University Place

Cultural Entomology: Insects in Our Lives

[Barrett Klein, Assistant Professor, Department of Biology, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse]

Cultural Entomology! How insects have affected humans, throughout history and across the world.

So, why a fascination, why an obsession with insects? Why am I not talking about frogs or birds today? I’ll focus on the question of why insects have so profoundly affected humans. In different traditional cultures and modern societies across the globe.

The why! Why insects? First thing –

[slide titled – Why insects? – featuring an illustration of moth above the word, ubiquity and the statement – insects live almost everywhere!]

– we could look at is their ubiquity. They’re almost everywhere! Anybody know where insects do not exist on planet Earth?

I have a book on the insects of Antarctica, so no, they do exist in Antarctica.

Good one. Good guess.

Others?

Where can you not find an insect?

There are whole studies on aquatic entomology. Close! They’re all freshwater, generally.

So, pelagic zones, deep oceanic environments, you’re not going to find insects. But you are going to find their close relatives. So, insects are recently discovered to be, one lineage within Crustacea. The crabs, the shrimp, the arthropods. Jointed legged, exoskeleton [hits his microphone twice] bearing organisms, of which insects are the most speciose lineage.

So, aside from deeper oceanic realms, insects are all over the place. So, ubiquity. If we look at this pie chart –

[return to the – Why Insects? – slide with the illustrated moth]

– literal pie chart of the diversity of life that I created. What is the biggest piece or slice of the pie? Insects. And if this spider web is representing arachnids, and this, the rest of crustaceans, then arthropods, this one phylum of animals, represents a huge swath of the diversity, of life on the planet.

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

At least of described species on the planet. So, they’re everywhere. And if insects are all over the place, we’re going to run into them all the time. And what is the expectation, the consequence of that? They’re going to permeate our culture.

Whether it be war, politics, literature, music, art, food. List goes on.

So, we can start with insects as symbols.

[slide featuring three photos, one of a honeycomb shaped wood carving in the Mormon church, one of a statue that is holding up a boll weevil, and one of Egyptian hieroglyphics of a scarab beetle on a column]

So, Mormons, have adopted the honeybee, as a major symbol throughout their religion. And then Egyptians use the honeybee, scarab beetle within their hieroglyphics. And if you’ve ever driven through, and I’ve only met a couple people who have – have, but if you ever driven through Enterprise, Alabama, then you may find this Hellenic sculpture, holding aloft, believe it or not, a crop pest insect, a boll weevil.

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

So, once this boll weevil had eradicated crops, what did this town of Enterprise do? In an enterprising fashion, they moved to different crops and technologies, and that saved them. So, the symbol of success? Was their crop destroying boll weevil.

Insects appear on our currency, and this is just a –

[slide featuring seven denominations of world currency that have insects on them including Mexico, Fiji, Costa Rica, Honduras, and several ancient coins]

– shabby, teeny, selection and I’ve got others up here, of paper bills and coins some millennia old, like the bee on my ring, 2000 years old. In which insects serve as symbols in currency.

And –

[new slide featuring numerous postage stamps that feature insects in the U.S.P.S. Insects and Spiders series as well as a stamp from Malaysia featuring an insect]

– postal stamps!

[more international postage stamps animate on around the U.S.P.S. postal series stamps]

Including this popular insects and spiders series. From around the world again, featuring our friendly neighborhood insects and arachnids, within phylum Arthropoda.

[new slide featuring seven photos and one video of people either wearing insect prints on their clothes or dressed up in insect costumes including one woman with an insect tattoo]

[suspenseful music]

And what we wear! Now, I cheated a little bit. This robotic spider dress represents an order of arachnids, a different group of arthropods. But all the others, including Corrie Moreau’s tattoos in the lower right, with ants adorning her body because she’s a curator of ants at The Field Museum. Victoria Rivers took a shot of that shawl, a Vietnamese shawl that includes buprestidae, metallic, boring beetle elytron. Those sheath-like forewings that can be iridescent metallic.

And then modern wears. Like these dresses that reflect moth and butterflies. And anybody recognize the feature film here in the lower left? My mother is raising her hand. Yeah, what? No, over there. Yeah, that’s not my son. Hunger Games. And yes, that is my son in a bee outfit. And up above, upper-left, these are molas, fabriqu and reverse fabriqu works by the Kuna –

[Barrett Klein, on-camera, holding up a mola]

– of the San Blas Islands in Panama. And often times, they feature natural history subjects. Including insects and their folklore tales. This is a human-headed fly.

So, even on what we wear. So, ubiquity, can serve as one mechanism for inspiring us to have insects affect our culture.

Next, we –

[slide still under title – Why Insects? – featuring an illustration of a flea above the words – negative impacts and the statement – insects as disease vectors, crop loss, pain]

– can thing of negative consequences. So, here’s a – a beautiful illustration by?

Anybody know?

Yes, Robert Hooke! Earliest micro – one of the earliest microscopists, and this was presented in Bubonic Plague time, Black Plague times. And so, Samuel Pepys diary, mentions seeing things like this. And, you have to believe that this might have affected people’s hygiene, seeing the giant – the GIANT organisms that are in your clothing. So, impacts can include disease. Where insects can serve as vectors of disease.

