Most of the owners of secondhand bookstores in town recognize me on sight and inevitably greet me with a smile whenever I walk in. The smile is more than just good retail business practice—they know that odds are excellent that when I leave I will take with me a lot of merchandise and leave behind a lot of money. I don't collect things as a rule—not coins, not matchbook covers, and not even insects to speak of—but I do seem to have a compulsive need to own out-of-date, cracked, yellowing books about insects. No matter how long that copy of Entomological Papers from the Yearbook of Agriculture 1903-1911 has sat moldering on the shelf—the booksellers know once I walk in they'll never have to dust it again. No matter how ridiculously overpriced that 1910 copy of How to Keep Bees for Profit is—the checkbook will open and the ink will flow. Sometimes in their zeal, these booksellers will show me books about snakes, worms, snails, and other noisome creatures, but to date I have usually managed to contain my impulses, succumbing only if there's a passing reference within the volume to anything six-legged.

As hobbies go, this one isn't bad, really—it's legal, it's not as expensive as, say, powerboat racing or big game hunting (not to

mention a lot safer), and, best of all, it's not fattening. This hobby is how I happened to read Lord Avebury 's account of a 14-year-old ant. A visit to Old Main Book Shoppe on Walnut Street in downtown Champaign produced a dusty copy of Lord Avebury's Ants, Bees, and Wasps, from 1916, which, of course, I bought without even opening. By the way, Old Main Book Shoppe was at one time actually located on Main; I assume the owner just liked the sound of “Old Main” more than “Old Walnut.” Once I got home, I started thumbing through the book and soon came across a passage discussing the life expectancy of ants, which, it happens, was a subject of some controversy a century ago:

The life of the queen and workers is much longer than had been supposed. I may just mention here that I kept a queen of Formica fusca from December 1874 till August 1888, when she must have been nearly fifteen years old, and of course she may have been more. She attained, therefore, by far the greatest age of any insect on record. I have also some workers which I have had since 1875.

When you think about it, keeping an ant alive for 14 years is quite a remarkable feat. After all, it's not like keeping a dog alive for 14 years. For one thing, it's hard to lose or misplace a dog on your desk, and it's even harder to flatten one accidentally under a coffee cup. And it's not like there's a tremendous support system out there for ant owners —all-night ant veterinary services, for example, or ant toys and treats at the local grocery store. I doubt that too many small animal clinics, name notwithstanding, will see ant patients. And it's a lot harder to ignore a dog if you have forgotten to feed it or take it for a walk. What makes this feat even more impressive is that Lord Avebury was an extremely busy guy who had many things to do in life other than look after a geriatric ant. Before becoming the Right Honorable Lord Avebury, he was

Sir John Lubbock, DCC, LLD, MD, FRS, VPCS, FGS, FZS, FSA, and FES. He belonged to no fewer than two dozen scientific societies, spread out among seven countries on three continents. I can't help wondering what friends or relations he might have prevailed upon to look in on his ant while he was making the rounds of scientific meetings.

It's no wonder that claims for insect longevity records are few and far between. They're not nonexistent, though. Not long after Lord Avebury's book came out, Ferris (1919) reported finding a single nymph of Margarodes vitium alive in a waxy cyst some 17 years after the specimen was deposited in the Stanford collection of Coccidae. E. Gorton Linsely (1943) reported 12 instances in which Buprestis aurenta, a woodboring beetle, emerged from structural wood in walls, floors, doors, and stairway handrails, anywhere from 10 to 26 years after the structures were built, in some cases struggling through linoleum to do so. Most recently, Jerry Powell (1989) reported that more than 180 adult yucca moths emerged from cocoons dating back to 1969, after 16 to 17 years in a quiescent diapause state. These cocoons had accumulated a lot of miles, moving from their childhood home in Nevada, to the Berkeley campus for a year, and then to the University of California Russell Reserve in Contra Costa, California. Those cocoons that had not produced an adult by 1985 were partitioned for a while among an outdoor cage at the Russell Reserve, an outdoor cage at Blodgett Forest in El Dorado County, California, and a mobile laboratory on the Berkeley campus. Eventually, all were reunited back in Berkeley for the final emergence.

It would be difficult to judge which feat was more impressive—keeping track of 180 yucca moth larvae for 17 years, or keeping an adult ant alive for 14 years. On one hand, the diapausing larvae

don't need to be fed and an adult ant does; on the other hand, while an adult ant is fairly responsive, it would be an almost overwhelming temptation to cut through the cocoons every five years or so just to see if their occupants were still alive. I am fairly certain I could not have accomplished either feat. I can't even keep track of a Sharpie marker on my desk for more than a week.

It must be said at this juncture that in none of these studies of insect longevity did the investigators tamper with the processes of nature. Studies aimed at prolonging the lifespan of insects don 't figure prominently in most entomology programs, the vast majority of which have exactly the opposite goal. But there is one group of scientists who for years have done everything they can to make insects live longer. If you haven't been reading journals such

as Age or Experimental Gerontology, then you may not have seen these studies. It turns out that there are many people who test theories of aging with insects. This is not surprising from an experimentalist point of view, when you think about it; practically speaking, it's nice to be able to detect a 50% increase in lifespan when that increase translates to a few days. Comparable studies of long-lived Amazon parrots or Galapagos tortoises could run a century and a half or longer, which far exceeds the average funding cycle of most federal agencies. From this perspective, Clunio maritimus could be the ideal subject—the so-called one-hour midge has an adult lifespan of about an hour, give or take 30 minutes. Most people in this area, however, use other flies, mostly Drosophila melanogaster, which live a positively Methusaleh-like month or more as adults. Among the myriad substances tested and found to prolong the lifespan of these flies are cortisone, hydrocortisone, aspirin, triamcinolone), meclofenoxate, sodium thiazolidine-4-carboxylate, 2-ethyl-6-methyl-3-hydroxy-pyridine, ethidium bromide, lactic acid, diiodomethane, sodium hypophosphite, vitamin E, and innumerable others too obscure to mention.

One has to wonder what Lord Avebury would have thought about using artificial means to prolong insect life. Would he have resorted to any means possible to extend the lifespan of his ant? How long can an ant actually live, if assisted? Evidently, it's still very much an open question. With all of this newfound gerontological knowledge in hand, I just might go ahead and try to answer that question with a study of my own. I'd start right away, too, except that I need to write down a few things first and I can't seem to find my Sharpie marker. . . .

Despite all human pretenses at being superior to other living things, there are a few body functions around that remind us that we, too, are fundamentally similar to the lower life forms. One such body function is the occasional need to eliminate accumulated waste gases from the digestive tract. In humans, these gases tend to build up in the gut lumen as the result of bacterial fermentation; hydrogen gas is generated as a byproduct of the fermentation of ingested carbohydrates and amino acids, and methane by bacterial fermentation of endogenous material. Although some of these gases can diffuse from the lumen to the bloodstream, they are more frequently expelled at the terminus of the digestive tract by a process known by medical professionals as “flatus.” Although it's a legitimate physiological process, the act of expelling excessive intestinal gas for some reason is often regarded as comical. Even the normally staid and stolid Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, a 2,578-page tome documenting in excruciating and often horrific detail every kind of defect human flesh is heir to, lightens up on the subject (p. 793):

Among those who are flatulent, the quantity and frequency of gas passage can reach astounding proportions. One careful study noted a patient with

daily flatus frequency as high as 141, including 70 passages in one 4-h period. This symptom, which can cause great psychosocial distress, has been unofficially ... described according to its salient characteristics: (1) the ‘slider' (crowded elevator type), which is released slowly and noiselessly, sometimes with devastating effect; (2) the open sphincter, or ‘pooh ' type, which is said to be of higher temperature and more aromatic; and (3) the staccato or drum-beat type, pleasantly passed in private.

Among the handful of people who regard the release of intestinal gas not as a matter for humor in questionable taste but rather as a matter of urgent global concern are scientists who study this universal phenomenon in insects. This is a position that in some respects is well-taken. After all, there are many more insects than there are humans, and mass release of methane, a known greenhouse gas capable of affecting global climate, from so many abdomens (with so many orifices) could have potentially earth-shaking consequences. It' s not surprising, then, that much serious study has been devoted to the subject.

The debate about the significance of insect flatulence has been waged for over three-quarters of a century not in obscure special interest entomological journals but rather in the premier scientific journals of our era. It all more or less began in 1923, with L. R. Cleveland 's observation that the protozoans living in the guts of termites may actually be performing a useful function from the termite perspective. That this function somehow involved methane was suspected early on but wasn't confirmed for another fifty years. Once it was confirmed, however, quantifying that methane production became a national priority. In 1982, a collaborative effort among four scientists from three continents produced the first estimate of the annual production of methane by termites. In a paper in Science, P. R. Zimmerman and colleagues reported

measuring carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane, hydrogen, and several short-chain hydrocarbons emitted from the anus of three different termite species and scaling up to the global level from there. They found that individual termites were capable of producing 0.24-0.59 micrograms of methane per day; drawing from literature estimates of the global population densities of termites, they calculated that the approximately 2.4 × 10¹⁷ termites in the world could produce 1.5 × 10¹⁴ Terragrams methane each year, give or take a few Terragrams, one Terragram being the equivalent of 10¹² g, a unit of mass not usually dealt with by entomologists. This amount is impressive in its own right, but it's even more impressive given that the annual production of methane from all sources globally was estimated at only 3.5 to 12.1 × 10¹⁴ g. In other words, termite flatulence might be responsible for as much as 30% of the earth's atmospheric methane levels—levels that are rising even higher, according to Zimmerman et al., because deforestation and agriculture tend to favor the buildup of termites.

