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15 Barrett Klein: Insect Epiphany
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Entomologist and author Dr Barrett Klein discusses cultural entomology – the study of how insects have shaped and influenced human culture and society. Taking us through the archaeological record, Klein discusses curious objects including a 3700 year old lice comb; ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics depicting apiculture; and a small paleolithic carving of a cave cricket. He also shares his research into honeybee society, insect sleep and what future insect industries may look like.
Bio:
Dr Barrett Klein is the author of The Insect Epiphany: How our six legged allies shape human culture. His research investigates mysteries of sleep in societies of insects, creates entomo-art, and is ever on the search for curious connections that bind our lives with our six-legged allies. Barrett studied entomology at Cornell University and the University of Arizona, fabricated natural history exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History, worked with honey bees for his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, and spearheaded the Pupating Lab at the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse. He celebrates biodiversity and the intersection of science and art, and believes fully that embracing the beauty of insects can transform our lives and our world.
Hosted and produced by Catherine Polcz with music by Carl Didur.
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Transcript
Introduction to Plant Kingdom Series
00:00:10
Speaker
I'm Katherine Poults and this is Plant Kingdom. I'm recording in Sydney on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and I pay respect to their elders past, present and future.
00:00:21
Speaker
Plant Kingdom is a conversation series about the sublime in nature and environment, featuring scientists, artists, researchers and writers. Each month we hear from people who have an intimacy with nature and we discuss their work, stories, and reflections from the field.
Humans and Insects: A Conversation with Dr. Barrett Klein
00:00:36
Speaker
Today's conversation is with entomologist and author Dr. Barrett Klein. In our conversation we spoke about the relationship between humans and insects, his research into honeybee society, and whether bees can dream.
00:00:49
Speaker
He is the author of The Insect Epiphany, How Our Six-Legged Allies Shape Human Culture. Here's our conversation.
00:01:01
Speaker
And I guess I just wanted to to start off, you know, reflecting back on your relationship to insects. They've been a big part of your life for a long, long time, right? Has it has it always been insects for you? What did you what did you love about insects from a ah young age?
00:01:20
Speaker
Well, I grew up in a house of artists. My mom and dad owned an art gallery. My mom is still an artist today doing some of her best work. And she kept a garden just outside of Detroit.
00:01:33
Speaker
And because vast natural landscapes weren't immediately accessible to me, what became really accessible was this diversity gorgeous insect life.
00:01:48
Speaker
And so I could explore that intimately, bring them in the house and raise them and introduce other people to insects and their wonders. And my mom started incorporating it in her artwork.
00:02:02
Speaker
And it just became so exciting to look at such a diverse array of organisms with their unique and varied behaviors right in my backyard.
00:02:15
Speaker
i spoke with researcher a while ago now, but she was telling me about this early plant memory she had, and it was kind of the emergence of this pansy kind of deep in her memory.
Insect Curiosity and Cultural Connections
00:02:30
Speaker
Do you have any early insect memories?
00:02:35
Speaker
Hundreds, hundreds. But one that I recount at the beginning of my book was particularly poignant. And though I'm not a butterfly researcher, finding ah really common But dead butterfly in the driveway when I was five years old was particularly exciting to me, really exhilarating because here I could hold in the palm of my hand a freshly dead, articulated, exquisite animal that I'd seen fluttering about and try to
00:03:11
Speaker
analyze it, assess it think about not only its beauty, but how the intricate parts work together. What once was this flitting butterfly was now a specimen I could consider in the palm of my hand.
00:03:28
Speaker
And so right then and there I had this nebulous epiphany at five that insects would be at the core of my existence somehow. And I started a little collection of insects when I'd find them dead and I'd bring some insects inside the house and that collection, that zoo grew of arthropods, or I could see how they'd reproduce, how they'd eclose into adulthood, spread their wings, as well as predate.
00:03:55
Speaker
And so it became this unending fascination that involved both the behavior as well as the aesthetics of this group of organisms.
00:04:08
Speaker
Children, I think, especially are keen observers of the miniature world. It is just part of their I don't know. Are they closer to the ground? It's heart it's how they experience the ground and the street. and It's a good question. I think because of the size, number, accessibility, as well as the range of forms, colors, shapes, an insect, especially a beetle, can be handled easily.
00:04:37
Speaker
by a child. E.O. Wilson, the famous entomologist, said that he went, we all go through a bug phase, he just didn't grow out of his. I think that's true for a lot of people. And if you grow out of the bug phase, what does that actually mean?
00:04:50
Speaker
Does that mean you don't pay as close attention to our nature's neighbors? Does it mean that you've moved on and away from our natural neighbors.
00:05:05
Speaker
I'm not sure what that would mean if you become if you if you once had an association with insects, but then distance yourself either consciously or unconsciously. Yeah, it's really interesting. And at that young age, you really have the imagination to inhabit their worlds with them.
