Richard Conniff's Blog, page 30

Eagle Says F–k Drones. Skies Now All Clear

The hero here is an Australian wedge-tailed eagle, reclaiming the skies for All Birdom (and especially for the ones that are edible)

Save the Shipwrecks to Save the Fish (and the Fishing)

(Photo: Reinhard Dirscherl/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

 

A few years ago in the Black Sea, off the Turkish coast, a marine archaeology expedition discovered a 2,400-year-old wooden shipwreck. It was still in good condition because of low-oxygen levels at its resting depth, and a video revealed human bones and vase-like clay storage vessels, called amphora, still intact. But when the crew returned to investigate the following year, fishing nets dragged across the bottom had reduced the entire wreck to scattered rubble. It was, said one archaeologist, like somebody drove a bulldozer through a museum.

The same thing has happened to roughly 45 percent of the estimated 3 million shipwrecks in the world’s lakes and oceans because of the industrial-scale trawling that has also decimated fish stocks worldwide.

But in a new study being published in the journal Marine Policy, an archaeologist and an ecologist propose a solution they say will protect these underwater cultural artifacts and at the same time boost fish populations and improve commercial fisheries.

The key insight came one day when Jason S. Krumholz, an ecologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service, was sitting with his five-year-old son watching videos taken by a remotely operated vehicle visiting shipwrecks in the Mediterranean. “We started to notice that some of these wrecks have a ton of fish, and some have almost none,” Krumholz recalled.

That led him and Michael Brennan, a University of Rhode Island oceanographer who had participated in that expedition off the Turkish coast, to ask what makes the difference. For their new study, they looked at videos from 18 ancient shipwrecks and found that “shipwrecks in areas historically excluded from fishing are in better condition and support larger and more diverse fish communities than wrecks which have been damaged by trawling.”

Moreover, they argue that those shipwrecks, protected by steep terrain, underwater cables, rocky waters, or other circumstances, become breeding grounds for commercially valuable fish, and that these populations “spill over” to increase the haul for commercial fishing outside the protected area. And that suggested a strategy to benefit archaeologists and fishermen alike by siting Marine Protected Areas, where fishing is outlawed, around sites that are already rich with shipwrecks.

The idea of Marine Protected Areas is, of course, not new. But they have become increasingly popular with conservationists and the fishing industry alike because experience has shown that they work. In one recent study, properly planned and managed MPAs had five times the tonnage of large fish and 14 times the shark biomass compared with fished areas. Siting new MPAs around areas with extensive shipwrecks is simply a way to make them more effective, according to Krumholz and Brennan.

Krumholz explained how these MPAs work by analogy with lobster fishing in Maine. Regulations there strictly limit the take to lobsters with a carapace length from 3.25 to 5 inches. That protects “all lobsters until they’ve had a chance to breed at least once” and also the lucky few that manage to elude the fishery long enough to outgrow it.  Big, old lobsters make many more eggs than younger ones—up to 100,000 per year, versus 5,000 or 10,000 for the youngsters. They can also keep restocking the lobster fishery for a life span up to 100 years.

The higher reproductive output by older individuals is true for most fish species, said Krumholz. But while the commercial fishers can protect younger and smaller fish by adjusting the size of the mesh on nets, they can’t avoid killing the big ones: Any fish that gets caught in a trawl net is a dead one. Instead, MPAs around shipwrecks could be a logical counterpart to the upper limit on the lobster catch: They’d provide a refuge where big, old breeders could continue pumping out eggs in peace.

MPAs are becoming a practical tool because most fishing boats now use global positioning software that can clearly indicate the borders of an off-limits area. “Very few fishermen cheat,” said Krumholz. “They know the MPAs are there for their own benefit, and they’re pretty good at participating in the process to site MPAs and then observing those rules.”

A few MPAs sited on shipwrecks already exist, notably Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary in Michigan’s Lake Huron and the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary off the coast of Virginia. It’s also a common strategy to support fisheries, said Krumholz, by “spending a lot of money sinking ships and dumping airplanes to build up artificial reefs.”

The new study asks, in effect, why not take better advantage of the shipwrecks that are already there?

Rainforest Birds Do Battle in New York City Parks

(Photo: Brian Harkin for The New York Times)

A month or two back, I wrote about the devastating effects of the reliance on tropical birds for singing contests in Indonesia.  Today The New York Times reports that much the same thing is happening right here in New York City:

Ray Harinarain cut the lusty Hellcat engine of his Dodge Challenger and gently lifted his birdcage from the front seat.

Mr. Harinarain, a heating and air-conditioner repairman from Brooklyn, joined a procession of middle-aged men in fedoras and flat caps, cradling wood poles and cages the size of large shoe boxes, streaming into a pocket-size park in Richmond Hill, Queens, on a recent Sunday morning. The cages were blanketed in white coverlets, some trimmed with lace. Inside each one was a delicate songbird: a chestnut-bellied seed finch native to the northern parts of South America and the Caribbean.

