Nature Boy
I
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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.
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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.
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| 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.
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| The praying mantis |
In the Fall, after the mantises had died and the leaves had fallen from the bushes, I spotted an egg case.
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| 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.