00:05:25
Speaker
but one that I think of here that i guess insects like plants you know, there's such connectors to place for us too. And even in Australia, there's monarch butterflies here. They are an arrival from the late eighteen hundreds And it's interesting to think about how they live here with, you know, without their migration, without that kind of life history and and story that we're so familiar with in North America. Milkweed has made it here too. So thank
00:05:56
Speaker
so they can do quite well. um but But wondering for for you, are any of those those home insects you grew up with in Detroit really special for you still or really connectors to a place that you associate so strongly with with childhood in your home?
00:06:14
Speaker
Yes. Certainly, and I think two that pop immediately to mind are stag beetles and cicadas. The stag beetle and dog day cicada. So you'd hear that a in the trees, that cacophony in late summer by the male singing cicadas. And that was really mesmerizing. So that sound brings me back. There's nostalgia there.
00:06:38
Speaker
and i revisited revisited cicada songs in a couple of ways in the last couple of years i went to the ark of appalachia run by nancy stranahan in ohio ah beautiful repository and and and sanctuary for nature and two people led a workshop, the songs of insects, and we explored cicadas, but also orthopterans singing during the day or at night to figure out who they were, and that oral landscape, that soundscape was opened up to me.
00:07:13
Speaker
But also the stag beetle, we had a particularly bountiful year where the stag beetles would unearth them themselves and fly in their slow clumsy way and you have these little slick sleek black tank-like organisms all their intricate parts. And so I have all these memories associated with stag beetles and aesthetically they really compel me as they did Albrecht Durer with his early piece, Stag Beetle and others.
00:07:46
Speaker
You've got this elegance and power all wrapped in one. And to dive into even more of a microcosm to look at the complexity of just one single species out there.
Honeybee Evolution and Society
00:08:00
Speaker
i wanted to talk to you about European honeybees, which are a big part of your your research in life.
00:08:07
Speaker
And just, I guess, going back to to basics even, can you tell us a bit about honeybee evolution? How long have they been on this this earth? Flowers came first and then the bees? Is Well, you've you've got this beautiful um interaction, this co-evolution between angiosperms, the flowering plants, maybe 60 million years or so ago. And some of the early ah pollinators were just clumsy beetles, you know.
00:08:39
Speaker
making their way through the anthers, being powdered with the pollen grains, and then traveling to another flower and spreading it to the sticky stigma, the female reproductive parts of a member of the same species, so they could serve as a menage a trois, right?
00:08:55
Speaker
And then then you have more specialized pollinators, and the honeybees, I mean, bees generally, and there are well over 20,000 described species on the planet, are known to be hairy.
00:09:09
Speaker
And even though only mammals have true hair, the hair-like structures on bee bodies, the seedy, are forked. They bifurcate. They become branched.
00:09:20
Speaker
And therefore, they collect more pollen more easily and spread them more easily. So here you've got the herbivores, the vegetarians of Hymenoptera, the order of ants, bees, wasps, and sawflies,
00:09:35
Speaker
going around and almost all the species save for vulture bees are these um these vegetarians. And so building up a society as the genus Apis has with honeybees ranging from the tiny honeybee to a giant honeybee.
00:09:55
Speaker
You have got this Western honeybee, European honeybee, Apis mellifera, mellifera, just in between. And we've spread them around the world like wildfire. They're cosmopolitan because we have long relied on their beeswax, on their honey.
00:10:12
Speaker
Sometimes we even use their propolis and other components in their nests. And what how rare is it to have social insects like that in such complex bees society. What kind of is that the structure of their society? Yeah, if we think about the evolution of not only sociality but what we call you sociality or true sociality that even extends beyond humans why because rather than simply have an overlap of generations and care for young beyond your own immediate offspring
00:10:53
Speaker
and living together you've got a reproductive division of labor and in other species here and there you've got what's called again eusociality with this reproductive division of labor and there are only there's only one major lineage of mammals naked mole rats that engage in eusociality outside of mammals you've got a strange bunch of arthropods, especially insects.
00:11:24
Speaker
So most of the groups are insects and most of them fall within the order Hymenoptera of bees, ants, wasps, sawflies. And there's there's a reason for that ah genetically.
00:11:40
Speaker
And if we focus on the bees in particular of those 20,000 plus described species of bees, Sure, a minority of them are truly social, but they really capture our imagination and we've associated with them so closely and they appear so abundant oftentimes because you've got the swarming events, for example, or we've domesticated them. So you see the bee yards with beekeepers.
00:12:07
Speaker
So they're very much in our minds, our mindsets. And whether they be honeybees or bumblebees, And occasionally, say, sweat bees, the eusocial ones are the ones that we pay most attention to.
