[These stories will follow an illustration dealing with biodiversity, food webs, and connectiveness in the little book on applied ecology, Games We Play.]
During a political dinner one evening I sat across from an older couple who were discussing in some scientific detail the life cycles and movement patterns of the hackberry feeder, the American snout butterfly, Libytheana carinenta (Cramer) and the milkweed feeder, the Monarch butterfly, Danaus plexippus (Linnaeus). In addition, they mentioned the fact that many species of beautiful butterflies will feed on feces and other somewhat disgusting materials to obtain needed sodium, other electrolytes, and various nutrients. They were discussing this in wonderful and caring scientific detail.
Since I had done some limited field research focus on Lepidoptera back in the past at universities in Texas, Florida, and Georgia (and with another insect order, Homoptera, in Brasil), I was eager to make a conversational connection and asked them if they were entomologists. “Oh no!” they replied. “We became interested in birding some years ago as a hobby, and from such outdoor experiences, we came across exciting insects, and began to study these creatures out of love.”
I thought to myself while sitting there at our table, “This is wonderful!” Nevertheless, this is but one small case in point of what the delightful Harvard myrmecologist and socio-biologist Harvard biologist, E.O. Wilson, calls biophilia!!
I have directly experienced and been encouraged by this love of life, of biota, by other humans many times in my life. Some examples can be drawn from volunteer experiences in recent years with non-governmental organizations with youth in Texas, Latin America and on Pine Ridge Reservation. We can give a group of kids a container of sweep net-collected insects and fascinate them into biological learning for more than an hour at a time. As the renowned E.O. Wilson emphasizes, biophilia is innate!
I do wish to apologize in advance at this point to biologists specializing in taxa other than Animalia. However, if we appropriately introduce human youth to their distant relatives in Animalia, they will particularly quickly embrace them, enjoy them, and even try them as a food. Plantae, Fungi, Protozoa, Chromista, Bacteria, and Archaea are great, but Animalia are the most fun for me and most other kids. An organic grower in northeast Austin who opened his facility to learning opportunities for youth, expressly volunteered in a meeting we both attended some years ago that, “You can pull kids in and keep them educationally occupied and intrigued with plants for tens of minutes. But introduce them to insects, chickens, a milk cow, and/or goats, and you have them enjoying and learning for hours.”
Years back while doing a summer science camp for elementary youth at St. Philip’s College, after a field trip on the grounds of St. Philip’s I noticed numerous green cynipid-wasp galls under the leaves of some live oaks on campus. I suggested to the students that they gather some, and we took them into the laboratory and began to dissect and investigate. One young Hispanic student who was 9-10 years of age, was much more adept than I at making slides of the hymenopteran larvae inside and was teaching others to do so. In addition, he was effectively teaching them as well about the internal parts of the tiny translucent vermiform organisms.
I asked this young fellow how he knew so much about entomology. He preceded to tell a story of hitting a paper wasp nest with his bat during a T-ball game in Crystal City, of getting stung, but also of having his interest raised about what was living inside the paper cells. He said that when he returned home his mom checked books on insects out of the library for him, and he began to harvest paper wasp nests and glue them beneath a suspended board apparatus for observation, i.e. for his scientific studies. I told the young one to follow me, and after we arrived in my office, I loaded him down with entomology books which I rarely used at that stage of my learning and gladly said, “Here son! They are yours! You’re going to be a much better entomologist that I will ever be!!”
Now … I don’t wish to give the simplistic impression that all is real peachy with respect to human beings’ love for Animalia. Entomophobia may be hard-wired and may get soft-wired into some of us. My experiences are that in contrast to truly rural kids, there can be serious concerns by many in today’s urban and suburban, more-indoor populations about a creepy, crawly being on their pure body or about a running, hopping or walking, or flying or floating six- or eight-legger in their vicinity, … and urban extension entomologists do receive frequent calls because of some folks’ fear of insects, spiders, and other Arthropoda.
We discussed house dust mites during one of my biology classes at St. Philip’s College one Friday, and I showed a video of one of these interesting critters traversing human skin. In the following Monday class, one older female soldier in my class complained, “Dr. Martin, you ruined my weekend off. I spent every spare minute cleaning to make certain I rid my apartment of any dust mites.”
