I recently watched a Simpson’s episode where Lisa develops an iron deficiency as a result of her vegetarianism, and she can’t stomach the iron pills the doctor prescribed. (They clang when she spits them out onto the table.) So she takes to eating insects.
Entomophagy (the fancy term for eating bugs) is practiced all over the world. I have a section devoted to entomophagy in my upcoming Bug Book–in the “Beneficial Bugs” section. Most insects are a good source of protein and fat, and they’re a more environmentally sustainable source of protein and vitamins than most of the animals we eat.
One edible insect is a large leafcutter ant. The scientific name is Atta laevigata. In Colombia they’re known as hormigas culonas. They’re harvested in spring, after the rainy season, when they emerge from their ant hills looking for a mate. The females are full of protein, because they’re bloated with eggs—hence their nickname, “big-butt ants.” According to this article (which also has some good pictures), when the ants emerge from their colonies in the spring, farmers abandon their crops and children skip school in order to catch the ants. The ants can sell for forty dollars a pound. People usually toast them. (If you’d like a recipe, you can find one here.)
Disturbing details have emerged about the recent public health drug disaster, where a meningitis outbreak killed 25 people, sickened hundreds, and may have put as many as 14,000 more at risk. A federal inspection of the company that made the tainted pain medicine found mold, dust, and dirty sterilization equipment, as well as an air conditioner that was shut off at night, when it ought to have been running nonstop in order to retard the growth of microbes. The fungus contaminated vials of methylprednisolone acetate, an injectable pain medicine.
The last time a disaster of this magnitude occurred in the U.S. was in 1937, when another tainted drug killed over a hundred people. Sulfanilamide was a drug used to treat streptococcal infections, and had been used safely for some time in tablet and powder form. But salesmen for the Massengill Company in Bristol, Tennessee, asked for a liquid form of the drug. A company chemist and pharmacist., Harold Cole Watkins, experimented and found that sulfanilamide would dissolve in diethylene glycol. He added some raspberry flavoring, which gave it a pretty pink color as well as a pleasing sweet taste. They called it Elixir Sulfanilamide.
I asked my friend Amanda to help me understand diethylene glycol (DEG). She has a PhD in chemistry. The upshot is, diethylene glycol is a compound of ethylene glycol, which is used in antifreeze and brake fluid. It’s used in cosmetics, household products, as a solvent for paints and plastics, and as a softening agent for cellophane. It creates the artificial smoke and mist for theatrical productions. And all the glycols and their compounds (eth-, dieth-, polyeth-) are deadly poisons if you ingest them. (On a side note–it’s worth checking the label on your shampoo bottle. I’ve started not buying products that contain this ingredient, whenever possible. It’s even found in some of those “natural” liquid hand soaps.)
At the time, food and drug laws did not require that safety studies be done on new drugs. The company compounded a quantity of the elixir and sent 633 shipments all over the country.
Bodies quickly piled up. Victims suffered symptoms characteristic of kidney failure—severe abdominal cramps, nausea, vomiting, convulsions—and intense pain. Many of the victims were children, who’d been given the medicine for their sore throats.
It didn’t take long to determine that Elixir Sulfanilamide was the cause of the deaths. FDA agents fanned out across the country, trying to retrieve the elixir. In many drugstores, it had been sold without a prescription to people the druggist didn’t know. One physician postponed his wedding to help an FDA agent search for a 3-year-old boy whose family had moved into the mountains after purchasing the medicine.
The incident hastened the enactment in 1938 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.
Although the Massengill Company refused to assume responsibility for the incident, Harold Cole Watkins, the company pharmacist who’d concocted the elixir, committed suicide, soon after learning of what he had done.
I’ve always been fascinated by homing pigeons. A homing pigeon is a type of domestic pigeon (Columba livia domestica) that is bred to find its way home, often from remarkably long distances. If it’s carrying a message, it’s called a carrier pigeon. (These birds are not to be confused with the extinct passenger pigeon Ectopistes migratoria, whichprobably deserves a separate blog post.)
Scientists aren’t sure how the birds do it, how their innate homing ability works. It might be the birds have some sort of compass mechanism, or an ability to detect the Earth’s magnetic field. They’ve been used for thousands of years.
Carrier pigeons were used extensively in both World Wars. During World War II, they were used by both the Axis and the Allied powers. The Nazis may have dropped off pigeons on the British coastline by way of parachutes, U-boats, or in personal baggage. Then German spies on the British side took them in, strapped secret messages to them, and sent them back to Germany. When the British discovered pigeons leaving the U.K. en route back to Germany, they began training peregrine falcons to pick off the outgoing homing pigeons.