00:12:23
Speaker
Though, i'd argue we should really pay more attention to, especially the native bees that we have in North America here. And of course, native bees that you have over there in Australia.
00:12:36
Speaker
Yeah, it's lot to learn about the native bees, aren't there? They have longstanding relationships with humans as well. Oh yeah, they sure do. And exciting stories all. it's I was particularly drawn to honeybees, partly because i serendipitously became a field assistant to Tom Seeley, who's this amazing honeybee researcher.
00:13:01
Speaker
And I fell in love with the, not only the ease with which you can observe and study honeybees, but the crazy things they can do, like waggle dancing to communicate very distant sources of food and other things they require in the colony.
00:13:19
Speaker
And I wanted to leap off of what Walter Kaiser in Darmstadt, Germany started And that was an exploration of what sleep might look like in an insect.
00:13:34
Speaker
And so he first described it behaviorally, and I wanted to take it in different directions, looking at individuals as well as colony level activities. And that became a source of fascination for me too. That's so fascinating.
00:13:49
Speaker
And of course, sleep is something that you look at at your at your pupating lab at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.
Insect Sleep Research
00:13:58
Speaker
Can you can you tell us a bit about your your research?
00:14:04
Speaker
Certainly. I have several master's students, one, bar Bug Hartsock, he's working on sleep in a primitively wingless insect, firebrats.
00:14:15
Speaker
And Erica Bjorngard, she is working on sleep and anthropogenic or human produced light pollution's effects on sleep in monarch butterflies.
00:14:26
Speaker
And others like Danielle Hudson looking at solitary ground nesting bees and what they pollinate. so we do a mix of things. Two of the three I just mentioned were sleep related.
00:14:40
Speaker
But we think about not only sleep as it affects behaviors, whether it be social behavior, communication behavior in honeybees,
00:14:52
Speaker
We also look at visualizing science, how to most effectively visual visualize scientific concepts, ideas, and also cultural entomology or how insects affect and have affected humans throughout our history and around the world.
00:15:10
Speaker
Yeah, incredible scope of of research. And we'll we'll dive into cultural entomology um ah a bit more. But but back to back to sleep, can you, like how...
00:15:22
Speaker
How much do honeybees sleep? What is their sleep behavior? Well, the beautiful thing is if you peer within nest or you've created an artificial nest, a hive, and especially one that's sandwiched between glass and observation hive, you can begin to really look carefully at individuals and what might initially appear as an overwhelming bustling mass of bees that all look the same turns into especially if you individually paint mark the bees a soap opera of individual actions and personalities
00:16:05
Speaker
And so what I've done with honeybees is looked at the adults and how they change as they age their caste.
00:16:16
Speaker
They have half tasks that they change depending on age, which is peculiar. ah Not many social species do that. Oftentimes you'll have, for example, in leafcutter ants or army ants, you have soldiers with their massive mandibles.
00:16:34
Speaker
And then you've got smaller workers who do different kinds of work than, say, defending and smaller workers who do yet different work and so on. um And they will perform those tasks for the duration of their adulthood.
00:16:48
Speaker
But honeybees, a couple of species of wasps and others, engage in what's called age polyethism or the as they age, they have many polyethism animal behaviors. So they change behaviors as they age.
00:17:03
Speaker
So a queen honeybee will lay an egg in a cell made of wax that workers exude from their abdomens. And that egg hatches and you have stages of larval development and then a pupil stage.
00:17:18
Speaker
And the pupa ecloses as this winged adult and the matted kind of stumbling, schloop debina they call it in German, which is a freshly closed newbie.
00:17:33
Speaker
she will tend or clean cells for the first couple of days of her adulthood and then typically she'll transition into nurse-bee who tends the queen and brood and then typically that nurse-bee will transition into food-storer and then the terminal cast for the worker adult bees all female will be foragers that take the risky flights.
00:17:59
Speaker
And so you can look at how a honeybee sleeps. You asked how much they sleep. It really depends on where you are in your adult life. And so that first couple of days as a young adult, you sleep the most.
00:18:14
Speaker
You might sleep, say, 10 hours a night. Or actually, I should say, During a day because those young adult bees don't have any periodicity or circadian rhythmicity with respect to their sleep. they They're cathemeral like cats. They have cat naps all through the day. Or like newborns. Yeah, that's right. Exactly right. And then as they age, they become more and more.
00:18:42
Speaker
periodic and the foragers are night and day. They'll nap during the day, but they're typically on during the day and and sleep at night. And so they'll they'll end up sleeping roughly about six and a half, seven hours or so a night.
00:19:01
Speaker
so not far off from humans in fact a recent relatively recent study looked at several traditional indigenous peoples in africa and south america and found that they tended to sleep about i think it was six and a half seven hours or so depending on which group they were looking at And with the bees, you can look not only at sleep and who sleeps when, but where and what effects sleep or the lack thereof can have on their behaviors.
