While searching through a bookcase one day for some otherwise forgettable reference, I came across my collection of Hexapod Heralds. The Hexapod Herald was a newsletter produced intermittently by the entomology graduate students at the University of Illinois between 1983 and 1986. An eclectic publication, it contained insect-related news, crossword puzzles, recipes, poems, jokes and riddles, and other sundries. In 1986, then-editor James Nitao published the results of a survey he had conducted among the faculty and students here at the time. Questions dealt with career interests and development, as well as personal interests and hobbies. When questioned about their early childhood experiences, 12 of 15 faculty respondents admitted to having made an insect collection, 3 to having had an ant farm, 3 to having burned ants with a magnifying glass and 6 (40%) to having pulled wings off flies. The graduate students weren't much better; of 31 graduate students, 12 had burned ants with a magnifying glass and fully 17 (55%) admitted to having pulled wings off flies. Among other activities reported by respondents were “spider fights, pulling legs off daddy longlegs, terrorizing . . . lightning bugs, blowing up ants with caps, tying string around horse flies”

and doing things with pieces of straw in the vicinity of the nether ends of flies that, in the interest of decency, will not be detailed further here.

Such information gives one pause, certainly as to whether entomologists are atypical with regard to this sort of behavior. According to Vincent Dethier, in his book “To Know a Fly”

. . . there never seemed to be a taboo against pulling off the legs or wings of flies. Most children eventually outgrow this behavior. Those who do not either come to a bad end or become biologists.

To Dethier, the distinction between those two outcomes was clear; I suspect that, in the view of the general public, they may appear as one and the same.

The Department of Entomology at the University of Illinois has a long and illustrious history of removing appendages from insects in the name of science. As early as 1932, before his arrival here, Gottfried Fraenkel clipped off the halteres of flies (the balancing organs behind the sole pair of wings) to see what would happen to their flight responses. By doing so, he became part of a rich entomological tradition dating back more than two centuries, to 1716, when W. Derham, rector of the Upminster Church, reported in Physico-Theology that “if both be cut off, they [flies] will fly awkwardly and unsteady, manifesting the defect of some very necessary part.” A current member of our faculty, Dr. Fred Delcomyn, does not pull legs, wings, or halteres off flies but in the course of twenty years of study of insect locomotion he has pulled the legs off innumerable cockroaches and thus is something of an authority on the subject. He has traced the scientific pulling-off of insect legs back to 1888, when G. Carlet published a paper in the Comptes Rendu de L'Academie de Science entitled, “De la marche d'un

insecte rendu tetrapode par la suppression d'une paire de pattes.” Dr. Delcomyn is a cut above most of his colleagues that remove appendages in that he is one of few who has pioneered the design and use of artificial limbs for cockroaches (picking up on a general practice evidently started by one W. von Buddenbrock more than seventy years ago). Dr. Delcomyn's interest in cockroach prosthetic limbs is purely academic; the cockroach prosthetic limb is simply not destined for success in the consumer mass market.

That there is a rich literature on the effects of removing legs or wings on insect locomotory behavior is not that surprising, and I guess it's also not surprising that this literature is substantially larger than the body of literature addressing the question as to whether insects feel pain. In fact, I was able to find only two papers dealing with the subject: one, by V.B. Wigglesworth entitled “Do insects feel pain?” published in 1980 and one by C.H. Eisemann et al., entitled “Do insects feel pain?—A biological view” written four years later. Authors of both papers conclude that, although it's difficult to say definitively, it's likely that insects don't feel pain as we define it. One relevant example of the sort of evidence used to support this conclusion is the observation that insects do not show “protective behavior towards injured body parts, such as limping after leg injury. . . . On the contrary, our experience has been that insects will continue with normal activities even after severe injury or removal of body parts. An insect walking with a crushed tarsus, for example, will continue applying it to the substrate with undiminished force” (Eisemann et al., p. 166). In contrast, injuries far short of crushing can reduce adult humans to a state of abject whimpering—an ingrown toenail, for example, sent my husband to a hospital emergency room not long ago.

My own opinion on insect pain responses was pretty much solidified by an experiment I conducted as a graduate student in Henry Hagedorn 's insect physiology class at Cornell University in 1980. In our exercise on “the insect heart,” we were instructed to anesthetize a cockroach, pin it dorsum-down in a dissecting dish and then, “working rapidly but with precision, ” cut off the head and legs, remove the ventral body wall, clear out the visceral mass, scrape out the fat body, and expose the dorsal vessel. We then pumped in cold saline to observe the effects on heartbeat as the temperature dropped 20 degrees; and we dripped in various physiological salines to determine whether or not they would stop the heart from beating altogether. Anyone whose cockroach heart was still beating at this point was encouraged to test the effects of various neuroactive substances, including nicotine, acetylcholine, and caffeine, on heartbeat. After about 2-1/2 hours of this sort of thing, my laboratory partner, an undergraduate named Steve Passoa, and I had completed all of our assigned tasks. Steve then removed the pins securing the truncated roach in place and, much to my unspeakable horror, the roach remains proceeded to SWIM AWAY, little stumps flailing frantically in the saline. At that moment, I reached the profound realization that cockroaches are just not like us.

So I'm not going to pursue the issue further, having satisfied myself that, if insects feel pain, it's in a way that I can't possibly hope to relate to. But there is one other issue that has bothered me. In April 1994, I was a guest on Whad'ya Know, a popular quiz program on Wisconsin Public Radio. I was prepared for most of the questions, of the usual sort (e.g., “What good are mosquitoes?”) but host Michael Feldman truly threw me for a loop when

he asked me whether or not insects have free will. Although this question was evidently a burning issue around the turn of the twentieth century, a computer search of the recent literature with the key words “free will” and “insects” failed to turn up anything useful. Any and all suggestions are appreciated.

Every now and then, I get mail addressed to me care of the Department of Etymology. It's an understandable mistake—neither entomology nor etymology is widely known as a profession by the public at large and the lexicographic similarity is certainly striking. I also have received letters addressed to the Department of Antomology, yet another understandable mistake, and I once even received one addressed to the Department of Endocrinology. Etymology, of course, is the study of word origins, and entomology is the study of insects. Every now and then, however, entomologists become etymologically involved with their subject, particularly when insect body parts acquire proper names.

Eponymous body parts abound in human anatomy and physiology—the human body is a veritable football roster of names. There are cells, glands, ligaments, capsules, loops, ducts, tubes, nodes, apparati, and canals named in honor of the men who first described them (Purkinje, Gley, Berry, Bowman, Henle, Mueller, Eustachios, Ranvier, Golgi, and Havers, respectively). This penchant for naming things after people probably stems from human fascination with exploring the unknown —it's undoubtedly why

continents and mountain peaks are named for their discoverers. It 's only a small logical jump for homebound physicians to compare their anatomical adventures with the more traditional sort, leading perhaps to travelogues such as “On navigating the islets of Langerhans,” “Boating the Haversian canals” or “Sailing around the angle of Louis.” The angle of Louis, by the way, is the angle made by the sternum at the second intercostal space in the rib cage. It's named in honor of Antoine Louis, 1723-1792, whose greater fame may have been as co-inventor along with J. I. Guillotin of an eponymous instrument of law enforcement.

Entomologists are hardly immune from this quest for immortality. Eponymous insect parts abound. Unfortunately, very few of these insect parts gain a reputation outside a rather narrow range of specialists. The great Malpighi, professor of anatomy at several universities, as well as physician to Pope Innocent XII, hit it big with his silkworm dissections back in the seventeenth century. The tubules he described, ultimately called Malpighian tubules, are kidney-like organs found in just about every insect species, except for aphids and a few other nonconformists. Christopher Johnston, a physician by training like Malpighi, lucked out in 1855, when he described the “auditory capsule ” at the base of the antennae of mosquitoes; he probably had no idea that Johnston's organs are widely distributed among insects. Now, not only mosquito experts know of their existence but generations of students have had to learn about them to prepare for quiz questions in insect anatomy classes.

More typically, though, having an insect body part named in your honor is hardly a shortcut to lasting fame. Consider H. Eltringham, who has not one but two glandular structures named in his honor in neuropterans: an extrusible abdominal gland in the

mantisfly, Mantispa styriaca, and a scent gland in the hindwing of the antlion, Myrmeleon nostras. Not even the great Malpighi can boast of two insect organs named in his honor, yet where has it gotten Eltringham? For that matter, how many people, other than Snodgrass and Imms, long-dead authors of insect anatomy texts, know where to find Weismann's ring, Semper 's rib, Latreille's segment, Dufour's gland, or the organs of Tomosvary, Gabe, Hanstrom, Schneider, or Nabert?

