The writer James Whorton opens his fascinating book, The Arsenic Century, with a news article from the London Times, 13 December, 1848. It recounts how for months, partridge hunters had been coming upon flocks of dead birds nestled together, eyes open, standing up, looking very much alive, but being, in fact, inexplicably dead. After some investigation, authorities concluded that the birds had been feasting on wheat seeds sown by farmers. The farmers had soaked the seeds in an arsenical compound to ward off insects, and the birds had been poisoned. No one could explain their upright, open-eyed position, but even then scientists knew that arsenic poisoning causes the body to remain strangely well-preserved.
Milliners jumped on the opportunity these dead birds afforded them, and partridges became popular adornments on hats. The pictures below aren’t partridges, but you can see that there was quite a demand for any number of species of birds on hats.
A few weeks ago, the publicity person at my publisher’s emailed me to say that David Greene from Morning Edition wanted to interview me about my new book, Bugged: How Insects Changed History. This is not something that happens very often to a nonfiction children’s book writer. The NPR producer told the publicity person to tell me that I should bring along some middle school kids to the interview.
I called the amazing head of the middle school in Waterbury where my youngest son went, and he proposed three kids to take along. I drove Maya, Rob, and Sophia to the NPR studios in Hartford, Connecticut. They seemed pretty psyched to be missing half a day of school.
Here they are in the waiting room.
I think I was as nervous as I’ve ever been in my life—like ten violin recitals piled on top of one another—but the kids were so fantastic, prattling away the entire time, even as we were putting on our big headphones and the engineer was doing the sound check. We didn’t know it at the time, but the microphone was on while the four of us were sitting in the booth, waiting for David to come on. And they used some of our pre-interview banter in the edited piece (the producer later asked permission).
And then when David started talking to us, I suddenly got much less nervous, and it just felt like a conversation. He’s awesome. We talked to him for forty minutes.
The lighting in the booth was oh-so-flattering.
And then three weeks went by.
Those were a long three weeks. I sank deeper and deeper into despondency with every passing day. And then they emailed and said it was scheduled for the next day. The morning it was scheduled, I happened to be in D.C. for a meeting with National Geographic. I was staying at my brother’s (he and my sister in law had had a wonderful book party for me the night before). And it was supposed to air at 6:50, and my brother and I sat there listening, and then it wasn’t on, and my husband back in Connecticut said it wasn’t on there, either, and I burst into tears.
But now I understand—local stations can chop up Morning Edition programming and air the segments in a different order. So across the country, hundreds of stations did air it. And it did air, later on, in both DC and Connecticut. My email, Twitter and Facebook started going nuts.
Since the story aired, it’s been kind of crazy, but all in a good way. I’ve been barraged with speaking requests, radio interview requests, library visits. The story got retweeted on Twitter hundreds of times. Bugged hit #11 on Amazon (briefly, but still!), and both Bugged and Poop sold out quickly there. (My publisher says both books have been reprinted and will be available asap—sorry to those people who found that Poop was being scalped on Amazon, used, for over $300. Please try contacting your nearest independent bookseller, who may have a much more direct line to the distributor and can get it for you as soon as it’s reprinted).
One of the many things I love about Charles Darwin is that he loved to collect beetles as a young man. My own passion was for bees, from the time I was around five. I’d collect as many as I could in a jar, sometimes two dozen or more, buzzing around inside my Mason jar with air holes hammered into the lid. I’d stare at them for an hour or so—hornets, wasps, yellow jackets, honeybees, bumblebees—and then I’d let them go. There was an art to that—I’d unscrew the lid so it was just barely on, fling the jar into the bushes, and high tail it the other way. I never got stung.
So according to his autobiography, one day when Charles was a student at Cambridge (1828 – 31), he went out to collect beetles. He tore some bark off a tree and found two rare species, seizing one in each hand. But “then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth.”
A natural inclination for anyone, right? Where else would you stash a live bug, but in your mouth?
“Alas it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as well as the third one.”
According to this website, the third beetle has since been identified as the Crucifix Ground Beetle (Panagaeus cruxmajor).
