Sex on Six Legs_ Lessons on Life, Love, and Language From the Insect World - Marlene Zuk [7]
Pollination deserves a special mention, both because of its importance and because the recent decline in honeybee colonies makes the topic particularly timely. More than 218,000 of the world's 250,000 flowering plants, including 80 percent of the world's species of food plants, rely on pollinators, mainly insects, for reproduction. Losey and Vaughan cite a 1976 publication estimating that 15 to 30 percent of our diet in the United States relies on food sources requiring animal pollinators. In a typical fast-food meal of a hamburger, fries, and a milkshake, most of the components required an insect somewhere along the way; although the wheat in the bun is wind-pollinated, the other plants, from the cucumber for the pickle to the feed eaten by the cow, are insect-pollinated. Nicola Gallai from the University of Montpellier in France and her colleagues estimated the world economic value of pollination to be $153 billion, pointing out that this is nearly 10 percent of the value of agricultural production used for human food in 2005. Even more graphically, researchers with the Forgotten Pollinators Campaign in Arizona calculated that one in every three bites of food is made possible by a pollinator. We tend to think primarily about honeybees when it comes to pollination, but hundreds of bee and other insect species help pollinate crops, including the blue orchard bee, the southeastern blueberry bee, and the squash bee. Bees are about much more than honey.
Insects Are Hidden
DESPITE all of the aforementioned virtues, it is undeniable that insects will never fall into the category of what biologists call "charismatic megafauna," the large showy animals such as elephants and eagles that attract the attention of the public and help make the case for conservationists. When whales are endangered, people want to pass legislation and protest in storm-tossed boats. When a butterfly is endangered, people chuckle, and that's if they are feeling sympathetic. In the part of southern California where I live, endangered species are political footballs. Multimillion dollar housing developments can hinge on endangered species occurring on the land where they are planned, and when the Delhi Sands flower-loving fly was put on the list, people were not exactly imagining their wingbeats pulsing over the dunes as stirring music played, the way they would if the species in question were an eagle. It wasn't just that the flies were, well, flies, and hence lumped with vermin, it was that they were invisible to virtually everyone. Why should we save something we'd never even seen?
Yet this seemingly innocuous, easily overlooked quality of insects, belying the extraordinary activity going on under our noses, is exactly what draws those of us in the know to them. In 1991, the Society for the Study of Evolution held its annual meeting in Hilo, on the Big Island of Hawaii. I wanted to go for the usual reasons one goes to scientific get-togethers: people would give talks on their most recent work, I could meet up with old friends and colleagues, and I could recruit new graduate students or collaborators. Besides, I had never been to Hawaii, and I was also excited about seeing the sights, from volcanoes to birds that lived nowhere else.
I therefore decided to go a bit early to the Big Island, and entertain myself for a week or so before the meeting started. I have been studying crickets and their parasites since graduate school, and so it seemed obvious, at least at the time, that the entertainment would involve doing something with crickets in Hawaii. A colleague who had done postdoctoral work at the University of Hawaii in Hilo mentioned that an introduced cricket species, Teleogryllus oceanicus, was abundant on the lawns and vacant lots around the campus, and so I decided to collect some of them and dissect them to look for parasites. I now wonder just why this seemed to be