Entomologist

Insects play a vital role in virtually all the earth’s ecosystems (community of organisms and their environment): Three quarters of the world’s flowering plants depend on insects for pollination. Insects are crucial seed dispersers. Many plants stud their seeds with tiny treats to entice ants to carry them off.

Legions of creatures depend on insects as food – including mammals (e.g., hedgehogs, shrews, and most bats); almost all amphibians consume insects, as do many species of reptiles and freshwater fish. Lots of birds rely on insects as food.

Collectively, insects transfer more energy from plants to animals than any other group. Insects may be considered “the glue that holds food chains together.”

DW’s life work is studying insects, specifically caterpillars. Despite growing evidence that insect numbers are on the decline worldwide, DW remains happy and energetic in his career. His story illustrates both the challenges and rewards of living life as a scientist.

FAMILY BACKGROUND

DW grew up “pretty much all over the place.” His father, a metallurgist, worked for a large corporation which necessitated the family moving whenever the father was assigned to a new project – a bridge in one state, a pipeline in another. In second grade, DW attended three different schools. “I don’t know where I come from,” concludes DW. At one school, in Missouri, he remembers he was greeted by kids throwing rocks at him. 

CHILDHOOD INTERESTS

From an early age. DW was interested in bugs. He collected them in an old cigar box, which moved from town to town with him. “They meant the world to me,” he said. “I would go into my room at night, and I would look at them with a hand lens. There was an infinite amount of beauty and complexity there.”

Though DW’s parents didn’t share his interest in insects, they supported it, buying him “A Field Guide to the Butterflies of North America, East of the Great Plains,” which he read so often that the cover eventually fell off.

“That book was a portal for me,” DW said. “I was able to see into another world, and I was fascinated by it.” A Christmas letter his father sent to a relative when DW was 9 – discovered years later – describes his son DW, as “interested in anything that crawls or moves and I’m sorry to be unable to answer my son’s million and one questions each day.”

EDUCATION – INSPIRED BY AN EXPERT

In college, DW was lucky to take classes from the world’s leading expert on wasps, who had given up a tenured professorship at Harvard to move to the Rockies as a more convenient location to study his favorite insects. 

After earning a Bachelor’s degree in science, DW later earned a Ph.D. in entomology. 

CAREER COMMENCES – EARNING A LIVING AS A SCIENTIST

Unless the budding scientist is the heir to a trust fund or wins a lottery, she or he is unlikely to immediately earn enough money to cover basic living expenses by merely investigating a scientific issue and preparing a written analysis for publication in a peer-reviewed, science journal. 

The typical career path for a budding scientist is to begin as an employee in a research laboratory funded by private industry or a government agency. 

DW’s first adult job within the world of science was as an employee of a lab which allowed him to focus his interests in “ghost moths.” Eventually, DW landed a coveted professorship at a university, where his education salary supported his living expenses while his teaching hours enabled him to conduct outside research, without pay until he could obtain funding for projects of interest to a corporation or state or federal government agency. 

Much remains to be learned about gypsy ghost moths and DW would probably have kept right on studying them had it not been for an ecological disaster which commenced more than 100 years ago, with repercussions reverberating in modern times, as described within the next section, “Experiments Gone Awry May Lead To Scientific Progress.”

SOME CHALLENGES TO A SCIENTIST

• EXPERIMENTS GONE AWRY MAY LEAD TO SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS

In the 1860s, in a bungled attempt to establish a silk business, a Frenchman imported gypsy moths from Europe to Massachusetts. Some of the moths escaped and their eggs hatched into “spongy moth caterpillars” which proceeded to munch their way through most of the green leaves of New England. By the 1990s, the descendants of those moths had slowly migrated to Virginia, wreaking havoc in Shenandoah National Park. The national Forest Service wanted to strike back with insecticide but was persuaded to let researchers set up experimental plots, spraying some of them and not others. Then they gathered all the caterpillars they could find from both plots and sent them, eventually totaling 13,000, to DW at his university’s research laboratory. 