Sundays are race days, though the events are not really races but speed-singing contests. Two cages each containing a male finch, whose fierce calls are triggered by an instinctive desire to woo females and defend turf, are hung on a pole about an inch apart. The birds are judged on the number of songs they sing. The first to reach 50 wins.

Ostensibly, it’s a battle of the birds. But …

Read the full story in The New York Times here.

The Pandemic Ahead for North America’s Salamanders and Forests

One of the hundreds of salamander species native to North America now
threatened by an emerging disease (Photo: Emanuele Biggi | anura.it)

Let’s say it’s 1880 and you discover irrefutable evidence that misguided human behavior is about to cause extinction of passenger pigeons—and you have this evidence in time to prevent the disaster from occurring. Or, to bring it closer to home, let’s say it’s 1990 and you have the power to stop the chytrid fungus pandemic that was unknown then, but about to send frogs worldwide twitching and suffocating to their miserable deaths. You’d do something, right?

That’s the situation the United States is in right now, with another unbelievably numerous and ecologically important animal group. The likely victims this time are salamanders and—hang on–before you say “I’m not going to waste time worrying about slimy little animals that live under rocks,” consider first that salamanders are adorable (check out the photo above), second, that they are characteristically North American, and third, that they are vital to the health of our forests.

For salamanders, North America is the Garden of Eden, and they are our true biodiversity: Of the 676 known salamander species in the world, almost half live on this continent, with hotspots of salamander abundance in the southern Appalachians, the Sierra Nevadas, and the highlands of Central Mexico.

The problem this time is that a new variety of chytrid fungus, called Bsal (short for Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans) has recently turned up in Asia, and it is already starting to do to salamanders what its notorious cousin Bd (short for Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis) has done to frogs. On introduction to the Netherlands in 2013, Bsal caused a mass die-off of European fire salamanders. Then it jumped to Belgium. In the laboratory, it killed off almost all of the European and North American salamander species tested.

The good news is that Bsal doesn’t appear to have reached North America. But so far the U.S. government has not taken any public action to keep it from getting here, though an article just out in Science warns that the arrival of Bsal could cause rapid “declines and extinctions in the world’s richest and most diverse salamander fauna,” with the likelihood of “severe” impacts on the health of North American forests.

The threat to salamanders comes from people who ostensibly love salamanders. They want them for pets. So the pet trade has imported almost 800,000 salamanders over the past five years. According to the paper in Science, 99 percent of these imports come from Asia (mostly Hong Kong, mainland China, Singapore, and Japan)—and they include the salamander genera that are reservoirs of Bsal.

This pathogen doesn’t bother the imported pets; they’ve always lived with Bsal and appear to be immune. But the zoopores these imported pets carry are highly transmissible in water, by direct contact, or otherwise, to North American species that have never encountered Bsal before. And the habitat suitable to Bsal coincides with all three North American salamander hotspots.

Vance Vredenburg, a herpetologist at San Francisco State University and co-author of the Science study, has spent much of his career studying the Bd fungus, as it has driven roughly 200 frog species to the brink of extinction, or beyond. “I’ve seen tens of thousands of animals die in the wild in pristine areas, here in California, right in front of my eyes,” Vredenburg said. “It is just an unbelievable sight to see all these dead animals.”

But the devastating spectacle of frog die offs from Bd might just be the key to stopping Bsal. At the beginning of the Bd pandemic, said Vredenburg, “no one could even imagine that one pathogen could cause so much damage across all these different species, because we had never seen anything like that before.” Bd turned out to be the most destructive infectious wildlife disease ever recorded, and that painful lesson is still fresh enough, Vredenburg thinks, to persuade the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to ban live salamander imports, until there is a plan in place to detect and prevent the spread of Bsal.

Ensatina salamanders from the U.S. West Coast (Photo: Tiffany Yap)

The standard argument against such a ban is that it would represent government interference in international trade, with the potential for a charge of unfair trade practice, or that it would cause major economic hardship. But Karen R. Lips, a salamander specialist at the University of Maryland, has worked with FWS analyzing both the biological risk and the economic effects. “Based on what little information you can get from the pet trade,” she said, “we think it’s a luxury trade, and relatively small, so the actual financial impact is relatively small.” On the other hand, the impact of Bsal on North American forests could be enormous, because salamanders are a major factor in the transport of energy and carbon from the leaf litter back into the ground and into tree roots.

The Center for Biological Diversity and the group Save the Frogs filed a petition in May seeking an emergency moratorium on the trade. FWS is currently working on a response, likely to be issued sometime in the next six months. But that will be almost two years after the discovery of Bsal in the Netherlands.

