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feature Around the World in Eighty-odd Years
Soon after my family moved down from Spokane, Washington, to San Francisco when I was four years old, we settled in Forest Hills in one of the first houses in the district. We were surrounded by wilderness—lupines, wild rabbits, and ponds—a wonderful place for a boy with an atavistic inclination towards nature to develop. Edward Wilson in his book Biophilia touches on this inherent love of nature that appears to be in our genes. That’s when my science education really began. I instinctively went for it. Right away I had aquariums and terrariums, and I was constantly wandering off exploring my surroundings. Mount Davidson was my Everest and the sand dunes that went out to the ocean were my Sahara. In those days one could walk from 19th Avenue all the way to the “Great Highway” beside the ocean without rossing pavement. It was a wonderful environment for a budding naturalist. I was frequently brought to the Academy and I vaguely remember the opening of the aquarium in 1923. At that time the Academy consisted of only one other building—North American Hall. My recollections of the museum are vivid. I could take a piece of paper and almost draw a floor plan—where the Goliath beetle was, the butterflies and the Indian baskets. The hall’s great dioramas are still on display. And I remember being very envious of Frank Tose, who was head of the exhibits department. He looked like a museum man with a white smock and a distinguished beard. I would see him disappearing into secret side doors and think “Gee, how wonderful it would be to work in a place like this.” Before I graduated from high school, I must have had 60,000 well-mounted, well-labeled beetles, all arranged phylogenetically according to advice from a nurseryman, F.W. Nunenmacher. He was an excellent entomologist even though he may never have finished high school. At his suggestion, I used to go from the East Bay, where we had moved, by ferry and streetcar to do fieldwork in the sand dunes and along Ocean Beach in San Francisco. Once, a neat beetle struck my fancy. It was very shiny, about a quarter of an inch long, glossy black with bright scarlet elytra, or wing cases. It’s a predator in the family Histeridae, found just above the highest tide. I became a specialist in Histeridae and published papers on them as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley. I was planning to do my PhD on the classification of the world’s Histeridae. But while collecting histerids and other creatures for a class in insect anatomy and histology (the cellular structure of tissue), I came across our local web-spinner, a member of the order Embiidina. I sectioned the front tarsi, the feet which contain glands that secrete silk to form the galleries in which they live. Embiids are easily cultured, and I discovered that this species never has males—the females reproduce parthenogenetically. Then, during additional fieldwork in Palm Springs, I found a new species, the only one native to California. I named its genus Dactylocerca because of the fingerlike left cercus a male uses for grasping a female during copulation. That first species I named whetted my interest in what would become my lifelong research. I got deeper in embiid studies—it’s a lovely “quicksand” to get caught in—and decided the Histeridae was too big a project for a PhD dissertation. Basically, a dissertation should demonstrate that you’re capable of asking a good question and then answering it well. I saw something more manageable in the embiids, and I decided to do the comparative anatomy of the order. Actually, some of my thesis has finally been published—60 years later—in Part I of an extensive Academy series called EMBIA—the name of the order’s type genus, which means “lively” in Greek. It’s a prolific group with perhaps as many species as termites or earwigs, but most are yet to be described. Web-spinners are a very old order that has changed little during the entire Age of Mammals. Like certain other insect orders, embiids probably evolved during the Permian period on a single supercontinent called Pangaea, where they were widely dispersed while both sexes had wings and before their major predators—ants—evolved. As the fragments of Pangaea drifted apart, they were like arks, each carrying an embiid fauna that would evolve into a distinct array of genera and species. Embiids don’t disperse well because the females are now wingless and their main defense is to stay within silken galleries. The order is excellent for studying biogeography, especially because they’re not dependent on particular host plants. So by happy fate, my career has been to visit these separated evolutionary “arks” to gather specimens and demonstrate, name, and classify taxonomic diversity. A few embiids are fossilized in amber. Such fossils are better preserved than those crushed in rock formations, which are like flies smashed on a wall. I have fossils from Dominican amber almost identical to species occurring today on Hispaniola. I have also studied Baltic amber specimens from the Eocene about 50 million years ago, a time when horses were about the size of fox terriers. Adults of this species retain their juvenile form—a trait called neoteny. I