“Patent Leather Beetle,” says the sign on a large glass terrarium in professor May Berenbaum’s office.
Due to Berenbaum’s growing reputation as perhaps the world’s only quirky-humored entomologist, you don’t know quite what to expect when peering in- side the terrarium.
Will it be a real bug? Or will it be a shiny party pump decked out with fake antennae, a shaggy haircut and a guitar?
“It’s a real bug, see?” Berenbaum says, pointing to not a fashion accessory but an insect, a very formidable insect, that appears not at all amused at being mistaken for a joke.
“They are interesting because they communicate with a repertoire of sounds that exceeds that of even some birds,” says Berenbaum, kicking into tutorial mode. “They also take care of their young. They are really cute.”
The following is a media prognostication: University of Illinois entomologist,author and pioneer of cinema insecte May Berenbaum is about to break out. Like Dr. Ruth from the sex clinic and Brad Pitt from Missouri, the bug-loving Berenbaum is bound for the bigger stage.
Book-smart and whip-witted, Berenbaum, 41, is head of the U. of I. entomology department, but she is more widely renowned as the founder of the school’s celebrated and widely imitated Insect Fear Film Fest. She is also the author of three books that manage to be both scientific and-in a slap at jargon-afflicted academics everywhere-decidedly non-pedantic,funny, even. In a quirky sort of way.
“Ninety-nine Gnats, Nits and Nibblers”(1989) and its sequel, “Ninety-nine More Maggots, Mites and Munchers” (1993), were both published by the University of Illinois Press. Each of these works contains brief character sketches on selected bugs, along with Berenbaum’s musings on their place in the eco-universe. The writing style calls to mind Seinfeld as scientist.
“For a dog to make headlines, it has to do something heroic like pull a drowning boy out of a lake, or awaken people in a burning building. … For a cockroach to make headlines, all it has to do is show up somewhere it’s never been before,” Berenbaum offers in pondering the media uproar over the discovery a few years ago of an Asian cockroach camped in some poor schmo’s ear.
Berenbaum got the writing bug because she wanted “to do insects justice” while also providing readers a service, she said. Her most recent serving of arthropodic justice, and her first “real book,” is “Bugs in the System” (Addison-Wesley).
The new book, subtitled “Insects and Their Impact on Human Affairs,” is based largely on material developed for her popular general science course at the U. of I., “Entomology 105, Insects and People,” which she teaches three times a week to about 150 students.
Of worms and tequila
“She is a witty, very intelligent, caring professor, who thinks a great deal of students and respects them and tries very hard to reach them,” said front-row student Susan Feuille, shamelessly angling for an “A.”
With Groucho-esque eyebrows and the deadpan delivery of a Catskills comic, Berenbaum is a headliner on the general sciences bill. She laces her lectures with witty asides, shameless puns and arthropodal humor.
One of her lectures is titled “Sex, Bugs, and Rock and Roll.” It features, among other things, a discourse on the Spanish fly, a beetle that contains a chemical that has been used as an aphrodisiac even though the substance is highly toxic and can kill a human, “which could certainly put a damper on a romantic evening,” she notes.
Berenbaum often leads her students into areas of the insect kingdom they have never pondered. “We have also learned what that worm at the bottom of the tequila bottle really is,” said Feuille, a non-traditional 46-year-old history major who signed up for Berenbaum’s class after hearing her on local public radio, where the entomologist is often deluged with calls from across the Midwest.
Berenbaum uses slides, dead insects, not-so-dead insects, scenes from insect terror movies and her eyebrows to great effect, according to her students.
In a recent class on Africanized, or so-called killer, bees, she displayed not only the usual bee-in-a-box and various scientific slides but also the front page of The Sun tabloid newspaper featuring a giant bee, a gun-toting man in a safari hat, and a headline, “Hunter Kills Giant Bee: Sting Could Kill An Elephant.”
“We’ve seen a lot of National Enquirer headlines,” noted Feuille.
Of her unorthodox teaching aids, Berenbaum says, “To coin an old phrase, `You catch more flies with honey.”‘
So many species, so little time
In her lectures and her books, Berenbaum’s primary theme is that bugs are here to stay, so we’d better learn to deal with them, and also to appreciate that their role on this planet is not just to become automotive grill splatter.
“Insects are an integral part of our existence,” she said.
There are 900,000 identified species of insects and perhaps as many as 30 million total species buzzing your own porch light any given night, noted Berenbaum, who “stumbled across” a new bug herself while doing graduate work.
“I didn’t know until I sent it off to an expert at the Smithsonian, who declared it a new species of weevil,” she said, noting that she was relieved that it was not named in her honor. “That’s the last thing I need. It has a nose that is half its body length. I’m already sensitive about that.”
Bugs (a word derived from the Middle Ages term for ghosts and hobgoblins) are serious players in the global marketplace, Berenbaum holds. Insects and their pollinating ways are vital to the production of not only the usual foodstuffs but also for such wonders as chocolate, silk and, even, indirectly, the computer.
