I received an arc of this title from NetGalley for an honest review. Not many realize how important insects are and how man could not survive w/o them. This book has more information on this topic, though I did skim a lot because it was so science forward.

Thanks Netgalley and Knopf for access to this arc.

I was lured to this book by the cover and the title but it covers far more than pondering whether or not the flap of a butterfly’s wing will cause a tornado around the world. The book covers in detail three products from insects which have played pivotal roles in human history up until this day: shellac, silk, and cochineal. Each has been sought after, bargained for, schemed for, and seen high then low then high demand. Entire economies have depended upon them and in new ways, humans have rediscovered how useful they are.

After World War II, the age of synthetic appeared to be poised to replace these and other natural products (not all necessarily derived from insects but most). Three things, among many possible items to choose to illustrate this point, have shown us how dangerous this can be: “Silent Spring,” Love Canal, and Bhopol, India.

Insects (six legged, with antennae, three part segmented bodies) have survived longer on the planet then the dinosaurs did and far longer than humans. They’re much better at producing non-toxic things we use as well as ensuring that life continues on Planet Earth. Every third mouthful of food we eat (on average) is due to the efforts of insects. And that’s not counting eating insects. Yes, this might be the future of food for our burgeoning population. Over 100 countries already have a long standing tradition of entomophagy (including the US) though proponents of wearily acknowledge that it’s going to take effort to get most western countries to (re) embrace the idea. But if potatoes and tomatoes can eventually be widely accepted as edible, then so can cricket flour, ants, larvae, and mealworms. Among other options. There are already entrepreneurs working on it and if you drink coffee, yeah, you’re already consuming some as up to 10% by weight of shipped coffee beans are often of entomological origin. ::slurp::

And along with being non-toxic, having multiple already established uses that humans just haven’t (so far) been able to replicate, the cultivation of lac bugs, silkworms, and cochineal bugs, as well as edible insects provide opportunities for rural populations (and especially women) to earn money and support themselves. We might even be able to reduce the tens of millions of pounds of e-waste generated every year by using shellac.Plus as humans and insects are so different, unlike humans and mammals, there might be less chance of species to species jumps in diseases.

“The Butterfly Effect” delves into much more than what I’ve mentioned. Fruit flies have provided research material that has led to numerous Nobel Prizes. Two researchers – one African American and one Austrian Jewish – fought racism and were responsible for elucidating fascinating details about how honeybees learn, map locations, and communicate with their hive sisters. There are a whole lot more bugs in the average house then most of us want to think about. Melillo has an entertaining style yet manages to be both thorough and interesting without the book becoming a boring lecture. Well done. B

One of four books reviewed in a science title roundup for Book and Film Globe.

Edward D. Melillo doesn’t pull off that same trick with The Butterfly Effect. It’s a decent survey of how our lives are intertwined with insects, and I don’t just mean bees pollinating flowers and plants. Though that is very, very important. Very.

Pollination gets its due, but Melillo is best when surprising us. He offers up six main subjects with decreasing success. First we have shellac, the breakthrough material for capturing sound brought to us by insect secretion. Silk, a surprisingly durable material both beautiful and complex that science simply can’t best, tops even that. And then there’s the cochineal, a source of red dye and other hard-to-equal attributes held tightly by empires, stolen by “biopirates” and ultimately brought to the world.

So far, so good. Melillo is on less solid ground when tackling the more familiar territory of the fruit fly in science and the insects that pollinate the world’s crops. You’d have to be daft or Sarah Palin not to know the fruit fly is an essential element in scientific research and the source of so much knowledge in genetics. And even Palin, who once mocked money spent on studying fruit flies as a boondoggle, must know we depend on insects for pollination.

In the final chapter, Melillo offers the tasty possibility of fried grasshoppers as the West catches up with the two billion people on the planet who chew on insects as a source of protein. It’s amusing, slightly squeamish, and offers none of the scope of his best passages.

Melillo offers some succinct history and good tidbits of information but he connects his tales very loosely at best. When the finale tosses in some poetry, a Barbara Kingsolver novel, the anthropocene and finally, finally (!) a nonsensical mention of the butterfly effect in the very last line, you’re a tad embarrassed. It’s a rather desperate end to a book that contains two or three very good magazine articles padded out to book length.

-- Michael Giltz
mgiltz@pipeline.com