named this genus Electroembia. Electron is Greek for amber, or electricity. Early Greeks were aware that rubbing amber produces static electricity. Adults with wings and other appendages are less mobile in the narrow silk galleries, and once they leave them they’re like fish out of water, vulnerable to ants and other predators such as insects and birds. Another embiid peculiarity is to avoid predators by darting backwards rapidly, a motion powered by large depressor muscles in the femora of the hind legs. Males of most species have wings. These would retard backward movement if they weren’t very flexible, flipping forward like a sweater pulled over the head. In 1939, while I was still a graduate student at Berkeley, I heard about a position as a curator of entomology at the California Academy of Sciences. I sensed the Academy was right for me because in a university job you’re pinned down by an academic calendar. I don’t like to be pinned down by anything! With its then-thin administrative veneer, the Academy was a place where you could “do your own thing”—if you had a thing to do. I felt that one could invent a worthy career. Of course the other advantage is that systematics is the Academy’s research specialty. Even our business cards indicate this. I don’t think any other institution in the country makes this commitment. The Academy shouldn’t try to be anything else because its role is very much needed. I snapped at the opportunity. On December 7, 1941, while driving down to the hills in back of Stanford to collect web-spinners, I heard the announcement of Pearl Harbor. My first reaction was “poor Japan.” I knew that the country couldn’t possibly win a war with the United States. But because of its activities in China, we had cut off its umbilical cord—its oil, and resources from America such as scrap metal. Japan reacted like a cornered animal. My second thought was that I was going to get into this war. So instead of going to the Academy Monday morning, I went straight to the Presidio of San Francisco. I went to the medical officer procurement desk and reminded them that much of the war was going to be fought in areas where tropical diseases are transmitted by insects. I had taken courses in this subject—not enough to be an expert—but, as they say, “in the realm of the blind the one-eyed man is king.” They said, “Yes we’d be very interested in your application, and we will offer you a first lieutenant commission in the Sanitary Corps,” what’s now called the Medical Specialists Corps. So I filled out the application and showed up for my physical exam. Who should be in line in front of me but Ronald Reagan! He was about to get into the Army, and he was young and handsome. The nurses were in such a flutter that when they attempted to extract blood for a test, they made hamburger out of my arm. My first assignment was as a sanitation inspector for the Presidio. The post got some of its water out of Lobos Creek and had a special purification facility. It was good experience, but of course I didn’t particularly like that kind of work and was delighted to get unexpected orders to report to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. Great, I thought, there will be embiids down there! The lab’s commander was a very genial colonel from Kentucky and he said, “At last I’ve gotten an entomologist! I’ve been trying to get one for a long time.” I quickly learned to be a mosquito expert and was out every night doing fieldwork. I was there nine months and never once went into the officer’s club. I used to carry my dinner in a brown bag and go out to places like Palmetto Swamp and wade around with nearby water moccasins studying what mosquitoes were doing at night. There wasn’t enough blood around to feed all the mosquitoes of Texas, and I discovered that many sustained themselves on a diet of floral nectar. As the weather cooled and the mosquitoes became less active, I decided to produce an identification manual for malarial vectors. Using my experience in art (my father had been an artist) I made some sample drawings and developed a format. Instead of going through all the hassle of requesting army funds, I just went to a local engraver, a typesetter, and a printer and had sample pages printed at my own expense. Then I submitted the proposal and a dummy. My commander was delighted that such initiative had originated under his benevolent command. So he forwarded the proposal to the Surgeon General’s Office in Washington, D.C. They liked it and said, “We are willing to cut orders for Lieutenant Ross if he tells us where he wants to work.” I said it would have to be the National Museum, which has the biggest collection of mosquitoes in the country. Administratively, I was assigned to Walter Reed Hospital, but never went there. At the museum, I lived and breathed work on a two-part Mosquito Atlas. It was mostly drawings. H. Radclyffe Roberts, who helped with the management and text, later became Director of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. The Secretary of the Smithsonian, Alexander Wetmore, loved to come through with visitors to show men in uniform working on a war project. Nobody else on the staff was doing anything connected with the war. At night I worked on revising the classification of New World embiids.
