The class Insecta encompasses about thirty orders. I say “about” because the number changed while I was doing research for this book. These orders include Coleoptera (beetles like dung beetles and Colorado potato beetles), Hemiptera (true bugs, like cicadas and bedbugs), Orthoptera (grasshoppers and crickets), Diptera (flies and mosquitoes), Hymenoptera (bees, ants, wasps), Siphonaptera (fleas), and Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths). One might think that more sophisticated science and more complete information — for instance, about genomes — would clarify and simplify our understanding of insects. Not so. A 2014 scientific article on the classification of some beetles, based in part on penis structure, was titled “A Preliminary Phylogenetic Analysis of the New World Helopini (Coleoptera, Tenebrionidae, Tenebrioninae) Indicates the Need for Profound Rearrangements of the Classification.”14 The authors spoke not only of the usual order, genus, and species, but threw in tribes, clades, and — just to make sure they’d fully covered the territory — polyphyly, polytomy, and paraphyly, which are classifications based on variations in genetically identified ancestors and descendants.
Insects account for more than 80 percent of all described living species. Among these, four orders predominate: Coleoptera, Diptera, Hymenoptera, and Lepidoptera. Although there are about a million named insect species, some researchers estimate that there could be another million — or several million — waiting to be discovered and named. There is also the counter-possibility that some of those already named are varieties of the same species. To put this into some sort of context, there are about 20,000 species of fish, 6,000 species of reptiles, 9,000 species of birds, 1,000 species of amphibians, and 15,000 species of mammals. So, most animals are arthropods, and most arthropods are insects. According to an oft-repeated quote, allegedly from paleontologist J. Kukalová-Peck, to a first approximation, every animal is an insect.
Which brings me back to the use of beetles in the title of this book. Why talk about eating beetles? Why not insects, or even bugs? True bugs, like bedbugs, cicadas, aphids, giant water bugs, assassin bugs, and scale insects, comprise “only” about 80,000 species of the millions of insect species out there. Despite this, some of the best books on insects and their taxonomic relatives written by entomologists have “bugs” in the title. These include May Berenbaum’s Bugs in the System, Scott Richard Shaw’s Planet of the Bugs, and Gilbert Waldbauer’s What Good Are Bugs? The term bug, with Welsh and Germanic roots, was first used in medieval times to refer to devils, hobgoblins, ghosts, and other unseen and sometimes frightening annoyances, which may accurately reflect the kinds of arthropods encountered by medieval Europeans. Today, the word bug carries that etymological baggage and more, being used to refer to small insects, disease-causing bacteria,15 hidden microphones, and computer glitches.
If we consider only insects that people eat, however, the picture changes. There may be 1,900 species eaten by someone, somewhere on the planet, but some families and orders — Coleoptera, Hemiptera, Hymenoptera, Isoptera, Lepidoptera, Orthoptera — are more popular than others. Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths, eaten as caterpillars), Hymenoptera (bees, wasps, and ants) and Orthoptera (grasshoppers, locusts, and crickets) each contribute somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the global insect diet. Cicadas, leafhoppers, plant hoppers, scale insects, “true bugs,” termites, dragonflies, and flies each contribute less than 10 percent. On a species basis, the largest insect contributors to human diets are the Coleoptera (beetles), which contribute about a third of the total number of species eaten. In many parts of the world, beetles are eaten as adults, but in North America and Europe, mealworms (baby darkling beetles) are the most popular.
There are more species of beetles (close to 360,000) than there are of all of the rest of us animals put together. If we are all, to a first approximation, insects, then I would add that, to a second approximation, we are all beetles. This also sounds like something a Douglas Adams character would say. The word beetle, which comes from Old English and once referred to a hammering tool, and then a “little biter,” carries less baggage; that’s one of the reasons I have used it in the title of this book. A German car, and then, misspelled, a musical group, are not likely to add confusion to the entomophagist’s kitchen.