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

Or destroyers of crops. And simply, causing pain. And I’ll start with pain.

So, a colleague Justin Schmidt just published this book –

[slide featuring the book cover of Mr. Schmidts book The Sting of the Wild as well as a diagram of The Schmidt Sting Pain Index featuring four levels and illustrations of the insects that inflict said pain – Level 1 – Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm, with illustrations of a Sweat Bee and a Fire Ant; Level 2 – The oven mitt had a hole in it when you pulled the cookies out of the oven, with illustrations of a Honeybee and a Jack jumper ant; Level 3 – Bold and unrelenting. Someone is using a power drill to excavate your ingrown toenail, with illustrations of a Yellow paper wasp and a Florida harvester ant; Level 4 – Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hairdryer has been dropped in your bubble bath, with illustrations of a Bullet ant and a Tarantula hawk wasp. To the right of the diagram are three illustrations, one of a human face, one of the front side of a human and one of the back side of a human and indicating all the places that are the most painful to be stung by a honeybee]

The Sting of the Wild. And here’s his famous hymenopteran pain index scale on the left. So, if there is a member of the wasps, bees, ants, order of insects that sting, and all a stinger is, is a modified egg laying device. So, no males will sting, only females deliver the potent venoms. So, instead of laying an egg, Schwoop! They’re laying something else in your body. And so, the pain index ranges from this one, two, three, four. And the most severe includes Paraponera clavata, the bullet ant. Or a pepsis tarantula hawk wasp.

Now, my other colleague Michael Smith at Cornell University, decided to do his own pain index scale, with just the honeybee. And subject, yes was Michael Smith. And you can imagine what were some of the more sensitive regions of the Michael Smith bow plan. But I was surprised to learn that the tip of the nose was ridiculously painful for him. So, these two gentlemen –

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

– together, shared the Ig-Nobel Prize this past year, for this insightful work.

So, beyond pain, far more serious than short term pain, is vectoring of disease. So, here’s an image –

[new slide featuring three images, one a photo of the cover of a book called Six Legged Soldiers – Using Insects as Weapons of War, one of a silhouette of a louse used as a nightlight above an image of Napoleon, and one of a woodcut illustration for Richard Pinsons translation of Aesops The Man and the Flea, 1500]

– of a man with a flea and we can talk about how Europe collapsed population wise. In some regions half the population lost, to the flea bearing the pathogen that causes the Black Plague.

We can also look at Napoleon down there, defeated! At least, visually in this display in Bern, Switzerland, by a louse. So, lice can serve as vectors of typhus. And Napoleon’s march on Russia –

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

– failed partly due to the freezing cold, but as a consequence of the cold, soldiers that dropped dead, had valuable clothing to keep their compatriots warm. So, what do you do? You grab a coat, with lice, potentially bearing typhus, on your own body. And so, Napoleon famously, retreated in defeat. Probably at the tarsi of a louse.

Who is the greatest killer of all animals on the planet? Let’s not blame Anopheles mosquitoes directly, because they suffer the consequences of plasmodium single-cell eukaryotes in their bodies. But they do –

[slide featuring two images from a pamphlet titled – Todos Contra La Malaria – featuring an illustration of a Hispanic soldier with his children standing in front of the Centro De Salud with a doctor and a nurse in one panel; in the other panel are an illustrated Hispanic couple in bed surrounded by mosquito netting protecting them from mosquitos outside the netting as well as an illustration of the same Hispanic couple filling in open water with dirt to prevent mosquitos from mating]

– this genus of mosquito serves as the vector of malaria, and some are more potent than others. Like Plasmodium falciparum, the deadliest of the mosquito malaria parasites.

So, biggest killer vectored by a mosquito.

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

And you have others, Yellow fever, Dengue fever, black or breakbone virus.

[slide titled – Dengue Virus – featuring a 3D animated illustration of the Dengue virus spinning at the top of a Virus Trading Card]

So, Dengue, the virus that causes Dengue, is very similar, same group, as the one that struck –

[new slide featuring an illustration of the Zika virus next to two brain scans that show the difference between a normal brain and one infected with Zika. Additionally, the bottom of the slide has an illustration of how the Zika virus enters the human population]

– us very recently, and you’ve probably been reading accounts of the Zika virus. So, this has swept through, it was in the Old World, but it’s swept through from Brazil, all the way north through Mexico, and will certainly pose a problem in the southern United States. It has been definitively linked to microencephaly now. Condition with a smaller brain, and other complications prenatally.

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

And who’s the vector? The same mosquito that vectors Dengue and some others –

[slide featuring an illustration of the mosquito that carries Zika and other diseases]

– Aedes aegypti.

[new slide still under the – Why Insects? – heading]

So, we can go past the negative –

[the slide animates on illustration of a cave painting of a honey robber as well as an inset of a Spanish postage stamp based on the cave painting]

– and enter the more positive.

[the slide animates on the words – Positive contributions – and the statement – Insect food, products, medicines, technology]

So, what do insects offer? Because actually I should pause there.

