Life on the Edge

They Did It Their Way

Keith K. Howell

The Academy is a great place to do your thing, if you have a ‘thing’ to do,” says Edward S. Ross curator emeritus of entomology at the California Academy of Sciences. Now 86, Ross still has plenty of things to do. He still comes to the office everyday to work on his many projects, most notably a series of volumes on the Embiidina, an order of web-spinning insects. After collecting embiids for over 60 years from more than 50 countries, Ross’s knowledge of his specialty is without peer. But his expertise on these obscure animals comprises just a fraction of his voluminous knowledge of all manner of plants and animals. Ross is one of those rare naturalists who are experts in all they survey.

Equally astounding is his photography, especially his close-ups of insects—their behavior and their intimate interactions with their surroundings. Here, too, he has blazed a trail that many younger photographers have followed. Some of his images illustrate his article “Bee Bank.” Others appear in the excerpts from his oral history, “Around the World in 80-odd Years.”

Ross spent much of his childhood scouring the sand dunes of San Francisco for hidden wildlife. It was a time when, he says, “one could walk from 19th Avenue all the way to the Great Highway without crossing pavement.” A decade or so earlier, Ansel Adams, who lived near Baker Beach in his youth, had also roamed these same hummocks, and he, too, took up insect collecting as his favorite hobby. Clearly there was something about western San Francisco in the early twentieth century that was conducive to both a love of nature and a love of photography. Both men were driven to record beauty. Elizabeth Rush writes about the forces that inspired Adams in “Preserving Nature in Black and White.”

Later on, after they were both well established in their respective fields and Adams was a Research Associate of the Academy, they were panel members together at some photography meetings. On one occasion, Adams remarked to Ross, “You know Ed, you’re a more diverse photographer than I am. You could be famous.”

“No,” replied Ross, who had other priorities. “It takes time to be famous.”

In the tradition of the peripatetic Edward Ross has come another entomologist who spends far more time in the field than the lab. Brian Fisher is a myrmecologist, someone who studies ants, and he has been especially drawn to the ants of Africa. He tells of a recent trip there in “Escape from Ant Paradise.” Between the swarms of sweat bees and the attempted coup in the Central African Republic, you get a sense that this vocation is not for the faint-hearted—which, of course, is one of its major attractions. But his travels make great tales for the armchair travelers amongst us.

Academy herpetologist Joe Slowinski’s last journey did not end happily. Last September, he was leading an expedition of scientists in the far north of Myanmar when he was bitten by a krait, a highly venomous species of cobra. They were eight hours from the nearest village and hundreds of miles from any antivenin, which requires refrigeration. Nevertheless, expedition members kept Joe alive for 30 hours–in hopes of an eventual rescue. Unfortunately, the heavy foliage together with the monsoon rains repeatedly prevented a rescue helicopter from landing, and Joe died. He will be sorely missed.

Keith K. Howell is Editor of California Wild.