Insectopedia

by Hugh Raffles

  One of the more controversial questions was whether kuwagata and kabutomushi would be listed on the act’s roster of prohibited species. Conservationists lobbied for inclusion, concerned about both the continuing effects of beetle imports and the logic of collecting more generally. They had long argued that collecting was harming native species through damage to habitats from tree felling and other indiscriminate methods, through the removal of breeding populations from the wild, and through the impact of released foreign animals.

  Representatives of insect commerce were well organized. After all, they were the ones with the most to lose. Tokai Media, the publisher of Be-kuwa!, sponsored a nonprofit organization, the Satoyama Society, which worked to enlist the industry in a preemptive campaign of conservation education that included articles in the specialist magazines, lectures, posters, flyers promoting more careful management of beetles, and the formation of local collecting clubs. The Satoyama Society promised their beetle-industry colleagues that the education campaign would generate lecture fees and new customers.

  People from Mushi-sha gave expert testimony at the hearings. They estimated a core of 10,000 to 20,000 amateur breeders, another 100,000 beetle-keeping adults (mostly middle-aged men), and millions of children raising insects from eggs. They argued that with estimates of up to 5 billion non-native beetles in circulation inside Japan, it made no sense to talk about import controls. The real danger was not from animals entering the country but from those already here. Controls would only undermine the educational and moral value of collecting. Instead, like their allies in the Satoyama Society, they proposed to manage the situation with a campaign to educate their customers about the consequences of abandoning their animals.

  By the third public hearing, it was clear that the industry and its allies had won the day. Few beetle species were included in the final document, and those that were appeared under the nonrestrictive “organisms requiring a certificate” column.25 However, conservationists were involved in a larger struggle that didn’t solely target the commercial collectors. Many also disliked what they saw as the unnecessary destruction behind the vast private collections of scholars like Yoro Takeshi. They worried about the moral effects that the sanctioned killing of animals had on children. For a number of years, and with success in Tokyo and elsewhere, they had worked to stop schools from assigning the summer entomology projects.

  My first thought on hearing this was for Kuwachan and his dream of fathers, sons, kuwagata, and kazoku service. But collectors such as Yoro Takeshi and Okumoto Daizaburo were forced on the defensive too. Aren’t we, they argued, like Fabre, both scientists and insect lovers? Don’t we, too, have reservations about the beetle boom? Aren’t we, perhaps even more than the conservationists, committed to fostering a world of sensitive and creative nature loving, especially among children?

  It was true that the commercialization of kuwagata had been highly damaging, they agreed, although the decline in numbers was due as much to loss of habitat through real estate development as to overharvesting. But in general, collecting had no effect on other insects: their populations were simply too large and reproduced too rapidly to be affected. The more serious question was about killing. For Yoro-san and his friends, a truly deep relationship with other beings results from interspecies interaction, not separation; it results not from abandoning communication in the name of paternalist stewardship but from the radical change in consciousness that comes with developing those hard-to-acquire “mushi eyes.” To find insects, you have to understand them, you have to find a way into their mode of existence. The focused attention that is needed to enter their lives is a form of training, philosophical as well as entomological. It brings a knowledge of nature that is inseparable from an affection for nature and an expansion of the human world. Killing insects is painful, but it is also meaningful. Echoing Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, Yoro-san told us that he had enough insects now. He had stopped killing them. Okumoto-san told us he never killed them but collected live specimens and pinned them only after they had died a natural death.

  Shiga Usuke also experienced this unease. One year, on the anniversary of the opening of his store, he invited a Buddhist priest to come to Tokyo from the mountains and perform kuyou to console the souls of the departed. Instead of photos of the dead, he arranged specimens. Instead of favorite human foods, he arranged insect food. This was more than seventy years ago, in the 1930s. The sense of guilt about other beings, he writes, the sensibility that killing living things is wrong, is far from new. He tries not to care about this, but he can’t escape it. He often wonders which is better: to live as a mayfly for only one day or to survive as a specimen for hundreds of years.

