The story of how we grew wise to the wisdom of insect trails begins, oddly enough, with the lowly caterpillar. One spring day in 1738, a young Genevan philosophy student named Charles…

As I now live on an island in the sea and am not an expert on anything but hoverflies, we will simply have to start there. In short, my artistic sense remained relatively undeveloped,…

So I’m reading The Fly Trap by Fredrik Sjöberg, a slim book by a writer I’ve never heard of, and I’m riveted for reasons I can’t explain. I honestly have no idea what the…

In 1841, an invasive water mold began to infect the world’s potatoes. Starting from Mexico, the infectious agent of blight traveled up through North America, then crossed the Atlantic.…

For someone who has spent decades drawing deformed insects, Cornelia Hesse-Honegger is remarkably normal: Warm, effusive, and quick to laugh, Hesse-Honegger combines the holism and…

When Chernobyl happened, I knew it was time for me to act. Nineteen years earlier, I had first drawn malformed and mutated flies while working in the zoological department at the University…

Five World War II bombers took off from a Florida airfield on Oct. 5, 1967 to bomb the American South. An article that ran that morning in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune said that three…