It seems that silk manufacturers developed punch cards that programmed their looms to weave specific designs. Their crude technology was adapted in modern times to develop the digital computer, and thus IBM is a bug by-product, Berenbaum claims.
Along with citing the lunch-spoiling fact that the average peanut butter and jelly sandwhich contains “as many as 56 insect parts,” Berenbaum offers in “Bugs in the System” that about one-third of the average person’s diet (not counting Californians) consists of food made possible by insect pollination.
No wonder the new book has even fellow bug writers trilling in approval.
“There is no better guide to the world of insects than Berenbaum, whose writing is as readable as a good novel and who has a quirky sense of humor all her own,” deemed entomologist and author Howard E. Evans in a review for Science magazine.
A rough beginning
That this woman has become a celebrated entomologist (she is about to be inducted into the prestigious National Academy of Sciences) is fairly astonishing in light of the fact that Berenbaum and bugs did not exactly hit it off from the start.
“I was stung by a wasp when I was 5, I remember it was on my hand. My hands were behind my back, and a yellowjacket stung me,” she said, summoning up unrepressed memories from her childhood in Levittown, Pa. (“I’m a child of the suburbs. I’m not comfortable in cities or rural environments, but I’m great in shopping malls,” she said.)
That early insect trauma caused Berenbaum to spend a great deal of time in insect avoidance, although she was not able to shirk vine-maintenance duty in her father’s back-yard vineyard.
“When I was 7, I went out to pull Japanese beetles off my father’s grapevines, and I remember looking up at a leaf over my head and seeing a dark shadow that looked like a clump of them but it turned out to be one very large beetle instead,” she said. “I remember dropping it and screaming and running into the house.”
This was not looking at all like the start of a glorious career in entomology. But life is strange, little grasshopper.
And so one day it came to pass that Yale University freshman Berenbaum found herself enrolled in “Biology 42B-Terrestrial Arthropods,” because “it was the only one that fit my schedule and I thought if I took a course in bugs I could figure out what ones I should be afraid of.”
Familiarity only allowed her to vent her contempt at first, she confesses. “In the first lab class we were supposed to dissect live cockroaches by anesthetizing them and examining their windpipes, but I drowned mine in ether,” she admitted.
“I didn’t care if I ever saw a functional tracheology, I wanted it dead.”
Maybe it was the license to kill bugs, or maybe the more she got to know them from the inside out, the less she feared them. Whatever it was, Berenbaum faced her fears and made her scientist parents proud.
“That’s the kind of a kid she is, she faces all of her problems head on, conquers them and becomes head of her department,” said Berenbaum’s mother, Adrianne, a textile chemist married to Maurice, a chemical engineer.
And the quirky humor, Mother? “I might sound like I was bragging if I said where she got her sense of humor, although her dad is pretty funny too.”
The legendary film fest
It was during her graduate studies at Cornell University that Berenbaum’s inherited sense of humor melded with her acquired taste for insects and led to a cinematic inspiration.
“The Asian-American students were hosting a Godzilla festival and I thought if they could have a sense of humor why couldn’t entomologists? I couldn’t convince the faculty at Cornell to do it because they felt it was undignified,” she said. “There is this notion that science has to be imponderable and incomprehensible.”
Not at the U. of I., however. When Berenbaum was hired to teach there after receiving her doctoral degree in entomology at Cornell, she found a more receptive audience for her Insect Fear Film Festival concept.
“The dean here thought it was a good idea and that we should charge admission. We ended up not charging, but we’ve been doing it for 12 years now, and they are popping up all over the country,” she said. “Michigan State is planning one, and somehow they’ve gotten a VW dealer to raffle off a Bug.”
Her entomologically correct film festival is designed to counter the general miscasting and misrepresentation of insects and spiders in film, Berenbaum said.
She does this all in good humor, although several years ago the professor stirred up a nationwide nit-pick after she publicly stated that the Bob Hope of bug actors, Jiminy Cricket, was not at all “cricketlike.”
“At least Donald Duck has feathers and quacks,” she told the Tribune then.
What gets Berenbaum’s back up are unrealistic cinematic depictions of insects as terrorists, she said.
Take the misunderstood army ant, for example.
“Army ants are not really the insurmountable foe they are depicted to be,” she said. “Their biology does not match the Hollywood conception. In order to escape from an onslaught of army ants, all you have to do really is step to one side.”
Or join her in contemplating the injustice heaped upon the killer bee.
“`Killer?’ Let’s not get too anthropomorphic here, it’s not like they are plotting the overthrow of America or anything,” she says in umbrage.
And though it’s true that many species of unappreciated insects have developed resistance to chemical bug killers, people need not fear them, she said. They have only to apply a time-tested tool to remain the dominant species.
“Insecticide resistance is a problem,” Berenbaum offered, “but there is no known resistance yet to the sole of a shoe.”