Ground beetle by Siga via Wikimedia Commons
Darwin didn’t identify what species from the family Carabus it was that ejected the burning fluid inside his mouth. It may have been a bombardier beetle; some species can emit an acrid gas with a loud popping sound.
A possible candidate: Bombardier beetle By Patrick Coin, via Wikimedia Commons
Paraponera clavata by Hans Hillewaert via Wikimedia/CreativeCommons
That’s a picture of Paraponera clavata, ora bullet ant. It can grow to be about an inch long.
They’re among the world’s most venomous insects, and are supposed to deliver the most painful sting of any insect, according to J.O. Schmidt. He’s an entomologist who’s been stung by pretty much every hymenopteran possible and who developed a pain scale rating that lists the relative pain caused by insects. His ratings go from 0, where the sting is as mild as the little zap you might feel while walking across a carpet in your socks, up to 4, where you might as well just lie down and scream. Bullet ants get a 4+. When he later revised his index, he described bullet ant stings as “pure, intense, brilliant pain, like walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch nail in your heel.”
But wait, it gets worse.
The ants have abdominal stridulatory organs—that means they can shriek at you when threatened, which alerts the rest of the group to come boiling up out of the nest to help impale you.
There’s a tribe of people in Brazil, deep in the Amazon forest, the Satere-Mawe, who use bullet ants as an initiation rite to manhood. Boys have to slip on gloves that resemble oven mitts, and which are teeming with bullet ants. They have to keep the gloves on for ten minutes. Evidently paralysis of the arms sets in rather quickly, so it’s after the gloves come off that the real pain and convulsions begin—and they last at least 24 hours.
Did I mention these ants also shriek?
Here’s another picture for you:
Paraponera clavata by Didier Descouens via wikimedia/creative commons
Schmidt, Justin O. (1990). "Hymenoptera Venoms: Striving Toward the Ultimate Defense Against Vertebrates". In D. L. Evans and J. O. Schmidt. Insect Defenses: Adaptive Mechanisms and Strategies of Prey and Predators (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press). pp. 387–419
Look closely at the picture. It’s taken in Matema in east Africa. Do you see the black fuzzy haze just above the horizon?
Here’s another one:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/martijnmunneke/
And another:
Martin Grimm https://www.flickr.com/photos/mgrimm82/ Used with permission
That’s not smoke. Those are flies.
These lake flies depend on water for reproduction. After the larvae living in the lake have pupated, the pupae float to the surface, where the flies emerge by the millions.
The locals love when the flies emerge. According to The Insect Cookbook, people collect them in large, flat baskets. They moisten the baskets and wave them around in the swarm, which causes the flies to get caked onto the basket surface. They’re then emptied into boiling water, drained, and dried in the sun. The resulting fly cakes are considered a delicacy, and are almost 70% protein. (p. 31)
House of Refuge, Randall’s Island, New York, a wood engraving published November 1855 in Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion via wikimedia
Up around 103rd Street on the east side of Manhattan, you can cross a bridge over the East River to Randall’s Island. It used to be separate from Wards Island, but in the 1960s the channel between them was filled in, so now they’re two parts of one island. Today it’s mostly parkland, full of golf courses, soccer fields, baseball diamonds, playgrounds, and picnic areas, along with several public facilities. But back in the 19th century, it was a different place entirely.
In 1835, Randall’s Island was sold to the city and by mid-century, in addition to a poorhouse, orphanage, and “lunatic” asylum, it became the site of the New-York House of Refuge, the first youth detention center in the country. It housed juvenile delinquents and other kids no one knew what else to do with.
This was before day care, playgrounds, child services, or public education. A lot of kids with working parents simply had nowhere to go, and others with no parents resorted to begging, pick pocketing, or prostitution to survive. Most of the inmates were committed for vagrancy or petty crimes—their parents dubbed “indolent and worthless.”
