Insectopedia
Page 18
Intensely colored, intensely subjective, dedicated on the opening page to both “lovers of art” and “lovers of insects,” Merian’s animals are oversize, the plants are shrunk, the proportions distorted; the animals in Merian’s Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, the masterpiece she published in Amsterdam in 1705, “appear palpably close, yet imaginary and distant at the same time,” as if we, too, are running a lens over their surfaces.15 Yet as never before, the drama of metamorphosis is given unity. On the same page, she paints the larva, the chrysalis, the butterfly, and the plant on which the caterpillar feeds. (Sometimes she includes the eggs, proof that she had assimilated Francesco Redi’s 1668 demonstration that maggots developed from eggs and not via Aristotelian spontaneous generation.) It is a dynamic, interactive world. Its principles are transformation, holism, and the overthrow of that earlier taxonomy of Aristotle, Aldrovandi, and Moffett, which segregated the insects into those that crawl and those that fly and, without knowing what it had done, sundered the butterflies and moths from their larvae.
7.
Michelet greatly admired Merian’s paintings. He embraced his fellow traveler in the land of the insects and felt a secure bond across the centuries. Her paintings, he thought, not only expressed the feminine qualities that he expected to find—“the softness, breadth, and fulness of the plants, their lustrous and velvety freshness”—but remarkably also had “a noble vigour, a masculine gravity, a courageous simplicity.”16
He examined the hand-colored copperplates that fill the Metamorphosis. All is change, all is impermanence, all is connection. The vitality of life itself erupts against the artificial tidiness of scientific categories.
Nonetheless, the questions that gnawed at him are not solved here. What is the germ that carries through from one form to another, from one being to another? What is it that persists? What kind of creature is this? Is it one or is it many?
In Japan many centuries earlier, the Lady Who Loved Worms spent her days collecting caterpillars from her garden, ordering them, examining them, admiring them, exclaiming over them. She was contemptuous of butterflies, worthless things compared with the larvae from which they came and which could furnish her with, for example, silk. She liked the little crawly things. She was drawn to things that lacked pretense. She admired the fundamental phenomena—that is, the ever-changing reality behind the “reality” in which we foolishly live. It was, she said, “the essence of things” that interested her; it was the honji, a Buddhist term that the unknown author of the famous twelfth-century story uses to mean something like “original form,” “original state,” “primary manifestation.”17 “The way people lose themselves in admiration of blossoms and butterflies is positively silly and incomprehensible,” said the young lady. “It is the person who is sincere and inquires into the essence of things who has an interesting mind.”18
But Merian, riding her colonial donkey through the forests of Suriname, sailing to Amsterdam in a flurry of self-publishing entrepreneurship, found herself somewhere else entirely, completely disconnected from such thoughts. Her energies were observational, her analytics were visual. She must have abandoned ontological rumination when she quit West Friesland and tired in the most profound way of self-denial. Her principle is beauty, its creation, its appreciation, the surrender to its ineffability. “One day,” she writes in one of her unaffected commentaries on the Suriname engravings, “I went far out into the wilderness and found, among other things, a tree the natives call a medlar.… There I found this yellow caterpillar.… I took this caterpillar home with me, and it soon turned into a light-wood-colored pupa. Fourteen days later, near the end of January 1700, a beautiful butterfly emerged. It has the look of polished silver, covered with the most appealing ultramarine, green, and purple; it is indescribably beautiful. Its beauty cannot be rendered with a brush.”19
And Michelet, straining too—though in a different way—to grasp both the poetics and the mechanics of transformation, found himself meshed in a metaphysical limbo. History plays strange games with historians. Have you ever visited the Puces de Paris Saint-Ouen, the famous flea market in central Paris? To get there, exit the metro at Porte de Clignancourt and look for the junction of avenue Michelet and rue Jean-Henri Fabre.
