When an Insect Dies

Abstract

I am sure I need not explain that although most of his work may be with living insects, the insect pathologist is perhaps more concerned with the mechanisms of death than are his colleagues in most of the other entomological disciplines. He not only studies the normal, healthy insect, and the diseased or abnormal insect, but he must also be intimately familiar with the dying and dead insect. When an insect dies in the pathologist's laboratory, it usually is not considered merely one of a number that may have died in an experiment, and to be swept away to the refuse container. More often than not the insect has been watchfully followed through the agonies of its disease and death, and then carefully and minutely studied in its postmortem state. Thus the pathologist comes close to the concern felt by the poet who wrote of the katydid when she “folds in death her feeble wings beneath the autumn sun.”