The good, the bad and the BUGLY
Working with insects is a dirty job — but it might just save the world
AMBER Partridge places two tarantulas together — one male, one female — and uses the end of a paintbrush to get them to copulate.
“What you’re going to do,” she says, “is take the brush and rub the palps.” Aspider’s pedipalps are the front tentacles, hairy straws that store semen.
The two arachnids in front of her are reluctant, so Partridge selects a randier pair, and they immediately go to town.
“Oh my God, this is amazing!” says Partridge. “We’ve all seen these guys at the club. Just sayin’.”
Partridge is a professional spider pimp or — to be more official — the head entomologist for the Butterfly Pavilion in Westminster, Colo. One of her main duties is to ensure, for research purposes, the continued mating of the tarantulas in her keep.
While working with bugs requires a strong tolerance for what others might consider creepy or gross, the new book “Bugged: The Insects Who Rule The World and the People Obsessed with Them” (St. Martins Press) by David MacNeal shows that fascinating careers await those brave enough to take the plunge. (If you’re squeamish, stop reading now.)
Michelle Sanford, for example, is “the world’s first and only full-time forensic entomologist.” In other words, she examines bugs left behind in human corpses to help determine how and when people died.
One case she worked on involved a woman who died of “morbid obesity.” Based on the size of fly larvae, “Sanford estimated 72 hours had passed since the body’s discovery and the woman’s unfortunate demise,” MacNeal writes.
There are plenty of illegal jobs in the insect world, too. Demand from bug collectors means you can make a good living as a smuggler.
Mexican redknee tarantulas, for example, can fetch “hundreds of thousands of dollars” on the black market, but the price offenders pay for sneaking them into the US can be a lot higher.
“In 2010, feds arrested 37-year-old German national Sven Koppler at LAX for smuggling over 300 live Mexican redknees in a government sting called Operation Spider-Man,” MacNeal writes. “He had hidden the tarantula spiderlings in drinking straws, possibly making, US agents believe, $300,000 in sales worldwide during his 10-month selling spree.”
Some on the cutting edge, however, have chosen insect technology as their field. Scientists are marrying insects to technology in order to electronically control their movements for a range of purposes — from education to disaster rescue.
“The idea is to use them to swarm and explore areas where GPS can’t penetrate, mapping out the detail of, say, the rubble in a collapsed building — tunnels, gaps, voids — using radio waves emitted from their censors,” writes MacNeal.
There is already a crude kit you can buy called RoboRoach where “an electrode, a red circuit board and a battery are glued onto a 10-centimeter cockroach,” and “silver ground wires inserted into the roach’s antennae stimulate its sensory neurons.” (MacNeal tried this and found that cockroaches could easily pull out the wires.)
But scientists at North Carolina State University are researching a far more advanced version of such control. Part of the problem with trying to remotely control cockroaches is that the famously resilient pests “can survive a lot of challenges,” according to NCSU professor Alper Bozkurt. So his team at the university is attempting to “overwrite their instinct” to make them more controllable from the outside.
So far, they’ve tried “electrode stimulation” with effects lasting from 10 minutes to 10 weeks. One process involves liquid-metal electrodes, which professor Bozkurt “compares to the [T-1000] in ‘Terminator 2.’ ”
“We open up a small hole in the antenna,” the professor said, “and inject a liquid metal inside. Sometimes if the tissue dries, you don’t have a good connection.”
The project has led to some intriguing results, including a demonstration where Bozkurt steered a micro herd of roaches on a platform. “Each was controlled individually, but to the audience it appeared to be a swarm.” While using such tech in real life is still years down the line, many search-and-rescue operations and military organizations are eager to work with the professor.
To those who dismiss these and other insect workers as strange, MacNeal argues the opposite: He calls them warriors, studying essential subjects to help greater understand our world.
“People tend to think a higher, godlike being runs the show. They’re wrong,” MacNeal writes. “The real answer is under your shoe. Or fly swatter. Or — parasitically — skin. You know them as the common house pest. But collectively insects are the microscopic lever-pullers calling the shots, shaping our ecological world and plant life for over 400 million years.”