That delay is symptomatic of a major impediment to protecting the United States in an era of emerging diseases, according to William Karesh, a veterinarian and wildlife disease specialist with Ecohealth Alliance. It’s a problem of fragmentation: FWS has responsibility for regulating wildlife trade, but concerns itself mainly with trade in endangered species. The U.S. Geological Survey meanwhile diagnoses and studies wildlife diseases and the USDA does the same thing for domestic animals (and some wildlife).  But as the Government Accounting Office has complained, they do not collaborate adequately and no single agency looks at all animal diseases. Finally, the Centers for Disease Control become involved when those diseases leap to humans. The result is that the United States imports about 250 million exotic animals a year with almost no oversight—until a disease breaks out and it is too late to act. And this is in an era of Ebola, SARS, and innumerable other diseases.

The FWS responses may still come soon enough to stop Bsal. But write your representatives in Congress now to make sure that happens. And remind them of the urgent need to streamline our response to the threat of emerging disease. It’s also worth stopping in at your local pet shop. The people there may not even realize that participating in this trade could make them the agents of the next great deadly pandemic.

Why Killing Lions Like Cecil Could Be Good for Conservation

Cecil the Lion in his prime

Here’s a counter-argument to the uproar about the killing of Cecil the Lion.  It comes from Niki Rust, a carnivore conservationist at the University of Kent, and Diogo Verissimo of Georgia State University:

The death of a celebrity often makes the headlines, but it is less common that the death of wild animal has the same effect. However, it appears that the entire world has mourned the loss of Cecil the lion, killed on a private game reserve bordering a national park in Zimbabwe. But is the recent barrage of attacks on trophy hunting, and the US dentist who killed Cecil, justified?

Let’s be clear: Cecil was killed illegally, which we don’t condone. The landowner who allowed the hunt on his reserve without the necessary permit should face the justice system. But

this one bad apple should not tarnish an entire industry.

Legally hunting lions in Zimbabwe is highly regulated: it requires various permits and licenses from the client, professional hunter and hunting reserve owner. National quotas aim to ensure sustainable off-take of the species and, in western Zimbabwe, lions are only killed once they have reached a certain age to make sure they’ve had the chance to pass their genes on. As a result, lion populations in Zimbabwe are either stable or increasing.

So if hunts are conducted following these rules, can trophy hunting really help conserve lions? Some argue that even if this were the case, the practice still shouldn’t be allowed because it involves killing a charismatic and threatened animal for fun. Opponents suggest that non-lethal alternatives such as photographic tourism should be the main way in which conservation is funded. But there are a number of problems with this argument.

Hunters are willing to go to remote and unstable areas that most photographic tourists are unwilling to venture into. Far more photographic tourists would have to travel to Africa than hunters to make up the same level of revenue, so the carbon footprint from all that air travel would surely have a significant environmental impact. It should also be noted that the potential for nature tourism is not equally distributed, with the industry often focused only around a few locations. This leaves other regions without access to tourism revenue. Oh, and let’s not forget that wildlife reserves can also kill lions.

If the goal is to preserve populations and species (as opposed to the welfare of individual animals), countries with healthy wildlife populations should be able to use their natural resources to cover the costs of management. This is particularly the case in countries such as Zimbabwe, one of the poorest places in the world.

Zimbabwe has a tradition of using trophy hunting to promote wildlife conservation. Through the CAMPFIRE programme, which ran from 1989 to 2001, more than US$20m was given to participating communities, 89% of which came from sports hunting. In more recent times, populations of elephants and other large herbivores have been shown to benefit from trophy hunting.

Zimbabwean trophy hunting generates roughly US$16m of revenue annually. While it has been rightly pointed out that only 3% of this goes towards local communities, the ethical implications of removing this money without a clear alternative need to be examined.

The economic impact of trophy hunting in comparison to tourism as a whole may not be huge, but what is the alternative if it is made illegal? Zambia banned trophy hunting of big cats in 2013, only to reverse it earlier this year because the government needed the money to fund conservation.

Conservation costs money – so does the damage done by lions killing livestock. It is not clear whether photographic tourism alone could cover these financial burdens.

If trophy hunting is to continue, how can we make it more sustainable? One study suggested we need to enforce age restrictions on trophy animals throughout the entire country , improve monitoring, change quotas over time depending on environmental conditions and ensure lion hunts are at least 21 days long.

Another study found that trophy hunting can be beneficial to lion conservation when the income is shared with locals who live with this species (and have to deal with the negative consequences of their presence).

While it is sad that we sometimes have to resort to killing animals for conservation, let’s not allow emotions to overtake our arguments. Conservation is a complex, difficult industry and needs all the financial help it can get: we are after all living through the sixth mass extinction. How much money will that take to fix?

