- Cultural Entomology!
How insects have affected humans,
throughout history and across the world.
So why a fascination,
why an obsession with insects?
Why am I not talking about frogs or birds today?
I'll focus on the question
of why insects have so profoundly affected humans.
In different traditional cultures
and modern societies across the globe.
The why!
Why insects?
First thing we could look at is their ubiquity.
They're almost everywhere!
Anybody know where insects do not exist
on planet earth?
I have a book on the insects of Antarctica,
so no, they do exist in Antarctica.
Good guess.
Others?
Where can you not find an insect?
There are whole studies on aquatic entomology.
Close!
They're all freshwater, generally.
So, pelagic zones, deep oceanic environments,
you're not going to find insects.
But you are going to find their close relatives.
So, insects are recently discovered to be,
one lineage within Crustacea.
The crabs, the shrimp, the arthropods.
Jointed legged, exoskeleton bearing organisms,
of which insects are the most speciose lineage.
So, aside from deeper oceanic realms,
insects are all over the place.
So, ubiquity.
If we look at this pie chart,
literal pie chart of the diversity of life
that I created.
What is the biggest piece or slice of the pie?
Insects.
And if this spider web is representing arachnids,
and this, the rest of crustaceans,
then arthropods, this one phylum of animals,
represents a huge swath of the diversity,
of life on the planet.
At least of described species on the planet.
So they're everywhere.
And if insects are all over the place,
we're going to run into them all the time.
And what is the expectation, the consequence of that?
They're going to permeate our culture.
Whether it be war, politics, literature,
music, art, food.
List goes on.
So, we can start with insects as symbols.
So Mormons, have adopted the honey bee,
as a major symbol throughout their religion.
And then Egyptians use the honey bee,
scarab beetle within their hieroglyphics.
And if you've ever driven through,
and I've only met a couple people who have,
but if you ever driven through Enterprise, Alabama,
then you may find this Hellenic sculpture,
holding aloft, believe it or not,
a crop pest insect, a boll weevil.
So, once this boll weevil had eradicated crops,
what did this town of Enterprise do?
In an enterprising fashion,
they moved to different crops and technologies,
and that saved them.
So, the symbol of success?
Was their crop destroying boll weevil.
Insects appear on our currency,
and this is just a shabby, teeny, selection
and I've got others up here,
of paper bills and coins some millennia old,
like the bee on my ring, 2000 years old.
In which insects serve as symbols in currency.
And postal stamps!
Including this popular insects and spiders series.
From around the world again,
featuring our friendly neighborhood insects and arachnids,
within phylum Arthropoda.
(suspenseful music)
And what we wear!
Now, I cheated a little bit.
This robotic spider dress,
represents an order of arachnids,
a different group of arthropods.
But all the others,
including Corrie Moreau's tattoos
in the lower right,
with ants adorning her body
because she's a curator of ants
at The Field Museum.
Victoria Rivers took a shot of that shawl,
a Vietnamese shawl that includes
buprestidae, metallic, boring beetle elytron.
Those sheath-like forewings
that can be iridescent metallic.
And then modern wears.
Like these dresses that reflect moth and butterflies.
And anybody recognize the feature film here
in the lower left?
My mother is raising her hand.
Yeah, what?
No, over there.
Yeah, that's not my son.
Hunger Games.
And yes, that is my son in a bee outfit.
And up above, upper-left,
these are molas, fabriqu? and reverse fabriqu? works
by the Kuna of the San Blas Islands in Panama.
And often times, they feature natural history subjects.
Including insects and their folklore tales.
This is a human-headed fly.
So, even on what we wear.
So ubiquity, can serve as one mechanism
for inspiring us to have insects affect our culture.
Next, we can thing of negative consequences.
So, here's a beautiful illustration by?
Anybody know?
Yes, Robert Hooke!
One of the earliest microscopists,
and this was presented in Bubonic Plague time,
Black Plague times.
And so Samuel Pepys diary,
mentions seeing things like this.
And, you have to believe
that this might have affected people's hygiene,
seeing the giant organisms that are
in your clothing.
So, impacts can include disease.
Where insects can serve as vectors of disease.
Or destroyers of crops.
And simply, causing pain.
