For Love of Insects

"Tom Eisner was a member of my thesis committee and a major inspiration to me. He really lived the life of a “curious naturalist”. This is a phrase that Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen introduced for those of us who derive research questions from what we observe in nature. Tom was uncanny at seeing things that other people missed. I think of him as a superhero. His superpower was what I call “nature vision” – he saw things in nature that most of us miss. Tom’s interest was chemical communication. You can’t see chemicals but you can see their mark in the morphology of organisms. One example is his revelatory work with the rather ordinary and unloved European cabbageworm – one of the most dirt common insects in North America. It’s an invasive species, on wing from early spring until fall. They feed on crops so they’re not particularly welcome in anybody’s garden. These caterpillars were familiar to every entomologist and thoroughly studied, but nobody ever bothered to ask why they were covered with little hairs that have glistening globules at the end. Tom asked, and found that what made the hairs glisten on this otherwise unimpressive caterpillar was an undiscovered class of chemical defence compound. They would find an abundantly illustrated autobiographical account of Tom’s life and his scientific explorations. It’s a compelling read for many reasons. He led a very interesting life and he had an amazing eye – not just for odd bits and pieces of insect morphology but also for the beauty that is easily overlooked in the arthropod world. He was a superb photographer and even developed methods to capture images that people would otherwise miss. The examples he uses are familiar to biologists because they are in introductory biology textbooks. They are brilliant examples of what evolution can do given time and opportunity. He writes in this book: “I spend a fair amount of time looking around, I already knew as a boy that if I wanted to see things happen, if I wanted to win the revelatory lottery in nature, I had to buy a lot of tickets.” That really captures the position of a curious naturalist – if you want to understand natural history, you need to be out in the field."