George Beccaloni joins me today at the campfire. George is an evolutionary biologist and historian
of science. He has worked at London's Natural History Museum for more than 20 years publishing
articles on butterflies, cockroaches and other insects. As a science historian, he has studied
the life and legacy of Alfred Russel Wallace and is the founder and director of the Wallace
Correspondence Project. In that role, he has contributed to many articles and books on
Wallace and through the Wallace Memorial Fund, George has helped restore the great man's
grave as well as erect a statue of Wallace, complete with his butterfly net, at the London
Natural History Museum. He has achieved many other feats and accolades, but to me, George,
the coolest thing is that you have one very particular title and function. You have to
be a very rare breed indeed, if in this day and age, you can call yourself a ship's naturalist.
George, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks, Arie. Nice to see you again. We met about five years for the first time on Bunaken
Island off the north coast of Sulawesi Island.
I think so. And I think I was trying to lecture you on Wallace at the time.
Yeah, it was a very nice island with a beautiful coral reef, but totally infested with giant
scolopendra centipedes, as I remember. There was that Austrian guy who's really big and
tough and he was walking back at night to his room and with sandals on and one of these
huge, he stepped on one of these huge centipedes and it wrapped around his foot and bitten.
So he rushed off to his room, lay on his bed, put his hand on his pillow and then was bitten
by another. And I just heard him sort of screaming for ages and ages from his room.
I remember that just crying all through the night. It must have been such a terrible pain.
Yeah, I've always disliked those giant centipedes, but I have one centipede claim to fame, which
I'll mention later on in this podcast. No, I like centipedes. The bite is not very nice.
Well, at least only about one person's ever been recorded as dying from a scolopendra
bite. Okay, that's very low. I didn't know. Just extremely painful.
Yeah. And you were just traveling throughout Indonesia when we met and you're doing a lot
of traveling still as I said, as a ship's naturalist, but it's your love for nature
and natural history, I think started a long time ago, as for most of us, you started as
a child, right? Yeah, absolutely. They say that naturalists aren't born, well, sorry,
they are born. Sorry, they say that naturalists are born, not made. And that was certainly
the case with me. All my earliest memories from Kenya where I was born are all natural
history related. And my first sort of encounters with natural history subjects, I don't remember
because I was about one. So for instance, my mother tells a story of how she came out
into the garden and found me touching this disc, this black disc, and I was saying, cookie
cookie and I'd bitten into it and it was one of these giant millipedes, they coiled up
and squirted all these horrible hydro phenols or whatever they are.
Yes, they're very toxic.
She said she couldn't get the smell off me for about two weeks. And another time in that
same garden, I was almost killed by African giant bees. My grandmother was looking after
me and she was in the house. And then she heard the sound of a swarm of African bees
approaching. So she rushed out in the garden, grabbed me by my nappy and took me inside.
And the bees got into the garden and adjacent garden and stung a puppy to death in the next
garden. Wow. I was really lucky that she got me in time.
And those African bees are the ancestors of the so-called killer bees, right?
Yeah, the killer bees are hybrids. Yeah. But yeah, all my earliest memories, as I say,
from Kenya are natural history related, like finding hedgehogs in the garden. And one of
my earliest memories was driving around a large fish when I was aged two years old,
which my father, I think, had caught. I really wanted it. So they gave it to me. And apparently,
I spent all day dragging this fish around and then was very surprised when it became
totally bloated and full of gas and smelled really terrible by the end of the day.
In the hot African sun. I can't imagine that.
Exactly. But yeah, I left Zimbabwe when I was about five. And then, sorry, I left Kenya
when I was about five. And then I grew up in Zimbabwe and left there when I was about
14. And when I was in Zimbabwe, I was also obviously very interested in natural history,
mainly reptiles early on. And I read Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals. So
that really inspired me. Wonderful book. Yes.
Excellent. And I got my mother's boyfriend to make me a collecting box like Gerald Durrell
had and some things in which I used to carry around. And all the snakes I came across,
if they looked harmless, I assumed that they were harmless and I would collect them. I
had some sort of close calls. There was one nice snake sort of with lions that I found
in the rockery in our garden. And I was, you know, I used to handle it and I kept it in
a bucket of soil by my bed with a sheet of glass on it. And but very soon after I got
it, it escaped into my bedroom and I never saw it again. And then when I went back to
boarding school, I looked it up and it looked harmless, but it was actually called something
like in Afrikaans, a scarpshtrekker. And it said that, you know, basically, it was
probably poisonous and venomous. So that's close call number three with a venomous animal
growing up in Africa. Yeah. Another occasion, I was walking under these eucalyptus trees
and this long brown snake fell on the ground. So I happened to have my sort of forked snakes
stick with me and I got it, put it in a cloth bag and then went to a friend's house and
asked his mother to drive me to the local museum. Okay. Halfway there, I noticed the
bag was empty. So I said, oh, my snake's escaped. And she almost crashed the car. She
veered off the road, jumped out and I felt the saw coiled up under his seat.
