Butterflies and Social Science

Mother and Child Feeding Silkworms in Laos

 

One of the really fun things about my fellowship  in Japan was meeting other students from different  fields.  One person who does especially cool work is my friend Annabel Vallard, who is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for South East Asian Studies  in Paris.  Annabel is an anthropologist who studies the silk production in Japan, Thailand, and Laos.  As I mentioned before, Silk worms are not technically butterflies.  However, they are in the same order (Lepidoptera), and I didn’t want to pass up the chance to interview a butterfly social scientist because of a technicality.

Silkworm farmer in Laos posing with a tray of silkworms

Annabel got interested in silkworms when she was studying textile industry in Laos and Thailand for her thesis. Since silk weaving is an important craft in the area, she started talking with rural silk producers about how they raise silk worms.  One thing she found out was that the Japanese government had started a collaboration in Thailand as early as the first decade of 1900’s and in Laos during the late 1950s in order to improve silk quality and to help impoverished Laotian and Thai silk farmers. Japan as a nation is very committed to international development and aid, and often sends its scientists abroad to do research or teach in developing countries.  Annabel’s work in Thailand and Laos focused on interviewing the silk farmers and the Thai and Laotian staff at the research station about how they raised silk worms as well as how they interpreted the scientific research and protocols for silk worm care.  Although scientists try to accurately follow standard protocols for their research, every person will perceive these instructions differently, and each culture has its own way of interpreting the same directions.  She’s now starting a new phase of the project here in Japan, trying to find the Japanese scientists who worked on the silkworm development programs in Thailand and Laos and to find out not only what they did in the project but what their current relationship to silkworms is.

Development programs and Silk

Even though the Japanese government started the program with the best intentions, silk

Postage Stamp Promoting Silkworm Production in Laos

production in Laos and Thailand was (and still is) a pretty different process from silk production in Japan.  In the previous blog post, I explained how the Meji emperor was influential in developing the science of silkworm breeding and rearing.  By the 1950s, silk production was a highly industrialized process in Japan, and silkworms were raised in sterile laboratories on artificial diet. However, Thailand and Laos were still using traditional methods of silk production.  Silk is still produced by individual households, where silkworms are raised in bamboo trays behind the kitchen and are fed mulberry leaves from the garden around the house.  At first, Japanese researchers tried to introduce the Japanese species of silk worms. However, the laboratory bred silkworms had evolved in sterile conditions and at cooler temperatures.  When they were crammed together in bamboo trays in the humid atmosphere of Laotian and Thai homes, they would get sick and die.  Eventually Japanese researchers hybridized the Japanese lab silk worms with Laotian and Thai native silkworms, and they produced a strain that could survive in the tropical heat in people’s homes. Today in Laos the Japanese government ships the research stations these special eggs produced in laboratories, the research station staff raises them, breeds the adult silkworms and supervises their reproduction. Then, they sell the new generations of eggs to local silk farmers that will raise them to maturity. More than half a century later, the Lao-Japanese program is still going, and every few years the Japanese government sends a diverse team of scientists to the field station to continue the research efforts.  The research team usually includes entomologists, soil experts, silk machinery engineers and silk worm disease experts.  Annabel’s new project is to find researchers who have participated in the project and to explore the manufacture of these biotechnological materials altogether in human imaginary and in practice. Annabel is interested in more than just silk worm raising technique though.  Just like Jess and I are interested in using butterflies to understand big questions about how insects can evolve in a changing climate, Annabel is interested in studying how two cultures can go about the same process in different ways, and what happens when people from those cultures try to work together.

 

A Day in the Life of a Butterfly Social Scientist

research station staff washing silkworm trays

Jess and I have talked a lot on the blog about what the daily life of a butterfly biologist is like.  Annabel’s work schedule is really different from that of a biologist.  Modern anthropologists use a method of data collection called “participant observation” where they try to become a part of daily life in the community they study.  They go about mundane tasks with the people while trying to observe and record what they are actually doing.   Since Annabel is just beginning her research here in Japan, her work right now consists of meeting with scientists and trying to track down the researchers who worked on the Laotian and Thai development projects.  In Thailand and Laos, however, her work day takes her to the silk research stations where she works alongside the staff to see what they’re doing.   If they’re breeding silkworms, cleaning cages, or answering questions from silk farmers, she’s right there watching how they work and sometimes working with them.  When they stop for a tea break or go out for a beer after work, she goes too.

