Bugged
Page 28
swattin and swattin and swattin
tis little else you hear
and we’ll soon be dead and forgotten
with the cost of living so dear
8 The US Army explored toxin- and bomb-sniffing skills with arthropods from 1963 through 2006. A kinder substitute to dogs. In smaller laboratories, other entomologists, like Jeff Tomberlin (chapter 6), have successfully conditioned wasps to detect chemicals. The wasps are placed in an observation container with a webcam called the Wasp Hound that delivers live feed from the inside as a technician watches the insect’s response to recognized smells.
Eight
1 Not unlike the buggy idols honored in US sports arenas. We have the New Orleans Hornets, San Antonio Scorpions, Columbia Fireflies, Savannah Sand Gnats, Salt Lake Bees, Fort Wayne Mad Ants, and, my personal favorite, the Santa Cruz Banana Slugs.
2 Such was the proposed mission of the malumbia caterpillar. In 1990, the Bush administration entertained a USDA plan to sabotage Peruvian and Bolivian coca fields by infesting them with this relative of the gypsy moth. Although much of the cocaine would pass through the caterpillar, it would retain about “53 nanograms per gram of body weight,” writes entomologist May Berenbaum. Perhaps justifiable enough to dry, dice, and snort the critter. Out of national pride and wariness of the agricultural repercussions, the plan never left the airplane’s bay door.
3 And according to folklore dating back to 2640 BCE, Chinese empress Si Ling-chi was sitting under a mulberry tree when a cocoon dropped into her teacup and unspooled from its hardened state into thread. Evidence actually dates our cultivation of silkworms to before 4700 BCE.
4 Iridescent elytra is sewn into dresses or set into jewelry. Unsettling too (certainly a fashion faux pas) are the very alive and bedazzled beetles some tourists smuggle into the US. Worn as gold-chained brooches called “Makech,” the jewels stem from a lovelorn Mayan fairy tale.
5 Of which there was a shirt I threw my money at. I also mailed one to our insect-pinning artist in New York, Lorenzo Forcella. This was his e-mail reaction to the Bug Boy shirt: “I love the larva eating the dead baby. It’s funny because there was some chick in my neighborhood who didn’t know my name so she just called me ‘Bug Boy.’”
6 Much like the website JapaneseBugFights.com, which pits various species—like praying mantises and Japanese giant hornets—against each other UFC style.
Nine
1 To be more precise, that’s 2,086 species of insect eaten by 3,071 different ethnic groups in about 130 different countries.
2 The opening dialogue: “Them insecs eats up every blessed green thing that do grow, and us farmers starves.” To which there is the reply: “Well, eat them, and grow fat!”
3 Starting in 1988, a similar group touting entomophagy was begun by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Gene DeFoliart. Although it was largely for academics, the Food Insects Newsletter really began the discussion about insects’ nutritional features.
4 Possibilities Martian colonizers should embrace, according to one 2005 study from Japan. Given the food-regenerating restraints of space habitation, scientists looked to “protein-rich” sources that didn’t go moo. Out of all the insect cosmonauts—hawkmoths, termites, drugstore beetles—silkworm pupae had the right stuff. Plant pollination, flightlessness, the ability to recycle organic materials, and the essential fatty acids made them prime space food candidates. Also included was a recipe for silkworm cookies.
5 However, more recently, an FDA spokesperson mentioned that “nutritional companies,” a designation that covers many insect foods, don’t have to undergo an expensive regulation process that could cost upward of $500,000 and take five years.
6 Chimpanzees will sometimes use their 20-piece “complex toolkit” of sticks etc. to free bugs from trees and crannies like cracking a safe.
7 And this is how entomologists suggest you prepare bugs. “Some insects serve as vectors or intermediate hosts for vertebrate pathogens,” writes FAO adviser Ruparao Gahukar, “such as bacteria, protozoa, viruses and helminths, thereby increasing the risk of disease transmission to humans.” Moral of the tale? Treat insects as you would many other raw produce or meat to avoid ingesting pesticide residue or salmonella. But also choose your species carefully. Gahukar warns budding entotarians of insect misidentification. As one person from Thailand discovered, the blister beetle’s canthardin toxin had a deadly aftertaste.