What's even more depressing, from the perspective of lasting fame, is that knowing where an organ is doesn't even guarantee that anyone will recognize its namesake. An informal poll of my colleagues here at the University of Illinois, inquiring as to whether anyone knew for whom the glands of Philippi were named (accessory glands associated with silk glands of caterpillars), invariably elicited the less than helpful response, “Some guy named Philippi?” I have no idea for whom Hicks' bottles—which, according to Snodgrass are “flask-shaped pits or depressions in the antennae of bees or ants”—were named, and whether or not this Hicks had some kind of drinking problem.

These matters are hardly esoteric and abstruse. In case you missed it while thumbing through your back issues of Memoires de Biospeologie, a journal dedicated to the biology of cave-dwelling organisms, the organ of Bellonci was described for the first time in stenasellid isopods. This organ is known from several crustacean orders but Pitzalis et al. (1991) were the first to have spotted them lurking “near the rostral corner of the cephalon,” in stenasellids. I can't help thinking that Bellonci would be proud. I also can't help wondering who the heck Bellonci was.

I did try to find out, but I was completely unsuccessful. Bellonci 's name doesn't appear in the Compendium of the Biographi-

cal Literature on Deceased Entomologists. Yes, there is such a book, compiled by Pamela Gilbert, Entomology Librarian at the British Museum. Of course Bellonci's not in the book, you say with righteous indignation, he described organs in crustaceans, which aren't insects, so why should he be listed in a compendium of entomologists? But where dead entomologists are concerned, Pamela Gilbert is quite a liberal, stating that, as a matter of policy, “It has seemed to me more useful to be embracive rather than restrictive. In fact one cannot be pedantic about defining entomology.” Even with such a broad view, Bellonci's is not among the 7,500 names in the compendium. I suppose another reason his name isn't listed is that he might not be dead yet. The criteria for defining “deceased” are a lot less ambiguous, one assumes, than the criteria used for defining “entomologists. ”

There is one odd similarity between medical and entomological eponyms: an extraordinarily high proportion of eponymous body parts seem to be concentrated in reproductive organs. The human (particularly female) reproductive system is fairly burgeoning with physicians vying for their piece of immortality. Fallopio found tubes, Bartholin described glands, and de Graaf discovered follicles. One might even count J. Braxton Hicks in this number. J. Braxton Hicks wrote a long series of papers in the Transactions of the Linnaean Society of London between 1853 and 1859 describing various structures of antennae and wings of species in many insect orders. Entomology was for Braxton Hicks, however, simply an avocational pursuit; by day he practiced as an obstetrician and gained immortality by describing uterine contractions of false labor during pregnancy.

Among insects, male entomologists have left their mark on the reproductive structures of female insects. The peculiar tissue mass

in female bedbugs that absorbs the force of the incoming intromittent organ of the male during the process understatedly known as “traumatic insemination” is known not by one but by two eponymous names. It's variously called the organ of Ribaga and the organ of Berlese. The latter name is a reference to Berlese, who also earned eponymous immortality among entomologists by designing a funnel for capturing soil-dwelling arthropods. Why (male) entomologists would like forever to have their names associated with a structure used during bizarre copulation by a bloodsucking and ill-smelling parasite is beyond my comprehension. The only explanation I can think of, which I guess would apply equally well to both human and insect anatomists, is this notion of anatomist as explorer in unknown terrain. Since the vast majority of these eponymous explorers are or were male, one supposes the female reproductive tract may very well seem enigmatic and possibly fraught with hidden dangers. All this notwithstanding, it still sounds a little funny to me. After all, how did Mrs. Berlese or Mrs. Ribaga feel about having their husbands' organs prominently displayed in entomology textbooks for all to see?

I've never been particularly gifted at naming things. To illustrate, for many years I lived with two cats whom I adopted and named; one was called, logically if not terribly imaginatively, “Pussins” and the other was called, imaginatively if not terribly logically, “Nooners.” Pussins and Nooners are not the only pets I've had occasion to name; in second grade, I had a series of red-eared turtles as pets—the type sold in pet stores in little plastic bowls equippped with a green plastic palm tree projecting from the center island. As I recall, they all had names starting with T (Tommy, Terry, Timmy, Teddy, etc.) and none ever lived longer than three weeks—so I guess I'm also not particularly gifted at turtle-rearing.

This problem I have with coming up with names is the reason I have so much respect and admiration for systematists who must, as a matter of course, invent names for species on a routine basis. These names, unlike the names of my turtles, must last longer than three weeks —theoretically, they're supposed to last forever. Fortunately for me, I guess, I rarely encounter, much less describe, new species in my line of entomology. I did once find a species of weevil in the genus Apion that, according to the expert at the

Smithsonian to whom I sent it for identification, was undescribed. I still live in fear that when it is described for posterity by a systematist in a refereed scientific publication it will be named after me. The last thing I need is for a beetle whose distinguishing feature is a proboscis fully half the length of its body to be known as “Berenbaum's weevil.”

But systematists find new species all the time. It's not that Linnaeus didn't do a spectacular job naming all living things, but there are many thousands more species needing names today than were recognized two centuries ago. Today there are probably more species of Apion than there were beetles with Linnaean names back in 1758. Insect names run the gamut literally from A (Aaages, a beetle described by Barovksii in 1926) to Z (Zyzzyva, another beetle, described by Casey in 1922). With so many species to name, it's not unreasonable that systematists, particularly entomological systematists, occasionally get tapped out. W.D. Kearfoot, for example, described a series of species of moths in the genus Eucosma in 1907 and gave them rhyming names running through most of the consonants in the alphabet, including bobana, cocana, dodana, fofana, hohana, kokana, lolana, momana, popana, rorana, sosana, totana, and vovana (anticipating by 60 years the song, “The Name Game,” by Shirley Ellis—you know, “if the first two letters are ever the same, you drop them both then say the name, like Fred Fred drop the F's Fo-red . . . ”). Scattered in amongst these are fandana, gandana, handana, kandana, mandana, nandana, pandana, randana, sandana, tandana, vandana, wandana, xandana, yandana, and zandana. To relieve the monotony, he also described a few other species with the more distinctive epithets boxeana, canariana, floridana, idahoana, miscana, nomana, sonomana, vomonana, and womonana, as well as, inexplicably, subinvicta.

Most systematists rise to the challenge more creatively than did Kearfoot. Some in fact are so creative that they end up being criticized by the International Zoological Congress. This is the body that drew up a set of standardized rules for naming things and that has continued to meet and to issue guidelines and opinions since 1901. Reading these rules has also convinced me that I was not destined to become a systematist—these rules are about as clear and simple to me as the instructions for filing an income tax statement. It didn't really help matters that the rules are written with alternate pages in French and English; nor was the 47-page bilingual glossary much help, except to keep me up nights wondering why the French glossary is 2-1/2 pages longer than the English one. Is there maybe a naughty section that hasn't been translated?

There have been several systematists who provoked the ire of this body by being a little too creative in their nomenclatural efforts. For example, G.W. Kirkaldy was criticized for frivolity by the Zoological Society of London in 1912 by unobtrusively bestowing upon a series of hemipterans, or true bugs, the generic names Ochisme, Polychisme, Nanichisme, Marichisme, Dolichisme, and Florichisme. Presumably, eight years elapsed before anyone in the Zoological Society actually pronounced these names out loud and realized that the series provided a plea for osculatory adventures. V.S.L. Pate slipped one by the censors in 1947 when he described a new genus of tiphiid wasp, Lalapa, and then proceeded to name the sole species in the genus Lalapa lusa. Dr. Arnold Menke of the Systematic Entomology Laboratory at the U.S. National Museum erected the genus Aha and proceeded to describe the nominate species Aha ha. Such actions have prompted A. Maitland Emmet, in his book, The Scientific Names of British Lepidoptera: Their History

and Meaning, to declare, “Scientific names have much in common with crossword puzzles. The nomenclator is the setter . . . if he can mystify his fellow entomologists, he will derive sadistic pleasure in so doing.”

In some instances, mystification was clearly not the goal—as when B. Neumoegen (1893) in his “Description of a peculiar new liparid genus from Maine,” dedicated the genus to his “faithful co-labourer and friend Mr. H.G. Dyar” in naming it the euphonious Dyaria (say it out loud with the emphasis on the penultimate syllable). Such actions may well have led to the inclusion in the “Recommendations on the Formation of Names” (Appendix D.I.5) the statement “A zoologist should not propose a name that, when spoken, suggests a bizarre, comical, or otherwise objectionable meaning” (p. 193).

