Insectopedia (70 page)

Read Insectopedia Online

Authors: Hugh Raffles

Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Writing, #Science

BOOK: Insectopedia
5.59Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

17.
Land, “Eyes and Vision,” 397.

18.
Robert Hooke,
Micrographia, or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon
(1665; repr., Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2003), 238.

19.
Ibid.

20.
Anton van Leeuwenhoek quoted in Land, “Eyes and Vision,” 394.

21.
Sigmund Exner,
The Physiology of the Compound Eyes of Insects and Crustaceans
, trans. Roger C. Hartree (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1989); originally published as
Die Physiologie der facettierten Augen von Krebsen und Insekten
(Leipzig, Germany: Deuticke, 1891). See Land and Nilsson,
Animal Eyes
, 157–58.

22.
Land, “Eyes and Vision,” 393.

23.
Ibid., 401.

24.
Land and Nilsson’s choice of Charles Darwin to demonstrate the remarkable optics of the superposition eye is more than apposite. For creationists and proponents of so-called intelligent design, the eye is the Achilles’ heel of natural selection. Drawing on Darwin’s own uncertainties about the precise mechanisms for the evolution
of the eye and the self-evident point that each of its elements must function both independently and collectively, they assert that such a complex, integrated structure could never have evolved piecemeal through natural selection. But Nilsson and his collaborator Susanne Pelger have recently proposed a convincing 364,000-year sequence of incremental developments and pathways by which an originary patch of light-sensitive cells could evolve through extant intermediary stages into the contemporary mammalian eye. See Dan-Eric Nilsson and Susanne Pelger, “A Pessimistic Estimate of the Time Required for an Eye to Evolve,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Science
256 (1994): 53–58; and the clear summary in Evolution of the Eye, PBS,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/1/l_011_01.html
.

25.
See Jakob von Uexküll, “A Stroll through the World of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds,” in
Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept
, ed. and trans. Claire H. Schiller (New York: International Universities Press, 1957), 5–80.

26.
Von Uexküll, “A Stroll through the World,” 13, 29.

27.
Ibid., 65.

28.
Ibid., 67.

29.
Ibid., 72.

30.
Ibid., 80.

The Sound of Global Warming

1.
David Dunn,
The Sound of Light in Trees
(Santa Fe, N.M.: EarthEar/Acoustic Ecology Institute, 2006).

2.
John A. Byers, “An Encounter Rate Model of Bark Beetle Populations Searching at Random for Susceptible Host Trees,”
Ecological Modelling
91 (1996): 57–66.

3.
Dunn, CD liner notes for
Sound of Light;
David Dunn and James P. Crutchfield, “Insects, Trees, and Climate: The Bioacoustic Ecology of Deforestation and Entomogenic Climate Change” (working paper 06-12-055, Santa Fe Institute, 2006),
http://www.santafe.edu/research/publications/workingpapers/06-12-055.pdf
; William J. Mattson and Robert A. Haack, “The Role of Drought in Outbreaks of Plant-Eating Insects,”
BioScience
37, no. 2 (1987): 110–18.

4.
David D. Breshears, Neil S. Cobb, Paul M. Rich, Kevin P. Price, Craig D. Allen, Randy G. Balice, William H. Romme, Jude H. Kastens, M. Lisa Floyd, Jayne Belnap, Jesse J. Anderson, Orrin B. Myers, and Clifton W. Meyer, “Regional Vegetation Die-off in Response to Global-Change-Type Drought,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
102, no. 42 (2005): 15144–48.

5.
Dunn and Crutchfield, “Insects, Trees, and Climate.”

6.
For the foundational statement on the soundscape and acoustic ecology, see R. Murray Schafer,
The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World
(Rochester, Vt.: Destiny Books, 1994). Schafer defines acoustic ecology as “the study of the effects of the acoustic environment … on the physical responses or behavioral characteristics of creatures living within it” (271), a formulation that signals the movement’s affinity with biological science.

7.
Steven Feld in conversation with Donald Brenneis,
“Doing Anthropology in Sound,”
American Ethnologist
31, no. 4 (2004): 462. See also Steven Feld, “Waterfalls of Song: An Acoustemology of Place Resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea,” in
Senses of Place
, ed. Steven Feld and Keith Basso (Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press, 1996), 91–135.

8.
For extraordinary accounts of transduction and immersion, see Stefan Helmreich’s
Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

9.
See Andra McCartney, “Alien Intimacies: Hearing Science Fiction Narratives in Hildegard Westerkamp’s
Cricket Voice
(or ‘I Don’t Like the Country, the Crickets Make Me Nervous’),”
Organised Sound
7 (2002): 45–49.

10.
On
musique concrète
, see Pierre Schaeffer, “Acousmatics,” in
Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music
, eds. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2004), 76–81. A further key distinction between acoustic ecology and
musique concrète
is the latter’s concern with sounds as self-contained entities complete in themselves without reference to their source.

11.
David Dunn, “Chaos and the Emergent Mind of the Pond,” on
Angels and Insects
(Albuquerque, N.M.: ¿What Next?, 1999); the quotation here and those in the following paragraphs are from the CD liner notes.

12.
Doug Struck, “Climate Change Drives Disease to New Territory,”
Washington Post
, May 5, 2006; Paul R. Epstein, “Climate Change and Human Health,”
New England Journal of Medicine
353, no. 14 (2005): 1433–36; Paul R. Epstein and Evan Mills, eds.,
Climate Change Futures: Health, Ecological, and Economic Dimensions
(Boston: Harvard Medical School/United Nations Development Program, 2006). For a careful study suggesting that causative models centered on climate change sideline the remediable social factors critical to epidemiology (for example, health care, poverty, drug resistance, urban development), see Simon I. Hay, Jonathan Cox, David J. Rogers, Sarah E. Randolph, David I. Stern, G. Dennis Shanks, Monica F. Myers, and Robert W. Snow, “Climate Change and the Resurgence of Malaria in the East African Highlands,”
Nature
415 (2002): 905–9.

