Small But Mighty
Black people, like people from all other cultures, have a diverse set of attitudes and ideas toward bugs. Some people may regard them as a nuisance or a threat, while others may regard them as intriguing and even environmentally beneficial.
Ants walking in the moonlight.
Bugs can be found mostly anywhere in nature: in the air, the ground, the grass, flowers, on water, and even within our man-made homes. Wherever they are, they have a purpose and a task to complete, and many HistoryMakers are fascinated by each insect's purpose or charm. Calvin Peet, for instance, is a professional golfer who spent a lot of time outside as a child. As an adult, he distinctly remembers the smells of pollen and the sounds of bees:
“Sometimes I could smell what we call the bumblebee field, where all the bees come to the flower, we go out there and catch them and put them in the jar.” Calvin Peet was then asked if he was ever stung by these bees, and he admits, “Oh, several times (laughter). And believe me, it hurts. So that's basically, you know, I would say what stands out most was, like I say, the bumblebee field was just a vacant lot right across the street from my house. So, you know, that's where we would hang out in the summertime and catch grasshoppers and so forth.”
A bee flying in a field of flowers.
Despite getting hurt, Peet had a curiosity that would make him love spending time with the bees in their floral field. Journalist Sonya Ross had that same amazement for insects. She would try capturing the beauty of insects with jars, wanting to preserve it forever. She had an admiration and respect for such creatures,
“I remember fireflies or lightning bugs, and we would hang outside in twilight and catch the lightning bugs. Sometimes we'd swat 'em with badminton racquets. But mostly I wanted to catch 'em in a jar and take 'em in the house so they could glow in my room. My grandmother [Mary Bell Jones Mariano] gave me an old mason jar with holes poked in the lid. And Adrienne Waller, who was my friend next door and the friend I've had longer than anybody, we would catch fireflies and put 'em in the jars. And then when they would die from either lack of oxygen or something like that, or just having a short insect lifespan, we did a bug cemetery between our two houses, and marked the graves with blades of grass that we stapled together into crosses (laughter).”
Fireflies flying around in a jar.
Shirley Anne Jackson, a university president and physicist, was the same way but took it a step further. Marveled by bees and wasps, she had a huge collection of them and would go to great lengths to satisfy her curiosity while still treating them humanely:
“Ah, we used to have these…hollyhocks in our backyard. And so I used to watch the bees fly into the flower, and I would be watching them, you know, sampling. And I wanted to study them more closely, but they would fly away, of course. And so I decided that I wanted to capture them…And I wanted to study them as live creatures. And so because of the nature of the hollyhock flower, it was easy to close the petals and pluck the flower and drop it into a mason jar or a mayonnaise jar and punch holes in it. And so I was just interested in questions - and I'm still like that - questions that tried to answer what would happen if there was a different diet and if one had an artificially produced diet, meaning sugar and so on, would that make these bees behave differently? If I put in the bumble bees with yellow jackets and wasps, who would emerge, and would they behave differently? And if I kept them in the dark or in a cool place, what would happen versus being in the light and a warmer place? So I used to keep them, you know, under our…back porch…So what I did was, the space under the porch was actually cemented over, and I washed it, I used to wash it every week with a hose. And I would, there were boards under the back porch that provided like shelving. And so I would keep the jars on these shelves under the back porch, and then I could sit there on the concrete and do my thing, look at them, examine them, write things up about them based on what I had fed them the day before…I would sit under that porch with these bees for a long time. I always tried to let them go though, before they died. So I had a kind of internal clock relative to, after having studied them for a while, relative to how long it would be before they would sort of slow down in this artificial environment.”
Bee loving a hollyhock flower.
Bumblebee in a glass jar.
Atmospheric scientist Vernon Morris was very interested in nature and bugs too. And just like Shirley Jackson, Morris would look at insects, not just with the intent to admire them but also to learn about bugs. In a science project, he went above and beyond in his exploration of bugs:
“I do remember a science project, middle school science project, which again was a challenge… So my project was to basically catch and characterize and mount as many insects as possible. And I remember the teacher being overwhelmed by the result, because I literally had hundreds of different insects. And you know, I just got swept up. So, I was digging for insects, and plus we were near the woods, you know. I was digging under trees and under stumps and carving things out. And every time I saw a bug I took it and characterized it…You'd mount it, you gotta say what it is. You know, you characterize it, you keep your little notebook. And so I had, I had literally hundreds of beetles and bugs and butterflies and moths. I caught everything. I went berserk (laughter). But it was good, because it fed my, you know, I wanted to get out. I could be out for hours, you know, in the woods, you know, mucking around.”
Little kids exploring the woods for bugs.