I – I highlighted some nefarious, hexapod foes of humans.

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

But they’re a tiny, tiny, tiny minority. If there are say a million, or close to a million described species of insects on the planet. How many actually vector diseases of consequence to humans? Very, very few. So, even within mosquitoes, some of them don’t suck blood to feed their young. Some of them are carnivorous on other mosquito species. And no male will suck your blood, they might suck nectar from flowers, but there – I guess there’s a theme here, females causing some issue.

Alright, so here we’ve got an image that I adapted from –

[return to the previous slide with the cave painting illustration and the inset postage stamp]

– a cave painting in – near Valencia, Spain, of a honey robber. Some say she’s a human female, that has climbed up and grabbed comb for the honey. Stealing, and this was produced, probably about 8,000 years ago. So, our association with insects are pretty ancient, and here is physical evidence of this association. And yes, it was made into a Spanish stamp.

[new slide featuring two photos, one of an Egyptian sandstone drawing of a bee over the top of an article called – The Pharaohs Apiaries, and second of several bricks, and straws and wood pieces that have holes in them that bees have used for colonies]

Let’s look at couple of other attributes of insects from a human perspective. Pollination. If you like almonds, so many other nuts and fruits, a variety of crops, that humans tend to embrace or even require. Bees, and specifically Apis mellifera honeybees, can be responsible for the efficient pollination from male parts to female parts. They’re the sexual agents. So, aside from honeybees –

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

– which of course have great ancient ancestry, several thousand years. There are bee keeping relics from Israel and certainly Egypt, that show this association of apid culture. But you also have native bees. Because the honeybees been called the white man’s fly, because it’s only about 500 years ago that it was introduced to the New World. We had eight families of bees, there are over 6,000 described species on the planet. We had a wealth, and we still have a wealth of bees, native bees, that aren’t Apis mellifera. And these little straws and sticks and bricks, offer holes –

[return to the previous slide]

– that you can set up in your front and back yard, that attract these native bees, which are also really valuable pollinators. So, not only do you have the pollination of plants, but bees can offer honey, if they’re honeybees proper. Wax, propolis, and other beneficial products.

[new slide featuring an illustration of Rene-Antione Reaumur writing on paper in front of an early map of Louisiana and Mississippi]

Another product inspired by insects, paper. All these books aren’t made of linen anymore, these books are made of paper. Ground up pulp from trees. And it was Reaumur who first was inspired by Polistes paper wasps that build their own paper nests, right? So, all of this is from, not Polistes paper wasps but closely related vespid wasps.

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

And so, the paper, is simply masticated or chewed up, dead wood. You find a log, chew it up, add salivary agents, and then lay layer after layer, sometimes you’ll see multiple colors in the paper. So, they make that as the basis for holding their young, their offspring, holding food, and sometimes as a protective envelope. Well, this gentleman looked at this a couple of centuries ago, and said Hey, we can learn from that. And that was the inspiration, years later, but the inspiration for using paper.

Food!

[slide featuring the cover photo and an interior page of the book – Man Eating Bugs; the cover features a Asian woman eating a bug and the interior page is a photo of a beetle with the nutritional facts next to it as well as photos of a grasshopper, a red ant, and a cricket inset with their nutritional information included]

So, in some parts of the world this is a staple. If you think of, some of you eat beef and pork. Inefficiency, I yell! Because the amount of protein per dry mass, is ridiculously low. Some cases 16 percent or so. But dry up, pulverize a cricket or a grasshopper, or a giant water bug? You might have 40, 60 percent protein. And if you have termites, and I’ve got some up here, if you’d like to check them out. You’ve got a lot of lipids and fatty acids, that could be great calorically, if you’re in a desert for example. So –

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

– food can be super important, from an insect – from a human perspective looking at insects. So, this Man-Eating Bugs is a couple that travels around the world, and looks at the different dishes, traditionally incorporating insects.

And this runs through the beneficial –

[return to the – Man Eating Bugs – slide]

– nutrients, micronutrients, protein counts of different insect groups.

[new slide featuring the cover of a magazine article titled – Edible Insects – Future prospects for food and feed security which has six photos of insects that are used for food]

This is a real thing! So, future prospects of looking at worldwide consumption. Theyre sustainable, potentially. And they can feed communities that can’t afford other proteinus sources of food. So, there are movements around the world, for creating mass product of ground up or pulverized insects as food.

And I have to ask, who here has eaten –

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

– an insect?