Not long after, in 1983, R. A. Rasmussen and M.A. K. Khalil published a dissenting view in the pages of Nature. Based on extrapolations of their own laboratory studies with Zootermposis angusticollis, they estimated termite methane production at a mere 5 × 10¹³ grams per year. These investigators qualified their findings even further by saying there was too much uncertainty not only about how much methane is produced by termites but also about how many termites there are in the world producing methane to come up with any definite figure for global emissions. Zimmerman and Greenberg (1983) were quick to respond, pointing out that, among other things, Rasmussen and Khalil had done their studies with termites confined in sealed and not flow

through containers, which likely affected their findings. Zimmerman and Greenberg actually obtained Z. angusticollis from Rasmussen and Khalil and repeated the experiment with their own chambers, obtaining estimates of methane production 3 to 6 times higher than the ones reported by Rasmussen and Khalil. Khalil took the lead in the next response (Khalil and Rasmussen, 1983), reiterating that termite colonies were more like sealed flasks than flow-through chambers and that the original Zimmerman et al. estimate was still probably too large by a factor of three. Another paper in Science came out the following year, in which N. M. Collins and T.G. Wood (1984) took issue with the way Zimmerman et al. had interpreted an earlier paper (by Wood and his colleague W.A. Sands, published in 1978) in estimating the total number of termites in the world and also disputed the assumption that deforestation increases termite abundance. Despite the authority that someone with the name of Wood would appear to have on the subject of termites, Zimmerman and colleagues (1984) replied to this criticism as well, acquiring a new co-author in the process. They responded that Collins and Wood had misrepresented their interpretation of the earlier paper, and then proceeded to cite the earlier paper (by Wood and Sands) to support their original estimate of termite densities.

While all of this wrangling was going on in the pages of Nature and Science, the methane levels of the atmosphere were apparently dropping. This decline did not go unnoticed by Steele et al. (1992), who reported the slowdown, in Nature of course. Meanwhile, on the termite front, several laboratories, seemingly oblivious to the waning urgency of the work, were intensively refining the estimates of global methane production by termites. Brauman and colleagues (1992) reported in Science that methane production

is a function of diet, with rates of methane emission greatest in soil feeders, followed by fungus feeders; wood-feeders bring up the rear, so to speak. Another refinement on the estimates was geographical; Martius et al. (1993) pointed out that the past decade of methane emission measurements were all from North America, Africa, and Australia. According to their findings, termites from North America and Australia couldn't hold a candle to Amazonian termites when it comes to producing methane (although holding a candle to any methane-producing body is probably a bad idea). They estimated that termites of all nationalities were collectively responsible for only 5% of the annual global methane flux.

In 1994, J. H. P. Hackstein and C. K. Stumm published what might be the definitive paper on arthropod methane emission and in doing so raised a terrifying specter. They surveyed more than 100 species of terrestrial arthropods and reported some findings that suggest termites may not be our chief concern in the methane arena. Whatever their other shortcomings, cockroaches are no slackers when it comes to producing methane. All of the major domiciliary species of cockroaches —the German, the Oriental, the American, and the brown-banded—produce in excess of 31 nanomoles per gram fresh weight per HOUR, with Periplaneta americana, the American cockroach, pumping out as much as 255 nanomoles per gram fresh weight per hour. While it's true that termites still can outproduce cockroaches by almost twofold on the global scale (50.7 Tg/year globally compared to only 28 Tg/ year), with a few exceptions they do most of this methane release in exotic localities such as African savannahs, Australian deserts, and Amazonian rain forests. Cockroach methane production hits just too close to home. It's one thing to have to take the blame for

the lingering odor of the digestive upset of kitchen vermin, but it's something else entirely to risk life and limb by cohabiting with cockroaches. Along with methane, cockroaches are capable of producing carbon monoxide, leaving open the possibility that fires of suspicious origin and carbon monoxide poisonings may have to do a lot less with faulty stoves and a lot more with windy cockroaches.

But maybe concerns about arthropod emissions are being blown out of proportion. After all, it's been known for years that at least some species of cockroaches can produce methane; D.L. Cruden and A.J. Markovetz (1984) first quantified the phenomenon a decade earlier and even reported finding a methanogenic bacterium in the gut of a cockroach uncomfortably similar to one originally identified from human excrement (suggesting that humans and cockroaches may be more biologically similar than is pleasant to contemplate). For that matter, there's evidence that cockroaches in particular and insects in general have shared this less than endearing human physiological foible for centuries. The Florentine Codex, a “General History of the Things of New Spain,” was translated from the Aztec in the sixteenth century by Fray Bernardino de Sahagun; Book 11 (Earthly Things) provides remarkable insights into the level of appreciation for natural history in pre-Columbian Mexico. Part twelve of Book 11 contains an account of the “pincatl. . . . It is blackish, dark, small and flat, with pointed jaws. It is sherd-like; rigid is its sherd. And when anyone molests it, then it breaks wind; it frightens one with its stink, its flatulence. It lives, it dwells, in damp places, in rubbish.” We may as well accept it, in ourselves as in others, since it's obviously been going on for a long time without any document-

able disastrous consequences for our species. Tiny gas bubbles are even visible in Dominican amber, clinging to the abdomens of termites, cockroaches, millipedes and other gassy arthropods. The process has been silent for millions of years, but it hasn't proved deadly yet.

If you went to public high school in the early seventies, as I did, then you probably are a survivor of an educational experiment called “health class.” I took health class in ninth grade, as did every ninth grader in Pennsylvania, because the powers-that-be in the state decreed that all ninth graders had to take health class in order to receive a high school diploma. The curriculum was designed to acquaint us with the hazards of sex, drugs, and inadequate personal hygiene. As I recall, we saw a lot of movies and filmstrips that I think were intended to frighten us. They couldn't have been exceedingly effective because I don't remember much about them. What I remember most clearly about health class was the textbook, and I remember that because the nameless student who had used that particular book the year before it was assigned to me had been thoughtful enough to pencil in all of the obscene terms for the various parts of both male and female reproductive tracts, very few of which I knew before, right next to all of the technical terms. Thus, overall, I have to say I found the class dull, but definitely educational.

Driver education class, on the other hand, was terrifying. We saw movies in that class, too, but these films were so frightening

that I ended up literally not getting behind the wheel of a car for eleven years after passing the course and getting my license. For the most part, these films depicted unremittingly horrific scenes of highway carnage. Time has dimmed these memories somewhat, and I do drive on occasion around town, but, thanks to a film called “Signal 30,” produced, I think, by the Ohio Traffic Safety Bureau and depicting all manner of gore-filled accidents (including one involving a truckload of cattle), I don't think I'll ever have the courage to drive in the state of Ohio (or eat hamburger, for that matter).

It seems to me that secondary school educators in the state of Pennsylvania missed a golden opportunity to instill morality through terror merely by virtue of their choice of films. I don't know if they still teach health class to ninth graders in Pennsylvania but if they do I recommend that they show a few nature documentaries instead of the movies they showed us. A brief glimpse into the reproductive habits of insects would be enough to put anyone off sex for a long time. Take the courtship ritual of Calopteran discrepans, for example. J. M. Sivinski (1981) describes a presumably typical encounter:

Males mount dorsally, between the females' slightly spread wings. Examination of coupled pairs showed the sickle-like male mandibles bite through the humeral angle (shoulder) of the female 's right elytron. Up to 3 males were found upon a female's back. When such masses were picked up they clung together and were separated only with some effort, leaving bleeding wounds in the female 's elytra.

In what can be described only as masterful understatement, Sivinski observes that such “love bites . . . illuminate the different reproductive interests of the sexes.”

This sort of mangling actually appears to be fairly routine

among insects. In a study of a dozen species of Nearctic gomphid dragonflies, for example, 88 to 100% of the females examined “had 2-6 holes in their heads resulting from the grip of male abdominal appendages” (Dunkle, 1991). The gomphids are apparently far rougher than aeshnid dragonflies, the male of which merely “gouges the dorsal surface of the female's compound eyes.” Hagenius brevistylus, North America's largest gomphid, earns distinction of a sort by exhibiting “the most severe head damage due to mating attempts so far discovered in any dragonfly.” In this species, “the laterodistal spines of the male epiproct gouged the edge of the female's compound eyes, and punctured the exoskeleton in . . . 32% of the females in which the male cerci also punctured the head. A proximodorsal ridge on each side of the male epiproct often . . . cracks the lateral corners of the female occiput. Finally, a distal spine and a mediolateral spine on each male cercus punctures the rear of the female head (postgenae). The pressure of the male grip splits the exoskeleton between the holes made by the cercal spines, resulting in a vertical split in each postgena. Thus a maximally damaged female would have 6 holes of varying sizes punched in her head.”

I expect a young, impressionable female high school student who grows up associating words like “gouge,” “puncture” “split” and “punch” with the act of copulation might never yield to temptation, even after years of marriage.

Actually, the girls have it relatively easy in the insect world—though they may be disfigured for life, at least they survive these encounters. There are innumerable accounts of sexual encounters among insects that leave males dead. I don't just mean those stories about praying mantids, which may be somewhat exaggerated (see “A prayer before dining” for details). Male Tribolium

beetles die a particularly horrible kind of death when they're maintained in all-male groups. Male T. castaneum beetles kept with females live on average 50 weeks; those in all-male groups die after only 15 weeks. These males die with a hard whitish plug at the tip of their abdomen, the apparent result of solidification of seminal fluids upon contact with air. When food particles adhere to the fluids, what results is a solid mass that interferes with the various and sundry functions of the nether end of the abdomen. Then there's the sad fate of Julodimorpha bakewell, a species of buprestid, or flat-headed boring beetle, in Australia. These shiny beetles mistake the shiny surface of a 370-ml beer bottle (called a “stubbie”) for a female buprestid and attempt to mate with it, invariably with less than satisfying results. Gwynne and Rentz (1983) conducted a short experiment by placing four bottles on the ground: within thirty minutes, six beetles had arrived to hit on the bottles. The problem with hazards of this behavior is that the beetles don 't give up; one male apparently died as the result of attack by ants, “biting at the soft portions of his everted genitalia.”