 

The Broken Promise of Ecological Restoration

Fake herons stand by the concrete-lined Los Angeles River–a candidate for restoration to its natural state. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)

Not long ago in the New Jersey Meadowlands, a private company took a 235-acre chunk out of an existing 587-acre protected area and turned it into a “mitigation bank.” The company running the deal paid $6 million for a lease and $25 million for restoration work, altogether about $132,000 an acre. The work involved removing tall, dense stands of phragmites (an invasive grass), knocking down berms along the Hackensack River, cleaning up contaminated soil, and replanting with native species. The idea was to create a bank of mitigation credits for sale at a profit to developers wanting to fill wetlands elsewhere.

The project did not create a single new acre of wetlands. While it did restore stands of spartina grass and other native species, says Erik Kiviat, an ecologist with the conservation nonprofit Hudsonia Ltd., the restoration effort also turned the habitat of a rare plant into an equipment parking lot, killed the last remnant of bluejoint grass wet meadow in the region, and destroyed what had been the state’s only known habitat for a globally rare invertebrate, Mattox’s clam shrimp. Moreover, the mitigation credits for this work require the company to monitor the restored acreage for just 15 years. After that, almost anything can happen. But the wetlands being filled thanks to mitigation credits will remain filled forever.

In the public imagination, there’s always been something tantalizing about the idea that we can restore trashed ecosystems, or—as Joni Mitchell never put it—take a parking lot and put up paradise. But the reality is that too often, ecological restoration projects

are wonderful for business rather than for plants, animals, and the environment. And it is big business: We have spent $70 billion on wetland restoration projects alone in North America over the past 20 years. But when a 2012 study in PLOS Biology looked at 621 such projects, it found most had failed to deliver promised results or match the performance of natural wetlands, even decades after completion. Meanwhile, despite a 26-year-old federal policy dictating “no net loss” of wetlands, the National Wildlife Foundation estimates that 100,000 acres of natural wetlands are still disappearing every year.

The picture isn’t much better for river restoration projects. They are typically profitable for the companies doing the restoration work but often disappointing for the environment. A new study in the journal Ecological Indicators looked at 120 river restoration projects, mostly in Europe or North America, and found that while they were generally beneficial, they had no effect, or even a negative effect, about a third of the time. Likewise, a 2010 study examined 78 river restoration projects and found that “only two showed statistically significant increases in biodiversity” compared with similar sites that had not been restored. “They may be pretty projects,” said lead author Margaret Palmer of the University of Maryland, “but they don’t provide ecological benefits.”

One problem for restoration projects is that they have tended to be relatively simple, whereas nature is endlessly complex and nuanced. So even people sincerely attempting to bring back a damaged environment often find themselves on a frustrating trial-and-error treadmill.

It’s often hard to know for a particular location which factor is really limiting the recovery of a target species, says Jochem Kail of the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany and the lead author of the Ecological Indicators study. “Is it water quality? Is it a source population that’s missing? Or is it a habitat that missing, and not just aquatic habitats, but terrestrial habitats?” he said. Planting native trees might seem to answer the requirements for a river site. But what if they’re not the tree species on which a certain insect species lays its eggs? And what if those insects are the ones certain fish would otherwise feed on?

Restoration projects have also often tended to be designed by engineers or geomorphologists rather than ecologists, and they often have an inclination to get something built, and damn the nuances: Reshape a river channel with bulldozers, add some rocks and wood baffles to slow the current down in places, plant the banks with something to prevent erosion, and then move on to the next project. They operate on what Palmer calls “the field of dreams hypothesis”: If you build something that looks like a pretty little river to us, plants and animals will come.

How to fix the problem and get restorations that are actually worth the money we spend on them? The first step is to get ecologists involved in every stage of the project, from planning to post-completion monitoring, on equal ground with the engineers and geomorphologists. “You need all three,” said Kail. A social scientist would also help, he said, because a restoration is far more likely to succeed if it engages the support of the local community.

Finally, all restoration projects should be judged not by what they do or what they build but on the outcomes they deliver—perhaps guaranteed with a bond posted by the project developer so that if a promised outcome doesn’t show up in year three, or year five, there are funds available to fix it.

If this sounds onerous, bear in mind that restoration projects are often the “feel good” means by which developers win permission to fill wetlands, kill wildlife, and do other environmental damage. Most of that destruction shouldn’t be happening in the first place, because wetlands provide a significant public value for wildlife, water supply, flood control, and carbon sequestration. Kiviat is still seething about a restoration project that enabled a company to build a large truck parking lot on wetlands in the New Jersey Meadowlands.  “The Meadowlands have gone from being a dumping ground for garbage to being a dumping ground for restoration projects,” he said.