  I’m happy that I’ve known insects, says Yajima Minoru. Shiga Usuke feels the same way and adds that it’s easy to get to know them. All you need is a magnifying glass and a net (maybe one of his inexpensive folding pocket nets).

  As you observe tiny insects, writes Shiga-san, you’ll grow more interested in nature and you’ll find more pleasure and more satisfaction in the world around you. There is really nothing better than getting to know insects. The relationship between human beings and nature starts with insects and ends with insects, he says. And then he adds: my life has been exactly like that.

  Zen and the Art of Zzz’s

  1.

  In 1998, I was lucky enough to get a job teaching at the University of California in Santa Cruz, a beach town in northern California. I hadn’t expected the offer and it came as a surprise. Both Sharon and I were raised in cities, and apart from my extended stay in Amazonia, neither of us had spent much time anywhere smaller. We were happy in our barely heated apartment in downtown Manhattan, even though the cold from the refrigerated warehouse below would often eat right through the floorboards and into our bones. But California seemed like an adventure, a whole new world. We packed up our stuff, rented a car, and set off like a couple of pioneers, trying to imagine what we’d find on the far side of the Holland Tunnel.

  2.

  Our favorite beach in Santa Cruz was at Wilder Ranch State Park. It’s called Three Mile Beach. To get there, we would walk along the cliff tops overlooking the Pacific at the northern tip of Monterey Bay. Because it’s so exposed, Wilder Ranch is usually windy and often much colder than Santa Cruz itself, which, only two or three miles away but sheltered by the bay, is a miracle of balmy weather.

  The walk along the cliffs is blustery but astonishingly beautiful. We couldn’t tire of it. The ocean, like all large bodies of water, never looks the same from one day to the next, and its mood always caught us unawares. Feet planted firmly on the cliff edge, high above the waves, we would look out on sea otters, seals, and sea lions far below. Sharon was the champion at spotting whales, and she’d point out gray whales and humpbacks spouting, sometimes pretty close to shore. We would tip back our necks, back, back, back into the sharp glare of the sun just as flocks of pelicans—the most inspiring of all—soared overhead, the whitest white against the bluest sky.

  3.

  Once we came across a dead whale. For days, we’d smelled the stench of something rotting as we drove out past the flat fields of artichokes that line the ocean side of Highway 1, a stench so strong that despite the summer heat, we rolled up the windows on our un-air-conditioned Datsun pickup and kept them up for miles. The next time we went to Wilder Ranch, we realized that the source was nearby. As we walked out along the cliffs, the smell grew more intense until the path fell away above a narrow inlet, and below we saw a discolored hulk, something indefinite that slowly became a whale.

  The animal was melting, dissolving into viscous liquid. Its mouth gaped open. Its massive penis dug awkwardly into the sand. Everything was awkward. Everything about it was wrong. Its skin peeled away in slimy blues and greens. All around it buzzed clouds of flies.

  4.

  When the weather was warm enough and the wind not whipping up the sand, we’d sit and read on Three Mile Beach. It was usually deserted, and somet
imes I’d strip off and swim out a short distance, cautious of the crosscurrents and riptide, the icy water shocking my warm skin.

  The beach is a pocket, a cove between the cliffs that slopes down gently into the ocean on one side and gives out into wetlands on the other. It has fine pale-golden sand and dotted clumps of tough marsh grass. We’d spend hours there, stretch out, breathe the sun into our bodies, the open sky above us, around us the roar of the surf as it rushed in, the tumble of smooth rocks as it poured out again.

  5.

  But despite all this, it was often hard to relax on Three Mile Beach. There were tiny flies, maybe the same flies that swarmed around the whale. They were fast and they were determined, too, impossible to deter. Every few seconds, one would deliver a sharp pinprick to an exposed leg or arm and then zoom off. The pinpricks hurt. They didn’t leave a mark, not even any redness, but they made it difficult to sit still and even harder to sleep.

  6.

  Recent research suggests that insects sleep. Or at least like most other creatures, they go through regular periods of rest and inactivity, during which their responses to external stimuli are greatly reduced.1 It would have been helpful if we’d known how to coordinate our visits to the beach with the flies’ inactivity, but that just wasn’t possible.

