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PART I
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1
The moonlit world
To begin at the beginning, the Lepidoptera are divided into two orders: butterflies (Rhopalocera) and moths (Heterocera). The rule of thumb for distinguishing between them is that butterflies have antennae with little knobs at the tip, while those of moths are threadlike, spindlelike or feathery â though there are exceptions. A second rule of thumb is: âIf itâs not a butterfly, itâs a moth.â Some might say that butterflies are Lepidoptera that people like while moths are ones they donât like, and yet as nocturnal flyers, linked to darkness and phases of the moon, moths are in many ways more romantic and mysterious than their diurnal cousins.
While butterflies are netted in sunny meadows, most moths must be caught after sundown using either light traps or pheromone traps baited with female moths. There are plenty of female butterfly collectors, but most moth devotees seem to be male. One celebrated example is W.J. Holland, author in 1903 of The Moth Book, which though outdated in many respects is still a bible for collectors. Its colour plates quickly disabused me of any prejudices I had about moth drabness. Here were rows and rows of moths set out like gems: mysterious underwings with flamboyant undergarments, splendid and eerie cecropia moths, startling luna moths with âeyesâ etched on their lime-green wings, elegant shocking-pink hawkmoths, tiger moths clothed in intricate wallpaper-like patterns. One of the stylistically most vivid passages in the book describes the mystique of the nocturnal world:
There are two worlds, the world of sunshine and the world of the dark. Most of us are more or less familiarly acquainted with the first; very few of us well acquainted with the latter. Our eyes are well adapted to serve us in the daylight, but they do not serve us as well in the dark ⊠There are whole armies of living things which, when we go to sleep, begin to awaken âŠ
Among the insects thousands and tens of thousands are nocturnal ⊠When the hour of dusk approaches, stand by a bed of evening primroses, and, as their great yellow blossoms suddenly open, watch the hawkmoths coming as swiftly as meteors through the air, hovering for an instant over this blossom, probing into the sweet depths of another, and then dashing off again so quickly that the eye cannot follow them âŠ
The Moth Book was instrumental in changing Ted Sargentâs career. He was still a bird behaviourist when he took a post in 1963 at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. A picture-postcard town with a garrulously populist âtown meetingâ government and an old-fashioned New England common at its heart, Amherst remained rural enough to have dairy farms within the city limits, where the lowing of cows mingled with the meditations of Dante scholars. The surrounding âhill townsâ were more bucolic still. In quiet Pelham, a town with a single tiny grocery store, Sargent, then a bachelor assistant professor, rented rooms in a house with a large, leafy backyard, and one humid summer evening he tried an old trick described by Holland in The Moth Book: mix brown sugar with beer, paint the solution on tree trunks â this is called âsugaringâ â and when night falls, rush out with a jar and a light. Moths will be found all over the trees, ready to be scooped up.
âHolland describes the excitement,â says Sargent. âAnd it is exciting. You run around picking the moths off the trees. Their eyes shine like coals. The brown sugar and beer smells like fermenting fruit. Some people use cat piss instead of beer. Everyone has his secret recipe.â
The British lepidopterist P.B.M. Allan, author of the popular Moth Hunterâs Gossip (1937), always insisted that the only foolproof sugaring ingredient was brown Barbados sugar; no other kind would do. The most renowned literary lepidopterist of the twentieth century, Vladimir Nabokov, had his own recipe: molasses, beer, and rum. âThrough the gusty blackness,â he wrote in Speak, Memory, âoneâs lantern would illumine the stickily glistening furrows of the bark and two or three large moths upon it imbibing the sweets, their nervous wings half open butterfly fashion, the lower ones exhibiting their incredibly crimson silk form beneath the lichen-gray primaries.â Nabokovâs moth sounds as if it must have been an underwing, a moth that wears a dull grey or brown skirt over a startlingly colourful underskirt.
In time, using his own varieties of sugar solutions, Sargent identified some forty underwing species in his backyard and became so infatuated that he put aside his bird studies. He had been feeling stale anyway, shut up in the lab, studying caged birds. âMoths are just so beautiful and there are so many of them,â he noted. Switching to moths, he became an expert on the Catocala (underwing) genus, but in the process he also got hooked on the mystery of melanic (black) moths.
Apart from an unsuccessful stint with a butterfly net at age seven that bagged only a few enraged hornets, I myself had paid scant attention to butterflies and even less to moths. I found it hard to fathom why so much passion would attach to an order of bothersome insects whose only purpose seemed to be to slip through holes in the screen to immolate themselves upon my reading lamp. Their stumpy, brownish bodies and kamikaze ways repelled me, and, had I taken the time to look closely, so would the feathery antennae and the space-alien honeycombed eyes. Against my skin the frantic, powdery wings felt like cobwebs, and Iâd brush them off with an impatient hand, never giving a thought to their small lives: their lifespan, what they ate, how they mated, how they survived, why exactly they had this compulsion to careen into a hot 60-watt bulb. I had, in fact, never really seen them at all, a fact that was impressed on me forcibly by one Jean Henri Cassirer Fabre (1823â1915), who in his 1915 book The Life of a Caterpillar described the emergence of a moth called Psyche:
In their modest pearl-grey dress, with their insignificant wing-equipment, hardly exceeding that of a Common Fly, our little Moths are still not without elegance. They have handsome feathery plumes for antennae. Their wings are edged with delicate fringes. They whirl very fussily inside the bell-jar; they skim the ground, fluttering their wings; they crowd eagerly around certain sheaths which nothing on the outside distinguishes from the others. They alight upon them and sound them with their plumes.