13.
Data from Dunn and Crutchfield, “Insects, Trees, and Climate,” 3, citing Dan Jolin, “Destructive Insects on Rise in Alaska,” Associated Press, September 1, 2006; Doug Struck, “‘Rapid Warming’ Spreads Havoc in Canada’s Forest: Tiny Beetles Destroying Pines,”
Washington Post
, March 1, 2006; Jerry Carlson and Karin Verschoor, “Insect Invasion!,”
New York State Conservationist
, April 26–27, 2006; Jesse A. Logan and James A. Powell, “Ghost Forests, Global Warming, and the Mountain Pine Beetle (Coleoptera: Scolytidae),”
American Entomologist
47, no. 3 (2001): 160–73. See also Jim Robbins, “Bark Beetles Kill Millions of Acres of Trees in West,”
New York Times
, November 17, 2008, in which the additional point is made about lodge pole pine stands that “because fires have been suppressed for so long, all forests are roughly the same age, and the trees are big enough to be susceptible to beetles.” For an interesting account of mountain pine beetle activity in western forests, see Robbins, “Some See Beetle Attacks on Western Forests as a Natural Event,”
New York Times
, July 6, 2009.

14.
Dunn and Crutchfield, “Insects, Trees, and Climate,” 4.

15.
Thomas Eisner,
For Love of Insects
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).

16.
For overviews, see David L. Wood, “The Role of Pheromones, Kairomones, and Allomones in the Host Selection and Colonization Behavior of Bark Beetles,”
Annual Review of Entomology
27 (1982): 411–46; and John A. Byers, “Host-Tree Chemistry Affecting Colonization of Bark Beetles,” in
Chemical Ecology of Insects 2
, ed. Ring T. Cardé and William J. Bell (New York: Chapman and Hall, 1995), 154–213.

17.
Dunn and Crutchfield, “Insects, Trees, and Climate,” 8.

18.
Jayne Yack and Ron Hoy, “Hearing,” in
Encyclopedia of Insects
, ed. Vincent H. Resh and Ring T. Cardé (New York: Academic Press, 2003), 498–505.

19.
Dunn and Crutchfield, “Insects, Trees, and Climate,” 10.

20.
Reginald B. Cocroft and Rafael L. Rodríguez, “The Behavioral Ecology of Insect Vibrational Communication,”
BioScience
55, no. 4 (2005): 323, 331.

21.
Dunn and Crutchfield, “Insects, Trees, and Climate,” 10.

22.
Ibid., 7.

Ex Libris, Exempla

1.
Claudine Frank, introduction to
The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader
, ed. Claudine Frank (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 28–31.

2.
Roger Caillois, “Letter to André Breton,” in
Edge of Surrealism
, 84.

3.
Ibid., 85.

4.
Ibid. (emphasis in the original).

5.
Denis Hollier, “On Equivocation (between Literature and Politics),” trans. Rosalind Krauss,
October
55 (1990): 20.

6.
Caillois, “Letter to André Breton,” 85.

7.
Maria Sibylla Merian,
Dissertation sur la génération et la transformation des insectes de Surinam
(Hague, Netherlands: Pieter Gosse, 1726), 49, quoted in Roger Caillois,
The Mask of Medusa
, trans. George Ordish (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1964), 113.

8.
On Bates, see my
In Amazonia: A Natural History
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).

9.
Caillois,
Mask of Medusa
, 118–20.

10.
Ibid., 104.

11.
Ibid., 117.

12.
Ibid., 121.

13.
Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” trans. John Shepley,
October
31 (1984): 19; Roger Caillois,
The Writing of Stones
, trans. Barbara Bray (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985), 2, 3, 104.

14.
Gustave Flaubert,
The Temptation of Saint Anthony
(1874), quoted in Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 31.

15.
Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 27.

16.
Hans Zinsser,
Rats, Lice and History: Being a Study in Biography, Which, after Twelve Preliminary Chapters Indispensible for the Preparation of the Lay Reader, Deals with the Life History of Typhus Fever
(Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press/Little, Brown, 1935), 183.

17.
See William Gates, ed. and trans.,
An Aztec Herbal: The Classic Codex of 1552
(Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2000).

18.
Pedro de Cieza de León,
The Second Part of the Chronicle of Peru
, trans. Clements R. Markham (London: Hakluyt Society, 1883), 51, 219.

19.
Virginia Sáenz,
Symbolic and Material Boundaries: An Archaeological Genealogy
of the Urus of Lake Poopó, Bolivia
(Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University, 2006), 50–51; Reiner T. Zuidema,
The Ceque System of Cuzco: The Social Organization
of the Capital of the Inca
, trans. Eva M. Hooykas (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1964), 100.

20.
Günter Morge, “Entomology in the Western World in Antiquity and in Medieval Times,” in
History of Entomology
, ed. Ray F. Smith, Thomas E. Mittler, and Carroll N. Smith (Palo Alto, Calif.: Annual Reviews, 1973), 77.

21.
George Poinar, Jr., and Roberta Poinar,
The Amber Forest: A Reconstruction of a Vanished World
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 129.

Other books

Body Shots by Amber Skyze
Reluctant Submission by JT Holland
Agatha Christie by The Love Detectives (SS)
Zinnia by Jayne Castle
Chasing Dream by Dandi Daley Mackall
The Clique by Thomas, Valerie
Mist Warrior by Kathryn Loch