Raise your hand high. Okay, now all of you raise your hands, ’cause you’ve all eaten insects whether you know it or not! If you’ve drunken glass of orange juice for example, the Food and Drug Administration allows a certain parts of fruit flies and the rest, within that respected glass of orange juice. And that’s the same across the board, you’ve all eaten insects. Vegans, carnivores alike have eaten insects. And, that can include not just the little random bits –

[slide featuring a bevy of labels from various fruit juices]

– but the natural coloring agents. If you look at the final ingredient, of something that looks scarlet. It may be carmine, or cochineal, or cochineal extract. And I’ve got a lot of it here. Cochineal extract –

[Barrett Klein, on-camera, holding up a vial of cochineal extract]

– is simply the pulverized bodies of true bugs that feed in Sonora, Mexico on opuntia, prickly – prickly pear cacti. So, they feed, and the females are just basically blobs. You don’t see legs, you don’t see eye – they’re almost nothing. So, people for centuries thought they were worms, that are called vermes or kermes, or seeds. Until someone saw, Oh there’s a winged male, that’s flying and mating with a female. So, you’ve got these little gloppy insects, that if you crush just with your fingers, you’ll get this bright-reddish scarlet. And that’s been used to dye a number of things. The Navajo rugs for example, have extracted, tinctured fabrics, for their rugs.

So, Mauna La’i, Ruby Red grapefruit drink, a lot of beverages can include cochineal extract, and we’ll come back to cochineal in a moment.

My mother’s here, as a gift to my wife, she gave the –

[slide featuring a photo of the cover of the book – A Feast of Ice and Fire – as well as a the recipe page for Honey Covered Locusts]

– Game of Thrones recipe cookbook. And what is one page? Locusts! As he seized the bowl and began to crunch them by the handful! So, even in this fictitious realm, insects are being con-consumed.

[new slide featuring two photos from the Naturhist Museum in Bern, Switzerland, one of a cochineal and lac power in a bottle and a second with items made of shellac – lipstick, an L.P. record and red food coloring]

Other products. Cochineal coupled with lac, as in shellac from lac bugs. So, you can find on certain plants, these true bugs, that will exude this protective layer of lac. Scrape that off, you can use it. Traditionally anyway, now shellac is made of different things, but that’s what made these albums, the L.P. There is some cochineal, dying sausage, cosmetics, liqueurs, all manner of things. Traditionally, the British Redcoats. Red, because of this rare or-organic dye from the New World. There was something far less potent in root feeding true bugs in the Old World. So –

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

– to capitalize on this royal red, it was very expensive. And upon penalty of death, no one could extract the secrets, let alone the physical bodies, the manifestations of this scarlet. It was only until 1777, that a Frenchman snuck out some of these cochineal with a Puntia. And he tried to place them in different areas, and it only stuck in the Canary Islands. So, you’ll find some cochineal being reared elsewhere.

Medicines, whether folk remedies, or tried and true remedies. Here are some supposed –

[slide featuring a photo of an article in the Journal of Ethnobiology titled – Entomotherapy, or the Medical Use of Insects – as well as a table from the same article indicating insects used, chemicals made and the pharmacological action of said chemicals]

– anti-cancer medicines, based on insects. At least anti-bacterials.

[new slide featuring a different article titled – T-Bee – Two researchers are trying to train bees to sniff out tuberculosis with an illustration of a bee staring down TB spores]

Then you can have – you can co-opt the very sensitive, sensory modalities of insects, to your favor. So, for example in this case, you can use honeybees that smell so well, that they can be trained to detect anything from gasses emitted by landmines, to in this case the presence of tuberculosis. There has been a German airport that has boxes with three honeybees –

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

– used to sniff out bomb making material that comes through the luggage security.

You could invest in the VASOR 136 –

[slide featuring an advertisement for the VASOR 136 which is a sensing device that uses 36 cartridges that each carry one bee that takes an air sample and has trained the bees to give a response on a P.D.A. screen]

– in order to have 34 cartridges filled with honeybees, to find whatever you train them to. And it’s pretty easy to train a bee. Basically, you give them sugar water, tap it to their antenna, they’ll extend their tongue. Now, couple that with an odor, what do you have? You’ve got a Pavlovian response eventually, when you remove the sugar water and just present the odor, and bloop! Instead of drooling, they stick out their tongues. Well, if you see a bee stick out her tongue, if you trained it to a landmine odor, and you present it with landmine odor, ding! ding! It’s a good indicator that you’ve got a landmine.

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

Aw, man! This is just a, really a teeny, short list. We could focus the entire time on biomimetics, engineering inspiration –

[slide featuring a myriad of articles about insects and technology including the cover of an article called C.S.I., Crime Scene Insects, an article about using Beehive Fences to Keep Elephants Out, Bugs as Biomonitors and Entomology and the Law]

– from insect morphology and physiology. In the upper right, you’ve got micro-flying machines, hexapodal robots out of Georgia Tech and other places. To the left you’ve got forensics, say detectives basing the age of a decomposing body on what arthropod stages are found present on or in that body. This has helped solve many a crime.

And then, you’ve got on the lower right, a means of staving off elephants from tromping through villages. Set up a honeybee colony. And that buzz, the sound of the bees, keeps the elephants away. Next, look at these freshwater dwelling, immature insects. These can be really excellent indicators, as for the quality of the waterways.

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

How about sports? Recreation. Warfare, defense. In this case, legend has it an Asian prince, witnessed a mantid with the speed and strength grabbing a cicada and then consuming it. So, he adopted –

[slide featuring photos of three pamphlets on Chinese Praying Mantis Boxing]

– that speed and strength in a martial art, and there are different forms of mantis style kung-fu. Now, the legs on a mantis are thin and weak, so he added monkey style legs. So, mantis style kung-fu, is really fasc – [whispering] You wanna come up, I’ll show you what to say. You sure? On mantis style kung-fu? Come on up here.

