“Let’s see how they fire,” I say.
“Great!” Tom answers, in a tone of voice that usually goes with gleeful rubbing of the hands.
We take a pan from the sink, wet it with iodine, starch, and a little hydrochloric acid, and place a piece of filter paper on top. Carrying it back to the lab table, Tom sets it down near an alcohol burner and arranges a small metal girder low over the paper. When he asks me to choose a “good-tempered” beetle from the sand pits, by which he means one that’s reasonably docile but not ill, I make several halfhearted pounces. At last I sneak up on one, corralling it between thumb and forefinger. But darting and swerving are its forte, and it wriggles free, runs up my arm, spins around inside my elbow, and races toward the wrist. Catching it with my free hand, I hold it gently by the rim, as if it were a gem I was about to set into a bevel. My eyes wrinkle again as it tickles me with its legs. There is nothing to itch. It’s just that it’s making such fine nerves dance in my fingers. I can feel its mandibles gnawing at me, but they are far too tiny to break the skin. These new sensations are more delicate than any I have known with animals, and it takes a few Zen-like minutes to divine what barely detectable pressure will hold a beetle secure without pinching or crushing it. At this level, where all the sensations are new, I find it best to let my senses teach themselves. Soon I get the delicate knack of handling the fast, vulnerable, and small, and I turn the beetle around, exposing its rump. Then I melt a little wax over a flame so pure it looks colorless, drop a warm ball of wax onto the beetle’s shell, and attach it to the aluminum girder. Lowering the beetle until its legs touch the paper, I let it rest there a moment. Then I take a pair of watchmaker’s forceps, reach for its left rear leg, and lightly pinch the thigh. Pop! Out of a tiny cloud of smoke streaks a splatter of chemicals. Next, I pinch the thigh on its right front leg and pop!, it shoots fast in the opposite direction, leaving another telltale trail. Its accuracy is amazing, as is its ability to reload and fire within milliseconds. The noise isn’t quite the sound of a cork popping, but damper and lower pitched, “like a gunshot behind a wall,” Tom says, and I trust this description. His early years were filled with the unforgettable sounds of gunfire, and with uniforms and Nazis.
“Berlin in the thirties must have been frightening,” I say as I reach for another leg. “Your father was Jewish?”
“Yes. A chemist. My mother a painter. And let me tell you, in the twenties, they found the Berlin of Kandinsky, Klee, and Reinhardt an exciting place. There were four different opera houses. My mother, an extraordinarily beautiful woman, rejoiced in her cre ativity. If she didn’t have any art, she would pick up stones and make things out of them, or pick up shells. She always saw the way things could be converted into something artistic. My father was a chemist, all right, but his hobby was making perfume. I remember he made a very good imitation of 4711 cologne, and a violet perfume for my mother. But he also made mouthwash, tooth powder, a first-aid ointment, all sorts of smells and lotions. As a chemist, he was more of a theoretician than anything. His Ph.D. thesis was “How to Get Gold out of Sea water.” Can you imagine? I mean, this was Germany’s effort to pay the Versailles debt, and it was a classified project. Anyway, his job was to see if it was feasible to make gold out of seawater. The answer was no, but he traveled throughout the world, sampling seawater and doing extractions. And then, in the pharmaceutical business, he became involved with producing tonics, a tanning agent, curative ointments for cuts and sores, chewable vitamins for kids (much later, when he moved the family to the United States, he took out a patent for chewable vitamins).”
By now, the indicator paper is covered with what looks like a compass rose, with the tethered beetle at its center. Once more I touch a leg, and tiny droplets of spray arc over the paper. This time there’s a click-clack (rather than the usual puff or uncorking sound) from the insect’s repeatedly rapid firing.
As we gently unstick the beetle and return it to its bin, Tom looks distracted by memory. “What an exciting era my parents lived in,” he says. “Society was a free-for-all. Recovering from the revolution, Berlin enjoyed the sort of chaos that has a way of bringing out the original in people, because anything that’s organized is unappealing. There were hundreds of different political organizations, all struggling for identity, and a great fever to be individual, to be unusual.”
“It must have been hard for them to leave.”