Wherever life takes you, there is always something that refuses to follow. However you travel, there is always something that tags along uninvited. “Everyone who walks this earth feels a tickling at his heel,” Kafka’s famous ape, Red Peter, tells the assembled academy. Kidnapped from his jungle, carried in chains across the ocean, forced to choose between the zoo and the vaudeville, transformed into something new, something part man, part greater than a man, no longer able to reach back to the old ape truth.20 “Whatever you do,” wrote Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and literary executor, “it is always wrong.” How symptomatic is it that, amid all the literature dedicated to butterflies and moths, until recently there was no authoritative field guide to the caterpillars of any region? Conceptually and taxonomically, their existence is somehow doubtful. Despite all their defenses, less than 1 percent survive to adulthood.
Language
When I wish to attract some bees for training experiments I usually place upon a small table several sheets of paper which have been smeared with honey. Then I am often obliged to wait for many hours, sometimes for several days, until finally a bee discovers the feeding place. But as soon as one bee has found the honey many more will appear within a short time—perhaps as many as several hundred. They have all come from the same hive as the first forager; evidently this bee must have announced its discovery at home.
KARL VON FRISCH
1.
Karl von Frisch won a Nobel Prize in 1973 for his discovery of “the language of bees.” It was the year of ethology, and along with von Frisch, the prize in Physiology or Medicine was also awarded to Konrad Lorenz and his Dutch colleague Nikolaas Tinbergen. There was nothing recondite here, no obscure fiddling at the margins of theory. The 1973 prize was awarded for populist research that illuminated the mysteries of animal existence and promised profound and far-reaching truths about the human condition.
Honeybees, said von Frisch, though so tiny and so different, possessed language, the capacity long definitive of humanity. Through a series of elegant experiments carried out over nearly half a century, he showed that they communicated symbolically, that, in a manner more complex than that of any other animals apart from humans, they drew on experience and memory to convey information to each other and to their fellows.
More than ninety years after his first reports, these discoveries are still exciting. And they are made more so by von Frisch’s way of telling. By inclination and early training a naturalist, he offered nature not in today’s technical language of genomics but in his own deeply personal language of bees, a remarkably affective language that imbued his subjects with purpose and intentionality, that made them appealing and familiar.
Von Frisch offered a science of “what animals do, and how and why they do it” that was as comfortable with ontological difference and abiding mystery as it was with the more familiar scientific impulse toward revelation.1 Unashamed in his confessions of affinity, he made readers believe—just as he did himself—that they could understand bees, psychologically and emotionally. He turned his public into animal analysts. And in doing so, he gave new impetus—though, perhaps, despite himself—to the Darwinian notion that not only the morphological but also the behavioral, moral, and emotional basis of human existence could be found in the lives of nonhuman animals.2 Von Frisch spoke for honeybees. And he made them speak. He didn’t just give them language; he translated it. Is there anything that is more irresistible?
Nonetheless, these affinities were deeply fraught in a discipline barely born yet already haunted by the specter of fallibility. Ethology’s ghost was Clever Hans, the celebrity horse whose cleverness unfortunately lay not in mathematics but in an uncanny sensitivity to the nonverbal cues of his unwitting trainer. Cle
ver Hans’s much-publicized debunking by the psychologist Oskar Pfungst in 1907 pushed questions of animal cognition to the very margins of scientific legitimacy and made it clear that ethology was at mortal risk from the allure of its subjects.3
It was a foundational temptation to which the resolutely anti-psychological behaviorists would not succumb. But it was the seduction to which von Frisch, caught between affect and object, preoccupied, as he himself wrote, by the interplay between “psychological performance and the physiology of the senses,” would forever be in thrall.4
Because von Frisch loved his bees. Loved them with a gentle passion. Tended and nurtured their generations. Warmed them in his cupped hands when the brisk air stiffened their wing muscles. Held them as his “personal friends.”5 They were his bees in the way that anthropologists of the past may have fancied the remote tribes among which they lived to be their tribes. That same heady mix of science, sentiment, and proprietorial pride, the same willingness to assume responsibility for another’s fate.
