Insectopedia

by Hugh Raffles

  12. Von Frisch, A Biologist Remembers, 129–30; Deichmann, Biologists under Hitler, 45–46.

  13. Von Frisch, A Biologist Remembers, 25.

  14. Ibid., 141. See also von Frisch, The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees, trans. Leigh E. Chadwick (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 4–5.

  15. Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 71. Deacon provides an extended gloss on the linguistics of Charles Sanders Peirce. Although Deacon prefers to reserve symbolic reference for humans, it seems clear that the bee dances meet the particular criteria that he outlines at this point.

  16. Donald R. Griffin, Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness, rev. edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 190. The following account of bee “language” is drawn from a number of sources in addition to Griffin’s excellent synthesis. These include three works by von Frisch: The Dancing Bees: An Account of the Life and Senses of the Honey Bee, trans. Dora Isle and Norman Walker (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966); Bees: Their Vision, Chemical Senses, and Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1950); and Dance Language. See also Thomas D. Seeley’s excellent foreword to Dance Language; Martin Lindauer, Communication among Social Bees (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961); Axel Michelson, Bent Bach Andersen, Jesper Storm, Wolfgang H. Kirchner, and Martin Lindauer, “How Honeybees Perceive Communication Dances, Studied by Means of a Mechanical Model,” Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 30 (1992): 143–50; Thomas D. Seeley, The Wisdom of the Hive: The Social Physiology of Honey Bee Colonies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); and James L. Gould and Carol Grant Gould, Honey Bee.

  17. Von Frisch, Dance Language, 57.

  18. Thomas Seeley suggests that it makes more sense to refer to all dances as waggle dances. Thomas D. Seeley, foreword to Dance Language, xiii.

  19. Von Frisch, Dance Language, 57.

  20. See, for example, Axel Michelson, William F. Towne, Wolfgang H. Kirchner, and Per Kryger, “The Acoustic Near Field of a Dancing Honeybee,” Journal of Comparative Physiology A: Neuroethology, Sensory, Neural, and Behavioral Physiology 161 (1987): 633–43. Bee communication has actually turned out to be considerably more complex than even von Frisch imagined. In addition to this acoustical signaling, of which he was not aware, it now seems that the waggle dances are not internally consistent. When honeybees are dancing for a food source that is closer than about one mile, both the number of waggles and the direction of the straight run in each cycle show significant variation. Followers deal with this by staying with the dancer for multiple cycles, rapidly calculating a mean before flying off to the food source. James L. Gould and Carol Grant Gould, Honey Bee, 61–62.

  21. Von Frisch, A Biologist Remembers, 150.

  22. Von Frisch, Dance Language, 132, fig. 114. Von Frisch illustrates the behavior with this figure:

  23. Lindauer, Communication among Social Bees, 87–111, summarizes this material.

  24. I am not reviewing here the many variations that researchers have patiently documented. Lindauer (ibid., 94–96), for example, reveals that bees will compensate for side winds by altering the angle of flight, but on returning to the hive, they will indicate the optimal direction, not the actual route taken.

  25. But see Christoph Grüter, M. Sol Balbuena, and Walter M. Farina, “Informational Conflicts Created by the Waggle Dance,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 275 (2008): 1321–27, an important paper that reports on research suggesting that the vast majority of bees observing dances do not act on the information performed, preferring instead to return to familiar rather than new sources of food. Although the authors note that bees will switch contextually between “social information” (that is, from the dance) and “private information” (that is, about an already visited plot), they propose that dance data are most often acted on by bees who have been inactive for a while or are new to foraging. In what has become a familiar but revealing trope in insect studies more generally, they conclude that further research “will most certainly reveal that the waggle dance modulates collective foraging in more complex ways than is currently assumed.”

  26. These findings are among those vigorously challenged by Adrian Wenner and his collaborators, who for decades—though ultimately unsuccessfully—argued that von Frisch’s claims were groundless. The controversy has generated a large literature. For a very useful account, see Tania Munz, “The Bee Battles: Karl von Frisch, Adrian Wenner and the Honey Bee Dance Language Controversy,” Journal of the History of Biology 38, no. 3 (2005): 535–70.