Notwithstanding, systematists have managed to sneak quite a few bizarre and comical names past the censors. The aforementioned Dr. Menke is an absolute master of names; Rumpelstiltskin wouldn't last ten minutes with him. He sent me his own list of more than 100 peculiar scientific names (published in the journal B.O.G.U.S. (Biological and Other Generally Unsupported Statements) 2:24-27 (April Fool' s Day, 1993). Dr. Menke's list convinced me that I shouldn't be writing humorous essays at all—the people who came up with some of these names would do a much better job. For example, there's Townesilitus, a braconid wasp; Agra vation, a carabid beetle; Castanea inca dincado, a moth; La cucaracha and La paloma, two more moths; Chrysops balzaphire, a horse fly; Colon rectum, a beetle; Heerz lukenatcha, Heerz tooya, Panama canalia, and Verae peculya, wasps in the family Braconidae; Leonardo davincii, a pyralid moth; Phthiria relativitae, a bee fly; Pison eyvae, a wasp; Tabanus nippontucki and Tabanus rhizonshine, both

horse flies; and, of course, Ytu brutus, a beetle. I don't know for certain, but I'd be willing to bet large sums of money that, even as a child, Dr. Menke would not have been one to saddle a turtle with such a pedestrian name as “Tommy.”

So it's a thin line that systematists must watch (and occasionally wink at); thanks to their efforts, scientific names can make for entertaining reading. In particular, names with cultural relevance are, in my estimation, particularly entertaining. This essay was in fact inspired by a letter I received from Dr. Margaret Novak, a water program specialist at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. She thought a column on “bizarre and cryptic species names” might be interesting and, to get me started, sent me a photocopy of page 88 of J.H. Epler's 1987 “Revision of the Nearctic Dicrotendipes Kieffer 1913 (Diptera: Chironomidae).” For those unfamiliar with the work, page 88 contains a description of the new midge species Dicrotendipes thanatogratus, “from the Greek thanatos, meaning death, dead; and the Latin gratus, meaning thankful, grateful. This species is named for the Grateful Dead, a group of musicians who for the past 20 years have provided the background music for my life.” I was subsequently inspired to search for other cultural references among arthropod names and had a few successes. In A Prehistory of the Far Side, by Gary Larson, there is reprinted a letter from Dr. Dale Clayton to the cartoonist. In the letter, Clayton proposed naming a new species of owl louse Strigiphilus garylarsoni, in recognition of the “enormous contribution that my colleagues and I feel you have made to biology through your cartoons.”

Not all cultural references are to people, though. When Jill Yager and colleagues discovered the world's largest remipede crustaceans in caves in the Bahamas in 1986, they were inspired to

name the family Godzilliidae, and the nominate genus Godzillius, in honor of the largest reptile to rise out of the sea in recent film history. Three years later, when called upon to describe a new genus in the family, Yager rose to the challenge and named it Pleomothra; “in keeping with the spirit of the first described godzilliid, the name is derived from the Japanese horror film star ‘Mothra' and the Greek word ‘pleo,' meaning ‘swim.'” I feel compelled to point out, though, that there may be some redundancy here—in the original film, Mothra does indeed swim (as a caterpillar) from Monster Island to Tokyo when the two little girls with whom she communicates telepathically are captured by ruthless entrepreneurs—but that's another story.

The one problem that might arise with culturally referential names is that sometimes cultural values can change. There is, for instance, an extinct palyodictyopteran fossil species described in 1934 by one P. Guthörl as Rochlingia hitleri, in honor of a rising political star of the era. A subsequent attempt to synonomize the genus with an older one and rename the species Scepasma europea was made by Hermann Haupt in 1949, declaring R. hitleri to be a nomen nudum (probably one of the nicer things Hitler has been called), but, according to my colleague Dr. Ellis MacLeod, Haupt's interpretation of the Rules is probably incorrect and Hitler's paleodictyoperan is “at least available if not valid.” Dr. MacLeod in all the years I know him never exhibited any neo-Nazi or white supremacist views, so I am confident that his analysis was based on solid nomenclatural grounds.

A less egregious example of how cultural values can leave names in the lurch was described in the National Enquirer from February 25, 1992, in an article entitled “A bug named Bush?”

Scientists want you to name newly discovered species after a beloved person or an enemy! And it's all to benefit nature. Leading scientists who classify new organisms want to raise save-the-habitat funds by auctioning rights to name new species of flowers, birds, bugs, or fish. Recently, a Costa Rican wasp was named Eurga Gutfreundi after a disgraced Wall Street trader who ripped off the federal securities market.

While a literature search did indeed confirm the existence of John Gutfreund, Wall Street ripoff artist, I could not at first confirm the existence of this wasp. This would not be the first story published by the Enquirer that proved to be difficult to confirm. However, Dr. David Wahl, of the American Entomological Institute of Gainesville, Florida, upon hearing of my difficulties, pointed out that my failure to confirm the existence of a Costa Rican wasp named for Gutfreund stemmed from the fact that the genus name was misspelled in the National Enquirer article I had cited. Eruga (not Eurga) gutfreundi is a pimpline ichneumonid in the tribe Polysphinctini, described by I.D. Gauld in 1991. Which means that, except for spelling, the National Enquirer story was essentially correct. Which means I'm going to have to start rethinking other entomological stories I see in the tabloids. I guess this means that the two-page story in the November 30, 1993 Weekly World News is true—that “2-inch fireflies” that “pack a 600-volt sting” really have “killed dozens of hapless citizens in Central America and Mexico in the past two years” (“they can flatten a grown man with a single jolt ” and have been steadily advancing on the U.S. border since “200,000 of them escaped from a top-secret research laboratory in Managua, Nicaragua.” The article states that, at the rate they're moving, they “could reach the U.S. border by March.” I don't think they've arrived yet, but I guess I better warn Elvis anyway next time I see him at the 7-Eleven.

From time to time, I am reminded of my first day in graduate school. My soon-to-be thesis advisor, Paul Feeny at Cornell University, was kind enough to pick me up in his Audi Fox at the graduate dormitory and drive me out the 3/4 mile or so to his laboratory. His laboratory was not in either of the buildings housing most of the entomologists on campus—Comstock or Caldwell Hall. Instead, he operated out of a ramshackle (borderline decrepit) building called the Insectary. As we pulled up to park, I noticed that the words “Entomology and Limnology” were emblazoned on the front of the building. Seeing my quizzical look, Feeny remarked offhandedly, “They dropped the Limnology part long ago,” and we walked on in.

To this day, I still don't see entomology and limnology as disciplines logically housed under the same (crumbling) roof. Limnology, from the Greek limnos (“pool,“ “marsh” or “lake”) is the study of lakes; entomology is the study of insects. Of course, insects frequently are found in lakes. Then again, insects are probably even more frequently found in boxes of cereal or lurking under seat cushions, hardly a justification for, say, a Department of

Entomology and Food Science, or a Department of Entomology and Furniture Studies.

I was most recently reminded of that fateful day in 1993, when various plans for reorganizing the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the College of Agriculture were being passed around the University of Illinois campus. Our department, which at eight full-time faculty members barely lost to the Program for Religious Studies for the dubious distinction of being the smallest unit in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, figured prominently in many of these schemes. We were encouraged, among other things,

—to merge with Plant Biology to form a Department of Plant Biology and Entomology

—to merge with the Department of Ecology, Ethology, and Evolution, presumably to form a Department of Ecology, Ethology, Evolution, and Entomology (the Departments of English, Economics, and Electrical Engineering declining to participate in this obviously alphabetically motivated move)

—to merge with the Office of Agricultural Entomology in the College of Agriculture, which was itself in the process of considering a merger with several other departments to form a Department of Natural Resources or possibly a Department of Plant Protection

—to buy one-way tickets to Borneo for each of the eight full-time faculty so they can stay and collect butterflies, thus ceasing to cause problems for people in other life science units.

With the exception of the eight aforementioned full-time faculty members, practically nobody thought that leaving us alone to

remain a free-standing Department of Entomology was an option worth pursuing.

While pondering our possible future, I conducted an informal survey of entomology programs in the United States by turning to the back pages of the 1992 Entomological Society of America membership directory, in which were listed addresses for most entomology programs in the country. On that list were addresses for 40 Departments of Entomology. Also on the list was one Division of Entomology (University of Idaho), and a Center for Studies in Entomology (Florida A&M). At other institutions, entomology shared billing with a diverse array of disciplines, as in the Department of Entomology and Nematology (University of Florida), the Department of Entomology and Applied Ecology (Delaware), the Department of Agronomy, Horticulture and Entomology (Texas Tech), the Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology (Tennessee), the Department of Entomology, Plant Pathology, and Weed Science (New Mexico State), the Department of Plant, Soil and Insect Science (Wyoming), and, rounding out the list, the Department of Zoology and Entomology (Colorado State). Entomology was also less obviously housed in three Departments of Biology, three Departments of Plant Sciences, a Crop Protection Department, two Plant and Soil Science Departments, and a Department of Zoology.

The University of Illinois, and I say this without local chauvinism, probably leads the nation in confusion with respect to housing entomologists. On our campus at the time reorganization discussions were under way, there was a Department of Entomology housed in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, an Office of Agricultural Entomology housed in the College of Agriculture, and a Center for Economic Entomology in the Illinois Natural History Survey (which is actually an autonomous state institution,

independent from, but intellectually closely tied to, the university). There were also three entomologists in the Center for Biodiversity at the Natural History Survey, at least one entomologist in the College of Veterinary Medicine, and rumor was that there was an entomologist cleverly concealed in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning in the College of Fine and Applied Arts.