00:19:32
Speaker
Amazing. And so interesting, their journey into their. their fifth career as a forager. Like do that. Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. Imagine.
00:19:44
Speaker
So you think you'd think it would be more efficient to stick with your job through your life, but it makes some sense to end your life with the riskiest endeavors, namely scouting for food and foraging because not everybody returns alive.
00:20:02
Speaker
And Do they dream? Do we know? i don't even know if you dream. and And that's true because I mean, i I can say that I dream because I can report on it. And if I saw, if I measured your brain waves and I watched you behaviorally, I'd see indicators that suggested to me, okay, Catherine's definitely in rapid eye movement sleep.
00:20:28
Speaker
And that's the period in which we document the most narrative dreaming. Not all dreaming. Non-rapid eye movement sleep has dreaming as well. But that's where you'd expect most of the dreaming to occur.
00:20:41
Speaker
So if I roused you and asked you to comment or self-report, you might tell me about your dream. Now, if you're telling me the truth, then great. I've got evidence that you have dreamt as I imagine I dream.
00:20:57
Speaker
Now extend that beyond the two of us to other humans and then beyond Homo sapiens to other primates and beyond primates to other mammals and then beyond mammals to other vertebrates and then beyond vertebrates to other, say, invertebrate animals separated by over 500 million years of evolution.
00:21:18
Speaker
Then it becomes trickier because I can look at sleep states and I can measure depth of sleep indifferent in different insects. And I can see what titillating hints of what might constitute dreaming.
00:21:34
Speaker
But how to study that? Can we look for self-reporting in non-human animals? And I say yes, we can. i think there are opportunities.
00:21:45
Speaker
of self-reporting in dogs and potentially close relatives within the primates. Can we go beyond that? And so this is something I'm thinking more and more about. Can we document something akin to a dream in honeybee?
00:22:04
Speaker
So there are all kinds of amazing questions about not only dreaming what it is, Who does it? But what functions dreaming can serve? And that's a contentious literature.
00:22:16
Speaker
lot of debate about what functions dream serves from Freudian work that has largely vanished from our our dream researchers' thinking.
00:22:28
Speaker
more into psychoanalysis in say in a psychiatrist's office to thoughts about, thoughts that relate to the evolution of sleep and dreaming or thoughts related to, and the list list goes on. Yeah, it's so beautiful thinking about dreaming and learning and memory and,
00:22:57
Speaker
what that might what that might look like. yeah Yeah, this really no no reason to think there's no reason to think that, say, a honeybee doesn't or can't dream.
00:23:11
Speaker
Some of the questions that would immediately arise, is it homologous? Is dreaming due to shared common ancestry? Does it come from the same evolutionary origins as our dreaming?
00:23:22
Speaker
Or is it convergent? And if so, either either way, you'd have exciting... ah directions to investigate. If it's convergent, for example, that would suggest functional because why evolve something convergently independent of evolutionary origin ah if it isn't to achieve some function?
Metamorphosis and Adaptations
00:23:48
Speaker
What happens to the bees' consciousness when they are pupating or going through metamorphosis, like when their everything is changing, is it?
00:24:00
Speaker
No one can answer that question. So there are beautiful studies that document the pupation, especially of yeah caterpillars to adult moths or butterflies.
00:24:14
Speaker
And you can see that most of the body liquefies. Most of the bodily systems change radically. And so that's a huge overhaul. What transitions from your early immature stages to adulthood is largely unknown. There hints within a few species of what is retained, say memory-wise.
00:24:36
Speaker
But beyond that, it's a huge question mark. What could happen in the brain or the mind? An insect that undergoes such major transitions, especially if they're a fully metamorphosing insect, one that goes through a pupil stage, not like a cockroach or praying mantis or cicada that goes through nymphal stages and then adulthood, but but an organism that goes through a such a major transition from and think of what a monarch butterfly caterpillar looks like and what a monarch butterfly adult looks like.
00:25:14
Speaker
Do the brains liquefy? the the The nervous systems, as far as I understand it, remain pretty intact. But there are major changes like in some organisms. like For example, the smallest known flying insect...
00:25:34
Speaker
which is a megapragma fairy wasp, a fairy fly, which is a type of parasitic wasp, she will downgrade from her already small number of brain cells as a pupa to far fewer as an adult simply to downscale, to become smaller.
00:25:56
Speaker
Why? Because her life is laying eggs inside the eggs of other insects. It's amazing. I think you you write about this wasp in in your book.
00:26:07
Speaker
Oh, I do. Yes. And does she live for just a few weeks within such close proximity to, is it Barklouse that she... That's correct. Good memory. Yeah.
00:26:19
Speaker
Wow. you You've actually read this book.