After doing so much indoor work, I was really anxious to get overseas—I had never been in the tropics where most embiids occur. I was asked, “What kind of a unit do you want”? I said, “Well, I’ve heard about malaria survey units, could I have one of those?” They said, “Sure. Now tell us, which Theater of Operations?” Well, I made a mistake there. I asked for the Southwest Pacific. I thought New Guinea would be interesting from an embiid standpoint, but it wasn’t. I should have asked for CBI [China, Burma, India]. Although I have made post-war visits to some of these areas, most are inaccessible today—a pity because this embiid fauna is extremely interesting. On the other hand, it might have been karma—I could have gotten killed. Then they said, “Well, the first thing you have to do is get a little training in company command.” I had had no military training. I barely knew how to salute. Finally, after training our unit in New Orleans, we got orders to board an old freighter in Oakland and zigzagged to avoid submarines all the way down to New Guinea. We disembarked at Finschhafen, where the Japanese had recently been cleared out. The ground and the jungle were littered with skeletons of Japanese killed by Australians. We went by LST (Landing Ship Tank) to the extreme hump of New Guinea near Cape d’Urville (Maffin Bay), where mainland-based artillery shelled the hell out of offshore Wakde Island. Our lab was within a beachhead about 20 miles long but only about a quarter mile deep. We had log-roofed foxholes in which we slept almost every night—like trap door spiders. The Japanese had been pushed inland and were starving. We even napalmed their gardens! They got pretty desperate and began ground kamikaze attacks along the perimeter. Attackers just carried hand grenades to blow up sensitive equipment. By dawn all were dead. A lot of GIs were killed, too. Nights were lively but during the day things were quiet, so I collected insects like mad for the California Academy whenever I could in conjunction with our malaria survey work. Then we moved to Leyte Island in the Philippines, chosen because of its big harbor and bay. A biologist could have told planners that it was a very poor choice for a landing. Because of the bottomless mud of rice paddies on Leyte, and almost constant rain, we were unable to make airstrips quickly and remained dependent on carrier-based planes. Most flew off “baby flat-tops,” or converted freighters. Some of them were sunk, and we occasionally picked up pilots who had “pancaked” down on the mud of rice paddies. The big thing we had to watch out for was schistosomiasis, or bilharziasis, vascular congestion by eggs of blood flukes. While waiting to move to our next site, we camped near a brackish lagoon which we’d tested for the intermediate hosts of the schistosoma fluke—a little freshwater snail. There weren’t any in the lagoon. But it turned out that when the tide ebbed there was a surface layer of polluted water coming from upstream. It had microcercariae in it—immature stages of the parasite that wiggle around in the water and penetrate skin. It was a dangerous place. Half of my unit became infected, including myself. But I never went on sick call, not the whole time I was in the army. In the army, if you’re hospitalized, you lose your outfit. So if I had gone on sick call, I would have lost my wonderful unit and opportunities to do entomological work in tropical forests and mountains. The army realized belatedly that we had to quickly move to an island that had a high, central, north-south mountain range and thus a seasonally dry west side. So they decided to make the next landing on the southwest end of Mindoro Island, which was free of Japanese. It was a wise choice because that side of Mindoro only got the monsoon rains and had a long dry season. But Mindoro was only a very short distance from the Japanese air bases on Luzon. Their planes could fly low behind the mountain range undetected on our radar, then flip over the range and make surprise kamikaze dives on our beachhead and convoys. Before one near-miss, I put corks in the culture tubes of my precious New Guinea web-spinners, so that if we went over the side, the cultures would not get flooded out. The island had the loveliest smell—the brown grass of the dry season. I set up camp at the periphery, right next to the mountains, close to nature. Every time I went up into the forest, always alone, my primary objective was to survey mosquitoes from a zoological standpoint. I became acquainted with the hill people, the Mangyans, who were slash-and-burn agriculturists on steep hillsides. Without knowing one another’s language, we had great communication. I later wrote an article on the experience for Pacific Discovery (Sept-Oct, 1968) called “Mangyan Memories.” I had borrowed a camera and film packs sealed in beeswax and photographed these people. With our supply of grain alcohol, I was able to barter for chemicals from a photographic unit at the base. I used three steel helmets without the liners: one for developer, one for wash water, and the other for hypo. So when the moon wasn’t shining, I developed the negatives. Mindoro was my dark room. Since the war I’ve been all over the world collecting embiids and observing human cultures. One of my more exciting trips was to southeast Asia in 1970, when we had diverse foreign aid programs in forestry and agriculture, among other things. In Sayaburi on the Mekong River in Laos, my wife, Sandy, and I traveled by jeep. After checking to be sure there were no terrorists, she would drop me off without stopping the engine, and I would immediately duck into the forest. Then I would hunt embiids in the forest, quiet like an aborigine, after which I would emerge at the drop-off spot at, say, four o’clock in the afternoon.
