how did you fall in love with insects?
It was quite unexpected. I spent much of my childhood terrified of insects. I was a real entomophobe, but I was interested in all other aspects of biology. As an undergraduate student at Yale, I got the introduction to biology my first semester, so by the second semester I was ready to take a higher level course. literally the only one that could fit into my schedule was called “terrestrial arthropods”. I thought: okay, fear comes from ignorance, I’ll take this course. I ended up completely in love with insects.
You are reading: Best books on insects
What would you say to people who reflexively squash or step on insects?
I teach a general education course for non-scientists here called “insects and people”. proper pedagogy requires that objectives be set at the beginning of the course. my goal is for students to stop and think before they swat, crush, or dismember any arthropod.
Life on this planet, if possible, would be miserable without insects. insects are the main partners of flowering plants. the plants are rooted in the ground, so when it comes time to find a mate and reproduce sexually, they are trapped. About three-quarters of the more than 240,000 species of flowering plants depend on an animal companion. the vast majority of those animal companions are insects. therefore, most flowering plants would not be able to reproduce without the help of insects, meaning that most terrestrial communities would essentially not exist without insects.
insects outnumber us and outweigh us. it’s basically your planet. They probably have the greatest adverse economic impact of any particular class of organism, but they also bring a disproportionate benefit to their numbers. insects are actually more instrumental than we are to the daily workings of the earth.
I look forward to learning more as we discuss his five books. Let’s start with a memoir by entomophile Thomas Eisner.
tom eisner was a member of my thesis committee and a great inspiration to me. he truly lived the life of a “curious naturalist.” This is a phrase that Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen introduced for those of us who derive research questions from what we observe in nature. Tom was extraordinary at seeing things other people didn’t see. I think of him as a superhero. His superpower was what I call “nature vision”: he saw things in nature that most of us don’t.
tom’s interest was chemical communication. you can’t see the chemicals, but you can see their mark on the morphology of the organisms. One example is his eye-opening work with the rather common and despised European cabbage worm, one of North America’s dirtiest and most common insects. it is an invasive species, in flight from early spring to fall. they feed on crops, so they’re not particularly welcome in anyone’s garden. these caterpillars were familiar to all entomologists and thoroughly studied, but no one bothered to ask why they were covered with tiny hairs that have shiny globules at the end. Tom asked, and discovered that what was making the hairs glow on this unimpressive caterpillar was an undiscovered class of chemical defense compound.
please tell me more what it’s all about for the love of bugs. if a reader were to pick it up, what would they find inside?
You would find a richly illustrated autobiographical account of Tom’s life and scientific explorations. It’s a compelling read for many reasons. He led a very interesting life and had an amazing eye, not only for odd bits of insect morphology, but also for beauty that is easily overlooked in the world of arthropods. he was an excellent photographer and even developed methods to capture images that people would not otherwise see.
The examples you use are familiar to biologists because they are found in introductory biology textbooks. they are shining examples of what evolution can do with time and opportunity. he writes in this book: “I spend a fair amount of time looking around, I already knew as a child that if I wanted to see things happen, if I wanted to win the revealing lottery in nature, I had to buy a lot of tickets.” that really captures the position of a curious naturalist: if you want to understand natural history, you have to be in the field.
Let’s move on to life on a little-known planet. Written in 1966 by Harvard entomologist Howard Ensign Edwards but updated in the 1990s, it looks like an accessible introduction to the world of insects.
The organism Howard Ensign Edwards studied primarily was the wasp, but in Life on a Little-Known Planet there are essays on cockroaches, crickets, and fireflies. Some of the stories I tell my class today I first learned in this book, given to me by a classmate when I was a student at Yale. the same copy is still on my shelf.
howard ensign evans was absolutely masterful in describing the majesty of the insect kingdom, the ways entomologists study insects, and the ways insects have been incorporated into human culture since ancient times. the book is a killer combination. it has elaborate descriptions of scientific experimental design, as well as poetry. is a wonderful description of how important insects are ecologically, scientifically, and culturally.
You told me earlier that this book is “guaranteed to captivate and conquer even the entomophobic.” how is that?
People don’t realize the key role insects play in ecosystem dynamics. entire communities are built around figs in the tropics. But figs don’t flower without pollinating fig wasps, which are almost microscopic. the whole system can collapse without a key agency. a capstone holds an arch together; It doesn’t seem more important than the other stones, but if you remove it, everything collapses. that’s the keystone species analogy.
You also wrote an accessible guide to the world of bugs, bugs in the system.
bugs in the system is where I try to reach people who don’t think they care about bugs and don’t think they need to know about them.
