154 years separate the birthdates of the founder of insect behavioral studies, Jean-Henri Fabre, and one of his most promising intellectual descendants today, Audrey Dussutour.
Both share certain affinities, apart from their emphasis on the ways and means of interaction in insect societies.
Both are of French ancestry, indeed both come from Southern France, although Dussutour was initially college-educated at the rather prestigious Paul Sabatier University in the large city of Toulouse, in Southwestern France, while Fabre was educated in Southeastern France, in Avignon, a rather small city at what is even now, primarily a schoolteacher’s college, the Ecole Normale de Vauclose, as opposed to the more prestigious university in town.
Fabre had a rather circumscribed career geographically. He taught grade school in the neighborhood, then moved on to a small college on the island of Corsica to the south, from which he was driven by bouts of malaria. He finally landed at a prep school back in Avignon, the latter which fired him in 1870, largely because he admitted girls to his science classes, a practice specifically denounced from the pulpit. (Ironically, he had paid for his early school fees by serving as an altar boy at daily Mass.)
Audrey Dussutour is clearly a beneficiary of the enlightened policy admitting bright women (as well as bright men) to education and careers in science, not only in France but around the world. She has pursued post-doctoral studies not only in France, but in Belgium, Canada, and Australia and collaborated with scientists in the U.S., before resuming her career in France at the Center for Research in Animal Cognition in Toulouse.
Both Fabre and Dussurtour are award-winning scientists, with the primary distinction being that Fabre had to wait until he was 84 before achieving any academic celebrity, according to an interesting account of Fabre’s life published as an introduction by Edwin Way Teale, to a 1957 translation of Fabre’s selected works. (cited below)
In 1910, the last of Fabre’s ten-volume series of chatty and often humorous accounts of insect behavior was published, and ironically, it was the glowing reviews by prominent literary critics rather than any raves in scientific journals that made him an “instant celebrity.”
He had in fact, been writing about insect behavior for 30 years by then -----an estimated 850, 000 of his words were in print at the time---- but he was virtually unnoticed and certainly unsponsored by any university or government agency.
Eventually, realizing that they had a national treasure on their hands in the person of Fabre and in his immense corpus of charming and highly literate writings on nature, the French government gave him its highest award, the Legion of Honor.
Fabre was granted a federal pension for the last four years of his life, just in the nick of time, for he was going blind. He was also elected to the leading scientific societies and academies in Europe at the time: London, Brussels, Stockholm, Geneva, and St. Petersburg (places by and large that he never got to see.)
When asked what he wanted to have engraved at the foot of a life-sized statue being erected in his honor, he said “Laboremus!”. This Latin exhortation has two possible connotations . It can mean: “Let us all diligently work. ” Or it can mean, “Hey, Stop looking at this statue and get to your place of business!).
Dussutour is only 30 years old, but the quality of her work has already been recognized by no fewer than five financial awards for her advanced studies.
Arguably the most notable recent coup was inclusion of a popularization of her her work in the Le Monde Prize Collection of University Research, named after France’s most important newspaper, Le Monde. The paper sponsors the award, to inform the public about promising work in the arts and sciences from rising stars in the university system, through essays, written by the researchers, that are deliberately intended to be more accessible to the lay reader.
Fabre would particularly approve of this development as he detested the impersonal turgid style favored by scholarly journals in his time (and often in ours). He is quoted as saying that academic prose is valued far more for being obscure and capable of being understood only by the few, rather than for being interesting and capable of being understood by the many.
Given the relative youth of her career, it is not too surprising that Dussutour has dealt with a smaller variety of insects than did Fabre ( who literally wrote about hundreds of different types) , but what is strikingly similar is a shared emphasis on ants, and to a lesser degree social caterpillars.
Dussutour deals with many of the many of the same themes as Fabre, but obviously she enjoys and employs all of the more sophisticated science that has been learned in the interim. (It should be noted that in many respects, Fabre was a somewhat atavistic natural historian and curmudgeon, and had little use for overarching theories, like evolution, that would have helped him make sense of animal behavior in a larger context.)
Dussutour’s works seek the answers to Fabre-like questions like: How is that ants don’t get into traffic jams? How is it that ants don’t bump into each other when cutting leaves in tight spaces much more than they do when they do leaf-cutting in spacious quarters? How do ants and social caterpillars make group decisions? What factors governs decisions about whether or not ants will climb over or around walls? What components of an ant’s diet seem to govern the size of the colony: carbohydrates, fats, proteins?
I suspect that Fabre would be quite pleased in the work of this fellow countrywoman, and highly worthy intellectual heiress of his scientific tradition.
Tony Stankus tstankus@uark.edu Life Sciences Librarian & Professor
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By & About Fabre Many of Fabre’s works have been re-issued in translation as collections of essays that all deal with a particular insect or insect relative, even though Fabre himself may not have written all of the reissued essays at the same time or in the same sequence. Some of these works have been made available from the University Press of the Pacific; Project Gutenberg Full-Text has scanned in a number as well. Colasurdo, N., Dussutour, A., & Despland, E. (2007). Do food protein and carbohydrate content influence the pattern of feeding and the tendency to explore of forest tent caterpillars? Journal of Insect Physiology, 53(11), 1160-1168. Dussutour, A., Nicolis, S. C., Despland, E., & Simpson, S. J. (2008). Individual differences influence collective behaviour in social caterpillars. Animal Behaviour, 76, 5-16.
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