead, considering the animal’s decentralized usage in this experiment thus far. A quick drive to hunting retail mecca Cabela’s, and we’re stumped yet again. The customer service person, looking as if he’d come from the Australian outback, comes up and tells us it’s not deer season. The least synthetic urine they have in stock is fox. But this is farm country, after all. “My best advice,” he says, “is to just find a milk cow and start milking, because that’s when they start whizzing.” Sadly, this can’t be accomplished with the beef cows on Michael’s parents’ nearby hobby farm. Also, I don’t happen to be carrying a kiddie pool for the mini Niagara Falls that cows can gush. Desperate, I ask the Cabela’s employee if he may have a cow pee hook-up. “To be honest with ya, we don’t have much demand for that,” he kindly states, shaking his head. “I think if you go out and ask a farmer, they might just shoot you on the spot.”

  Favoring my life, I opt for fox urine.

  Using a patch of rich Nebraskan dirt in the back of Michael’s garage, we plant four rows of pregrown cabbage plugs. Two receive designated applications of olive oil and chrysanthemum powder, as well as fox urine and amurca. One is hit with an off-the-shelf, wide-spectrum carbamate insecticide, while another row is used as a control with no additional substances.

  Four months later I phone Michael for the results. He has some unfortunate news. “They were trashed,” he says grimly. Apparently most of our patch grew into full-sized cabbages. But these veggies fell victim to the nightlife of this college town. The back of Michael’s home has an alleyway leading to Kearney’s main street—a byway to bars, convenience stores, and fast food. Apparently these cabbages were showered with more than just a dose of fox urine. But before piss-drunk college boys felt it necessary to relieve themselves and stomp out the evidence, Michael tells me that the plants grew to be healthy and edible. The Geoponika worked! In fact, the only row of cabbages that failed was our control, the one with no insecticides, which started to “split open,” he tells me. “Otherwise, I could eat any of them.” After a thorough rinse, of course.

  Two additional rows, grown from seeds pretreated with antler dust and deer blood, however, never sprung leaves as the cabbage seedlings died shortly after planting. Such is the trial and error Greeks certainly encountered on this road to pesticide development, its need obvious and beneficial when practiced wisely. As entomologist Robert Snetsinger wrote in his 1983 book The Ratcatcher’s Child: “The development of a professional pest control industry was an important element in mankind’s social development and is associated with an increasing concern for a better life on this earth and the ability to make improvements in human living conditions.” And it will be endless.

  The War on Bugs is a curious one, fraught with casualties. As with the benefits and repercussions of pesticides, there is a balance to be struck—one we could possibly reach as the wiser generations of the twenty-first century learn from past mistakes. We might want to holster that swatter every now and then, because insects most certainly do improve the conditions for human life. And, more important, death.

  Six

  First Responders

  You can assign a dollar bill to almost anything—even nature. To help estimate how beneficial wild insects are (in terms of moolah), entomologists Mace Vaughan and John Losey arrived at this equation in their 2006 Bioscience paper:

  Vni = (NCni − CCni) × Pi

  They found this value by first subtracting the estimated pest damage to crops with current control methods by the “greater damage” from no control. The bug-men-cum-economists then multiplied the price of these “natural enemies” by the proportion of baddies snuffed out by insects. Plugging in a few more calculations revealed that pest-controlling insects saved $4.5 billion per year in the United States alone. That’s icing to an annual $57 billion ecological cake. Their paper analyzed the ingredients and layers of such services, reaching that whopping price tag without factoring in man-driven insect commodities like silk or honey. On the top of that list was insects’ contribution to wildlife nutrition: an estimated total of $49.96 billion.

  “That was probably the most surprising value that we found,” John Losey tells me over the phone, midlunch from his office at Cornell. “Looking into the fish, the birds, and the mammals and what they fed on was an eye-opener.” They derived the number by taking into account the money generated by US recreational activities like hunting, fishing, and bird watching and then factoring in the base of the food chain: insects. But this is limited to one industry—a mere fraction of insect benefits. It took Losey and Vaughan a year of research to calculate the reported economic value. There’s simply not enough data or an algorithm to quantify the other factors.1

  “We can’t live without insects in the long term,” he says conclusively. “How long would we eke out a survival? I don’t know.”

  Pollination aside, in a world without insects, a hanky couldn’t possibly quell the global stink. According to Vaughan and Losey’s paper “The Economic Value of Ecological Services Provided by Insects,” dung burial prevents a whopping $380 million yearly loss to the cattle industry by busily disassembling feces and, as a result, recycling nitrogen. Mammals defecate about 40 percent of what they eat. Based on recent cattle head invento
ry from the National Agricultural Statistics Service and solid waste research from Losey and Vaughan, there’s about 2 trillion pounds of poop a year. Therefore we must be grateful for these processing agents who eliminate 10 percent of our nation’s refuse.

