Bugged Read online

  A Google search also reveals a litany of genocidal images3 and videos—things like a Seattle man accidentally burning a portion of his house down to kill a spider.

  This blatant contempt is partly why I’m about to watch Amber assist tarantulas’ sexytime. Although it’s not billed as a conservation-release effort, her study permits a sneak peek into ex-situ breeding. It’s funny that one of the least-preserved terrestrial invertebrates found its way into the Butterfly Pavilion, effectively sneaking onto those first-class lifeboats.

  * * *

  I must admit that spiders scare me more than death itself. I’m quick to beg girlfriends, neighbors, or even strangers to remove them from my vicinity. I am totally Little Miss Muffet. Apparently, earlier in life, so was Amber.

  “I slept in my car for a week freshman year of college because there was a wolf spider in my house,” Amber tells me. “I was raised to be so afraid of spiders.” We’re standing in her white-linoleum-tiled office, separate from the Westminster grade school berserkers touring the Butterfly Pavilion. Their zealous screams trickle in. Like a PR lady, Amber is equal parts bubbly and steadfast, armed with a brain library of bug wisdom and a silver Marilyn Monroe necklace charm. Clearly she’s gotten over her fear, because stacked along her office walls are shelves of what appears to be dirt and condensation labeled in clear plastic containers. NyQuil-cup-sized water dishes and a mix of curly-haired, Texas brown, pinktoe, and Chilean rose hair (aka “Rosie”) tarantulas are inside. All of them were bred in captivity.

  “How many spiders do you have?” I ask.

  “Oh, my gosh!” Amber exclaims. “I probably have, let’s see, there’s fifty—plus the one hundred ‘Rosies.’ Hmm…” She trails off, finger on chin as she scans the cramped room. “Probably two hundred tarantulas in this corner here…”

  My mouth goes dry.

  Still, having read through Jeffrey Lockwood’s The Infested Mind: Why Humans Fear, Loathe, and Love Insects, I’m reluctant to call myself arachnophobic. My instant reaction to avoid unpleasant situations models that of the opossum—I yawn, get drowsy, and bow out. Yet there are roughly 19 million entomophobes in the United States who might experience the “automatic and uncontrollable” trembles, shortness of breath, or “irrationally exaggerated responses” as summarized by Psychiatry.org. It’s an age-old fear capitalized on since the late 1800s, as shown by magician Henry Roltair and his “Spidora the Spider Girl” sideshow illusion—a spider with the head of a woman.4 Entomophobia had also been an “emotionally traumatiz[ing]” inspiration for Salvador Dalí, who in one buggy confrontation with grasshoppers leapt out of a window. (Grasshoppers sprung their way onto many of his paintings too, including The Great Masturbator.) And that fear was nearly exploited by the CIA as an “Orwellian strategy” during al-Qaeda terrorist interrogations by threatening to place entomophobic prisoners in a dark containment box with a “stinging” insect, writes Lockwood. In reality, a 2002 memo from the US Justice Department proposed that they’d “place a harmless insect in the box, such as a caterpillar.”

  Luckily for entomophobes, exposure therapy is available. Methods vary from hypnosis to physical confrontation to virtual reality simulations, like the mid-1990s, first-person hit SpiderWorld developed by University of Washington professor Hunter Hoffman, which helps desensitize5 patients. After participants complete the simulation, they view all spiders as gentle. And it’s not a trick: for the most part, spiders are. Amber Partridge occasionally lends her Rosies to psychologists, aiding patients by strengthening their mental fortitude with tarantula knowledge, perhaps to the point of getting them to hold one.

  Now some tarantula Sex Ed 101: each developmental stage of an arthropod is called an instar. For example, tarantulas undergo molts where they shed the exoskeleton of their former selves, maturing around ages four to seven. Picture an eight-fingered hand working its way from a leather glove. After this ultimate molt, males can now breed, and many are equipped with protruding tibial spurs on their front legs intended to hook the female’s fangs while the male crawls beneath her for insemination. Otherwise, she’d dig her fangs into his noggin.6 The spurs later prevent males from escaping their postultimate molt—a tarantula’s final shedding. Unable to jump out of their skin, they die from dehydration. As part of her study, Amber ushers them through that phase, noting how “super awkward” they become. They’re confused. Their gait is off. I imagine the human equivalent to this senescence would be expecting to die at 65 and waking up at 90. Longevity in the arthropod kingdom really goes to the females, especially since some hobbyists have said female Mexican redknee tarantulas live to see 50. The males need only to mature enough to contribute their chromosomes. “You get to a certain age and you’re like, ‘Okay, I really want to go to the bar tonight,’” Amber says, laughing through her nose. And after their jollies are had, it’s checkout time.