And I'll start with pain.
So, a colleague Justin Schmidt just published this book,
The Sting of the Wild.
And here's his famous hymenopteran pain index scale
on the left.
So if there is a member of the wasps, bees, ants,
order of insects that sting,
and all a stinger is,
is a modified egg laying device.
So no males will sting,
only females deliver the potent venoms.
So, instead of laying an egg,
Schwoop!
They're laying something else in your body.
And so, the pain index ranges
from this one, two, three, four.
And, the most severe includes Paraponera clavata,
the bullet ant.
Or a pepsis tarantula hawk wasp.
Now, my other colleague Michael Smith
at Cornell University,
decided to do his own pain index scale,
with just the honey bee.
And subject, yes was Michael Smith.
And, you can imagine what were some
of the more sensitive regions
of the Michael Smith bow plan.
But, I was surprised to learn that the tip
of the nose was ridiculously painful for him.
So, these two gentlemen together,
shared the Ig Nobel Prize this past year,
for this insightful work.
So, beyond pain,
far more serious than short term pain,
is vectoring of disease.
So, here's an image of a man with a flea
and we can talk about how Europe collapsed
population wise.
In some regions half the population lost,
to the flea bearing the pathogen
that causes the Black Plague.
We can also look at Napoleon down there, defeated!
At least, visually in this display
in Bern, Switzerland,
by a louse.
So, lice can serve as vectors of typhus.
And Napoleon's march on Russia,
failed partly due to the freezing cold,
but as a consequence of the cold,
soldiers that dropped dead,
had valuable clothing to keep their compatriots warm.
So what do you do?
You grab a coat, with lice,
potentially bearing typhus,
on your own body.
And so Napoleon famously,
retreated in defeat.
Probably at the tarsi of a louse.
Who is the greatest killer of all animals
on the planet?
Let's not blame Anopheles mosquitoes directly,
because they suffer the consequences
of plasmodium single-cell eukaryotes in their bodies.
But, this genus of mosquito serves
as the vector of malaria,
and some are more potent than others.
Like Plasmodium falciparum,
the deadliest of the mosquito malaria parasites.
So, biggest killer vectored by a mosquito.
And you have others,
Yellow fever, Dengue fever
or breakbone virus.
So, Dengue, the virus that causes Dengue,
is very similar, same group,
as the one that struck us very recently,
and you've probably been reading accounts
of the Zika virus.
So this has swept through,
it was in the Old World,
but it's swept through from Brazil,
all the way north through Mexico,
and will certainly pose a problem
in the southern United States.
It has been definitively linked
to microcephaly now.
Condition with a smaller brain,
and other complications prenatally.
And who's the vector?
The same mosquito that vectors Dengue
and some others, Aedes aegypti.
So we can go past the negative,
and enter the more positive.
So, what do insects offer?
Because, actually I should pause there.
I highlighted some nefarious,
hexapod foes of humans.
But they're a tiny, tiny, tiny minority.
If there are say a million,
or close to a million described species
of insects on the planet.
How many actually vector diseases
of consequence to humans?
Very, very few.
So, even within mosquitoes,
some of them don't suck blood
to feed their young.
Some of them are carnivorous on other mosquito species.
And no male will suck your blood,
they might suck nectar from flowers,
but I guess there's a theme here,
females causing some issue.
Alright, so here we've got an image
that I adapted from a cave painting
near Valencia, Spain,
of a honey robber.
Some say she's a human female,
that has climbed up and grabbed comb for the honey.
Stealing, and this was produced,
probably about 8,000 years ago.
So, our association with insects are pretty ancient,
and here is physical evidence of this association.
And yes, it was made into a Spanish stamp.
Let's look at couple of other attributes of insects.
From a human perspective.
Pollination.
If you like almonds,
so many other nuts and fruits,
a variety of crops,
that humans tend to embrace or even require.
Bees, and specifically Apis mellifera honey bees,
can be responsible for the efficient pollination
from male parts to female parts.
They're the sexual agents.
So, aside from honey bees,
which of course have great ancient ancestry,
several thousand years.
There are bee keeping relics
from Israel and certainly Egypt,
that show this association of aphid culture.
But you also have native bees.
