Eat the Beetles!: An Exploration into Our Conflicted Relationship with Insects

by David Waltner-Toews

  Although the number and variety of insect species still branched and flowered and tumbled across the landscape during Permian times, many of those who had dominated the aquatic milieu, like the trilobites, were already in decline. After having survived multiple ups and downs, adapting and thriving for more than 300 million years, the trilobites disappeared during that greatest extinction of life in the history of earth. Today, they have the dubious distinction of living on only in such names as Aegrotocatellus jaggeri (named after Mick Jagger) and Arcticalymene jonesi (named after Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols). Cockroaches, having abandoned the seas for terrestrial adventures, might have — had they the benefit of German culture — looked over their shoulders in schadenfreude.

  The next couple of hundred million years, from about 250 million years ago to 65 million years ago, have been called the Mesozoic Era, comprising the Triassic, Jurassic (of dinosaur movie fame), and Cretaceous periods. During that era, the supercontinent of Pangaea broke into pieces, starting about 200 million years ago, as part of shifting tectonic plate cycles.38 In the wake of the mass extinction and continental drifts, life on earth renewed, redirected, and reinvented itself.

  Having been the first to make landfall and prepare the soil for plants and non-arthropod animals, arthropods went on from innovation to innovation. Xyelid sawflies, winged ancestors of a wild array of social insects — bees, ants, and wasps — as well as some, like the parasitoid Ichneumonidae, whom some might call anti-social, evolved in the Triassic treetops. If you are eating bee brood at a dinner party, and someone is quoting Solomon or Aesop and pontificating about the social lessons to be learned from insects, you might wish to remember that the eggs of sawflies and wasps that are fertilized by males always grow up to be female, while unfertilized (virgin-birth) eggs are always males. In postmodern terms, if we were given to “learning from nature,” we could perhaps frame this reproductive system in terms of female power and choice.

  Over the next tens of millions of years, some of the arthropods that survived the Permian extinction went through a complex diversification dance with their bisexual, flowering plant inamoratas. We have been taught to envision this time as the age of the dinosaurs, but the world that the dinosaurs bumbled and stormed around in was replete with a wide diversity of insects that influenced, and in turn were influenced by, the larger beasts.

  During the Cretaceous period (145–66 million years ago) many of the animals favored by entomophagical enthusiasts, as well as those bugs that have, through pollination and honey making, made possible the abundance of food in the twentieth century, coevolved with flowering plants. The dinosaurs roamed a world diversely abundant with Hymenoptera (wasps, bees, ants), Lepidoptera (butterflies), and many beetles (Coleoptera) and flies (Diptera). In 2006, entomologists reported finding a bee embedded in amber (in what is now Myanmar) that was more than 100 million years old.

  Wasps, hornets, and yellow jackets are members of the Vespidae family, within the same order as honey bees. These bee relatives have, in recent years, been demonized by the general public, often because they attack people or, more often, because they attack honey bees, one of the few insects to be granted saint status in non-bug-eating cultures. But we should not be too hasty in attacking them. In the first instance, you are much more likely to be attacked by another person than by a wasp, so the general military case against wasps is here on shaky ground. But there are other reasons, based on an understanding of ecological relationships, to be more circumspect and selective in how we respond to wasps. Of the seventy-five thousand species of wasps living today, fewer than 1 percent attack bees; they have many other roles in natural systems.

  The ancestors of our sweet, friendly, fuzzy, helpful, vegan bees were predatory wasps that emerged from the flower gardens of this Cretaceous Eden. Furthermore, if we are looking for early experiments in which evolutionary forces tried out new behaviors and technical skills to which we are now genetic heirs, the wasps deserve some consideration. A female nest-provisioning wasp, after stabbing a caterpillar with its antibacterial preservative (well before humans accidentally invented sulfa drugs and penicillin) and paralytic venom, will drag it into a nest that she has tunnelled or sculpted and lay an egg inside the still-living caterpillar’s body. Some species will then scatter sand around the entrance to camouflage it, or drag a stone to cover the hole. Wasps were thus stone tool users and disease managers millions of years before primates came around. Did the ancestors of our primate forebears learn toolmaking from them and then pass it on? Is this knowledge embedded in some of the genes we share with insects? If we include genetic memory going back to life’s origins, perhaps human toolmaking is but a clever variation on the survival strategies of life itself, and not a feature that distinguishes humans from other species.

  But we need not deny the annoyances of hornets, wasps, and yellow jackets, or speculate on the evolutionary origins of human behavior, to defend the importance of the Vespidae. Many Vespidae serve essential functions in promoting sustainable food security. I have already touched on their importance in fig tree pollination. Historically, in many parts of the world, wasp and hornet larvae, as well as those of honey bees, have been foraged and eaten directly. Furthermore, by preying on other insects, they offer nontoxic alternatives to pest control, which we will need if entomophagy is to succeed.