“Hitler came in in early April, and we left at the end of April. I was not quite three, my sister six. Off we went to Spain, with nothing, a couple of suitcases. My father went from one pharmaceutical company to the next looking for a job. At last he found one, and we rented a house in Barcelona. I can still remember Julia, a wonderful maid with a big bosom on which I used to rest my head. I just loved that, not knowing that this was the beginning of discovering sexuality. She must have been in her late twenties, a tremendous flirt. The policemen with their ornate helmets used to stop by outside, and she would flirt with them through the iron grille in the windows. She smelled like lavender, and would sneak me chocolate and other treasures.
“Then the Spanish Civil War came. Those are really traumatic memories. One day when I was seven, I was sitting in the sandbox and heard an incredible noise—a series of explosions. They were taking streetcars and filling them with dynamite and rolling them down the hill. Some apartment buildings and churches were burning. I flew out of the sandbox and ran from the racket. Suddenly Spain blew up. The Spaniards, who are capable of the greatest expressions of human warmth, can also inflict the most horrendous tortures on one another. There were so many factions at the time that it was dangerous to go out. If you made the wrong salute to the wrong truck or boat, you were in trouble. You had to know the Communist salute, the anarchist salute, and so forth. I was too old by then to see any romance in all the commotion; I was terrified. We fled Spain on a freighter, which was full of cattle infected with sleeping sickness. Mutilated nuns were on board. The boat was crammed with people, and my sister and I slept covered up by half a dozen fox terriers inside the coiled anchor chain. We only sailed for one day, but that’s a long time to children. We thought it was a great adventure. Then we got to Marseilles and stayed with friends. We did some crazy things, like smuggling in other children. The world was in so much turmoil. It was total confusion. Finally, we got to Paris and found an apartment. My father rented a piano, which was a great source of strength.”
“Was he a good pianist?”
“Well, he was an enthusiastic pianist. I started taking piano lessons, which I loved. But we didn’t stay in Paris long, only about half a year. I remember how, in school, the other kids called me a dirty Nazi because I was a German refugee. We could smell World War Two. So we decided to head for South America, where my father felt he could start from scratch. But it wasn’t easy to get a visa; my father and I went to the Brazilian consulate every day and lined up with hundreds of people. One day lightning struck the building next door. There was a tremendous crash, and I started screaming at the top of my lungs. I was the only kid there. A door opened—one of those doors that everyone was praying would open for them—and a man came out and asked why I was crying. My father told him about the lightning. The man sat me on his knee and patted me and told me not to cry. My father explained that we were urgently trying to get to South America, and the man felt sympathy for us and gave us a visa. Life was that sort of lottery. So we went to Brazil and, with further complications, made our way to Uruguay.”
Tom stayed in Uruguay from the age of seven until he was seventeen, ten crucial years, during which he discovered puberty and Brahms. Then the family moved yet again, this time to the United States. One key to his nature may be that he’s an immigrant, driven by the need to find a place for himself, a sense of address. Seeking identity, immigrants often lead a split life—trying to succeed in what is for them a more forbidding environment than it is for the native, but also drawing upon an alien childhood, whose experiences were formative. Camus on
ce said that the whole of a person’s artistic expression is the attempt to recapture through art those two or three images in the presence of which his soul first opened.
As he removes the beetle, it touches the paper and leaves a mark resembling the Chinese character for “evening.” When bombardier beetles fire, they aim at the body part being pestered and invariably bathe themselves in poison. Why don’t they suffer from it? Scientists don’t know. Another bombardier beetle, dosed by mistake, will run off but not be hurt.
“How many times can he fire?” I ask.
“Oh, twenty or thirty. Then it takes a couple of days to reload a fifth of that.”
“What happens in the meantime?” I have visions of a besieged beetle suddenly discovering its revolver is empty.
“It’s in trouble. But one of the great things about bombardiers is that they rarely have to shoot in succession. The first discharge coats them with chemical, and it’s repellent. I’ve run experiments, for example, where I put bombardiers together, let them bathe in their own defensive secretions, and then put them in a swarm of ants. The ants moved around them, but avoided touching them.”