It might be argued that knowledge of these fatal attractions would be of little relevance to people—that small, crawling animals have little to do with human sexual practices. Remarkably enough, that 's not always the case. There is an unusual convergence of sex, invertebrates, and humans in a form of fetishist known as the crush-freak.

To define “crush-freak,” I refer to the definitive source on the subject, the American Journal of the Crush-Freak (1993):

This is a very unique sexual fantasy, which is part of the foot-fetish. In the “Crush-Freak's” mind he wishes himself tiny—insect like—and wants to be stepped on and squashed by the foot of a woman. There are a number of variations on this fetish fantasy. Some of us want only to be stepped on

barefoot, some only want to be crushed under the pump of the shiny, high-heeled shoe. . . . Others want to create scenarios in which the female imagines that one male is a bug, and gets her boyfriend to stomp him. Many fetishists must see a female step on a tiny living thing, an insect makes a fine surrogate for the “Crush-Freak.”

The American Journal of the Crush-Freaks is edited by Jeff Vilencia, an aspiring film-maker and self-avowed crush-freak who, in the biographical information appearing in his journal, admits to fantasizing about “being a bug.” I learned of Jeff Vilencia and of his unusual entomological interests when he called me up after reading about our departmental Insect Fear Film Festival in an article in Modern Maturity Magazine (official publication of the American Association of Retired Persons) at his mother's house. Jeff was kind enough to send me a copy of his award-winning short film, “Smush,” approximately eight minutes of actress Erika Elizondo crushing earthworms first with bare feet and then with her mother's black, stiletto-heeled pumps. This film was recognized at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1993, the Helsinki Film Festival of 1994, and, somewhat less surprisingly, at the Sick and Twisted Film Festival of 1995, and was written up in the New York Post and the Washington Post.

Technically speaking, this sort of sexual encounter really has adverse consequences only for the small invertebrate so I suppose “Smush” really wouldn't be suitable for showing to adolescents to demonstrate to them the hazards of unprotected sex. To be honest, I'm not exactly sure just what the appropriate audience would be for this film. I feel a little bad that I have trouble appreciating the aesthetics of the film because Jeff Vilencia certainly appreciates entomologists. In fact, in his journal he even reviews and rates entomological publications. Of course, he doesn't use the same

criteria that, say, I might use in reviewing such a text; his “criteria for inclusion” are that the books must be written by a woman and “that there must be one or more good ‘Crush' references.”

The issue of the American Journal of the Crush-Freaks in my possession contains two such book reviews. Of Bug Busters, by Bernice Lifton (1991), Vilencia excerpts six references to insect-crushing, with annotations. Such annotations are often quite succinct—e.g., “p.212, Ch. 13 ANTS, SPIDERS, AND WASPS . . . QUOTE: ‘Try to kill the biting spider without squashing it beyond recognition . . . OKAY.” This is not to say he's entirely uncritical in his praise of entomological texts, though. In his review he states his disappointment that the author uses the term “squash” instead of “squish”; evidently he finds “squish” a more evocative term. He concludes the review with the note, “we can only hope that Ms. Lifton is a young sexy babe with a size 9 or 10 shoe, and loves to step on bugs!”

Rhonda Wassingham Hart also received accolades from Jeff Vilencia for her book Bugs, Slugs & Other Thugs. Vilencia's review ends with what must be the ultimate praise for an entomological text—“I can only say that I would love to be a bug in her garden so she could step on me.”

I guess the point of all of this is that what is erotic is largely in the mind, not only for high school kids but also for grown-ups. My experience with Jeff Vilencia has led me to wonder about who reads the books I've written and what motivated them to buy the books in the first place. On the one hand, it's almost gratifying to think that insect pest management can arouse people's interests to such an extreme extent. On the other hand, it has convinced me not to list my shoe size in the biographical sketch of my next book.

The first place I read about the U.S. government's plan to eradicate illicit coca fields by dropping caterpillars from airplanes was not on the front page of our local newspapers —it was farther back, in the editorial section. A spate of editorial cartoons appeared, generally depicting drug czar William Bennett in a number of less-than-flattering ways. Imagine, if you will, the illustration accompanying the caption, “Disguised as a parachuting caterpillar, Wily Coyote Bennett prepares to pounce on his prey, the crafty drug-runner” (Oliphant, Universal Press Syndicate). Or the one where Bennett, crouched in an airplane hold, is dumping moths out the bay door and pointing at crates of benzene-contaminated Perrier, saying “See . . . first we drop the moths on the coca plants . . . and if that doesn't work . . .” (Mike Keefe, the Denver Post). Then there's the one that simply reads “Has this gotten stupid enough for you?” (Toles, Universal Press Syndicate).

I was, of course, interested in finding out the real story behind the editorial cartoons. The hometown paper, the Champaign-Urbana News Gazette, was of no help at all—I couldn't find any trace of the story. Of course, the Champaign-Urbana News Gazette is a bit on the provincial side; any insect that doesn't eat corn or

soybeans can pretty much give up hope of appearing on the front page in this town. But even the considerably hipper student paper, the Daily Illini didn't run the story, although one student did write an editorial column on the subject, called, “Mission insectible: Bush's bug-thugs strike back.” I eventually found a version of the story in the National Enquirer. Look, I know what you're thinking, but you're wrong, I really don't read it all that often. I think my husband actually brought that issue home from the grocery store. Yes, that's it, my husband bought it and I just happened to see the story as I was about to recycle the paper. In any case, I was anxious to find a version of the story in the legitimate press, so I ended up going to the newspaper library on campus.

It seems that the Washington Post broke the story on 20 February 1990, with the headline “U.S. may try biological war on coca crop/Swarming caterpillars would devour plants.” Clearly, this was the story I was after. After reading it, all I can say is that the editorial cartoonists didn't do it justice. It's not that I don't think the general principle was sound—the details were what struck me as amazing.

Take, for example, the statement in the Washington Post report that the object of all the attention, a white moth called the malumbia, “has not been written about in entomology journals for more than 55 years.” Okay, so maybe lepidopteran systematists don't often pass through the Huallaga Valley of Peru and maybe drug lords don't routinely cooperate with cooperative extension agents, but, even so, I would have thought malumbias would have attracted someone's attention. So, I went back to the library in search of the malumbia, armed with the somewhat mangled scientific name eloria-noyesi, provided by the Washington Post. Rules for writing scientific names are simple and clear—capitalize the

genus (the first part) and don't capitalize the species (the second part). I don't know why newspapers have such a hard time writing out Latin binomials, although I guess I shouldn't be surprised because no two papers seem to agree on how to spell Moammar Khadafi's name, either.

After exhaustive searching, I had to conclude that the Washington Post was right—I couldn't find any account of the malumbia in

any entomology journals more recent than C.L. Collinette's 1950 revision of the genus. The closest I came to a study of insects attacking illicit plants was an article in the Pan-Pacific Entomologist about confused flour beetles infesting confiscated marijuana in a federal building in Douglas, Arizona. Actually, Tribolium confusum is called the “confused flour beetle” because it is frequently confused by entomologists with its morphologically similar congener Tribolium castaneum, the red flour beetle, but I expect these particular confused flour beetles may have been more confused than usual.

I did have better luck finding malumbias, however, in phytochemical journals. Murray Blum, Laurent Rivier, and Timothy Plowman published a paper in 1981 in the journal Phytochemistry describing the metabolism of cocaine by the elusive malumbia. Evidently, even though most of the ingested cocaine passes out with the frass, the caterpillar can sequester some of it from its host plant; female moths contain as much as 53 nanograms per gram body weight of the stuff. So here is an insect that actually has a street value. For that matter, here is insect excrement that has a street value. I can't imagine why these findings didn't get more publicity, and for that matter why legislation wasn 't passed making it a felony to possess or smoke malumbia. This does raise a delicate etymological point, however—would the stub of a malumbia cigarette properly be called a roach?

Even more remarkable than the general lack of knowledge about the malumbia—after all, there are lots of tropical moths about which virtually nothing is known—was the fact that the Bush administration allocated $6.5 million dollars to this program. Granted, the money was for more than work on coca moths—there was also a project to test “a red dye that kills marijuana

plants” (perhaps government stockpiles of banned Red 40 from maraschino cherries?) and to investigate “a soil fungus that wipes out coca. ” But, according to the article, “the principal focus of the stepped-up effort is the malumbia, a white moth that, in its caterpillar stage, gobbles the green leaves of the coca plant.”

So basically, the government allocated more than six million dollars to breed and air-drop malumbias. That's six with six zeros after it. Six-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. That's a lot of money. Actually, that's three times the entire 1990 budget of the Plant Pest Program in the Competitive Grants Office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That's the program that funds research on caterpillars that gobble the green leaves of soybeans, corn, wheat, oats, peaches, pears, plums, turnips, cabbage, cauliflower, carrots, parsley, parsnips, celery, pine trees, cotton, tomato, potato, and other plants too numerous to mention.

I guess if there is a lesson here, it's that research funds are available to work on insects if you pick the right one. It has to be a species that clearly fits into a political agenda. Unfortunately, not too many insects fit this description. Mosquitoes bite conservatives and liberals alike, and termites cannot, as far as I know, be trained to eat up savings and loan buildings, kited checks, records of illegal campaign donations, copies of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, or any of the other things that have compromised politicians of late (Dan Quayle's “potatoes” come to mind, too). I suppose it's best, then, that scientists focus on problems of scientific interest and remain objective, apolitical, and underfunded. I wonder, though—given former President George Bush's aversion to broccoli, was there possibly a secret fund during his administration to support studies of moths that, in their caterpillar stage, gobble those green leaves?