In the past few hundred years, non-insect-eater scientists have attempted to overwrite traditional insect names with Linnaean taxonomies. Yet it is not always clear how that insect-eater knowledge maps onto non-insect-eater science, or vice versa. Given that we have no clear idea how many species there are, and that many indigenous cultures are disappearing or being absorbed into some variant of the generic “global” insect-avoidant McCulture, however, it is easy to feel as if one is a prisoner wandering around in the luminous fog of George Lucas’s pre–Star Wars movie THX 1138.
Once we get “down” past arthropods and insects, and into the crowded Victorian streets of species and genus, it becomes very clear that most scientists are from non-insect-eater cultures. About a million insects have been given two-part Linnaean names; I could find none that related them to food, and many are neither ecologically informative nor globally understood. Some, like Mantis religiosa (the European praying mantis) reflect religious practices. Others are both whimsical and culturally specific: the second name of Dicrotendipes thanatogratus reflects the entomologist’s love of the Grateful Dead, while others, such as a parasitic wasp named Heerz Lukenatcha and a fly named Pieza kake — you have to say these last two out loud — are clever insider jokes. Many insects are named after famous people, mostly from Europe or North America. Entomologists have named parasitic wasps after Ellen DeGeneres, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, J.S. Bach, and Ludwig van Beethoven, for instance. In 2013, John Huber and John Noyes reported on a new genus and species of fairyfly in Costa Rica, which they named, in a flight of scientific fancy, Tinkerbella nana. Since fairyflies are parasitoid wasps who lay their eggs inside the eggs of other insects, thus killing them, this offers a somewhat sinister reframing of the Walt Disney–J.M. Barrie fairy Tinkerbell and the children’s dog Nana.
One might be forgiven if one thought that all this naming and differentiation down into orders, families, and species was a case of Linnaean OCD, but the classification system is a reflection of both our language and the complex differentiations that occur in observed nature. Insects have evolved their own version of the “narcissism of small differences,” a phrase that Freud used to describe the phenomenon of exaggerating small differences in order to emphasize one’s own unique identity. For insects, these fierce differentiations are a feature that, along with their small size and high reproductive rate, have allowed them to fill the biosphere and make the world over in their own image.
For entomophagists, the ability to recognize fine differences between species is more than a quibble between specialists, postcolonially defined indigenous peoples, and postmodern entomophagists. As we consider the question of insect-eating, the distinctions enable us to more intelligently reconsider the contexts for environmental management, economic benefits, and human health outcomes. These distinctions are at the heart of which insects we see as invasive species, which ones we think will eat us the first chance they get, which will just annoy us, and which, even as they titillate our taste buds, might help us imagine a convivial future on earth.
Some of these differences will become clearer as we continue this journey into global insect-eating, but let me give a few examples here to illustrate the point. Members of the Tenebrionidae family, whose larvae are called mealworms by chefs, are also known as darkling beetles. The family includes beetles that live in chicken litter; chickens eat the beetles and larvae, but the insects can also eat the floor and walls of the chicken coops, and carry around bacteria and viruses that may infect the birds and those who eat them. Other members of the same family include confused flour beetles (yes, that’s a real name), mealworm beetles, and others that eat and recycle detritus in forest floors. So when talking about darkling beetles and mealwo
rms, some precision in naming is called for if we wish to avoid unnecessary battles between entomophagists, chicken farmers, and forest ecologists.
Control of the invasive citrus pest California red scale (Aonidiella aurantii) was delayed by six decades because entomologists had lumped together all the ectoparasitic wasps Aphyrus as if they were a single species. Aphyrus turned out to be a complex of species, some of which would attack the red scale. Similarly, fig production in California was held back by a decade until entomologists and farmers identified and imported one species among hundreds in a particular genus of wasps that would pollinate the trees. In Australia, when farmers brought cattle into the country in the late 1700s, an initial failure to differentiate dung beetles and to recognize their finicky, often species-specific eating habits, created disastrous bush fly and landscape management problems.
