When I was 4 years old, I visited some relatives in Virginia and we took a trip to the Smithsonian Natural History Museum.
I don't remember a lot about it on that visit except for a giant taxidermied African Elephant at the entrance and an entire wall of
illuminated blue irridecent butterflies that I now know to have been Blue Morphos and related species. The memory of that dazzling
wall of butterflies stuck with me. As I got a little older, maybe 6 or 7, I expressed interest in insect collecting, and my
grandmother showed me a small collection that someone had given her consisting of various types of insects all pinned to a
piece of styrofoam. I asked how this was done and was given a quick explanation of They are caught in jars and they die
.
Seemed pretty simple to me. I was also given a butterfly net constructed from the wooden handle of and old automotive snow brush,
a coat hanger, and sewn mesh fabric from my father who said that it had been his when he was a kid. I caught things occasionally,
but always released them. I had an Audobon butterfly coloring book that I colored to the best of my abilities according to the guide
given on the inside of the covers and read about each one.
When I was 8 however, I was wondering around by myself on a camping trip and spotted a beautiful, somewhat large green and black
butterfly that to this day I swear was an out of typical range Malachite. I ran back to the campsite and found a pickle jar with one
left. I gave the pickle to my mother, dumped out the liquid and ran off with the jar back to the site I had seen the butterfly. It was
still there, sunning itself in a clearing! I didn't have the net, so I carefully got it into the jar, closed the lid and walked back
admiring my prize. I sat it on the picnic table and watched it. It wasn't dying. (I didn't know at the time that this is typically
done with some sort of chemical soaked rag in the jar that quickly gasses the insect via fumes.) I kept watching it, for several hours
and eventually the butterfly began to slow down. Instead of quickly flitting about, it was now only making little hops. Then those
hops became further and further apart in frequency. It seemed tired. I was killing it slowly and it just seemed really wrong. I took
it back to the site I had captured it and gently dumped it out of the jar. It sat on the ground still for a few minutes and I wasn't
sure it was going to make it. I felt horrible. Then suddenly, it took flight and flew off into the trees.
For many years, I never again tried to catch an insect but I did watch and observe them closely. As an adult, the memory of the
Smithsonian's Morpho wall was still just as vivid as ever and I wanted to figure out how I could achieve something like that without
killing them. Surely they must die natural deaths just like us. Maybe I could find them. So I began hunting, and my first specimen
was the Imperial Moth I found behind the Wallmart under a pine tree. I bought books upon books on life cycles, blacklighting, rearing,
habitats, host plants and identification of both butterflies and moths. I even got a book on entomology in general which I'll admit
became a difficult read once it started getting into cellular biology. In all those books though, there was nothing from the authors
about here's a mistake I made that you can avoid
or here's where I went wrong
. That is why I have tried to include in this
guide mistakes I've personally made along the way so that you can avoid them.
I've been thinking a lot about this for this page, and what is ethical seems to depend largely upon culture mixed with the individual.
For example, in the US, we think it absolutely wrong to eat dogs, cats, or horses. Yet in other cultures that's seen as normal, and I've
heard one man from Korea explain it as they are just different types of animals.
He's not technically wrong. Scientific studies have
shown that pigs are as if not more intelligent than some dogs, yet eating pigs is culturally fine in the US despite those findings, but we
see dogs as off the menu companion animals. By the same token, humans are also just a kind of animal, and a tribe in Papua New Guinea used
to eat their dead as a way of honoring them. Let's never mind that they stopped due to prion diseases, my point is that it was their culture.
I think though, that pretty much everyone who's sane around the world would agree that causing pain and suffering is wrong.
On that, I've witnessed some pretty interesting things observing insects: When cicadas emerge from their larval state, they hang on their
molt and pump fluid through their tiny wings to expand them into their final size. I once saw a cicada, freshly emerged and wings at their
full size, except a lot of fluid had pooled at the tip of one forewing. I was afraid that it wouldn't be able to fly properly and
wanted to help it. So I felt the wings extremely gently, they seemed hardened save for that pool and I thought if I could drain the
excess, it would be able to fly. I got a pin and gently touched the membrane where the pool was with the tip. It flinched hard which took
me by some surprise as I hadn't yet punctured through. I paused and then touched the same spot with my fingertip--no reaction. I found
a small stick and touched the spot with it--no reaction. So again I just touched the tip of the pin to the wing membrane and it flinched
again. Did that hurt? I can't know for sure, but it seemed like a definite possibility. I left it alone. If I remember correctly, there were
disembodied cicada wings in my garden under where it had been the next day. Likely it stayed and a bird got it.
In another instance of interesting behavior, I had a an Eastern House spider that had made a home on my garage door. I observed it every day
for several months. It had egg sac after egg sac, babies after babies. The tiny spiderlings would spend a few days in a cluster in the
web before ultimately descending and being on their way. On one occasion, 3 spiderlings did not descend and they did not move. After about a
day, the mother spider climbed down to them and I thought she was going to eat them. She did not. She sat there near them in the web for 3
days before I eventually saw them on the ground under the web. She had cut the webs they were attached to. What was she doing for those 3
3 days? I'm sure I'll sound absolutely crazy if I suggest mourning, but on the other hand, no one has proven that they don't.
Just some food for thought. When I was a kid, it was culturally acceptable to kill insects willy nilly and have an insect collection. Despite
cultural acceptance, my first experience with it changed my mind and I'm glad it turned out that way. In the chapter entitled To kill or not
In John Himmelman's book,
to killDiscovering Moths, Nighttime Jewels in Your Own Backyard
, he thinks over the same ethical quandries.
He complares the opinions of one avid collector who kills, and one person who refuses to collect anything but photos. He also briefly touches
upon what I do. I feel it's a sort of sane middle ground where I am not the cause of any pain or suffering, and no insect for my collection
dies by my actions. It is weird though, both the author and I kill living insects like dermestids in order to protect our dead ones. I guess for
me personally, my line is at protection of myself and my property. I think even a vegan would have a hard time just allowing termites to take
their house down. I've used flea treatments on my cats. I've killed every tick that I've ever found on myself. I've had my own house treated
for termites, while I could also tell you about how interesting they really are. I need shelter to live (termites), I need to not have
lyme disease (ticks). I don't need an insect collection--yet I have one. Rationalization is a hell of a drug, and everyone has thier own ethical
line in the sand.
I'm not against inconveniencing insects for a macro photo, trying to see a sphynx moth's hindwing for identification, or briefly disrupting their
lives with sparse instances of blacklighting. I think there's a way that we can do these things responsibly. I've also raised Cecropia moths for
release for 2 years and Promethia moths for 1 year. If you would like me to add anything to this section of my site on those things, you can let
me know in my guestbook as well as leave any comments, questions, or random thoughts.
If you made it this far, thank you, and I hope you enjoyed this section of my site.
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