8 Children at private Danish daycare Valby Lillefri were asked how they felt about eating foods that may or may not contain insects. Having chosen the children for “their lack of established experience” with food, the researchers presented five snacks: an apple, baguette, pasta with cricket-infused tomato sauce, salad with apparent whole crickets, and a snail. Based on their repulsed facial expressions, it didn’t go well. When asked if they’d consider entomophagy, one kindergartener left the discouraging note that the bugs were “disgusting … because they are slimy.”
9 The team of which ran amok exploring insect tastes in the 2016 documentary BUGS: A Gastronomic Adventure with Nordic Food Lab. I strongly advise visiting their BugsFeed.com blog that aggregates recipes, including: silkworm spaghetti and bruschetta, wild herbs with honey and ants, waxworm paella, and a Bee-LT sandwich.
10 The harvesting of insects concerns conservationists. Whereas some maize fields in Thailand are grown solely for locusts to eat, other regions overharvest insects to near extinction. Over 10 species are listed as threatened in Mexico thanks to restaurants. The Aboriginal preference for witjuti and bardi grubs is endangered by “increased exploitation” by ecotourism and restaurants as well. Proof that every farming practice requires sustainable protocols. And cultural awareness: In Mali, children regularly snack on grasshoppers that in turn snack on cotton fields. However, when Western advisers promoted the use of pesticides, the hoppers diminished, as did the children’s protein source, leading to malnutrition in 23 percent of the kids.
11 Insect allergen sensitivity is a rarity for those who haven’t been exposed to bugs on the reg. But some have asthmatic responses to Orthoptera. Others react poorly to waterbugs. One study found those overexposed to dust mites grew “sensitive to seafood tropomyosins.” And by overexposure, I mean people who regularly breathe in cockroach-crap-infested dust particles.
Ten
1 Honey known as tiúba and uruçú in Portuguese, which fetches ten times more than your average jar of the sweet stuff.
2 This death-defying stunt is still practiced in Nepal. Gurung tribal members use traditional tools—bamboo pole rafters—and rope ladders in the biannual tradition of collecting honey from A. dorsata bees on steep cliff faces, putting the best acrobatic performances to shame.
3 Which spurred my curiosity for the beehive-topped head. The 1960s hairdo much beloved by film director John Waters known as the beehive was invented by Chicago beautician Margaret Heldt. This fez-inspired design, comb-twirled and solidified with aerosol spray, received its name from a reporter observing the bee-shaped pin accessorizing the coiffure.
4 Around this time in 401 BCE, historian and soldier Xenophon and his army retreated from Turkey. The culprit? Debilitation by the country’s infamous “mad honey” foraged from Rhododendron ponticum flowers. The nectar contains grayanotoxin, which led to a number of symptoms. “[They] went off their heads,” Xenophon observed of his soldiers, “and suffered from vomiting and diarrhea … those who had eaten a great deal seemed like crazy … dying men.”
5 An ancient prototype compared to today’s modern alternative hives. For instance, Flow Hive—crowdfunded by a father-son team in Australia in 2015—fits plastic honeycombs on plates that split vertically when cranked like a music box. Influenced by beer taps, the honey flows directly from the hive. BeePak, on the othe
r hand, offers a compartmentalized Samsonite hive weighing less than half of the traditional ones and is built to withstand charging elephants. And for the health nuts out there, mushroom expert Paul Stamets has prototyped a hive composed of compressed sawdust and mycelium. The reason being that Metarhizium anisopliae fungi helps eliminate bee-killing varroa mites.
6 No one ever accused Purchas of being succinct.
7 At this time in England, Thomas Wildman, aka the “Barnum of Beekeepers,” had been demonstrating the harmlessness of bees in public shows by covering his body with them. His most famous trick, replicated by others, started by taking the queen and positioning her on his chin, forcing the colony to form a buzzy ZZ Top beard.
