Termites are foraged, not farmed, but they do produce GHG. Furthermore, termite populations are modified — usually increased — by practices of industrial agriculture and forestry. May Berenbaum, in an essay collected in her book Buzzwords: A Scientist Muses on Sex, Bugs, and Rock ’n’ Roll, reviews the reported evidence on arthropod flatulence. She notes that insect methanogenesis predates human society by many millennia, and that insect flatulence is a well-documented phenomenon. The General History of the Things of New Spain, for instance, compiled by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún in the sixteenth century, tells of an insect whose breaking of wind was alarmingly stinky. Nevertheless Berenbaum focuses most of her review on the intense efforts to quantify methane production by termites beginning in the 1980s. A 1982 report in the journal Science by an international team of scientists estimated that the trillions and trillions of termites on earth were producing about 30 percent of the methane in the earth’s atmosphere (trillions and trillions of teragrams).
We might ask how greenhouses gases produced by wild insects are relevant to those we are eating. Well, for one thing, the study reported that the amounts produced were increasing over time as termites took advantage of all that termite food produced by deforestation and agriculture (and, I might add, the production of printed journals).
Other studies suggest that clearing land for monocropping agriculture and deforestation is decreasing termite habitat, resulting in a downward trend for termite-associated methane production. Initial reports making the case for this view were followed by a series of arguments and research reports using different research methodologies and/or drawing different inferences from the same data. The general consensus that developed over the last decade of the twentieth century seemed to be that the amount of methane produced by termites depends on where they live — termites from Amazonia have the highest rates of emission — and, as it does for all of us, on what they eat, with soil feeders taking the lead, and wood feeders (in Berenbaum’s words) “bringing up the rear.” By the late 1990s, calculations suggested that termites were down to an estimated 5 percent of total methane emissions, but that emissions from cockroaches, for whom people were increasingly creating comfortable urban habitats, may have been offsetting whatever gains were seen from changes in termite populations. I wish there were some simple quantitative calculation to resolve this, but we live in a complex world where feedbacks and unintended consequences are to be expected. If we take a systemic view of agricultural ecosystems, then if a food system based on mini-livestock results in less land-modification than a macro-livestock–based system (and I think there is a very good case to be made for this), we end up with less GHG emissions from the insect-based food system even if the farmed insects themselves produce more GHGs.
One of the ways to try to integrate and make sense of some of this information is to carry out what’s called a full life cycle assessment (LCA), looking at resource use and gas production throughout the entire food production system. Unfortunately, LCA requires that the “system” have boundaries; one of the challenges we faced in the 1990s, when trying to assess the health of ecosystems, was where and how to set these boundaries.36 This often depended on the goals of the LCA and what one was measuring, whether the health of human communities, or migratory birds, or insects, or water availability. Communities have political, social, and geographical boundaries. Water use can be assessed within watersheds, but what if we are drawing water from a faraway lake? In comparing resource use of different animal-based agricultural systems, one would ideally wish to look at everything: fertilizer inputs to grow feeds and other crops, shipping and processing of those feeds, how the feeds get to the farm, how they are managed at the farm, what happens to the products once they leave the farm, how they get to the consumer, how all this alters GHG production by wild termites, and so on. Such ideal comparisons are, for the most part, unattainable. In comparing resource use and GHG production for different species of livestock, such as crickets and chickens, it is often most convenient to make assessments within farms, from the point at which animals are born (the cradle) to the time they leave the farm (the gate).
In a cradle-to-gate LCA of two tenebrionid species, the mealworm (Tenebrio molitor) and the superworm (Zophobas morio), researchers at Wageningen University quantified the insects’ global warming potential, fossil energy use, and land use. Mealworm production required more fossil energy than production of milk or chicken, but similar amounts to pork and beef. Overall, however, the authors concluded that, given that land availability was the chief constraint to sustainable livestock production, and that farming mealworms required less land than farming other livestock, mealworms “should be considered as a more sustainable alternative to milk, chicken, pork and beef.” Although this factor was not addressed in that study, cattle, pigs, and chickens also take a lot more water to grow than insects.
