Insectopedia

by Hugh Raffles

  Indeed, after spending time inside the piñon alongside the animals and scaled to their world, it becomes more and more inconceivable that so little research is being done on beetle bioacoustics and that the intensely interactive sounds inside the tree are arbitrary. Reviewing the piñon soundscape, Dunn and Crutchfield discover that “a very diverse range of sound signaling persists well after the putatively associated behaviors—host selection, coordination of attack, courtship, territorial competition, and nuptial chamber excavations—have all taken place. In fully colonized trees,” they write, “the stridulations, chirps, and clicks can go on continuously for days and weeks, long after most of these other behaviors will have apparently run their course.” What does this mean? Their inference is careful but important: “These observations suggest that these insects have a more sophisticated social organization than previously suspected—one that requires ongoing communication through sound and substrate vibration.”19

  Recent research by Reginald Cocroft and his associates at the University of Missouri at Columbia raises yet another question. Cocroft has shown that the low-frequency and ultrasonic airborne sounds recorded by David Dunn are actually only one element of an insect’s sound-world. In huge numbers, it seems, insects that live on plants also communicate by the nonacoustic vibration of their living substrate. “Vibration-sensitive species,” write Cocroft and Rafael Rodríguez, “can not only monitor vibrations to detect predators or prey but also introduce vibrations into structures to communicate with other individuals.” By vibrating the leaves, stems, and roots of plants, insects send meaningful signals across significant distances (up to twenty-six feet in the case of stoneflies). Unconstrained by the physical limitations of airborne communication, they can deter predators by producing low-frequency signals that mimic far larger animals. Some, such as leaf-cutter ants, vibrate to call their comrades to a high-quality food source. Others, such as larval tortoiseshell beetles, exchange vibrational signals that coordinate the formation of defensive groups. Still others, including thornbug leafhoppers, generate collective distress signals to summon their mothers when they are under threat. And needless to say, predators eavesdrop on vibrations to locate their prey (a practice that accounts for “vibrocrypticity,” by which some insects “move so slowly and generate so little vibration in the substrate that they can walk past a spider without eliciting an attack”). The diversity of vibrational signalers and signals is “fantastic.”20

  Let’s reimagine the landscape of the soundscape. Let’s begin with all that busy, noisy, musical energy and open our senses wider still. And let’s assume not only multimodality but cross-modality—that, like our own, these senses make sense in combination rather than isolation.

  Yes, the world of insects is a noisy world, a constant whir of acoustics: drumming, clicking, squeaking, chirping.

  Yes, it’s also a vibrating world, so sensitive that even gentle winds can disrupt it and a rainstorm can cause it all to dry up or be drowned out.

  Yes, it’s a chemical world, too: a nonstop, impossibly complex, wildly inventive molecular maze of attractants, repellents, potions, poisons, and disguises.

  And yes, as we know from von Frisch’s honeybees, it’s a world of direct physical intimacies—touching, palpating, and substance sharing—and a world of visual cues, too.

  It’s an intensely interactive world, a landscape across which animals of the same and different species connect and communicate.

  Listen. Can you hear it? With the soundscape we take tentative steps into a wider, richer world.

  8.

  But more than just the sound of life in trees, the soundscape is the soundtrack to an epidemic. These noisy beetles are not merely symptoms of global warming, say Dunn and Crutchfield; they are also its cause. Dunn and Crutchfield see forest dynamics as a cybernetic feedback loop accelerating under conditions of climate change. With their relentlessly successful adaptive population dynamics, the insects drive the system past equilibrium. Decisive in felling the forests and so releasing carbon stored in tree biomass and captured during tree growth, bark beetles become the accelerating motor of what Dunn and Crutchfield call “entomogenic climate change.”21

  It is an intriguing insight. But in practice it is likely to make little difference to the Scolytidae and their bark-piercing allies. Already there is little hesitation from any quarter in holding beetles responsible for the deforestation overwhelming so many North American forests, in understanding their behavior as “infestation” and “invasion” (folding these anxieties into persistent fears of human immigration), and in working to eradicate them.

