Bugged Read online

  During that burgeoning time of entomology in the nineteenth century, taxonomists decided that visual observation alone didn’t suffice. Identifying external characteristics and coloration on, say, butterfly wings could easily mislead—the same vexing goofs the two Williams made while writing An Introduction to Entomology. As USDA entomologist F. Christian Thompson puts it, “Scientific names are hypotheses, not proven facts.” To that end, Lorenzo—sitting in his chair, placing the forty-fourth scattered pin around a bullet ant that could play a minor role in Hellraiser—points to a case filled with 30 near-identical butterflies. To the naked eye they are indiscernible. The school of copycats encased inside share black and orange features. But in their pre-metamorphic state, each butterfly came from very different-looking caterpillars. Belonging to the genus Heliconius, they benefit from a genetic survival trait known as Müllerian mimicry—the puzzling work of supergenes controlling color-pattern variations that enable poisonous butterflies to mimic each other. That is how these guys raise their odds against predators.

  A close examination of butterfly genitalia will help discern what a species is. But the five different nomenclature codes taxonomists use for animal names can be overwhelming. “If you go back and look at publications over the last 20 years,” Lorenzo says, “you’d see multiple layers of classification. And they keep moving stuff around because they’re not 100 percent sure how everything relates.”

  DNA classification has already begun to change this. In 2003, Canadian biologist Paul Hebert created a universal data system called the Barcode of Life. Taking genetic material from all of Earth’s organisms, researchers participating in the project have now barcoded over 500,000 species. Doing a recent search on newly coded species, I read about the molecular analyses of scuttle flies done by Swedish biologists. Their findings showed that two species described as synonymous in 1920 were in fact entirely separate. To you and me, that might be peanuts. But in terms of future entomological research, the implications of DNA barcoding are significant. Even Lorenzo, who doesn’t dedicate much time to taxonomy, is excited.

  “From the dawn of entomology to just recently people have been like, ‘Ah, I can see the elytra are slightly different on this one,’” he says in a snooty accent. “‘We should call this a new species.’” (Elytra are the hardened forewings you’d see on a ladybug, for example.) But DNA barcodes will turn past taxonomic characterization on its head, or at least make it more neat.

  The Natural History Museum in London is undergoing a similar adaption to the digital age. Scientists recently started to catalog their 80 million specimens from the past 250 years with unique QR codes, with a publicly accessible database that’ll progress the understanding of changes in species for future centuries. This system would make the two Williams and that litany of “fathers” writhe with envy.

  * * *

  Back at Lorenzo’s Soho Entomology Department, I’m invited to visit him in Hastings-on-Hudson—an hour-and-a-half trip north from where I’m staying with friends in Brooklyn—for a Father’s Day bug excursion he’s leading through the forest. Of course I accept. It may also be an opportunity to meet some budding entomologists.

  Bizarre and complex, insects possess a quality that can make us act equally so. Take for instance eighteenth-century “ardent collector” Pierre DeJean, writes Carl Lindroth in History of Entomology. Serving in Napoleon’s army, he’s rumored to have paused an attack before a battle, dismounted his horse, and collected a Cebrio beetle he had spotted. After hiding it inside his helmet, he went on to fight. Though his helmet suffered some damage, he was thrilled to find his “precious Cebrio [was] intact.” Oh, and they won the battle too.

  Then there’s Charles Darwin. A big fan of Coleoptera—a student of his drew him riding a large beetle like a kid on a pony—he often toasted wine with colleagues saying, “Floreat Entomologia!,” which in Latin basically means “May entomology flourish!” One time, in a scramble to catch scurrying beetles from a tree, Darwin, his hands full, used his mouth to cage a live beetle. He only spit it out once it “ejected some intensely acrid fluid.”

  Dame Miriam Rothschild’s fascination with bugs stuck with her until her death at age 96 in 2005. The naturalist of famed Rothschild banker wealth had an infectious ardor for small things, especially fleas. (Sensible enough. Her entomologist father pinpointed Xenopsylla cheopis fleas as the carrier of the bubonic plague.) Entirely self-taught, Miriam became an authority on the great wonders evidenced by an insect 1.5 millimeters in size. By setting up a camera running at 3,500 frames per second, she and a colleague discovered that the powerful jump of those fleas on your cat can hit 400 g-forces—“twenty times the acceleration of a moon rocket reentering the Earth’s atmosphere.”