While Jess and I use a lot of lab equipment, Annabel just uses a list of questions and a tape recorder or video camera to watch how people work.  She says recording is really important because it’s easy to miss something while you’re thinking of your next question.  However, it’s not just a simple interview process and you have to be a strong observer to catch and remember the smallest details.  Annabel says that you have sometimes to let your research subjects lead the conversation, and be flexible when they surprise you with a new topic or idea.  “In anthropology you have to be open to what will happen next”, she says.

 

Ethnoentomology: The Social Science of Insects

When I asked Annabel what surprised her the most when she started the silk worm project, she said “the fact that people can have such strong relationships with insects.”  Annabel says that there is a growing field related to anthropology called Ethnoentomology.  You may have heard of Ethnobotany, the study of how communities use plants, and Ethnoentomology is basically the same thing but for insects.   In the past, anthropologists usually studied human-insect interactions when insects were part of food, myths or ceremonies.  Now anthropologists are becoming interested in how people organize economic and social institutions around insects.  Most ethnoentomologists do this by studying a small scale example in detail.  For example one of Annabel’s colleagues, Nicolas Césard, studies urban bee keeping  in  France while another, Stéphane Rennesson, studies beetle fighting rings in Thailand.  Of course, biologists like Jessica and I are part of a community with our own beliefs, hierarchy and rituals surrounding insects.   Biological scientists are now becoming the subjects of research themselves, as anthropologists try to understand how the scientific community works .  While it can feel a little strange to be under observation yourself, I think it’s great that we have social scientists to help biological scientists understand the way we do our job.

MacGyver Moments in Science II: the Hyaku Yen store

The Hyaku Yen Shop: a Japanese retail wonderland

As we’ve previously discussed on the blog,  scientists sometimes need to improvise research tools using house hold objects .  I recently got a shipment of butterflies from Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan. I’m hoping to test whether these northern butterflies are adapted to a different range of temperatures than their southern counterparts.  The scientist collecting them for me shipped them to me as pupa, and soon they’ll be emerging from their chrysalies and I will try to breed them and use the offspring in experiments.   I’ve been asking my Japanese labmates for advice on how to set up experiments here, and one big thing  they’ve taught me that the Hyaku yen shop is the number one place to purchase butterfly rearing supplies.

What is a Hyaku Yen Shop?

Hyaku yen shops are like the dollar store in the U.S. but even better..  Hyaku means 100, the yen is the currency of Japan, and Hyaku yen is about $1 depending on the exchange rate (lately it’s more like 75 cents).   Some Hyaku Yen shops are little mom and pop places, but mine is three floors of ridiculously cheap goods manufactured in China all for under Y100.  You can get anything from laundry detergent to pickles to purses at the Hyaku yen shop, including butterfly rearing supplies.

Raising Butterflies using the Hyaku Yen Shop: 

Butterflies are pretty uncomplicated animals to raise, at least in theory.  They basically need a container with air holes and some type of sugar water to feed on.  Therefore, an aspiring bioligist can buy a functional lab set up for under $100.  I’m lucky because my Japanese lab already has some equipment I can use.  My labmates in Kyoto rear their butterflies in these plastic containers.  In their former life they used for take out at  restaraunts, but they now have holes cut in the top to let air in (although they aren’t technically from the Hyaku yen shop, they are still clearly in the MacGyver spirit).

To close the butterfly cages we use little squares of plastic mesh.  Japanese families usually cover their drains with mesh to keep food out of the plumbing (houses here usually don’t have garbage disposals).  Mesh squares also make a great cover for a butterfly cage.    Butterflies also need a stick to cling to when they emerge from their chrysalis.  Back home we used sticks from the ground outside which are free and therefore cheaper than the Hyaku yen shop.  However, they often had crazy bacteria, mold and fungi which can reduce unsuspecting butterflies to a pulp.   Chopsticks, on the other hand, cost about one yen per chopstick, and are totally sterile.

Mesh for covering your drain to keep food out - or the top of a butterfly cage!

Chopsticks

Finally, butterflies need to eat.  Back in the U.S., we mix up a solution of honey and water to feed our butterflies.  However, my Japanese labmates use sports drinks, which are a lot more convenient and can be bought in bulk.  The butterfly drink of choice is apparently “Pocari Sweat”, an insanely popular sports drink in Japan.