Although it may be a little odd to think of it as a form of armor, smell plays many crucial roles in an insect’s life. It’s similar to a telephone wire over which different kinds of messages can flow: threat, invitation, courtship; the whereabouts of food; a call to arms; a password; a death knell; the trail home.
“Why do they have such long necks?”
“That’s not a neck,” Tom says. “Actually, it’s part of the thorax. All insects have a simple body structure, and this beetle is no exception. Let me give you the two-bit tour of an insect. First of all, insects are bilaterally symmetrical—that is, they have the same number of legs, eyes, et cetera, on each side. What does that tell us? That they move in one direction. If you had to design such an animal, where would you put the sense receptors? Obviously, on the body part that meets the conditions first. So the eyes, mouth, and antennae are all on the head. Then you’ve got the thorax, which is little more than a box of muscles, nothing, really, but a motor for the appendages. The gut runs through the thorax, weaving among the muscles. The wings are also on the thorax—and, by the way, these beetles are good fliers. The abdomen is this large area here,” he says, running his fingertip over the widest part of the beetle. “An abdomen in a beetle—and in ourselves—is a part of the body that’s unencumbered by appendages and therefore can undergo a certain amount of distention. It needs to house the expanding gonads, fertile eggs, testes, sperm packages, as well as to engorge with food. So that’s the insect design. Very successful. With that combination of brain, gut, and gonads, what have you got?” He pauses dramatically. “Either an insect or the average male.”
Life’s theater appeals to Tom, who has a rare talent for finding a story and telling it. If you are a human physiologist, there are just so many topics to explore, just so many glands, just so many nerve centers, just so many things that can go wrong with the human body. Your focus will be relatively narrow. But, if you are one of the few researchers traveling across the almost unlimited wilderness of insect diversity—tens of millions of species, the great majority of which do not even have a scientific name—you tend to move from one pinpoint puzzle to another.
“The way Tom works,” his best friend, E. O. Wilson, said one day when we sat in his office at Harvard, eating shards of Rainforest Crunch, “is that he goes into the field, sees an interesting-looking insect, or a familiar insect doing something unusual, and studies it with a wide range of paraphernalia—cameras, preliminary chemical tests, observation chambers—and finds out what it’s doing, why it’s unusual, where it fits in. He develops it as a story; he brings it back to the laboratory.” As a renowned ant specialist and the father of sociobiology—a field that explores the biological basis for social customs, mores, and habits—Wilson knows intimately what it takes to prevail in science. “Then he turns to a collaborator in chemistry who can work out the natural-products chemistry of that species—Tom grasped years ago that most of what insects do is chemical. They communicate chemically, they defend themselves chemically—they are magnificent chemical factories. In this way, Tom treats his subjects not just as visible objects with fascinating behaviors but as chemical wonders.”
Once an insect yields its secret, Tom is likely to move on to the next mystery. Because there are only a handful of investigators with his drive and ability exploring the hordes of insect species that exist, that is probably a good strategy. You’d think this would continue indefinitely, that in a Borgesian way he would move through an infinite library of stories and at the end hold the same small lamp he started out with. But over the years what he learned formed patterns and he began to tie the stories together, producing some of the first principles of chemical ecology.
“The result of all of this,” Wilson said thoughtfully, “is that Tom is a pointillist. He’s a person who daubs points of light on a broad canvas, which at first seems to be a random splattering of bright pigment but, as more and more pieces fill in, reveals an extremely interesting picture of a little-known part of the living world.”
It is nearly ten o’clock when we finish with the bombardier beetles, put them back under their silver tents, and lock the lab up for the night. When we step outside into the dark, we instinctively turn and look back at the building, still, for once, and otherworldly in its carapace of light.
Packing for a trip to the Florida scrublands, a unique and endangered habitat where rare insects dwell, I let my thoughts wander over “biodiversity,” a notion that dominates Eisner’s life and career. Like many environmentalists, including his friend Wilson, he has evolved a bold insight about the biological future of the planet. What it boils down to is a living kaleidoscope, in which all the pieces can change and link up in many different ways. Why does biodiversity have so much to do with insects? Most people aren’t much concerned about ants and flies and may even think the world would be improved if more insects went extinct. But insects aerate the soil, clean up decay, help in pollination, produce foods for us (such as honey), and teach us about genetics and chemistry. A gene is a terrible thing to waste. Remedial creation isn’t possible. So we need the malaria mosquito, the voracious sand flea, the Lyme tick, and all their cousins.