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

Come on up and punch me. You know you wanted to. You sure? You wanna come up? Alright, come on. Okay. So, if you’re practicing monk-monkey style legs, it’ll be very different from what I’ll show, so I’ll just stand up straight. But if you punch me –

[a volunteer student that Professor Klein has been whispering to has come up from the audience and does a slow-motion punch of Professor Klein who parries this punch]

– so, one thing I can do is just parry that, right? And I can grab that and pull forward. So, this raptorial foreleg, is incapacitating this arm, and then you can do all kinds of things, right?

[Professor Klein demonstrating Chinese Mantis Style Kung-Fu]

So, it’s this first sparring, and this grab that mimics that mantid. Now, you’re on TV. [laughs]

[Volunteer returns to audience]

So, mantis style kung-fu, just one of many ways that insects have affected how we physically behave.

Here’s one of my favorites.

[slide featuring a military photo of Sir Robert Baden Powell, 1915 along with the title of his book, My Adventures as a Spy and including two illustrations of a butterfly, one head on and one as viewed from the top]

So, founded the Boy Scouts, famous individual. Here’s a book, My Adventures As A Spy. So, during war-times, what did Sir Powell do? He would collect butterflies; he would collect insects. Nobody thought twice about it, right? Even if he approached fortresses. So, his sketches in his notebook, innocuous sketches of Lepidoptera, the order of moths and butterflies. Were actually –

[the slide animates on the actual ground plans that the butterfly illustrations were meant to represent]

– quite precise ground plans of different fortresses. With symbols representing fortress guns, field guns, machine guns. So, he could very easily exit, even if his field notebooks were examined, with all their beautiful insect drawings.

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

Humans using insects for evil. Well, maybe not evil.

Then we can think about lessons of social insects. If you look at, say tens of millions of years of evolution, honing the traffic plans of ants, the foraging plans of bees, the swarming behavior and efficiency of finding a new hole in a distant tree to start a home. Then maybe we can better understand how to more efficiently organize our cities, our traffic plans. And so –

[slide titled – Commentary – Ant Traffic rules- and featuring two book covers, one called Honeybee Democracy by Thomas D. Seeley and one titled The Wisdom of Bees – What the Hive Can Teach Business About Leadership, Efficiency and Growth by Michael OMalley Ph.D]

– you’ve got a number of papers that do this, Ant traffic rules, above. And these are models based on natural, empirical data. Then you’ve got Thomas Seeley’s book, Honeybee Democracy, which the final chapter, cleverly examines, not only how honeybees operate, but how humans operate in certain respects, and what are the similarities in decision making.

Wisdom of Bees, can we learn from social insects?

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

Okay. Why insects? The final category, that I – I’m sure we could all come up with many more categories, is the aesthetic sense, the beauty –

[slide still under the – Why Insects? – heading with the subtitle – Beauty and Inspiration (Sexual selection, aposematism and camouflage) featuring a photo of various pins, brooches, paperweights and other things shaped like insects – butterflies, moths, beetles, scarabs, flies, and dragonflies are some examples]

– that comes with insects inspiring us. So, I’m gonna take a biologist’s approach to this beauty. So, why do flowers exist? It’s not for humans. It’s to attract pollinators. Opportunistically we love flowers, we tend to breed flowers because we really are attracted, to what has evolved, to attract different species. Well, if we look at gorgeous insects out there, the iridescent wings of a Morpho butterfly –

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

– the multiple colors of a grasshopper, the orange, black, white banded Monarch butterfly. What are we looking at? We’re looking at either something that is display for courtship, for sexual selection purposes. We could be looking at camouflage, crypsis. Looking like your environment, so you look like a leaf or something like that. Or, aposematism, warning coloration. You’ll remember yellow-black bands, or red, or high contrast patterns. If you take a nibble and it tastes awful. So, if you sequester noxious chemicals in your body, and you can just display that willy-nilly, you can potentially be safe, if organisms that would serve as potential predators, avoid you and your kin, or at least those belonging to a similar ilk. You can pro-procure benefits, by looking like others that are chemically defended, even if you’re not chemically defended yourself. And we can find beauty in these patterns and these colors. So, do you confer benefits?

[slide featuring two illustrations, one of a petroglyph of a water strider on the left and the painting The Cricket by Juan Miro on the right]

Let’s look at a couple of human derived examples inspired by insects. Anybody guess what that insect is on the left? This is from a thousands year old petroglyph.

So, think four bigger legs, and raptorial teeny forelegs. What do you think those circles represent? They’re not wings, at least by some interpretations.

Ripples on the water? Maybe Gerridae, family of water striders. So, this is really ancient, on the right you’ve got Juan Miro’s Le crayon, The Cricket. An abstract piece based on the cricket.