I like to help people. Unfortunately, as an entomologist, I don't get a lot of people running to me for help. I guess if I were a doctor or a lawyer (or, for that matter, a police officer, telephone operator, librarian, auto mechanic, travel agent, or department store sales clerk), I'd get more questions. The discouraging thing about being an entomologist is that, frequently, I can't even help the people who do come to ask me questions. Usually, these kinds of questions begin with statements like, “I found this bug, and it's brown or black and I think it has six legs but I'm not sure.” There is one question, though, that I'm ready for. Someday, someone will come into my office and ask me, “If all of the offspring of a single fly survived to reproduce, how many flies would there be in a year?”

I know the answer to this and similar vitally important questions, because entomologists have occupied themselves with making these vitally important calculations for years. The tradition goes back at least as far as J. H. Fabre, who did some figuring and reached the conclusion that “three flies will devour a dead horse as quickly as a lion.” This fact, although titillating, must certainly have been a conversation-stopper at parties, especially the dead

horse part, so it's not surprising that others felt compelled to improve on the estimates. Charles Darwin (1859) confined his geometrical increase estimates to vertebrates, calculating that one breeding pair of elephants would give rise to nineteen million progeny “after a period from 740 to 750 years. Nineteen million is indeed a large number, particularly in elephant units, but 750 years is also a long time, so even Darwin 's calculation didn't impress everyone.

Insects were obviously the group of choice for generating staggering numbers without a wait. Following up on Fabre, Jordan and Kellogg (1908) estimated that “if each egg of the common house fly should develop, and each of the larvae should find the food and temperature it needed, with no loss and no destruction, the people of the city in which it happened would suffocate under the plague of flies.” Daunting, yes, but hardly rigorously quantitative. L.O. Howard rectified that deficiency in his 1911 book The House Fly—Disease Carrier. He estimated that a single female fly who started to reproduce by 15 April in Washington, D.C., would have generated a population of 5,598,720,000,000 adults by September 10. As Howard justifiably remarks, “Such figures as these stagger the imagination.”

That's probably why other entomologists felt obligated to improve on the calculation. Plowman and Dearden gently reminded readers in 1915 that, although Howard assumed that each fly lays only a single batch of eggs, “a fly may lay from 4 to 6 batches of eggs,...thus founding not one, but several, colonies in a single season.” Hodge and Dawson (1918), not content with merely pointing out places for improvement, made their own calculations from scratch. They set their fly to laying eggs on 1 May (in an unspecified location), and estimated that, with 150 eggs

laid at a clip (compared with Howard's 120), there would be 5,746,670,500 flies by 30 July—or, in more familiar units, “about 143,675 bushels of flies.” Hodge and Dawson estimated the number of flies would escalate to 1,096,181,249,310,720,000,000,000,000 by the end of September. They leave their readers to convert that figure to bushels themselves. One must assume that it was Hodge, rather than Dawson, who had done the calculation, since he subsequently stated in another publication that, “A pair of flies beginning operations in April, might be progenitors, if all were to live, of 191,010,000,000,000,000,000 flies by August. Allowing one-eighth of a cubic inch to a fly, this number would cover the earth 47 feet deep.”

Hodge would undoubtedly have been crushed to learn that Oldroyd (1964), an authority on flies, did not accept his calculations at face value: “Incredulous, I recalculated them and decided that a layer of such a thickness would cover only an area the size of Germany: but that is still a lot of flies.” It seems unlikely that anyone will dispute the latter part of Oldroyd's conclusion any time soon. If nothing else, forty-seven feet of flies over every square inch of Germany would certainly wreak havoc with the tourism industry.

Insects other than house flies have attracted the notice of calculating entomologists. There's been a controversy raging in the literature almost as long as the fly furor about the reproductive capacity of aphids. Herrick (1926) took his lead from Huxley, who calculated that, after ten generations, the progeny of a single aphid “contain more ponderable substance than 500 millions of stout men; that is, more than the whole population of China.” Herrick actually weighed four cabbage aphids (Brevicoryne

brassicae), calculated the number of progeny from a single female after 16 generations (564,087,257,509,154,652), and estimated their collective weight at “789-odd quadrillion milligrams, which, by reduction, gives 789,722,160,512,816 grams” and by further and further reduction “gives us the staggering number of 822-odd million tons of ponderable substance.” Figuring that the average stout man weighs two hundred pounds, Herrick concluded that Huxley 's comparison with the whole population of China would be a gross underestimate, weighing “altogether a mere bagatelle of 50,000,000 tons.”

Switching taxa, Howard (1931) reentered the insect fecundity fray by reconverting Herrick's 822 million tons back to pounds (1,644,000,000,000), estimating the average weight of a human at 150 pounds, the world population at 2,000,000,000, and the collective weight of humans on the planet at 300,000,000,000 pounds—“in other words, the plant-lice descended from one individual in a single season would weigh more than five times as much as all the people of the world.” Calculating on the basis of length rather than weight, Metcalf and Flint (1928) decided “it would be possible, theoretically, for a single female to produce in one year, if all her descendents survived, a chain of these aphids long enough to encircle the earth,” a far more robust estimate because the earth's circumference is less likely to vary than either the population of China or the average weight of stout men.

Other estimates of insect fecundity have failed to pass the test of time. Duncan and Pickwell (1939) cited the case of the vedalia ladybird beetle, Rodolia cardinalis—“if all circumstances were favorable to their survival, a population of twenty-two trillion beetles could be produced in six months' time! This is approximately twenty-two thousand times as many beetles as there have

been minutes of time since the birth of Christ!” This conversion factor (as it were) doesn't really clear things up for me at all. Maybe another reason this particular calculation isn't frequently cited is that anyone who wanted to cite it would of necessity have to do some serious recalculations, since many minutes have passed since Duncan and Pickwell finished their arithmetic exercise. In fact, if it takes you a long time to do these calculations, you might have to start all over by the time you finish. For all I know, there are entomologists whose entire careers are subsumed by this task.

Or not. Nowadays, people don't seem so driven to come up with impressive numbers. Why do I say this? In 1954, Borror and DeLong introduced to this literature what may be the definitive calculation: starting with a pair of Drosophila fruit flies, allowing each female to produce one hundred eggs and allowing all progeny to survive, Borror and DeLong ended up, after twenty-five generations, with “about 10⁴¹” flies. Just exactly how many flies is 10⁴¹ flies? “If this many flies were packed tightly together, 1000 to a cubic inch, they would form a ball extending nearly from the earth to the sun.” I don't know about you, but I'm willing to take their word for it. Probably, most other people are, too. Significantly, in their first edition, Borror and DeLong prefaced their calculation with this statement: “Those who do not believe what follows may figure it out themselves.” By the fourth edition, this statement is no longer included. After all, even if the ball would only reach as far as Mercury, that's still a lot of flies.

The human body comes equipped with nine or ten natural orifices, little portals that allow light, air, and solid or liquid material to enter or leave the body, depending on biological necessities. Although there are exceptions (which I'm sure, given time, you can probably come up with on your own), movement in or out of these orifices for any given state of matter tends to be resolutely unidirectional. Thus, it becomes rather unsettling whenever the normal flow of traffic is reversed. Drooling, for example, lacks the sensory fulfillment of drinking fine wine, and bleeding from the ears tends to be looked upon by most people with at least some degree of disquietude.

Unfortunately for us humans, insects are for the most part oblivious to these traffic patterns and thus occasionally wander into orifices that are not designed to accommodate them. Not all arthropods have an equal likelihood of appearing in any given orifice. Cockroaches, for example, appear to have a particular predilection for ears. According to one report published by Baker in 1987, of 134 foreign objects found in children's ears, 27 were arthropods, and, of these, 21 (78%) were cockroaches. In case you're wondering, one ant, one fly, three spiders, and a tick made

up the rest. While there is a general consensus not only in the medical community but in the world at large that cockroaches do not belong in ears, there is by no means a similar consensus on the best procedure for removing said bodies from said orifices. The usual methods of dispatching insects are, for the most part, not really easily adapted to auditory canals—spraying insecticide directly into the ear seems only slightly less unpleasant than putting up with the cockroach, and dispatching the cockroach by stepping on it is just plain unworkable inside a person's head.

Physicians (as the experts to whom people who find cockroaches in their ears generally turn) have thus become amazingly resourceful. Among the most widely accepted approaches is to drown the cockroach lodged in the auditory canal in a fluid of some sort. A remarkable variety of substances have been used to this end, with varying degrees of success. While esoteric solutions involving benzocaine, succinyl choline, isopropyl alcohol, or hydrogen peroxide have been tried on occasion, the more prosaic water, vegetable oil, ether, and mineral oil have a long historical record of use. Of these, ether has the decided disadvantage of being explosively flammable and vegetable oil is rarely on hand in an emergency room. In 1980, Dr. A. Schittek introduced to an eager medical community a novel approach to the challenge of extricating cockroaches from auditory canals—immobilizing the cockroach with lidocaine spray. Lidocaine spray is more typically used as a topical anesthetic but when sprayed inside an infested ear it has the advantage of rendering a cockroach paralyzed and thus less likely to kick and scratch while being extricated.

This new method received validation of sorts when an unusual opportunity presented itself to an enterprising team of emergency room physicians in a large urban hospital; a patient checked in

with a cockroach in each ear (O'Toole et al. 1985). The emergency team immediately set up a controlled study, using tried-and-true mineral oil in one ear and innovative 2% lidocaine spray in the other ear. While the cockroach that had drowned in mineral oil required manual extraction, the cockroach sprayed with lidocaine “exited the canal at a convulsive rate of speed and attempted to escape across the floor.” In fairness, it must be pointed out that the “simple crush method,” employed by a quick-thinking and “fleet-footed intern,” was ultimately responsible for the demise of the cockroach, but the lidocaine clearly facilitated the process.