This feverish agitation marks them as lovers in search of their brides. This one here, that one there, each of them finds his mate. But the coy one does not leave her home. Things happen very discreetly through the wicket left open at the free end of the case. The male stands on the threshold of this back-door for a little while; and then it is over; the wedding is finished. There is no need for us to linger over these nuptials in which the parties concerned do not know, do not see each other.3
Ruminating lavishly on each event of the insect world as if it were a dinner chez Guermantes, the strange and solitary Fabre converted hordes of schoolboys to entomology. Such was the allure of natural history that his fame in his time â certainly in his native France â rivalled Darwinâs. At his country home in Provence, where he also did seminal work in botany, the âHomer of Insectsâ prefigured the modern discipline of animal behaviour by devising numerous experiments, such as attaching tiny burdens to beetlesâ backs to see how heavy a load they could support, or shooting a cannon to test the hearing of cicadas.
During his remarkably long life Fabre was an intimate of John Stuart Mill and attracted the admiration of Darwin, PoincarĂ©, MallarmĂ©, Maeterlinck, and Bergson, yet in a modern setting he might have come across as the sort of marginal fanatic to be avoided at all costs. It seems possible that the charm of entomology might include the faintly sadistic prospect of lording it over very tiny creatures that are completely in oneâs power.
Like Fabre, entomologists in general tend to be obsessed, as they freely admit. When asked for his views of the Creator, the biologist J.B.S. Haldane quipped that he could deduce only that He must have an excessive fondness for beetles, an in-joke for entomologists, for there are more kinds of beetles on Earth than any other animal â about 500,000 species, a prodigality of nature that attracts squadrons of fanatical beetle collectors, many equipped with expensive wooden carrying cases for their specimens. The young Charles Darwin was a typical nineteenth-century beetle fancier who crammed his rooms at Cambridge with the nut-hard exoskeletons; later, as a mature scientist, he would spend eight years studying barnacles. It is difficult for the rest of us to imagine the avidity of such a quest. It seems probable that lepidopterists are the most obsessed, the most besotted, of the lot.
âWe are complete nut-cases,â says Luxembourg-born lepidopterist Michael Majerus, of Cambridge University. âYou spend many many nights walking around woodlands in England with a torch and a moth trap. Anyone who encountered you would think you were extraordinarily strange, but you are as happy as you could possibly be.â Lepidopterists say that it is a matter of temperament; you are either made for it or youâre not. Part of having the right temperament is the ability to sit patiently for long periods doing nothing. âIt would drive many people bonkers going out every day at dawn, and very often youâre sitting there watching very little for long periods of time,â Majerus adds. âI spent one summer working on the clouded yellow butterfly, which only flies in sunshine in Swedish Lapland. Every morning I had to climb to eight hundred metres and sit down, and many days the sun never came out, and at four oâclock I would just walk down the mountain. It was one of the most idyllic months I ever spent.â
There are many more moths than butterflies in this world. The latter number only about 20,000 out of some 165,000 Lepidoptera in total. Consequently the most gifted moth connoisseurs must have a savant-like knowledge of the insectsâ habitat, range, and larval food plants, which they usually do not hesitate to display. In Massachusetts, where there are sixty species of butterfly and thousands of moths, even Ted Sargent is awed by enthusiasts who âcan go up to a streetlight and start naming these things ⊠Itâs an extraordinary talent.â
Sargent has reached the conclusion that moth people are a breed apart, âweirder and crazier than butterfly people. They have this male bonding thing; they have a language all their own, a latinized vocabulary, since the moths and the food plants have Latin names.â Like other rapt hobbyists â horse and dog breeders, experts on Chippendale chairs, conspiracy theorists perhaps â lepidopterists can be crushing bores if youâre not one of them. In his lepidopterist writing, even the consummate stylist Vladimir Nabokov could be dense, fussy and jargon-ridden, with only the occasional turn of phrase (âcloudletâ, skies of âimpeccable blueâ) to distinguish his postings from the usual fare. The female of sublivens is of a curiously arctic appearance, completely different from the richly pigmented, regionally sympatric, locoweed- and alfalfa-feeding L. melissa ⊠And so on.