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You argue that insects have a greater impact on human affairs than almost any other group of organisms.
There are few human activities, however simple or complex, that are not related to insects. even the invention of the computer owes its origin to bombyx mori, the domestic silkworm. the silk is, of course, a product of the salivary secretions of bombyx mori. Herman Hollerith devised a punch card system for encoding census data in the late 19th century based on the punch cards used to work silk looms in American factories. [His innovations of his later became the basis of the information processing industry.] So silkworms brought computers to life.
Another important service that insects provide is waste removal. our planet would be almost uninhabitable if there weren’t dung beetles busy cleaning up droppings and scavenging insects busy cleaning up corpses. these insects have become incredibly useful to us. Carrion insects help solve crimes: they are used as indicators in forensic investigations. and manure troughs are a must to keep pastures clean and usable.
When Australia was colonized, Europeans bought their cattle from them. Australia raised large numbers of cattle and sheep, which are placental mammals, while the native Australian mammals are marsupials. Dung beetles in Australia were equipped to deal with marsupial dung, but did not have the capacity to handle large amounts of cow and sheep dung. As a result, manure accumulated and another insect called the dung or bush fly proliferated, to the point that there were places in Australia where you couldn’t walk without flies hitting you in the face. it was incredibly unpleasant. in the 1960s [entomologist] george bornemissza suggested importing dung beetles adapted to feed on placental dung from mammals to australia. Over 40 species were ultimately imported, with different life cycles and temporal patterns for different regions of Australia. they are doing a good job handling manure. it’s a dirty job, but some body has to do it.
why is your next pick, triplehorn and johnson’s introduction to the study of insects, a must have for entomologists?
is essentially a parts list and operation manual for classification. there are more than 900,000 described species of insects. Insects are the most abundant animals on the planet, in terms of number of species. As an entomologist, one of the minimum expectations is to be able to tell them apart. that’s not easy to do without an introduction to basic anatomy, physiology, and ecology. This provides an order-by-order overview of most of the 900,000 and step-by-step guides to examining all sorts of anatomical features so you can discern who belongs to which order. that’s not an easy thing to do because of the overwhelming diversity within the insect class. the book is extensively illustrated and surprisingly complete. the authors somehow managed to say a word or two about even the most obscure families, like the enicocephalidae or the single-headed insects.
I refer to it all the time, and find it hugely entertaining to read about what insects have come up with. If you’re an entomologist, at some point in your career someone will bring you something in a pillbox or ziplock bag and ask, “what is this?” It’s always a time of high tension, but this is the book that can help you find the answer. no entomologist can identify everything. the reason entomology departments exist is that insects are abundant, very rich in species, and have huge economic impacts. so every entomologist has an obligation to be useful. even if it’s just putting a name to something annoying.
The way entomologists are often helpful, to be blunt, is as a pest control resource.
The politically correct term is insect pest management, not control.
I wonder what it’s like for those who populate entomology departments to learn that their research might be subsidized by an industry trying to kill the bugs they love.
A significant proportion of entomologists have no interest in destroying insects. even those whose careers are devoted to management are often advocates of tolerance. it is the public that does not appreciate insects, not entomologists. I try to advocate tolerance as often as possible because the vast majority of insects are not bad actors.
First published in the 1950s, the introduction to the study of insects is now in its seventh edition, and it appears that the new molecular science has led to significant revisions. How is molecular biology affecting entomology?
is essentially a revolution. the traditional means of reconstructing evolutionary relationships and classifying insects is to rely on morphology, but morphology can be misleading and difficult. as I said, it is very difficult to classify 900,000 insects. there may be convergence: structures that appear similar because they perform similar functions but do not reflect any close relationship. But molecular analyzes that really go down to the DNA level have illuminated relationships that we could never see simply by relying on morphology. that’s what kept me buying the new editions, because people who look at the evolutionary classification of insects keep adding new attributes and features to deepen our understanding of the relationships between organisms.
then the encyclopedia of insects. Some 260 experts selected by the editors wrote the 300 entries in the encyclopedia. what makes this reference work exceptionally useful?
this is like wikipedia on steroids: it has all sorts of topics and is easy to access, but the difference with wikipedia is that the encyclopedia editors did an excellent job of finding people to go to who are the absolute experts on the topic. is not completely comprehensive, you won’t find all insect-related topics here. but each topic is covered by an entomologist who arguably knows more than anyone, making it a delight.
If I were stranded on a desert island, I’d like to have this book with me because it’s endlessly entertaining. It’s not just arcane technical stuff like mantophasmatodea, a new order of carnivorous insects that was recently discovered in Africa. I don’t think the average person on the street has burning questions about mantophasmatodea. there are also accessible themes. I was invited to contribute a chapter on “Movies, Bugs In”.
you started the fear of insects film festival at the university of illinois. why?