  For today’s demonstration, Amber calls upon Greg Kinnear.

  Initially, Amber’s spiders get numbers, and, though rarely, accidents will happen. When I visit Amber’s lab, Rosie no. 115 is recovering in the “Non-Working Rosies” sickbay. Successfully impregnated spiders receive actual names. Same if they encounter—like our male specimen today did—a celebrity. Besides loaning out Rosies to psychologists, Amber is summoned to Hollywood to wrangle insects on film sets,7 as she did for Heaven Is for Real. She convinced the movie’s main star, Kinnear, to hold a Rosie—the one we’re now attempting to mate, thus convincing me that heaven is indeed for real.

  I ask if we should put on some Al Green. “We always joke about that,” she says, half expecting the question. “But no. No Barry Manilow.” (I think she means Barry White, but “Copacabana” works too, I guess.) Our resolute matchmaker sets down a cage on a metal table fit with a partition between Kinnear—the tarantula, not the actor—and a female Rosie, which is perforated in order for their pheromones to travel through the terrarium, permeating and enticing each other. Amber must now steer the two using a green paintbrush she keeps in a pencil jar. Looking around at the 300-plus spiders, it’s obvious she is good at her job. She’s bred 23 pairs, 16 of which successfully had offspring. On average, her spiders mate within 15 minutes. So, she removes the plastic divider. The starting gate opens! And—

  Nothing. Neither of them budges.

  Kinnear emerges from his trailer—a tipped-over clay pot—his dark pink velvet asterisk of a carapace gleaming. The stage is already dressed with a web laid across the pebbly floor laced with thick ribbons of sperm, some of which Greg Kinnear—of Westminster, not Hollywood—has already sucked up into quill-like appendages near his mouth called pedipalps. But the atmosphere is tense. Amber guides the female toward him. Normally, in the wild, a male approaches a female’s burrow and politely taps on the edge. If she doesn’t come out to mate with him, he’ll try a burrow next door. Some male Rosies are brave enough to trespass inside. “But that could result in death,” Amber warns.

  Hoping not to end Kinnear’s career, Amber delicately guides him, using the brush to rub the pheromones off his pedipalps and onto the female’s. She nudges the two closer. They’re coy.

  “Kinnear doesn’t want any of this,” she says, disappointed by their apprehension. At one point, the female lifts onto her hind legs, presenting herself for insemination—but Kinnear hides in the corner. “He’s camera shy. He’s not a very good actor,” she says, visibly upset. “She may be a little aggressive and he’s nervous.” It could also be that she’s giving off a gravid pheromone telling him she’s already pregnant.

  Instead, we opt for the spider that originally frightened Amber as a college freshman: a wolf spider.

  We do an about-face in the small room and check on a pair in the terrarium. “Hi, you’re very pretty, honey,” she pacifies the fuzzy female. “We have a divider in here, but he decides to climb over it every night,” Amber explains. Normally, they’d receive separate homes, but caging both for a week to incubate pheromones makes for faster breed times. But something’s amiss.


  “Humph…” Amber is stumped, and uses her brush to probe the male’s side of the divider.

  Oh, no, I think.

  “Did you eat your boyfriend?” she tranquilly asks the female.

  His side of the court is empty. There’s zero trace of any limb-y morsel.

  “That’s unfortunate … You look like you ate him.” Dismayed, Amber hardly speaks as she sets aside the now lone wolf spider and grabs a pair of pinktoe tarantulas. We both brim with hope, noticing the sperm web draped on the dirt floor. But the once-amorous mood here at the Butterfly Pavilion has turned anxious. The pinktoes also get cold feet.

  “I guess—” she sighs. “This is ridiculous. This is seriously like herding cats! I’ve never had this much trouble ever—ever!”

  Omens apparent, we decide to pair up different spiders and let the pheromonic anticipation simmer for a week. Spoiler alert: we will succeed, and, yes, I get hands on.