Issues of land use, and the larger questions of habitat conservation, raise some tough questions about the relative merits of foraging versus farming. The 2015 Japanese NHK World documentary Hungry for Bugs shows an insect forager hacking open several trees, looking for larvae of the longhorn beetle. Watching this, I was uncomfortable. It seemed to me that a great deal of energy was being expended for minimal food rewards. In purely biological terms, were the fat and protein rewards worth the effort? More problematically, I worried about the destruction of habitat through foraging. When foraging is an occasional activity (such as eating cicadas when they emerge), or based on light human population demands, this is not a significant issue. But if insect-eating is commercialized and pulls a “sushi,” mainstreaming itself globally with increased economic returns — and if this eating is based on foraging — will this result in serious environmental destruction? Is farming better? I’ll come back to this.
The first, and probably most effective, step in enabling the positive impacts of entomophagy and minimizing the risks would be to stop exporting European and American styles of livestock agriculture to other parts of the world. By learning about, facilitating, supporting, and improving traditional entomophagical practices throughout the world, we can encourage genuine intercultural conversations about how people can eat sustainably.
Thai entomology professor Yupa Hanboonsong, one of the stars of global entomophagical research, asserts that it is not her intention to convert the world to entomophagy. ‘‘My mission is to preserve our farmland culture and domestic species,” she says. “Unless we treat this subject sensibly, the bug-eating tradition will disappear from our society very soon either from the extinction of insects themselves or due to their declining popularity. And, sadly, our younger generation will only know hamburgers and fried chicken.”37
Managing climate change would, in this narrative, be an unintended positive outcome of behaving in biologically sensible and culturally sensitive ways. I am reminded of the cartoon I send climate-change deniers who occasionally accost me. A scowling man is standing up in a hall where someone has just delivered a lecture on responses to climate change. “What if it’s a big hoax,” the man in the audience asks, “and we create a better world for nothing?”
Are the grand claims made on behalf of entomophagy warranted? If omnivorous humans shift away from eating the usual suspects to eating insects, will the human ecological footprint on the planet decrease? Possibly, but one of Sarah Beynon’s arguments, which I have heard echoed elsewhere in the entomophagy community, gives me reason to hesitate. If entomophagy is to have an impact on climate change, Dr. Beynon says, insect-eating cannot be a novelty; it would need to become a standard part of the diet. The current agri-food system creates a global food culture run by economically and politically powerful corporations and the governments that serve them, rationalized on an unsubstantiated assertion that this is the best way to feed the world’s populations. This globalized agri-food culture, framed in terms any livestock farmer understands — that an unidentified we are feeding an unnamed them — benefits the share
holders in those corporations. If insects are merely inserted into this system, we may simply be perpetuating a zip-line ride to hell in a handbasket.
The current wave of enthusiasm for entomophagy opens up some interesting alternatives. Can entomophagy be a strong stimulus for, and contributor to, mitigation of climate change impacts even as we provide sustainable and equitable food security for seven or eight or nine billion people? The issues I have raised here assume that people will be, or should be, farming insects. Traditional insect-eaters have most often relied on foraging in the wilderness to gather bugs. In a very crowded world, harvesting directly from the wild might help preserve wilderness areas — or devastate them. At the same time, farming insects raises for many the specter of industrialized livestock production with its economies of scale and negative social and environmental impacts. Are those our only options? What if we were to look at other possibilities? Where would we find different forms of inspiration, different examples?
Before we consider the variety of options available, or jump too hastily or drastically into changing human diets and agricultural systems with the hope of creating “a better planet,” we would do well to step back and look at the importance of insects in creating and sustaining the world we currently inhabit.
PART II.
YESTERDAY AND TODAY: INSECTS AND THE ORIGINS OF THE MODERN WORLD
Insects were here millions of years before us and prepared the way for our arrival. They created us, and their DNA is part of who we are. Before we eat them, maybe we should have a conversation. But how? What are the languages of insects? In what languages can we converse? They are so different from us! Let us explore the magical mystery of the world that they created, and we now inhabit.