Until the 1970s, the mosquito Anopheles gambiae was thought to be the most important vector of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. This “one” mosquito, however, was found to be a mix of seven different mosquitoes that looked essentially the same but varied in their ability to transmit disease and in their resistance to pesticides. When it comes to a disease that kills millions of people every year, the inability to precisely differentiate species can have tragic consequences.
Even using the word entomophagy is not without controversy, at least among academicians. Anthropologist Julie Lesnick has written that insectivory is appropriately applied to what nonhuman animals do when they eat bugs, and that entomophagy, a term which she does not like, applies to what people do when they eat insects. Since people are animals, and I am officially retired from academia, I will not take sides in the entomophagy versus insectivory skirmishes. Like Jeffrey Lockwood, I prefer to use a variety of words, as long as they communicate clearly. The guys at Entomo Farms refer to “a person who consumes insect protein in order to drastically reduce his/her carbon footprint and contribute towards the healing of the Earth” as a geoentomarian.16 For some reason, to my mind, that word conjures up the image of someone really old, like me.
Heather Looy and John Wood, in a thought-provoking 2015 article titled “Imagination, Hospitality, and Affection: The Unique Legacy of Food Insects?” suggest that “as we come to value insects for the vital roles they play in sustaining life, and as a source of food, our language will necessarily change. And if we want to stimulate this change, we need to discover new ways to speak, and therefore to think and enact insects as a dietary element. Speaking of ‘insect-based foods’ or ‘edible insects’ is certainly better than using the technical term ‘entomophagy.’ But we still lack a rich language of familiar and nuanced terms for meat from the taxonomic class Insecta.”
I agree with Looy and Wood. We need a richness of language to match the diversity of this extended animal family of ours, one that draws on the millions of eco- and place- and cuisine-specific names indigenous peoples have conferred on our tiny cousins — some proto-Babel ur-tongue that includes and transcends entomophagy, gourmet insect-eating, and rustling up some (literal) grub. We’ll need to include the languages that enable us to talk about the control of malaria and dengue fever, and to evoke the seductions of honey and the healing properties of termites. In this book, I shall be careful to use specific terms when those are warranted to make fine distinctions, but will use more general terms like bugs and arthropods when fine distinctions amount to overspecification, the linguistic counterpart of economists adding several numbers after a decimal point to give hard credibility to soft theories.
Our eyes, our imaginations, and our science tend to see — and to differentiate and name — the world in terms of what is immediately apprehended by our senses and what has been important for our immediate human survival and reproduction. Hence we see children (our genetic future), cows (food, fertilizer, labor) and tigers (a predatory threat) as individuals or small groups. But, with the exception of those that dig into our skin in sometimes embarrassing places, we tend to notice most insects — ants, bees, black flies, mosquitoes, locusts, cockroaches — because of their sheer, overwhelming numbers.
Now that I have completely overthought, defensively overexplained, and taken all the fun out of the book title — and before I draw up a list of which insects we are inviting to dinner — let us spend just a few pages exploring the size of our extended six-legged family. Really, kidding aside: how many invitations are we sending out?
HERE, THERE, AND EVERYWHERE
The Problem of Numbers
They never give us their numbers/
They only give us their situations
Naming the contenders for our next chef’s challenge is only one part of our entomophagical dilemma. If one argument for eating insects is that there is such an abundance of them, we might ask how many there actually are. And — this is particularly important if we wish to forage, manage, or farm them in some way — what are the characteristics that allow them to live in such abundance?