Pigeons played a heroic role for the Allies in the Invasion of Normandy, when the Allied troops couldn’t use radios for fear of vital information being intercepted by the enemy. Just recently, one such message was found on a dead carrier pigeon. The bird was found inside a chimney in Surrey, England, when the owner was restoring his fireplace. Still attached to the bird’s leg was a red cylinder, and inside, this secret coded message:
According to this article, historians believe the bird was sent from behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied France on June 6, 1944, during the D-Day invasion, in order to inform generals back in England about the progress of the operation. It may have gotten lost in bad weather, or just disoriented and exhausted after its long flight. It might have stopped to rest and been overcome by fumes from the chimney.
This pigeon, like the other military pigeons, would have been dropped behind enemy lines from bombers. The resistance fighters would have picked up the birds and then attached messages to the birds’ legs before releasing them homeward bound.
People all around the world have been attempting to decode it, but without a special key, deciphering it seemed impossible. But just a couple of weeks ago, an amateur codebreaker appears to have cracked it, using a code book he inherited. The message seems to be describing German troop positions in Normandy. (You can read more about the code cracker here.)
Here are a few more pictures. This one shows a pigeon being released from a tank in the British Western front in France. It was a way for tanks to keep in touch with the infantry.
And here’s a bus from London that was converted into a pigeon loft, for use in Northern France and Belgium during World War I:
And, in case you were wondering, here’s how to wrap your pigeon in order to drop it from an airplane safely:
Image credits:
Homing pigeon By Pearson Scott Foresman [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
“Wireless” a very clever bird. From the British Western front, 1917, Nationaal Archief, Public Domain
Bandaging the leg of a carrier pigeon which returned wounded with a message. With the British forces in Italy, 1914 – 18, Nationaal Archief, Public Domain
The cryptic WWII message. Credit: GCHQ .
Tank image courtesy Nationaal Archief, Public Domain
The passenger pigeon was hunted to extinction during the last century. One method used by hunters was to sew a decoy pigeon’s eyes closed to attract other pigeons. It was called a “stool;” hence the term “stool pigeon.”
source: from an article by Paul R. Ehrlich, David S. Dobkin, and Darryl Wheye.
I have a book coming out next year about the effect of insects on human history. As you might imagine, malaria figures into the book pretty heavily, as it’s been a terrible scourge of a disease since ancient times. And of course it is vectored by a certain species of mosquito.
I wanted to show you these spookily beautiful pictures that were taken a year ago in Pakistan’s Sindh province, courtesy of the UK Department for International Development, after much of the country experienced devastating floods.
It seems that hungry spiders, fleeing from rising floodwaters, convened in the trees. They spun webs to catch insects. Because the waters took so long to recede, many of the trees became almost completely gauzed over with spider webs. The happy result (in an otherwise devastating event) was that rates of malaria in the area plummeted.
I just think these photos are awesome.
Photos: UK Department for International Development
Recently in his English class my son had to read the Odyssey (well, an abridged version), which I read along with him. I hadn’t read it since college. It’s quite the rip-roaring yarn. No wonder Homer is enjoying his 130,443rd straight week on bestseller lists everywhere.
The Cyclops is one such creature. It’s the name given by the ancient Greeks (and later, the Romans) to a primordial race of giants with one eye in the center of their forehead. As you may recall, in Homer’s story, Odysseus blinds a Cyclops and effects an escape from its cave when he and his men strap themselves to the underbellies of sheep.
According to Kaplan, the Greeks’ belief in the Cyclops may have emerged when they found fossils that belonged to relatives of modern elephants, which paleontologists believe once roamed the islands of the Mediterranean. The Greeks wouldn’t have been familiar with elephants, so the large nasal cavity where the trunk once attached might have looked to them like a giant eye socket.
Images:
Polyphemus, by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, 1802 (Landesmuseum Oldenburg) via Wikimedia
Deror Avi, photographer: A Cyclop statue at the Geological Museum, London, June 2008 via Wikimedia
In the third century BC, Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth as 24,700 miles. (It’s actually 24,900 miles). But no one listened to him. For 1500 years, everyone believed Claudius Ptolemy’s calculation, which was 17,800 miles. That’s the number Columbus used when he miscalculated where India was.
I recently watched a Simpson’s episode where Lisa develops an iron deficiency as a result of her vegetarianism, and she can’t stomach the iron pills the doctor prescribed. (They clang when she spits them out onto the table.) So she takes to eating insects.