Ecological restorations are still worth doing. But we should be doing them for the right reasons and in the right ways. Our restorations should be a lot more about science, and perhaps a little bit of art—and a lot less about business.

 

Putting Bees in a Blender to Save Them

Three spotted Digger Bee Habropoda excellens (Photo: Sam Droege/USGS)

If you like food, you had better like pollinators, because you eat their work. Bees, hoverflies, butterflies, and other pollinators are essential to the production of 60 percent of crop species and 35 percent of total crop production. Apart from putting food on our tables, their services are worth about $200 billion a year worldwide. And the problem for farmers, conservationists, and food lovers alike is that pollinator populations are collapsing everywhere. They’re under assault from pesticides, pollution, habitat loss, and climate change, among other factors.

To fix the pollinator crisis, researchers need to know which species are declining, and under what circumstances. But that’s generally a slow, costly, cumbersome process, requiring highly trained taxonomists to prepare a species and identify it under a microscope. It can take years to get the results—and there aren’t enough taxonomists to do the job, in any case. So instead of studying them in minute detail, some researchers now think mashing pollinators into a soup may be

a better way to save them.

Panama’s Megalopta genalis (Photo: Sam Droege/USGS)

Writing in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution, a team of researchers from China and the United Kingdom described their pilot study to rapidly identify bee species from samples collected around southern England. The collecting itself was a low-tech affair, using blue, yellow, and red plastic bowls filled with soapy water. (They’re called pan traps.) The colors attract bees and other insects, which then become caught in the soapy water.

For their analysis, the scientists blended the samples into DNA soup and ran it through a sequencer, generating millions of short DNA sequences. Computers then flipped through a reference database of mitochondrial genomes (mitochondria are a cell’s energy factory and carry their own genomes) to match the DNA-soup sequences to telltale sequences in the mitochondria of particular bee species. In the proof-of-concept test, this method sorted 204 samples into 33 species. Instead of years, said coauthor Douglas Yu, the process can take just a few months.

Both the United States and the United Kingdom are now debating how and whether to establish a monitoring program to track pollinator decline. According to a 2012 analysis, a realistic regional or national program would require sampling 200 sites every other week in the first year, and again in year five. That would yield an estimated 1.3 million insect specimens, and including the slow business of getting them identified, it would cost upwards of $2 million. But this assumes a “work ethic and an environment like what you’d see in a Foxconn electronics factory,” said Yu, an ecologist at the University of East Anglia and China’s Kunming Institute of Zoology.  Moreover, the five-year interval would be useful “if a species is dropping like a stone” but not much good at detecting a more gradual decline—or at least not in time to do much about it

Australia’s On and Off Bee Paracolletes species (Photo: Sam Droege/USGS)

Yu already relies on a variant of the “bee soup” technique—using “leech soup” instead—for a study in Southeast Asia. He sequences blood from leeches as a low-cost way to monitor the mammal populations on which they have been feeding.

He believes the bee counterpart could become a standard tool in the not-too-distant future for farmers and park managers to monitor pollinator populations on a regular basis, much as they they now monitor rainfall.

They might even skip the pan traps, he said, and simply drive around the property with sticky tape on the grill. The driver would then simply remove the day’s insect collection, put it in preservative, and ship it off for analysis. The data, shipped back by email, could verify that a farmer is meeting the requirements in the environmental incentive programs now available in the United Kingdom. They could also clue farmers in when they need to change their regimen to get better results.

The proposed “metogenomic monitoring” method doesn’t rely on the conventional PCR (polymerase chain reaction) technique, which takes a small section of DNA and amplifies it for analysis. Instead, it sequences the raw DNA in a batch. That makes it possible to determine how often a particular species appears in the batch, a good indicator of how large a population survives in the wild. It also leaves open the possibility of going back to the same results later to identify other species—hoverflies, for instance, or beetles. According to Yu, you could even detect species of mites—a factor in honeybee decline—or bacteria types. “You could go back and say, ‘We think a virus entered the population at this point.’ So the data gets more and more valuable.”

Asked to comment on the new study, Sam Droege, a bee taxonomist and coauthor of the new book Bees: An Up-Close Look at Pollinators Around the World, predicted that “our ability to process, monitor, and accurately ID bees (and other insects) will soon be orders of magnitude greater than we have now, allowing surveys and monitoring to generate insights completely opaque to us now. In such samples are not only bees but wasps, beetles, skippers, and flies that all play important but lesser roles in overall pollination but are almost uniformly ignored, primarily due to identification problems.”

So far, the only objection to the “bee soup” technique is that it entails killing bees. But so does every other technique of properly identifying them—and identifying them is the only way to monitor their well-being. The ultimate result should be to increase pollinator populations and get them back to work on farms and in gardens everywhere.