So, why is it so hard for university administrators to find a place to keep their entomologists? It's obviously not that entomologists are regarded as pariahs by the rest of the scientific community— otherwise there would be 50 free-standing departments of entomology, and applied ecologists, plant scientists, and nematologists wouldn 't be professing their solidarity with entomologists. In my opinion, the problem may lie in the difficulties people have in finding a place to put insects. It's not always easy even to recognize what belongs in the class Insecta, much less to know where within the vast reaches of the class to place it. Considering that there are about a million species of insects, it's really not all that surprising that people have had a hard time over the centuries trying to figure out where to put them—after all, finding a place to keep a million of anything in order is a challenge.

Taxonomists in particular have grappled with this problem for centuries. Around 1230 A.D., for example, one Bartholomaeus Anglicus authored De Proprietatibus Rerum, a 19-volume compendium intended to serve as a complete description of the universe. Insects appear in several places throughout the opus. In Book 12, for example, creatures of the air are featured and flying insects are lumped in with birds. Bees are rather poetically described, along with birds, as “ornaments of the heavens.” Book 18 features terrestrial animals and considers collectively “worms, adders and serpents.” Even so, Bartholomaeus recognized that insects didn't

fit obligingly into the general scheme. The bee, for example, “is a little short beast with many feet. And though he might be classified among flying creatures, yet he uses his feet so much that he can reasonably be considered among ground-going animals.”

Bartholomaeus Anglicus can be forgiven for his confusion about the placement of bees in particular and insects in general, since, after all, he was working in the depths of the Dark Ages—the word “insect” hadn't even been coined yet. But even the Scientific Revolution did little to ease the task of finding rightful places in the world for all insect species. The notable taxonomist Schiffermüller, for example, missed by a mile when he described Papilio coccajus in 1776; the species he thought was a butterfly and thus confidently placed in the order Lepidoptera, along with other butterflies and moths, was in actuality an ascalaphid neuropteran, or owlfly, an entirely different sort of animal altogether.

Things didn't improve much in the nineteenth century, either. One notable classification that was definitely out of order involved the immature stages of the syrphid fly genus Microdon. Adult Microdon are perfectly normal looking self-respecting hover flies in the family Syrphidae. The larvae are quite another story. Maggots of Microdon are legless, armored, bizarrely ornamented but otherwise featureless little creatures. This body build is ideal for fending off the stings and bites of enraged ants—to which Microdon larvae are often subjected by virtue of the fact that their habitat of choice is ant nests—but it is less than revealing for systematists seeking out resemblances to other known life forms. Thus, it is not surprising that these creatures were early on described as snails (not even the right phylum, much less the right order).

According to Andries (1912),

Spix discovered the larva of Microdon near Ammerland on Lake Starenberg, in old stumps of oaks and spruces that were still rooted in the ground—and always in the company of Formica herculanea and Formica rufa. According to his own words (the larva) appeared to him at first sight like a webwork of spiders, or a footless insect larva, finally even as a turtle-like little animal. ‘To the same extent that the deception disappears upon closer examination,' he continues, ‘it increases the astonishment concerning its peculiar form, and the conviction gains increasingly the upper hand with the observation how the larva can creep, almost imperceptibly, on the footless, naked belly, and manages to explore nearby objects by sudden contractions and expansions of the fleshy tentacles, that this peculiar little animal does not belong among the insects which are equipped with feet and jointed feel-horns, but rather belongs in the class of the snails.' He (Spix) then expresses his delight to have found a new genus, such a beautiful addition to the snail fauna of his own fatherland.

[The translation of Andries, by the way, was graciously provided to me by Dr. Rainer Zangerl, a very fine man who is noted not only for being one of the rare individuals who actually understood Willi Hennig's famous book Phylogenetic Systematics but for actually translating it into English, so new generations of systematists could argue about it in yet another language.]

Debate on the proper placement of Microdon raged on. Schlotthauber (1839) actually figured out that Parmula cocciformis, described as a scale insect, as well as the Fatherland's newest snail were actually the larval stages of Microdon. He even delivered a detailed paper to the Naturalists Congress in Pyrmont with the rousing title, “Über die Identität der Fliegenmaden von Microdon mutabilis Meig. mit den vermeintlichen Landschnecken Scutelligera (Spix) und Parmula (v. Heyden) sowie morphologische, anatomische und physiologische Beschriebung und Abbildung ihrer Verwandlungsphasen und ausführliche Naturgeschichte

derselben. Zur Kenntnis der Organisation, der Entwicklungs- und Lebensweise aller zweiflügeligen Insekten überhaupt.” His exhaustive and excruciatingly detailed study pretty much demolished the snail theory but unfortunately he never got around to publishing it, the title, perhaps, having exhausted all of his creativity. It really wasn't until 1899 that Hecht more or less came to the decision that, however snaillike on the outside, Microdon remained an insect at heart (or dorsal aorta).

So I have a lot of empathy with Microdon—here at the University of Illinois our department is more than a little like a small strange object, unfamiliar to those looking in from above, surrounded by hordes of vicious angry biting creatures bent on driving it from their ranks. I suppose my viewpoint is somewhat colored by the fact that the Illinois Board of Higher Education once targeted the undergraduate entomology curriculum for elimination (along with biophysics and astronomy) for being too “specialized. ” It's hard to know how to counter that kind of argument, given that there are about a million insects (and at least as many stars, as far as the Astronomy Department goes). Here in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences there are more than 60 full-time faculty members in the English Department and there aren't even as many English words as there are insect species. There are at least as many faculty in British literature alone as there are in our entire department—not even good old American literature, but British literature. Shakespeare wrote about wars and epic battles but he never influenced the outcome of any, as did insect vectors of typhus, malaria, plague, and other wartime scourges; Wordsworth wrote lovely poems about daffodils but he never pollinated one. There's definitely a perception problem here and I just don't know what to do about it.

I suppose I could take inspiration from Microdon—the maggots manage to remain untroubled in ant nests by producing analogues of brood pheromones, signal chemicals that induce the ants to care for them and transport them lovingly throughout the colony while they happily consume their fill of ant grubs. I'll let you know if I can identify anything that works the same way on deans.

Anyone who has ever had occasion to grade student insect collections undoubtedly has come across composite specimens—bits and pieces of various insects painstakingly pieced together from many branches of the insect phylogenetic tree. My first encounter took place early in my entomological career—I was a teaching assistant in Entomology 212 at Cornell University. As teaching assistants were expected to do, I was grading collections when I spotted it: a single specimen that was clearly not of natural origin. Keying it out would have been a challenge but for the fact that the student thoughtfully saved us the trouble by clearly labeling it Humbug. As I recall, we gave him full credit for the identification.

From an entomological perspective, the term “humbug” is a bit of a disappointment. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the word has several meanings, but none of the meanings appears in any way related to insects. There's the familiar meaning of humbug as “a hoax; a jesting or befooling trick,” or “a thing which is not really what it pretends to be.” But a humbug is also “a kind of sweetmeat” (specifically, peppermint-flavored toffee lumps) and “a nippers for grasping the cartilage of the nose. Used with

bulls and other refractory bovines.” Reading about refractory bovines and toffee lumps under the heading “humbug” made me wonder whether the folks at the OED were pulling a little “jesting or befooling trick” of their own.

The etymology of the term is perhaps even less satisfying to an entomologist than the definition; according to the OED, “humbug” is a

slang or cant word which came into vogue c 1750 (an earlier date has been given in several Dictionaries on the ground of the occurrence of the word in the title of Fred Killigrew's Universal Jester, which the Slang Dictionary dates ‘about 1735–1740.' But the earliest ed. of that work is dated by Lowndes 1754). . . . Many guesses at the possible derivation of humbug have been made; but as with other and more recent words of similar introduction, the facts as to its origin appear to have been lost, even before the word became common enough to excite attention.

In other words, nobody knows why, or even whether, there is a “bug” in “humbug.”

Which is not to say that arthropod humbugs do not exist. The arthropod humbug actually antedates the apparent origin of the word. No less an authority than the great Carolus Linnaeus himself, the man who named some two thousand insect species and devised the system of nomenclature in use today that is named in his honor, was taken in by a fake. In distinguishing between his new species, Papilio ecclipsis, and the well-known European brimstone butterfly, P. rhamni (Gonepteryx rhamni), in the twelfth edition of Systema Naturae, Linnaeus called attention to the distinctive black wing patches and crescent-shaped blue mark on the hindwing of the former—which, unbeknownst to Linnaeus, were painted on. This fabulous fake, along with many others, is chronicled to good effect by Peter Dance in his remarkable book

Animal Fakes and Frauds. Dance was moved to remark that the relative paucity of insect examples of humbuggery is likely due to the fact that “such fakes could only have been made to dupe a relatively small number of entomologists . . . and others who derive pleasure from collecting and studying lowly creatures.” He apparently never considered the equally plausible explanation that insect humbugs are few because we entomologists are simply too astute to dupe.