Boys playing checkers in the street, 1908 – 1915 Library of Congress LC-USZ62-71201
NYC Boys swimming at dock 1908 Library of Congress LC-USZ62-41531
Wading pool Armour Square, Chicago 1909 via Wikimedia
Lewis Hine, Children Playing Baseball on the Lower East Side, NYPL Digital gallery Image ID: 416562
Upon entering, the children were stripped, washed, and given uniforms, and assigned to a windowless 5 x 8 cell. They were kept occupied with a regimented system of work, religious instruction, and schooling. Male inmates produced brushes, cane chairs, brass nails, and shoes. Females sewed all the uniforms, did laundry, and performed other domestic work. In the mid 1800s, at the height of the crinoline craze, children were employed making hoop skirts.
Jeanne Baret, in a painting painted around 1812, after her death
Ferdinand Magellan is commonly, although incorrectly, credited as being the first explorer to circumnavigate (sail all the way around) the globe. He was killed in what are now the Philippines, and only eighteen of his crew managed to limp back to Spain–they’re the ones who actually completed the voyage (you can read my blog about that here). But did you know the story of the first woman to complete the trip?
Her name was Jeanne Baret, and for most of the voyage she went disguised as a man.
She was born in the Loire region of France in 1740, and as a girl she acquired the botanical skill to use herbs and plants to treat wounds and diseases. When she was a teenager, she was hired by a nobleman and well-known botanist named Philibert de Commerson, whose wife had recently died, to be an assistant and housekeeper. Eventually they fell in love.
In 1765 Commerson was selected by the French navy to go on a round-the-world exploration. He would collect plant and animal specimens in his role as ship’s botanist. He was allowed to bring along a servant, and the two hatched a plan whereby Jeanne would disguise herself as a man, pretend to be a stranger to him, and show up at the last minute to be enlisted as his assistant. (Women weren’t allowed on French navy ships.) It worked. Jeanne bound her chest and dressed in men’s clothes, and the two shared a cabin.
According to this account, the crew grew suspicious because “Jean” never undressed or went to the bathroom in front of them. “He” also seemed too clean-shaven and wore baggy clothing. Jean/Jeanne made up a story about having been kidnapped by Ottoman Turks and castrated, which helped explain why “he” was embarrassed to be seen in a state of undress. They may or may not have believed “him,” but eventually, Jeanne’s secret identify was discovered somewhere near Tahiti, in the South Pacific. At the next port-of-call, Jeanne and Philibert were left behind at the French port of Mauritius. They lived there for seven years. Philibert died, Jeanne married a French soldier, and she and her husband sailed back to France in 1774. She was recognized in her lifetime as the first woman to sail around the world.
In the spring of 1782, Robert Shurtlieff (b. 1760) enlisted in the Continental Army during the American Revolution, joining the Light Infantry Company of the 4th Massachusetts Regiment, based in Westchester, New York. About a year prior, on October 19, 1781, the British General, Lord Cornwallis, had surrendered to General Washington. Although this was the last major battle of the Revolution, the war was not quite over.
In June of 1782, Shurtlieff and two sergeants led about 30 other infantrymen on an expedition and clashed with a band of Tories. During this encounter, Shurtlieff was gashed on the forehead by a sword, and was shot in the left thigh just below the groin.
Shurtlieff didn’t want anyone to know about the thigh wound, because Robert Shurtlieff was a woman.
Robert Shurtlieff’s real name was Deborah Sampson. She’d passed as a man by binding her chest. She was also about 5’7, as tall as the average man, and her lack of a beard didn’t set her apart from the many young boys that had enlisted.
Deborah Sampson
She was able to conceal the thigh wound from the doctors, and extracted the pistol ball herself, using rum to clean the wound and digging it out with a knife and a sewing needle. (Fun times.) But because no one knew of that injury, she had to return to combat before it was completely healed. Antibiotics were, of course, nonexistent, and sanitary conditions were most certainly dismal. She probably knew she was in serious peril–soldiers who sustained similar injuries frequently died of sepsis or shock.
Soon thereafter she contracted a serious bout of fever, and lost consciousness. A doctor who was attempting to determine if she was alive and breathing unwound her bound-up chest and discovered her secret.
She recovered from the fever and received an honorable discharge in 1783. She later married and had three children.