Pocari Sweat: Japan's #1 sports drink for humans and butterflies

The Hyaku yen shop also has baskets for organizing petri dishes and , lab note books, labels and an assortment of fine pens for collecting data . In the past two months, I’ve come to depend on the Hyaku yen shop for my research supplies.  Having a one-stop shop for all my research needs is one of the many things I’m really going to miss when I get back to the U.S.

Sample bags in every imaginable size

Petri Dish Labels

Testing my petri dishes in the tupperware to see how many will fit

Silkworms and Samurai: How Butterflies Shaped Modern Science in Japan

The silkworm (Bombyx mori), bringing you science since the Edo period

Before coming to Japan I didn’t know anything about the history of science in Asia.    Luckily, the fellowship program I’m brought in a guest speaker, Dr. Kaori Iida, to give the American students a crash course in Japanese scientific history.  Dr. Iida did her PhD in genetics at Pennsylvania State University, but one of her interests is the history of biology in Japan.  One of the big surprises from her talk was that silkworms (which are butterflies, well,  moths to be exact) played a big role in developing science in Japan, which led me to read more about the history of sericulture (raising silkworms).   Silkworms (Bombyx mori) produce silk when they spin their cocoons and this silk fiber can be re-processed into silk thread and woven into silk cloth.  More importantly, they were one of the first subjects of rigorous biological study in Japan.

To give you an idea of how silkworms shaped science in Japan, I have to take you back to the early 1800s when Japan was still a feudal nation. Japan had had some contact with the outside world back in the 1500s, but in 1633 it decided that it didn’t like how it was being treated by western powers.  So it shut it’s borders and cut off almost all contact with the outside world. During this time Japan was developing its arts and literature, but science was still a pretty informal job. The Japanese were great at breeding plants and animals, and understood how to select for unique traits.  However most people doing science at the time didn’t consider themselves scientists, they thought of themselves as farmers or breeders.  One of the best examples of this is silkworm breeding. Japanese silk merchants knew a lot about how to breed silkworms, and had done lots of experiments to refine silk production, but they were doing it in a decentralized way rather than as a scientific community.  In fact, lots of the silk producing families were trying to select silk worms to produce unique lines that would make their silk a recognizable “brand” ,and they didn’t want to share their trade secrets.

Print of women raising silkworms. Actually, raising caterpillars hasn't changed much in the last 200 years and Jess and I use a similar method to the one depicted in the painting. We collect eggs (bottom right panel) and then raise caterpillars in bins filled with leaves (upper and lower left panels).

Feudal japan in the 1800s was a lot like feudal Europe: most people were peasants living in rural areas. If you were lucky, however, you were born a samurai (who were like noblemen/knight/poet/bureaucrats) and the government paid you to live in an awesome castle, tax your peasants, and keep order. You also had the right to strike down any commoner who didn’t show you respect and had the right to carry awesome swords.  The man in charge of feudal Japan was called Shogun. There was an Emperor as well, but he was basically a figurehead and was kept in isolation away from the public.  The laws of the Shogun stated that he couldn’t even leave the palace unless there was an emergency.  The emperor lived in Kyoto, while the Shogun ran the show up in Tokyo.

Samurai!

Everything started to change when the American navy arrived in 1853, and decided that they were going to trade with Japan whether Japan liked it or not.  Commodore Matthew Perry got down to business doing what colonial powers do best, and he forced Japan to sign what are now called the “Unequal Treaties” (which I think are pretty self-explanatory). Perry’s arrival upset the status quo in a number of ways.  The Japanese were dismayed to learn that they were going to be basically giving away all their trade goods to the United States.  If that wasn’t bad enough, when they saw Perry’s modern ships they suddenly realized that they were missing out on the technological advances of the rest of the world.  So in 1868 they decided to rebel and kick the Shogun and his isolationist policies out, and installed the Emperor on the throne.

Japanese painting of Commodore Perry's ships. While the ship clearly didn't have a gaping mouth and eyes, I think this painting captures the general feeling of "Oh crap..." that swept Japan after contact with the United States.

Being ruled by an Emperor doesn’t sound very different from being ruled by the Shogun, but Emperor Meiji and his government were actually really eager to interact with the rest of the world.  They were also very committed to promoting science and technology in Japan.   Within a few years they  had set up  new universities and started hiring foreign instructors to expose students to new ideas. They started using western clocks to tell time and got everyone using a western calendar, so that the Japanese could more easily do business with other countries. They set up a European style parliament, and gave all male citizens the right to vote (women got the vote in 1946). They also felt that all the samurai antics were a distraction from the business of modernizing Japan, so they gave the samurai a huge pay cut and stripped them of their special privileges. It was a pretty crazy time in Japan, the economy was in turmoil, people violently disagreed with each other about whether to support the Shogun or the Emperor, and unemployed samurai were roaming around the countryside causing havoc.