  27. Von Frisch, Dance Language, 109–29.

  28. Ibid., 27.

  29. Von Frisch, Bees, 85.

  30. Von Frisch, Dance Language, 32, 37ff. Von Frisch’s bees even “give it up on the dance floor” (265), though it’s only fair to point out that—even though this is the 1970s—he’s talking here about water, not the spirit of disco.

  31. Ibid., 133, 136.

  32. Martin Lindauer, interview by Thomas D. Seeley, S. Kühnholz, and Robin H. Seeley, “An Early Chapter in Behavioral Physiology and Sociobiology: The Science of Martin Lindauer,” Journal of Comparative Physiology A: Neuroethology, Sensory, Neural, and Behavioral Physiology 188 (2002): 441–42, 446.

  33. Lindauer, ibid., 445.

  34. Von Frisch, Dancing Bees, 1.

  35. Ibid., 41.

  36. Thomas D. Seeley, Wisdom of the Hive, 240–4.

  37. Lindauer, Communication among Social Bees, 16–21.

  38. This, of course, is also the narrative for the robotic assembly-line hive that appears in so many variants of social theory, for example, Marx’s famous fable of the architect: “What distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1921), 1:198. (My thanks to Don Moore for reminding me of this one.) There are only two clear examples of competition within the hive that I know of, both of which are of direct functional value to the colony. The first is the eviction of the drones, which I describe below; the second is the regulated fight for dominance among emerging queens after the nest has fissioned.

  39. Klaus Schlüpmann, “Fehlanzeige des Regimes in der Fachpresse?” [Negative Reports of the Regime in Specialist Publications] in Vergangenheit im Blickfeld eines Physikers: Hans Kopfermann 1895–1963 [History from the Viewpoint of a Physicist: Hans Kopfermann 1895–1963], Aleph 99 Productions, September 20, 2002. http://www.aleph99.org/etusci/ks/t2a5.htm.

  40. Quoted in Deichmann, Biologists under Hitler, 43. I have taken my account of this episode from Deichmann’s more detailed narrative, esp. 40–48. For additional material on von Frisch’s conduct during the Nazi period and particularly his willingness to act in support of dismissed colleagues, see Ernst-August Seyfarth and Henryk Pierzchała, “Sonderaktion Krakau, 1939: Die Verfolgung von polnischen Biowissenschaftlern und Hilfe durch Karl von Frisch” [Sonderaktion Krakau, 1939: The Persecution of Polish Biologists and the Assistance Provided by Karl von Frisch], Biologie in unserer Zeit 22, no. 4 (1992): 218–25. My thanks to Ernst-August Seyfarth for sharing this paper with me and to Leander Schneider for translating it.

  41. On Nazi sympathy for animal welfare, see Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the Twentieth Century: A History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), and Boria Sax, Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust (New York: Continuum, 2000).

  42. Although Lorenz’s involvement with Nazism was widely known at the time, it was actively forgotten postwar and effectively erased by the Nobel Committee. The extent of his commitment to the Nazi regime has only recently been documented. See particularly Deichmann, Biologists under Hitler, 178–205, from which I have drawn most heavily for this account. Deichmann wants to secure the link between the contemporary ethological v
ersion of instinct—derived from Lorenz—and fascist politics. See also Theodora J. Kalikow, “Konrad Lorenz’s Ethological Theory: Explanation and Ideology, 1938–1943,” Journal of the History of Biology 16, no. 1 (1983): 39–73; Boria Sax, “What Is a ‘Jewish Dog’? Konrad Lorenz and the Cult of Wildness,” Society and Animals: Journal of Human-Animal Studies 5, no. 1 (1997), http://www.psyeta.org/sa/sa5.1/sax.html; and Burkhardt, Patterns of Behavior.