Source: Young, Alfred F. Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004
Fans of Ernest Hemingway know that a lot of absinthe gets drunk in his novels. Absinthe was a strong alcoholic drink made from an aromatic, bitter-tasting herb called Artemisia absinthium, or wormwood. Its characteristic licorice flavor was derived from fennel and anise, and it smelled like a Christmas tree. In its pure form it was a clear liquid, but became milky when diluted with water or wine.
The Absinthe Drinker by Viktor Oliva, 1901
This article in the New York Times explains why the drink turns milky when diluted: “[T]he key constituent of wormwood is a chemical called thujone, which gives it — and absinthe — a penetrating evergreen aroma. . . . The aromatics are more soluble in alcohol than in water, so when the concentrated spirit is cut with wine or water, they cluster together in tiny droplets that reflect light from their surfaces. Instantly, what was a clear liquid clouds over.”
Nineteenth and early twentieth century paintings and novels show that absinthe played a huge role in the artistic world. References to and renditions of the drink appear constantly in paintings and poetry and novels.
Edgar Degas, In a Cafe–that glassy-eyed stare.
Five o’clock was known as the “green hour,” and the drink was called the “green fairy.” Absinthe, and particularly thujone, was blamed for causing hallucinations, mental problems, and crime, and was banned in 1915.
Albert Maignan: The Green Muse, 1895
Manet, The Absinthe Drinker 1859
Nowadays scientists are leaning toward the theory that the negative effects the drink had on people were caused more by its super-high alcohol content or toxic additives than by the trace amounts of thujone it contained. It was later reformulated by Jules Pernod, without the wormwood.
In my new book, I have a section on entomophagy, which is a big word that means eating insects. And entomophagy is a prominent part of my book trailer, if you haven’t had the joy (or stomach) to watch that yet. When I was researching the book, I requested a small stack of insect cookery books from my local library, which caused quite a stir behind the desk.
Now there’s a new book out called The Insect Cookbook: Food for a Sustainable Planet, and it’s a book that’s both why and how to eat insects. Initially published in the Netherlands (Het Insectenkookboek), it’s written by two Dutch entomologists and a chef, includes interviews with chefs and world figures, and is chock a block with recipes and sumptuous photos. I just got my copy in the mail, and my kids have been poking suspiciously at their dinners ever since.
The premise of the book is that we must begin including insects on our menus, because they’re “a sustainable source of protein for humans and a necessary part of our future diet.” As it says in the introduction, in order to feed the 9 billion people who will probably populate the earth by 2050, we need to increase our production of animal proteins by 73 percent. And much of that will have to come from insects.
This is not a new concept. People today eat insects in countries all over the world. And they’ve been doing so for millions of years.
The ancient Greeks and Romans regularly ate insects. The Greeks chomped on toasted cicadas, whereas Romans favored softer beetle grubs.
Bugs are good for you–low in fat and high in protein. They are a much better source of protein environmentally than are cows and pigs. The book is filled with cool information and interesting anecdotes. In Australia, for example, some clever entrepreneurs cashed in on a locust plague by marketing the insects as “sky prawns.” (p 20) Emperor Hirohito of Japan’s favorite dish was rice with wasp larvae, cooked in sugar and soy sauce. If you’re wondering how wasp larvae are collected, the book explains that wasp hunters attract the wasps with a piece of meat to which they have attached a tiny white flag. When the wasp flies away with the meat, they run, climb, and scramble after it until it reaches its nest. Then they anesthetize the insects with smoke and harvest the larvae. (p 27)
So how about it? Would you eat a bug? In all honesty, I’m trying, really trying, Dear Reader, to approach eating bugs with an open mind. I’ve gotten to the point where I can at least eat one and not gag, but I’m not yet at a place where I feel I could, say, sautee up some grubs and mix them into my scrambled eggs.
If you want to see some brave high school kids sampling dry roasted crickets, click here.
The writer Vladimir Nabokov was also a lepidopterist (butterfly expert). For six years, he was the curator of the butterfly wing at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Over twenty butterflies have been named in his honor, including “Lolita” and “Humbert.”
Photos: Library of Congress, Wikimedia
And then when David started talking to us, I suddenly got much less nervous, and it just felt like a conversation. He’s awesome. We talked to him for forty minutes.
In my