  * * *

  Snippets of the 1964 research paper by professors W. H. Whitcomb and R. Eason entitled “The Mating Behavior of Peucetia viridans”—about green lynx spiders easily mistaken for crawling boogers—verges on fervent: “They touched each other rapidly and repetitiously … Often, he twirled her by only touching the thread, but at other times, he touched thread, legs, and body … He began to drum on the tip of her abdomen with his palpi and the tarsi of his forelegs, his body often trembling concurrently.”

  Scientist and author of Sex on Six Legs Marlene Zuk comments that some of these insect mating papers “sound like what would happen if Danielle Steel were an entomologist.” Reproductive behaviors in insects appear so odd and incapable of characterization that scientists who up their wordsmith game deserve a pat on the back.

  The P. viridans action gets spicier: “The female then bent into a shallow ‘U-shaped’ position … With lightning speed, the male thrust his whole body forward and jabbed at the female’s epigynum with his palpi, first one and then the other.” Using 16-millimeter motion-picture film to shoot 40 pairs of spiders housed in ice cream pints, the entomologists found that the time length for courtship averaged 11 minutes, and mating lasted 10 minutes.

  Former Lancôme model Isabella Rossellini entertained us with buggy sex in half the time. In 2008, when the Sundance Channel was looking to air five-minute segments between programs, the Italian entophile figured the best way to “capture people’s attention” was raunchy, educational descriptions of insect sex. The resulting combination of plush and cardboard costumes for the segments called Green Porno stemmed from Rossellini’s childhood dream to make films about animals. Seemingly sewn together by some beatnik Sesame Street prop master, the costumes set the stage for Rossellini to run amuck. She humped praying mantis and fly statues, and dressed as a tubular earthworm imparting anthropomorphic winks to the camera, saying: “To have babies I need to mate with another hermaphrodite—in the sixty-nine position.” Donning compound eyes in complete dragonfly getup, she explained how “first I will clean her vagina to make sure she would only have my babies. Then we would copulate.”

  Good insect sex material seems endless. For instance, University of Canterbury researchers found Portia labiata female jumping spiders, with their misleadingly adorable convex eyes, usually eat their mates after sex, executing a sudden “twisting lunge” with fangs drawn while chomping down on the male’s head. Bizarre insect mating facts like this abound. Scorpionflies snack on fresh prey while in bed. A Silverfish male sets up sperm packet traps with thread and lures a female to crawl underneath as it drops the payload into her. Necrophilic flour beetles are quick to copulate with their dead female companions.

  Smaller male rove beetles mimic females by having sex with other males to finagle their way to reach the ladies. Such documented male-on-male actions, Marlene Zuk writes, are sometimes mistakes that insects—about 117 known arthropod species—are willing to make rather than miss out on actual reproduction opportunities. Research also shows that male fruit flies that engaged in homosexual practices had better chances of scoring with females. Similar sociosexual behaviors were observed in silkworms back in 1909 by Italian entomologist Antonio Berlese. And a recent survey done by two researchers in Mexico pushes the hypothesis that lepidoptera males exhibit copulatory attempts “to inflict damage to sexual competitors”—habits also seen in bedbug threesomes. The topmost male injects his sperm into a male who is already ejaculating into a female on the off-chance his squigglies will flow into her, supporting the idea that it is not only survival of the fittest, but rather of the most deceitful.

  Affluence works too. Dance flies, like many insects, require payment for sex with gifts, such as small prey or nonedible tokens such as pebbles, leaves, or silk balloons filled with food or left empty.

  A good deal of moths, like the European corn borer, willingly put out for any species releasing pheromones. But those moths, like many other species, suffer for their promiscuity. Entomologist James Wangberg’s book Six-Legged Sex alludes to an STD within “5–10 percent of all insects” called Wolbachia. Some studies even estimate the number at 20 percent, tiptoeing closer to human STD numbers. The transmitted bacterium, which lives in the female’s eggs, makes procreation possible only with other Wolbachia-carrying males. It’s either that or reproducing parthenogenetic carbon copies of themselves, aka virgin birth, resulting in only female offspring.

  As absurdly complicated8 as bug mating rituals can be, their abundance and variety proves that they’ve worked for over 400 million years.

