Insectopedia (67 page)

40.
Quoted in Deichmann,
Biologists under Hitler
, 43. I have taken my account of this episode from Deichmann’s more detailed narrative, esp. 40–48. For additional material on von Frisch’s conduct during the Nazi period and particularly his willingness to act in support of dismissed colleagues, see Ernst-August Seyfarth and Henryk Pierzchała, “Sonderaktion Krakau, 1939: Die Verfolgung von polnischen Biowissenschaftlern und Hilfe durch Karl von Frisch” [Sonderaktion Krakau, 1939: The Persecution of Polish Biologists and the Assistance Provided by Karl von Frisch],
Biologie in unserer Zeit
22, no. 4 (1992): 218–25. My thanks to Ernst-August Seyfarth for sharing this paper with me and to Leander Schneider for translating it.

41.
On Nazi sympathy for animal welfare, see Anna Bramwell,
Ecology in the Twentieth Century: A History
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), and Boria Sax,
Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust
(New York: Continuum, 2000).

42.
Although Lorenz’s involvement with Nazism was widely known at the time, it was actively forgotten postwar and effectively erased by the Nobel Committee. The extent of his commitment to the Nazi regime has only recently been documented. See particularly Deichmann,
Biologists under Hitler
, 178–205, from which I have drawn most heavily for this account. Deichmann wants to secure the link between the contemporary ethological version of instinct—derived from Lorenz—and fascist politics. See also Theodora J. Kalikow, “Konrad Lorenz’s Ethological Theory: Explanation and Ideology, 1938–1943,”
Journal of the History of Biology
16, no. 1 (1983): 39–73; Boria Sax, “What Is a ‘Jewish Dog’? Konrad Lorenz and the Cult of Wildness,”
Society and Animals: Journal of Human-Animal Studies
5, no. 1 (1997),
http://www.psyeta.org/sa/sa5.1/sax.html
; and Burkhardt,
Patterns of Behavior.

43.
Boria Sax and Peter H. Klopfer, “Jakob von Uexküll and the Anticipation of Sociobiology,” in “Jakob von Uexküll: A Paradigm for Biology and Semiotics,” special issue,
Semiotica
134, nos. 1–4 (2001): 770; Ernst Haeckel,
The Evolution of Man: A Popular Exposition of the Principal Points of Human Ontogeny and Phylogeny
, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1897).

44.
All the more striking, then, that both von Frisch and Tinbergen stood by Lorenz following the war. Tinbergen, who was imprisoned in a concentration camp and worked actively for the resistance, wrote to an American colleague in 1945 that Lorenz “was rather nazi-infected, though I always considered him a[n] honest and good fellow…. It is not right,” he continued, “to think that the atrocities were only committed by a minority of fanatical SS-, SD-, or Gestapo-men. Nearly the whole people is hopelessly poisoned…. Personally I should regret if … [he] would be expelled [from scientific collaboration].” Quoted in Deichmann,
Biologists under Hitler
, 203–4.

45.
The only example I have come across is the brief section of
Dancing Bees
called “The Bee’s Mental Capacity.” Perhaps because he is forced to address this question directly, von Frisch retreats decisively from the affective burden of his corpus. “Because of its extraordinarily narrow range,” he writes, “we cannot form a very high opinion of the bee’s mental capacity” (162). Yet he closes his discussion more ambivalently: “Nobody can state with certainty whether the bees are conscious of any of their own actions” (164). See also Griffin,
Animal Minds
, 278–82.

46.
It also provided a bridge to Jakob von Uexküll’s influential phenomenology of the
Umwelt
, the sensory world through which all beings experience life. See the discussion on pages 314–17.

47.
Von Frisch,
A Biologist Remembers
, 174.

48.
Griffin,
Animal Minds
, 203–11. My account of swarming and nest location is drawn primarily from Griffin; Lindauer,
Communication among Social Bees;
James L. Gould and Carol Grant Gould,
Honey Bee;
Thomas D. Seeley,
Wisdom of the Hive;
and Thomas D. Seeley, S. Kühnholz, and Robin H. Seeley, “An Early Chapter.”

49.
Lindauer,
Communication among Social Bees
, 35.

50.
Ibid., 38.

51.
Ibid., 39–40.

52.
James L. Gould and Carol Grant Gould,
Honey Bee
, 66–67.

53.
Ibid., 67.

54.
Ibid., 66.

55.
Ibid., 65–66; Griffin,
Animal Minds
, 206–9.

56.
James L. Gould and Carol Grant Gould,
Honey Bee
, 65.

57.
Griffin,
Animal Minds
, 209.

58.
Karl von Frisch, “Decoding the Language of the Bee,”
Science
185 (August 1974): 663–68.

59.
Frisch,
Dance Language
, xxiii.

60.
Ibid., 105. What it lacked was a response to the acoustic stop signal given by the surrounding workers. Mechanical bees have since become a staple of bee science. See, for example, Michelson et al., “How Honeybees Perceive Communication Dances.”