The field continued to advance in 1989, when Drs. J. Warren and L. Rotello improvised another method under very stressful circumstances. Although lidocaine was introduced into the

Orifice space for rent: immediate occupancy

auditory canal according to custom, it failed to have an instantaneous effect. Prompted by the patient's urgent request to “‘Get that sucker outa my ear!'” the physicians took her at her word and applied a metal suction tip to the opening of the auditory canal; the cockroach was immediately sucked up and removed. These authors made medical history in that, in describing the moment of contact between cockroach and suction tip, they introduced the word “shloop ” to the medical literature.

Although cockroaches appear to be the most frequently encountered insects in ears, the same cannot be said for other human orifices. Maggots have a habit of turning up in all kinds of openings, natural or otherwise. Maggots are what turned up, for example, in the urogenital tract of a 5-year-old girl in a Tokyo hospital. Some of these larvae came into the possession of R. Disney and H. Kurahashi (1978), who attempted to rear them to adulthood. Eventually, these authors tentatively identified the specimens as a species of Megaselia. Positive identification was undoubtedly complicated by the fact that, of the two larvae they were rearing, one “escaped”—although the authors do not describe how a legless, headless maggot encumbered by “very conspicuous posterior balloonlike structures” managed to make a clean getaway. Curiously, these authors made no attempt to speculate on how these maggots came to live where they did; in fact, there is no indication in the article that the authors thought that the habitat was in any way extraordinary, although they did allow as how they found the specimen “interesting.”

Disney (1985) eventually described the specimen as a new species, M. kurahashii, having been supplied in the interim with additional specimens from one Dr. K. Kaneko, although where these additional specimens were collected was not specified. An

earlier publication reports this species as breeding in steepers of Takuwan, a kind of Japanese “pickle made with radishes, rice-bran, and salt.” The fact that the species initially found in a girl's urogenital tract also breeds in pickle brine doesn't really clear things up for me. For the life of me, I can't imagine any plausible scenario that connects Japanese pickle brine and urogenital tracts, but perhaps I am just lacking in imagination or suffering from too conventional an upbringing.

I guess I'm interested in how maggots in particular and insects in general gain access to human orifices because, as the possessor of more than a few of these orifices, I would like to take every precaution necessary to keep them insect-free. I've always believed that one of the few benefits of living in central Illinois is that one is relatively well insulated against the many forms of arthropod infestation that are largely limited to tropical climes. Human bot flies, jigger fleas, and Congo floor maggots are among the very few things I do not have to spend time worrying about on a daily basis. However, casual interloping at orifices that are left open and inviting seems to have no climatological boundaries. Badia and Lund (1994) describe a case of nasal myiasis, infestation of the nasal cavities, by Oestrus ovis, the sheep nasal bot fly, in a 35-year-old living in London, England. Nasal myiasis is not all that uncommon in tropical Asia and Africa —Sharma et al. (1989) reviewed some 250 cases over a ten-year period —nor is it all that uncommon in shepherds and in other people who for whatever reason choose to spend a lot of time around sheep. But this man from London denied having knowingly associated with sheep or traveled abroad immediately prior to the appearance of the maggots.

The mere occurrence of these maggots in the man's nasal

passages, however, was not the most remarkable thing about this case; what struck me as truly extraordinary was that this man had been “sneezing out several maggots during the preceding six weeks” before he checked in with his physician. Call me a wimp, but I think if I sneezed out even one little tiny maggot I would be on the phone and dialing 9-1-1 before it even hit the floor.

While it's true that London, England, is a comfortable 3,000 miles or so away, there's little justification for complacency here. M.J. Phelan and M. W. Johnson (1995) recently reported an instance of myiasis uncomfortably close to home. A 16-year-old boy returning from summer camp in southwestern Michigan experienced a rapid and progressive decline in the visual acuity of his right eye. Close examination of the eye revealed the presence of “a white, segmented maggot, approximately 1.25 disk diameters in length and tapered at both ends . . . moving slowly in the subretinal space near the equator inferotemporally.” Lidocaine and mineral oil both being out of the question here (not to mention shoe leather), the inventive physicians photocoagulated the maggot with an argon laser, treatment end point being a “mild vaporization (bubbling) of the worm.” Possibly the only thing more disconcerting than the thought of a maggot moving slowly across one's eye is the thought of a maggot being mildly vaporized while attempting to crawl across one's eye.

From even this superficial and incomplete review of a disturbingly vast literature, I have reached the inevitable and distressing conclusion that nobody's orifices are safe these days. I really don't mind that insects might occasionally take advantage of extraordinary circumstances. It's not all that surprising that debilitated geriatric patients in comas come to host infestations in their mouths, for example. And, although I couldn't actually read the

paper (because it was in Japanese), the translated title of Tomita et al. (1984), including the words “self-amputation of the penis, ” suggests a set of circumstances that must certainly qualify as unusual by anyone's criteria (and not anything that I will have to worry about any time soon). But I never imagined my eyes, ears, nose, and mouth (not to mention less public places) might be at risk here in the Midwest. I don't know what to recommend—it's not as if we can go about our business with eyes shut tight and fingers in our ears. Maybe I'll think of something, but, until then, I can pass on one bit of advice—if you should find yourself in a Japanese restaurant, try to steer clear of the pickles when you sit down.

A while ago, I received a phone call from an editor at Ranger Rick Magazine, asking if I might verify a few facts for an insect story that was about to come out. This care and attention to accuracy came as no surprise to me—despite the fact that they're written for children, articles for Ranger Rick are scrupulously reviewed. I know this to be true because, the one and only time I ever wrote for the magazine—an article titled, “Watch out! Wild carrots! ”—reviewers caught an error that went unnoticed in an article on a similar subject that went to a scientific journal for grown-ups. In particular, the editor wanted to know if the New Zealand weta (one of several species of very large stenopelmatid crickets) is heavier than the goliath beetle (one of several species of very large scarabaeid beetles). Frankly, all I knew at the time was that they were both really big insects, and, with intraspecific variation being what it is, providing a definitive answer could definitely be risky. I hesitated to go with my gut instinct and say “goliath beetle,” without first ruling out the possibility that, lurking deep within the jungles of New Zealand, there might be a morbidly obese weta with a glandular condition. Moreover, I really didn't think it should matter to people whether average

wetas are a fraction of an ounce heavier than average goliath beetles.

I know, though, as does the editor, that it really does matter. For reasons I can't completely understand, most people seem to care passionately about records. Students, for example, who complain about the burden of memorizing the names of insect orders can rattle off statistics about Chicago Bulls' superstar Michael Jordan's shooting percentage or Chicago Cubs rookie pitcher Kerry Woods' earned run average at will. They're willing not only to commit these numbers to memory but also to update them as they change (hey, it's not like the names of the orders change over the course of a semester). The world is awash in records and the most prominent keepers of records are the people at the Guinness Book of World Records (GBWR). First published in August, 1955, the book became a best seller within a matter of weeks and it has remained a best seller ever since; sales now approach $80 million a year.

The people behind the GBWR have not overlooked the class Insecta in their pursuit of all things exceptional or extraordinary. The book includes categories of achievement for which all animals are eligible—e.g., records for greatest concentration of animals (currently held by a swarm of Melanoplus spretus locusts sighted over Nebraska in July 1874 and estimated to have contained over 12.5 trillion insects), fastest reproduction (the cabbage aphid Brevicoryne brassicae), most acute sense of smell (the male emperor moth), the strongest animal (a rhinoceros beetle), and the most prodigious eater (larvae of the polyphemus moth). And there are records for which only insects are eligible—the oldest insect, the longest insect, the smallest insect, the lightest insect, the loudest insect, the insect with the fastest wingbeat, the

insect with the slowest wingbeat, and so on. Here is where the Guinness people weigh in on the heaviest insect controversy, designating the goliath beetles (Goliathus regius, G. meleagris, G. goliathus, and G. druryi) as the collective record holders in the 1998 edition (although among coleopterists the taxonomic status of these four is in dispute, even if their size isn't). There are even a few records restricted to members of certain taxa—largest grasshopper, largest flea, longest flea jump, largest dragonfly, smallest dragonfly, largest butterfly, smallest moth, and longest butterfly migration.

“Fastest flying” is a category that's been around for a while and it's worthy of discussion because it illustrates the pitfalls of paying attention to these sorts of records. At the moment, according to GBWR, the record is held by Austrophlebia costalis, an Australian dragonfly clocked at 36 mph by person or persons unnamed. Historically, however, the zest for setting (or even just reporting) records has caused many people to lose their objectivity. The deer bot fly Cephenemyia pratti was assumed to be the fastest flyer on earth for a long time. C. pratti is one of a group of oestrid bot flies that make their living laying their eggs in the nostrils of deer and their relatives and developing as maggots by consuming blood and soft tissues in the nasal and pharyngeal cavities of their hosts. This insect became a record holder as a consequence of buzzing by one Charles Townsend as he was scaling 7,000-foot peaks in the Sierra Madres of western Chihuahua. The event apparently left an impression.

There was at the time an ongoing debate in the popular science literature, occasioned by new technologies in aeronautical engineering, on the feasibility of a daylight-day circuit of the earth. In an essay on the subject, Townsend (1927) put high speed travel in

the context of his own personal experience: “the gravid females pass while on the search for hosts at a velocity of well over 300 yards per second—allowing a slight perception of color and form, but only a blurred glimpse. . . . On 12,000-foot summits in New Mexico I have seen pass me at an incredible velocity what were quite certainly the males of Cephenemyia. I could barely distinguish that something had passed—only a brownish blur in the air of about the right size for these lifes and without sense of form. As closely as I could estimate, their speed must have approximated 400 yards per second.” For those keeping count, 400 yards per second is equivalent to 818 miles per hour (greater than Mach 2) and 300 yards per second is 614 miles per hour. Townsend reckons that these flies could likely have “kept up with the shells that the German big-bertha shot into Paris during the world war.” Despite the extraordinary biological nature of this claim, Townsend really didn't seem all that impressed. Rather than dwelling on the astonishing nature of the fly's abilities, he devoted most of his essay to offering suggestions for inventing flying machines that can beat the speed of the earth's axial rotation, apparently a more easily realized goal than beating the speed of the fly.