  Listen. These sounds provoke complicated responses. The beauty of that rich interior life, the music of the phloem—it is self-contained, indifferent, the soundtrack to catastrophe. These beetles live fully communicative lives, their Umwelt is thoroughly social. These are not the enemies we ought to choose. The biosecurity state, with its traps, its pesticides, its arborists, its public-education programs, and its quarantined counties, is largely powerless. It was Mao Zedong, apparently, who said that where there is repression, there is resistance. He wasn’t thinking of insects. But we should be. As far back as twenty-five years ago, 7 billion beetles were caught in pheromone traps during a campaign to repulse an invasion of European spruce bark beetles in Norwegian and Swedish forests.22 Seven billion, and still they kept coming. Repression is futile. Somehow, we will have to cohabit. Somehow, we will have to make friends.

  Ex Libris, Exempla

  Excess

  December 26, 1934. A famous episode in the history of Surrealism. In a Paris café, André Breton and the up-and-coming writer Roger Caillois quarrel over two Mexican jumping beans.

  * * *

  Three years later, Caillois founded the Collège de sociologie with two other dissident Surrealists, Georges Bataille and the anthropologist Michel Leiris. (He also participated, halfheartedly, in the charismatic Bataille’s Acéphale [Headless] group, a secret society whose few members, the story goes, having reached agreement on the radical gesture of a human sacrifice, found plenty of volunteers among themselves to play the victim but none to perform the execution.)1 Two more years passed, and Caillois left France to sit out the Nazi occupation in Argentina. Nine years after that, he began a career as a cultural bureaucrat at UNESCO. Twenty-three years later, he was elected to the Académie française. Along the way, he wrote a series of erudite, idiosyncratic, and barely remembered books on unusual topics, among which insects—and in particular praying mantises, lantern flies, and other masters of mimicry—held a special place.

  * * *

  Sometime on December 27, 1934, perhaps nursing a hangover (he was twenty-one), Caillois sent a letter to Breton in which he declared his break with Surrealism. “I had hoped,” he wrote, “that our two positions were not as deeply divided as they turned out to be during our conversation yesterday evening.”2

  * * *

  The enigmatic beans sat in front of them on the table. Why did they jump like that? Were those irregular twitches a symptom of some strangely suspenseful life force? Caillois took his knife to break them open. Breton, nearly twice his age, recently expelled from the Communist Party, the author of the Surrealists’ founding manifestos, a prominent figure in French intellectual life, made him stop.

  They knew that each bean contained a larva of the Laspeyresia saltitans moth and that its spasms were the creature’s movements inside its hollowed shell. But Breton didn’t want this type of confirmation. “That would have destroyed the mystery, you said,” wrote Caillois.3

  * * *

  Caillois described the dispute as between poetry and science. But his science was distinctively poetic even then. He threw himself into the “utter confusion” that he identified as the hallmark of inquiry in a contemporary world characterized by “the debacle of the evident.”4 Like any good scientist, he saw confusion as a provocation to systematic inquiry. But he was developing his idea of “diagonal science,” “the science of what e
xceeds knowledge,” a science that would encompass “what science doesn’t want to know.” He was in search of “an order that will allow disorder itself to enter into the order of things.”5 Revealing the larva inside the bean would hardly end the mystery, he wrote to Breton: “Here we have a form of the Marvellous that does not fear knowledge but, on the contrary, thrives on it.”6

  * * *

  The natural world is full of marvels. Maria Sibylla Merian came across one in Suriname. The lantern fly, Laternaria phosphorea, she discovered, creates enough light by which “to read a book printed with the same type as that used for the Gazette de Hollande.”7 Actually, she was mistaken; the lantern fly creates no phosphorescence—an odd, uncanny mistake that affixed itself to the insect for more than 100 years and lives on in its Linnaean name. Caillois suggests that the appearance of this creature so surprised Merian that she unconsciously made sense of it by the substitution of a different, unrelated strangeness, the strangeness of animal luminosity.