  The sleep research doesn’t investigate whether insects dream. That’s a little too speculative for biologists right now. Perhaps the methodology isn’t obvious. But what if they do … What do they dream of? Yet more unanswerable questions.

  7.

  The insects are all around me now. They know we’re at the end. They’re saying, “Don’t leave us out! Don’t forget about us!” I’m trying hard to include them all. But, honestly, there are just too many. Even the most ambitious and richly illustrated insectopedia wouldn’t have room. Even Vincent Resh and Ring Cardé’s monumental Encyclopedia of Insects had to perform some triage.

  The beach flies stopped us from sleeping. Their bites were sharp stabs. They refused to leave us alone. In other ways, they were very Californian. They kept repeating the same thing, a four-part mantra: This is our beach too. Learn to live with imperfection. We’re all in this together. The minuscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world.

  NOTES

  Air

  1. P. A. Glick, The Distribution of Insects, Spiders, and Mites in the Air, U.S. Department of Agriculture Technical Bulletin 671 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1939), 146.

  2. For these and other examples of airborne dispersal, see C. G. Johnson, Migration and Dispersal of Insects by Flight (London: Methuen, 1969), 294–96, 358–59. I have drawn heavily on Johnson’s classic book and on Robert Dudley’s The Biomechanics of Insect Flight: Form, Function, Evolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000) for this chapter.

  3. B. R. Coad, “Insects Captured by Airplane Are Found at Surprising Heights,” in Yearbook of Agriculture, 1931 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1931), 322.

  4. Glick, Distribution of Insects, 87. On ballooning, see Robert B. Suter, “An Aerial Lottery: The Physics of Ballooning in a Chaotic Atmosphere,” Journal of Arachnology 27 (1999): 281–93.

  5. Johnson, Migration and Dispersal, 297.

  6. See, for instance, A. C. Hardy and P. S. Milne, “Studies in the Distribution of Insects by Aerial Currents: Experiments in Aerial Tow-Netting from Kites,” Journal of Animal Ecology 7 (1938): 199–229.

  7. William Beebe, “Insect Migration at Rancho Grande in North-Central Venezuela: General Account,” Zoologica 34, no. 12 (1949): 107–10.

  8. Dudley, Biomechanics of Insect Flight, 8–14, 302–9.

  9. L. R. Taylor, “Aphid Dispersal and Diurnal Periodicity,” Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London 169 (1958): 67–73.

  10. Dudley, Biomechanics of Insect Flight, 325–6.

  11. Johnson, Migration and Dispersal, 606.

  12. Ibid., 294, 360.

  Chernobyl

  1. In English, these insects, classified as a suborder of the Hemiptera, are known as the true bugs.

  2. Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, Heteroptera: The Beautiful and the Other, or Images of a Mutating World, trans. Christine Luisi (New York: Scalo, 2001), 90.

  3. Hesse-Honegger reflects on her career in a number of short published articles and, more extensively, in two books: Heteroptera and Warum bin ich in Österfärnebo? Bin auch in Leibstadt, Beznau, Gösgen, Creys-Malville, Sellafield gewesen … [Why Am I in Österfärnebo? I Have Also Been to Leibstadt, Beznau, Gösgen, Creys-Malville, Sellafield …] (Basel, Switzerland: Éditions Heuwinkel, 1989). A short article that includes four good-quality color reproductions can be found in Grand Street 70 (Spring 2002): 196–201. Two beautifully produced exhibition catalogs also contain autobiographical accounts and useful critical essays: Hesse-Honegger, After Chernobyl (Bern, Switzerland: Bundesamt für Kultur/Verlag Lars Müller, 1992), and Hesse-Honegger, The Future’s Mirror, trans. Christine Luisi-Abbot (Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.: Locus+, 2000). My thanks to Steve Connell for all translations from the German.

  4. Hesse-Honegger, Heteroptera, 24.

  5. Hesse-Honegger, After Chernobyl, 59.

  6. Hesse-Honegger, Heteroptera, 9.

  7. Galileo Galilei, Sidereus nuncius, or The Sidereal Messenger, trans. Albert Van Helden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 42, quoted in Hesse-Honegger, Heteroptera, 8.