  David Rockefeller, another wealthy entophile, owned 90,000 beetles. He became obsessed with them at the age of seven. The German model Claudia Schiffer also scrounged in the dirt for bugs as a child, particularly arachnids. Her affinity for terrestrial invertebrates can be seen in the paintings hung on her walls, as well as the spiderweb inspiration behind her clothing line of knitwear. What I’m getting at is there’s a juncture where as adults our childlike curiosity, and perhaps intrigue, with creepy crawlies turns testy. It didn’t for these guys. Surely, if nature documentaries and YouTube views are good indications, there’s a healthy bulk of us still in awe.

  The most unlikely hobbyist I’ve encountered is a heavily tattooed mechanic who worked graveyard shifts at an Oscar Mayer processing plant for 27 of his now 45 years there. By working nights, Wisconsinite Dan Capps was able to dedicate his days to accumulating enough insects to fill over 3,000 handmade cases measuring a yard each. “I have to say, the collecting became almost an addiction,” the sexagenarian tells me on the phone in a thick ’Scansin accent. “I may die from the exposure to paradichlorobenzene alone.” His claim about the fumigant may hold merit.12 Encased in his shadowboxes is a storybook of his life. Capps wrote thousands of letters to insect dealers and other hobbyists listed in The Naturalist’s Directory, the book used long before online insect trading. His correspondence reached as far as Germany, Japan, and Australia. One exchange with the Natural History Museum in London got him a swallowtail butterfly from 1874. Another exchange in the 1970s, this time with a Parisian auctioneer, scored him what would equate to $20,000 today for a Mecynorhina oberthuri beetle “found on only one side of a mountain in Tanzania.”

  Guys like Capps are rare. His tone over the phone conveys the mellowness of an NPR host. But a photo of Capps from 1969 might as well have been from the set of Easy Rider. “At one point, I was a dead ringer for Charles Manson,” he jokes, which doesn’t help the anti-serial-killer analogies Lorenzo and I made earlier. His biker build was strong and he grew a “nasty-looking” beard. Inked bugs on his arm and shoulder are a fleshy insectarium of memories. They are visible only when he wears the muscle shirts normally donned by motorcyclists. Capps explains that each insect tattoo he’s collected has some particular significance: Ulysses swallowtail, Hercules beetle, Crowned Hairstreak butterfly, Eastern tiger swallowtail, Agrius moth, and Australian dragonfly are only some examples. Hobbyist friends from various countries continue to visit his house, this walk-in cabinet of curiosity with displays lined floor to ceiling. “This is a monument to my ex-wife’s tolerance,” he says, reluctantly adding that his obsession may have contributed to their divorce. “I was always careful to acknowledge her and the sacrifices she made letting me spend time on it.”

  It’s partly why he thinks hiding his collection in the basement would be “damn selfish.” So he’s spent the past 30 years loading cases onto a trailer and driving them to midwestern malls, schools, and education centers from Los Angeles to Florida’s Epcot Center. He’s always searching for new opportunities to display them even though it’s not lucrative enough to allow him to quit his job fixing bologna-slicing machines. His buggy road trips stay on the backburner for now. (Joyrides in his Wienermobile are prohibited.) Capps hopes that his son Jeff wi
ll inherit the collection, his legacy, so it might continue to dazzle those who see it. “The hobby has brought a lot of joy into my life,” he says.

  Chief among his accomplishments is holding the current Guinness World Record for spitting dead crickets—approximately 32½ feet. The secret, despite what you think, is not saliva. A curled tongue will create a “spiral effect,” he told a reporter, and then you aim the cricket’s head like a bullet. While touting the ecological benefit of insects, the St. Louis Science Center asked Capps to spit crickets to promote the opening of an IMAX theater. To win tickets, kids had to go head-to-head with Capps. This, he said, was probably the first time mothers encouraged their children to put crickets in their mouths. Anything, he says, to inspire and shape some attitudes. “Many of the insects don’t live very long,” he concludes. “But their beauty can be preserved for countless years, and it’s worth my inconvenience. And I think it enriches my life, and I think it enriches theirs too.”