In 1691, British naturalist Sir John Ray, author of The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of His Creation, guessed at the proportion of insect species among all the animals in his homeland and projected this onto the world population. Using this most reasonable method, he came up with an estimate of ten thousand for the total number of insect species. In the eighteenth century, Swedish biologist and physician Carl Linnaeus created the binomial framework for naming living things. His initial descriptions included 4,023 species of animals, of which 2,102 were insects. By the mid-1800s, more than 400,000 insect species had been named, and by the early decades of the twentieth century, British entomologists David Sharp and Thomas de Grey had raised the total probable number of insect species to two million while American Charles Valentine Riley, considering the unknown unknowns living in the tropics, suggested that ten million insect species might be closer to the truth. Other estimates, based on expert opinions, or using proportions of all animals known to be insects and projecting them globally, ranged from a few million up to thirty million. Arguments among entomologists continue in the scientific literature. In a 2009 compendium on insect biodiversity, entomologist May Berenbaum simply subtitled her chapter “Millions and Millions.”
Peer-reviewed scientific estimates since Berenbaum’s publication have suggested that there are about 8.7 million species of all kinds on earth, of which about 90 percent have yet to be catalogued or described. The task given humanity in Genesis to name all things seems endless. In 2016, for instance, a group of researchers discovered and described twenty-four new species of assassin bugs. Considering the large uncertainties regarding all these estimates, Berenbaum’s flexible “millions and millions” is as reasonable a place as any to start.
The next question is: given that there are so many species, how many individual animals might there be? Poet-naturalist Bill Holm imagined the population of boxelder bugs around his house by comparing them to adult male Norwegians and then imagining how much space they would take up.17 Most scientists, however, use more pedestrian (although not necessarily more accurate) methods.
The UN has estimated that there are, at any time, about a billion cows and nineteen billion chickens on the planet, based on adding up numbers of documented animals country by country. In the same way, one could, theoretically, take each insect species, estimate the numbers for that species, and then add them up. That would assume, in the first place, that we knew how many species there were, and, secondly, that we could count the numbers for each of them and then add them up. I suspect, however, that our numbers in this case would tax even our most delirious statistical imaginations.
World-renowned biologist E.O. Wilson states (on the website of the Entomological Society of America) that “there are some 10 quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) individual insects alive.” According to a 2016 estimate, there are about 7.4 billion people on the planet. If each “average” insect weighs three milligrams, then the total weight of bugs on the planet is seventy times the total
weight of all the humans, assuming the “average” person weighs sixty kilograms. All of these are guesses, of course, since we don’t actually know how many bugs there are on the planet. If you really need an answer more specific than that, I can recommend a good psychotherapist. Bottom line: there are a lot more of them than there are of us.
How did so many six-legged creatures come to be? Biologist J.B.S. Haldane once ascribed this abundance to an alleged creator’s “inordinate fondness for beetles,” but less fanciful reasons have also been proposed. In general, their numbers and diversity can be attributed to several interrelated characteristics, including being tiny, inhabiting many ecological niches, having multiple-use appendages, learning to fly, being sexually and reproductively clever and adaptable, (mostly) having lots of babies, discovering the joys of complete metamorphosis, and pretending to be leaves and flowers.
Let’s look at some of these causes of abundance more closely. Apart from a few slow-reproducers, like tsetse flies, who give birth to a single larva every nine to ten days for a few months, most insects are what biologists call r-strategists. They produce a lot of young, thus increasing the chances that some will survive. Depending on temperature and feed, crickets, for instance, can lay ten eggs a day (a hundred in a lifetime); black soldier flies can lay hundreds of eggs in a five- to eight-day life, and ant and termite queens pop out tens of thousands per day (up to millions in a lifetime). The individuals in an ant nest may be numbered in hundreds of thousands, a termite nest in millions, and a locust swarm in billions. Insects are not only prolific baby-makers; some can also reproduce parthenogenetically — that is, females producing young without the intervention of males. Virgin birth can occur in some fish, birds, reptiles, and amphibians — and has even been rumored to occur in humans — but is most common in arthropods. For ants, bees, aphids, rotifers, and other insects, parthenogenesis may result in different kinds of offspring, requiring different food sources, which can enable them to adapt to more diverse climatic and ecological conditions.
Eat the Beetles!: An Exploration into Our Conflicted Relationship with Insects Page 3
