Insectopedia (69 page)

7.
California Penal Code and Health and Safety Code quoted in Lasden, “Forbidden Footage,” 4.

8.
Quoted in Kapelovitz, “Crunch Time.”

9.
Ibid.

10.
I owe this mapping to Katharine Gates. See her
Deviant Desires: Incredibly Strange Sex
(New York: Juno Books, 2000).

11.
Carla Freccero, “Fetishism: Fetishism in Literature and Cultural Studies,” in
New
Dictionary of the History of Ideas
, ed. Maryanne Cline Horowitz (New York: Scribner’s, 2005), 2:826–28.

12.
Vilencia,
Journal of the Crush-Freaks
, 1:149.

13.
Georges Bataille,
The Tears of Eros
, trans. Peter Connor (San Francisco: City Lights, 1989), 19, 70n23.

14.
Edward Wong, “Long Island Case Sheds Light on Animal-Mutilation Videos,”
New York Times
, January 25, 2000. See also Edward Wong, “Animal-Torture Video Maker Avoids Jail,”
New York Times
, December 27, 2000.

15.
Act to amend title 18, U.S. Code, to punish the depiction of animal cruelty, H.R. 1887, 106th Cong., 1st Sess.,
Congressional Record
, 145, no. 74 (May 20, 1999): H3460.

16.
“Hall of Fame” is Gallegly’s glamorous term. Officially, he was named in the U.S. Border Control Congressional Honor Roll.

17.
Lasden, “Forbidden Footage,” 5.

18.
“Rooney Backs ‘Crush’ Video Ban,” BBC News, August 25, 1999,
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/429655.stm
; Associated Press, “Activists, Lawmakers Urge Congress to Ban Sale of Animal-Death Videos,” August 24, 1999; Lasden, “Forbidden Footage,” 5.

19.
Associated Press, “Activists, Lawmakers Urge Congress.”

20.
“Rooney Backs ‘Crush’ Video Ban.”

21.
Testimony of Representative Bill McCollum of Florida, speaking for an act to amend title 18 on October 19, 1999, H.R. 1887, 106th Cong., 1st Sess.,
Congressional Record
145, no. 142, H10267.

22.
Pros and Cons
, COURT TV, September 3, 1999.

23.
Testimony of Robert C. Scott (D-Va.), ibid., H10268. For an incisive discussion of these points, see Lasden, “Forbidden Footage.”

24.
Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah
, 508 U.S. 520 (1993).

25.
Testimony of Representative Spencer Bachus of Alabama, speaking for an act to amend title 18, H10271.

26.
Testimony of Representative Elton Gallegly (R-Ca.), ibid., H10270.

27.
Testimony of Susan Creede to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime, September 30, 1999,
judiciary.house.gov/legacy/cree0930.htm
.

28.
Gilles Deleuze,
Coldness and Cruelty
, trans. Jean McNeil, in
Masochism
, which also contains
Venus in Furs
by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 40–41, 74–76.

29.
Sacher-Masoch,
Venus in Furs
, 271.

30.
Vilencia,
American Journal of the Crush-Freaks
(Bellflower, Calif.: Squish Publications) 2 (1996): 12–13.

31.
William J. Clinton, Statement on Signing Legislation to Establish Federal Criminal Penalties for Commerce in Depiction of Animal Cruelty, December 9, 1999, at John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara,
www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=57047
.

32.
Adam Liptak, “Free Speech Battle Arises from Dog Fighting Videos,”
New York Times
, September 18, 2009.

33.
Testimony of Representative Gallegly, speaking for an act to amend title 18, H10269 (emphasis added).

1.
C. R. Osten-Sacken, “A Singular Habit of
Hilara
,”
Entomologist’s Monthly Magazine
14 (1877): 126–27. All uncited quotations in section 1 are from this paper.

2.
George Henry Verrall, obituary of C. R. Osten-Sacken,
Entomologist
39 (1906): 192.

3.
Edward L. Kessel, “The Mating Activities of Balloon Flies,”
Systematic Zoology
4, no. 3 (1955): 97–104. All uncited quotations in section 2 are from this paper.

4.
Thomas A. Seboek discusses the symbolic qualities of the empidid gift in the context of Peircian linguistics, although largely just to emphasize its inflexibility in comparison with human symbols. Seboek,
The Sign and Its Masters
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), 18–19.

5.
See, among others, Natasha R. LeBas and Leon R. Hockham, “An Invasion of Cheats: The Evolution of Worthless Nuptial Gifts,”
Current Biology
15, no. 1 (2005): 64; Scott K. Sakaluk, “Sensory Exploitation as an Evolutionary Origin to Nuptial Food Gifts in Insects,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
267, (2000): 339–43; and T. Tregenza, N. Wedell, and T. Chapman, “Introduction. Sexual Conflict: A New Paradigm?”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
361 (2006): 229–34.

6.
Georges Perec,
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces
, trans. John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 1998), 129, 136.