  43. Boria Sax and Peter H. Klopfer, “Jakob von Uexküll and the Anticipation of Sociobiology,” in “Jakob von Uexküll: A Paradigm for Biology and Semiotics,” special issue, Semiotica 134, nos. 1–4 (2001): 770; Ernst Haeckel, The Evolution of Man: A Popular Exposition of the Principal Points of Human Ontogeny and Phylogeny, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1897).

  44. All the more striking, then, that both von Frisch and Tinbergen stood by Lorenz following the war. Tinbergen, who was imprisoned in a concentration camp and worked actively for the resistance, wrote to an American colleague in 1945 that Lorenz “was rather nazi-infected, though I always considered him a[n] honest and good fellow…. It is not right,” he continued, “to think that the atrocities were only committed by a minority of fanatical SS-, SD-, or Gestapo-men. Nearly the whole people is hopelessly poisoned…. Personally I should regret if … [he] would be expelled [from scientific collaboration].” Quoted in Deichmann, Biologists under Hitler, 203–4.

  45. The only example I have come across is the brief section of Dancing Bees called “The Bee’s Mental Capacity.” Perhaps because he is forced to address this question directly, von Frisch retreats decisively from the affective burden of his corpus. “Because of its extraordinarily narrow range,” he writes, “we cannot form a very high opinion of the bee’s mental capacity” (162). Yet he closes his discussion more ambivalently: “Nobody can state with certainty whether the bees are conscious of any of their own actions” (164). See also Griffin, Animal Minds, 278–82.

  46. It also provided a bridge to Jakob von Uexküll’s influential phenomenology of the Umwelt, the sensory world through which all beings experience life. See the discussion on pages 314–17.

  47. Von Frisch, A Biologist Remembers, 174.

  48. Griffin, Animal Minds, 203–11. My account of swarming and nest location is drawn primarily from Griffin; Lindauer, Communication among Social Bees; James L. Gould and Carol Grant Gould, Honey Bee; Thomas D. Seeley, Wisdom of the Hive; and Thomas D. Seeley, S. Kühnholz, and Robin H. Seeley, “An Early Chapter.”

  49. Lindauer, Communication among Social Bees, 35.

  50. Ibid., 38.

  51. Ibid., 39–40.

  52. James L. Gould and Carol Grant Gould, Honey Bee, 66–67.

  53. Ibid., 67.

  54. Ibid., 66.

  55. Ibid., 65–66; Griffin, Animal Minds, 206–9.

  56. James L. Gould and Carol Grant Gould, Honey Bee, 65.

  57. Griffin, Animal Minds, 209.

  58. Karl von Frisch, “Decoding the Language of the Bee,” Science 185 (August 1974): 663–68.

  59. Frisch, Dance Language, xxiii.

  60. Ibid., 105. What it lacked was a response to the acoustic stop signal given by the surrounding workers. Mechanical bees have since become a staple of bee science. See, for example, Michelson et al., “How Honeybees Perceive Communication Dances.”

  61. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 223. See the discussion by Cary Wolfe, “In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion: Language, Ethics, and the Question of the Animal,” in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1–57. Wolfe reminds us of Vicki Hearne’s comment that Wittgenstein’s aphorism is “the most interesting mistake about animals I have ever come across.” Hearne, Animal Happiness (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 167. Hearne was a philosopher and animal trainer who wrote insightfully on horses and dogs, among other large mammals, convincingly arguing for a human-nonhuman communicative practice that emerges from sensitivity to differential sensory abilities, a notion implicitly indebted to Jakob von Uexküll’s theory of the Umwelt. On Washoe and the Gardners, see Donna J. Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), and Hearne, Adam’s Task, 18–41.

  62. Hearne, Animal Happiness, 169.

  63. Ibid., 170.

  64. For similar assessments, see Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), and Wolfe, “In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion.” Derrida tracks an unhappy lineage through Descartes, Kant, Levinas, Heidegger, and Lacan. For a less unitary view, see Ian Hacking, “On Sympathy: With Other Creatures,” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 63, no. 4 (2001): 685–717. Hacking starts his countergenealogy with David Hume. My thanks to Ann Stoler for pointing me to this important article.