The earliest example of an insect fake that he recounts is found in Maria Sibylle Merian's Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium; the 49th plate of the second edition of the book conspicuously featured an insect with the body of a cicada (Diceroprocta tibicen) and the head of a lanternfly (Fulgora laternaria). How it happened to be depicted is a mystery, but it's likely that Merian, who otherwise gave no indication in her works of having a wry sense of humor, was the butt, rather than the engineer, of the joke.

The actual word “humbug” does appear early on in an arthropodan context. J. C. Loudon's Magazine of Natural History, was founded with the aim of “promoting a taste for Natural History among general readers,” which, in 1828, also meant protecting the public from unscrupulous charlatans anxious to capitalize on the public's fascination with natural history. The first volume, for example, featured an article on “the tests by which a real mermaid may be discovered.” A letter appeared in the second volume, in 1829, signed M.C.G., describing a strange and wonderful Tarantula Sea Spider captured in a fisherman's net in the vicinity of Margate. This creature

has eight legs, which are not jointed; and . . . but two eyes which, when alive, were green, and are placed on the back of the thorax. It has no head, and is destitute of palpi. The mouth is beneath the abdomen, and inside of

it is a spiral tongue nearly half a yard long, the extremity of which is armed with a pair of forceps. The spinner is very large, out of which the exhibitor took a web, but unluckily had thrown it away. . . . The colour of the insect is that of a pickled tongue, which, probably, may be accounted for by the pickle that had been used to preserve it. . . .You may form some idea of its size when I add, it weighed 5 1/4 lbs. Many wonderful stories are told of it when alive; such as it ran with the velocity of a race horse, and changed colour every instant.”

Its owner, Mr. Murray of Hastings, planned to exhibit it later in the year, pickled tongue probably planted firmly in cheek. Unfortunately for Mr. Murray's business, this article was spotted by the ever-vigilant reader V., who had earlier exposed the seven-inch bison exhibited by Murray as a fraud (1829, Mag. Nat. Hist. 2:218-219). About the Tarantula Sea Spider, V. ascerbically stated, “Had you inserted my article on the Pygmy bison four months ago . . . you might have saved many individuals the mortification of being humbugged by another attempt of the rare individual to appropriate some of their cash to his own use by such unfair means as the exhibition of his Tarantula or Sea Spider.”

Humbuggery is a lot harder to get away with than it used to be, thanks to modern methods of analysis; today the practice is engaged in more for amusement than for profit. One of the most venerable twentieth century examples of the art of insect fakes is the big bug post card. These so-called tall tale post cards were the special effects wonders of their day, with watermelons the size of boxcars or ears of corn as tall as radio towers—inevitably with a caption along the lines of “The kind of corn we grow in Oregon, Missouri,” or “How we do things in Omaha, Nebraska” or “The size we grow them at Osage, Minnesota.” Archer King of Table Rock, Nebraska, was a real pioneer in producing innovative big

bug postcards. Whereas most purveyors of gag postcards contented themselves with oversized produce, King went in for giant rabbits, giant fish, giant hogs (occasionally depicted eating giant corn), and other more challenging zoological subjects; he was, for example, the first and perhaps only post card producer to feature a giant cicada.

Undisputed master of the big bug post card, however, was one F. D. Conard of Garden City, Kansas. A relative latecomer to the field of big thing post cards, he began his business in 1935. His was a big business in every sense of the word—in his first year, he sold 60,000 postcards and two years later his annual sales exceeded 350,000 postcards. A true artiste, he dealt almost exclusively with giant grasshoppers—pulling plows (“The old grey mare she ain't what she used to be”), climbing oil rigs (“The Inspector”), crossing bridges (“Hopper has the right of way”), sporting saddle and bridle (“Ride ‘em cowboy”), and even being interviewed on the radio (“A hopper tells a whopper via radio”).

The entrepreneurial spirit of Conard lives on in Don Moffet, who can now rightly be considered the reigning king of big bug post cards. Several years ago, his company, Charm Kraft of West Lake Village, California, bought out John Hinde Curteich, Inc., the original producers of post cards decades ago. Along with Curteich came its archives, as well as a postcard museum in Wauconda, Illinois, and Moffet was inspired to gear up production of a whole new line of big thing postcards —including big bug cards featuring a 25-foot-long dragonfly casting an enormous shadow across a lake (“they have been known to pick up animals and small children”), a 12-foot-long cockroach obscuring a motel sign (“these specimens really take the cake!”), and, as proof that a good joke is timeless, the ever-popular 400-pound grasshopper (“rare

sport of grasshopper shooting can be dangerous and exciting”). The images are slicker than they've ever been before, Moffet and his photographer son Buddy having been assisted by computers in creating them, and the cards are selling well. All are emblazoned on the front with the slogan “Bigger and Better in America” in big bold letters. Not so obvious, in very small type along the bottom at the back of the card, is written, “Printed in Ireland.” It looks like the humbug is alive and well and, like so many other strange things, living in California.

As most entomologists will aver, the benefits of taking up entomology as a profession are neither readily apparent nor easily articulated. It's not as if a Ph.D. degree in entomology is a ticket to instant fame, fortune, and success in love. A disturbingly large proportion of the general public isn't even aware of what an entomologist is, and, of those who actually do know what an entomologist is, a disturbingly larger proportion doesn't know exactly how to spell the word. But, ironically, one of the greatest benefits of this particular career choice is something that I would bet most entomologists themselves are unaware of. Whatever the indignities they must endure because of their profession, at least entomologists should have the satisfaction of knowing that they are remarkably durable.

I first became aware of the amazing longevity of entomologists in the usual roundabout way I become aware of most interesting things —I was looking for something else. In this case, I was in pursuit of an article on cockroach feeding preferences written by Phil Rau in 1945 and published in the journal Entomological News. While paging through the journal, I stumbled onto another interesting paper, H. B. Weiss's “How Long Do Entomologists Live?” in the same issue. Dr. Weiss had evidently made a detailed

analysis of another paper published that same year, M.M. Carpenter 's 116-page “Bibliography of Biographies of Entomologists.” This compilation included birth and death dates for some 2,187 entomologists active between 372 BC and 1920. According to Weiss' analysis, the average age at death of this group was 65.48 years. Remarkably, breaking down the group by century and calculating life expectancies didn 't really change the average much—an entomologist was just as likely to reach the ripe old age of 65.48 in 1605 (when, for example, systematist Ulysse Aldrovandi died, at age 83) as in 1905 (when, for example, aphidologist George Bowdler Buckton died, at age 88).

Thus, as Weiss (1945) pointed out, entomologists have been outliving their contemporaries for centuries, by staggering margins. In Breslau, Germany, in 1685 the life expectancy of an entomologist was approximately twice that of a typical male resident, which at the time clocked in at about 34 years. A century later, in England, the average life expectancy of a typical male was only 40, fully 25 years less than that of a contemporary entomologist, and in the U.S. in 1910 the average life expectancy was up to 50, 15 years less. By the time Weiss wrote his paper, the life expectancy in the U.S. for males had risen to 62.94, 2.54 years less than for the typical entomologist.

Weiss was amazingly matter-of-fact about his findings—he succinctly concluded his paper by suggesting that, because heredity is largely responsible for lifespan, “most of the credit for living long lives should go to the parents of entomologists.” I, on the other hand, was extremely troubled by the pattern that he had documented. What I saw was an alarming erosion of the differential in lifespan between entomologists and the general populace. It was disturbing to me that, since the life expectancy of entomolo-

gists had been twice that of their contemporaries in the seventeenth century, it wasn't also twice the life expectancy of contemporaries (on the order of 125.88) in 1940, when Weiss wrote his paper. Given the seemingly inescapable fact that the one relative advantage of being an entomologist was in danger of fading away, I searched the literature to see if the trend had continued in the intervening years since Weiss' paper appeared.

Despite some effort on my part, I was successful in turning up only a single paper on the subject of entomologists' longevity, published in 1976 in the little-known journal, Insect World Digest. In the paper, Messersmith reported finding a table in a book called Man, by R. J. Harrison and W. Montagna and published in 1969, reporting longevity of“eminent men” according to profession. This table actually included entomologists among its eminent men; also in these ranks were philosophers, historical novelists, state governors, authors of church hymns, and composers of both choral and chamber music. According to Harrison and Montagna, entomologists in 1969 had a life expectancy of 70.89, exceeding that of any other profession except for members of U.S. Presidents' cabinets. Entomologists in fact outlived their fellow botanists (68.36 years), chemists (69.24 years), geologists (69.79 years), and mathematicians (66.62 years). For completeness' sake, it is perhaps worth pointing out that the shortest life expectancy reported was for hereditary European sovereigns, who could expect to live a mere 49.14 years.