  8. Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, “Wenn Fliegen und Wanzen anders aussehen als sie solten” [When Flies and Bugs Don’t Look the Way They Should], Tages-Anzeiger Magazin, January 1988, 20–25.

  9. Hesse-Honegger, Heteroptera, 94–96.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Hesse-Honegger discusses some of this material in the works already cited. For more detailed accounts, see, among others, Ernest J. Sternglass, Secret Fallout: Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to Three Mile Island (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981); Ralph Graeub, The Petkau Effect: The Devastating Effect of Nuclear Radiation on Human Health and the Environment (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994); Jay M. Gould and Benjamin A. Goldman, Deadly Deceit: Low-Level Radiation High-Level Cover-up (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1990); and Jay M. Gould, The Enemy Within: The High Cost of Living Near Nuclear Reactors (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1996). On activist alliances between scientists and community groups, see, for example, Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Phil Brown and Edwin J. Mikkelsen, No Safe Place: Toxic Waste, Leukemia, and Community Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); and Sabrina McCormick, Phil Brown, and Stephen Zvestoski, “The Personal Is Scientific, the Scientific Is Political: The Public Paradigm of the Environmental Breast Cancer Movement,” Sociological Forum 18, no. 4 (2003): 545–76. My thanks to Alondra Nelson for directing me to Phil Brown’s work.

  12. For Busby’s second-event theory, see Chris Busby, Wings of Death: Nuclear Pollution and Human Health (Aberystwyth, U.K.: Green Audit, 1995), and Busby, interview by Sunny Miller, May 8, 2004, Grassrootspeace.org, http://traprockpeace.org/chris_busby_08may04.html.

  13. See, for example, the newspaper and magazine articles included in Hesse-Honegger, Warum bin ich in Österfärnebo?, 93–101.

  14. Hesse-Honegger, Heteroptera, 99.

  15. Ibid., 127.

  16. Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, “Leaf Bugs, Radioactivity and Art,” N.paradoxa: International Feminist Art Journal 9 (2002): 53.

  17. Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, “Der Verdacht” [The Suspicion], Tages-Anzeiger Magazin, April 1989, 34.

  18. Max Bill, Konkrete Gestaltung [Concrete Formation] in Zeitprobleme in der Schweizer Malerei und Plastik, exhibition catalogue (Kunsthaus Zürich, 1936), quoted in ibid., 82.

  19. Max Bill, quoted in Margit Weinberg-Staber, “Quiet Abodes of Geometry,” in Concrete Art in Europe after 1945, ed. Marlene Lauter (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2002), 77.

  20. Peter Suchin, “Forces of the Small: Painting as Sensuous Critique,” q
uoted in Hesse-Honegger, Future’s Mirror, n.p.

  21. Hesse-Honegger, Heteroptera, 132.

  22. Ibid.

  23. Ibid., 179.

  24. See especially Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (London: New Left Books, 1975).

  25. Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, “Field Study around the Hanford Site in the States Washington and Idaho, USA” (unpublished manuscript, Zürich, 1998–99), n.p.

  26. Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, “Field Study in the Area of the Nuclear Reprocessing Plant, La Hague, Normandie, France, 1999” (unpublished manuscript, Zürich, 2000–2003), n.p.

  27. Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, “Field Study in the Area of the Nuclear Test Site, Nevada and Utah, USA, 1997” (unpublished manuscript, Zürich, n.d.), n.p.

  Death

  1. Hans Erich Nossack, “Der Untergang,” in Interview mit dem Tode (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1963), 238, quoted in W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2003), 35. Available in English: Hans Erich Nossack, The End: Hamburg 1943, trans. Joel Agee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

  2. “Seen from Above,” in Miracle Fair: Selected Poems of Wisawa Szymborska, trans. Joanna Trzeciak (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 66. My thanks to Dilip Menon and Lara Jacob for introducing me to Szymborska’s work and to this poem in particular.