Townsend may not have been impressed, but a lot of other people were. For over a decade, this record was cited widely—among other places, in the New York Times in 1926 and in the Illustrated London News in 1938—particularly to put into perspective feeble human attempts to set new speed records with mechanical devices. These citations eventually drew the attention of Irving Langmuir, an engineer with the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York. By use of dimensional reasoning, “comparing the fly with a Zeppelin as to

diameter and speed and fuel consumption,” along with ballistics equations and simple mathematics, Langmuir (1938) was able to calculate that a fly traveling at such speeds would have to consume 1.5 times its own weight in food every second in order to maintain itself. Moreover, flying at such speeds, a fly that strikes human skin “would come to rest in about 55 × 10-⁶ sec and during this time there would be a force of 1.4 × 10-⁸ dynes or 140 kg (310 pounds),” certainly enough force to “penetrate deeply into human flesh.” Given that these flies have the habit of darting in and out of their host's noses to lay their eggs, it's remarkable that more Sierra Madre mule deer aren't wandering around with an extra nostril or two.

Based on the appearance of a moving lead weight on a string (and observing at what speed it becomes blurry), Langmuir estimated that Townsend's blurry flies were probably traveling only at the far-from-record-setting speed of about 25 mph. So, it's clear there's a need for stricter standards when it comes to reporting on record-setting animals. There are already strict standards for human accomplishments that involve insects, and I can see the value of reporting such records, even if they are a tad on the bizarre side. For years, there weren't many such records to worry about. In the 1998 issue of GBWR, in fact, among the “fantastic feats” documented (on the same page as the records for logrolling, ladderclimbing, bigamous marriages, and knitting) is, somewhat incongruously, the sole 1998 insect-related record—for wearing a mantle of bees. On June 29, 1991, Jed Shaner “was covered by a mantle of an estimated 343,000 bees weighing an aggregate of 80 pounds in Staunton,Virginia. ”

Television stands to propel insect-related human records out of their neglected status. Summer 1998 marked the debut of the Fox

Network television program, “Guinness World Records: Primetime.” In early promotions, each episode was promised to include “multiple challenges and breathtaking events during which people go to the ultimate extremes” either to break existing records or create new ones. Some of these record-setting scenes are more visually appealing than others—walking a tightrope between two hot air balloons at 14,000 feet is probably more exciting to watch than, say, the man with the world's largest feet. The quest for ratings has added substantially to the number of insect-human records in the record book. In June, 1998, in front of GBWR judges, Dan Capps, by the act of spitting a dead cricket a distance of 32′ 1/2″, succeeded in setting a new world 's record for dead-cricket spitting.

I spoke with Dan Capps about this feat when he came to the University of Illinois for the 1998 Insect Expo, accompanied by his remarkable collection of insect specimens. Mr. Capps was a 48-year-old maintenance mechanic at an Oscar Mayer bologna plant in Madison,Wisconsin when he accomplished this impressive feat. He was very self-effacing about his accomplishment and in fact revealed to me that the official record isn't even his personal best. On April 19, 1998, at Purdue University 's Bug Bowl, Mr. Capps succeeded in spitting a dead cricket 32′ 1-1/2″ but, because the official judges were not present, that particular spit never made it into the record books.

There is no question that television has upped the ante in terms of the nature of records set; big risks mean big ratings. On October 20, 1998, Dr. Norman Gary, retired bee biologist from the University of California at Davis, traveled to Griffith Park in Los Angeles, CA, and, in front of officials, succeeded in holding 109 live bees in his mouth for ten seconds, thereby setting a

world's record for holding live bees in the mouth for ten seconds. This world record was one that Dr. Gary conceived of himself, based on years of working with bees and studying their behavior. I won't reveal to you his secrets; suffice it to say that, even though “Guinness Primetime” compensates its record-setters, there isn't enough money in the world to entice me to attempt to break this one.

For the record, Dr. Gary is no stranger to record books; he says he's very competitive by nature. His first record, and first encounter with GBWR, was back in 1988, when he set the Australian record for largest mantle of bees. In 1998, he conquered the world—on July 21, 1998, Dr. Gary succeeded in assembling a mantle of bees on colleague Mark Biancaniello, an animal trainer who had worked at Michael Jackson 's Neverland ranch, that weighed in excess of 87.5 pounds and included an estimated 353,150 bees. It took three tries, and it required developing new and innovative methods for estimating the number of bees in a mantle, but Dr. Gary rose to the challenge and earned a form of immortality in the process (at least until someone comes up with an 88-pound bee mantle).

I'm happy for Dr. Gary, but I don't want to be the one to break the news to Jed Shaner that he will no longer be featured in GBWR in the “fantastic feats” section—at least for “mantle of bees.” If he's been busy ladder-climbing, knitting, or logrolling since 1991, he may still have a shot in the next issue on the same page. And I'd encourage those wetas not to lose hope—there may be a place for them in the next issue if they keep eating.

One of the great disappointments of my childhood was the fact that my parents never allowed us to have any real pets. By “real pet,” I mean any creature capable of learning its own name. All of the goldfish, red-eared turtles, and anoles we were allowed to keep, then, didn't really count. Nor did Jacques, our hamster, the only mammalian pet to grace our home during my formative years. I know for a fact Jacques didn 't answer to his name, because, when he managed to escape from his cage one fateful day, we called out his name over and over again in the hope that he would materialize, and he never did. Months later, my mother found his tiny, shriveled body in a remote corner of the attic. To this day, I feel bad about Jacques.

I think my parents were reluctant to allow us to have pets because they were concerned that we weren't responsible enough to take care of a sentient creature (and I guess that unfortunate hamster incident pretty much proved their point). Nonetheless, even in my seriously pet-deprived state, I never had any interest in owning an insect pet. This is all the more surprising given that I grew up during the dawn of the insect pet era. On July 4, 1956, Milton Levine poured some sand into a plastic container and

invented the Ant Farm. Uncle Milton, as he and his eponymous ant farms came to be known, really found a market niche; today, it's a million-dollar enterprise, with close to seven million ants sold to ant farm owners annually. Personally, though, I've never been tempted by the prospect of ant farm ownership. Knowing as I do today that the species of choice for populating these farms are Pogonomyrmex harvester ants, which have among the nastiest stings in the class Insecta, I can't help wondering what percentage of Uncle Milton's profits go toward maintaining a crackerjack legal staff.

Had I been less adamant about that name thing, I could even have gotten in on the ground floor of the sea monkey phenomenon. Sea monkeys are the arthropod pets, par excellence. Only a year after ant farms came into existence, one Harold von Braunhut, of Long Island, New York, had a brilliant flash of insight relating to marine biology and its commercial pet potential. Three years later, in 1960, he was marketing genetically improved Artemia salina brine shrimp (hitherto vended as fish food) as “Instant Life”—pets that came to life simply by the addition of water. As a child, I wasn't tempted by sea monkeys any more than I was by ant farms. Among other things, they were always advertised in the back pages of comic books next to the ads for X-ray specs, and, even at that early stage of my scientific training, I was fairly certain that X-ray specs couldn't possibly work as advertised. I also had a hard time believing that simply adding water could reanimate a living creature; instant oatmeal I could accept, but not instant animal.

I was wrong, however, and sea monkeys went on to become an international phenomenon. Today, countless children add water and enjoy their instant pets; they achieved such popularity that

they even inspired a short-lived television show, on Saturday mornings on CBS, in the early 1990s. According to the catalogue and instruction book that accompany every Sea-Monkey Ocean Zoo, dozens of products are available for the sea monkey owner who wishes to indulge his pets. There's an Electric Ocean-Zoo “Showboat,” a “Sea Show Projector,” “Sea Medic Sea-Monkey Medicine,” and even “Sea-Monkey Banana Treats,” to reward sea-monkeys “for the FUN they give you!” Not surprisingly, the book provides tips on feeding and breeding sea monkeys, but it also has a section on training sea monkeys to perform tricks and to play games with people. For an extra $1.25, there's a supplemental book to teach them how to play baseball (according to patent number 3,853,317 issued to the redoubtable von Braunhut).

The last page of the instruction book provides a “limited group sea-monkey life insurance policy,” with a form on which to write the names of sea monkey pets. Also provided is a naming guide:

“Names given must be Socially Acceptable, i.e., names such as : Stinky, Slimy, Sneaky, etc. will not be allowed as your sensitive pets might be offended. Give them nice “Sunday School” names. Suggestions: Scamper, Moby Dick, Davy Jones, Barry Cuda, Barry Goldwater, Sharkey, Agamemnon, Puddles, Finn, Peppy, Flippy, etc.”

I notice, though, that nowhere is there any kind of guarantee that they'll answer to those names.

I know it shouldn't, but it bothers me, as a professional entomologist, that one of the “World's Most UNUSUAL and AMAZING Pets” is a crustacean and not an insect. I know today that von Braunhut created a novel pet by taking advantage of the phenomenon of cryptobiosis, or anhydrobiosis—kind of a suspended animation state induced by desiccation. The phenomenon

has been reported in a wide variety of crustaceans other than brine shrimp, including ostracods and water fleas, as well as nematodes and tardigrades, but remarkably few insects are very proficient at entering a cryptobiotic state. Among the few exceptions, and perhaps the best known cryptobiotic insect, is Polypedilumvanderplanki, brought to the attention of the scientific world by H. E. Hinton in 1951. That it was H. E. Hinton who brought P. vanderplanki to prominence is not really surprising; throughout his long and productive career, H. E. Hinton brought all kinds of remarkable things to the attention of the scientific world, including lycaenid butterfly pupae that look like monkey heads. P. vanderplanki is a chironomid midge that, as a larva, lives in small pools that form during the rainy season in depressions in unshaded rocks in Nigeria and Uganda. When these pools dry up, the larvae dry up with them, often while ensconced in burrows made in the thin layer of mud that lines the bottom of the pool. Pools can fill up and dry out alternately several times during the rainy season and during the dry season temperatures at the surface of the dry soil layer protecting the larvae can exceed 42°C.