61.
Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations
, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 223. See the discussion by Cary Wolfe, “In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion: Language, Ethics, and the Question of the Animal,” in
Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal
, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1–57. Wolfe reminds us of Vicki Hearne’s comment that Wittgenstein’s aphorism is “the most interesting mistake about animals I have ever come across.” Hearne,
Animal Happiness
(New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 167. Hearne was a philosopher and animal trainer who wrote insightfully on horses and dogs, among other large mammals, convincingly arguing for a human-nonhuman communicative practice that emerges from sensitivity to differential sensory abilities, a notion implicitly indebted to Jakob von Uexküll’s theory of the
Umwelt.
On Washoe and the Gardners, see Donna J. Haraway,
Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science
(New York: Routledge, 1989), and Hearne,
Adam’s Task
, 18–41.

62.
Hearne,
Animal Happiness
, 169.

63.
Ibid., 170.

64.
For similar assessments, see Jacques Derrida,
The Animal That Therefore I Am
, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), Matthew Calarco,
Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), and Wolfe, “In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion.” Derrida tracks an unhappy lineage through Descartes, Kant, Levinas, Heidegger, and Lacan. For a less unitary view, see Ian Hacking, “On Sympathy: With Other Creatures,”
Tijdschrift voor Filosofie
63, no. 4 (2001): 685–717. Hacking starts his countergenealogy with David Hume. My thanks to Ann Stoler for pointing me to this important article.

65.
Jacques Lacan,
Écrits: A Selection
, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 84, quoted in Derrida,
Animal That Therefore I Am
, 123.

66.
See James L. Gould’s summary of honeybee sociality: “Everyone must be wired in exactly the same way and live by the same set of rules or social life would turn to anarchy.” James L. Gould,
Ethology
, 406.

67.
On this distinction, see Derrida,
Animal That Therefore I Am
, 119–40.

68.
C. F. Hockett quoted in Tim Ingold,
Evolution and Social Life
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 304.

69.
Deacon,
Symbolic Species
, 22. The literature on animal cognition and language is
obviously vast. For an ethological review, see Marc Bekoff, Colin Allen, and Gordon M. Burghardt, eds.,
The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002); for an innovative interdisciplinary account by a biological anthropologist, see Deacon,
Symbolic Species.
Deacon argues for language acquisition and facility of use as the critical distinction between humans and other animals, including primates. It is, in his view, the distinction that enables human achievement.

70.
Von Frisch,
Dance Language
, 278–84.

71.
On the Aristotelian natural child as a figure in sixteenth-century European expansion, see Anthony Pagden,
The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology
, corrected ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

72.
W. G. Sebald,
Austerlitz
, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2001), 94.

73.
Eva M. Knodt, foreword to Niklas Luhmann,
Social Systems
, trans. John Bednarz, Jr., with Dirk Baecker (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), xxxi, quoted in Wolfe, “In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion,” 34.

1.
Scott Atran, “A Leaner, Meaner Jihad,”
New York Times
, March 16, 2004.

1.
Boureima Alpha Gado,
Une histoire des famines au Sahel: étude des grandes crises alimentaires, XIXe–XXe siècles
[
A History of Famine in Sahel: A Study of the Great
Food Crises, Nineteenth to Twentieth Centuries
] (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993). See also Michael Watts,
Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), and John Rowley and Olivia Bennett,
Grasshoppers and Locusts: The Plague of the Sahel
(London: Panos Institute, 1993).

2.
Chinua Achebe,
Things Fall Apart
(London: Heinemann, 1976), 39–40.

3.
Achebe,
Things Fall Apart
, 97–98.

4.
Souleymane Anza, “Niger Fights Poverty after Being Taken by Shame,” Afrol News, January, 19, 2001,
http://www.afrol.com/News2001/nir001_fight_poverty.htm
; see also Frederic Mousseau with Anuradha Mittal,
Sahel: A Prisoner of Starvation?
A Case Study of the 2005 Food Crisis in Niger
(Oakland, Calif.: Oakland Institute, 2006).

5.
Niger is one of eight Central and West African countries that use the euro-pegged West African CFA franc as their currency.

6.
Comprehensive information on
criquet
species and control can be found at the website of CIRAD (Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement),
http://www.cirad.fr/en/index.php
. See also Rowley and Bennett,
Grasshoppers and Locusts
, and Steen R. Joffe,
Desert Locust Management: A Time for Change
, World Bank Discussion Paper, no. 284 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1995).

7.
Current research also suggests that the neurotransmitter serotonin is involved. See Michael L. Anstey, Stephen M. Rogers, Swidbert R. Ott, Malcolm Burrows,
and Stephen J. Simpson, “Serotonin Mediates Behavioral Gregarization Underlying Swarm Formation in Desert Locusts,”
Science
323 (January 2009): 627–30.

8.
For a more detailed account, on which I have drawn extensively here, see Hugh Dingle,
Migration: The Biology of Life on the Move
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 272–81; see also the locus(t) classicus, Boris Petrovich Uvarov,
Grasshoppers and Locusts: A Handbook of General Acridology
, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966).

9.
The UFBIR is an ongoing online project that can be found at
http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/walker/ufbir
.

10.
Apart, that is, from the anomalous use of
locust
in the United States to name the periodic cicada.

11.
John Keats, “On the Grasshopper and Cricket” (1816).

12.
Robert A. Cheke, N. D. Jago, J. M. Ritchie, L.D.C. Fishpool, R. C. Rainey, and P. Darling, “A Migrant Pest in the Sahel: The Senegalese Grasshopper
Oedaleus senegalensis
,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
328 (1990): 539–53.