So even as he took such care over the tiny creatures’ welfare, von Frisch would lovingly (with another love), painstakingly (with a professional patience), and delicately (with such safe hands) snip their antennae, clip their wings, slice their torsos, shave their eye bristles, glue weights to their thoraxes, and carefully paint shellac over their unblinking eyes, modifying their bodies, mutilating their senses, manipulating their behavior according to the experiment’s requirement, reconciling his will to suture the yawning gap that separated human from insect with his unspoken assertion of a natural sovereign power.
2.
In April 1933, the Nazi-dominated Reichstag passed the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. Jews, spouses of Jews, and political unreliables could now be legally dismissed from the universities.6
By then, von Frisch was director of the new Rockefeller-funded Institute of Zoology at the University of Munich and a leading figure in German science. Years before, in the landscaped and columned courtyard of the institute, he had, as he recalled in his memoir, fallen “irresistibly under the spell of the honey-bee.”7
His enchantment by those he would come to call his little “comrades” had in fact begun even earlier. In 1914, with a magician’s flair, he publicly demonstrated what now seems the rather unsurprising truth that honeybees—whose livelihood, after all, depends on their identification of flowering plants—are able to discriminate by color (despite being red-blind). Using the standard behavioral method of food rewards, he trained a group of bees to identify blue plates. He then showed them small squares of colored paper and watched delightedly as they congregated “as if by command” for his skeptical audience.8
But it was in the garden in Munich that the bees first danced for him: “I attracted a few bees to a dish of sugar water, marked them with red paint and then stopped feeding for a while. As soon as all was quiet, I filled the dish up again and watched a scout which had drunk from it after her return to the hive. I could scarcely believe my eyes. She performed a round dance on the honeycomb which greatly excited the marked foragers around her and caused them to fly back to the feeding place.”
Although beekeepers and naturalists had known for centuries that honeybees communicated the location of a food source among themselves, no one knew how. Did they lead one another to the nectar? Did they diffuse scent trails? “I believe,” von Frisch wrote more than forty years later, that this “was the most far-reaching observation of my life.”9
Under the civil service law, von Frisch and his academic colleagues—as well as all other civil servants in the Reich—were required to produce documentary proof of their Aryan ancestry. Already suspect for his willingness to sponsor Jewish graduate students even when their theses were far from his own specialties, von Frisch found himself in an even more dangerous dilemma.10 His mother’s mother, now deceased, the daughter of a banker and the wife of a philosophy professor, was a Jew from Prague. At first the university protected its star zoologist, arranging for his safe classification as “one-eighth Jewish.” But imagine the virulent mixture of ideology and ambition that began to ferment, fed by a rigid institutional hierarchy and the lack of opportunity for advancement among scholars locked out of academic privilege despite their years of training. In October 1941, the campaign against von Frisch succeeded in forcing his reclassification as “second-grade Mischling”—one-quarter Jewish—and securing the order for his removal from his post.
As we know, von Frisch survived the Nazis. Inevitably, though, it was far from straightforward. Influential colleagues mobilized on his behalf, arranging a platform in Das Reich, a new weekly in which Goebbels contributed the editorials. Von Frisch wrote about the national-economic contribution of the Zoological Institute and how its work was vital to the resilience of the home front.11 Eventually, though, if in somewhat tortuous fashion, it was the bees that saved him. For two years, an outbreak of the parasite Nosema apis had ravaged German hives. Both the national honey crop and agricultural pollination were threatened. Through the intervention of a highly placed ally, von Frisch was appointed as a special investigator, and a panicked Ministry of Food was induced to defer his dismissal from academia “until after the war.”12
The indifference of the honeybees to politics did not prevent their recruitment to the National Socialist war effort. The ministry soon expanded the Nosema remit to include a search for ways of persuading bees to rationalize pollination by visiting only economically desirable plants. Years before, von Frisch had experimented with scent guidance—training bees to respond to a particular odor before freeing them to visit the associated flower—but he had been unable to generate commercial interest. This time, galvanized by looming calamity, national enthusiasm, and news of a large-scale Soviet research project along similar lines, the Organization of Reich Beekeepers rushed to sponsor his work.
