The late-19th and early 20th-century French naturalist and amateur entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre, who started life as a butterfly-chasing, bug-loving kid, was the first to describe in detail the life of a species of processionary caterpillar. It was his account that provoked Terrence D. Fitzgerald, the author of our September cover story, “Lethal Fuzz,” to investigate the behavior of these toxic-bristled marchers, which, crawling nose to tail like the cars of a train, once managed to bring a real railroad to a standstill (PDF).

To read Fabre, who has been wonderfully translated and published on the Web in more than one place, is to go back to the wellspring of pure curiosity that gave rise to natural history and ultimately to its grandchild, science. At a time when that grandchild was growing tall, professionalizing and becoming more rigorously experimental, the self-educated Fabre was already a throwback to a time before science separated from art, before anthropomorphism, fable, metaphor, and frank attempts to imagine oneself into a bug’s or beast’s head got banished, at least to the sidelines.

They proceed in single file, in a continuous row, each touching with its head the rear of the one in front of it. The complex twists and turns described in his vagaries by the caterpillar leading the van are scrupulously described by all the others. No Greek theoria winding its way to the Eleusinian festivals was ever more orderly. Hence the name of Processionary given to the gnawer of the pine. . . .

At the head of every procession, long or short, goes a first caterpillar whom I will call the leader of the march or file, though the word leader, which I use for want of a better, is a little out of place here. Nothing, in fact, distinguishes this caterpillar from the others: it just depends upon the order in which they happen to line up; and mere chance brings him to the front. Among the Processionaries, every captain is an officer of fortune. The actual leader leads; presently he will be a subaltern, if the file should break up in consequence of some accident and be formed anew in a different order.

His temporary functions give him an attitude of his own. While the others follow passively in a close file, he, the captain, tosses himself about and with an abrupt movement flings the front of his body hither and thither. As he marches ahead he seems to be seeking his way. Does he in point of fact explore the country? Does he choose the most practicable places? Or are his hesitations merely the result of the absence of a guiding thread on ground that has not yet been covered? . . .

Why cannot I read what passes under his black shiny skull, so like a drop of tar? To judge by actions, there is here a small dose of discernment which is able, after experimenting, to recognize excessive roughnesses, over-slippery surfaces, dusty places that offer resistance and, above all, the threads left by other excursionists. This is all or nearly all that my long acquaintance with the Processionaries has taught me as to their mentality. Poor brains, indeed; poor creatures, whose commonwealth has its safety hanging upon a thread!

As much as he admired the creatures he observed, you can see that Fabre also harbored a certain imperial human contempt for them. Incredulous at the “machine-like obstinacy” of one caterpillar procession that followed itself round and round the rim of a flowerpot for seven days, he wrote, “I was expecting too much of them when I accorded them [a] faint gleam of intelligence.” Not stopping there, he went on to rail at “the abysmal stupidity of insects as a class whenever the least accident occurs” and “the lack of any gleam of intelligence in their benighted minds.” This scathing dismissal of the “lower” orders seems linked to his opposition to Darwinian evolution, which he did not believe could account for either the intricacy or the fixity of instinctive behavior. (Today’s Biblical creationists claim him, questionably, as one of their own.) It was Darwinists Fabre was hinting at when he wrote haughtily, “The school most highly honoured to-day is very anxious to find the origin of reason in the dregs of the animal kingdom. Let me call its attention to the Pine Processionary.”

Darwin, who called Fabre “the inimitable observer,” wrote to him, coaxing him to reconsider his adamant opposition and also to give the bugs a break:

     My Dear Sir,—I hope that you will permit me to have the satisfaction of thanking you cordially for the lively pleasure which I have derived from reading your book. Never have the wonderful habits of insects been more vividly described, and it is almost as good to read about them as to see them. I feel sure that you would not be unjust to even an insect, much less to a man. . . . I must believe, with Pierre Huber, that insects have “une petite dose de raison.” . . .

     I am sorry that you are so strongly opposed to the Descent theory; I have found the searching for the history of each structure or instinct an excellent aid to observation; and wonderful observer as you are, it would suggest new points to you. If I were to write on the evolution of instincts, I could make good use of some of the facts which you give.

Fitzgerald, too, looked into the caterpillars’ apparently mindless circling somewhat in their defense; he suspected, and demonstrated, that Fabre’s subjects kept on going nowhere not because they were abysmally stupid, but because they were trapped. Fittingly, it was Fabre’s own example of observation that ultimately led us from fruitless circling on the high rim of human exceptionalism to a growing recognition of the all-but-infinite forms intelligence can take. Fabre inspired ethologists such as Karl von Frisch, who went on to discover the communicative dance of honeybees (PDF). (That link is to a fascinating, if somewhat abstruse, Cabinet Magazine

“[L]et’s start from the position that we have certain limitations in our capacity to understand, rather than that these other beings have limitations in their capacity to become us. . . . There’s a lot to be said for beginning from a position of humility.”  —Hugh Raffles

interview with New School anthropologist Hugh Raffles, author of the forthcoming Illustrated Insectopedia. Among other things, it breaks the news—to me, anyway—that the even more famous ethologist Konrad Lorenz was “an active member of the Nazi party and a key figure in its Office for Race Policy,” eager to demonstrate that instinct was “the engine of racial progress.” No species takes such spectacular wrong turnings as ours.)

Von Frisch’s work (PDF) with bees has now been carried forward into even more astonishing territory, as our September Sampling “Bee Brains” documents, and this six-part video lecture by Professor Mandyam V. Srinivasan of the Australian National University delightfully explains:

“Small Brains, Smart Minds,” Part I:

Watch the remaining parts on YouTube:

Part II,  Part III,  Part IV,  Part V,  Part VI

If only we could show this to Fabre, who performed pioneering experiments on the homing behavior of mason bees. He’d be enthralled. Even a strategic fib he told about his bees turns out to be true:

Time was when I used to share the common fears, when I hesitated before venturing into a swarm of Anthophorae or Chalicodomae; nowadays, I have quite got over those terrors. If you do not tease the insect, the thought of hurting you will never occur to it. At the worst, a single specimen, prompted by curiosity rather than anger, will come and hover in front of your face, examining you with some persistency, but employing a buzz as her only threat. Let her be: her scrutiny is quite friendly. . . .

I was careful not to divulge the secret to strangers. If any one, coming on business, passed outside the arch while I was standing before the hanging nests, some such brief dialogue as the following would take place:

“So they know you; that’s why they don’t sting you?”

“They certainly know me.”

“And me?”

“Oh, you; that’s another matter!”

Whereupon the intruder would keep at a respectful distance, which was what I wanted.

In fact, bees can recognize human faces—as beekeepers have known all along.

It’s a long way from Fabre’s “dregs of the animal kingdom”—directed at caterpillars in a fit of pique—to Dr. Srinavasan’s effusion, "I realised that [bees] are actually miniature human beings—they’re extremely intelligent, they will learn things very quickly, they have excellent colour vision. . . . They can remember things for long periods of time. They’re just beautiful creatures."

If Fabre needed to hold on to a consoling scrap of human exceptionalism, well, there’s always this: to the best of our knowledge, only people do science.

(Annie Gottlieb)

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