 

The Postcard Poems

(Illustration: Ping Shu)

MY father was a great believer in the Postal Service, and when his grandchildren were young, his postcards to them arrived almost daily. They were plain white postcards, never the photo variety, so there was plenty of room to write on both sides, and from edge to edge. What he wrote was almost always nonsense verse, with titles like “The Mother of All French Fries,” and “Reasons to Sneeze.”

I keep them, now that my father is gone and my children are grown, in a couple of file boxes under a bed and pull them out occasionally to remind myself of that time. They have almost nothing to do with reality, and yet they are the reality that survives. On a postcard from 1985, my oldest child is still a 2-year-old hunting for jelly beans with his entourage:

Jamie Conniff took a ride

With six monkeys by his side,

Fourteen leopards out ahead,

Sharp of fang with eyes of red…

My youngest, from a 1997 postcard, is still 8 years old and birdlike:

Clare paints her hair to look like wings

Because that lets her fly

Over the hills at break of day

Into the by-and-by

Animals were my father’s usual theme, as they are in many verses and stories for children. He wrote about monarch butterflies, singing mice, spitting camels, cats and dogs, a living conch picked up on the beach and tossed back into the water (“Two passing gulls that saw it hissed, / Went diving for it, but they missed”), and the occasional snow leopard. Animals are, of course, a natural topic in childhood, when we are sorting out big questions about what we are, what we should or shouldn’t eat, what might possibly eat us, and of course what might be lurking under the bed to do so at this moment. For Ben, age 6, my father wrote:

Bears don’t scare me!

I’m too big:

I make noises like a pig!

I make noises like an owl:

You should hear me hoot and howl!

But the power of animals to inspire feelings of strangeness, wonder and delight had somehow not faded for my father, any more than it had for his grandchildren. Or maybe he was simply recovering a natural sense of awe after the long forgetfulness of his working life. At times he relived his own childhood fears — for instance, in a poem about a vicious chow dog the family kept (“Minsing’s evil yellow eye / Rolled from sky to earth to sky”).

My father had taught writing to college students, inculcating them in “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White, with its emphasis on plain language, orderliness, short, simple sentences and a close regard for the reader’s perspective. His mantra was “Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite,” and the program he ran had the unfortunately Orwellian name “Prose Control.” But in retirement, he seemed to chuck all that, and cram the page with whatever happened to wing through his mind at the moment. He wrote not as James C. G. Conniff, ponderous and professorial, but as JimBaba, crackpot elder extraordinaire.

As a writer myself, still firmly in the realm of Strunk and White, I sometimes envied his freewheeling disdain for prose control. But it could also be disconcerting. His children’s verse often veered into bizarre literary or political territory. It was hard to explain to my daughter, Clare, why her stuffed bear would have a habit of eating “its weight in honey combs / And books of Seamus Heaney’s poems.” Likewise,

Boomba-Zoomba went to sea

In a waterlogged snot-green boat

(He had no choice — he’d been reading Joyce),

And he took along a goat.

I sometimes suggested edits to my father, little tweaks that might save the gems and omit the outright lunacy. “Do you think a 3-year-old will get that reference to Edwin Meese?” I wondered mildly. (Of the man who was then the United States attorney general, my father had written, “Ronald Reagan pulls his strings / Mousey Meesey dances, sings.”) “And, um, what about this line urging Ben to ‘give him a good one with your gat’?” (I looked it up. “Gat, noun: Handgun.”) “Maybe ‘bat’ would be more Ben’s style?” And so much less of a felony.

He always professed willingness to be edited. He had been a published poet as a young man, and he could recite many great poems from memory. At his funeral his former students — not English scholars but aging accountants, journalists, municipal clerks — remarked that lines of Milton or Keats that he had had them memorize still surfaced decades later in their minds. Poetry was the lost ambition of his youth.

In his 80s, he hoped that I would salvage his better self and make these poems publishable. I wanted to do so, because there were times when they lit up with the charm and zaniness of Roald Dahl or Edward Lear. But then I would point out a line or two in need of minor editing and he would immediately write a whole new poem from that point. “No, no, it’s just those two lines. The rest of it is fine,” I’d say. “O.K.,” he’d agree, and promptly unleash another torrent of verse, until I thought that maybe it was time to get back to my other work.

Often the poems went on too long, or made too little sense, and they were also overwhelming in their abundance, piling up like leaves in the corners of cabinets, sometimes unread. The postcards still turn up unexpectedly here and there around the house:

I like to watch the frogs bounce by;

They’re bulgy-eyed and jumpy.

The young are green as a parrot’s wing

While the old are green but grumpy.

I file them away. In their time, they gave the writer and his readership the enduring pleasure of words, rhythm and rhyme, and of animals in all their wonder. The postcard poems also reminded my children that a somewhat odd grandparent, somewhere at the other end of the mailbox, loved them dearly. And that is enough.

