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By Root 283 0

lived on a passionflower vine in our yard, year after year, never tiring of watching as the eggs hatched into threadlike caterpillars that grew and grew inside my jars, eventually hanging upside down from a stick and becoming a gaudy spangled adult. No special equipment necessary, no need to venture anywhere my mother would disapprove of or that cost any money at all. And the results were just as compelling, maybe more so, than if I'd had a telescope or a dissecting kit or a way to watch the social lives of wolves.

This equal-opportunity entomology has been going on for centuries. Maria Sibylla Merian was a German-born painter whose work is rediscovered and shown every few decades; she was recently featured at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Merian documented, many years before the naturalists of the time, the life cycles of butterflies, moths, and other insects. Her work is exquisite from an aesthetic perspective, but what interests me more is that as a woman in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, she was able to make scientific contributions that would have been impossible in virtually any other field, simply by virtue of using the specimens from her own garden. She eventually traveled to Surinam to study the brilliantly colored insects of the steamy jungle, but that was after her interests had been firmly set. Although she, like many other women scientists and naturalists, faced opposition for her unfeminine activities, the accessibility of her subjects meant that she could keep doing the work she loved.

Interestingly, professional entomology has become one of the more male-dominated fields of biology, perhaps because of its connections with crop pest management and agribusiness, both of which tend to attract men. Regardless, it still appeals to children, both boys and girls, as my experience testifies. And even now it is not impossible to make important discoveries without a lot of technological gizmos. A group of scientists working in Brazil recently discovered that caterpillars parasitized by a wasp continue to make an unwitting sacrifice even after the wasp larvae have emerged from their host to pupate on a nearby stem. The ravaged caterpillar stands guard over the developing wasps and defends them against intruders with vigorous swings of its body, a most uncaterpillar-like behavior. Apparently the wasps exert a kind of mind control over their host that persists even after they leave it, doomed to die before it will ever become a moth.

This gruesome story has many arresting elements; most of the news coverage used words such as voodoo and zombie, as with the jewel wasp mentioned above. What I like most about it is that the scientists who discovered it were just watching the goings-on in a guava plantation, an illustration of what you can find if you are just paying attention. High tech has its place, of course, and I would hardly champion a return to simpler science or the eschewing of DNA sequencers. But I take great pleasure in the unifying ability of studying bugs. It's not just that insects level the playing field: they even supply the toys. The chapters that follow will let you play with them, will let you in on some remarkable new truths, in a way that would be impossible with most other fields of science.

Insects Are a Mirror

ALONG with all of their alien behavior, insects seem to do much of what people do: they meet, mate, fight, and part, and they do so with what looks like love or animosity. Dung beetles take care of their helpless squirming young, doing almost everything human mothers do, short of giving their baby a bottle—or parking it in front of the television. Ants keep aphid "cattle," moving their herd from place to place and milking the honeydew the aphids produce. Bees convey the location of food using symbols. Unlike any other nonhuman animal, some insects live in sophisticated hierarchical societies, with specialized tasks assigned to different individuals and an ability to make collective decisions that favor the common good. They mirror most of our familiar behaviors.