  The ancestral Orthoptera (our old friends the grasshoppers and crickets), an order which today includes some twenty-five thousand species, also survived the Great Catastrophe. A 2015 study, using a combination of molecular genetics and statistics, decided that these orthopterans could be divided into two so-called clades, members within each group coming from a common ancestor: Ensifera (crickets and katydids) and Caelifera (grasshoppers and locusts). The crickets who, in a tradition honored even today among humans, sing to find mates,39 went their merry troubadourian way more than 200 million years ago (Triassic and later). Katydids, the flower children of the Cretaceous, were selected for their leaf-shaped wings, blending in with the leaves of flowering plants; as a confusing aside, the Mormon cricket is actually a katydid, and is not a member of the famous tabernacle choir.

  When the dinosaurs — except for the warm-blooded, feathered ones we now call birds — went extinct 65 million years ago, many tiny, six-legged animal species survived. Grasshoppers, at eight thousand living species the most diverse of the orthopterans, made their dramatic, munching appearance post-dinosaurs, just as the grasslands were evolving. Also, a few small, insectivorous, shrewlike mammals (our ancestors!) squeaked through the meteorite-blasted bottleneck.

  It was after this creative destruction of the biosphere that the interactions between species of animals that are recognizably human and those that are recognizably insect begin to take forms that are recognizably modern.

  Primates made their first appearances about fifty or fifty-five million years ago. The lineage of primates that led to the grandfather who is writing this book probably diverged from the chimpanzee lineage five to seven million years ago. Primate species such as australopithecus, who might be able to photobomb our family picture and be mistaken for Uncle Bob with a hangover, showed up in eastern and southern Africa a few million years ago, give or take. Some early people-like species left Africa and wandered north and east, looking for the fabled spice islands of the Indonesian archipelago. Others stayed and evolved on home territory for a couple of million years, only migrating out in the tens of thousands of years ago.

  What stimulated the transformation from armpit-scratching pre-human foragers to head-scratching, insect-eating Homo sapiens? In an ironic twist in the evolutionary story worthy of a Sophocles tragedy, it appears that just as we are beginning to promote entomophagy in a big way, we are discovering that insects created us.

  WILD HONEY PIE

  How Insects Created People

  Picture yourself in a bug on a river

  Bugs have been on the menu — at least as a condime
nt — from the beginnings of primate history. As for many prehistoric events, the direct evidence is scant, but there are various clues from which we can infer an insectivorous diet.

  Some of this history can be surmised based on the behavior and diet of today’s primates, many of whom are insectivores. Smaller primates, having higher metabolic needs than great apes, get a greater proportion of their diet from bugs than their larger cousins. However, all great apes eat insects; in general, like people, they have been drawn to those more easily seen and caught, like large, sedentary beetle grubs or other larvae; or to social insects such as honey bees, wasps, weaver ants, and termites; or to those that arrive in handy mouthfuls, at least periodically, like locusts and caterpillars.

  Termite fishing and ant-dipping take time, but with patience, persistence, and the right tools, chimpanzees seem to think the activities worthwhile, as do those folks out in slow boats or hip waders. Jane Goodall noted that David Greybeard and Goliath, two chimpanzees from the Kasakela chimpanzee community in Tanzania, created termite fishing rods by stripping leaves off twigs. Researchers suggest that these chimps eat insects for nutritional reasons (of course), and that their specific choice of which bugs to eat is influenced by seasonality. I’m guessing that the rewards of fishing with your pals include peace of mind as well as fats and proteins; that is, as in people, insectivory in chimps has cultural as well as biological benefits.

  This is borne out by a report published in 2014 that looked at insectivory in eastern African chimpanzees.40 Drawing on fecal analysis, behavioral observation, and measurements of insect abundance, the researchers found that Semliki chimpanzees in western Uganda, whose communities are known to be among the most insectivorous in Africa, selectively ate honey and bees from Apis mellifera, as well as weaver ants (Oecophylla longinoda). The researchers suggested that, while there were “ecological time constraints” biasing consumption toward prey that could be gobbled up quickly, the particular species selected by the chimps might have been culturally determined. It is no great shock, then, to discover other evidence that supports the assertion that early humans probably ate insects for complex eco-social reasons.

  There is indeed reasonably good archaeological evidence that, for nearly a million years, early hominids (starting about five million years ago) in southern Africa used bone tools to dig in termite mounds. If we make a few imaginative but biologically plausible leaps across the millennia, we can point to ten thousand-year-old Cro-Magnon cave drawings of grasshoppers, in the Cave of the Trois-Frères in Ariège, France, as evidence that these ancestors were paying attention to insects.

  Rock and bark drawings of honeypot ants by Aboriginal Australians, and evidence that they dried and stored insects in empty squashes, suggest ancient practices going back before documented histories. From there, it is but a few more millennia to other cultural artifacts that connect us to bug-eating in the last, say, seven thousand years. In Mexico, anthropologist Julieta Ramos-Elorduy reports that the practice of storing insects in ceramic pots goes back three thousand years.