  And L. phosphorea is a startling animal. Like the praying mantis, it fills the world around itself with myth, storytelling, and legend. Henry Walter Bates, the British naturalist who lived eleven years in the Amazon basin and discovered, among many other things, a form of butterfly mimicry crucial to Darwin’s theorization of natural selection, retold stories that circulate in the region about lantern flies that attack and kill men on the rivers. In Amazonia, Bates says, the insect is known as the crocodile head because of its long, snoutlike proboscis.8 This empty box extends from its face and “imitates an alligator’s head exactly,” writes Caillois (who was not really one for biogeographic precision); “color and relief combine to simulate the savage teeth of a powerful jaw.” The effect is “absurd, even ridiculous,” but undeniable.9 How strange that a small fly that lives among the trees should have this resemblance and, accordingly, such power to intimidate.

  * * *

  There is, Caillois proposes, “a repertoire of frightening appearances,” a set of prototypes in nature upon which both the crocodile and the lantern fly draw. Mimicry is not about disappearance, about hiding in plain sight. It’s more often the capacity to reappear, to induce panic by the sudden substitution of one appearance by another, like a Haida shutter mask. Out of nothing, out of empty space, the praying mantis abruptly rears up over its prey, revealing its intimidating eyespots, emitting sinister sounds; its victim is rooted, paralyzed, hypnotized, incapable of fleeing its presence, and the mantis “seems supernatural, unrelated to the real world, coming from the beyond.”10

  And so does the lantern fly. Behind its reptilian “false head, dwarf and giant at the same time,” Caillois makes out another head, “the tiny head of the insect,” with its “two bright, black, almost microscopic points—the eyes.”11 The crocodile face is a mask, a mask that corresponds in its effect and method of use to the mask of the human shaman. The lantern fly “behaves like a spell-binder, a sorcerer, the wearer of a mask who knows how to use it.”12

  * * *

  Caillois was a dedicated collector of rocks and stones. Toward the end of his life, he published The Writing of Stones, a lavishly illustrated guide to the highlights of his collection, in which he describes each stone with his singular combination of biological reason and analogical poetics. He finds the same kinds of correspondences in stones as those that draw him so relentlessly to insects. Just as insect mimicry shares the decisive characteristics of sorcery, just as the animal’s mimetic ornaments are equal in practice and effect to the shaman’s mask, just as the alarming eyespots on the wings of the Caligo butterfly call to mind the evil eye (“The eye is the vehicle of fascination in the whole animal kingdom”), so the gorgeous stones of Caillois’ collection—“and not only they but also roots, shells, wings, and every cipher and construction in nature”—share, along with the human arts, a “universal syntax,” a connection to the “aesthetics of the universe.”13

  If categorical segmentation is always the first step in scientific reasoning, this is a world that at all times exceeds its compartments. It is the dissolution of boundaries—self, other, body, animal, vegetable, mineral. The dissolution into space. At the end of one of his most famous essays, Caillois quotes the final ecstasy from Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony, “a general spectacle of mimicry to which the hermit succumbs”:

  “Plants are no longer distinguished from animals.… Insects identical with rose petals adorn a bush.… And then plants are confused with stones. Rocks look like brains, stalactites like breasts, veins of iron like tapestries adorned with figures….”

  Anthony, writes Caillois, “wants to split himself thoroughly, to be in everything, ‘to penetrate each atom, to descend to the bottom of matter, to be matter.’”14

  The inky-smoky-vibrant polished surfaces of jasper and agate can take Caillois there. A riled hawk moth can take him there. A rearing mantis can take him there. A lantern fly can take him there. “No one,” he writes, “should say it is nonsense to attribute magic to insects.”15

  Exaction

  Writing from what is now Mexico City, the Franciscan chronicler Juan de Torquemada described how, after Hernán Cortés had taken Moctezuma II prisoner in the Aztec ruler’s own palace in 1520, the conquistador gave his men free rein to explore the royal compound. Among the Spaniards’ discoveries, wrote Torquemada, were a number of small bags, which they at once assumed were filled with gold dust.