Because the honey bee's been called the white man's fly,
because it's only about 500 years ago
that it was introduced to the New World.
We had eight families of bees,
there are over 6,000 described species on the planet.
We had a wealth,
and we still have a wealth of bees, native bees,
that aren't Apis mellifera.
And these little straws and sticks and bricks,
offer holes that you can set up
in your front and back yard,
that attract these native bees,
which are also really valuable pollinators.
So not only do you have the pollination of plants,
but bees can offer honey,
if they're honey bees proper.
Wax, propolis, and other beneficial products.
Another product inspired by insects, paper.
All these books aren't made of linen anymore,
these books are made of paper.
Ground up pulp from trees.
And it was R?aumur who first was inspired
by Polistes paper wasps
that build their own paper nests, right?
So all of this is from,
not Polistes paper wasps
but closely related vespid wasps.
And so the paper, is simply masticated
or chewed up, dead wood.
You find a log, chew it up,
add salivary agents,
and then lay layer after layer,
sometimes you'll see multiple colors in the paper.
So, they make that as the basis
for holding their young, their offspring,
holding food,
and sometimes as a protective envelope.
Well, this gentleman looked
at this a couple of centuries ago,
and said hey, we can learn from that.
And that was the inspiration, years later,
but the inspiration for using paper.
Food!
So, in some parts of the world this is a staple.
If you think of,
some of you eat beef and pork.
Inefficiency, I yell!
Because the amount of protein per dry mass,
is ridiculously low.
Some cases 16 percent or so.
But dry up, pulverize a cricket or a grasshopper,
or a giant water bug?
You might have 40, 60 percent protein.
And if you have termites,
and I've got some up here,
if you'd like to check them out.
You've got a lot of lipids and fatty acids,
that could be great calorically,
if you're in a desert for example.
So, food can be super important,
from a human perspective looking at insects.
So, this Man Eating Bugs
is a couple that travels around the world,
and looks at the different dishes,
traditionally incorporating insects.
And this runs through the beneficial,
nutrients, micronutrients, protein counts
of different insect groups.
This is a real thing!
So, future prospects of looking at worldwide consumption.
Their sustainable, potentially.
And they can feed communities
that can't afford other Proteinus sources of food.
So there are movements around the world,
for creating mass product of ground up
or pulverized insects as food.
And I have to ask,
who here has eaten an insect?
Raise your hand high.
Okay, now all of you raise your hands,
'cause you've all eaten insects
whether you know it or not!
If you've drunken glass of orange juice for example,
the Food and Drug Administration allows a certain parts
of fruit flies and the rest,
within that respected glass of orange juice.
And that's the same across the board,
you've all eaten insects.
Vegans, carnivores alike have eaten insects.
And, that can include not just the little random bits,
but the natural coloring agents.
If you look at the final ingredient,
of something that looks scarlet.
It may be carmine,
or cochineal, or cochineal extract.
And I've got a lot of it here.
Cochineal extract,
is simply the pulverized bodies of true bugs
that feed in Sonora, Mexico
on opuntia, prickly pear cacti.
So, they feed and the females are just basically blobs.
You don't see legs, you don't see ey--
they're almost nothing.
So people for centuries thought they were worms,
that are called vermes or kermes,
or seeds.
Until someone saw oh there's a winged male,
that's flying and mating with a female.
So you've got these little gloppy insects,
that if you crush just with your fingers,
you'll get this bright-reddish scarlet.
And that's been used to dye a number of things.
The Navajo rugs for example,
have extracted tinctured fabrics,
for their rugs.
So, Mauna La'i,
Ruby Red grapefruit drink,
a lot of beverages can include cochineal extract,
and we'll come back to cochineal in a moment.
My mother's here,
as a gift to my wife,
she gave the Game of Thrones recipe cookbook.
And what is one page?
Locusts, as he seized the bowl
and began to crunch them by the handful!
So, even in this fictitious realm,
insects are being consumed.
Other products.
Cochineal coupled with lac,
as in shellac from lac bugs.
So you can find on certain plants,
these true bugs,
that will exude this protective layer of lac.
Scrape that off, you can use it.
Traditionally anyway,
now shellac is made of different things,
but that's what made these albums, the LP.
