Sex on Six Legs_ Lessons on Life, Love, and Language From the Insect World - Marlene Zuk [0]
Lessons on Life, Love, and Language from The Insect World
Marlene Zuk
Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Acknowledgments
References
Index
Copyright © 2011 by Marlene Zuk
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce
selections from this book, write to Permissions,
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zuk, M. (Marlene)
Sex on six legs / Marlene Zuk.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-15-101373-9
1. Insects—Behavior. 2. Insects—Sexual behavior.
I. Title.
QL496.Z85 2011
595.715—dc22 2010025829
Book design by Melissa Lotfy
Printed in the United States of America
DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Lines from The Lives and Times of Archy and
Mehitabel by Don Marquis, copyright © 1927,
1930, 1933, 1935, 1950 by Doubleday, a division
of Random House, Inc. Used by permission of
Doubleday, a Division of Random House, Inc.
Introduction
Life on Six Legs
Two-legged creatures we are supposed to love as we love ourselves. The four-legged, also, can come to seem pretty important. But six legs are too many from the human standpoint.
—JOSEPH W. KRUTCH
PEOPLE are more afraid of insects than they are of dying, at least if you believe a 1973 survey published in The Book of Lists. Only public speaking and heights exceeded the six-legged as sources of fear, although "financial problems" and "deep water" (presumably when one was immersed in it) tied with insects at number three. Dying came in at number six. I have no reason to expect that matters have changed much, and suspect that if spiders had been included with insects in the options, fear of the multilegged would have easily topped the chart. People have strong feelings about insects, and most of those feelings are negative.
And yet for centuries, some of the greatest minds in science have drawn inspiration from studying some of the smallest minds on earth. From Jean Henri Fabre to Charles Darwin to E. O. Wilson, naturalists have been fascinated by the lives of six-legged creatures that seem both frighteningly alien and uncannily familiar. Beetles and earwigs take care of their young, fireflies and crickets flash and chirp for mates, and ants construct elaborate societies, with internal politics that put the U.S. Congress to shame. And scientists—along with many backyard naturalists—keep on wanting to tell their stories.
It's not just that we publish scholarly journal articles about insects, or use them in our laboratories. Insects are special. Rats and mice are useful scientific tools, too, but although we personify them in fairy tales or cartoons, rodents are just not as compelling as bugs. Birds are beautiful, and we admire them and write poetry about their song and grace, but they don't get under our skin—literally or figuratively—the way that insects do. When it comes to insects, we write about Life on a Little-Known Planet, with Bugs in the System. We muse about Little Creatures Who Run the World, and we're only partly joking. Those of us who study insects are passionate about them in a way that can seem incomprehensible to outsiders. People get why Jane Goodall loves chimps; they are less sanguine about my fondness for earwigs.
Some of it, of course, is the sheer magnitude of almost everything about insects—they are more numerous than any other animal, making up over 80 percent of all species. Estimates of the number of kinds of insects vary wildly, because new ones are being discovered all the time, but there are at least a million, possibly as many as ten million, which means that you could have an "Insect of the Month" calendar and not need to re-use a species for well over eighty thousand years. Take that, pandas and kittens! At any one moment, say while you are reading this sentence, approximately ten quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) individual