Life on a Little Known Planet

"The organism Howard Ensign Edwards mainly studied was the wasp, but in Life on a Little Known Planet there are essays on cockroaches and crickets and fireflies. Some of the stories I tell my class today I first learned about in this book, which was given to me by a classmate when I was an undergraduate at Yale. The same copy still sits on my shelf. Howard Ensign Evans was absolutely masterful at describing the majesty of the insect realm, the ways entomologists study insects and the ways insects have been incorporated into human culture since ancient times. The book is a killer combination. It has elaborate descriptions of scientific experimental design as well as poetry. It’s a wonderful overview of how insects are important ecologically, scientifically and culturally. People don’t realise the key role insects play in ecosystem dynamics. Entire communities are built around figs in the tropics. But figs don’t flourish without pollinating fig wasps, which are almost microscopic. The whole system can collapse without a keystone organism. A keystone holds an archway together – it doesn’t look any more important than the other stones but if you take it out everything collapses. That’s the analogy to keystone species. Bugs in the System is where I try to reach people who don’t think they care about insects and don’t think they need to know about them. There are few human activities, no matter how simple or complex, that don’t relate to insects. Even the invention of the computer owes its origins to Bombyx mori, the domestic silkworm. Silk is of course a product of salivary secretions of Bombyx mori . Herman Hollerith devised a punch card system for coding data to conduct a census in the late 19th century based on the punch cards used to work silk looms in US factories. [His innovations then became the foundation of the information processing industry.] So silkworms gave life to computers. Another important service that insects provide is waste disposal. Our planet would be almost uninhabitable if there weren’t dung beetles busy clearing out excrement and carrion insects busy clearing out dead bodies. These insects have become incredibly useful to us. Carrion insects help solve crimes – they are used as indicators of forensic investigations. And dung feeders are indispensable in keeping pastures clear and usable. When Australia was colonised Europeans bought their livestock with them. Australia raised massive numbers of cattle and sheep, which are placental mammals while native Australian mammals are marsupials. Dung beetles in Australia were equipped to deal with marsupial dung but did not have the capacity to cope with huge quantities of cow and sheep dung. As a consequence dung piled up and another insect called the dung or bush fly proliferated, to the extent that there were places in Australia where you couldn’t walk without getting flies in your face. It was incredibly unpleasant. In the 1960s [the entomologist] George Bornemissza suggested importing dung beetles adapted to feeding on placental mammal dung to Australia. Over 40 species were ultimately imported, with different life cycles and different temporal patterns for the different regions of Australia. They’re doing a good job handling dung. It’s a dirty job but some organism has gotta do it."