There is some cochineal,
dying sausage, cosmetics, lacquers,
all manner of things.
Traditionally, the British Redcoats.
Red, because of this rare organic dye
from the New World.
There was something far less potent
in root feeding true bugs in the Old World.
So, to capitalize on this royal red,
it was very expensive.
And upon penalty of death,
no one could extract the secrets,
let alone the physical bodies,
the manifestations of this scarlet.
It was only until 1777,
that a Frenchman snuck out some
of these cochineal with a Puntia.
And he tried to place them in different areas,
and it only stuck in the Canary Islands.
So you'll find some cochineal being reared elsewhere.
Medicines, whether folk remedies,
or tried and true remedies.
Here are some supposed anti-cancer medicines,
based on insects.
At least anti-bacterials.
Then you can co-opt the very sensitive,
sensory modalities of insects,
to your favor.
So, for example in this case,
you can use honey bees that smell so well,
that they can be trained to detect anything
from gasses emitted by landmines,
to in this case the presence of tuberculosis.
There has been a German airport that has boxes
with three honey bees,
used to sniff out bomb making material
that comes through the luggage security.
You could invest in the VASOR 136,
in order to have 34 cartridges filled with honeybees,
to find whatever you train them to.
And it's pretty easy to train a bee.
Basically, you give them sugar water,
tap it to their antenna,
they'll extend their tongue.
Now, couple that with an odor,
what do you have?
You've got a Pavlovian response eventually,
when you remove the sugar water
and just present the odor,
and bloop!
Instead of drooling,
they stick out their tongues.
Well, if you see a bee stick out her tongue,
if you trained it to a landmine odor,
and you present it with landmine odor,
ding ding!
It's a good indicator that you've got a landmine.
Aw, man!
This is just a, really a teeny short list.
We could focus the entire time on biomimetics,
engineering inspiration,
from insect morphology and physiology.
In the upper right,
you've got micro-flying machines,
hexapodal robots out of Georgia Tech
and other places.
To the left you've got forensics,
say detectives basing the age of a decomposing body
on what arthropod stages are found present
on or in that body.
This has helped solve many a crime.
And then, you've got on the lower right,
a means of staving off elephants
from tromping through villages.
Set up a honey bee colony.
And that buzz,
the sound of the bees,
keeps the elephants away.
Next, look at these freshwater dwelling,
immature insects.
These can be really excellent indicators,
as for the quality of the waterways.
How about sports?
Recreation.
Warfare, defense.
In this case,
legend has it an Asian prince,
witnessed a mantid with the speed and strength
grabbing a cicada and then consuming it.
So, he adopted that speed and strength
in a martial art,
and there are different forms
of mantis style kung-fu.
Now, the legs on a mantis are thin and weak,
so he added monkey style legs.
So mantis style kung-fu,
is really fasc--
You wanna come up, I'll show you what to say.
You sure?
On mantis style kung-fu?
Come on up here.
Come on up and punch me.
You know you wanted to.
You sure?
You wanna come up?
Alright, come on.
Okay.
So, if you're practicing monkey style legs,
it'll be very different from what I'll show,
so I'll just stand up straight.
But if you punch me,
so one thing I can do is just parry that, right?
And I can grab that and pull forward.
So this raptorial foreleg,
is incapacitating this arm,
and then you can do all kinds of things, right?
So it's this first sparring,
and this grab that mimics that mantid.
Now, you're on TV.
(laughing)
So, mantis style kung-fu,
just one of many ways that insects have affected
how we physically behave.
Here's one of my favorites.
So, founded the Boy Scouts,
famous individual.
Here's a book, My Adventures As A Spy.
So during war-times,
what did Sir Powell do?
He would collect butterflies,
he would collect insects.
Nobody thought twice about it, right?
Even if he approached fortresses.
So his sketches in his notebook,
innocuous sketches of Lepidoptera,
the order of moths and butterflies.
Were actually quite precise
ground plans of different fortresses.
With symbols representing fortress guns,
field guns, machine guns.
So he could very easily exit,
even if his field notebooks were examined,
with all their beautiful insect drawings.
Humans using insects for evil.
Well, maybe not evil.
Then we can think about lessons of social insects.