The Meiji Emperor observing parliament from the balcony on the left (image:MIT archives)

So you’re probably asking where the butterflies and science come in.  Well, one of Japan’s major exports was silk, and just as the Meiji Revolution was taking place, a terrible epidemic of silkworm diseases  struck Europe.  Japan, being isolated, escaped the epidemic and the price of Japanese silk skyrocketed.  Japan’s new economy meant it could re-negotiate it’s unequal treaties and gain back power.

The Meiji government realized the importance of silk production in getting the new economy up to speed, and by 1890 they had set up 300  agricultural  research and extension centers to study silkworms and to train and license silkworm breeders.   Another big advance was the introduction of “Mendelism” to Japan, and scientists from the agricultural stations began to educate silkworm breeders about basic genetics.   In just a few decades, breeding silk worms went from being a trade practiced by merchants and craftsman to a scientific discipline with university research programs dedicated to it.  All that silkworm research later provided the foundation for Japanese genetics and biology all the way up through the present day.

women feeding silkworms in 1904

Although Emperor Meiji is considered one of the great promoters of science in Japan, as a butterfly scientist, I think it is important remember that the silkworm played a small but important role in the process too.  If you’d like to learn more about silk worms and the history of science in Japan here is a paper by Dr. Lisa Onaga, and a paper on the later development  of genetics in Japan by Dr. Iida.

Onaga, L.  Toyama Kametaro and Vernon Kellogg: Silkworm Inheritance Experiments in Japan, Siam, and the United States, 1900-1912. Journal of the History of Biology (2010) 43:215–264

Iida, K.  Practice and Politics in Japanese Science: Hitoshi Kihara and the Formation of a Genetics Discipline. Journal of the History of Biology (2010) 43:529–570

Butterfly Tourism

One of the many fun things about Japan has been learning about the research that my labmates are doing.    Last weekend, my labmate Suzuki-san invited me to come see the study species he used for his masters degree.  There was a regional ecology conference in a town outside Kyoto called Nara, and Suzuki-san and I went to get dinner with some of the professors who were in town for the meeting.  Since I don’t speak Japanese and couldn’t understand any of the talks, we decided do a little sight-seeing around Nara instead of going to the conference.  We also checked on Suzuki-san’s old field site on the way, to see how his butterfly is doing.  Luckily his field site is in a town just a few train stops outside of Nara, so it was easy to drop by for a quick visit.  One great thing I’ll really miss about Japan is being able to use public transportation for research!

Suzuki-san did his masters on the endangered butterfly Ypthima multistriata, which is only found in a small area of Kansai, Japan (Kansai is the area surrounding Kyoto, and includes the cities of Osaka, Nara,  and Kobe).  Not much is known about the butterfly, nobody is even sure what it’s caterpillars eat (it lays its eggs on dead leaves and the caterpillars then go in search of the host plant themselves).  Another baffling thing about Ypthima multistriata is the fact that it’s reproductive schedule seems to vary a lot even in populations living close together.  Some populations breed twice during the summer, while others breed only once.  Suzuki-san and his colleagues studied nine populations of the butterfly, thinking that the closely related populations would have the same reproductive pattern.  They found instead that the reproductive schedule wasn’t related to the genetic background of the population, but that each population had adapted independently to it’s location.  They now think that competition with other butterflies and different host plant quality are what determine the reproductive schedule of the butterfly.  This is a very interesting finding because it means that two populations living close together can evolve very different traits.  However,  there is still a lot more to be learned about this  rare species!

After checking up on the butterfly, we went on to Nara which was once the capital of Japan, and has a number of really beautiful historical sites, including a giant Buddha.  Legend has it that the god Takemikazuchi, rode in on a white deer to protect the city, so deer are considered sacred animals here.  Nobody is allowed to hurt them (although you can feed them special deer cookies sold at the temples), and they roam freely through the streets.   The following slide show is from our trip to the field site, and from the visit to Nara.