  65. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 84, quoted in Derrida, Animal That Therefore I Am, 123.

  66. See James L. Gould’s summary of honeybee sociality: “Everyone must be wired in exactly the same way and live by the same set of rules or social life would turn to anarchy.” James L. Gould, Ethology, 406.

  67. On this distinction, see Derrida, Animal That Therefore I Am, 119–40.

  68. C. F. Hockett quoted in Tim Ingold, Evolution and Social Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 304.

  69. Deacon, Symbolic Species, 22. The literature on animal cognition and language is obviously vast. For an ethological review, see Marc Bekoff, Colin Allen, and Gordon M. Burghardt, eds., The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002); for an innovative interdisciplinary account by a biological anthropologist, see Deacon, Symbolic Species. Deacon argues for language acquisition and facility of use as the critical distinction between humans and other animals, including primates. It is, in his view, the distinction that enables human achievement.

  70. Von Frisch, Dance Language, 278–84.

  71. On the Aristotelian natural child as a figure in sixteenth-century European expansion, see Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology, corrected ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

  72. W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2001), 94.

  73. Eva M. Knodt, foreword to Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz, Jr., with Dirk Baecker (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), xxxi, quoted in Wolfe, “In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion,” 34.

  My Nightmares

  1. Scott Atran, “A Leaner, Meaner Jihad,” New York Times, March 16, 2004.

  On January 8, 2008, Abdou Mahamane Was Driving through Niamey …

  1. Boureima Alpha Gado, Une histoire des famines au Sahel: étude des grandes crises alimentaires, XIXe–XXe siècles [A History of Famine in Sahel: A Study of the Great Food Crises, Nineteenth to Twentieth Centuries] (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993). See also Michael Watts, Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), and John Rowley and Olivia Bennett, Grasshoppers and Locusts: The Plague of the Sahel (London: Panos Institute, 1993).

  2. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1976), 39–40.

  3. Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 97–98.

  4. Souleymane Anza, “Niger Fights Poverty after Being Taken by Shame,” Afrol News, January, 19, 2001, http://www.afrol.com/News2001/nir001_fight_poverty.htm; see also Frederic Mousseau with Anuradha Mittal, Sahel: A Prisoner of Starvation? A Case Study of the 2005 Food Crisis in Niger (Oakland, Calif.: Oakland Institute, 2006).

  5. Niger is one of eight Central and West African countries that use the euro-pegged West African CFA franc as their currency.

  6. Comprehens
ive information on criquet species and control can be found at the website of CIRAD (Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement), http://www.cirad.fr/en/index.php. See also Rowley and Bennett, Grasshoppers and Locusts, and Steen R. Joffe, Desert Locust Management: A Time for Change, World Bank Discussion Paper, no. 284 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1995).

  7. Current research also suggests that the neurotransmitter serotonin is involved. See Michael L. Anstey, Stephen M. Rogers, Swidbert R. Ott, Malcolm Burrows, and Stephen J. Simpson, “Serotonin Mediates Behavioral Gregarization Underlying Swarm Formation in Desert Locusts,” Science 323 (January 2009): 627–30.

  8. For a more detailed account, on which I have drawn extensively here, see Hugh Dingle, Migration: The Biology of Life on the Move (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 272–81; see also the locus(t) classicus, Boris Petrovich Uvarov, Grasshoppers and Locusts: A Handbook of General Acridology, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966).

  9. The UFBIR is an ongoing online project that can be found at http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/walker/ufbir.

  10. Apart, that is, from the anomalous use of locust in the United States to name the periodic cicada.

  11. John Keats, “On the Grasshopper and Cricket” (1816).

  12. Robert A. Cheke, N. D. Jago, J. M. Ritchie, L.D.C. Fishpool, R. C. Rainey, and P. Darling, “A Migrant Pest in the Sahel: The Senegalese Grasshopper Oedaleus senegalensis,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 328 (1990): 539–53.