Giving bugs a good name
A group of friends turn childhood interest in entomology into a passionate career, Li Yingxue reports.
Every child goes through a phase where creepy-crawlies interest them. You could say they get bitten by the bug. But sometimes it turns out to be more than a passing fad. For four Shanghai-based bug enthusiasts, it actually started 16 years ago when they got to know each other through an online forum. Two of them were junior middle school students and two were already in college.
They have been sharing their discoveries, mutually identifying species and sometimes visiting zoos or botanical gardens together to collect specimens ever since.
This long-standing hobby has now turned into a career. The quartet founded their studio, DachengXiaochong, or Mini Beasts, earlier this year, with the aim of observing and recording species diversity in China.
Their first labor of love went public in June — a book named
(Snails in Shanghai) that carries data on more than 40 species of gastropods found in and around the city.
The book is written by Zhou Deyao, a graduate with a master’s degree in zoology from the College of Life Sciences at Shanghai Normal University, who now works on plant protection at a local agricultural technology extension and service center. It is edited by the other three members, Song Xiaobin, Tang Liang and Yu Zhizhou.
Anyone who has ever wanted to know how many species of snail there are in Shanghai, what they all look like and where you might see them, can find all this in the book — the information for which took Zhou years to compile and research.
The strong point of the pocket-sized publication is the attention to detail. Each species of snail is depicted in four photos, one of its body and three of its shell from different angles.
There are some species listed that were recorded in documents they read, but were not actually spotted and seen by the team in Shanghai, so Zhou hopes the references in the book will serve as clues for readers to go out and find them.
Tang is an associate professor in zoology at Shanghai Normal University, Zhou’s alma mater, and a council member of the Shanghai Society for Entomology.
“When I was a kid and played with the bugs alone, I wondered if there was any other child in the world that had the same interest,” Tang recalls. “When I was a graduate student, I got to know Zhou and other bug lovers on the internet, and that became the starting point for this book.”
Song, 30, also a graduate with a master’s degree in zoology from the same university, has been running another studio that aims to popularize science since 2017.
According to him, the Chinese book was created specifically to spark public interest. It is free to anyone who requests a copy, but the recipient has to cover the postage, which is 16 yuan ($2.26).
book, Shanghai).
Some bugs can play dead, but when you place an open umbrella upside down under a tree and knock the branches, the ‘dead’ ones will fall on the umbrella, then you can collect them.” Song Xiaobin, 30, a member of the Mini Beasts studio