  * * *

  The no. 22 tunnel exit from Grand Central Station opens to New York’s cityscape. The northbound train chugs along till the view widens to the lush New Jersey Palisades along the Hudson River like a jungle-draped Great Wall of China. Periodically, you pass abandoned factories, the train’s rhythmic sway going ka-link, ka-link like the metallic beat of a robotic heart.

  I land on the railway platform in Hastings-on-Hudson. With its sun-plumped wooden houses and shops, cat’s cradle of power lines, and a diaphone horn to alert the volunteer fire department, Hastings is a primed competitor for a Village of the Year award. A hike up a steep hill takes me to Lorenzo’s boxcar apartment where he’s eating a bowl of hot applesauce. His place is a low-lit, uncurated museum, with Luna moths, alien photos, newspaper clippings, caged beetles stripping meat off a deer hoof (for the Evolution Store). I especially like the Post-it note cautioning BUGS IN OVEN.

  Before heading out on today’s bug excursion, we stop at his second apartment. Its Cornell drawers and cardboard boxes house 500,000 or so specimens for his insect-dealing side venture God of Insects. Insect nets lean against the doorway like fishing poles. Lorenzo grabs the one with a time-worn sweep bag and we step outside into the 80 percent humidity afternoon. Sweat beads bunch in the balding cul-de-sacs of my scalp, and I release a guttural noise. “Welcome to Vietnam, right?” Lorenzo says, smiling, his wood-handled insect net doubling as a walking staff. At Hillside Elementary School, our rendezvous point, we find a mix of 22 kids and parents. Lorenzo is surprised by the turnout. An older New England gentleman with neatly combed white hair named Stew Eisenberg tells me how he hasn’t hunted insects since he was a Boy Scout, recalling tips from Boy’s Life magazine. The kid members of this excursion are visibly ecstatic.

  “We’re gonna get buuuugs!” revels a boy in a Phillies hat leading the charge.

  A light breeze bends the tree branches above us as we follow Lorenzo down a wood-planked walkway behind the school and into the forest. He thwacks the tall grass and flowers with his heavy-duty bug catcher. I overhear a dad call him a “net ninja.” After a couple sweeps, he rolls the bag till it’s cuffed near the bottom where all the bugs accumulate. “If you’re going to be looking for insects, it’s more than what you’re going to be looking for with your eyes,” Lorenzo says, explaining how invisible these behind-the-scenes forces are. “Here is an oak tree cricket nymph. There’s a stink bug. Baby assassin bugs. A spider. A leafhopper.”

  A toddler has a handful of saliva-soaked shirt in her mouth as she gazes at the catch.

  “Which one’s the assassin bug?” asks one dad, igniting a chain of questions for Lorenzo. “The green one?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What does that mean?” a mom asks. “Do they hurt you?”

  “Well, assassin bugs feed on other insects,” he answers. “You’ll see they have a little proboscis. That’s what they use to suck either plant juice or animal fluids. They’re one of the richest forms of insect life within the plants here.”

  Another dad asks his son’s question: “What makes a stink bug smell?”

  “Um, there’s toxins in it for protection. When something eats it, they taste really foul.” (Darwin could attest to that.) This inquisitive focus permeates the group. I wonder when kids lose that rubbernecked, enraptured joy. Purdue professor Daniel Shepardson sought to find out more about human-insect interactions by investigating how 120 elementary school children understood bugs. Students across multiple grade levels were asked to draw an insect and explain what it was. In terms of adorableness, you have images with human attributes: “the caterpillar forms a cocoon because it needs a home.” And then by the fifth grade, the 2002 research paper notes, physical characteristics (three body segments, six legs) were consistently correct. What Shepardson also found was that children began “to emphasize the negative aspects of insects (e.g. biting, stinging, eating flowers)” as early as the first grade. By age nine, that contention was engrained. Though it might vary culture to culture,13 it’s clear the beneficial attributes of insects weren’t stressed early enough.

  Out of all the kids trailing Lorenzo, one in particular sticks out. Una is five at most. Her dad, Ken, hands her a plastic magnifying glass as she kneels down to inspect flowers along the trek. Una’s level of intrigue can be felt from a distance.

