A Bug's (After)Life
By Emily Stearney, Public Relations intern and 2018 graduate of Iowa State University, B.S. Public Relations
Anyone who’s ever tried to get their dog to sit still and look at the camera during a family portrait can confirm: taking photos of animals is hard. While it’s one thing to snap pictures of pets or creatures at the zoo, a different challenge entirely lies in the art of taking photos of insects.
Luckily, we have it down to a science here at the Field.
Museum researchers don’t need to worry about these critters moving too much (they’ve found peace in the insect afterlife), but getting all of the intricate details into a single shot is a time-consuming process. The Collaborative Invertebrate Lab (CIL), located on the third floor of the museum, houses some of our most advanced imaging technology. Scientists from all disciplines may use the equipment, but its primary purpose is producing invertebrate images for documentation and research.
Built from a National Science Foundation grant awarded to curators Rüdiger Bieler and Margaret Thayer, the CIL is the workspace of just a few of our many scientists, including Stephanie Ware, a research assistant in the Insects Collection. Her role involves managing the lab and producing images of all types of insects, from bat flies to millipedes. The finished product makes pet photography look like a walk in the (dog) park.
First, photographing such small animals require special tools to position, stabilize, and clean them. Few objects can interact with specimens in a way that doesn’t damage their delicate, carefully preserved bodies. If you assumed these tools involve the latest, most complex technology and cost hundreds of dollars, guess again; some of them are as straightforward as attaching a human eyelash to a toothpick-sized stick.
Eyelashes, as well as cat whiskers, make incredibly simple yet effective tools for cleaning tiny bugs. Similarly, there are no fancy ways to stabilize bugs for their glamour shots—instead, a small pump of hand sanitizer or some dental wax will affix the specimen to the microscope’s stage, depending on whether the specimen is wet or dry.
Stephanie can also produce hyper-detailed shots of an insect using Microptics, Leica, and Olympus imaging systems. With the extremely high levels of magnification that these systems use, only a tiny sliver of a whole photo is in focus at one time. To account for this, multiple photos—anywhere from 30 to 90 of them—are taken from the top focus of the specimen down through to the bottom focus. Next, special composite software detects the slivers of each image that are in focus and compiles the focused sections into one complete portrait.
As if that weren’t enough, some photos are made using ultraviolet (UV) light. Stephanie has a lot of experience using this method to photograph one class of arthropods in particular: millipedes. Using UV photography for curator Petra Sierwald’s National Science Foundation-funded project “Millipede Systematics: Developing phylogenomic, classification and taxonomic resources for the future” has so far revealed that every order of millipede has representatives that light up in some way. (This isn’t the only animal with UV markings— scorpions, some parakeets, and the polka-dot tree frog all glow in UV light.)
So you have a bunch of beautiful, detailed, colorful—and sometimes creepy—insect photos. Now what? Sure, they’re stunning, but what could these photos provide us besides a different perspective on bugs?
Well, to start—documentation. When scientists identify a new species, it’s critical that a detailed description of the exact animal that was discovered—called a type specimen—be recorded. So, when future generations of scientists discover new animals, they have a complete, crystal-clear record of what animals have already been found and where they fit in the phylogenetic tree. Photos like these are about as detailed a description as it gets.
Collaboration is another big reason. By having detailed digital images of species that can be uploaded and shared on searchable databases, scientists around the world can access and contribute to information with relatively little effort. Imagine how much faster the science community would be able to work if every museum’s collections were digitized and searchable online!
These photos advance science by letting us tap into the brain power of the world. And this isn’t just the case with bugs, either; photos and illustrations help us make sense of everything in our world, whether it’s historical events, physics, botany, architecture, and more. So, the next time you see something out in nature that interests you, channel your inner scientist and take a photo—it might just become a discovery one day!