  In the words of entomologist Scott Richard Shaw, “the origins of human tool use, fine motor skills, manual dexterity, and ultimately the rise of human civilization are firmly rooted in our ancestral insectivorous diets.” In fact, Shaw writes, “We may owe our very existence to social cockroaches. If termites weren’t abundant, would primates ever have come back down out of the trees? I doubt it.”

  And once we were out of the trees? What then? Much of the information we have on prehistorical entomophagy is based on anecdotes by anthropologists and archeologists, and a few targeted research projects. We can make some conjectures, however, from the living traditions of eating termites, mopane caterpillars, locusts, and grasshoppers in Africa, beetles in the Americas, and witjuti grubs in Australia. Insect-eating practices in central Australia, Amazonia, and eastern Africa are probably ancient, forage-based, and seasonal. The seasonality reflects the close ties that all insects have with plant cycles, ambient temperature, and rainfall.

  Research into the dietary habits of the Tucanoan Indians in the Amazon discovered that they consumed more than twenty species of insects (mostly ants and termites), and that the species and stages of insects they ate were similar to those consumed by other indigenous Amazonian populations. Jena Webb, a researcher into the links between ecology and human health, described to me how she was guided by a ten-year-old boy along a pipeline in the Peruvian Amazon. As they passed through a flooded forest, the guide, bare-chested and wearing only shorts, “jumped from the slippery pipeline to the spikey palm tree and dug his arm into the heart of the tree to extricate a very large beetle, which he had seen scuttling along the tree from the pipeline. The beetle did not have big mandibles but it was big, the size of a small egg. Black. Then he discovered that it was not the only beetle. So one after the other he proceeded to remove the legs with his teeth and put the live beetles in the only receptacle he had, which was a tiny pocket in his shorts. He collected about 6–7. He walked along the trunk to get back to the pipeline and we continued on our fishing outing. We caught a couple of fish, which he strung up on a stick and we headed back after an hour. Immediately upon arriving at home he gave the treasure to his mom who began sucking the juicy, yellow liquid inside the beetle out with her mouth. She shared one with her two-year-old daughter. The mother had an air of contentment and pride.”

  From the description of the beetle and where it was found, I suspect that this was Titanus giganteus, one of the largest beetles in the world. They are thought to depend on decaying root systems of tropical hardwoods, and hence they will likely disappear as good-quality tropical hardwood forests are cut down. The ability of the boy to quickly identify the beetles as food and his mother’s reaction would suggest a long cultural history of opportunistic entomophagy. The anecdote also suggests that the research uncovering the complementary eating of fish and insects among the Tucanoans can probably be extended — not surprisingly — to many other people.

  Eating termites is an ancient tradition in eastern Africa, and knowledge of insect behavior and harvesting, as well as the medicinal uses of termites, is widespread, indicating a long coevolutionary history. In the Ugandan countryside, where I was out looking at tsetse fly traps, a young boy explained to me the seasonality of termite-eating. Poking at the insect soldiers guarding a termite mound, he explained that he and his family gathered termites for food when the winged forms emerged from the mounds in large numbers. These winged forms are the sexual stage of termites, and their emergence is related to a mating flight. They are attracted to light then and are more easily caught than at other times.

  A veterinary colleague of mine recounted to me a story told by her son, who injured his back while digging a fish pond in western Kenya. Local children brought him “a large bowl that was crawling with live, winged termites. The Mama said they would cure the strained muscles in his back. He sat wrapped in a lesso, eating termites while the children chatted and laughed with him — dipping their hands into his bowl to share this delicacy that is limited to a very short season each year. A few days later, Peter was recovered enough to rejoin the work on the permaculture team.”

  Contemporary non-insect-eating cultures live primarily in temperate zones, where extreme seasonal temperature fluctuations would historically have made foraging for insects an unpredictable food source. Perhaps more to the point, temperate regions also offered ready multipurpose alternatives, with larger mammals such as cows, sheep, and horses supplying food, labor, and later — as agriculture developed and barns were attached to houses — warmth. In fact, the development and spread of agriculture in temperate climates about ten thousand years ago would have changed human attitudes toward insects more generally; that is, insects would now have been seen to be a threat to more reliable, abundant, domesticated food sources rather than a source of food in themselves. There is some irony, then, in contemporary Europeans promoting insects as an answer to food
insecurity; but, of course, the context is fundamentally different.

  In temperate zones, the history of insect-eating tends to be either seasonal or rooted in certain cultures. Silkworm larvae, a by-product of silk production, have been eaten for millennia in temperate areas of Asia. Aboriginal people in the North American plains ate locusts seasonally and opportunistically for over four thousand years. By contrast, the history of eating worm-infested Casu marzu cheese in Sardinia is probably recent (that is, measured in mere centuries). The exception to these general patterns is the unique human relationship with honey bees.

  Among all the insects that figure prominently in global entomophagical practices, bees and their relatives have the longest documented role in early human evolution. That relationship has much to teach us about how entomophagy might find its place, both economically and culturally, in this century.