[new slide featuring a painting by Mr. Kleins mother titled, Mars Beetle with an illustration of half of Mars at the top of the painting and a scarab beetle in black on the lower half of the painting and both surrounded by a star field]

And we happen to be fortunate enough to have the world’s greatest artist in the room, happens to be my mother right there, and she produced this Mars Beetle. So inspired thinking cosmically, with respect to insects as symbols.

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

Then you’ve got Max Ernst and Salvador Dali. Thinking in terms of surrealism and dreams-

[slide featuring two paintings, on the left a painting by Max Ernst featuring a prince in the foreground and a swarm of crickets approaching a woman who is shackled to a wall, and on the right the painting Gala and the Tigers by Salvador Dali]

– and how influences from insects, can permeate a dream.

So, I don’t know if you can spot it, but right above that pomegranate on the lower right of that Salvador Dali image, what do you have? You’ve got a little honeybee, which purportedly inspired her whole dream.

[new slide featuring two photos, one of the artist Cornelia Hesse-Honegger and the second of her work of art of an insect effected by nuclear radiation]

So, an artist can have great impact in a variety of ways. Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, from Switzerland, is an artist, she’s an environmentalist, she’s an activist, and she’s become somewhat of a scientist, at least an amateur scientist. What she looks for, is mutated insects primarily. Sometimes leaves of oaks, but primarily mutant insects. That had been distorted physically, by radiation output according to her studies, produced by nuclear power plants. Even the cleanest ones, as in Switzerland. But she’s gone to Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and collected insects and shown that you’ve got a number of them –

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

– that have been affected adversely. What does that say about humans? So, she makes claims, to try to affect our decision making in terms of sustainability in our energy choices.

Bill Logan in New Jersey produces these exquisite fly ties. When I first saw one, someone – a friend of mine just said, “Here, look at these photos. You gotta go to this art exhibit.” And I looked and said, “Well, these are beautiful photos of stone flies. And I thought, There must be something more to it. And I looked through the photos, and then one showed a ventral view with a big hook. So, he’ll spend over a hundred hours –

[slide featuring a photo and an illustration, the photo is of one of Bill Logans fly-ties of an earwig and the illustration is an inset of a 1600s painting of a man fishing]

– traditional fly-tying methods to produce these hyper realistic fly ties. And he’ll make them look really realistic in terms of some damage. Like that circus, that posterior appendage on the right, broken off as you might see in nature. Conscious choice.

[new slide featuring an illustration and a photo, the first is an illustration is of women making silk in ancient Japan and the painting is of a work of art by Kazuo Kadonaga of Japan using thousands of cocoons interspersed in wooden structures]

Kazuo Kadonaga, Japanese artist who looks at sericulture, traditional methods of producing silk and in this case, he produced 110,000 cocoons that he heat-treated or killed, after moving those crates all around so they’d be evenly distributed to make commentary about sericulture, and human culture.

[new slide featuring four photos, one of the artist Steven Kutcher in the midst of several of his works, one a close-up of Steven putting paint on the feet of a beetle, one of the beetle scrambling along the canvass leaving the paint behind and one of a close-up of one of Stevens finished paintings]

Then you’ve got Steven Kutcher in California, and he’ll dip the tarsi of beetles and other insects in paints, and he’ll collaborate with his insect friends. And create these canvases of abstract works, that he can somewhat manipulate by presenting light and other things.

[new slide featuring four works of art from Henry Dalton, one a tryptic and three individual paintings of vases, flowers and urns using the parts of insects]

One of my favorites Harry or Henry Dalton, was a Victorian microscopist. And what he did, was he’d take a pig bristle, and pick –

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

– individual scales, these are modified, seedy, hair-like structures on another insect that form the scales that form the color patterns on butterfly wings. He’d take individual scales with a pig bristle and arrange them with diatoms and still lives with no adhesive on slides. And some of these exist in the world, they were shown at the Museum of Jurassic Technology and here are some of those still lives –

[return to the previous slide with the tryptic and three paintings]

– close-up, and far away.

[new slide featuring four photos, two of works of art by Jan Fabre of the finished art of a dress and a hooded weaver and two of Jennifer Angus pieces that use a plethora of insects to create her art]

Jan Fabre produces these works made of entire insects. So, instead of just the paint tracings by Steven Kutcher or the individual scales as in Harry Dalton’s work. Here, Jan Fabre will take entire beetles and form these exquisite displays. Jennifer Angus at U.W.-Madison produces geometric displays with entire insects as well. And she has a recent – she has a present display in the Smithsonian right now.

[new slide featuring two photos and a newspaper clipping – the newspaper clipping is from an article about the artist Catherine Chalmers featuring a photo of her, the second is of one of her painted cockroaches and a third is of a painted honeybee]

Catherine Chalmers. When this was published this painted American cockroach, Periplaneta americana on the right, as the cover of Art in America, I thought, Oh, this is interesting; well, let’s see what letters come up in the next issue. And all the letters that were published were like, How could you do that to a cockroach? I thought, Wow, probably people who wouldn’t think twice about crushing the same cockroach. But something about her work, brings a humanity, to these very distant relatives, these cockroaches. Such that whether or not she’s painting an insect or creating faux executions of cockroaches, no cockroach was harmed in any of these exhibits, she switches it out at the last minute with a – a carcass of an insect. But people respond really strongly, viscerally.