Intrigued by the challenge, Hinton commenced a decade-long effort aimed at determining the physiological limits of P. vanderplanki. In 1951, he reported that, at 0% relative humidity, the water content of the larvae decreased to about 3%; in the laboratory, larvae could tolerate up to ten successive dehydrations and rehydrations without ill effects. Two years later, Hinton reported that desiccated larvae maintained at room temperature and humidity could survive for more than three years and still be reanimated simply by rehydration without adverse effects. Storage for three years at room humidity followed by seven years of storage

over calcium chloride also failed to prevent larvae from reanimating upon rehydration (Hinton 1960).

Hinton continued to push P. vanderplanki's envelope, subjecting them to even more rigorous conditions. He discovered that they could survive exposure to 106°C for 3 hours and 200°C for five minutes. And they were unfazed by total immersion in absolute alcohol for seven days, in glycerol for 67 hours, in liquid air, at -190°C, for 77 hours and in liquid helium, at -270°C, for 5 minutes.

I don't know about you, but I think surviving total immersion in liquid helium is a pretty cool trick (as it were), much more impressive than, say, Sea Monkey hypnosis (positive phototaxis) or Sea Monkey Acrobatics (swimming). Yet, P. vanderplanki larvae have never lived up to their obvious pet potential. Perhaps all they're lacking is a catchy common name. Tardigrades, or “water bears,” may already have the edge on them in that regard. Moreover, in their cryptobiotic state, water bears can not only withstand temperatures as low as -253° and as high as 151° but can survive a century of desiccation as well as exposure to a vacuum, to X-rays, and to hydrostatic pressure equal to six times the pressure of sea water at 10,000 meters depth (Seki and Toyoshima 1998).

But maybe it's just as well; having children plunge their pets in liquid helium doesn't really seem like the right mechanism for teaching responsibility. As a parent myself now, I have to think of these things. Maybe I 'll just order my daughter a pair of X-ray specs and hope for the best.

If you stop almost any average citizen on the street and ask him or her to provide you with three facts about insects, odds are good that one will be this: the female praying mantis is a cannibal that is not beneath eating her own mates or children. Absolutely everyone seems to know this particular bit of insect lore and it's practically celebrated in popular culture. It's been featured in “The Far Side” cartoons (“I don't know what you're insinuating, Jane, but I haven 't seen your Harold all day—besides, surely you know I would only devour my own husband!”) (Larson 1987) and it's even provided the plot for at least one episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” on television—the one called “Teacher's Pet,” which, according to TV Guide, features a male high school student “nearly seduced by a voluptuous substitute science teacher who transforms into a large praying mantis . . . [And] what's more embarrassing than almost getting devoured by a femme fatale insect teacher?” It has even made it into the screenplay of a James Bond film. In Dr. No (1962), voluptuous Honey Ryder (who later murders a man by placing a black widow spider under his mosquito netting) says, “Did you ever see a mongoose dance or a scorpion with sunstroke sting itself to death, or a praying mantis eat her husband after

making love? Well, I have.” Even people who can't keep straight in their minds the concept that spiders aren't insects seem comfortably fluent with the notion that praying mantids are unreconstructed sexual cannibals.

While it's true that consuming offspring is fairly widespread in the animal kingdom, as anyone who has tried to raise gouramis in a fish tank that's too small can attest, the sexual cannibalism thing is a source of particular fascination. Mantids are by no means the only arthropods that are reputed to engage in the practice—spiders, scorpions, amphipods, copepods, crickets, grasshoppers, antlions, and ground beetles are known to indulge from time to time. But mantids seem to hold a special place in the pantheon of sexual cannibals. After all, it's not pictures of cannibal copepods you see in the introductory biology textbooks. Figure 55-14b in Helena Curtis' Biology (p. 1032), for example, depicts “copulating praying mantids. This male mantid is lucky—so far. Female mantids usually eat their mates, often decapitating them before copulation. Decapitation of the male mantid releases inhibition and results in his copulating even more vigorously, thus helping to ensure that his sacrifice will not have been in vain. ” The implication is that the male's fate, however happy it might be in the short term, is pretty much sealed permanently.

The only problem I have with this venerable fact of life is that it's not at all clear to me that it's a fact at all. Among other things, there are more than 180 species of mantids, and sexual cannibalism has been reported to occur in just a tiny handful of those species. Moreover, the vast majority of those reports are from laboratory studies, which are, needless to say, conducted under highly artificial conditions. Examining those reports in detail is quite interesting, entirely independent of their content. The paper that catapulted

mantid sexual cannibalism into the American scientific conscience was the lurid account published by L. O. Howard in Science in 1886. It's only 500 words long but it makes up in impact what it lacks in verbosity:

. . . I brought a male of Mantis carolina to a friend who had been keeping a solitary female as a pet. Placing them in the same jar, the male, in alarm, endeavored to escape. In a few minutes, the female succeeded in grasping him. She first bit off his left tarsus, and consumed the tibia and femur. Next she gnawed out his left eye. At this the male seemed to realize his proximity to one of the opposite sex, and began to make vain endeavors to mate. The female next ate up his right front leg, and then entirely decapitated him, devouring his head and gnawing into his thorax. Not until she had eaten all of his thorax except 3 millimeters did she stop to rest. All this while the male had continued his vain attempts to obtain entrance at the valvules, and he now succeeded, as she voluntarily spread the parts open, and union took place.

To me, even more remarkable than the phenomenon of sexual cannibalism is the fact that, back in 1886, you could get a paper published in Science based on a study with a sample size of one. In any case, Howard was evidently so fascinated with the phenomenon that he managed, with C. V. Riley, to publish a second account, this time based not on observation but on an anecdote related by one Colonel John Bowles about a captive pair he had observed. The fact that Bowles chloroformed the couple before the male could finish mating and the female could finish eating makes interpretation a bit difficult and is probably the reason this paper was published in Insect Life and not Science. The story reached the general public when masterful writer J. H. Fabre gamely picked up the sexual perversion gauntlet and in 1897 wrote a flowery, even moving, account of yet another captive

male's spirited demise:“if the poor fellow is loved by his lady as the vivifier of her ovaries, he is also loved as a piece of highly flavored game. . . . I have . . . seen one and the same mantis use up seven males. She takes them all to her bosom and makes them pay for the nuptial ecstasy with their lives.”

The paper that absolutely guaranteed “textbook example” status for mantid mating habits was the extensive study published by physiologist Kenneth Roeder in 1935. Roeder is widely credited with suggesting that sexual cannibalism is required among mantids because inhibitory impulses from the subesophageal ganglion prevent the mantis from completing his conjugal duties; removal of the head removes these inhibitions and allow consummation to take place. I doubt, though, that many people have actually read this paper. Roeder didn't really go so far as to suggest that decapitation was a necessity. Among other things, he was well aware that, in nature, many mantids mate multiple times, and he was the first to admit that the conditions under which he made his observations were, to say the least, artificial.

I doubt, though, that reading Roeder's clarification would convince people to abandon the notion that mantids eat their mates. Later studies failing to document cannibalism at all (Liske and Davis, 1984) or documenting cannibalism only under certain ecological circumstances or at levels well below those meriting the statement “Female mantids usually eat their mates” (Lawrence 1992) certainly haven't. People hate to let go of things sick and twisted; after all, there's great reluctance to let go of the notion of human cannibalism, despite the fact that the evidence for it is flabby, indeed. According to Brottman (1998), in his Meat is Murder! An Illustrated Guide to Cannibal Culture (note: this is definitely not recommended as a coffee table picture book), “the

major historical phenomenon is the idea that people eat each other, not the fact.” Since time immemorial, it has been the practice to note that “the other fellows” are cannibals. Herodotus, widely recognized as the first anthropologist, described “Androphagi,” with “the most savage customs of all men,” in the eastern fringes of Europe. Throughout history, Romans accused Christians, Christians accused Jews, the English accused the Scots and Picts, and Europeans accused Africans, New Guineans, Polynesians, Native Americans, and just about any other non-European people they encountered. The cultures most likely to display cannibalistic traits have, not coincidentally, tended to be the ones in possession of material goods or resources most highly desired by the reporters of the cannibalism. There very well may be occasional incidences of cannibalism; historically, however, it 's highly likely that the accusation takes hold as a mechanism, acknowledged or not, to marginalize a people and to justify subsequent acts of violence against them. In fact, the word “cannibal” itself is a reference to the “Caribe” people, who resisted pacification efforts by Columbus and his successors; the Arawak, a more tractable tribe in the same neighborhood, were never accused of such dietary anomalies.

After all, there is ample documentation that cannibalism exists in western societies. Brottman (1998) provided graphic evidence of that fact, with stories of Fritz Haarman, the “Butcher of Hannover,” a meat-vendor who not only ate vagrant children but sold their flesh as horsemeat in his butcher shop in Hannover, Germany; Anna Zimmerman, of Monchen-Gladbach, Germany, who killed her lover and then chopped him up into “manageable pan-sized steaks;” Karl Denke, the “Cannibal Landlord” of Munsterberg; “Weird Old Eddie” Gein of Plainfield, Wisconsin

(the inspiration for the movies “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” “Psycho” and “Deranged”); and, of course, Jeffrey Dahmer, the “Milwaukee Cannibal.” But nobody would seriously suggest that humans are, as a species, cannibalistic, or even, from the face of it, that people from Germany or Wisconsin are cannibals.

