NATURE BOY

Nature Boy

I

 was always interested in nature. One of my earliest memories—I doubt if I was more than two years old—is the discovery of the “rolly polly”—the armadillo bug. It was the small gray bug that protected itself by rolling up into a ball if you touched it with a finger or a twig. It was called “rolly polly” because you could roll it around on the ground like a bead. As long as you kept nudging it, it stayed curled up. It made no attempt to unwind itself and run away.

                                                 

I did not understand it at that time, of course, but this was my introduction to “protective mimicry,” the methods that insects use to hide themselves from their enemies—their predators.

By the time I was seven or eight, I had trained myself to see through these disguises in the many forms that they took. Some caterpillars made cocoons that looked just like a bunch of dead leaves hanging from a twig on a tree or bush. There was the “stick insect” that looked just like its name. There were moths whose wings were colored in a pattern of grays and browns that matched the bark of the trees that they rested on.

I developed those observational powers at that early age because of a book of photographs, entitled Look at Life, that Aunt Sara gave me when I was seven and a half years old. I’ve treasured the book for more than seventy years. Aunt Sara inscribed the book with the date, and my name and hers, on the first page as you open the cover.

               

The pictures are all in black and white, taken with a close-up lens that revealed to me a world I was not so familiar with. It was from my study of that book that I learned to look at life. And until I read the Introduction to the book, while preparing to write this piece, I did not realize that this book had helped me to select my career as a scientist and an engineer. In the Editor’s Introduction I found these words:

“…it is certain that in every boy who opens his eyes to the light there are the beginnings of a scientist.”

What this means is that observations lead to questions, then to answers, and then later to learning the methods by which we answer questions—the Scientific Method.

I did not realize that my childhood fascination with insects and their behavior was leading me to become a Questioner. I did recognize that I was The Observer, and I spent a lot of time at it. In the spring and summer I spent hours in the grass and dirt, or hovering over bushes, or at the edge of a pond or stream finding and watching insects going about their business.

Their main business was survival. In fact, it probably was their only business. I monitored various insects as they ate, hunted and hid. Once in a while I was there when they transformed—when a Monarch butterfly crawled out of its chrysalis, for example. I wanted to know how something so large could emerge from such a small container.

 

A monarch butterfly emerges

from its chrysalis.

My timing was not usually so good that I was present when an insect transformed from one stage to another. More usually, all I found was the empty shell from which a beautiful dragonfly had emerged after its ugly nymph crawled out of the pond.

Dragonfly nymph. The shell splits and the dragonfly emerges

                          

                               After its wings dry, the dragonfly is ready

                                                to fly off in search of food and a mate.

Sometimes I would find the remains of the outer skin of the cicada (we called them “locusts”) that had burrowed its way up from beneath the ground, to find its freedom—after 17 years underground!—as a flying insect.

       The cicada squeezes itself out of the shell that has been its home for 17 years.

         It crawls to a resting place where its wings expand and dry.

One time, when I was about ten years old, I was around for a transition, but the consequences were not what I expected. It was Winter, and I found a mantis egg case in a bush in front of our apartment.

It was not easy to find praying mantises. Because of their body shape and color, they blend in very well with the bushes that they live and hunt in. They are a good example of protective mimicry.

The praying mantis

In the Fall, after the mantises had died and the leaves had fallen from the bushes, I spotted an egg case.

A mantis egg case

I carefully cut away the stem that it was attached to, and brought it inside to study. There wasn’t much about it to study. It was about the size and color of a walnut. The surface felt like styrofoam. The female mantis manufactures the case by whipping up a foam from a liquid that comes out of its tail end. It’s just like making meringue by beating air into egg white. While the foam is still liquid the female fills it with hundreds of eggs. When the foam hardens it is an insulation against the cold of the Winter ahead, and the surface is hard enough to keep other insects out.

I knew that the eggs would not hatch until Spring, when the weather turned warm in Baltimore. So I put the egg case in a safe place. At least, it seemed safe to me. I placed it inside of one of my father’s hats—one he did not wear often—which was kept on an upper shelf in a closet in our dining room.

Our dining room was hot through most of the Winter, so Spring came early, at least in that room. The eggs hatched into tiny mantises who began to crawl through narrow slits in the egg case to the outside surface. Then they filled up my father’s hat. Lucky for them—unlucky for me!—my mother went into the closet to get something. She found hundreds of baby mantises crawling over the brim of the hat. I don’t exactly remember the noise that she made upon this discovery, but I knew exactly what it meant. I quickly grabbed the hat and took it outside, where I shook off the

                                               Baby mantises after hatching

babies into a bush. I doubt if any of them survived the Winter—they were not supposed to hatch until Spring. That night, my father (who was usually gentle with me about these kinds of things) suggested that next time, instead of his hat, I use a large jar as an incubator.

One of the things I’ve learned about insects, from my observations, is how much we are like them. I’m thinking especially of protective mimicry, which is really nothing more than learning to blend in with the surroundings. We learn to do this as young children. We look around, and we see how our playmates behave. We often see that the one that stands out from the others because of what he wears, or how he talks, becomes the object of attention of the others. Often, that attention is not the kind that we want. Instead, we are sometimes singled out for ridicule, for abuse, or for exclusion. So we learn to behave like the others—to fit in.

But if we are wise enough, we can learn to become individuals in ways that let us stand out, that let us grow to be the person we want to be, without appearing to be a threat to the crowd—without becoming the object of their negative attention. Sometimes it takes a wise teacher, at home or at school, to help us make this transformation.

When I see this red dragonfly at the edge of my pond, poised on the end of a stalk, looking nothing like anything around it, I admire its fearlessness—its ability to stand apart from everything around it. It will permit me to approach within inches of it, so close that my finger is nearly touching its head. But any closer, and it darts away so fast that I’m not even sure which direction it has flown. It has the skill to protect itself. It has the skill to stand out and be what Nature has intended.