It’s hard for Tom to explain the concept of biodiversity to people, let alone the important role that insects play. One strategy that seems to work well is to appeal to plain, old-fashioned human greed. Drug companies help protect some rain forests because of the medicinal plants there; but Tom has begun proving that there are medicinal insects, too. Obsessed with sex, poison, and death, insects live like lilliputian Lucrezia Borgias and Machiavellis, wielding sophisticated weapons, concocting lethal potions, refining aphrodisiacs. Their scourge or weaponry sometimes works as a tonic for us. As a direct result of Tom’s work, Merck and Company has agreed to protect the rich Costa Rican rain forest for “chemical prospecting”—a conservation coup. Of course, he first has to prove that there’s an orient of treasures to be found among insects. Much of Tom’s voyaging to the land of the small takes place at Archbold Biological Station, near Lake Placid in South Central Florida. I decide to join him on his annual pilgrimage, and fly down to Fort Myers one clear cold day in February.
After driving two hours northeast, past one-story towns with romantic names—Venus, La Belle, Arcadia—I turn at the Archbold Station sign and drive down a gauntlet of trees to a large clearing. There I find a main building, which houses a dining hall, two dormitories, a suite of lounges and offices, and four research laboratories. A huge straggler fig covers the walls, framing the doors and windows. The brick and glass are only temporary, it implies; soon enough everything will return to nature. Flanked by a grass-tufted tennis court and a garage filled with Land Rovers, the main building faces a semicircle of cottages tucked in the woods. At the office, a secretary points me in the direction of the Eisners’ cottage—Number 2, next to the watertow
er—and I soon see it, surrounded by pink azalea bushes. Two bicycles (one male, one female) nestle together under one of the gray-and-white, wasp-patrolled awnings. Organ music pours across the screened porch. I let myself in and find Tom in the parlor, sitting at an electronic keyboard, playing Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in F Major, with Maria poised beside him, turning the pages. A slender woman with short hair, large blue eyes, and delicate skin, she is wearing a pink-checked shirt and khaki trousers. Spotting me at the door, she touches Tom lightly on the shoulder, but it’s enough to startle him from his reverie. His hands pause over the keys for a moment as he returns from a different world. Then we greet one another and swap news about friends. They show me the latest snapshots of their children and grandchildren and give me a glimpse of their cottage, the whole back half of which is a laboratory dominated by high-power microscopes, a hive of vials, and insect and plant specimens. Tom usually takes an evening walk, since many insects become active at night, and I decide to join him. A flashlight on a headband frees the hands for work; looking like coal miners or spelunkers, we set out to stroll through the caverns of twilight.
The evening is full of chirping crickets and the occasional saxophone melody of a bird. But humans are poor connoisseurs of insect song, which can be too high, too fast, too percussive for us to hear. It helps a little to picture how a cricket “sings,” by moving a file on one wing over a ridged scraper on the other. It’s similar to a guiro, the serrated gourd scraped with a stick that one finds in a mariachi band. “The poetry of earth is never dead,” John Keats begins one of his loveliest sonnets, referring to the sounds made by cricket and grasshopper. Although crickets have several songs, the loudest and longest are made by randy males hoping to mate. Sur rounded by the sexual yearning of countless crickets, we stroll down a sandy road, under a full, mother-of-pearl-colored moon. When darkness falls, the woods feel closer, and in the absence of reassuring cues, the mind endows the shadows with menace: rattlesnakes, scorpions, wild boars. A fast whoosh-plod-whoosh-plod off to our left is probably one of the white-tailed deer that share the station. My flashlight beam picks up deep cloven-hoof tracks in the sand, and we follow them a short way, until they disappear in the brush. It’s a little like surgery, walking through the night world, assuming what must be where, using instruments to help feel your way along. A green star blinks in a tree.