Oh, that's awesome. Yes. Parents of reptile enthusiasts are long suffering, I think.
Mine were too. One other snake story was, well, it involved a really rare chameleon that I
found, Rampolian marsh li, which is one of these dwarf chameleons, founded on in the
Wumba mountains and the border of Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Very hard to find, I imagine.
They look just like a dead leaf. Yeah. Yeah. Really amazing. And I took it to the local
museum in what's now Mutare and I used to take them all the snakes that I found and they
used to sometimes exhibit them. But in this case, because it was so special, I was ushered
down to see the reptile expert. So I went into his room and he was on the phone and
talking away and I was just looking at the things on his desk and I saw a jar of liquid
with this object and I thought, is that a snake or something or part of a snake? And
he put down the phone and said, oh, you're looking at that as my finger. And it turns
out that he had been out in the bush on a collecting expedition and something very
venomous had bitten him like a slung or something. So he immediately got his bush knife and
cut off his own finger and was so pleased that he preserved him formaldehyde or whatever
as a death corn. That is a hardcore herpetologist right there. Yeah. Well, I've seen what happens
with your, you know, you see sometimes photographs of what happens when you actually let the
venom do its work. It seems better to chop it off sometimes. Yeah. Unless it was a dry
bite, it dropped it off for nothing. Yeah. Could have been. But yeah, so Zimbabwe, I
developed my interest in butterflies, aged about 10 because another friend of mine was
interested in catching butterflies and that became my main kind of focus and I dreamt
of actually doing it for a career, which of course, if I'd stayed in Africa, would have
been impossible and it's virtually impossible anywhere actually in the world. There's not
that. Anytime after the 19th century that came an extinct profession. Exactly. But so
yeah, I'm just planning to tell you a few sort of funny stories of natural history stories
that have happened, you know, to me during my life. So it's sort of a bit chronological
because that seems more logical to do it that way. Definitely. So when I was 14, I left
Zimbabwe and my parents came to England and applied for a work visa for the United States.
I was sent to my aunt, Boulder, Colorado, and I spent a year and a half there. Oh, wow.
And yeah, it was a bit of a shock to the system. I saw things like snow for the first time
and modern things like computers and I remember my first encounter with a microwave. I'd never
even heard of a microwave and I went to a friend of the family's house and they told
me about this marvelous microwave and I was really interested in it. They left the house
to go to the shops or something. So I experimented by putting their cactus into it and sort of
blasting it for 10 seconds to see what happened. And it actually had no visible effect. I was
a bit disappointed, but I thought I better not risk doing it anymore. No. So I took the
cactus out and put it there and it looked fine. But then several days later, my aunt
said to me, oh, you didn't microwave my friend's cactus, by the way. She said that it suddenly
sort of went liquid. To this day, I don't know how they worked out that it was me who
microwaved it. Yes. It's amazing when you said it. That was very clever. You must have
expressed enough interest in the microwave to raise suspicions. And then after that,
my parents didn't get their visas for the state, so I came over to England and that's
where I've been ever since. And went to university here and then did a PhD at London's Natural
History Museum. I joined PhD with Imperial College, University of London and Natural
History Museum. And it was on the aspects of the evolution and ecology of a group of
butterflies from South and Central America and the Caribbean called the Othomiani. And
I was looking at mimicry, how sort of mimicry evolved in this group because they're famous
for their mimicry. They are apposematically coloured, so brightly coloured or distinctively
coloured so that predators can remember them. But mimicry theory, well, there's two sorts,
six sorts of mimicry in butterflies. There's actually more, but the two common ones are
Batesian mimicry where a tasty species has evolved to mimic toxic or unpalatable species
and so is avoided by predators who think that that's toxic. That's what most people think
of when they think about mimicry. Yeah. Yeah. The other sort of counterintuitive type of
mimicry is called Mullerian after Fritz Muller, the famous German naturalist who lived in
Brazil. And it's where toxic or unpalatable species have evolved to mimic each other.
They converged on a common colour pattern because it reduces the number of different
patterns that birds have to memorise to learn to avoid. And so it decreases the mortality
of the group. So if there were ten species each with a different pattern and a naive
bird that it just fledged, it would have to sample each one, remember ten patterns. But
if they all showed one pattern, then there's a massive decrease in predation because only
one from the group would have to be taken. And that's the case with the Thonians. They're
protected by these toxic pyrolysidine alkaloids, which they mainly get as adults. And birds,
if they taste them, release them. And the butterflies are very tough, very tough birds.
So they often survive being caught. And did you study them yourself in the field?