This book, Man, by the way, is a little strange. It seems to be a textbook of some sort, written by a team consisting of a male marine biologist and a male primatologist. If you wonder why it struck me as peculiar, it's that I find it hard to understand why a book with the title Man has such an extraordinary number of

photographs of naked female breasts—16, by my count (photographs, not breasts).

My efforts to turn up another, more recent, survey was unsuccessful. To get an approximate idea of the current status of our advantage over our peers, I turned to the pages of the American Entomologist, the official publication of the Entomological Society of America. A review of obituaries in the pages of this journal was anything but reassuring. Of the 172 men and one woman whose obituaries were published in this journal between 1983 and 1996, the average lifespan was 72.5—well below 75.7, the years of life expected at birth for men and women of all races born in 1994.

I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising that the rest of the world is catching up with us. Truth be told, I can't figure out why we had it so good for so long. Particularly in recent centuries, being an entomologist meant either spending an inordinate amount of time at a desk, hunched over tiny specimens and impaling them with pins while writing out minute labels in a crabbed hand, or in an agricultural field, soaking up or breathing in noxious organic compounds designed to short-circuit the nervous system or accumulate in body fat or breast milk. Neither set of activities seems especially conducive to long life. But the study of occupational health and longevity is often full of contradictions.

These contradictions were well known to one of the earliest practitioners of occupational health and medicine, William Thackrah (1795-1833), a British surgeon and apothecary who in 1832 authored one of the first definitive studies of the association between profession and disease, a book titled The effects of arts, trades, and professions, and of civic states and habits of living, on health and longevity. As might be expected, the professions he studied differed from what might be studied today. Among those he catalogued in

the garment industry were scribblers and carders of wool, slubbers of cloth, spinners, weavers, raisers of cloth, croppers, burlers, frizers, cloth-drawers, and blanket makers, most of which rarely, if ever, turn up in the “Help Wanted” section of the newspaper these days. I found no heading for “entomologists” per se but on reading through the book found the category into which I suppose he was most likely to have placed them, had he encountered them (p. 180), “the last class of society —persons who live in a confined atmosphere, maintain one position most of the day, take little exercise, and are frequently under the excitement of ambition. This class includes individuals from the several professions, as well as the men devoted to science. . . . ”

Thackrah provides no insight as to why entomologists were long-lived; if anything, his litany of the ills facing scholars would lead one to the opposite prediction. According to his observations,

The position of the student is obviously bad. Leaning forward, he keeps most of the muscles wholly inactive, breathes imperfectly, and often irregularly, and takes a full inspiration only when he sighs. He generally lives, too, in an impure atmosphere, and neglects the common means of relief. The circulation is enfeebled; the feet become cold. The appetite. . . whether moderate or excessive . . . is greater than the power of digestion; for the application of mind too great or too long, absorbs that nervous energy, which digestion requires. The stomach becomes foul, the secretion of bile is impaired or vitiated, the bowels are sluggish, and constipation, with its attendant evils, progressively succeeds. The brain becomes disturbed. . . . A highly excitable state of the nervous system is not infrequently produced. Irritability of temper, vain fear and anxiety about trifles, mark, in common life and ordinary circumstances, the character of men. . . . Chronic Inflammation of the membranes of the brain, ramollisement of its substance, or other organic change, becomes established; and the man dies, becomes epileptic or insane, or falls into that

imbecility of mind, which renders him an object of pity to the world, and of deep afflictions to his connexions.

So I guess I've found my answer. I had assumed that long life meant long, healthy life; evidently, although we collectively may live longer, we entomologists live out our earthly span as irritable, constipated burdens to our relatives. Maybe that is an advantage to our profession after all —if we can't have fame, fortune, and good health, at least we can provide annoyance to those who do have them.

By the way, the central premise of this essay—that entomologists have until recently enjoyed a longer lifespan than most other people—is based on a distortion of demography in that average lifespans should be calculated from birth. Because it is impossible to identify at the moment of birth those individuals destined to become entomologists, average lifespan calculations are compromised; unlike the apparently short-lived European sovereigns, entomologists are made, not born. In my defense, I can say that I was only extrapolating the logic used by Harry Weiss in the 1945 paper that inspired this essay. Based on my reading of several other articles he had written, it is my guess that Dr. Weiss, too, had his tongue at least partially implanted in his cheek when he wrote his paper. Incidentally, playing fast and loose with life tables apparently did Dr. Weiss no harm—he lived to be 91 years old. Not so the author of the paper on cockroaches I was originally looking for, Phil Rau. Despite his interest in longevity—he even authored a paper in Annals of the Entomological Society of America (38:503-504, 1945), titled, “Longevity as a factor in psychic evolution,” in which he suggested that “the high mental qualities in the animal world are the result of long life”—Rau died in 1948, at the unentomological age of 53.

Probably everyone agrees that stereotyping people is bad, but there are some people that can be stereotyped with aplomb without fear of societal disapprobation. Entomologists are among those people. I've been photographed on several occasions for a variety of types of publications—newspapers, magazines, and the like—and it seems that, every time, photographers ask me to pose in one of three ways: seated in front of a microscope; with an insect, usually a cockroach, on my face; or with an insect net clutched in my hand. Posing with a microscope is all right, I guess, but it's been done to death, not just with entomologists but with life scientists of all descriptions. I categorically refuse to put any kind of insect on my face; as I explain to the photographers, there's no earthly reason that I can think of for any kind of entomologist to walk around with arthropods on his or her face, the human follicle mite, Demodex follicularum (which lives in the follicles of human facial hair) notwithstanding. For the record, and for any photographers who might be reading this article, I also categorically refuse to pose with deely-boppers, wings, or any other prop designed to make me look like an insect. I don't mind posing with a net, but, again, most of the time these photographers are

shooting pictures indoors and I explain to them that there are very few occasions upon which I must use a net while in my laboratory. Also, for the record, I won't pose wearing a pith helmet or a safari jacket, either, articles of apparel that most photographers seem to feel hang in every entomologist's closet.

I give photographers a hard time basically because I have no desire to look ridiculous. This aversion of mine takes them by surprise because it's their perception that entomologists ought to look ridiculous. It's not hard to figure out where this perception comes from—entomologists have had an image problem ever since the discipline came into its own. Examples from popular literature are rife. Among the earliest references I could find to an entomologist in a work of fiction comes from a story written in 1895 by H.G.Wells, called “The Moth.” This story is an account of a feud between “the celebrated Hapley, the Hapley of Periplaneta Hapliia, Hapley the entomologist” and one Professor Pawkins. The feud began

years and years ago with a revision of Microlepidoptera (whatever these may be) by Pawkins, in which he extinguished a new species created by Hapley. Hapley, who was always quarrelsome, replied with a stinging impeachment of the entire classification of Pawkins. Pawkins in his ‘Rejoinder' suggested that Hapley's microscope was as defective as his powers of observation, and called him an ‘irresponsible meddler' . . . Hapley in his retort, spoke of ‘blundering collectors,' and described . . . Pawkin's revision as a ‘miracle of ineptitude.'

What eventually happens is that Pawkins (“a man of dull presence, prosy of speech, in shape not unlike a water-barrel . . . and suspected of jobbing museum appointments”) dies before replying to Hapley's stinging critique of his work on the ‘mesoblast' of the Death's Head Moth. His sudden demise leaves Hapley

(of “disordered black hair [and] queer dark eye flashing”) without a purpose in life. To make a 10-page story short, Hapley begins to hallucinate, imagining himself to be pursued by a strange moth, invisible to others, that bears an uncanny resemblance to the deceased Pawkins. The story ends with Hapley “spending the remainder of his days in a padded room, worried by a moth that no one else can see. . . . ”

Thus, things didn't start off very auspiciously for entomologists in literature, and, unfortunately, things haven't improved much since then. Even when entomologists are sympathetic characters, they invariably look peculiar or act eccentric. Witness Shelly Hubbard, the entomologist in Swarm, a 1974 Arthur Herzog novel about killer bees:

. . . Hubbard resembled his own zoological specialty, the beetle. At fifty-two he was short and massively broad, with a bulging chest. He had almost no neck at all, and his round head seemed to pivot directly on his sloping shoulders. Two fringes of black hair stood up on the sides of his bald dome like antennae. Habitually, and in line with his coleoptera character, Hubbard rubbed his hands together with a rustling sound or created sucking noises by making a vacuum between his palms.

Interestingly, there is another scientist in the story, an environmental biologist, described most emphatically as “not an entomologist, much less a bee man.” In contrast with his colleague, he “was thirty-five, six feet tall, thin, with a straight nose, blue eyes, angular cheeks, an affable but controlled mouth and a military set to his shoulders. He had the sort of face women reacted to. . . . ” Women probably reacted to Hubbard, too, most likely by screaming and running away in terror.