00:26:25
Speaker
You don't get to talk about Barklouse very much. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, so her her ah whole miniature short life is really just in in close proximity. Well, it's so existential. I think that was really interesting, thinking about yeah the life cycle.
00:26:42
Speaker
And the idea that you would sacrifice the very nuclei within your brain cells to become smaller. to reproduce. but That's life.
00:26:54
Speaker
That's right. And I mean, we have a big bias that the adult is is the big deal. But for many organisms, it's the juvenile or immature stages that last the longest and are the biggest deal in some ways. Like, for example, a longhorned beetle. If you chop open that fallen tree and you uncover a large serambicid longhorned beetle larva, he may be 27 twenty seven years old you your beautiful cicadas that live their mysterious underground lives and then... Yeah, 17 years or 13, depending on which species of periodical cicada you're enthralled by. And then have their showy song long enough to mate and then...
00:27:38
Speaker
get eaten some point. That's right. it's like That's all you need. It doesn't matter if you're eaten as long as you sow your seed. Yeah, because some adults don't even eat, right? That's right. species No, you're absolutely right.
00:27:50
Speaker
In fact, the like the mayfly in the order aptly named Ephemeroptera, short-lived winged ones, I mean, in the extreme cases, and I mentioned this in the book, the female will rise as an adult for even minutes, mere minutes. it could be five to six minutes and she's dead. So she has to do a lot within those few minutes.
History of Human-Beekeeping Interactions
00:28:11
Speaker
And I guess looking at the relationship between humans and honeybees, when did society start domesticating honeybees? And the relationship started with robbing.
00:28:25
Speaker
So humans would rob honeybee colonies. You'd gather this omni-important, super useful beeswax. And of course the honey.
00:28:36
Speaker
And this may have even shaped or changed or given advantage to Homo sapiens. And... Our relationship certainly precedes the existence of our species. So we split from chimpanzees seven six to seven million years ago.
00:28:54
Speaker
And certainly along that path, we've exploited the bees for these valuable resources. Now, the first evidence that we have are cave paintings. And there you so you see thousands of year animals.
00:29:08
Speaker
paintings of humans that are climbing rope ladders on cliff faces and taking what they see as their share of the comb.
00:29:18
Speaker
And so you've got some famous examples in the Iberian Peninsula, also in Africa and one place in India. all of this robbing. There are even examples in Australia, although it won't be of the social honeybee that was later introduced there.
00:29:34
Speaker
And this transformed into who knows how old in Africa and elsewhere, the robbing, but under more controlled conditions. You hang a hollow along the bees enter and set up a nest, and then you pull them out.
00:29:49
Speaker
And then came more advanced means of true beekeeping, where you might have removable frames in a hive, where you can extract but replace or mix and match.
00:30:03
Speaker
And that way, that became much more versatile. Is that right? There were drawings from Egyptian tombs about domesticated beehives that were being cared for and tended to Oh yeah.
00:30:21
Speaker
So, so somewhere around 2450 BCE.
00:30:27
Speaker
fifteen b c e You had ah the earliest example from this temple and those five pieces of limestone are now in ah Berlin museum and they show pretty clearly beekeeping in action.
00:30:43
Speaker
Much clearer examples come later with full on bees in bas-relief and painted, but you've got this great evidence from probably five thousand years ago or close to it and we do have examples from ancient what is now israel so tel rehov has an amazing site that an archaeologist in Israel was able to explore.
00:31:12
Speaker
It was a huge enterprise, and this was several thousand years old, that it may have been more important in terms of the beeswax and the lost wax process producing metal objects by burning out the wax than the honey itself.
00:31:30
Speaker
Yeah, wax would be a pretty pretty rare substance in nature. And so useful in so many ways as an adhesive, in terms of sculpting, in terms of cosmetics, in terms of waterproofing.
00:31:44
Speaker
So it's been used for millennia ah across the world. do You pick a culture and wax is used in some fashion, whether it be by our stinging honey social honeybees or by stingless bees in Latin America, or as has been used by Mayan people and others,
00:32:03
Speaker
true bugs that produce a wax, at least within their bodies. So the the whole bodies are used. And remind us what what is honey How does a bee, before we pour it into our next coffee or tea, how does a bee make make honey?
00:32:21
Speaker
Well, a bee basically regurgitates or vomits the the the contents of its secondary stomach or crop within which she has temporarily stored the sweet nectar, which is primarily just sugar water, but has amino acids and traces traces of this and that.
00:32:43
Speaker
and then combines it with over 100 ingredients from her own body. So on the flight back from a flower, she's already converting that nectar to honey. And then she'll regurgitate it usually by trophallaxis or liquid food exchange to fellow bees say food stores or others in the colony and they'll take that away and feed the young or put it in some cells or she will do so herself but yeah it's just a converted nectar with many ingredients from her own body
00:33:18
Speaker
And it happens that they'll place it in exposed hexagonal wax and cells for a certain period of time. Let's say it's eight days or so. And during that time, water will evaporate.