  When they cut the bags open, the Spanish were dismayed to find that instead of gold, they were filled with lice. In Torquemada’s story—a story he attributes to two of Cortés’s lieutenants—the lice were an expression of the profound sense of duty that even the poorest of the emperor’s subjects, those with nothing else to offer him, felt toward their sovereign.16

  Torquemada credited the discovery of the bags to Alonso de Ojeda, the notoriously brutal governor of Urabá who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage to the Indies. But Ojeda had died five years earlier, in Santo Domingo, following a rout by Indians at Cartagena and a subsequent shipwreck. If Torquemada, writing nearly a century after the event, was wrong about Ojeda, perhaps he was mistaken about other details too?

  * * *

  In another version of this story, the lice made their way to the palace through the efforts of elderly people conscripted for the task by Moctezuma. Incapable of more onerous duties, these men and women were charged with visiting their neighbors’ houses, delousing the occupants, and delivering their bounty to Tenochtitlán as tribute. Given that the earliest medical text from the Americas—the Aztec codex of 1552 (unearthed in the Vatican in 1931)—lists indigenous herbal treatments for head lice, phthiriasis (eyelid lice infestation), and “lousy distemper,” it could be that this tribute was an initiative of imperial public hygiene.17

  * * *

  Far to the southwest, the Inca ruler Huayna Capac was touring the limits of his empire. Arriving at Pasto, a frontier outpost close to today’s border between Colombia and Ecuador, he supervised the building of defenses and pointed out to the leaders of the district that as a consequence of the empire’s investment in their welfare, they were now in his debt. According to Pedro de Cieza de León, one of the most important Spanish chroniclers of the Incas, the local notables replied that they were entirely without the means to meet new taxes.

  Resolved to teach these lords of Pasto the reality of their situation, Huayna Capac issued instructions that “each inhabitant should be obliged, every four months, to give a rather large cane full of live lice.” Cieza de León says that the lords laughed out loud when they heard this command. Soon enough, though, they learned that no matter how diligent they were in collecting, they were unable to fill the designated baskets. Huayna Capac provided them with sheep, writes Cieza de León, and it wasn’t long before Pasto was providing Cuzco, the Inca capital, with its full complement of wool and vegetables.18

  * * *

  Further south, the Urus retreated to floating reed islands in Lake Titicaca in an effort to stave off Inca c
onquest. (These artificial islands and the few people who live on them are today one of the area’s principal tourist attractions.) The chroniclers report that the Incas regarded the Urus as so lowly that the word with which they named them meant “maggot.” The same accounts explain that the Incas levied the Urus’ tribute in lice simply because they considered them unfit to pay in any other currency.19

  * * *

  Nothing like this is documented for the Wari, the Maya, the Mixtec, the Zapotec, or the other great pre-Columbian empires. Often the records are just too scant. However, it is known that in battle the Maya were able to create a formidable panic among their enemies by bombarding them not with lice, but with missiles constructed from live wasps’ nests.20

  Exile

  From a remote district of mountainous Guangxi Province, the renowned Tang-dynasty poet and philosopher Liu Zongyuan described the character of owl-fly larvae.

  * * *

  Owl-flies are ancient creatures. They have been identified in amber from the Dominican Republic that is more than 45 million years old.21 The adults resemble dragonflies, but the larvae look like the larvae of ant lions: they have dark-brown oval armored bodies about an inch long, with powerful pincer-shaped mandibles. Unlike ant lion larvae, which set a shallow trap in sandy soil and lie in wait for ants and other prey to drop in, owl-fly larvae camouflage themselves by pulling debris over their bodies. Only the outsize mandibles remain uncovered. When an insect wanders too close, the large jaws snap shut, and the larva sucks the pinioned body dry.

  * * *

  In A.D. 805, Liu Zongyuan was banished from the cosmopolitan imperial capital of Chang’an (present-day Xi’an) for his involvement in a failed reformist coup. Chang’an, says Liu’s biographer Jo-shui Chen, was “the ‘hometown’ to which he dreamed of returning” but never would.22