In the process of doing various ecological activities with some wonderful inner-city youth out on a ranch north and west of Fort Worth, we adult volunteers had a difficult time calming them when the dirt-daubers were in their proximity and convincing these elementary kids that dirt daubers will not aggressively sting humans. Even just one innocent little mud wasp flying around in a barn in which we were working would bring on screams, shaking, and evasive movements among the kids. (On the other hand, I do have to mention that during one trip while working with the wonderful Mrs. Peggy Maddox and Kathy Dickson of “Kids on the Land”, one sweet young African-American lad from the inner city, brushed away his fear of wasps, embraced these hexapods and their ecology to which I was introducing him, and melted my heart by exclaiming, “Dr. Martin, you’re going to be my best friend for the rest of my life!”)
To backtrack somewhat and attempt to dig myself out of the hole I’ve gotten myself into with microbiologists, mycologists, and botanists, I do wish to ask forgiveness once again for perhaps have given Plantae and members of kingdoms other than Animalia short shrift up to this point herein. Youth and adults love in a very natural way most all organisms. I have many stories where young and old expressed their affinity for plants and other Kingdoms and will now tell one which was particularly enjoyable for me.
I did a one to two-hour class with elementary youth one summer in the Seguin LULAC Council 682 community garden in which we learned together about plant ecology, experienced through work in the garden appropriate sustainable agriculture, and harvested vegetables to take home to our respective families. That afternoon I was working alone in the garden when one of the young students who actively participated in morning activities, her younger sister, and mother and grandmother arrived at the edge of the okra patch in which I was hoeing. The mother said that her daughter would not sit still at home until she had the opportunity to show her family the wonderful garden she had experienced that morning. Of course, I dropped my hoe and the work I was doing and proceeded to eagerly and happily take the family for a tour of the garden while eliciting transfer of the knowledge the young morning-student had absorbed than morning to the rest of her family. It was a very good day!
I also wish to mention herein that through necessity and evolution, we humans are omnivores and do also love to eat a variety of biota. Different cultures enjoy the sustenance of a variety of cultivated organisms. And in my classes with youth, we have eaten and enjoyed corn smut, huitlacoche, and as well as corn earworms and mealworms. We’ve eaten Opuntia-cactus nopales and tuna, and crunched down grasshoppers. We’ve had salads and cooked bowls of poke, purslane, lambsquarters, pigweed, and green briar. There actually are a wide variety of so-called “varmints”, “pests”, and “weeds” which we can quickly learn to appreciate as foods for the nourishment of human bodies as well as their being important parts of various very much needed food webs.
Now, let me go back to the group of organisms which has provided me a great and sustainable livelihood for much of my life, the insects. In the Friday August 24, 2018 Wall Street Journal there was a review of Termites and Us by Howard Schneidner of Lisa Margonelli’s Underbug. After his reading and analysis of this wonderful book, Howard states that he did not become particularly enamored with termites. However, through his review he does help to make the point that we can all benefit by: learning about, respecting, and even loving all other life forms, and rather than Warring against them, beginning to try once again to just “get along”. Howard quotes Mrs. Margonelli, “If termites, ants, and bees were to go on strike, the tropic’s pyramid of interdependence would collapse into infertility, the world’s most important rivers would silt up, and the oceans would become toxic.” Mrs. Margonelli suggests that we might learn about sociobiology and governance from studying termites from “the way they build—coordinating thousands of individuals with a simple ruleset for every local termite but no overarching plan as that global mound takes shape.”