  “The community of insects and other organisms in a dung pat is more complex than you might expect,” reads a line from Gilbert Waldbauer’s What Good are Bugs? Such tenants might include fly maggots and fungi-eating mites and springtails. But beetles take a major slice of the (cow) pie within 15 minutes of it being laid by either burrowing chunks beneath the pat or taking it to go2 in a round ball to later drink the “liquid ‘soup’” with their soft mouth parts, as described in Encyclopedia of Insects. Losey and Vaughan found that about a third of US cattle dung can be recycled by these ultimate trash compactors.

  So, what would the planet be like without these fecal heroes? I’m happy to say we’ll never know … unless, of course, you were born in Australia 50 years ago.

  * * *

  In the jazzy bongo and bass opening of Dung Down Under—a 1972 government-produced documentary about how Australia solved its eighteenth-century bovine dung issue—a beetle is hind-limb-deep in excrement. In 1788, colonizing fleets introduced cattle to the landscape. However, native beetles hadn’t evolved to reduce robust, moist droppings, as they were accustomed to doing with the dry, manageable pellets of marsupials. “One passenger was missing from the livestock consignment,” the narrator says. “The dung beetle.”

  What happened over the next 200 years as farm industries grew was the result of untended cow pies. If a bull were to “exhaust” 10 pounds of fecal nitrogen in a month, one study explained, only one-fifth would get into the soil. Toss in dung beetles and the return is two-thirds. The fecal invasion also brought pests, and maggot-ridden pats decomposed slowly, sometimes taking years. The ever-increasing number of buffalo and bush flies and midges disturbed livestock, decreasing life spans by transmitting pathogens like Salmonella. And the hand motion of waving flies from your face famously became known as the “Aussie salute.”

  Enter Hungarian entomologist George Bornemissza. Escaping the rise of his country’s Communist Party, he found himself in Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) by 1955. He was the first to suggest the importation of dung beetles to create sustainable agriculture by cycling nutrients and reducing fly populations. Ten years later, the proposal received funding, and Bornemissza soon found himself in South Africa procuring suitable beetles, the most adept of which were found in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park. As a test he placed pats in a controlled paddock and timed how long it took for various kinds of beetles to break them apart.3 After picking the most effective species, scientists sent eggs to a quarantined lab in Australia where lab researchers crammed turds through a Play-Doh-like sausage stuffer and then hand-rolled them to house the beetle eggs from Africa. After the eggs were incubated, the scientists set the adult beetles to work in a lab setting using dung squeezed from bags. The time-lapse sequence of beetles melting away a cow pat (which reminds me of The Evil Dead) is worth a watch on its own.

  Starting in 1967, 55 dung beetle species, 22 of which came from Africa, had been mass reared and introduced to farmers and pastures across northern Australia. Half of them proved successful, and according to a 2014 article in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Aussie salute has become a “dying custom.” So dense was the Onthophagus tarus beetle population that males’ horns receded over time as wrestling battles over females became unnecessary. By 1985, release of the tunnelers and ball rollers tapered off until just recently when two new species (O. vacca and Bubas bubalus) were set loose by CSIRO in hopes of doing some spring cleaning.

  Bornemissza’s legacy, as he said, was “to do something … nobody has attempted before,” and he proved that simple solutions can make large strides in agricultural management, especially when it comes to recycling organic matter. For instance, clothes moths are adept at reducing fur and hair. Termites, also called “white ants,” can recycle over 50 percent of dead plant material. Microorganisms within their guts enable them to process cellulose. Seemingly nothing slips past these tiny disposers of matter and waste, these consumers of the past. And that could potentially include man-made refuse.

  In 2013, two Canadian researchers reported on the curious choice of building material made by alfalfa leafcutter bees in Toronto. Researchers observed bees constructing nests with polyethylene-based plastic bags, collected locally, and composing the brood-bearing cells and their doors. One row of cells showed the plastic had replaced 23 percent of the otherwise natural material derived from resins and leaves. The magnified images of the nests are visually rattling in that mutated monster kind of way.