Yeah. So I was studying the pheromones of them in case, well, to find out whether the
species could tell each other apart from the pheromone bouquets, which is what you'd expect
because they all look the same. I also looked to see if they had hidden ultraviolet colour
patterns that the butterflies could see, but other things couldn't see. But of course,
birds can see UV light. So that wouldn't work. So they rely on complicated pheromone bouquets
to distinguish, you know, members of their own species. But I was also looking at the
question of why there are often many different colour patterns of the same group of butterflies
in one habitat. Mimicry theory would say that they should all converge onto one best protected
pattern. Yeah. And it was suspected that it might be because they occupied different strata
in the forest, but it hadn't really been studied. So I studied that and found indeed that there
were ones that colour patterns that flew near the ground, ones, you know, in the canopy
and also in different micro habitats like secondary forest, primary forest, there were
different dominant patterns. And I worked out that it was probably due to the weather
host plants grew and also the heights of the host plants that were utilised. So species
that flew high up tended to utilise shrubs or trees or epiphytes of the groups of plants
that they fed on. So Solanaceae basically, potato family. Yes. And the one, the colour
patterns that flew low down utilised herbaceous plants. And because there's sort of different
guilds of birds in different micro habitats in strata, there's different predators and
the butterflies at all had a similar flight height and micro habitat seem to have converged
together. That's amazing. There hasn't been convergence in the between the strata, etc.
It's hard to imagine that a rainforest is really built up of these layers that don't
interact that much, apparently, at least for some organisms. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, that
was interesting. I did three field trips to Ecuador, studying these butterflies. And yeah,
that was an enjoyable part of my life. Yeah. But actually, the first time I did an expedition
to the tropics was when I was still an undergraduate in Imperial College. And I organised for a
group of three of us to go to Papua New Guinea to do various studies. So one of mine was
going to study the mushrooms used by local people. I was looking for a particular interesting
cockroaches which is believed to suckle its young. And we were going to do a survey of
the insects and other invertebrates eaten by local people. But anyway, so we got to
New Guinea, went off into the highlands and started our projects. I mean, New Guinea is
not beginners tropics. That's a pretty tough place. I would say. And you were there as
young as well relatively young biologists. Yeah. Well, this was in 1990 when very, very
few tourists were going to New Guinea at that time. I think actually very few go these days
because it's so dangerous. But we didn't realise how dangerous it was. Although I remember
when we got off the plane and got into Port Moresby, I saw all these red stains all over
the place. I thought, God, this place really is dangerous. There's been multiple stabbings.
But it was actually beetle nut juice that people spat onto the pavement. Right. But
we were pretty naive at the time. And one stupe, well, it ended up not being stupid,
but it could have been fatal. A thing that we did was all our clothing was army surplus
clothing because we thought it was hard wearing and cheap and everything. But in most countries
or many countries, you don't want to be wearing that sort of clothing because they think you're,
you know, going on. But it turned out to be a positive advantage in New Guinea. And we
didn't realise it for a long time. When we were walking around in the highlands, people
were abnormally friendly and they'd come up and slap our backs and shake our hands and
say thank you. And we thought, God, these people are really nice. And we only found
out later towards the end of the trip, someone said, actually, you know why the people are
so friendly. They think that you're Australian troops who got rid of all the Japanese troops
in World War Two. Wow.
Yeah, New Guinea was an eye opening experience. The survey of invertebrates eaten by local
people failed because we found that they absolutely ate everything from web spiders to shield
bugs to cockroaches, you know, just everything. So it was impossible to create a list.
But shield bugs and cockroaches, they have these terrible glands and chemicals that they
shouldn't be very palatable.
No, all I can think of is the shield bugs might have tasted a bit like coriander because
they smell a bit like coriander.
That they do, yeah.
The cockroaches are non-toxic ones. The ones that they told me, I was looking for these
amphibious cockroaches, which live under stones by the sides of streams. And I couldn't find
any. When I asked the local people, do you know these cockroaches? And they said, oh
yes, go to that stream there and you'll find lots of them. And it turns out that they go
there and collect them and steam them in bamboo tubes. It was my first introduction to this
interesting group of cockroaches found all over the tropics, epilamprines. And they all
seem to be amphibious, at least when they're nymphs, so subadults. But the curious thing
is that these small streams that they live on the banks of just have no aquatic plants
or anything. They're swift flowing. And the only thing that you could possibly eat in
them is algae growing on the rocks. So I observed these cockroaches at night crawling on the
rocks underwater. And I think that's what they must be doing, but it hasn't been proved
yet.
Wow. Still, after all these years.
No.
Yeah, that's a hard place to get to, I imagine.
Well, I found these cockroaches all over the place in Africa, South East Asia. It's just
very, very few people study cockroaches.
Yeah, that's the thing. And are they able to breathe underwater because these are very
shallow, fast flowing streams or because they have some sort of blastron or adaptation for
breathing underwater?
They have an adaptation. The rear spiracles are elongated into tubes so they can back
up on a stone, put the spiracles like snorkels above the water surface, get oxygen and go
down.
So they protrude from the body. Wow. That's interesting.
I've seen reports, a guy called Shelford, who was one of the greatest cockroach taxonomists,
he said that in the middle of a big river in Borneo where he was based, he actually
saw cockroaches swimming in the middle of the river and diving like diving beetles and
coming to the surface. But he wasn't able to catch them. He didn't have a net at the
time, but that's never been studied.
So that's why.
Wow. Yeah, there's a lot of cockroaches in the world. People only know the few species
that live with people and are a nuisance, but there are just so many amazing, beautiful
species of cockroaches that don't bother anybody.
Absolutely. Yeah.
So the other cockroaches I was interested in in New Guinea were these, a group in the
genus Paris ferris, and one of the leading, or the leading cockroach expert of all time,
Louis Roth, found that on dead specimens of the cockroaches, there was still white young
clinging to the underside. And these nymphs are blind. They have curious, proboscis-like
sucking mouthparts and huge pole villi on the tarsal pads.
To hold on.
Yeah.
To hold on. So because they're blind and they're unpigmented and they seem to be unpigmented
for at least two instars, it's very, very unlikely that they leave the mother. And the
mother happens to have four holes on the ventral surface into which the mouthparts exactly
fit.
Wow.
So it's thought that they probably suckle from the mother.
And what would they suckle from those particular holes? Hemolymph or some gland?
No one knows. It hasn't been proved yet. But it seems very likely that it must happen.
Anyway, with great difficulty, I managed to find some living examples of these cockroaches.
And they're very unusual that the females are wingless and heavily armored and they
roll up into a tight ball when they're attacked by ants or whatever. And anyway, I found them
in these vines by beating the vines and found quite a few of them. And during the two months,
we were in New Guinea. So for about, I don't know, six weeks, I kept them alive and was
hoping that they would give birth. None of them did. So I pickled them just before we
left New Guinea. When I got back to England, I dissected, the first female I dissected
had a well-developed young insider. So would have given birth any day.
Oh no.
Because this group of cockroaches actually gives birth to live young, the blabberids,
they incubate the egg case internally and then young are produced live. But then years
later in Thailand, I found actually a female which I shipped back to the UK and she gave
birth. And I thought, great, I'm now going to resolve this great mystery of suckling
cockroaches and examined her, the nymphs were all clinging to a ventral surface and put
her in a clear glass tube, but I just couldn't see what their heads were doing. So some of
them might have been suckling, but it was impossible to tell.
Yes. Yeah.
So these days, actually that genus is now kept commonly in captivity, but no one's been
able to prove what they're doing. You can't observe the nymphs. I thought maybe of doing
a micro CT scan, see where the proboscis of the nymphs were.
That would work. Yes. Maybe flash freeze them and then scan them. Yeah. It's funny that
species like that, even when in captivity, it still has some secrets that are not resolved.
I mean, that's amazing. And how long it takes to figure out, you know, one super interesting
biological fact like that is, I like that kind of story. And you seem to be very good
at it also with figuring out that cockroaches actually evolved into termites or at least
termites are social cockroaches.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. That was my main cockroach claim to fame. It's been thought since the
1930s that termites might be more closely related to cockroaches than people thought.
There's certain morphological characteristics of the guts, et cetera. Yes. Almost identical.
And the most primitive termite is master termites from Australia. And it actually produces an
egg case. And cockroaches. Yes. Just like cockroaches. But they're so different in so
many other ways in ecology, et cetera, that people have always regarded the cockroaches
as a separate order of insects to the termites. But I initiated a study when I was working
at the Natural History Museum where a friend of mine, Paul Eggleton, who is a termite expert,
who had a student working on molecular stuff to do with termites. So I said, why don't
we try and solve this problem once and for all? And they agreed. So I got basically samples,
tissue samples of a wide cross section of all the families and sub families of cockroaches.
So that's about 4,600 named species of cockroach. Probably about 20,000 in total. So a lot that
haven't been named yet. And they got samples of all the termite groups. And then we did
sort of molecular phylogeny and found that lo and behold, the termites came out from
within the cockroach lineage. And that they were most closely related to a genus of cockroaches,
true cockroaches called cryptostalsis, which is found in the Northern Hemisphere. And they're
interesting because they live inside rotting logs and live in family groups.
Ah. Yeah.
Basically, they need to, the young need to live with the parents in order to get the
symbionts needed to digest the wood. Because every time they molt and grow a bit bigger,
the gut lining is shed, apparently the stomach lining, and all the symbionts go. So they
need to be in the same galleries as the parents to get infected again and again with the symbionts
to allow them to digest wood. And that's how termites are thought to have evolved.
That I didn't know that super interesting. It's a good start for sociality and then new
sociality after, yes.
Yeah. Yeah. And so since our study, other people did similar studies to see whether
we were right or wrong. And everyone's concluded we were right. So we were able to sync the
entire order of isoptera, although some termite people still use it, which is completely wrong.
You can't have one order isoptera nested within another order, which is Platoidea.
So what is the new name inside the cockroaches? Does that clade have a name?
Yeah, Termitoidea, an epi family. We had to erect an epi family in order to not disturb
the classification, the higher classification of the termites and cockroaches.
That's a good idea. Yes. Conservation of names.
Yes. Just returning to cockroaches and to New Guinea. After New Guinea, I went to Australia
and I went in search of the world's heaviest cockroach, the giant rhinoceros cockroach,
which can weigh up to 40 grams, which is massive for an insect.
And I'd heard, because I went to stay on the Atherton tablelands in Queensland with a family
friend and then I got a coach to this totally remote town called Mount Garnet in the middle
of nowhere because I had read an article that macroponasia was found there. And I think
I thought at the time I would just saunter out of town and see the burrows and dig some
up. But when I got there, I realized that it was like a needle in a haystack and I wasn't
going to be able to find these things. And I happened to go into the one local shop in
this sort of one horse town and there on the shelf behind the counter was a glass jar with
formalin or something in it and one of these cockroaches preserved in it.
Yes. I said, how comes you have that? And they said,
well, haven't you heard of Bill Brotherton? He was the first person to study these cockroaches
in the world and he's the local naturalist. And in fact, he had hoped to put the town
on the map, Mount Garnet, the town by having silver plated souvenir teaspoons with one
of these cockroaches on the handle. There's one. So look.
Oh, beautiful. Very detailed even. Yeah. I think I was the only person ever to buy
one. Who wants a cockroach? This is what the cockroaches actually look like. So this is
one I collected earlier. Oh, wow. That is huge. Yeah. It's gigantic.
You can see it's a typical cockroach. It's got its head is below a shield called the
pronotum. And I don't know if you can see the four legs there. Yes, like shovels. Yeah.
This is a burrowing species. Yes. Well, as I mentioned earlier, but I didn't know how
to find it. So I went to Bill Brotherton's house and he came out and he was a really
charming old guy with a look like something out of a Disney movie with a long white beard
and an old dog pickup truck and a little personal museum of pickled snakes and things in alcohol.
And he said, Yeah, you know, I'll take you outside and show you. We'll go and collect
some. So we went out with some spades to out of town into the sparse eucalyptus woodland.
And basically it was the dry season. And he showed me how to find these little ridges
of sand on the forest floor, which were the sealed up burrows of the cockroaches. They
seal them up in the dry season. Of course, there would have been absolutely no way that
I would have ever found them myself. Once you know what to look for, you can find the
burrows and then dig down. And they live in this one meter long spiral burrow. Okay. Spiral
just like scorpions do as well there. Yeah. Really? Yeah. Well, that's interesting. Yeah.
And usually just one adult female lives in a burrow together with her young. So they're
also one of these advanced groups of cockroaches that incubates the eggs internally. The young
live with the mother for about six months until they're half grown. And the mother goes
to the surface at night and drags down dead eucalypt leaves and twigs and puts those into
sort of chambers and lets the humidity in the solid sand soil that they're in kind of
moisten them and maybe fungi start to attack them. And during heavy rains, sometimes all
the cockroaches are flooded out of their burrows and they come to the surface and go on the
roads and there's been records of motorists stopping and taking some of them and going
to the local museum saying, I found this little tortoise. They obviously didn't notice that
it had six legs. They're that big. Yeah. As you can see, they're very kind of shiny. They
are. Yeah. Big brown dome carapace. You would think maybe, well, if you didn't know anything
about biology, yeah, it's a tortoise. But anyway, yeah, I was able to find them and
yeah, it was a really amazing experience, but really good luck that I happened to meet
this guy and he was the first person ever to study their biology. Wow. Now they're
quite widely kept in captivity, but they're very expensive, like 70 UK pounds one for
a young. Well, if it takes that long for the young to grow up and it's a big species, so
I can imagine. Yeah. It's one of the longest lived insects. They can live for seven years.
Really? Yep. And so I guess, you know, you get value for money if you cost it per year.
Well, then that makes them cheaper than hamster. That's a... But it's interesting what you
said about the rotting of the tritis that they do, because it sounds a little bit like
what leaf cutter ants do, of course. Oh, yeah. But they actually chew up the leaves and cultivate
a fungus in the leaves. But yeah, but it's sort of along the same lines. Interesting.
Yes. They're close relatives in their subfamily, live in rotting lobs. They're not related
to the ones I just mentioned, the cryptocercis. They're a totally different group of cockroaches,
but they've evolved to feed on wood as well. And they live in family groups in rotting
logs all around, mainly Southeast Asia. Right. But then some in the, in arid Australia have
then developed this lifestyle of making burrows and coming up to get the leaves and stuff.
This is not nice, moist, rotting logs lying around. No. So they make do with what they
have and they make their own rotting logs. Kind of. Yeah. Fascinating. I had never heard
of that one. Never heard that one. One other cockroach story. I was lucky enough to see
the, come across the biggest winged cockroach in the world. This is Megula blatter blabaroides.
You can see from my finger that it is not from this perspective. They can have a wingspan
up to 18 centimeters across. Wow. Beautiful. Four wings. Yeah. And anyway, I was in Ecuador
doing my PhD field work. And I went to a reserve called Los Cedros up in the Andes. It was
sort of mid-mountain cloud forest. And there was a very, very basic accommodation with
an outside long drop toilet, as call them. So pit toilet. I was there one morning, I
was sitting on the toilet and suddenly one of these cockroaches appeared on the wall
beside me. So I thought bloody hell, you know, this is a chance of a lifetime. So I grabbed
it in one hand and you know, they're totally harmless. Like, there's no cockroaches that
can bite humans. There's one very aggressive cockroach that I found in Madagascar that
can draw blood. It's got very long, needle sharp spines on the legs. And it's a very,
very powerful cockroach. And if you try and hold it, it will just jab you with these spines.
None of them can bite. Some of them can squirt nasty things, but this one doesn't. I don't
know. I'm sure, but I'm sure a lot of people will flee if an 18 centimeter wingspan cockroaches
come flying in. I mean, I was attracted. But anyway, I was sitting there with a cockroach
in my hand and then another one appeared. So I had to grab that. And then I thought,
I know, you know, what am I going to do now? Cause I haven't finished. So I think I managed
to get them into one hand, one on top of the other, right? Do my business and then quickly
go inside and put them in bags or whatever. So the one you've just seen is one of the
two that I actually collected. Really? Okay. I never saw another one. And they, no one's
managed to keep the species in captivity. They, people desperately want to, but they
just die. They might have a very specialized diet. Some, some cockroaches have very specialized
foods. So this species might feed on only on fungi or something. Or something in that
toilet. We don't know. It was attracted to something. I'm sure you were the only visitor
ever to be enthusiastic about those cockroaches there, George.
Yeah. I didn't mention why I became interested in cockroaches. It was because as I said,
I got really interested in butterflies in Zimbabwe. And Zimbabwe had about 600 species
of butterfly. I then went to North America where there was only about 200 and that was
a downer. And then I came to Britain that has just over 50 species and they, there's
about 500 books being written on these 50 species over time. You could have a whole
library of British butterfly books, just recycling the same information. So luckily I met a guy
who was interested in tropical cockroaches and he got me interested and I started keeping
things like giant hissing cockroaches from Madagascar.
Yes, I've had them too. Yes. Lovely. Yeah.
The first one I got was from a pet shop and they were very rare in the country at the
time and it escaped and I didn't find it till a year or so later when we moved house and
it was in my parents record collection and the records had fallen onto it and it was
like paper thin. I went on years later to do two long expeditions to Madagascar to study
and collect these cockroaches and I found quite a few new species, including the world's
most aggressive cockroach that I mentioned. Right. The one with the spines you just mentioned.
Yes. Which is a new genus. I haven't got around
to publishing it yet because well, that's a long story but basically when I was at the
Natural History Museum, I did my PhD there, then got postdoc working on insect plant relationships,
mainly butterfly relationships. Then my supervisor who was the butterfly expert retired and I
thought his job was going to be advertised because he was the one and only butterfly
researcher at the museum. But the museum never advertised the job. They decided they didn't
need a butterfly person even though being a butterfly researcher would attract much more
money and all the rest than probably working on any other group of insects.
Certainly the public likes them better than cockroaches. Yeah.
Exactly. It's the same thing the museum's done with birds. There's no professional ornithologist
on this stuff. It's just curators. Yeah. That's the tendency of museums now.
So anyway, a job as curator of orthophtroid insects, so cockroaches, stick insects, grasshoppers,
crickets, earwigs, etc. came up. Because of my interest in cockroaches, I applied and
I'm the only person in the country, apart from my friend who now works at the Oxford
Museum. So I got the job and that's what I did for, I don't know how long it was, seven
or so years. It was during that time that I studied the term cockroach relationships
and stuff like that.
Right. I mean, I was so lucky when I met you in Sulawesi because I just come across this
tiny little animal that I photographed and you were able to tell me it was a dwarf mole
cricket.
Yes. I've never seen something like that before.
I remember you're incredibly good at taking amazing pictures with the Olympus TG5 camera.
I've tried taking macro photographs with it and just not being successful at all.
Well I now know what it is, George. Apparently they're not all the same because I bought
another one and I cannot take as good pictures with that one as I can with the old one. So
apparently they're just not all good. No, but can you, I mean, just the fact that you
run into the curator of orthopterans when you have a question like that in the field,
fantastic luck for me.
Yeah. So anyway, I ended up leaving the museum because I got interested in Alfred Russell
Wallace and the museum was very, very happy that I was working on Wallace because he's
obviously one of the top naturalists of all time. And I helped organize the worldwide
celebrations for the 100th anniversary of his death. He died in 1913, so this was 2023,
no 2013, sorry. And the museum did all kinds of things, an exhibition. I raised money for
a life-size or larger than life-size bronze statue of Wallace, et cetera. And the museum
was very happy that I spent part of my time working on Wallace, especially when I then
decided to start the Wallace Correspondence Project because going back a step, due to
all my work on Wallace and commemorating him, I got to know the Wallace family. So his two
grandsons were still alive. And I got to know one in particular, Dick Wallace. And he showed
me when I went to his house, part of Wallace's insect collection, plus a library of all of
the books Wallace had written and the editions and foreign language editions, all annotated
by Wallace. And then there were something like 6,000 other documents, including notebooks
and all kinds of things. So to cut a long story short, I arranged for the museum to
buy the whole collection. And it came to the museum, was cataloged, and then it went into
the rare books room, which is very difficult to access. As a researcher, you can't just
go to the rare books room and go through the collection. You have to know what's in the
collection, then ask for one thing after the other. I want to see so-and-so letter, et
cetera. So I decided to set up a project to digitize the collection. And then I thought,
well, if I'm going to digitize 6,000 documents, I might as well try and digitize every letter
in all the archives in the world. So I managed to get a big grant from a foundation in America,
about half a million pounds, and employed an archivist and people. And I supervised
it for one day a week and designed the database system and everything. And we basically had
huge numbers of volunteers, as well as the archivist. And after all the letters were
scanned, basically transcribing all the letters. And they're now all available on a system
called Epsilon, which is online. Yes, I will put a link in the description of this video
and this podcast. I've accessed it. It's very interesting to see his own letters and
his own writing. Yeah. Absolutely. It's a treasure trove for people interested in the
history of science. And no one person has read more than about 10 or 20% of the letters
so far. And I know that there's enough material for several PhDs in there, like a PhD on Wallace's
thoughts about Lamarckian evolution, for instance. Because I mean, most people don't realize
these days that Darwin's theory of adaptive evolution was a combination of natural selection
and Lamarckism, which he called use and disuse inheritance. He wrote an entire chapter of
origin to use and disuse inheritance. Whereas Wallace, so Wallace and Darwin jointly published
the theory of natural selection in 1858, 15 months before origin came out. And Wallace
in his essay, so I won't explain the whole story, but Wallace sent Darwin an essay about
natural selection, which was ready for publication. And he actually attacks Lamarck in the essay
and totally refutes Lamarckian selection. So Wallace was actually the first modern evolutionist,
the first neo-Darwinian, because he rejected Lamarckism in favor of pure natural selection,
because Darwin never rejected Lamarckian view. So there's lots of letters and things related
to this. And that could be, you know... Yeah, but digging that out of all those thousands
of letters, that would be a lot of work. But now that you've digitized it. It's easy to
do now. You just look for keywords in the Epsilon system. Yeah. Anyway, where was I
going with this? Oh, yes. So I started this big project to do all the letters. And then
I got a new boss. So my former boss was happy for me to work a day or two a week on Wallace.
But my new boss, she thought, well, he's supposed to be a curator of insects. So he has to spend
all his time on that. And then we were running out of money for the first grant. And another
organization contacted me and said, how would you like to apply for more funding through
us? And it sounded like a dead certainty that if I applied, I would get money. So I knew
that she wouldn't agree to it. So I went to the head of department and said to him, I
got this problem. I could get a huge amount of money to continue the project, but my boss
isn't going to like it. And he said, oh, yeah, go ahead, apply for the money and I'll sort
it all out. So I got the grant and then she got to hear of it and was furious. And unfortunately,
at the Natural History Museum in London, it's exceptionally bureaucratic. It's like Rome
became before the fall of the Roman Empire with, you know, tons and tons of layers of
bureaucracy from one manager to the other. So within the entomology department, there
was my boss and her boss was the head of entomology collections. And she had a boss above her
that was the head of all the life science collections. And then there was the head of
department. So my boss influenced the boss above her to take sides and to stop me from
doing the work on Wallace and overrode the head of department. So I was told, sorry,
you have to give back, you know, half a million pounds and stop work. So I had no, I just,
yeah, I decided to resign. I imagine. Yeah. And then the museum tried to grab the project
by writing to the funders, the new funders saying, George has left the museum. We can
take on the grant. So they were going to get the libraries to manage the project. But the
funders actually told me that this had happened. So, and they were furious as well. The museum.
So anyway, to cut a long story short, I then had to find a place to an organization to
host the grant because it has to be managed through a charity. Right. Various organizations,
no luck. But I happened to remember Randall Keynes, who's Charles Darwin's great, great,
great grandson was head of the Charles Darwin Trust. And I had met him years ago. I contacted
him. He was very enthusiastic. He said, yes, the Charles Darwin Trust will manage the money.
And so that's what happened. So I got an office. I hired two kind of full time staff and quite
a few temporary staff. And we continued the project. And it's now in a pretty advanced
state. But then we ran out of money and I haven't managed to get a grant since then.
So I'm now funding the project partly by doing being the naturalist guide and speaker on
Wallace and natural history. So Bukit cruise ship in Indonesia. Yeah. So being run by a
company called Sea Trek Sailing Adventures. Yes. It's a brilliant ship with only 22 cabins.
And there's as many staff as there are guests. And it's got sails that it can use at times.
And we go to really remote parts of Indonesia where literally no other Western tourists ever
go there because you can only get there by ship and they're all off the tourist routes.
Right. They're amazed to see us. And I remember just on the last trip, we stopped in a port on
an island and all these little kids came over to have a real close look. They'd never seen
living white people before, even though they were six and seven years old. Wow. They were
really fascinated. That's really off the beaten track. Yeah. So that's really enjoyable. I do
four trips a year, spend two months of the year out in Indonesia. Lovely. Yeah. In search of
Wallace and his living treasures trip, where we see birds of paradise displaying and golden
bird wing butterfly, one of the biggest butterflies in the world that Wallace discovered in the
Moluccas, the spice islands. Yeah. And that's the thing. I mean, you really need a ship's naturalist
on such a trip because you can go to the remotest place in the world, but you will not know what is
unique and what is special about these places unless somebody very knowledgeable can tell you
about it. Right. And also, I mean, I've seen pictures of you sitting in the places where Wallace
spent some time. It must be very special for you to visit the places where our hero essentially
spent a lot of time. Yeah. Well, on the next trip, I'm going out to Indonesia in September,
and on the 5th of October, I've arranged through Sea Trek to have a big black granite plaque made,
commemorating Wallace's independent discovery of natural selection in the village of Dodinga
on the island of Halmahera. That's where he was when he had his malarial epiphany and discovered
natural selection after thinking about the mechanism for 10 years. And I was the only,
I heard of one other tourist, one other Westerner who went to that village before I did.
Okay. The villagers didn't know about the history, and the rest of the world didn't because they
assumed that Wallace discovered the theory on Tanate Island, which is nearby, but that's where
he actually posted his essay to Darwish from. But anyway, so we're having this, we're going to
unveil this plaque and Bill Wallace, Wallace's great-grandson from Canada is going to be on the
trip and he's going to unveil it. And it will be a plaque commemorating Wallace's, you know,
earth-shattering discovery while there. Yeah, it was. And it's amazing that in such a short time,
well, not a short time, of course, he'd been thinking about it for many years, but in one
epiphany, he managed to write the whole thing down in one short essay, which took Darwin's whole book
pretty much. Yeah. Well, if you look at the original Darwin Wallace paper on natural selection of 1858,
I did so a few months ago. Because people always say Darwin and Wallace's theories were similar,
but actually they're not, they're identical. If you look at the definition of natural selection
and all the steps that have to occur for the process to work, and then look at Darwin's writings
that were published alongside Wallace's, every single step of the process is mentioned by both
men. They came up with it independently. And some of the steps, you know, could easily have been
missed out, but their theories of natural selection were absolutely identical. It's quite remarkable.
But Wallace had been thinking about it for 10 years, whereas Darwin actually came up with it
pretty rapidly. He was actually a Christian and anti, well, certainly not an evolutionist when he
was in the Galapagos. But shortly after getting back to England, he had begun to have doubts about
the fixity of species. And within a fairly short space of time, he had discovered natural selection,
but it had taken Wallace 10 years of careful thought and lots of previous writings that were
getting closer and closer to the mechanism. And I think it's wonderful that you are doing all
these efforts to commemorate him and to remind the world that there was not one discoverer of
the theory of evolution, but there are two. And one is really important and sometimes forgotten
or overlooked. Yeah. Well, I think it's important even for, you know, to combat creationists,
because they all say, oh, Darwin's theory, you know, that's wrong. But actually, two people came
up with the same idea independently. So, you know, how comes, you know, it's much less, makes it much
less likely that the initial theory is going to be wrong if two people come up with it independently.
Exactly. And thousands of people have confirmed it since.
Exactly. It's not an important. And great to hear that you're still doing the Seatrack
tours there. I mean, it must be a wonderful trip to go with you. I mean, I really enjoyed my time
with you when we were in Indonesia. You know so much about all the subjects. So that's definitely
a treat for anybody who goes on board. Well, that's very kind. Thank you. I know.
Well, you must come on board sometimes. Yeah, if you have a sudden cash windfall, please come on board.
Unfortunately, their trips are a bit expensive. I would never be able to afford them.
Yes, because so few people can come on the ship, of course. Yes. But it's, I'm sure that's definitely
a unique experience to go with you and see all these super rare places. And I'm sure you come
back with a lot more stories to tell us next time, George, I hope. Yeah, I didn't tell you all the
stories that I had and I was going to, but I think we've basically run out of time. Well, then I'll
have to ask you back sometime soon. Okay. I'd love to hear some more. If people want to know more
about you or book a tour or anything, where should we go for any of your projects online?
Maybe. Yeah, online. The best place is the Wallace Memorial Fund. If you just type
Wallace Memorial Fund, you'll find my web page, which is not working very well at the moment,
for some reason. The server is on its malfunction, but it still works. And it's got details of my
Sea Trek trips or alternatively just type in Sea Trek, one word, Bacolony or Wallace, and you'll
find my trips. And then there's the Wallace Correspondence Project page, which is on the
same server that's malfunctioning. So, but it is, hopefully that will be sorted out soon.
And then I'm on LinkedIn and I bet my email is very easy to find because I'm, amazingly enough,
I'm the only George Bacolony in the world. So if you type in George Bacolony email,
you'll probably find it. All right. All right. I'll put all those links in with the description
of this podcast. And with that, George, thank you very much for your fantastic stories. We learned
a lot about cockroaches and Wallace and everything else. And I'm really looking forward to having you
on again sometime soon. Thank you. Thank you, Ari. Thanks very much.