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As a young kid growing up in south central Texas, biology for me was milking the cow, watering and feeding the chickens and pigs, and doing some mostly recreational hunting of rabbits, squirrels, dove, and quail. (Even though we did cook and eat them, we weren’t dependent on them as a food source.) Biology was playing with horned lizards in the ditches of the canal district near Devine and Natalia and observing with wonder all the dead prehistoric-looking alligator gars when Chacon Lake was drained. Biology for me in my formative years was also the applied ecology of gardening and picking dewberries, grapes, plums, pears, and other fruits for the Martin-family mass-production of canned vegetables, juices, and jellies. Applied biology was castrating pigs, doctoring wounds infested with screwworms, worming with piperazine and spraying the cattle with toxaphene for external parasites. Biology back in the Devine area of Texas was also stickers and goatheads and thorns. It was not being able to swim in the dark waters of the Jasik’s Blackland-dirt tank because their cattle had been diagnosed to have brucellosis (undulant fever). My biological experiences back then were the feeding of, treating with diethylstilbestrol, and doctoring of cattle in the small feed lot between where we live near where Highways 173 and 35 now cross. (I suppose applied biology and ecology was also the experience of being covered with, and uncovered and recovered from seven-foot of cottonseed hulls which we were using to make feed for cattle in a small feed-lot, and of burying cholera-killed hogs for my Uncle Peggy Martin. Later it also meant getting poisoned by the carbamate aldicarb, an acetylcholinesterase-inhibiting neurotoxin which were testing on cotton against boll weevils and associated arthropods, and suffering some very nasty and painful muscle-spasming symptoms internally and externally.)
But back in my formative years in Devine in the hard-scrabble post-War agriculture of the southwestern U.S., I did not think of myself as a biologist and never aspired to be “a biologist” (even though I now emphasize to everyone that they are de facto applied biologists/ecologist, and that I personally want them to be knowledgeable and positively ethical applied community ecologists). Nevertheless, after stumbling through majors of petroleum engineering, history, and animal husbandry at Texas A&M University and San Antonio College, my Uncle Peggy, a successful agricultural entrepreneur, suggested I try entomology. (He thought he needed a field man versed in this discipline to help him in his agriculture business enterprises.)
Therefore, during my junior year at Texas A&M, I took general entomology under Horace Van Cleave and insect physiology with Dr. Joe Schaffner. Dr. Schaffner–in particular–utterly and intensely fascinated me with his way of teaching about insect metabolism, respiration, hemolymph, flight physiology, and excretion, etc. but especially his teaching of the physiology of the nervous system and the cutting-edge research on insect hormones of Carroll Williams at Harvard. It was Dr. Schaffner who hooked me into an increasing curiosity in biology!
Moreover, Dr. Schaffner took an interest in my development as a citizen and applied ecologist such that he strongly suggested I leave my food services job with the TAMU Memorial Student Center and seek out a student job in entomology. When my movement in that direction was too slow, Dr. Schaffner sicced Dr. R. L. Ridgway, a USDA cotton insects researcher on me. One night about ten o’clock as I was studying on the upper bunk in my dorm, Dr. Dick Ridgway came a-knocking and hired me to rear the cotton bollworm parasitoid, Campoletis sonorensis (Cameron) for a graduate student, Jim Cate. Work with Dr. Ridgway and Jim, the wildlife biology students on my summer insect-counting crews (including a baboon researcher seeking his doctorate who’d worked in Africa), and others of this wonderful USDA team of researchers and student help, opened a world of biological management, population dynamics and natural regulation.
Moreover–I’m slow and not overly-bright–but over time I came to realize that in terms of regulatory needs, it is us and not insects who are the primary problem here on this old Earth or new Eaarth. Insects and other biological organisms are our sustainable coinhabitants and we need to learn to live more through natural regulation of those we perceive as pests, pathogens, weeds, and varmints, and to get along with all biota.
I will never match up to my elders, teachers, mentors of biology, but I am forever indebted to these entomologists and biologists who made me be appreciative of the biophilia–the innate love of biota, the natural, Nature—in me, in us. There were too many along the way from back in the 1960s to where I am now in time of the early 2000s to mention all of them herein. However, some of the most memorable–in sort of chronological order as they influenced me toward increased biophilia–are: Joe Schaffner, Dick Ridgway, Knox Walker, E.J. Dyksterhuis, James Teer, Pete Lingren, David Pimentel, Archie Carr, H.T. Odum, Miguel Altieri, and E.O. Wilson.
Thanks and kudos to all these wonderful biophiliacs!!!
7Ss / VV->^^
pbm