If you look at,
say tens of millions of years of evolution,
honing the traffic plans of ants,
the foraging plans of bees,
the swarming behavior and efficiency
of finding a new hole in a distant tree
to start a home.
Then maybe we can better understand
how to more efficiently organize our cities,
our traffic plans.
And so you've got a number of papers that do this,
Ant traffic rules, above.
And these are models based on natural, empirical data.
Then you've got Thomas Seeley's book,
Honeybee Democracy,
which the final chapter,
cleverly examines,
not only how honeybees operate,
but how humans operate in certain respects,
and what are the similarities in decision making.
Wisdom of Bees, can we learn from social insects?
Okay.
Why insects?
The final category,
I'm sure we could all come up
with many more categories,
is the aesthetic sense,
the beauty that comes with insects
inspiring us.
So, I'm gonna take a biologist's approach
to this beauty.
So, why do flowers exist?
It's not for humans.
It's to attract pollinators.
Opportunistically we love flowers,
we tend to breed flowers
because we really are attracted,
to what has evolved,
to attract different species.
Well, if we look at gorgeous insects out there,
iridescent wings of a Morpho butterfly,
the multiple colors of a grasshopper,
the orange, black, white banded Monarch butterfly.
What are we looking at?
We're looking at either something,
that is display for courtship,
for sexual selection purposes.
We could be looking at camouflage, crypsis.
Looking like your environment,
so you look like a leaf or something like that.
Or, aposematism, warning coloration.
You'll remember yellow-black bands,
or red, or high contrast patterns.
If you take a nibble and it tastes awful.
So, if you sequester noxious chemicals in your body,
and you can just display that willy-nilly,
you can potentially be safe,
if organisms that would serve as potential predators,
avoid you and your kin,
or at least those belonging to a similar ilk.
You can procure benefits,
by looking like others that are chemically defended,
even if you're not chemically defended yourself.
And we can find beauty
in these patterns and these colors.
So, do you confer benefits?
Let's look at a couple of human derived examples
inspired by insects.
Anybody guess what that insect is on the left?
This is from a thousands year old petroglyph.
So think four bigger legs,
and raptorial teeny forelegs.
What do you think those circles represent?
They're not wings,
at least by some interpretations.
Ripples on the water?
Maybe Gerridae, family of water striders.
So this is really ancient,
on the right you've got Joan Miro's le crayon,
The Cricket.
An abstract piece based on the cricket.
And we happen to be fortunate enough
to have the world's greatest artist in the room,
happens to be my mother right there.
And she produced this mars beetle.
So inspired thinking cosmically,
with respect to insects as symbols.
Then you've got Max Ernst and Salvador Dali.
Thinking in terms of surrealism and dreams,
and how influences from insects,
can permeate a dream.
So I don't know if you can spot it,
but right above that pomegranate on the lower right
of that Salvador Dali image,
what do you have?
You've got a little honey bee,
which purportedly inspired her whole dream.
So an artist can have great impact
in a variety of ways.
Cornelia Hesse-Honegger,
from Switzerland,
is an artist,
she's an environmentalist,
she's an activist,
and she's become somewhat of a scientist,
at least an amateur scientist.
What she looks for,
is mutated insects primarily.
Sometimes leaves of oaks,
but primarily mutant insects.
That had been distorted physically,
by radiation output according to her studies,
produced by nuclear power plants.
Even the cleanest ones,
as in Switzerland.
But she's gone to Three Mile Island, Chernobyl,
and collected insects and shown
that you've got a number of them,
that have been affected adversely.
What does that say about humans?
So she makes claims,
to try to affect our decision making
in terms of sustainability in our energy choices.
Bill Logan in New Jersey,
produces these exquisite fly ties.
When I first saw one,
a friend of mine just said, "Here, look at these photos.
You gotta go to this art exhibit."
And I looked and said, "Well, these are beautiful photos
of stone flies."
And I thought there must be something more to it.
And I looked through the photos,
and then one showed a ventral view
with a big hook.
So he'll spend over a hundred hours,
traditional fly tying methods
to produce these hyper realistic fly ties.
And he'll make them look really realistic
in terms of some damage.
Like that circus,
that posterior appendage on the right,
broken off as you might see in nature.
