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| This Man Loves Bugs | | By: Becky Menn-Hamblin |
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Meet the insect aficionado, Martin Galloway--a guy who's never met a bug he didn't like.
HGTV Ideas magazine
From the age of 7, Martin Galloway was bringing home everything he found by the creek or out in the wild. Though terrifying for his mom, she didn't discourage him. And that probably laid the groundwork for his lifelong interest in nature and its workings. Today the environmental biologist is an entrepreneur (as a teen he worked in and launched the horticulture business he owns today), teacher (college science professor and lecturer to professional societies as well as the public) and host of HGTV's Secret World of Gardens.
Q: Did you know early on you'd be a biologist?
A. I wanted to know as much as I could about bugs, plants, birds, mammals. In college I took equal parts of botany, zoology and environmental biology, mostly entomology. I wanted to be a generalist, not a specialist. I like to put the big picture together, which means I have to know a lot about a lot of different areas.
Q: You're a horticulturist too.
A: Yes, I've been in the horticulture business since I was 14 years old. I worked in a greenhouse and put myself through college selling to chain stores and markets. Now my wife and kids and I grow some 500 different perennials for distribution to wholesale garden centers, architects, designers.
Q: And you're also a teacher!
A: Yes, I teach college courses in biology, chemistry and environmental sciences as well as human anatomy and physiology and the biology of disease to nurses. My goal as a teacher is to make people love the subject. I also teach environmental aspects of health to health-care workers in the developing world. I started thinking about being a teacher in my teens, when I was panicky about the future of the world. I decided to be a net benefit to the world rather than a net burden.
Q: How many different insects are there?
A: Estimates range from five to 30 million species of creatures, a huge portion being insects. There are millions of species, so you never get tired of learning because you will never know them all.
Q: Do we find the same insects the world over?
A: Insects fit into the same basic categories, families, orders and so on, and there are a number of varieties, but they all adapt to their local environment. There is no opportunity that they don't exploit, and they have all kinds of possibilities for lifecycles, so you find them catering to whatever the local environment is. The only place you don't find insects on the planet is the ocean--you find them on shore, but you don't find them on the sea.
Q: So, how high up do insects live?
A: Most of them can't live very high for very long, but they do drift, and you find all kinds of winged insects caught in the wind and carried huge distances. When new islands appear with volcanic action, insects are usually among the first to colonize the area.
Q: Is each insect fodder for another creature?
A: Yes. Look at nature this way: it's beautiful and intricate and all those nice things, but it's also a set of resources, and every other living thing out there is a resource for somebody else. Take the aphid, which most people don't want in their garden. It is parasitized by the tiny braconid wasp, which inserts an egg into the aphid. The aphid is then eaten from the inside. But sometimes another wasp finds the parasitized aphid and lays its eggs into the wasp larva body. So a parasite is being parasitized by another parasite.
Q: Seems as though we know a lot about these critters.
A: Well, we do and we don't. It's a scary thing to realize that insects compose the largest single group of organisms on the planet and they play a crucial role in agricultural systems, but they are pretty poorly understood; some we know absolutely nothing about their lifecycle.
Q: What's a typical lifespan?
A: Most of them are very short. Sometimes it's a matter of a few weeks--lots of butterflies, for example, live a month or two, but others live a year or so. Some insects have a long juvenile stage and a brief adulthood. One of the weirdest is the cicada, also known as the 13-year or 17-year locust. They spend maybe 13 years underground feeding on tree roots, then when they're the right size and age, in unison they all crawl out of the ground, affix themselves to the bark of trees, split out of their skin and emerge as an adult. Within the next two days, they mate and die. Imagine: 13 years of childhood, one day of sex, then death.
Q: Many people loved bugs when they were children but no more. Do little kids see bugs differently?
A: The big thing is that little kids have an unbounded interest. They're fascinated by almost everything equally. But as we get older, we divide the world into things that are yucky and things that are not. And insects most of the time are in the yucky department. Our antibug attitude is the result of not understanding. Here's an example: I lecture frequently to horticulture societies, and adults want to know how to control insects or creatures in their garden. Half the time I'm not really sure what the concern is! I never tell someone to not control a pest that is doing serious damage, but he or she should first ask three things:
1. Is the insect really doing damage, or is it just my perception?
2. By controlling that insect or pest, am I having any other impact on my garden that I don't want?
3. Can I really eliminate this thing? Most of the time it's virtually impossible to really wipe out a bug, so why start a battle that you can't possibly win?
Q: So we should just learn to live with our garden bugs?
A: People with field crops might have a problem with bug pests because that is how they make their livelihood, but a garden is for mostly aesthetic reasons. We need to realize that there are some repercussions of killing off every garden pest. The spider mite, for example, is a serious problem today because over the years we've killed the mite's natural predators, and the surviving mite has a reproductive rate that's faster than its surviving predators. This is why it's important to know the lifecycle of different bugs. You can end up killing predators that can't recover as fast as the population you're trying to wipe out.
Q: But there must be some bugs that annoy even you?
A: Aphids and whitefly are problems for me today because I produce crops to sell, but I let the other creatures out there take care of them. The odd problem that I do have is with phlox, for example, which will get powdery mildew on it, not due to insects, of course, but it's the pest that I can't do much about, especially if we get wet, cloudy weather. So I just cut it down to the ground and let it resprout and sell something else. If other gardeners just took that same attitude--you know , have a diversity of interesting plants and don't depend on any one thing for your whole show, tolerate the creatures out there and let them interact with each other--they'd save a lot of energy. Most of the time you'd take the work out of gardening and could spend a lot more time just enjoying it.
From the March/April 2001 issue of HGTV Ideas magazine.
Photo: copyright, John Mitchell
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