Insects Are Nature's Garbage Collectors

In the 1940s, William Albrecht coined the term insects are nature's garbage collectors, based on his observations at Sanborn Field while he was a professor of soil science at the University of Missouri. In his observation that unhealthy plants were always the first to be attacked by insects. And he was really expressing his perspective that insects are nature's survival of the fittest mechanism. They're here to take the unhealthy plants out of the system before they can reproduce. From the work that William Albrecht did, that expanded into the work of Philip Callahan, which I'd like to talk briefly about. A lot of the original research work that he did was classified at the time, since he was working for the military as a, as a military researcher, Philip's research was on plant insect communication systems and understanding how plants and insects communicate. Ultimately, his research was used as the foundation to develop anti radar cloaking devices for military aircraft. So what Philip discovered was that plants and insects are communicating with each other in the infrared spectrum, and unhealthy plants emit a very different radiation signature than healthy plants. So Philip authored a number of books, including Tuning into Nature and Exploring the Spectrum, as well as a number of other books that very clearly describe the research work that he did on plant insect communication systems. In its simplest essence, Phillips research work describes how plant insects communicate with each other. What he describes is that when we have a healthy plant in the field, plants that are vigorous, growing very well, and a particular emphasis, plants that have the correct nitrogen forms in the right ratios, this is what we see, and this is what insects see. They don't see anything. It blends perfectly into the background radiation. And they cannot see healthy plants standing out against the background of all the infrared radiation that is already present. However, when we have unhealthy plants, plants that have insects present in the field, particularly plants that have high ammonia concentrations, because ammonia serves as an infrared amplifier or as an infrared pump, so it greatly enhances the infrared signal. So, so when we're looking at unhealthy plants in the field, this is what we see, and this is what insects see. In Phillips own words, he said that plants that have high concentrations of ammonia within the plant structure appear to insects as a neon light against a dark background. The interesting part, of course, is when you have unhealthy plants that are serving as insect attractants, you can put on a pesticide and you can obliterate all the pests that are there, but you haven't removed the signal. The sign is still there, serving as an attraction for all other insects in the immediate neighborhood. This is a photomicrograph of the bottom side of a tomato leaf at 4000 times magnification, displaying all of the micro antenna on the bottom side of that leaf that are migrating in the neighborhood of 26,000 MHz and are also functioning as photon receptors for more efficient photosynthesis. This is an antenna that, surprisingly enough, we call an antenna. The only difference between this antenna and this antenna, from a practical applications perspective, there's obviously many other differences, but from a practical applications perspective, the only difference between these two antenna is the wavelengths that they are picking up. So if you look at the electromagnetic spectrum, you can see that a much smaller antenna, much shorter antenna, is going to pick up much shorter wavelengths. So this is actually an image of a single hair on the antenna of one of those moths that we were looking at earlier. And now if we take one of those smaller hairs on this picture, on this photomicrograph and amplify that, this is what that looks like. So in many ways, it is like fractal geometry, where we have antenna upon antenna upon antenna. The really interesting part, of course, is that these antennae are biological wave guides. And as biological waveguides, entomologists have not been successful in producing antennas that are as sensitive to electromagnetic signals in the environment as the natural antennas that an insect is already equipped with.

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