Waiter! Why Aren’t There Any Insects in My Salad?

Cricket mealworm scampi. Yum. (Photo: Camren Brantley-Rios)

Years ago in a South American rainforest, the researcher I was visiting announced with something like joy that he had just found some palm beetle grubs. They were fat, yellow, and the length of my fingers, and when we sautéed them with garlic in a frying pan, the skins took on a lovely al dente chewiness around the creamy interiors. They were delicious—and I ate just one.

Would they have gone down smoother if the researcher had called them “rainforest baked brie” instead, or maybe “Amazon croquetas”? That’s one idea put forward by Matan Shelomi, an American entomologist at the Max Planck Institute of Chemical Ecology, in a new article titled “Why We Still Don’t Eat Insects.”  Writing in the journal Trends in Food Science & Technology, Shelomi chronicles 130 years of clumsy marketing and entomological un-trendiness, ever since an eccentric British author named Vincent Holt first introduced nose-wrinkling Western society to what’s come to be termed “entomophagy” in his 1885 book Why Not Eat Insects?Shelomi points out that the word entomophagy itself is a lousy place to begin. It’s like saying “decapophagy” (a made-up word) when you mean “Let’s go eat some crab rolls.” Better even

to avoid the word “insects,” he suggests. Cicadas, for instance, might be “more easily marketed with clever euphemisms like ‘land shrimp’ or ‘tree lobster.’ ”A larger problem, Shelomi writes, is that people have always promoted eating insects for ideological reasons. “Much of the drive for entomophagy is based on the idea that producing insects requires fewer resources (land area, labor, water, etc.) than producing meat, while still providing the same nutrition,” he writes. But that argument doesn’t even stand up on its own terms, because a vegetarian or vegan diet would be even greener (and with a lower yuck factor). “Ecological footprint” is a worthy idea. But factors like taste, convenience, and status are more likely to motivate consumers to drop a product into their shopping cart.

And entomologists are frequently clueless about status. It’s why they eagerly show up to espouse insect-eating on radio shows with themes like “people with bizarre eating habits” or on Fear Factor-style reality shows that emphasize the grossness of eating raw insects. They “get played for a sideshow,” says Shelomi, and that is seldom a path to marketing glory.

Insect fairs and other events where people can taste insect-based food generally offer a more positive experience, and they now take place on an almost weekly basis somewhere in the United States. But they generally proceed on the assumption that giving people the chance to try insects just once will lead them to start eating insects more regularly. In reality, that first chance is typically the last, because “convenient, inexpensive sources of insects are simply not available in the West.”

If you really want people to start eating insects, says Shelomi, you should start by persuading supermarkets to put “bags of cricket meal, bottles of termite oil, or loaves of insect flour bread” on their shelves, with recipes, “making them available for consumers to try on their own time in their own homes on their own terms.” Instead of pushing insects as alternatives to meat, a failed strategy, promoters should position them as alternatives to nuts, which they already resemble “in their texture, macronutrient content, and even flavor.”

It may be hard to imagine the typical consumer livening up salads or baked goods with a sprinkling of insects or putting out fried insects instead of cocktail nuts at a party. But Shelomi is already thinking about product placement. He envisions upper-class characters in British sitcoms “casually munching on cricket chips” or a Hollywood romantic drama taking place during an insect harvesting party. (Think Splendor in the Cicada Beds.

And this raises the question of why, after all, entomologists care so much about getting the animals they spend their lives studying onto other peoples’ dinner plates. “You don’t hear ornithologists urging people to go out and eat English sparrows, do you?” I asked Shelomi in a Skype interview.

“If you eat something, you’re clearly not afraid of it,” he said. “We want to get people over their fear of insects. So I think a lot of the entomophagy is—sure—the sustainability thing, but also, insects can be fun, they can be cute, they can be adorable. Insects are awesome, and now they can be awesomely delicious too.”

Marketing geniuses of America, this is your moment. The mealworms and bush crickets are ready for their close-up.

 

A Tale of Pooters & Malaise

This is a book review I wrote for yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:

Anyone who spends time in the field with people who study insects is likely to encounter the “malaise trap,” a tent-like device with a sloping ridge. Insects have a tendency to escape by moving upward, and this trap ingeniously encourages them to do so, into a collecting jar at the top. I always assumed the name “malaise” referred to the dreamy idleness of the collectors who rely on such an efficient device.

In his curious book “The Fly Trap,” Swedish journalist, translator and entomological enthusiast Fredrik Sjöberg corrects my mistake: The name comes from the inventor of the device, a peripatetic 20th century sawfly specialist named René Malaise. Mr. Sjöberg’s entertaining memoir is partly about his own unsuccessful attempts to write a biography of Malaise, partly about life on Runmarö Island in the Stockholm archipelago, where the author lives and Malaise sometimes visited, and mostly about Mr. Sjöberg’s own obsession with a group of insects called hoverflies.