From dozens of collecting trips like this, I’ve gathered what might make up the most singular collection in the Academy. In fact, it may be the most significant collection in any institution in the world, because it’s a veritable monopoly of an order of animals. No other institution in the world has anything approaching it. The British Museum or the National Museum each has perhaps two or three hundred effective specimens of Embiidina. Yet, in my office there are about 300,000 specimens representing most of the known species and perhaps as many as 750 undescribed species. I still haven’t named all the genera, families, and suborders. One of the great paradoxes of doing this kind of work is that you really aren’t done until you’re dead. In other words, there’s a constant chance to add unexpected information. So you are slowed down in publishing new category names because you want to fill specimen-gaps by going to unvisited regions. The excitement is comparable to geographic exploration and frontier map-making. What is “over the next hill” is so tempting it is easy to put off the lab work. In a mere 14 years I will be 100, and I know what a short time 14 years is—like the last sands in an hourglass. When I see my beautiful self-created home and garden, I think of the things I could do there, and how nice it would be just to vegetate and grow vegetables and read books. But I have a sense of obligation. I’ve had a lot of support over the years through grants, and I feel it would be terrible to just turn my back on the great embiid accumulation. I like to think of myself as a kind of Billy Graham of entomology. I want to convert nonbelievers to appreciate insects and the wonders of nature. One of my own favorite expressions is: “The ultimate sermon on the Mount saves the Mount.” To this end, Sandy and I, with help from the Schlinger Foundation, established Butterfly Lodge (Cabañas Alinahui) on the Rio Napo in Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest. The lodge and its adjacent forest are like a church, which inspires the “faithful” to participate in what we regard as the only worthy religion, reverence for life on planet Earth. There are precious few things you leave behind you: the goodwill of people who remember you, but that’s transitory—people who knew you die off too; and what you publish—your life’s work. Now that I have the EMBIA series going, soon there’ll be a lengthy shelf of volumes in the series. That will be an indelible mark that I existed. I hope to get out 1,500 printed pages before I’m 90—and more after that. I am also concerned about my huge picture collection. A picture collection is like a pile of building material—a big pile of lumber and gravel and cement. But you need “architecture” in the form of manuscripts and plans for other uses, especially education. I’d like to see continued use of my photos. It’s similar, say, to the compositions of George Gershwin; you wouldn’t want somebody to acquire the compositions only to put them in a vault. I just got a letter the other day from Cornell professor of chemical ecology Thomas Eisner. “Let me say…how inspired I have been by your photography over the years,” he wrote. Others have said, “I grew up on your photography—maybe I wouldn’t have been an entomologist if I hadn’t seen your work.” At times I think that I have created an “orchard”; an orchard heavily laden with “fruit” ripe for harvest. One large tree, of course, bears unstudied embiids; others are laden with pictorial and knowledge ingredients for a book on people I’ve met; others on tropical forest insects, or insects and plants, or insects of the San Francisco Bay region. And I should also write a book, a narrative of my life…my lifelong safari. Edward S. Ross is curator emeritus of entomology at the California Academy of Sciences. |