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

Because they see a humanity in an insect. And if you fear honeybees for example, it’s a different scene if you put a dab of paint on one and watch that individual. Then it becomes more of a soap opera.

And then there’s Hubret Duprat in France –

[slide featuring a video and a photo, the video is of a caddisfly larva being coaxed out of its shell by the artist Hubert Duprat and one of a finished piece of art that he has created by using the discarded shell from the larva]

– and he takes individual caddisfly larvae that often times build, depending on the species, these protective cases around their bodies. Sometimes out of pebble, sometimes out of sticks, and what he’ll do is he’ll take the back end off and poke the posterior end of the larva. She’ll wiggle out, ditch that case, and now offer gold spangles and pearls. I know it’s a tough collaboration, because you – as you can see in the upper left, they can be really finicky. So, Ugh, forget that one. Ugh, forget that one, and then maybe this one. I’ll incorporate with cephalic silk glands to glue it essentially, or sew it on my cloak, on my case. Hubert Duprat.

The Stouts in the U.S. do a similar operation out of their garage producing earrings.

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

And Yukinori Yanagi, World Flag Ant Farm and other projects –

[slide featuring two photographs, one of the entirety of the World Flags Ant Farm by Yukinori Yanagi as well as a close up of the ant farms proper between the flags]

– are – are linked ant farms, made with colored sands, to form flags. The ants will distribute, the colors of those flags. Breaking down the political boundaries, that we’ve artificially imposed upon ourselves, in the world.

[new slide featuring six photos, the cover of Syd Barretts self-titled album featuring insects on the cover, an album called The Insect Musicians by Graeme Revell, the cover of an album by Amon Tobin featuring insects on the cover, the cover of the book, The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe, a photo of the sculpture Metamorphosis and a photo of a speed skater]

You also have insects inspiring music, dance, literature. And in a moment, you’re going to hear a traditional folk song (singing in Chinese of the Cicada song) by the Dong in China.

Okay. What insects do you think they’re mimicking?

The heat of the summer in the trees. Cicadas.

[singing in Chinese of the Cicada song continues]

Males calling with tymbals, females. Lower right, modern dance in China. Center, a theatrical performance of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. On the left, made into a film directed by Teshigahara is Kobo Abe’s Woman of the Dunes, one of my favorites. An entomologist roams the deserts in Japan. I won’t send any spoilers your way.

And then music Syd Barrett.

[singing in Chinese of the Cicada song continues]

Graeme Revell actually incorporating insect songs in his electronic music. And then I put that up, just because one of my favorite artists. You’ve got Tessa Farmer, with her little fairies made out of insect wings and vine roots, forming these spear wielding tirade –

[Barrett Klein, on-camera – singing of Cicada song in Chinese continues]

– or hoard, atop other insects or animals.

[singing of the Cicada song in Chinese finally ends]

[classical music begins]

Film!

[slide featuring a movie and a one-sheet, the one-sheet is for the film The Deadly Bees and the movie is a stop motion animation of a grasshopper painting by Ladislas Starevich]

There are hundreds of films that feature insects central role. Ladislas Starevich, a Russian who produced these beautiful, stop-motion animations. So, imagine insects with wire armatures, he moved them do-do-do-do-do, frame-by-frame-by-frame. And he’d have these little scenes like this grasshopper painting a scene, and these tragic tales at Christmas, you can find all of these on YouTube.

[crickets chirping]

[the film Green Porno by Isabella Rossellini starts playing]

I’ll only show a bit of Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno.

[Isabella Rossellini in a black outfit]

If I were a bee. A queen bee.

[shot of Isabella dressed as a very fat queen bee with a pile of eggs to her right]

I would be very fat and do nothing else but lay eggs.

[shot of the rear end of Isabellas bee costume with eggs flying out her backside into the pile of eggs]

[close-up shot of the pile of eggs zooming into a single egg]

The unfertilized eggs will hatch my sons.

[close-up shot of red sperm on top of three eggs in the pile zooming out to the whole pile]

The fertilized eggs will hatch my daughters.

[dissolve to Isabella in her black outfit]

If I were a daughter, I will be sterile, and I would do all the work.

[the movie fades out]

[new slide titled – education – featuring two illustrations, one of a half dozen dragonflies and one showing the sketches of two bees and underneath various representations of bees knees]

She has a whole series of these inspired by insects.

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

We can also think about how insects have affected education. How can you use insects to talk about behavior, ecology, evolution, principles in a generalizable way. So, a field guide I illustrated –

[return to the previous slide with the illustrations]

– with John Abbot. Looking at bees’ knees, orchid bees’ knees, to distinguish you can educate, using insect models.

[new slide featuring four photos, one of educator Lorenzo Possenti with one of his gigantic insect models of a cockroach, one of six of the giant-sized insect models, one of a young girl holding a gigantic spider and one of a gigantic cockroach]

Lorenzo Possenti in Italy produces these exquisite gigantic insects, he devotes his life to this. In order to teach about insect not only morphology, but diversity and sometimes in ecological contexts.