Among the thousands of larvae sent by the Forest Service were lots that DW didn’t recognize. He checked with colleagues who weren’t much help. At that point, there was no definitive guide to the caterpillars of eastern North America to consult. This experience led DW to write what is now the scientifically, well-regarded guide to identifying eastern North American caterpillars. 

• ORGANIZING NEW DISCOVERIES IN THE ABSENCE OF EXISTING GUIDELINES

Without definitive, scientific guidelines to identify many of their discoveries, DW and his lab assistants had to create an organizational scheme. In that process, they had some rare fun making up nicknames for the caterpillars. A particularly colorful caterpillar became known as the “Dazzler.” Another, with a groove on the tip of its rearmost segment, they dubbed “Plumber’s Butt.” 

• DIRTY TASKS

Any animal which eats voraciously also poops voluminously. So, the first task every evening after gathering the caterpillars and placing them into individual test tubes, is to clean the “frass” (polite scientific term for animal poop) out of the vials – a process DW calls “mucking the stalls.”

• LONG HOURS

Scientists are sometimes so consumed by their experiments that they forget to sleep or eat as recommended to maintain physical and mental health. Examples include:

# lab assistant was “volunteered” to wake up several times each night – from sleeping in the lab – to peer through a microscope to determine when the fish larvae’s heart could first be detected beating

# DW has often continued his research well past midnight. “The only reason I go to bed is, so I don’t mess up the next day,” he has said. 

# DW confesses that while hunting for specimens to examine, he routinely finds time for only two meals a day.

• DISAGREEMENTS AMONG SCIENTISTS

Many science-based studies have well documented the decrease in insect populations over just several decades. Peer reviewed papers have been published, noting bleak statistics, and predicting “the insect apocalypse.” As those papers piled up, a countermovement has taken shape, some researchers arguing that there was a bias toward doom, the proponents of this counter theory suggesting that studies finding no particular trend in insect numbers were less interesting than those that suggested a crisis and therefore were less likely to get published. 

But then other researchers pushed back, contending that even if insects were doing okay in some places, the outlines of the problem were clear and the stakes too high to wait to take action – or at least to push governments to take action. 

Editor’s note – Scientific debates are not – in modern times – settled by jury trials or political elections, though during the public stress of the recent covid pandemic, scientists were sometimes utilized by politicians for their different but supportive opinions about the origin of the virus and how best to treat and prevent its effects. In an ideal world, science would resolve its disagreements by continuing its investigations, making its data publicly available and ultimately reaching a consensus without political interference. 

CAREER SATISFACTION

As an educator, DW has been praised by many current and former students for his passion about the scientific method in all its details, disappointments, and discoveries but most significant to students, his understanding and support. One former student noted, “DW has been my hero and my inspiration pretty much my whole adult life. He has this ability to reignite my belief that what I’m doing matters. As an example, when I was working on my Ph.D. I was doing a side project on the phylogeny of hummingbird flower mites, which live in the nostrils of hummingbirds. I showed him the results and I kind of wanted him to tell me, ‘Don’t waste your time.’ But instead, he told me, ‘This is fantastic!” 

As a scientist, DW believes that his efforts and those of his colleagues which he has inspired to participate in his research regarding insects, have led, “For the first time, to people really worried about ecosystem services and all the things insects do to sustain the planet.”

Despite DW’s realistic awareness of the plight of insects, he has maintained his optimism about his life’s work, confessing once to never experiencing a period of gloom or depression, including the years he has pondered the ‘insect apocalypse.” 

(Editor – Possibly DW’s daily optimism did not include the day he went to school with kids who threw rocks at him.)  

During all his nature investigations, colleagues report that DW never appears to get rattled or annoyed. How does he do this? Perhaps the explanation is found in the writing of one of his former science professors: “To a person attuned to smaller creatures, there is no corner of nature not full of excitement, not rich in unsolved problems.”

In DW’s own words, “The more you know, the more fun this is.” 

This career story is based on several sources: an article written by Elizabeth Kolbert, published within the 3/20/23 issue of The New Yorker magazine plus online research including Wikipedia.