Exhausted by the intensifying air war on Munich, von Frisch and his lifelong co-worker, Ruth Beutler, evacuated to the village of Brunnwinkl on the shore of Lake Wolfgang, southwest of Salzburg. This was where von Frisch had spent his childhood summers, and attached to the family house was the natural history museum he had founded as an eager seventeen-year-old. It was here, pursuing adolescent obsessions, that young Karl had enrolled relatives and family friends in scouring the nearby woods and shoreline for local fauna. It was here, at the old mill on the edge of Lake Wolfgang, under the quiet hand of his uncle, the prominent Viennese physiologist Sigmund Exner, that he developed the classical skills in observation and manipulation that would characterize his experimental research.
And it was also here, here among the animals, that von Frisch found his “reverence before the Unknown,” less a formal religious conviction than a commitment to a pantheistic relativism. “All honest convictions deserve respect,” he insisted, “except the presumptuous assertion that there is nothing higher in the world than the mind of man.”13 And it was here, as he tells it in straightforward yet often lyrical prose, that his liberal Catholic family—doctrinally liberal in an era when Austrian biologists were routinely dismissed for espousing evolution—created a bourgeois haven, a home for science and the arts, for the gentle satisfactions of polite culture far from the upheavals of early-twentieth-century Mitteleuropa: his spirited mother and his caring if reserved father, his three older brothers, all preparing merely for the uneventful unfolding of long and distinguished academic careers.
And it was here, in the cocoon of family memory, as the Allied bombs rained firestorms on Munich and Dresden and as the air thickened over Auschwitz, that von Frisch and Beutler took advantage of their Reich permits to revisit the work on bee communication that he had laid aside some two decades earlier.
In those long-ago studies in the courtyard of the Institute of Zoology, von Frisch had identified two “dances”—he named them the round dance and the waggle dance—and concluded that bees used the former to indicate a source of nectar and the latter to indicate a source of pollen. Beutler had continu
ed this work in the intervening years but had begun to doubt the hypothesis. Resuming their experiments together in 1944, they discovered that when they positioned the feeding dishes more than 100 yards from the hive, it didn’t matter what substance the bees were carrying: on their return, they all performed waggle dances. Rather than a descriptor of material, the variation they observed in the dances must be the bees’ way of communicating the far more complicated information of location. This ability to accurately describe distance and direction “seemed,” von Frisch wrote, “altogether too fantastic to be true.”14
It was the complexity of the bees’ behavior that was so arresting. Making connections between the intricate sociality of honeybees—which live in self-reproducing “colonies” of thousands of individuals—and the development of sophisticated forms of communication is commonplace now. But early-twentieth-century animal studies were dominated by the conviction of biologists and psychologists that animal behavior was fully explicable in terms of a range of simple stimulus responses, such as reflexes and tropisms. And von Frisch’s bees were doing something that leading behaviorists such as John B. Watson and Jacques Loeb considered impossible: they were communicating symbolically, representing information through a form—a predictable pattern of physical movements—that was tied to its object “by social convention, tacit agreement, or explicit code.”15 What was more, this representing could take place several hours after the flight it described. It relied on registering the details of that flight, recalling its content, and, of course, translating and performing the significant information. Moreover, it also required an audience able to interact effectively in its interpretation. To Donald Griffin, the tireless advocate of animal consciousness and the sponsor of von Frisch’s 1949 lecture tour of the United States, this was “the most significant example of versatile communication known in any animal other than our own species.”16 Von Frisch went further. It was, he believed, an accomplishment “without parallel elsewhere in the entire animal kingdom.”17