Entomology is, apparently, dangerous work. In the 1950s, apparently, an insect researcher (a human entomologist, not an insectoid scientist) by the name of Paul Hurd went to work in Point Barrow, Alaska with a faulty aspirator (that’s a sort of siphon operated by the researcher’s own mouth), which resulted some months later in “four major groups of insects (Coleoptera, Colembola, Diptera, Hymenoptera)” passing out through his nostrils.
In his write-up in Science magazine, the author recommends that “those persons who utilize this apparatus so modify it that the flow of air will not be toward the operator’s mouth” (815).
This is just one of the fascinating articles I promised myself I’d look up after I finished Richard Conniff’s Swimming with Piranhas on the flight home from New York yesterday. While I won’t have a full review ready for some time, here are some other things that caught my attention while reading this fascinating collection of essays:
Conniff went to interview Justin O. Schmidt, originator of the Justin Schmidt Pain Index, and his essay on that episode contains the following words of wisdom:
Contrary to myth, pinching out the stinger [after a honeybee stings you] doesn’t cause it to inject more venom. So don’t waste time looking for a credit card to scrape it out: just get the damned thing out as quickly as possible. The amount of venom injected depends entirely on how long it’s stuck in your skin.
That’s fine as far as it goes, but the really important bit is what comes next:
In addition, the barb contains an alarm pheromone, which calls in other bees and incites them to sting too.
Wow! You really do want to get that stinger out as fast as you can!
Another essay features Brian Fisher, author of the recent field guide* to the Ants of North America: A Guide to the Genera, who has revolutionized taxonomy by sending off collections of ants to be gene sequenced before spending years creating voucher specimens with pins, etc. E. O. Wilson, writing before June 1, one assumes, describes Fisher’s methods, according to Conniff, as
“industrial-strength taxonomy.” He means it as high praise. Fisher himself says he aspires to the time-and-efficiency thinking of a car manufacturer.**
Also in this essay about the world’s leading expert on ants, after Wilson and Hölldobler, of course, is the first mention of the capital of Madagascar. It comes on page 226 of the book. Conniff has written quite a bit about Madagascar already in this book. The third essay is about lemurs, more than 70 species of which are endemic to the island and nowhere else. Don’t think he hasn’t been holding the name of this city in reserve, for just this essay, some 150 pages later: the capital of Madagascar, we learn in the essay about ants is: Antananarivo.
One of the things I really like about Conniff’s book is that it is made up entirely of short essays, the perfect length to finish in the limited, fragmented time I seem to have available for reading these days.
One of the things I dislike about the book is that, I imagine in order to keep it affordable, there are no illustrations or photographs. Since most of the essays originated in one magazine or another, I’m sure there were photographs when they originally appeared. But since Conniff was part of expeditions from some heavy hitters in publishing (National Geographic, Discover magazine, the BBC, etc.), I’m sure permissions would have been a nightmare. So now what I have to do is find all the original articles.
Which brings me to the other thing I dislike about the book: Conniff doesn’t give the bibliographic information for the original essays in the collection. He does list the references he used for each article, and he does give the title of each magazine in which each article originally appeared (Smithsonian predominates), but he doesn’t list volume number, issue, or year of the original publication. That would have been helpful for me…
But those are minor quibbles; Conniff’s writing is engaging and informative, bringing some rather unlovely, or at least little loved, creatures into remarkably sympathetic focus. In fact, his writing is so good that I may never get around to an in-depth review of this book: I’ve already moved on to his 1996 Spineless Wonders, which arrived in the mail today!
*It’s hard to have a field guide for a group whose genera, let alone individual species, are sometimes difficult to distinguish without a dissecting microscope.
**We presume he means a solvent auto manufacturer.
1 thought on “By way of review: Conniff’s Swimming with Piranhas”