8 A similar hive gate collects pollen from bees, knocking it off their legs and bodies as they push through a narrow door. Bee pollen’s worldwide popularity grew so much that western Australia will annually produce, at times, 143 tons. Global production of the aforementioned royal jelly, sought by the cosmetic industry, can reach as much as 660 tons.
9 And if concerns of bee hypersensitivity prevent you from pursuing apiculture, rest assured only 0.35–0.40 percent of Americans are allergic, according to a US survey.
10 I am.
11 A mind-blowing feat, as evidenced in a clip from the NatGeo documentary Hornets from Hell. A Japanese hornet invades a honeybee colony. As soon as the intruder attacks one bee, it’s pounced on by a gang that begins vibrating, raising their body temperatures to 117 degrees Fahrenheit. The hornet’s innards are liquefied.
12 Rescuing a colony from a building is a task that urban beekeepers like Andrew Coté risk neck and limb for. Literally. Founder of the New York City Beekeepers Association, Coté harvests honey from rooftop hives across all five boroughs. And often he’ll get a call to collect wild swarms found on skyscrapers. He told me how he once clung to a parapet wall on a 22-story building, dangling over the street with a 15-foot PVC pipe hose fixed to a low-suck vacuum.
13 A hexagonal structure that inspired Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hanna-Honeycomb House in Stanford, California, which utilizes space by connecting rooms at 120 degree angles. Less functional (but cool since they appeared in Star Wars: The Force Awakens) are the ancient beehive huts of stone on Ireland’s Skellig Island, built in the sixth century by monks.
14 While some environmentalists protest rightly with well-researched arguments, there are the overly passionate and straight-up weird, e.g., those who blame it on cell phone tower radiation or claim that “bees were abducted by aliens.”’Nuff said.
15 Stressing the earlier remark of the importance of healthy queens, one 2016 study discovered that low sperm viability can encourage colony loss. Queens bred by different businesses and later shipped in tiny boxes by UPS and the USPS were found to lose over 50 percent of their stored sperm with temperatures around 40 degrees Fahrenheit and above 104 degrees.
16 In a move to kill mosquitoes potentially carrying the Zika virus, millions of bees were ravaged in South Carolina with an insecticide known as Naled. According to a bee farm owner interviewed by the Associated Press, the collateral aftermath was as if her field had “been nuked.”
Epilogue
1 Incredibly accurate, the wheel breaks down 100 descriptions, sommelier style. It starts with primary reactions, i.e., fruity, spicy, floral, animal, herbaceous, and branches into specifics, ranging from practical sources (jasmine, fig, clove) to unorthodox (cat pee, humus, locker room, and goat).
Acknowledgments
Writing a book can be impressively isolating. Were it not for my family and friends, it would be an impossible journey to undertake. (Sorry, Bill “Fucking” Murray, but even cockroach companionships have their limitations.) I’m about to go into a lot of thank-yous here, but perhaps the largest I owe is to my mom and dad, who supported my journalistic pursuits despite my times of self-doubt. And then there’s my sister Kristen. How much your impromptu flight to Denver to lift my spirits meant to me, you’ll never know.
Bugged happened because of you guys. This especially goes for Tony Bellah. Our near-daily phone conversations, averaging at about 40 minutes per, were motivational sparks fueling the creative fire of a book about bug people from conception to proposal and through the completion of the manuscript. A large part of this book is also owed to Reilly Capps—my fellow journo buddy and Couchsurfing host for when I first moved to Denver. Your ideas, suggestions, and encouragement were not only influential but gave me faith in pursuing this project.
To that end, I’d like to thank my agent, Eric Lupfer, and incredible editor, Elisabeth Dyssegaard, who, like me, appreciate weird things. Both of you took a chance on me. (Shout-out to Laura Apperson, Bill Warhop, and Alan Bradshaw, as well, for aiding in book production!) Thank you for believing something as niche as insects could appeal to a wide audience. Because insects are truly amazing in every definition of the word.