Conscious choice.
Kazuo Kadonaga,
Japanese artist who looks at sericulture,
traditional methods of producing silk
and in this case he produced 110,000 cocoons
that he heat treated or killed,
after moving those crates all around
so they'd be evenly distributed
to make commentary about sericulture,
and human culture.
Then you've got Steven Kutcher in California,
and he'll dip the tarsi of beetles
and other insects in paints,
and he'll collaborate with his insect friends.
And create these canvases of abstract works,
that he can somewhat manipulate by presenting light
and other things.
One of my favorites Harry or Henry Dalton,
was a Victorian microscopist.
And what he did,
was he'd take a pig bristle,
and pick individual scales,
these are modified, seedy, hair-like structures
on another insect that form the scales
that form the color patterns on butterfly wings.
He'd take individual scales with a pig bristle
and arrange them with diatoms and still lives
with no adhesive on slides.
And some of these exist in the world,
they were shown at the Museum of Jurassic Technology
and here are some of those still lives close up,
and far away.
Jan Fabre produces these works made of entire insects.
So instead of just the paint tracings by Steven Kutcher
or the individual scales as in Harry Dalton's work.
Here, Jan Fabre will take entire beetles
and form these exquisite displays.
Jennifer Angus at UW-Madison,
produces geometric displays
with entire insects as well.
And she has a present display
in the Smithsonian right now.
Catherine Chalmers.
When this was published
this painted American cockroach,
Periplaneta americana on the right,
as the cover of Art in America,
I thought oh, this is interesting,
well, let's see what letters come up in the next issue.
And all the letters that were published were like
how could you do that to a cockroach?
I thought, wow probably people who wouldn't think twice
about crushing the same cockroach.
But, something about her work,
brings a humanity,
to these very distant relatives,
these cockroaches.
Such that whether or not she's painting an insect
or creating faux executions of cockroaches,
no cockroach was harmed in any of these exhibits,
she switches it out at the last minute
with a carcass of an insect.
But, people respond really strongly, viscerally.
Because they see a humanity in an insect.
And if you fear honeybees for example,
it's a different scene if you put a dab
of paint on one,
and watch that individual.
Then it becomes more of a soap opera.
And then there's Hubret Duprat in France,
and he takes individual caddisfly larvae
that often times build,
depending on the species,
these protective cases around their bodies.
Sometimes out of pebble,
sometimes out of sticks,
and what he'll do
is he'll take the back end off,
and poke the posterior end of the larva.
She'll wiggle out,
ditch that case,
and now offer gold spangles and pearls.
I know it's a tough collaboration,
because as you can see in the upper left,
they can be really finicky.
So, uhh forget that one.
Ugh, forget that one,
and then maybe this one.
I'll incorporate with cephalic silk glands
to glue it essentially,
or sew it on my cloak, on my case.
Hubert Duprat.
The Stouts in the U.S. do a similar operation
out of their garage producing earrings.
And Yukinori Yanagi,
World Flag Ant Farm and other projects,
are linked ant farms,
made with colored sands,
to form flags.
The ants will distribute,
the colors of those flags.
Breaking down the political boundaries,
that we've artificially imposed upon ourselves,
in the world.
You also have insects inspiring music,
dance, literature.
And in a moment,
you're going to hear a traditional folk song,
by the Dong in China.
(singing in foreign language)
Okay.
What insects do you think they're mimicking?
The heat of the summer in the trees.
Cicadas.
(singing in foreign language)
Males calling with tymbals, females.
Lower right, modern dance in China.
Center, a theatrical performance
of Kafka's Metamorphosis.
On the left, made into a film directed by Teshigahara
is Kobo Abe's Woman of the Dunes,
one of my favorites.
An entomologist roams the deserts in Japan.
I won't send any spoilers your way.
And then music Syd Barrett.
(singing in foreign language)
Graeme Revell actually incorporating insect songs
in his electronic music.
And then I put that up,
just because one of my favorite artists.
You've got Tessa Farmer,
with her little fairies made out of insect wings
and vine roots,
forming these spear wielding,
tirade or hoard,
atop other insects or animals.
(singing in foreign language)
(classical music)
Film!
