Profile: Dr. Thomas Eisner

"From the moment I could walk, I picked up bugs."

Dr. Thomas Eisner cannot remember a time in his life when he was not interested in insects. "From the moment I could walk, I picked up bugs," he says. He would dig into things to find insects. He would look inside rotting fruit and find bees, find beetle larvae inside logs, and find bees and butterflies on flowers.

His next step was to start a collection. Unlike other people who kept collections of bugs, he liked to keep his insects alive. He would usually bring home the plant it was living on, too. He began to notice how different insects behaved differently. Some bugs would eat at night while others would eat during the day. Some of the caterpillars he brought home would also make noises. "I liked to go to sleep at night listening to the sounds that the caterpillars made," he says. "My sister thought I was crazy." Crazy or not, he has achieved a lot because of his love and his study of insects.

Dr. Eisner is one of the people who invented the study of chemical ecology. "My father was a chemist," he says. "He liked to make perfumes for a hobby, so the house was always full of funny smells. I noticed that bugs sometimes had funny smells, and I wanted to know why." So he teamed up with a chemist when he was in graduate school, and they have been working together ever since. During the past forty years, they have discovered a lot of interesting things about how bugs communicate with other animals and plants through smells and tastes.

He believes insects are very important to the environment and to us. They are important to us because many insects are pollinators. Pollinators are very important to the survival of plant species because they help the plant to produce fruits and seeds. Since we are dependent upon plants for food, "we are," he says "dependent on insects, too." There are about two hundred million insects alive for each person who is alive on the planet. This means they are probably much more important to the natural world than we are.

He says that studying biology makes a wonderful life if you are very dedicated. "It's like being on vacation all the time," he says. It requires hard work, but if you really enjoy it like Dr. Eisner does, it can be a lot of fun. He also suggests that if you are interested in studying nature, you should drag your parents and friends outside. "You should try to convince them that watching nature is more fun than watching TV," he says. ThereÕs still a lot out there in nature for us all to discover.