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

Science! Insects as model organisms. Of course, there’s drosophila melanogaster –

[slide featuring the cover of the magazine Science showing two large fruit flies and the title of the article about them – the Drosophila Genome]

– the fruit fly. That has been the staple for better under – understanding genetics, including in humans, because so many of our genes have been conserved.

[the slide animates up to reveal a new slide featuring a map titled – Driftless Area Landscape Conservation Initiative Boundary – showing the driftless areas of Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota. The map also has a map of Wisconsin as an inset for geographical reference]

Alright, it’s time to focus on the Driftless zone, to bring the relevance locally. So, how are insects really relevant, right around this area. And I just picked a handful of examples, I could’ve included a lot more.

[new slide titled – Bee Naked Deodorants – featuring a photo of the deodorant product and the following fact sheet – Handmade in small batches in the Driftless Region of Southwest Wisconsin. Hand-crafted without the use of parabens, aluminum, alcohol, or water. All Natural Ingredients. Gentle Antiperspirant, Lightly Scented. Made with Fresh Raw Bees Wax, Shea Butter, Coconut Oil, Bentonite Clay, Arrow Root, Raw Honey and Essential Oils]

The first, we talk about bee products. So, bees are kept all around the Driftless zone area. Pollination is very important, honey is very important, wax can be very important, and even deodorant can be very important. This is a local company that includes bee products like wax. And it comes in an unscented variety.

[new slide featuring the logo for the Minnesota Swarm Lacrosse team as well as a head-shot of one of the Lacrosse players wearing their jersey which features a honeycomb design on the shoulders]

Sports, taking on the image of a swarm because who wants to face a swarm of anything, right? And this national lacrosse team outside of St. Paul, existed from 2004 to 2015. But obviously –

[the slide animates off the picture of the player and replaces the picture of the Minnesota logo with the new Georgia Swarm logo]

– they swarmed off to Georgia.

[the slide animate in a photo of the Georgia Lacrosse team in a pre-game huddle]

So, we no longer have that in the Driftless zone.

[new slide featuring two images, one of a Doppler radar image of LaCrosse showing a swarm of mayflies showing up on the radar image and the second of a gas station gas pump in La Crosse covered in mayflies]

But we do have mayflies. And I’ve been snapping my fingers in dismay, every summer I’m doing work in Panama and people write me and said, Have you seen this it appears on our radar, there’s so many mayflies. And I snapped photos of them filling gas stations. Piles and piles of mayflies. Order Ephemeroptera, short-lived, winged insects. Because in some cases –

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

– while they may live weeks, months, as immatures. It can be as short as a day, as an adult. So, they better reproduce and reproduce fast.

So, I looked up –

[slide featuring a screenshot of the National Weather Services website page dedicated to mayflies]

– through the National Weather Service, what they say about mayflies, and I love it. They show the mayfly, they talk about it, and I put a star here, mayflies are sensitive to gross organic pollution, and their presence is good news ecologically because it means that pollution such as sewage, is not present in large amounts. So, again here’s an insect serving –

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

– as a bio-indicator, and kudos to the National Weather Service to point out the attributes, even it’s from a human perspective of insects.

So, what does that affect? Well local recreation, fishing.

[slide featuring a screenshot of the webpage for the Driftless Angler Fly Shop]

So, some of you may have passed this nearby, the Driftless Angler.

[new slide featuring a screenshot of the webpage for Driftless on the Fly]

You can hire people to take you on tours in the Driftless zone for fishing.

[new slide featuring a photo and a group of illustrations, the photo is of one of the chapter headings for the book Mayflies of the Driftless Region by Gordon Shanilec and the illustration is of three layers and the final illustration of a mayfly for the book]

And this culminates in a beautiful piece of art in the form of both a science and an art book, based on mayflies of the Driftless zone.

So, before I totally wrap up –

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

– a project that I’m really excited about, and it’s a long-term project, involves a database on cultural entomology. So, students of mine are helping me build what I hope will be the largest resource online, focusing on all these different categories –

[slide featuring four photos of insect inspired artwork as well as the search parameters of Dr. Kleins database – insect name, geographic region, time period, artifact, thematic category, and artist/author as well as a listing of categories for the project – art, architecture, design/fashion, literature, comic books, music, theatre and dance, film, sports and recreation, symbols, language, religion, war, politics, technology, food, medicine, products, advertisements, medicine disease/harm/damage]

– of how insects affect humans and have throughout history and across the world. The idea is, that maybe an historian, a student, a teacher, a scientist, an artist, can search by insect. Popular common name or scientific name, region of the world. Maybe you wanna look up mosquito, Africa, World War II and see what comes up. Either in art or politics.

[Barrett Klein, on-camera]

The idea is you’ll have this potential Wiki, where people can contribute en masse someday in the future. So, that’s what we’re working on now to bring all this together. So, at the end after questions, you’re more than welcome, I’d love to give you a little tour of a teeny sample of tangible, cultural entomology items I’ve brought.

But I’d love to take questions, and your thoughts about how insects have affected your lives. Thanks a lot for coming, first of all. Really appreciate it.

[applause]