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MacGyver Moments in Ecology

In some scientific fields there are standard techniques and equipment that all researchers use.  For biologists who work on laboratory species like fruit flies or lab mice, there are lots of tools that every researcher learns to use during their training.  However, in Ecology, researchers often work on a species that has only been studied by a few scientists, or hasn’t been studied at all.  Ecologists have to try lots of different things to get their species to survive in the laboratory.   Researchers who study unusual or rare species often have to make their own food and cages for their animals.  For example Jessica and Heidi made their butterfly cages from some tubes and screen that they bought at the hardware store.  In the lab where I worked as an undergraduate, my advisor used to raise tadpoles for his experiments in children’s wading pools.

Sometime having to use household items to do research reminds me of the TV show MacGyver.  For those who haven’t seen the show for a few years, MacGyver was a freelance secret agent who solved crimes with science.  Since he believed that guns were unethical, he had to use whatever object he had handy to fight criminals (the first few seconds of the video below should give you an idea).  

The other day I had a “MacGyver Moment” as I was trying to set up my research project here in Japan.  Normally I grow my own plants for my butterflies to lay eggs on, but I couldn’t do that this year because I only arrived in Kyoto three days ago.  My Japanese labmate planted some cabbages for my experiment, but they were too small to use.    Another student drove to his mom’s house and borrowed some cabbages from her garden.  It was incredibly kind of him, but the cabbages didn’t survive the trip back to the lab.

I wasn’t sure what to do, and I needed the plants to start the experiment, so I looked up a home and garden shop in downtown Kyoto, hoping that they might have some cabbage seedlings for sale in their garden section.  Since I don’t speak Japanese, I couldn’t just call and ask them if they had cabbages.  I decided to jump on the subway near my university and tried to get downtown before the shop closed.  Unfortunately the subway ticket machine was in Japanese, so it took me a long time to figure out how to buy a rail pass.  Luckily, most of the stops were labeled in English so navigating once I was inside a bit easier.

However, once I got off the subway, the streets weren’t labeled in English, so I tried to navigate by landmarks.  I knew that I needed to go left at a large temple and right at a high school.  However, Kyoto has a lot of temples and high schools, so I ended up pretty lost on the back streets of Kyoto.   

I eventually did find the Home and Garden shop after about an hour of walking, and bought some small cabbage plants.  However, taking them on the subway was a bit of a challenge.  Luckily, I made it back to the train before rush hour, because the subway cars are incredibly crowded around 7 pm when work gets out, and I was afraid someone would crush my plants.

My laboratory is still about a mile from the subway station, but luckily I have a bike with an enormous basket. Kyoto is an incredibly bike friendly city.   The train system here is cheap and efficient,  secondhand bikes are about $50.00, and every street has a bike lane.  Most bikes here are built to haul everything a person would need in their daily life.  My little bike has just one basket, but it’s common to see moms with two children in saftey seats on the front and back of the bike and a basket of groceries on the back of the bike as well.  My Japanese labmates even use their bikes to go out collecting insects in the mountains outside the city.

After all that work, I was really happy to get my plants into the lab.  It was a pretty crazy and stressful day, but I think that if he was real, MacGyver would be proud!

Even More Butterflies and Science

Sarah out collecting butterflies

Hello!  I’d like to take a moment to introduce myself as one of the other butterfly researchers writing this blog.  I’m Sarah, and I’m a graduate student in Jessica’s lab.  I also study butterflies and climate change, although I study a different species, the cabbage white butterfly (Pieris rapae).  My butterfly is an invasive species that was introduced from Europe and Asia 150 years ago.  I study how it has adapted to it’s new environment in North America, where it lives everywhere from Canada to Florida.   I want to understand how it has adapted to  such a broad range of climates, and also to understand how invasive species change after they are introduced to a new environment.

This summer however, I’m expanding my project to Japan, where I will study the butterfly in it’s native range.  I am doing a fellowship through the National Science Foundation and the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (which is like the NSF of Japan).  I’ve been placed at Kyoto University where I will work in the Laboratory of Insect Ecology.

Also, to explain what I mean when I say that I’m in Jessica’s lab, I should probably briefly explain how university labs work.  Labs at North American universities are a little like families, with a faculty member in charge of one laboratory and several grad students who are studying with them.  Jess, Heidi and and I have the same advisor, we share an office,  laboratory space and sometimes help each other out with research.  I’m very excited to be sharing this blog with them as well, and I hope that you’ll enjoy reading about both of our adventures as we study butterflies around the world!