There are hundreds of films
that feature insects central role.
Ladislas Starevich,
a Russian who produced these beautiful,
stop-motion animations.
So imagine insects with wire armatures,
he moved them do-do-do-do-do,
frame-by-frame-by-frame.
And he'd have these little scenes
like this grasshopper painting a scene,
and these tragic tales at Christmas,
you can find all of these on YouTube.
(crickets chirping)
I'll only show a bit of Isabella Rossellini's
Green Porno.
- A queen bee.
I would be very fat,
and do nothing else but lay eggs.
(eggs bouncing)
The unfertilized eggs,
will hatch my sons.
The fertilized eggs,
will hatch my daughters.
If I were a daughter,
I will be sterile
and I would do all the work.
- She has a whole series of these inspired by insects.
We can also think about how insects
have affected education.
How can you use insects to talk about behavior,
ecology, evolution,
principles in a generalizable way.
So, a field guide I illustrated with John Abbot.
Looking at bees' knees, orchid bees' knees,
to distinguish you can educate,
using insect models.
Lorenzo Possenti in Italy,
produces these exquisite gigantic insects,
he devotes his life to this.
In order to teach about insect not only morphology,
but diversity and sometimes in ecological contexts.
Science!
Insects as model organisms.
Of course there's drosophila melanogaster,
the fruit fly.
That has been the staple
for better understanding genetics,
including in humans,
because so many of our genes have been conserved.
Alright, it's time to focus on the Driftless zone,
to bring the relevance locally.
So how are insects really relevant,
right around this area.
And I just picked a handful of examples,
I could've included a lot more.
The first, we talk about bee products.
So, bees are kept all around the Driftless zone area.
Pollination is very important,
honey is very important,
wax can be very important,
and even deodorant can be very important.
This is a local company
that includes bee products like wax.
And it comes in an unscented variety.
Sports, taking on the image of a swarm
because who wants to face a swarm of anything, right?
And, this national lacrosse team outside of St. Paul,
existed from 2004 to 2015.
But, obviously they swarmed off to Georgia.
So, we no longer have that in the Driftless zone.
But we do have mayflies.
And I've been snapping my fingers in dismay,
every summer I'm doing work in Panama
and people write me and said,
have you seen this it appears on a radar,
there's so many mayflies.
And I snapped photos of them filling gas stations.
Piles and piles of mayflies.
Order Ephemeroptera,
short-lived, winged insects.
Because in some cases while they may live weeks,
months, as immatures.
It can be as short as a day,
as an adult.
So, they better reproduce and reproduce fast.
So, I looked up through the National Weather Service,
what they say about mayflies and I love it.
They show the mayfly, they talk about it,
and I put a star here,
mayflies are sensitive to gross organic pollution,
and their presence is good news ecologically
because it means that pollution such as sewage,
is not present in large amounts.
So, again here's an insect serving as a bio-indicator,
and kudos to the National Weather Service
to point out the attributes,
even it's from a human perspective of insects.
So what does that affect?
Well local recreation, fishing.
So, some of you may have passed this nearby,
the Driftless Angler.
You can hire people to take you on tours
in the Driftless zone for fishing.
And this culminates in a beautiful piece of art
in the form of both a science and an art book,
based on mayflies of the Driftless zone.
So, before I totally wrap up,
a project that I'm really excited about,
and it's a long term project,
involves a database on cultural entomology.
So students of mine are helping me build
what I hope will be the largest resource online,
focusing on all these different categories
of how insects affect humans
and have throughout history and across the world.
The idea is,
that maybe an historian,
a student, a teacher, a scientist, an artist,
can search by insect.
Popular common name or scientific name,
region of the world.
Maybe you wanna look up mosquito,
Africa, World War II and see what comes up.
Either in art or politics.
The idea is you'll have this potential Wiki,
where people can contribute en masse someday
in the future.
So, that's what we're working on now
to bring all this together.
So, at the end after questions,
you're more than welcome,
I'd love to give you a little tour
of a teeny sample of tangible,
cultural entomology items I've brought.
But I'd love to take questions,
and your thoughts about how insects
have affected your lives.
Thanks a lot for coming, first of all.
Really appreciate it.
(applause)