The writing is whimsical, digressive and pleasingly devoid of anything too weighty or purposeful. Mr. Sjöberg attempts to pass off the hoverflies early on as “only props,” a means to write “about the art and sometimes the bliss of limitation.” But clearly they have a hold on him. Hoverflies are a worldwide family of insects, known for pollinating plants, attacking agricultural pests and achieving a magnificent degree of mimicry, mostly of wasps and bees. They are worthy of enthusiasm. For his part, the author, using a net, a tube-and-bottle device called a pooter, and a mega-Malaise—“a real monster,” of which he is inordinately proud—has collected 202 species on his island of just six square miles, and solved a puzzle or two that have eluded other specialists in the field.

“The Fly Trap” fits into a surprisingly rich genre of great and idiosyncratic writing about insects—from “The Insect World of J. Henri Fabre,” a 1991 collection of writings by a 19th-century French entomologist and “Life on a Little Known Planet” (1966) by Howard Ensign Evans, to recent offerings like “For Love of Insects” (2005) by Thomas Eisner.

Why the obsession with insects? Mr. Sjöberg toys with the idea that studying insects provides an occasion for “exercising slowness,” a means of escape from the “apparently universal, self-generating acceleration” of our technological world. This explanation makes the summer vacationers who pester him about his collecting practically quiver with delight. So Mr. Sjöberg promptly demolishes the idea: “If nothing else, the trend towards more and more, faster and faster, is preferable to its opposite because you can always get off an express train but there’s no good way to speed up a donkey caravan.”

In the same iconoclastic spirit, he takes a swipe a environmental pessimists as “gentle self-flagellants who hunker down beside ill-smelling compost piles” and always glow slightly “in the cosy darkness of approaching apocalypse.” He decides instead that his hoverfly obsession has to do with “exercising concentration. A focus so intense that I forget myself.”

He doesn’t do anything quite so predictable as suggesting that readers should step off the train, or at least notice the natural world whipping past out the window. But his knowledge of the succession of flowers, the insects they attract and the shifting colors of springtime on his island is likely at the very least to induce envy among commuters on the 5:22 to Ronkonkoma (or pretty much anywhere else): “Maple blossoms are greenish yellow, and the tender leaves a yellowish green—and not the other way around. From a distance, the mix of these two tones creates a third so beautiful that the language lacks a word to describe it . . . Just a week, maybe two, and then the alders burst into leaf in deadly earnest. I wish so profoundly that everyone knew.”

At times, the writing can be too whimsical. Mr. Sjöberg brings off the literary feat of making the reader care how many necrophagous insects might turn up on a dead badger (versus the 130 beetle species collected from a dead cat), but then neglects to deliver the answer. Mr. Sjöberg: the world wants to know!

His exegesis of a mystifying passage in the Bible is brilliant but also insufficient. It’s the one (Judges 14: 8-9) where Samson finds honeybees swarming in the carcass of a lion and scoops up the honey to eat and to share with his family. The conventional interpretation treats the honeybees as just an instance of the myth that insects could generate spontaneously from rotting meat. Mr. Sjöberg concludes instead that the carcass was infested with bee mimics, not bees, specifically the hoverflies of the species Eristalis tenax, which frequent carrion. But just as the reader cries “Aha!” the question arises: Dear God, then what was Samson eating? Mr. Sjöberg answers airily that the honey was just “one more in a long line of tedious later additions” to the Bible and one must hope that he is right.

What about René Malaise? He passes in and out of the narrative, now collecting in Kamchatka, now in northeastern Burma, always a bit of a ghost. On several of these expeditions, he traveled with adventurous and alluring women, who somehow managed to leave him out of the books they wrote afterwards. Perhaps they did not know what to say, other than that on one such trip, his ingenious trap raked in 100,000 insect specimens, many of unknown species. In later life, Malaise also collected paintings, ostensibly by Old Masters.

Mr. Sjöberg, upon learning this, shows up at an auction in Stockholm and buys one of them, paying far more than he can afford: “I was now the owner of a copy of a Rembrandt forgery. A small one. Probably stolen,” and yet once owned by the elusive Malaise. It is a sort of bookend to a house in southeast Sweden Mr. Sjöberg has earlier come close to purchasing in the book because the dilapidated two-seater outhouse in back was once owned by a forgotten poet named Esaias Tegnér.

Here is my theory: Insects attract so much great writing because eccentricity,​ close attention to detail and a heightened sense of the absurd are almost prerequisites in the field. Somehow in this book it all hangs together, and even takes wing.

 

Mr. Conniff’s latest book, “House of Lost Worlds​​,” is due out in spring 2016.​