7.
Joan Roughgarden,
Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 171.

1.
Karl von Frisch,
Ten Little Housemates
, trans. Margaret D. Senft (New York: Pergamon Press, 1960), 91.

1.
These discoveries are routinely attributed to von Frisch, but it seems that at least some of the experimental work was completed independently, and possibly earlier, by Turner (1867–1923), a pioneer in ethology. Despite his doctorate and his authorship of scholarly papers (including the first by an African American to appear in
Science
), Turner spent the majority of his career teaching high school—it appears that he may have turned down academic positions, preferring to teach public school because of both a sense of social commitment and the additional time it gave him to pursue his research. Turner published his demonstration of honeybees’ ability to distinguish among colors in 1910. He is also credited with discovering the ability of insects to hear sounds and distinguish pitch, with recognizing the capacity of bees to utilize geographic memory, with showing that cockroaches are able to learn from experience, with documenting a characteristic
motion of ants approaching their nests (“Turner’s circling”), and with developing methodology—particularly conditioning strategies—that would become basic in animal-behavior studies. See
Selected Papers and Biography of Charles Henry Turner (1867–1923), Pioneer in the Comparative Animal Behavior Movement
, ed. Charles I. Abramson (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002).

2.
Karl von Frisch,
Bees: Their Vision, Chemical Senses, and Language
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1950).

3.
But see the detailed critique of von Frisch’s methodology in Georgii A. Mazokhin-Porshnyakov,
Insect Vision
, trans. Roberto Masironi and Liliana Masironi (New York: Plenum Press, 1969), 145–54.

4.
See Kentaro Arikawa, Michiyo Kinoshita, and Doekele G. Stavenga, “Color Vision and Retinal Organization in Butterflies,” in
Complex Worlds from Simpler Nervous Systems
, ed. Frederick R. Prete (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 193–94.

5.
For a survey of debates on color and the problem of “color realism,” see Alex Byrne and David R. Hilbert, eds.,
Readings on Color
, vol. 1,
The Philosophy of Color
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), particularly the editors’ lucid introduction (xi–xxviii). Further evidence of this point can be found in color constancy, the ability of humans and other animals, including bees and butterflies, to recognize the color of an object under changing light conditions. Goethe famously revealed that color was also a function of additional relationships: those between an object and its neighbors. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Theory of Colours
, trans. Charles Locke Eastlake (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970).

6.
Mazokhin-Porshnyakov,
Insect Vision
, 276.

7.
Prete, introduction to pt. 1, “Creating Visual Worlds: Using Abstract Representations and Algorithms,” in
Complex Worlds
, 3–4.

8.
Karl Kral and Frederick R. Prete, “In the Mind of a Hunter: The Visual World of the Praying Mantis,” in Prete,
Complex Worlds
, 92–93.

9.
For a discussion of this problem in relation to the human mind, see John R. Searle, “Consciousness: What We Still Don’t Know,”
New York Review of Books
, January 13, 2005, a critical review of Christof Koch’s best-selling
Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach
(Englewood, Colo.: Roberts, 2004); and note also Koch’s recent comment: “We don’t understand how mind emerges out of this vast collection of neurons. We have no intuition. It’s like Aladdin rubbing a lamp, and a genie appears.” Quoted in Peter Edidin, “In Search of Answers from the Great Brains of Cornell,”
New York Times
, May 24, 2005.

10.
Eric R. Kandel, “Brain and Behavior,” in Eric R. Kandel and James H. Schwartz,
Principles of Neural Science
, 2nd ed. (New York: Elsevier, 1985), 3. Indeed, much as the size of the human brain was once a measure of racial hierarchy, the marvelous complexity—and, as ever, the size—of the modern hominid brain is now a marker of human exceptionalism.

11.
For a reliable popular introduction, see John J. Ratey,
A User’s Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain
(New York: Vintage Books, 2002). For an appraisal of debates in the philosophy of mind that is both sympathetic to neuroscientific claims of biological primacy and suspicious of their reductionism, see John R. Searle,
Mind: A Brief Introduction
(Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2004).

12.
See, for important contributions, two works by Jonathan Crary:
Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), and
Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001); Martin Jay,
Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); and Hal Foster, ed.,
Vision and Visuality
(Seattle: Bay Press/ Dia Art Foundation, 1988).

13.
David Howes, ed.,
The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991); Constance Classen,
Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and across Cultures
(New York: Routledge, 1993).

14.
On linear perspective, see Robert D. Romanyshyn’s rather overstated
Technology as Symptom and Dream
(New York: Routledge, 1989), and, for effective delineations of the discontinuities in and displacements of linear perspective, see Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” and Jonathan Crary, “Modernizing Vision,” both in Foster,
Vision and Visuality
, 3–28, 29–50. On the shift to the morphological, see Michel Foucault,
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
(New York: Vintage Books, 1994).

15.
A fascinating discussion of some of the cultural components of vision along these lines can be found in Oliver Sacks’s celebrated essay “To See and Not See,” in
An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales
(New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 108–52.

16.
Henry Mallock quoted in Michael F. Land’s excellent “Eyes and Vision,” in
Encyclopedia of Insects
, ed. Vincent H. Resh and Ring T. Cardé (New York: Academic Press, 2003), 397; I have drawn substantially on that article (393–406) for this section. See also Michael F. Land, “Visual Acuity in Insects,”
Annual Review of Entomology
42 (1997): 147–77; and Michael F. Land and Dan-Eric Nilsson,
Animal Eyes
(Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2002). Recent recalculations that take into account the poorness of human peripheral vision have reduced Mallock’s calculations to a much smaller but still unwieldy 400 inches diameter.