00:33:33
Speaker
And once it hits the right viscosity, then they'll cap it with wax. Incredible. And the wax is a product of their body...
Cultural Entomology and "The Insect Epiphany"
00:33:44
Speaker
Yeah, if you look carefully inside a nest at the right time when they're building comb, you'll see a number of workers that are have these scales, these silvery white scales. They're secreting from the undersides, the ventral side of their abdomens.
00:34:02
Speaker
And they'll pull that up and they'll from leg to leg and then masticate it into the soft wax. They heat up their bodies, which probably helps to melt the wax as they place it in in position.
00:34:17
Speaker
And I guess this is what we've been talking about for a little while now, but what is cultural entomology?
00:34:26
Speaker
It's really a broad examination of the intersection between human culture and insects. And that can be in the arts, it can be politics, it can affect war, it can affect literature, music, it can affect every aspect of all of our professions or avocations.
00:34:48
Speaker
Well, let's let's talk about the Insect Epiphany, which was just released in 2024 Timber Press. How our six-legged allies shape human culture and a beautiful book, 367 pages of of art, science, and industry featuring hundreds of objects from museum collections and contemporary artworks and the stories of human and insect interactions over millennia.
00:35:18
Speaker
Incredible work. Can you introduce this this work and then what inspired you to write Insect Epiphany? Sure, well, the title was calculated to dissuade people from running away from insects, but rather to be curious and compelled by how could they be allies?
00:35:40
Speaker
And honeybees come to mind. Sure, we take honey and wax and we benefit from honeybees. But what's beyond that? with the one point one million described species and estimated ten quintillion in abundance what do they do and what good are they And so my aim, my primary objective was to get people who might be curious to start to appreciate insects as being essential partners and and contributing in hidden ways to our culture.
00:36:22
Speaker
When I started to think about what i what stories I wanted to tell, I knew it couldn't be a comprehensive book, so I wanted to to think about our associations with insects first in terms of working with them.
00:36:39
Speaker
And that's largely the products, silk, wax, honey, lacquer, various color colors or dyes, paper, chitin, venoms and poison.
00:36:50
Speaker
made useful for us. And then I decided, okay, we've got the using them or working with them. How about making them? if we can't If we can't use an insect in this way directly, can we fabricate an insect? And what use is there or value in creating our own insect part?
00:37:13
Speaker
And that opened up a world of biomimicry, where engineers and architects and others can learn from the body shapes and forms of insects for gain.
00:37:26
Speaker
And then the third section, was thinking head, thorax, abdomen, but I was thinking three sections. And the third one, i thought becoming an insect. And so I bring up examples of how some would fight like an insect or dance or act or dress or sound like an insect musically.
00:37:44
Speaker
And so these ah these allowed for me... to open gates and draw in all these marvelous stories and invitations for them to further explore not only how we relate to insects, but about the natural history of insects.
00:38:05
Speaker
Just a ah small task, isn't it? And I think how... Yeah, it it bridges history to looking to the future, how we might use insects in a different way, taking inspiration or learning from how they do things rather than using their their bodies in that way is really interesting. And we we talked about honey and bees, of course. Some of my other favorite examples that you spoke about, of course, were
00:38:38
Speaker
Bombix Mori and the silkworms and how silk has been in production since 2750 BCE in China. And it was such a military government secret, had that that process. and that Just like Cochineal, like upon penalty of death, it can't be released to the rest of the world. It was such an important, valuable commodity.
00:39:01
Speaker
Right, and the the epiphany moments that someone had observed to even learn how to exploit, you know, the the silk produced in the cocoons or the dye and to farm these insects. as so Imagine being that person who looks at, if we look to lack insects, and we say that person, that entrepreneur who says, look at that hard substance on a twig.
00:39:29
Speaker
Can I use it to make a hard substance that would benefit us? And then you start robbing from insects. And that's technology, early technology. Plants get spoken about as being a technology and it's the it's the same, isn't it?
00:39:43
Speaker
Yeah. Exactly right. And yeah, I guess looking into some of those future insect industries, you spoke about architecture, exoskeletons.
Insects in Innovation and Art
00:39:54
Speaker
Is there kind of a ah future industry or product?
00:39:58
Speaker
that is an active area of research and development that you think is particularly exciting or interesting or? Yeah, there are actually many, some at very small scales. I mentioned surgical tools, looking at the micro sculpture of, for example, a clanger cicada wing, all the way to can we use Insects bodies as protection on spaceships or suits or as building materials on Mars.