  We reach a clearing at Sugar Pond. Lorenzo gathers the crowd around a waterside log with holes made by wood-boring beetles. “This bench is a habitat,” he says. “Here’s a predatory ground beetle hunting on the face of this log. They could spend their entire life in this log. That’s their world. Think of things in a smaller universe.” Lorenzo places the beetle in a plastic vial and passes it around. Una folds her hands around it, leaning her face in closely to observe the thing clawing around inside. Next she offers the beetle up to Stew’s wife. She takes it from Una, and holds it at arm’s length. The juxtaposition of our different attitudes toward bugs simplified to its core. Stew the ex–Boy Scout nudges her. “Give it a kiss.”

  We’re nearing the end of the trip. Unless you were to, as our bug expert says, “Stop. Stare. And look,” you’d miss the elusive wheels shaping the plants and overall global ecology. As a demonstration, Lorenzo leads us to a dead tree trunk. Fresh rainwater seeps through the dirt, intoxicating us with a rich forest-y aroma. The group has tapered off to a select few including a couple boys dragging each other by the ankle and climbing dead trees. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” Lorenzo says to the boys, “I have to lift this log. You’re standing on someone’s house.” He unmasks the life below. Seconds later kids are shouting out “worm!” “centipede!” “slug!” “pillbug, pillbug!” Una quietly plays with a leopard slug, laughing as it slimes across her finger. I collect a red, plush-toy-looking mite with a Poland Spring bottle cap. “Bugs are more interesting than people,” one of the dads tells me.

  “Look! Look! Your foot’s near another one,” a kid points out. There’s a ruckus of elations, ooos and aahs as more bugs are unearthed from the loose soil and decaying wood. This grotesque high pervades the science. Nineteenth-century banker John Lubbock mentions it in his 1856 letter about collectors. That those cabinets, that this crumbly patch of grub-wriggling dirt, are “storehouses of facts.”

  Before everyone gets on with their day, Lorenzo concludes the afternoon’s excursion. “Insects are kinda suicidal,” he says. “They’ll just throw themselves at the world and hope to survive.” Maybe that’s my answer to what a bug is: suicidal. It’s a design preprogrammed into their DNA; they’ve evolved for nearly half a billion years to be ubiquitous micro-machines pulling off colossal feats like shaping the world’s flora. Some believe this in turn helped Homo sapiens evolve. After all, sociologically, we have much in common.

  Two

  Buried Cities

  Imagine you’re an ant. More precisely, a leaf-cutting Atta texana ant. Crawling through a bumpy dirt tunnel toward blue celestial sky. You pass by your queen sitting atop a throne of fungus and coworkers carrying leaf remnants over their h
eads like shark fins.

  No, you don’t need to smoke whatever’s beneath your kitchen sink to experience this. You can navigate a 10-centimeter sample of a real ant colony reproduced in a virtual space on a multifaceted screen. The navigation tool is a Wii remote. Zooming out all the way shows you, the participant, the outer structure of the colony—a view available in the past only through guesswork.

  This exploratory, visual map of underground tunnels and chambers is courtesy of a motley crew of computer scientists, artists, and geophysicists led by Carol LaFayette, a professor at Texas A&M. I’m standing beside her collaborator Fred Parke, who helped construct the mini-theater, in a khaki-colored barrack on the university’s Riverside campus. Called the Atta project, the team used ground-penetrating radar (GPR) scans of an A. texana colony in 2006 to create exploratory, visual maps of underground tunnels and chambers. Modeling the GPR data—a sort of “MRI for soil,” says LaFayette—with 3-D polygons transformed the otherwise hidden living Texas leafcutter colony into an immersive, algorithm-generated, textured experience.

  “What entomologists are interested in are the formation of colonies,” says LaFayette. “Their tunnels, their shape, and their distribution can tell them about the behavior of the different species of ant.”

  This is merely an eight-meter slice of a single colony in Texas. The scope of the leafcutters’ abilities—despite being one-millionth our size—are rather gargantuan.1 “I’ve seen excavation sites of this particular species that can hold a three-story house,” LaFayette says. An excavated A. texana nest in 1960 spanned nearly two football fields. But together, social insects, like ants and termites, can create cities that New York planner Robert Moses would envy, and towers as ornate and functional as the Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona.