Real Shutterbugs : UCI Biologist Who Photographs Insects Puts Focus on O.C.’s Back Yards

In my journalistic experience I’ve found that the only sure-fire way of getting a positive response to an article is to have it accompanied by photos of small, adorable critters with big imploring eyes. So here, for your perusing pleasure, is the photography of Peter Bryant.

His creatures are about as small as they get. They’ve certainly got those big eyes. But “adorable” may be a matter of personal taste.

“A lot of people are repulsed by insects. I don’t really understand why that’s the case,” Bryant said. “They’re certainly not repulsive to me. I did photograph one though, a thing called the rat-tailed maggot, that I could see why people might think it was ugly. But as far as I’m concerned, the closer you look the more interesting they get.”

As director of the UC Irvine Developmental Biology Center, Bryant sees quite a few insects as it is. The center is doing research on fruit flies, studying tumor-suppressing genes that may lead to unlocking secrets of human gene counterparts. The British-born biologist became interested in photographing bugs in 1976 after seeing a slide presentation on Hawaiian insects by photographer Bill Mull.

Bryant has since photographed hundreds of California insects, many of which now appear in textbooks and professional journals.

“There really isn’t a magazine with a large distribution that does a lot of insect photos,” he said sadly, and indeed the magazine racks aren’t exactly crowded with titles like Grub-boy, Pesthouse or Popular Maggots. Bryant takes his photos to the public in slide presentations--one titled “Back Bay Bugs” is shown on three screens simultaneously--to local nature organizations and gardening groups.

In his book-crowded office on the fourth floor of the modernistic Bio Sciences building, Bryant talked about his crawly hobby.

“One of the reasons I do this is to try to convince people that insects are at least interesting, and sometimes fascinating and occasionally beautiful. It is quite an eye-opener to a lot of people to find that so many of these things are going on right in their back yard. It opens up a whole world that was there all the time and easily accessible but, just because you can’t focus your eyes close enough, you never see it. You see some fascinating things going on,” he said.

Bryant pulled out a Hungarian science magazine--”Some of these European countries have a healthier respect for insects,” he noted--that had a feature on aphids featuring Bryant’s photos. They showed aphids giving birth, being farmed by ants and being eaten by ladybugs.

“People tend to spray as soon as they see aphids. But if you watch them through a lens, they are part of a fascinating little ecosystem . . . .The aphid feeds on plant sap. Here’s an ant that’s tending aphids. You know ants will feed on the honeydew that the aphid produces, and sort of in return for that they move aphids around on the plant and put them on fresh leaves.

“Then, if they haven’t all been killed by insecticides, there are a number of predators and parasites to control them. This is an aphid wasp that lays its eggs inside the body of the aphid, which develops into a grub that feeds on the internal organs of the aphid.

“One of the amusing things about this is the parasite feeds on the nonessential organs first, and before it kills the aphid it makes a little hole in the belly and glues the body of the aphid to the leaf so it won’t fall to be eaten by ground-living insects. Then the wasp can go back in and feed on all the rest of the inside of the aphid and eventually it’s just a carcass.”

Boy, just add Sigourney Weaver and you’ve got a hit film on your hands.

“If you don’t look closely at what’s really happening in the garden, you’ll think these aphids are absolutely resistant to any kind of spraying because their bodies just stay on the plant there forever. You can keep spraying these carcasses till you’re blue in the face and they won’t go away.”

Unlike some TV nature programs with their “Just what do you suppose will happen if we throw a snake and mongoose together?” techniques, Bryant finds he can’t set up his natural dramas. Although he does most of his photography indoors in a makeshift studio in a bathroom of his Newport Beach home, he lets nature take its course.

“Setting things up doesn’t work very well with insects. Usually you have to take the whole branch where things are already happening. If you set insects up in an artificial environment they don’t behave for you. Sometimes you can get them to feed, but for pictures of mating I’ve always had to find it already happening and bring it inside.

“I usually do that because you need to get things set up in a more controlled way than you often can outside. Quite often the insect that you’re trying to photograph will fly away, and it’s pretty frustrating if you’ve spent any time setting a shot up.”

Not all of his subjects come from the field. Bryant pointed out the cover of a book on pesticides that shows one of his photos of a bug chowing down on some yellow kernels. “That’s a corn ear worm, which happened to be on an ear of corn I got at the market,” he said.

His photo equipment isn’t exotic. He sometimes uses a macro lens, but usually it’s just a standard one set at the minimum aperture and mounted to an Olympus body by means of an extension bellows, which gives him the magnification needed. He employs an electronic flash and finds that insects don’t photograph with “red eye” the way human subjects often do. His most difficult subject, he says, may have been a trapdoor spider.

“They live at the bottom of a foot-long, half-inch wide tube with a very elaborate trap door at the top. At night they sit up at the top of the nest and wait for something to come by at random. It’s curious that if they leave the nest, they can’t get back in because they can’t open the door. To photograph it I had to dig one up and reconstruct it at home. I don’t like to do that kind of thing too much, because they’re becoming very uncommon now,” he said.

He was also having trouble shooting the official state butterfly, the California dog-faced butterfly, because they rarely spread their wings--revealing poodle-like markings--when they’re perched. He found they aren’t quite so finicky once they’re dead. “That’s the exception,” he said. “I don’t think pictures of dead insects are as attractive as live insects.”

Growing up in Torquay, Devon, England, Bryant had a small collection of dead insects, but he says that played no part in his choice of biology as a career.

“That was a result of the way the English school system works. At the age of 13 I was given a series of choices, and one of them was between Latin and biology, and I didn’t like the Latin teacher. I’ve been happy with the choice I made.”

Now that he has small children of his own, he finds he’s bringing fewer bugs home.

“It’s not that they don’t approve of it; it’s just it’s difficult to find the amount of undisturbed time to do something like this now. Plus I already have a pretty good collection of what I was hoping to get. Now I fill in the gaps whenever I find interesting things.”

With up to 30 million insect species estimated to exist in the world, he shouldn’t run out of subjects.

“My main interest, though, is in photographing the insects that live here,” he said. “When I do my slide shows, it’s quite an eye opener to a lot of people to find that so many of these things are going on right in their back yards. It’s not something you have to go somewhere with a National Geographic film crew to see.”

He says he hopes that the exposure will help change attitudes.

“Rather than assuming that any bug is bad, I hope they recognize that (bugs are) an important part of the environment,” Bryant said. “If you didn’t have insects, flowers wouldn’t get pollinated. A huge number of birds are dependent on insects for their survival. You hear a lot about preserving the gnatcatcher (bird), but people don’t often stop to think that we need to preserve its food supply as well.”