Then, there's Noble Pilcher, in Thomas Harris' 1988 Silence of the Lambs. He's the Smithsonian entomologist who assists Special

Agent Clarice Starling in tracking down a serial killer who leaves insects at crime scenes—“Pilcher had a long friendly face, but his black eyes were a little witchy and too close together, and one of them had a slight cast that made it catch the light independently. ” Agent Starling first encounters Pilcher in his office as he and fellow entomologist Albert Roden are absorbed in a game involving a rhinoceros beetle and a chessboard and arguing heatedly over the rules.

When “Silence of the Lambs” was made into a movie, it was only natural to include the character of Noble Pilcher for comic relief. Hollywood has been even harder on entomologists than has the literary world, particularly when they 're ancillary characters. While it's true that positive depictions can be found of entomologists who are presentable and reasonably normal in appearance and who haven 't unleashed some kind of hexapod plague upon humanity, it's also true that such films are few and far between. It's far easier to find cinematic examples of entomologists with thick glasses and no sense of style in terms of apparel (and just because I happen to wear thick glasses and lack any sense of style in terms of apparel doesn't mean I resent the stereotype any less). In “Fierce Creatures,” a John Cleese film about a zoo in England, Adrian Malone, the “keeper of the Marwood insect house, was renowned for his loquacity. Rarely has a human being on the planet Earth been quite so verbally unchallenged. To Bugsy—a soubriquet which he had once been unwise enough to say he detested and which as a result had become the name by which he was universally known . . . life was one long soliloquy. And that soliloquy was primarily on the subject of insects.” Suffice it to say, nobody likes him. Nor does anybody appear to like Dr. T.C. Romulus, the entomologist in “BioDome,” who sports not only

the inevitable thick glasses and pith helmet but, inexplicably, a flyfishing vest as well. (Note to readers: the fact that there is an entomologist in the film is the ONLY REASON I actually bought a video with Pauly Shore in it.)

Whatever else you might think of it, television may actually be the salvation of the entomologist. Although they're not commonly encountered on the small screen, when entomologists do appear, they're surprisingly sympathetic. Among the greatest achievements in advancing the image of the entomologist with the public was the appearance of Dr. Maxsy Nolan, of the Department of Entomology at the University of Georgia, on the television show, “Space Ghost Coast-2-Coast.” For those who sleep regular hours and thus may not be familiar with the Cartoon Network's late-night offerings, SG-C2C is a part animated, part live-action extraterrestrial talk show featuring host Space Ghost, a superhero who first appeared in Hanna Barbera cartoons in the 1960s, and his sidekick/keyboardist Zorak, a giant alien mantis. Space Ghost interviews real-life celebrities on a television monitor while Zorak mutters generally disparaging remarks and threatens to destroy things. Dr. Nolan was a guest on episode 41, titled “Zorak,” which was kind of a “This is Your Life” retrospective in honor of Zorak. Dr. Nolan and another guest, an exterminator, offered insights into the lives of mantids. I asked Dr. Nolan by e-mail how he enjoyed his stint and he admitted that he “had a whale of a time with the show,” dealing, among other things, “with a nine foot mantis hovering over me the entire time of the shooting (about 4 hours).” What makes this appearance such a landmark in the stereotype-busting is the fact that Dr. Nolan has joined an extraordinary elite, individuals that define popular culture. Other guests of SG C2C include such luminaries as actor Charlton Heston, psychologist Dr.

Joyce Brothers, rapper Ice-T, cartoonist Matt Groening, astronaut Buzz Aldrin, and parodist (and personal favorite) “Weird Al” Yankovic.

In terms of prime-time achievements in stereotype-busting, however, recognition must go to the Fox Network program “The X-Files,” a show that depicts the activities of a division of the Federal Bureau of Invesigation devoted to investigating inexplicable and potentially paranormal phenomena. Of particular significance was the episode that aired originally on January 5, 1996, titled, “War of the Coprophages.” In this episode, Agent Fox Mulder is called in to investigate a mysterious series of cockroach-related deaths; in time, Mulder becomes convinced that these are no ordinary cockroaches and may, in fact, be extraterrestrial in origin. As he pursues his investigation, he eventually teams up with a U.S.D.A. entomologist he encounters after breaking into her laboratory (where she's been investigating, among other things, the electrical properties of cuticle and the effects of light, temperature, humidity, and food availability on behavior). Here's how the novelization of the episode (Martin 1997) describes the encounter:

Standing in the doorway was the best-looking woman Mulder had seen in a long time. Her eyes were bright against her dark hair. Her flannel shirt, safari shorts, and hiking boots looked surprisingly attractive. But the look on her face told Mulder that she was not nearly as impressed with him. In fact, she looked downright angry.

‘What do you think you're doing here?' She demanded. . . . ‘This is government property. And you are trespassing.'

‘I'm a federal agent,' Mulder said.

The woman's eyes didn't soften. ‘So am I.'

Mulder put his phone back in his pocket. He flashed his badge.

‘Agent Mulder—FBI,' he said.

‘Dr. Berenbaum,' the woman said. ‘U.S. Department of Agriculture Research Service.'

‘Dr. Berenbaum,' Mulder said. ‘I need to ask you a few questions.'

‘For instance?' the woman said.

‘What's a woman like you doing in a place like this?'

Dr. Bambi Berenbaum then proceeds to lecture Mulder on the habits of cockroaches and ably assists him throughout the episode with her entomological expertise.

When I first became aware of this episode, I naturally took a considerable interest in it. Two questions came to mind. First, in the TV Guide listing for the episode, I couldn't help noticing that the fictional entomologist's last name was identical to mine. It was hard to believe that this might be by chance because not even all of my relatives spell “Berenbaum ” exactly that way. More important, was the casting of gorgeous actress Bobbie Phillips in the part of Dr. Berenbaum a desperate ploy for ratings on the part of a casting director, or was it the actual intent of the scriptwriter to make the entomologist an attractive character? There was only one way to find the answers to these questions—to go to the source, scriptwriter Darin Morgan.

It took me almost two years to work up the nerve (among other things, Darin Morgan is revered by “X-files” fans and is something of a celebrity as a result), but I finally spoke with the man and found him charming, gracious, and extremely personable. He told me that he had consulted some of my books in preparing the script and thus felt “Berenbaum ” would be an appropriate name

for an entomologist. In response to my question about Dr. Berenbaum 's appearance, he replied that he had indeed intended to depict her as a “luscious babe. . . . I needed a rival [for female Agent Scully] and it helps if she's really good-looking.”

Kudos, then, to Darin Morgan for actually conducting some

research before putting pen to paper and for rising above stereotypes. Thanks to him, we've come a long way—from “water barrel” to “luscious babe,” to be precise. As for the next photographer who asks me to put on a pith helmet or to kiss a cockroach, I think I 'll just show him a copy of my Bambi Berenbaum X-Files Collector Card and ask him to reconsider that request.

As an entomologist, I have often wondered whether my parents, protestations to the contrary, may not have been the teensiest bit disappointed with my career choice. Admittedly, they have always been embarrassingly proud of my entomological accomplishments, such as they are. When I wrote a book, a collection of what I hoped would be regarded as humorous essays about insects titled, 99 Gnats, Nits, and Nibblers, they made sure that every single one of my relatives, no matter how distant, received his or her own copy. This includes family members whose native language isn't even English and babies who haven't yet learned how to read. I'm sure the University of Illinois Press sales staff can't figure out why so many book orders keep coming in from the state of New Jersey; I think my parents alone are responsible for the fact that the book went into a second printing.

Nonetheless, when the journal Science ran an article in 1991 about “Career Trends in the 90s,” my father, a polymer chemist with a major chemical company, called me up to point out that, according to the article, entomologists are paid less than scientists at equivalent rank in any of the 17 life science disciplines surveyed. I had missed the article the first time through the journal

(probably too busy sailing my yacht or exercising my polo ponies), but, intrigued, I went back to find my copy and read the article. My father had somewhat overstated the case—it was true that full professors of entomology made less than anyone else, but assistant professors of entomology on average earned more than assistant professors of biology, botany, marine biology, and zoology. But it was undeniably apparent, in full color graphics, that my chosen profession is hardly a lucrative one.

Although the details were interesting to see, the fact itself was hardly a revelation to me. I don't think anyone goes into entomology to earn heaps of money and to win the respect and admiration of one 's peers. And this fact is hardly a product of contemporary crass commercialism. While rummaging around the entomology department archives, I came across a broadside that had been in the reprint collection of W. P. Hayes, department head from 1945 to 1953. On the back it was stamped “FEB 10 1920”: on the cover was written:

AMERICAN ENTOMOLOGISTS

and those Employing Entomologists

will find in this Paper a VALUABLE MESSAGE

American Entomology:

Its Present and Future Status as a Profession

This paper is published and distributed by a group of younger Entomologists who are concerned with the advancement of the science they love. It is their fondest hope that Entomology will shortly be placed on such an improved basis that they will be able to devote their uninterrupted thought and effort to the subject without endangering the welfare of their homes.