I AM THE COCKROACH
How Insects Created the World
Bugs are us and we are bugs
and we are all together
Sometime more than three billion years ago (give or take), life emerged on earth. During the next billion or so years, single-celled organisms lay back and just kind of bubbled around in the warm water, producing wastes such as oxygen and experimenting with carbon dioxide as a building material. About 2.3 billion years ago, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels dropped and the earth toppled into the first of several catastrophic ice ages. Over the next 500 million years, there were four global ice ages, including what has been called “snowball earth,” around 610−690 million years ago. In between those ice ages, life on earth experimented with a variety of options, recreating itself in diverse and exciting waves.
Then, during a period of time more than 500 million years ago, when the earth was spinning faster than it is now, the moon was closer, and young love was in the air, the adolescent continents of Gondwana and Laurentia, as well as Siberia and Euramerica, moved away from that (perhaps) mythical mother of all land masses, Rodinia (from the Russian ródina, for homeland). Ah, those were the days! At some point — if I might be allowed some poetic license to consider millions of years a point — Gondwana and Euramerica sidled up to each other; together, they formed one giant continent, Pangaea. But that happened later — like, we’re talking hundreds of millions of years later — during what came to be called the Permian period, named for the Russian province of Perm Krai, near the Ural Mountains, where many rock strata from this time have been found.
Also during these pre-Permian days, single cells discovered the joys of exchanging bodily fluids, and what has been called the “Cambrian explosion” unfolded like slow-motion fireworks. The years from the Cambrian period (570 million years ago) to the end of the Permian period (250 million years ago) are sometimes lumped together into the Paleozoic Era. When evolutionary biologists describe events occurring over twenty-five million years as an explosion, we might be forgiven for pointing out that their understanding of an explosion differs from that of war refugees or gold miners. Stephen Jay Gould, writing about the almost hallucinatory variation in Cambrian fossils discovered in Canada’s Burgess Shale, called this the era of “Wonderful Life.”
Among the many living things that came into being over the next few hundred million years were the first attempts at achieving insect-like perfection. Secreting waste products that solidified, some organisms developed external protective gear. Ever since that time, those of us with internal skeletons have, with various sorts of shields and body armour, dressed up like jousting knights and riot police in an attempt to mimic the incredible success of exoskeletons.
Those early animals that survived to reproduce had multiple jointed legs. The happy campers in the warm Cambrian seas included Anomylocaris, a meter-long predatory arthropod with long, spiny feeding appendages that fed on (among other things) thousands of species of smaller trilobites with segmented, three-lobed hard skeletons and jointed legs. It is fairly easy — and lazy — to lump together all these arthropod ancestors. In fact, some scholars have labeled the time before 400 million years ago the “Age of Invertebrates,” which is just another way of saying the “Age of Things That Are Not in Our Family.” If we were to look for vertebrate human ancestors during those years, we would have to dig through the bottom sediments in search of a slithering, tiny Gollum, the soft-bodied worm-like animal we now call Pikaia.
Cambrian life writhed its slow orgiastic tangle through the Ordovician period (488–433 million years ago) and into the Silurian period (444–419 million years ago). During the scant thirty-odd million years of the Silurian, several types of arthropods were the first animals — and possibly the first living things — to colonize land. Some evolutionary biologists assert that arthropods were thriving on land for millions of years before plants arrived. The arthropods did not write the history of this living planet; as the first farmers, they were too busy making that history, preparing the soil for the tall, tropical Devonian trees. The myriapods — which included the predatory centipedes, the friendlier, mostly scavenging millipedes, and the most insect-like of the group, the symphylans — were among the first land-dwellers. With segmented bodies (like all arthropods), and two legs per segment, symphylans are very small (2–10 millimeters, which is less than half an inch) and, like millipedes, can live on various organic materials in soil. In those early days, these myriapods prepared the way for the much later entrance of pre-human vertebrates. The first recorded (terrestrial) insect fossil, Rhyniognatha hirsti, dates from about 400 million years ago. Our vertebrate ancestors, the sluggish lungfish, only crawled out of the swamp forty million years later, during the Devonian period.