00:40:30
Speaker
And if you've got regolith, if you take say the substrate that you'll find on Mars and then mix it with something like chitin in the exoskeleton of crustaceans, including insects, will that give you something workable? And one lab ah proof of concept produced a wrench that works by molding it and casting it out of this chitinous material and also created a travel pod so there are lots of ways that you can think about not only extracting the actual exoskeletons of crustaceans to be useful for sculpting anything medically to tools to shelters
00:41:17
Speaker
all the way to what can they provide in terms of food? Can you bring crickets along? Can you bring honeybees along? Can you bring, for silk, Bombix Mori silkworm moths along?
00:41:30
Speaker
So traveling interplanetary space may benefit from having our insect partners along.
00:41:40
Speaker
Another aspect that I really loved in the book, I love museums, I love collections, I love nothing more. And you have so many amazing, awe-inspiring different examples of of history and art in the book. Some of my favorites were the engraving of a cave cricket on the bison bone from a French cave. just Just that, yeah.
00:42:08
Speaker
Oh, yeah. And the bison bone. Yeah. Brilliant. Yeah. Actually, of all the images in the book, and that's, I believe, the second image I have in the book of all the images in the book.
00:42:19
Speaker
That was the the first one I went for. And I felt the most important one to go for. And so I tried to track down, okay, I knew it was from Trefraire Cave System, and I'd read a lot about it in these early papers from the 1920s and 30s. And there was one really sketchy drawing that just really rough, let's say.
00:42:46
Speaker
and a bad photograph that was on the web. And so I wanted to track it down, see if I could go and actually photograph it myself. And I finally tracked down a relative, a descendant of the person who found that.
00:43:00
Speaker
And he didn't speak write in English. And I used really terrible French and Google Translate, for example. And he was so wonderful in that he had very recently photodocumented items from that cave and produced an exquisite image a version of what which you see in the book and graciously sent it to me and that was this Who knows how old some have suggested, 16,000 years old, 20,000, who knows how old, but the inscribed early cricket on this bison bone in a French cave.
00:43:43
Speaker
The earliest documentation or documented evidence of an artistic representation of insect by human. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, who we were sharing those capes with.
00:43:55
Speaker
Another example I loved was the the lice comb. That was thrilling. So that was that was one of many examples of timely serendipity. I paid close attention to the news.
00:44:11
Speaker
If you look carefully at any news source, you'll find an insect story pop probably daily. And here this story came up and I immediately contacted the anthropologists.
00:44:23
Speaker
He and another on the team supplied me with imagery to use. So I used a couple of those, the best images for the book. What are you showing? You're showing a nitpicker, a louse comb, an ancient one, so ancient that the Canaanites had inscribed a sentence, which use is the first sentence in the alphabet, or at least the first complete sentence or thought in an alphabetical script.
00:44:51
Speaker
and And it has to do with, may this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard. mean, how appropriate is that? Right. Life is not all poetry, is it?
00:45:06
Speaker
But how poetic that here we've got this ancient, conflicted and profound relationship yeah with our hexapod neighbors. yeah And here this one that at the very root of our language is related to one of these insects.
00:45:25
Speaker
Yeah. And that's, that was around 1700 BCE. When your children have lice, you know, it's just part of our our ancient traditions. It connects you all the way back to the Canaanites.
00:45:39
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And there's so many references in contemporary art as well in your work. Some of the my favorite ones is that insect collaboration that you spoke about, like,
00:45:52
Speaker
Hubert de Pratt's work with the caddisfly larvae, where he provided them gold, pearls, and gems to incorporate into their cases. And also Catananga's work with the 110,000 silkworms. He provided them cedar grids where they made city blocks or apartment blocks of moths in that kind of insect decision-making is really the art.
00:46:17
Speaker
I guess for for you, what interests you in insect art? I think because my upbringing was in a house full of art or the art gallery in royal oak michigan that was my second home helping to work at the gallery sweep up front and all this and meeting all these artists and having a a changing landscape with the walls of art in our home and at the gallery and so it was pretty obvious to me to connect art and insects
00:46:51
Speaker
because I'd written a few papers and a review about the use of insects as art media. And i mean, the most fun I had writing the insect epiphany was one going down all these rabbit holes and learning this and that with every page.
00:47:10
Speaker
And the second was meeting people, reaching out, collaborating with people. And that included artists, included engineers and scientists and others. In the closing of your you wrote...
00:47:25
Speaker
you wrote Our relationship with insects is ancient, deep, and conflicted. the ivory comb rooted out unwelcome parasites. They are great vectors of disease and destroyers of our crops.
00:47:39
Speaker
Because we share habitats, we compete for the same resources. We tend to bias our attention toward the faction of insects that pose problems for us. But of the 1.1 million described species, that's just less than 5,000.
00:47:53
Speaker
The vast majority play ecological roles we've only begun to understand and insects provide basic and profound cultural services, though few of us recognize their involvement and influence, which you pack a lot into into that paragraph. But I think what this work is doing is trying to increase our compassion or empathy or understand our relationship with them in a more complex way.