The tract was basically a lament about the meager salaries paid

to professional entomologists. Such salaries meant that young men who wished to be entomologists were forced to find outside work, or even to abandon the profession altogether, to maintain hearth and home. Those choosing to remain in the profession were obligated to “beg at corner cigar stores for boxes in which to store his specimens. ” The anonymous author of the tract implores “those superior in power and influence” to remedy the situation—“by entering the field of Entomology one should by no means infer that he must become a vagabond.” That the author was not optimistic is evidenced by his concluding paragraph—

. . . then the Entomologist may walk boldly down the principal street of the city and look his fellow citizens in the eye, rather than slinking thru the back alleys so that his ragged appearance will not be noticed. Then will the hands of fellow citizens and fellow scientists be offered in respect and with honor to the Entomologist and he will no longer be greeted with a smile of amused ridicule —then, perchance, the millenium will arrive.

Things were undoubtedly worse then than they are now, no matter how small your raise was last year—after all, the millennium has arrived and it IS possible to make a living as an entomologist these days. Of the 16 founding members of the Entomological Society of Washington, only about half were paid to be entomologists. Reverend J.G. Morris was a clergyman of the German Lutheran church in Maryland, Lawrence Johnson was a judge, E.S. Burgess was a botanist who taught high school biology, C.J. Schafhirt was a druggist, Alonzo H. Stewart was a page in the U.S. Senate, R.S. Lacy was a Washington lawyer, R.W. Shufeldt was an ornithologist, and John Murdoch was a librarian. Ten years after its founding in 1884, L. O. Howard exhorted its members

not to lose a single opportunity to press the importance of . . . a donation to science in particular, and to the world at large, upon chance millionaires of their acquaintance. . . .Who knows but a clause may be found in the will of some one of the men who are already active members of our Society, which will put us upon a firm financial basis? We are not looking forward to the demise of any of our wealthy members, and hope that they may be with us for many years to come. When, however, full of years and full of honor, they prepare themselves for the inevitable end, let us hope that . . . a little slice of their accumulated riches may be left to the struggling organization upon which they have shed the lustre of their names.

To some extent, I think entomologists bring financial penury upon themselves. In general, entomologists are all too willing and eager to dispense their knowledge and practice their skills gratis. Bring your car to a mechanic and you have to pay him thirty dollars just for him to tell you what's wrong with it; bring a wilted coleus plant to your neighborhood entomologist and he or she will not only identify what's causing the problem but will provide you with enough reprints, bulletins, and other assorted reading material to last you a week, all absolutely free of charge. This practice is so ingrained that making money at entomology is almost regarded as dishonorable. Alexander Arsene Girault, for example, who worked for the United States Department of Agriculture and for the Australian government as an entomologist near the turn of the twentieth century, was particularly adamant on this point. He “felt that the use of entomology for economic purposes was a prostitution of science and learning” and wrote derogatory doggerel about his colleagues who profited from their profession (Spilman 1984). At one point, he lambasted J.F. Illingworth of Australia in a snide, sarcastic parody of a scientific description—“Shillingsworthia. ”

S. shillingsworthi, blank, vacant, inaneness perfect. Nulliebiety remarkable, visible only from certain points of view. Shadowless. An airy species whose flight cannot be followed except by the winged mind. . . . This so thin genus is consecrated to Doctor Johann Francis Illingworth, in these days remarkable for his selfless devotion to Entomology, not only sacrificing all of the comforts of life, but as well as his health and reputation to the uncompromising search for truth.

There probably remains a bit of residual Girault in all of us, accustomed as we are to being overlooked and unappreciated.

What we lack in power, wealth, and prestige, perhaps we make up for in nobility of purpose and self-sacrifice. By the way, in case you 're wondering, I'm giving away half of the proceeds from this book to the Entomological Society of America, which never paid me in the first place to write these essays. And no, I haven't had the nerve to tell that to my father yet.

Female entomologists are not now, nor have they ever been, particularly numerous. There are so few of them, in fact, that it seems unlikely that anyone (with the possible exception of a male entomologist) has had contact with enough female entomologists to form any sort of opinion about them at all. And yet prejudice and hostility toward female entomologists exist.

Am I, as a female entomologist, just being paranoid, you ask? I hardly think so. All you have to do is take a look at how female entomologists are depicted in insect fear films. Admittedly, scientists in general don't come off too well in this particular genre, but at least occasionally male entomologists are positively heroic. Dr. Harold Medford, the kindly old “myrmecologist” in Them (1954), for example, saved Los Angeles from a swarm of giant ants. He even looked saintly: the man who played the part, Edmund Gwenn, had just a few years earlier played Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street. Handsome, young Peter Graves in The Beginning of the End (1954) singlehandedly saves Chicago from an atom bomb that the army had planned to drop to rid the city of a plague of thirty-foot locusts. Granted, it was his own sloppy experimentation with radiation that produced the giant locusts in

the first place, but the audience forgets such details by the last reel of the film.

Even the crazed male entomologists in these films are at least well intentioned. Dr. Deemer (Leo G. Carroll), the scientist in Tarantula (1955) who accidentally looses a thirty-foot tarantula on an unsuspecting town, was only trying to develop a synthetic food to save millions from starvation. Peter Graves (The Beginning of the End) was using radiation in the first place to grow giant tomatoes, among other things, to feed the hungry masses.

Female entomologists, on the other hand, have only one thing in mind: achieving eternal youth and beauty. For years, female scientists in movies have had the peculiar conviction that insects or their various bodily fluids have pharmacological properties that can bestow beauty and longevity upon those who consume them, a conviction that is all the more peculiar given the physical appearance and breathtakingly brief life span of the vast majority of arthropods. Generally, these women are not even interested in developing beauty creams to save millions from the ravages of age—they usually have a vested personal interest in this research.

Take Janice Starlin (Susan Cabot), the subject of Wasp Woman (1959), for example. As founder and CEO of Janice Starlin Enterprises, a cosmetics firm that's floundering because she's showing her age and it's affecting her image, she hires the dubious Dr. Eric Zinthrop to prepare extracts of wasp royal jelly. When injected, these “enzymes” take eighteen years off her age and restore her to her former beauty. They also have the unfortunate side effects of stimulating the growth of antennae and creating a ravenous appetite for human blood, which might well prove to present problems in obtaining FDA approval (although it presents interesting possibilities to the advertising department).

As Dr. Elaine Frederick in Flesh Feast (1970), Veronica Lake conducts “rejuvenation” experiments in the basement of a mansion in Miami Beach. These experiments consist of allowing Calliphora blow fly maggots to feast on human flesh, clearing away dead skin cells to leave a younger, fresher face. One of the more admirable women scientist in insect fear films, she does, to her credit, use her maggots to destroy Adolf Hitler at the end of the film, in a series of plot twists that are too complex to describe here.

Even as experimental subjects, women in these films are embarrassingly shortsighted and selfish. In She-Devil (1959), a female patient receives an experimental drug derived from Drosophila serum that allows her to metamorphose at will. She uses this extraordinary power and once-in-a-lifetime gift to change from brunette to blonde. In Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973), the only soft-core pornographic insect fear film (to date), a female entomologist creates a society patterned (loosely) after that of the honey bee. Women in the society recruit new female members by having profoundly energetic sex with the husbands of the recruits-to-be, leading to massive coronaries; the grieving widows are then metamorphosed into bee girls. Among other things, metamorphosis entails a new hairdo (not inappropriately, a beehive).

An obsession with hair is a peculiar undercurrent throughout films of this genre. The doomed but noble Leo G. Carroll in Tarantula has a female laboratory assistant named “Steve.” Many of the female scientists in insect fear films, by the way, have men's names—just another mechanism for introducing some levity at a dramatic moment. The leading man gets to do a double-take when he realizes that the scientist he'll be working with has two X chromosomes and is wearing a skirt. Just as developments in the

laboratory are getting exciting, Steve remarks, “Science is science but a girl must get her hair done,” and departs, leaving her test tubes behind without a second thought.

This strikes me as incredibly unrealistic, although admittedly my objections sound like nitpicking given that the movies I'm talking about also contain tarantulas or grasshoppers the size of mobile homes. In most other bad science fiction films, all the women have to do is stand around and look helpless while the male hero figures out what to do. Occasionally, they get to undress in front of windows into which giant apes or lizards peer. What is it that women entomologists have done to incur the will of at least four decades of filmmakers? Maybe playing around with insects is considered unfeminine. Perhaps male entomologists, feeling threatened by general perceptions that people who play around with insects are less manly, unconsciously are projecting animosity toward women who would perpetuate such stereotypes. Maybe there is a Jungian association in the collective unconscious of filmmakers between the image of predatory female insects and domineering mothers. I could speculate all day, but I really have to go now because I have an appointment to get my legs waxed. After all, science is science. . . .