  * * *

  A pair of one-and-a-half-inch froghopper insects, “belly to belly” in a standing missionary position, are freeze-framed in coarse sedimentary rock dating back to the Mesozoic Age. The bottom of their abdomens connect, the entomologists write, his aedeagus (essentially penis) entering her bursa copulatrix (basically vagina). That makes the 165-million-year-old fossil the oldest record of insects doing the dirty. Found in northeastern China in Daohugou Village, the species Anthoscytina perpetua was named by Beijing researchers from the Latin perpet, meaning “eternal love, in reference to this everlasting copulation.” The amorous image caught the interest of those studying the evolution of asymmetrical insect genitalia, since it shows more evidence of shared similarities from that time with modern bugs.

  Today’s insects have plenty in common with their prehistoric ancestors. In fact, certain stick insects have cloned themselves for over 1 million generations. A team of Canadian scientists traced the lineage of several Timema stick insects using DNA analysis to find when they became distinct from their elders, revealing they maintained asexual reproduction since the Mesozoic age without the introduction of new genetic diversity from males. But it’s by going back over 300 million years to insects’ Paleozoic origins that we can better illustrate how their, as biologist Michael Samways puts it, “evolutionary resourcefulness … in prehistorical times” applies to future climate change.

  Within the Paleozoic era was the Carboniferous period, aka the “Age of Cockroaches.” If you were magically transported there, you’d be surrounded by lush arborescent plants, far-reaching coal swamps, and eight-foot-long arthropleuras—extinct ancestors of modern centipedes and millipedes—quietly scurrying past your feet like serpentine surfboards. Because of the higher temperatures, there were an astonishing 4,500 species of cockroach. But during the Paleozoic era, you’d also have to dodge buzzing dragonflies large enough to carry frogs and mesothelae spiders capable of enveloping your entire face. The air during this period was composed of about 35 percent oxygen, as opposed to today’s 21 percent, which physiologically required a bigger respiration system in the biome, hence the gigantism. Over the next couple of periods, temperatures cooled and rose. Mass extinctions occurred, save for 8 of the then 27 insect orders. Those 8 are now relatives of today’s bugs. Eighty-four percent of current insect families are the same as 100 million years ago.

  Which brings us to the increased concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere today, raising the gl
obal average surface temperatures by half a degree Fahrenheit from 1906 to 2005, according to NASA. The trend is not lost on conservation biologist Michael Samways. He and other biologists theorize these ectotherm insects, “sensitive to temperature changes,” will migrate to “geographical ranges closer to the poles” and flee to higher elevations, upping the diversity found in those regions. An example of this shift can be seen with the Comma butterfly, which over the course of three centuries has relocated itself 100 miles northward in England. And potato leafhoppers arrive 10 days earlier from the Gulf than compared to summers in the 1950s. A 2009 paper exploring these thermodynamic effects found that such varied temperatures would “constrain the maximal performance of organisms,” favoring insects with thermoregulation adaptations, aka endotherms. Meanwhile, a recent census by researchers Timothy Bonebrake and Curtis Deutsch shows insects in topographically diverse tropical regions like South America and eastern Africa “are predicted to be more physiologically capable of tolerating changes in temperature.” Figuring out the mechanisms for wider tolerance in bugs at higher elevations, they say, will require further analysis.

  Also of note, says Samways, is how associations changed with certain crops. The increase of carbon dioxide will “likely result in greater carbon-to-nitrogen ratios in plant tissues … stimulat[ing] greater feeding activity in some insects.” Reproduction of the Texas field cricket decreased with higher-than-average temperatures, one study found. Their survival “hinge[d] on food availability.” The Texas cricket researchers at Dalhousie University believed that if their temperature experience was applied to other insects, climate change would favor agricultural pests in temperate zones, increasing their reproductive rates when there’s enough food to sustain their survival.

  What effect would an even more dramatic change, like a nuclear holocaust, have on the insect population? Should one occur, I’m sure you imagine a future beyond just Twinkies and cockroaches, right? Timothy Mousseau aims to find out. The University of South Carolina professor is predicting how radiation will affect animal life over the next couple decades. For nearly 20 years, his team has surveyed the contamination in Chernobyl’s exclusion zone to trace radionuclides and their effects on humans. In 2011, he began inspecting fauna in the Ukraine and later comparing them with insects and other animals in Fukushima. Let’s just say it’s a far cry from the nuclear monster movies of the 1950s. Biological life has changed. The pulse is faint but also revealing. Following radionuclides—isotopes that can emit cancer-causing gamma rays—Mousseau has witnessed firsthand how natural populations are affected by this shift in mutation selection balance and how it affects the evolutionary process and, ultimately, adaptation for survival.