Physicist Warren Buck would bravely explore all kinds of nature, often not even knowing what everything was. This would sometimes put him in messy situations, but other times it would create interesting experiments for him to learn from:
“I always went to the water…So we had this creek and we found little tadpoles swimming around. So we went back and got some jars and dipped it into the creek and capped them off and brought them back. We're going to hatch some frogs. So we had this basement…and so we poured the jars into a big tub, one of those big, white porcelain tubs. And went away. We'd come back and check periodically and you know, they're still swimming around. And one day we opened up the basement door and there was mosquitoes all over the place (laughter). They weren't tadpoles, those were, those were mosquito larva. So we filled the whole house with mosquitoes (laughter)... But it was, you know it was learning - you learn. You learn the difference in tadpole and a mosquito larvae (laughter). A lot of times we would have a little animal zoo. We'd have this--we'd get--and this is the Cub Scouts' way. They would show us how to do this. We'd get some aspirin, get a little water, take an aspirin and crush it into the water at the bottom of a jar. And then you could get a bumblebee. And if it hits the aspirin, it drugs the bee. So we would then drug the bees and not leave them there long, cause you, you'll kill them if you do. So you stun them and we'd take them out and we'd make them walk tightropes. So we'd have these strings and the bees would walk along the tightrope cause they're still kind of stunned, they couldn't fly. And they'd walk right along the rope to the other side. So we had this zoo, we called it an insect zoo…”
Tadpoles
Mosquito larvae
Many of these HistoryMakers had this amusement and curiosity as children and it kind of faded as they grew up, but not for everyone! Physiologist Albert Crenshaw is a natural lover of bugs. Reflecting on his childhood, he says,
“I used to love bugs. I used to love watching bugs and watch them work, and I used to always want to try to get inside their head and see what they were thinking. So, bugs, and especially--I used to--this was a little bit cruel. I used to catch bugs and take them to spider webs and put them in there just to see how the spider comes out, and see how they wrap them up and what they do with them. But I was fascinated by bugs, yeah.”
And now that he’s older, he continues to be blown away by the abilities of insects like spiders and ants,
“Later on when I grew up, I became interested in taking photography with the spider webs. I didn't know where they came from, but then I--one day I was talking to somebody, and I realized--But, how spiders--how they protect, how they build this web and then they catch these bugs--and then how they come out and how they wrap it up and sometimes they save it for a little while. I mean, those kind of, that fascinated me. So, I don't know, I just like watching bugs. I still do. I can just get fascinated by it. If you take me somewhere and there's an ant farm or something like that--watching those little suckers working, and really focusing in on one of them, and seeing what they do--and you're realizing that…they can carry three times their body weight or something crazy like that. And you know, you just kind of, just get amazed, yeah.”
Spider on it’s web.
Robotics engineer James McLurkin also is consistently astonished by insects, so much so that he has pet ants. These ants play a role in his robotics research:
“So the insects…give you an existential proof of the fact that these systems do work, and they do solve these problems. And they do them in ways that are, sometimes surprising, sometimes unexpected. They use far less information than we think. They have less mobility, they make all these mistakes. They sometimes communicate in very subtle ways. They leverage tremendous variation between individuals to their best advantage. So all the ants don't make decisions…Some ants do some things, some ants do something else…So you have this natural smooth, you know, the temperature increases and the ants colony responds slowly. Then the temperature decreases, and they respond slowly as each individual worker gets to their different threshold. So you have all these, you know, honey bees, when they go out and find their new nest sites. They come back, and…they need is…a quorum to make a decision. They don't vote. It's not a majority thing. They need a certain number of bees to like something and then off they go. That seems to be the model. And so now, algorithmically, how are they doing this? …Now, it turns out they [ants] have solar compass. They know not only where the sun is, but they also have accurate clocks. They know what time it is, and they can now compute their compass angle based on the sun and their clock. I mean it's just like, whoa, really? And he's [a coworker] done experiments in the wild. He comes back to the lab. He's gotten down almost to the neurological, almost the neuronal level of where these information interests are, where they're storing the landmarks, and how they're doing the navigation. So that kind of…low-level stuff--I mean it's the same problems I have to solve with my robots.”
Strong ant lifting plant.
There are many kinds of insects with unique qualities and purposes, but most all seem to share one characteristic: their size. Insects tend to be very tiny in size. But this doesn’t mean they have a small effect on the world. Despite their size, insects possess great strength, power, and effectiveness beyond their apparent size. Whether they serve by assisting science, maintaining the balance in the ecosystem, or simply for admiration, insects are small but mighty - small but important. Just by existing, insects have a big impact on the world.
AMBASSADOR UPDATE:
This week, I am announcing the winners via the PVAMU HistoryMakers account and planning for the award ceremony in April. I am also starting to reach out to my staff members about continuing the use of the digital archive in their course curriculum and/or what they would like to change. I hope I get good feedback!
The @pvamu_historymaker post.
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