  Mealworms that grub on Styrofoam have also been proven to pitch in. Researchers in Beijing found that although polystyrene is “resistant to biodegration,” Tenebrio molitor larvae not only had a hankering for it, but their gut bacteria could break down the long-chain molecules into monomers. “The mealworm gut can be considered an efficient bioreactor,” pushing degraded polystyrene into the biomass, the authors wrote. We use and discard nearly 300 metric tons of synthetic plastic per year on a global level, according to the researchers. So there was a certain sigh of relief when, after two weeks, spectroscopes showed that nearly 50 percent “of the ingested Styrofoam carbon was converted into carbon dioxide,… reveal[ing] a new fate for plastic waste in the environment.” (Though bits of micro-Styrofoam were left behind as dust.)

  Mealworms are fast; just 500 can turn 30 percent of six Styrofoam grams into Swiss cheese in a period of 30 days. Like the adult Toronto bees, the larvae pupated and became darkling beetles. Don’t expect dung beetles to pack and roll snowball-sized Styrofoam any time in the future. I simply promote the thought: if bees and worms can recycle nonorganic material, think how effective they are with the organic stuff.

  The most important bug contribution, John Losey believes, is the incalculable one: the decomposition of dead plant and animal material. “Some people would say the bulk of the work of decomposition is with microbes … In a sense that’s true.” But maggots give it a head start by first stripping the rotting waste into mulch. What’s that like? To get an idea, I traveled to Texas A&M University to a series of bungalows collectively known as the Forensic Laboratory for Investigative Entomological Sciences. Or for the short-winded, FLIES.

  “The breadth of what they can eat is extremely wide,” says Jonathan Cammack. We’re sitting in a half-lit meeting room at FLIES. Outside in a nearby greenhouse, cages full of black soldier flies colonize piles of waste. By the time the larvae, aka maggots, crawl away to pupate, they’re composed of approximately 40 percent fat. In fact, such fat stores can be seen on the “windowpane” backs of the adults, occasionally appearing as a radiant green. When their stomachs are empty, you can see clear through them, as I learn later pinching one of their wings. In terms of recycling food waste, the scientists at FLIES have been promoting this specific species for a good reason.

  “They have the Midas touch,” Jeff Tomberlin chimes in, joining Jonathan and me. He wears a burgundy sweater vest and a wide southern smile. Before grabbing a couple of Lone Star beers together later, I easily pictured him being a host on QVC. “One of the major issues with waste,” he continues, “is that they produce noxious odors, greenhouse gases … By using the black soldier fly to convert wastes into protein and oil, it also reduces these odors.”

  Years have been spent proving how beneficial the flies’ recycling techniques are. A paper coauthored by Tomberlin discusses how black soldier flies can cut manure waste in half all while reducing the E. coli it contains. Their maggots were especially voracious eaters when it came to kitchen waste. Salads, hamburgers, and other boxed foods from restaurants (extremely high in fat, calories, and proteins) were consumed 98.9 percent more than standard poultry feed. Though it did take more time, the maggots they yielded, which can fetch $330 per ton on the feed marke
t, were “longer and heavier.” For all their data, Cammack and Tomberlin’s black soldier flies haven’t taken flight just yet.

  There is a hindrance: federal regulations prohibit insects as livestock feed, which is the larger part of how Tomberlin and Cammack want to utilize these maggots. However, other countries have embraced the technology. AgriProtein, a company based in Cape Town and backed by Bill and Melinda Gates, currently employs black soldier fly larvae for large-scale biorecycling of city waste and then as protein-rich feed before they pupate.

  Part of Jeff Tomberlin’s interest in this field originates from watching similar cycles as a child on his parents’ Georgia farm. “I remember seeing a dead cow on the pasture,” Jeff tells me. “And I was curious. So, I went up and hit it with a stick—and three dogs ran out of it!” He says it’s one of those visions that stays with you. Jeff and Jonathan tell me a bit more about black soldier flies before Jeff turns to Jonathan.

  “You should have David put his hands in a pan of maggots.”

  Me: “Sorry?”

  Jeff grins. “Yeah.”

  Moments later Jonathan leads me past fridge-sized incubators housing various soldier fly experiments. Then we enter a dim storage room with the pans. I ask him, with all that intense munching going on, how hot can maggots get?

  “When the ambient temperature was 90 degrees,” he recalls, “the temperature of the maggot mass was 140 degrees.”

  I let that number—140—sink in for a second before submerging my hand into a pan of very alive dirt. On the surface, the maggots are tranquil and cool and sparse. Their posteriors look about three times larger than their heads, and they have two brownish spiracles, or holes, from which they breathe. But when I dip my hand into the bottom, the mound I scoop writhes with life. In my palm it feels disturbingly ticklish. And the very biological, metabolic warmth I’m getting—well, all I can say is I’ve stretched my yuck spectrum beyond donating blood to a jar of bedbugs. On the plus side, the dead skin cells on my hand are gobbled up.