I joined the staff in the Smithsonian’s Department of Entomology, National Museum of Natural History in 1992, at the time Pam Henson and I published “Digging for Dyar: The Man Behind the Myth”. Having stayed in Washington, DC long enough to complete the article, my job at the Museum would give me roughly a dozen years to accumulate information on Dyar, while performing other duties.
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I first became acquainted with Dyar’s work on the moth family Limacodidae, my chosen entomology dissertation topic, in 1983 at the University of Minnesota. It was in the Hodson Hall library on the St. Paul campus where I noted how Dyar’s authorship dominated the Journal of the New York Entomological Society in the middle to late 1890s. Particularly notable was his running series from 1895-1899
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Question: What do Napoléon Bonaparte, Walter Reed, the Panama Canal, and the Zika virus all have in common? Answer: The Aedes aegypti mosquito. Although its official common name, according to the Entomological Society of America (ESA), is the “yellowfever mosquito,” Aedes aegypti is also the primary vector of dengue, chikungunya, and the Zika virus.
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Entomologists estimate there to be around a quintillion individual insects on the planet–and that’s just insects. Bugs are everywhere, but how much do we really know about them? Jeff Lockwood to the rescue! Professor Lockwood is answering all your bug questions–one at a time, that is. Send your question to him care of [email protected] and he’ll do his best to find you the answer.
Do bugs feel pain? Like, how does the exoskeleton work?
Well, it’s hard to know. But then it’s hard to know what any organism experiences. For that matter, I’m not even sure that you feel pain—or at least that your internal, mental states are the same as mine. This is the “other minds” problem in philosophy. At least other people can tell us what they feel (even if we can’t be certain that their experience is the same as ours), but we can’t even ask insects. However, we can have three rather compelling lines of evidence that our six-legged brethren feel pain.
First, insects have a nervous system that resembles ours in many ways. That is, they see, hear, smell, taste, and feel. Many of our pains arise from pressure, shock, heat and other stimuli administered at high levels—and insects most assuredly respond to these bodily sensations.
Insects can even detect stimuli that are outside of our sensory scope. For example, butterflies can see ultraviolet wavelengths and bees can detect the plane of polarization of light.
Next, there are relevant biochemical similarities between insect and human nervous systems. At least some invertebrates possess endorphins and enkephalins. These chemicals are opioids (think opium) produced by the body to alleviate pain and stress. So the presence of these in insects suggests that they might experience pleasure/pain. We also know that the mechanisms of neural transmission are similar in insects and humans. This is one of the reasons that neurotoxic insecticides also poison you along with the cockroach in your kitchen. In fact, the organophosphate insecticides are based on the nerve gases developed during World War II. Kinda creepy, eh?
Finally, from an evolutionary perspective the awareness of pain is an enormously adaptive mechanism. Feeling pain when you touch something hot allows a fast response—and a learning opportunity. So it is unreasonable to assume that pain is unique to humans. In fact, this perception might reasonably be expected in organisms whose survival can be augmented by the experience of pain, either as part of an escape mechanism or as a basis for the capacity to learn from past experience. Insects have lots of things inflicting damage on them (fly swatters, bug zappers, lizards, bats, entomologists, etc.) and they certainly have the ability to learn (one experiment showed that headless cockroaches can learn—which is possible because insects don’t stuff all of their neural processing into their heads, like we do). So it seems quite reasonable that insects would have evolved the capacity to feel pain.
About 30 years ago, an eminent insect physiologist addressed the question of pain in insects. Vincent Wigglesworth (seriously, that was his name) argued that insects experience internal, visceral pain as well as pain caused by heat and electrical shock. However, he inferred from observations that cuticular damage did not cause pain. For example, an insect doesn’t limp when its leg is damaged. And this leads to your question about the exoskeleton.
The insect’s exoskeleton is, well, a skele
Entomologists estimate there to be around a quintillion individual insects on the planet–and that’s just insects. Bugs are everywhere, but how much do we really know about them? Jeff Lockwood to the rescue! Professor Lockwood is answering all your bug questions–one at a time, that is. Send your question to him care of [email protected] and he’ll do his best to find you the answer.
Are daddy-longlegs really as venomous as I’ve heard?
Well, that depends on what you’ve heard. If people have told you that these creatures are deadly, then those people are dead wrong. This tale is debunked on the website of the University of California Riverside, and I trust my colleagues at UCR. I know a several of the entomologists there, and they’re a really smart bunch of scientists (a claim that one might question, given that they chose to live in Riverside, but my concern is for their entomological acumen, not their geographic aesthetics). So, I’m going to use what they say about daddy-longlegs and if you end up dying from a bite, then it’s on them.
First, let’s get clear on just what creature we’re considering. I grew up thinking that daddy-longlegs were those spider-like beasties with a spherical body and really long spindly legs that were invariably found in wood piles and in the crawlspace under the house. However, some folks use the name to refer to cellar spiders—which do have rather long legs. Both versions of daddy-longlegs are arachnids, along with scorpions, mites and ticks. However, the creatures of my youth aren’t spiders at all. They belong to the Order Opiliones, while the true spiders—including cellar spiders—belong to the Order Araneae. The big difference is that the woodpile version (also called harvestmen) don’t spin silk and their head-thorax-abdomen is crammed into one blob, while the cellar version spins silk and has two body parts (the head and thorax fused in a cephalothorax and the abdomen). And just to make matters a bit more confusing, the silly Brits call refer to crane flies (which do have long legs but then so do giraffes) as daddy-longlegs, but they also have really weird terms for the hood/trunk of a car and other such things so we’ll just ignore their misnaming of arthropods.
The UCR folks think that most people are referring to cellar spiders when they talk about daddy-longlegs. I think my colleagues are nuts. In my estimation, they know their entomology, but not their colloquial terminology. I suppose that because cellar spiders are common along the Pacific Coast, the UCR faculty hang out at cocktail parties where people sip Chardonnay and ask entomologists about daddy-longlegs in their basements. Well there’s a big country to the east of California, and out here a daddy-longlegs is most assuredly the sphere-and-legs version. But let’s move on to the venom-thing.
As for the real daddy-longlegs (Opiliones), these fellows mostly eat decomposing stuff, hence their affinity for woodpiles and crawlspaces. They’ll nab a smaller creature if the opportunity presents itself. However, they don’t have fangs or venom glands. Some species can secrete nasty stuff, so if you’re a small animal then perhaps you could be poisoned. If a human wants to be harmed by these daddy-longlegs, it might be possible if you gather up a humongous bunch of daddy-longlegs and eat them. As Paracelsus told us centuries ago, the dose makes the poison—and even water is poisonous in sufficient quantities.
Entomologists estimate there to be around a quintillion individual insects on the planet--and that's just insects. Bugs are everywhere, but how much do we really know about them? Jeff Lockwood to the rescue! Professor Lockwood is answering all your bug questions--one at a time, that is. Send your question to him care of