Some moth men have the stunted social skills of the more monomaniacal computer hackers, going about with misbuttoned shirts and uncombed hair, spouting taxonomic Latin. Their dinner-table small-talk is likely to be confined to adoring descriptions of a certain moth, its foodplant, its range, who first named it. I think the such and such is extending its range. So and so reported ⊠They will go to extraordinary lengths to catch a rare specimen. One obsessed collector acquaintance of Sargentâs goes into the field wearing a cap with a light mounted on it. From his belt dangle his killing jars, and secured in a holster at his waist sits a cylinder of sugaring solution the size of an oxygen tank. He stays at a cheap motel on a busy commercial strip and collects at night behind the motel, wandering into peopleâs landscaped yards and spraying the trees with his sugaring solution.
It might be said that Lepidoptera are all about sex and death â as indeed, from a Darwinian perspective, everything is. Like butterflies, moths pass through four life-cycle stages: egg, larva (caterpillar), pupa and adult (known as the âperfect insectâ or âimagoâ). Technically, metamorphosis is a form of moulting, which all animals with exoskeletons must undergo to grow. The larvae exist only to eat, feeding (and feeding and feeding) on their specific hostplants. Children who collect caterpillars quickly learn that to keep the caterpillar alive you must keep its foodplant in the box with it. The identity of the larval foodplant of rare species is part of the lore of lepidoptery, discussed endlessly in the journals. As they grow, caterpillars undergo several distinct moults, or âinstarsâ, before becoming transformed into pupae, or chrysalids, which may be naked or covered with a cocoon more or less composed of silk. After spending a period of time in the pupal state, they appear as four-winged, six-legged insects. Nabokov once described their metamorphosis thus: âThere comes for every caterpillar a difficult moment when he becomes pervaded by an odd discomfort. It is a tight feeling â here about the neck and elsewhere, and then an unbearable itch. Of course, he has moulted a few times before, but that is nothing in comparison to the tickle and urge that he feels now. He must shed that tight, dry skin, or die.â Some species pupate underground; others in nests. In some species it is the eggs that âoverwinterâ, or hibernate; in others it is the larvae or pupae that do so.
Moth anatomy is as complex as it is tiny, requiring a battery of lilliputian magnifying and surgical tools. Just consider the legs: as in all insects, these consist of coxa, trochanter, femur, tibia and tarsus, the latter composed of five joints and armed with hooks or claws, known technically as the ungues. The genitalia of Lepidoptera are usually dissected with care and debated fiercely, as the fine points of their structure commonly reveal the identity of the species. And all this pales next to the complexity of the breeding experiments undertaken by serious amateurs. âIn Britain alone 780 species of Macrolepidoptera ⊠demand 780 different techniques in breeding in each of their four stages of metamorphosis,â noted Kettlewell.
A typical breeding handbook, this one translated from the German, throws the reader into a realm more demanding in its way than neurosurgery or nuclear physics. The sense of secret lore, the painstaking (and numbingly boring) instructions, the solitary, never-ending toil, is reminiscent of early alchemical treatises. Under the heading âArctiidae (Footmen, Tigers and Ermines)â, for example, one reads such instructions as:
A large number of species overwinter as larvae, often after the second moult, in plucked moss. They must not be kept too dry and in mild winter weather they often become quite active and occasionally nibble brambly leaves or cabbage stalks. The winter-hardy blue-green saxifrage (Saxifraga caesia) is also readily accepted. The overwintering larvae may generally be brought into the warmth in March. If mating and oviposition have occurred earlier than in nature, the larvae begin to diapause equally early. In this case, it is more practical to keep the stock in an airy cage, containing fairly damp moss, at c. Âș C in a refrigerator for two or three months âŠ4
If you feel like meditating on the brevity of earthly life, consider a moth. A sudden frost can murder thousands of eggs. Larvae perish by the million, from starvation, predators, bad weather or disease. Unspeakable viruses exist that are 100 per cent fatal to caterpillars, reducing their tissues to jelly. If youâre a caterpillar in the wild your odds of dying before you become a moth are at least 90 per cent. Moth wings, tissue-paper-thin, can be easily torn. A moth or butterfly can be blown off-course by the wind. There is no protection against predators beyond oneâs fated coloration (or, in some cases, a noxious taste). Life according to Darwinâs inexorable mathematics is cruel and brief. Even Darwin shuddered at natureâs rapacity, which, by some accounts, convinced him of the nonexistence of God.
The adult mothâs entire career is sex. Many moths and butterflies do not even have mouths, for there is no eating required during their few days of winged life. Their sole imperative is to mate, and, if female, to lay. âThey are,â wrote Holland, âsimply animate, winged reservoirs of reproductive energy, and, when the sexual functions have been completed, they die.â As the dewy new female moth emerges from her pupa she emits a pheromonal scent that summons the males of the species from miles away. Copulation ensues within minutes or hours and is of unusually long duration. As a boy in Wisconsin Paul Ewald, a biologist at Amherst College, kept moths in his backyard, not an unusual childhood hobby for people in his profession. At dusk, when the females emerged, or eclosed (another lovely lepidopterist word, suggestive of French poetry), squadrons of male moths would streak through the violet sky, over the backyard fence, into the cage. âI was amazed at how long they stayed together,â Ewald told me, a r...