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I got the idea when I was a graduate student at cornell. i noticed a sign on campus that said asian american society was showing godzilla, and i thought if asian americans can have a sense of humor about their identity, why can’t entomologists? I thought: we could take advantage of people’s fears and misperceptions to attract them and then we could explain to them why insects are useful. I pitched the idea to the department head at Cornell. he thought he was unworthy. when i got to illinois, once i established my credentials as a legitimate scientist, i suggested it to my department head here. The festival is entering its 29th year and I am pleased to say that we are in no danger of running out of insect films.
The description in the encyclopedia says that it covers all aspects of “exploitation, conservation and management”. which leads me to wonder how can insects be exploited?
we exploit insects in all sorts of ways. silkworms produce silk, bees produce honey and wax. Of course there are the pollinators. we also use parasitic insects; In many cases, an insect’s worst enemy is another insect, which is why we mass-raise parasitic wasps and release them to control crop pests without causing the collateral damage associated with synthetic insecticides. we even exploit dung feeders and carcass eaters. we clean museum specimens by throwing a carcass into a colony of so-called museum beetles. scavenging beetles remove every last bit of meat from a bone more efficiently than any chemical processing. so we use insects in all sorts of ways. they contribute services, they just don’t get credit for it.
And what insects are the focus of conservation?
This is an interesting question because it’s hard to convince the public that protecting insects is important. Not many insects are as charismatic as the endangered megafauna: the noble bald eagle and other iconic conservation creatures like leopards. It’s not the same when you’re worried about saving haematopinus oliveri, also known as the pygmy pig sucking louse. he feeds exclusively on pygmy pigs, which, like him, are in danger of extinction. it is a struggle to get insects included in the provisions of the endangered species law. the preponderance is butterflies. people care about butterflies. but other insects, those that may not be so pretty to look at, are also marvels of evolution.
let’s finish with the social insects that make up much of our biomass. you chose two-time pulitzer prize winner eo wilson’s insect societies.
insect societies is a book by the most famous entomologist of the last 50 years. edward o wilson is a myrmecologist, that means he’s in love with ants, and it’s not hard to see why. most insects are solitary. ants are one of the few species among 900,000 that are social.
The elaborate social systems of some insects are amazing. termites can build nests that tower over people. bees live in communes of 30,000 to 50,000 individuals. The brilliance of insect societies is that EO Wilson distills the essence of social behavior into all of these organisms. he finds the commonalities and unique attributes of insect societies. and he writes about them in absolutely captivating prose. he is a superb writer. many would argue that he has written other books with greater scientific impact – he basically created the field of sociobiology – but I think it all started with this book. It’s crystal clear and so mesmerizing. he removed all the interesting examples that existed at the time and integrated them into a perfect story about how organisms learn to cooperate.
what makes social insects (ants, bees, wasps, and termites) so interesting to study?
Social insects have a disproportionate influence on the planet relative to other species. they outnumber most other organisms, including humans. they change the physical characteristics of the environment through their social activities and their collective ability to do amazing things, like build huge structures. And, as Eo Wilson showed, social insects help us understand how organisms can get along and work collectively.
All of these books seem to celebrate the evolutionary achievements of insects. What is your greatest achievement?
flying is quite impressive. they are the only organisms on the planet that have managed to fly without giving up a couple of appendages. birds and bats had to give up a pair of limbs to fly, but insects did not. being able to fly carried insects everywhere. they are tiny creatures, not as large as most other vertebrates. but this ability to fly means that they can exploit resources that are unpredictable in time and space. they can find food in remote places and escape from their enemies. they can fly thousands of miles. Monarch butterflies are capable of migrating at least a thousand miles. Can you imagine walking that much, especially if you have six tiny little legs?
You wrote a humor column for the American entomologist and many of those pieces are collected in your book’s buzzwords. what is the funniest thing about insects?
I find them endlessly entertaining. that’s one of the reasons I’m an entomologist. I’m supposed to be a serious scientist and there are serious aspects of the research I’m involved in, but I’m not a serious scientist because insects are fun and inspiring. however, superlative questions are difficult.
Okay, so what’s the best lecture joke you’ve ever told?
I’ll tell you two:
A termite walks into a bar and asks, “Is the bartender here? Is the bartender here?”
A man walks into a doctor’s office and says, “Doctor, you have to help me. I think I’m a moth. The doctor says, “Of course you have a problem, but I’m a pediatrician, not a psychiatrist. why did you come here?” the man says, “the light was on.”
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