In the broader entomophagy movement, we occasionally see insects lumped together with scorpions and their arachnid relatives like spiders, ticks, and mites. Arachnids are members of the subphylum Chelicerata: arthropods that cannot digest solid food and that have special appendages for grasping prey. They are related to insects and can be viewed as part of the ancestral arthropod family, but they are not as closely related as we once thought. In 2010, a team of American researchers led by Jerome Regier from the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute concluded, based on a combination of genetic sampling and complex statistics, that terrestrial insects are more closely related to lobsters (for instance) than to millipedes or spiders. For those promoting entomophagy, these relationships have marketing possibilities. See that cockroach on your plate? Think lobster!
In this age of obsession with carbon use, carbon taxes, and projecting our narcissism onto the natural world, some hive off the late Devonian period and refer to it as the Carboniferous period. It could also be called the Age of Peak Coal, or — given that atmospheric oxygen went as high as 35 percent — the Age of Oxygen. The Carboniferous period was also when the keyhole amphibians came around; these were the first four-legged vertebrates to develop ears, so that (we guess) they could engage in whispering sweet nothings and all that other important foreplay. Or maybe entomologist Scott Shaw is right when, in Planet of the Bugs, he argues that “it’s probably no coincidence that vertebrates developed ears at a
time when arthropods were starting to make a lot of buzzing and fluttering noises in the forest.” Hear that, honey? That’s lunch! Meals on Wings!
Insects, as usual, were millennia ahead of Amazon.com with the idea that one might use drones to deliver their goods. In fact, in an insect-centric version of the evolutionary narrative, we should really call the Carboniferous period the Age of Roaches, whose thrillingly winged ancestors made up about 60 percent of known Carboniferous insects. Roaches have been given a bad rap by a few destructive city cousins, but many thousands of modern species live in tropical forests, in the leaf litter, in the canopy, in caves, in bromeliad water basins, in daylight and darkness, at dusk and dawn.
Among the flying air-dancers during the high-oxygen Late Carboniferous were the largest insects that ever lived, the griffenflies (Meganeuridae). Meganeuropsis permiana, one of the Permian descendants in this family, was a predator with a 71-centimeter (2.3-foot) wingspan, spiny front legs for grabbing, and very strong jaws — the better to chew you with. With no birds, bats, or pterosaurs to compete with, these air dragons must have had a Wild West shoot-’em-up of a time.
Which bring us, finally — and here I really do mean finally, as it was the last age for most living things on the planet — to the aforementioned Permian period (542–250 million years ago), which brought to a close the Paleozoic Era. The Permian period ended with the greatest mass extinction in the history of planet earth, but, my-oh-my, what a Titanic celebration that age was before it went down! Many of those species that eventually became food and singing entertainment for pre-human primates and postmodern people were breeding, reproducing, skittering, and scattering onto the world stage during the Permian. These arthropods included the Protorthoptera, ancestors to the crickets, grasshoppers, and katydids, our modern karaoke singers, plague-makers, and storytellers. They also included the first insects in which the transition from babyhood to adulthood (egg, larva, pupa, adult) involved dramatic changes in form and diet (that is, complete metamorphosis): the beetles, lacewings, caddisflies, and scorpionflies. Dome-headed, and later two-tusked, warm-blooded proto-mammals roamed the landscape; the smaller ones probably ate some insects. In fact, this was the first time (if tens of millions of years can be called a “time”) that our mammalian ancestors (the proto-mammalian synapsids and “beast-faced” therapsids) and the ancestors of those whom we now wish to eat (the arthropods) shared the same landscape.
Eat the Beetles!: An Exploration into Our Conflicted Relationship with Insects Page 6