Just as people would like to believe the worst about another culture due to be subjugated, I think people would like to believe the worst about insects, an entire class that most people would like to subjugate. I think that's one reason the tortuous hypothesis of adaptive mantid cannibalism still remains firmly entrenched in the scientific literature. There are, after all, other explanations for the fact that, when the subesophageal ganglion is cut, the male genitalia start pumping away. One that comes to mind is nonadaptive inhibition—it's in the nature of the wiring. Well known to neurobiologists, such release phenomena are described as “abnormal responses to stimuli or of motor behaviors that emerge” after damage to the corticospinal system (Kandel and Schwartz, 1985). These abnormal responses are generally attributed to the removal of inhibitory signals that influence the interneuronal networks controlling the response. Roeder (1936) himself reported that the genitalia of decapitated female mantids also come to life—but no one ever suggested that any female needs to lose her head before she engages in sexual intercourse.

Inhibitory impulses are well documented and, when strange things ensue after their removal, most people are rarely moved to erect elaborate hypotheses to account for them. Here's a case in point—Schmidt et al. (1999) studied penile erections during paradoxical sleep in rats and humans. It's been long suspected that the brain exerts an inhibitory signal to the organ because (I'm quoting here) “reflexive erections are facilitated by spinal

transections or spinal block.” All kinds of lesions to the brain seem to release reflexive erective activity in rats—transection of the brainstem caudal to the medullar paragigantocellular nucleus, bilateral cytotoxic lesions to the medullar paragigantocellular nucleus, even complete midthoracic spinal transections not only don't stop reflexive erections, in some cases they even make them “more easily elicited with shorter latencies relative to controls.” In other words, doing some selective brain surgery would do wonders for how some men may perform sexually (a speculation no doubt made independently by many women, even those unaware of these studies).

Needless to say, nobody is translating these results into tips for marital aid manuals, nor will bilateral cytotoxic lesions to the medullar paragigantocellular nucleus be replacing Viagra any time soon. It just wouldn't be reasonable. I'm not convinced it's so reasonable for mantids, either. Reports of sexual cannibalism seem better suited for the movies or maybe a German cookbook than for introductory biology texts.

I've only been to the state of Arkansas once in my life—I spent the bulk of summer 1974 in Fayetteville—but that one visit has had a lifelong impact on me. I don't mean the fact that I now have to cart around a red two-pound candle shaped like a University of Arkansas razorback hog every time I change residences (I'm still not sure why I bought it back then and I really don't know why I've kept it all this time). Rather, I mean the raging claustrophobia that I contracted while I was there. I ended up in Fayetteville that summer as a student member of a research team charged with conducting an ecological inventory of Devil's Den State Park. Devil's Den, in the Boston Mountain section of the Ozarks in the state's northwest corner, was of ecological interest because it lay directly in the path of a proposed expansion of Interstate 71. Our team was supposed to inventory the animal and plant life in the park, paying particular attention to whether any rare or endangered species might be in residence. I was designated the team's invertebrate biologist despite the fact that the sum total of my experience consisted of exactly one course in terrestrial arthropod biology and one semester of a two-semester sequence in invertebrate zoology.

There was yet another reason I was not exactly prepared for the assignment. Devil's Den owes its name to the extensive cave system that runs through the park and of course the caves were to be a central focus of our inventory efforts; caves have long been known to harbor strange and unusual life forms that can potentially stop highway projects. I'd actually never set foot in a cave before my trip to Arkansas, so to say I was speleologically challenged is an understatement. The names of the caves we were to explore didn't exactly inspire confidence. The state park owes its name to the local legend that early settlers heard ‘the roar of the devil' in the vicinity; the two major formations in the park were called Devil's Den and Devil's Icebox. For the record, in addition to a Den and an Icebox, the Devil keeps a Kitchen, a Kettle, a Fireplace, a Dining Table, a Punch Bowl, a Sugar Bowl, a Honeycomb, and a Well in Arkansas; his Toll Booth is apparently somewhere north in Missouri.

It was on my first trip inside one of what are so aptly called crevice caves that I discovered I really can't cope with pitch blackness or narrow spaces you can't stand up or turn around in. Since no one else on the team seemed to be concerned that we might be buried alive at any minute, I managed to keep my feelings to myself. I struggled through the entire summer, though, desperately trying to fight back the blind panic I experienced every time we entered anything resembling a cave. There are evidently some unique biological features of the cave system in Devil's Den state park. There is, for example, an overwintering site (hibernaculum) for the endangered Ozark big-eared bat (Plecotus townsendii ingens), among the rarest bats in North America. I don't recall ever seeing any Ozark big-eared bats. I found some kind of crustacean once in the cave, which I couldn't identify (I suppose I

really should have taken the second semester of invertebrate zoology, after all), along with quite a few Polaroid film wrappers and some empty beer cans, but otherwise I really didn't do much to expand the body of knowledge of Ozark cave biology. So I didn't have much of an impact on Arkansas' environment. But the Arkansas environment had had a definite impact on me—by the end of the summer, I was so claustrophobic that I couldn't walk into the elevator in the high-rise dorm where we stayed at the University of Arkansas campus.

Devil's Den State Park is at least part of the reason that, when I traveled to Australia in 1999, I didn't avail myself of one of the more unusual ecotourism opportunities in the world, an opportunity that certainly should have appealed to me as an entomologist. I did hear a talk about it, though, at the 1999 Australian National Congress. The talk, given by Claire Baker and David Merritt of the Department of Zoology and Entomology at University of Queensland, detailed the tourist industry geared around Arachnocampa flava, a cave-dwelling fungus gnat maggot that glows in the dark. A. flava lives in caves in the rainforests of southeastern Queensland. The immature stages of A. flava spin sticky threads that hang down like fishing lines; the bright blue-green glow of the larvae apparently attracts small prey, which get ensnared in the lines and become paralyzed upon contact with oxalic acid droplets distributed strategically along the lines. The maggot then hauls in the prey and consumes it.

There are a few other spots for viewing glow-in-the-dark maggots throughout Australia. There's the Glowworm Tunnel in Lithgow, New South Wales, for example, where luminous maggots light the ceiling of an abandoned railway line through the Blue Mountains constructed for oil shale workers. But the real mecca

for watching fungus gnat maggots glow in the dark is in neighboring New Zealand, in the Waitomo Caves. Up to 400,000 tourists a year pay $20 (NZ) apiece to travel by boat through the Glowworm Grotto to see the luminescent larval, pupal, and adult A. luminosa. The glow is produced by modified Malpighian tubules in the last abdominal segment, which lie directly over a richly tracheated reflective layer. The fungus gnats apparently put on quite a show, glowing more brightly when fighting amongst themselves as maggots or when courting and mating.

The tourist industry discovered the Glowworm Grotto just about the same time that the scientific community became aware of the glowworms therein. The cave was first explored in 1887 by a local Maori chief, Tane Tinorau, and a British companion, Fred Mace, who instantly saw its commercial potential. By 1910, a hotel was built to accommodate the crowds of visitors. The entomological community first heard about the insects in an article published by 1886 in Entomologists' Monthly Magazine. Meyrich reported finding large numbers of sticky, luminous larvae along a steep creek bank near Auckland producing light consisting “of a small, bright, greenish-white, erect flame, rising from the back of the neck.” Although he guessed that they were predaceous, and possibly beetles, he was loathe to put a name to them, claiming that “it is impossible for a wandering entomologist to attack a larva of these habits.” Subsequent contributors to Entomologists' Monthly Magazine undertook the task, Hudson (1886) in the process pointing out that Meyrich's erect flame rising from the back of the neck was more like a brilliant gleam arising from “the posterior extremity of the larva,” an understandable discrepancy given the general absence of heads and other distinctive directional features displayed by maggots. Osten-

Sacken (1886) was the one who eventually recognized it as a mycetophilid fungus gnat and even in a subsequent paper offered free copies of his recently reprinted review of larvae of Mycetophilidae to “anyone applying . . . for them.”

Remarkably, given that there are only about a dozen species of luminous mycetophilids in the entire world, there are a few glow-in-the-dark species right here in North America, some of which aren't even too far from Arkansas. Orfelia (= Platyura) fultoni is a bluish maggot that is found in permanently damp soil in rock crevices or rotten wood in parts of the southeastern U.S. There' s even a small tourist industry just beginning in Alabama, where visitors are invited to come to Dismals Canyon to see the “dismalites ” in the glowworm-covered mossy canyon just down Highway 8 from the town of Phil Campbell. If the state of Alabama ever needs an environmental impact statement on improving Highway 8, I might even volunteer. I would feel a lot better about going into a cave or cavern there to look for insects knowing they lit up the place.

Not everybody, though, is as comforted as I am by the soft glow of arthropod light. In parts of Thailand, according to Yuswasdi (1950), many rural people believe “that a certain luminous myriapod, usually found in old thatched roofs, and known in Siamese as Maeng-Kah-Reaung (“luminous insect in the roof”) has the habit of climbing into the ear of sleeping individuals to bore its way into the brain, where it prefers to dwell. Patients frequently complain of such intrusion, though no one seems to have actually seen the creature inside the ear. The chief complaint is an intermittent or continuous ringing in the ear of long duration. ” I'm not sure I believe these reports—after all, a physician wouldn't even need an otoscope to see a glowworm in a

patient's ear so the fact that they haven't yet been spotted leaves room for skepticism. Moreover, there are two genera of luminescent millipedes and the genus found outside Asia, Motyxia, is reported to occur in the mountain valleys of California, where there haven't been any otherwise inexplicable outbreaks of ringing of the ears. On the other hand, maybe I should keep my phobias down to a manageable number and just try to stay out of thatched houses in California mountain valleys from now on.