Drinking the buggy Kool-Aid along with me was Michael Kennedy, who hammered out a series of masterful illustrations. Each one surprised me like a bunch of Christmases wrapped into one. I owe a great debt of gratitude. In fact, the whole Kennedy clan is beyond lovely, so big thanks to your wife, Emily, and daughter, Charlotte, for just being a cute baby with a baby face. Handing over the mic to Mr. Michael Kennedy for a second, he’d also like to thank his wife, Emily, for her endless support and enthusiasm.
Then, of course, there are the entomologists and bug-lovers I encountered through the book, on page and behind the scenes. Your inspiring viewpoints, work, and research deserve a greater amount of public support. For those wanting to get involved, here’s a short list of groups trying to make the best of the Anthropocene:
Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation
E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation
Monarch Join Venture
Bumblebee Conservation Trust
Honey Bee Health Coalition
The Entomological Foundation
Buglife (UK)
Detroit Zoo
The Nature Conservancy
Speaking of behind-the-scene folks, a HUGE THANKS to all the professionals commenting on early drafts of each chapter, suggesting ideas and catching boo-boos along the way: Robert Nathan Allen, aka RNA; James N. Hogue; Mohammad-Amir Aghaee; Vincent H. Resh; Adrian Smith; Michelle Sanford; Eric Benbow; Evan Paul Cherniack; Mario Padilla; and Elina L. Niño. As a journalist with no scientific background—besides coming from a family tree of engineers—diving into such a complex subject as entomology can be daunting. Your help was greatly appreciated. Infinite thank-yous, as well, to Gwen Pearson; she not only helped in finding commenters for the book, but happens to write incredibly fun and accessible articles about insects. Ditto the large number of great writers/entomologists doing the same, like May Berenbaum. If you liked this book, you will definitely love their work.
Besides the fascinating characters I met, there were people who took me in during my travels, hosting me and sharing great conversations—both strangers turned friends and friends turned family.
So, thank you: Sandro Batista for welcoming me into South America for the first time (sorry, again, about the ink blot–stained blanket); Adam Conrad and Dan Zamzow for the Minneapolis hospitality and finally exposing me to Rick and Morty; my Brooklyn/Burning Man family members Doug Bierend, Jenn “Flash” Salvemini, and Aaron Stone for giving me a bed and a decade of encouragement; Eiji Ohya for coming to the rescue during my Lost in Translation experience in Tokyo; Mushimoiselle Giriko for arranging that excellent Bug Crawl and her translator friend and talented illustrator Eri Sasayama; Ayomi Anabuki-Browning for organizing the field trip to the Tomioka Silk Mill; Andrea Cavallera and his wife, Laura Caracristi, for being such great hosts and drinking buddies in Brazil; Robyn Schoen for coming in clutch with a couch in Austin; my Airbnb host Diana from Brighton for the lead on the Hive at Kew Gardens; Rosie from Bristol for an amazing, albeit brief two-hour conversation, des
pite me sweating like “ice cream”; the kind and accommodating monks at Buckfast Abbey; Lina Tsingerlioti, Xenia Regina and Lefteris Karoutsos for helping me arrange my stay in Ikaria; and Aleksander Sønder for the room in Copenhagen and the eye-opening experience at his lakeside cabin with the rest of the Danish crew. Skål!
For both sides of my family, the MacNeals and the Sururs: Thank you, habayyeb! (That’s Arabic for “my loves.”)
Thanks also to my friends Robert & Lauren Schauer, Jim & Tara Grude, Andrew & Christina Whyte, the Nyby Brothers, Nick Gutierrez, and Tasha Finken for participating in said Bug Feast and through the years making me laugh till I cried. Joining in with the laughs has been my Big Lebowski–obsessed friend Anne-Claire Siegert, as well as John & Ellie Nonemacher and Tom DeFreytas (really appreciate you aiding me in the cockroach surgeries). The coffee crew at Pablo’s on 6th Ave. were consistently uplifting, especially Lauren. Same goes for my main bagel-slinger, Peter Paul Russo at Rosenberg’s, for talking comic books and brightening my day with rugelach.
And, most of all, to my grandparents, who, as the Greeks say, planted “trees whose shade they know they will never sit in.”