00:48:22
Speaker
in a more positive way. Yeah, that's well put. The compassion, the empathy, if we can spread our compassion or our extend our empathy beyond our human neighbors and our pets, for example, in our house, to those who we even depend on, I mean, I don't think that's asking too much.
00:48:46
Speaker
Yeah, what has been the kind of reaction from audiences and readers that you've observed or seen from this book? Oh, I've gotten so many great responses from people, and I love to hear how people, what they take away from the book.
00:49:04
Speaker
My favorite is to talk about it, give a talk, give a presentation, show specimens, show examples of cultural entomology, and then draw from people their personal experiences with insects. That's really exciting to me.
00:49:19
Speaker
Yeah, it's a really joyful book. And I guess that comes through the joy that insects bring you. It's really palpable in it. Yeah. That was a huge goal of mine.
00:49:32
Speaker
I didn't want to have a doomsaying book. And I didn't want to do what so many others have done and written about insects as disease vectors and crop destroyers. Because there's a lot of books about urban entomology or injurious insects.
00:49:51
Speaker
And again, that's looking at that tiny fraction of a giant branching tree of insect life. Yeah.
Lessons from Insects and Conclusion
00:50:02
Speaker
And it's also, you know, it's it's not about the catastrophe of species loss and biodiversity loss, like to shift things to you also need just that basic relationship, the, the love, the natural history, the curiosity of these different creatures too, which I really loved about this book.
00:50:26
Speaker
Thank you so much. I'm, And I have one last question, which as I thought more about it and went back to your book, and then I thought maybe this is not a good question, but i'm going to put it to you and then we can talk more about it What can we learn anything from insects? Are there any, ah what can we, what can we gain from looking at insects more closely? What can we learn from them?
00:50:49
Speaker
Honestly, I think we can learn everything from insects. Simply by associating with insects, we can attain an appreciation for the myriad, myriad, myriad, myriad stories they have to tell.
00:51:03
Speaker
And one takeaway for me is that there are a thousand and one stories that each species has to offer. Even the best studied insect species on the planet, Apis mellifera western honeybees or Drosophila melanogaster fruit fire flies, we've just opened up a box and the number of questions remaining is endless.
00:51:25
Speaker
So if these few best known species have a lot more to tell us, then think about all of the others, the species where we have destroyed and are destroying, that we're obliterating all the stories that we've lost.
00:51:44
Speaker
So to preserve and explore, to investigate those that are still with us through our investigations, provide not only a greater understanding of natural phenomena and how life operates, but can also provide a mirror so that we can better understand ourselves. I mean fruit flies certainly do that. we know We know our own biology from fruit flies probably more than any other species on the planet.
00:52:17
Speaker
Model organisms are so interesting, everything we've gained from them. One of the other quotes that you included in your in your book that is what I was thinking about when I was kind of thinking about this question again was from E.O. Wilson.
00:52:33
Speaker
E.O. Wilson's, that's right. So yeah, I pair that with the Holy Bible's proverb, go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise, which having no guide, overseer a ruler, provided her meat in the summer and gathereth her food in the harvest.
00:52:51
Speaker
I mean, that that tells us, wow, look at the ant, you can learn from the ant. And then E.O. Wilson, big ant biologist, As an entomologist who has spent most of his career on hands and knees studying the highly organized and super efficient colonies of ants, I'm often asked the following question.
00:53:08
Speaker
What can human beings learn from these insects? And the answer I give with my fingers steepled, my mouth pursed, and my eyes squinted is nothing. Not a thing.
00:53:19
Speaker
And it would be a major Aesopian error to believe otherwise. Now, That shocked me when I read that because Wilson has talked about how we can learn from ants in different ways.
00:53:32
Speaker
So Wilson, I think, said this at a talk at Harvard, probably my guess is to to separate himself from many of the controversial episodes in which he was embroiled. Because what do ants do? You have slave-making ants. You have ants that...
00:53:52
Speaker
do I'm tempted to say inhumane things but humans do these things so can we learn from ants well you yeah you want to pick and choose yeah I mean it puts the mirror on us right What lens do you put on insects and what, what message do you want to extract? Do you want to see a honeybee colony as a democratic entity? Do you want to see it as a monarchy?
00:54:21
Speaker
Will that help you decide how we should live? We should be mighty careful. Yeah. And it speaks to, yeah, our search for meaning understanding and trying to reflect how we live onto the world too, where what is really,
00:54:37
Speaker
fascinating about it is just how different other lives are
00:54:51
Speaker
that was my conversation with dr barrett klein thank you for listening and thank you to barrett for sharing his work plant kingdom is hosted and produced by me katherine pultz and our music is by carl deiter Listen to us wherever you get your podcasts and check out our website at plantkingdom.earth.
00:55:39
Speaker
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