HOBBYIST insect-lovers are becoming rarer. To understand why it matters, we might need to know more about what it means to be an entomologist. 

There are many niche interests in the world. Amateur entomology — the study of insects — is one of these. It is perhaps hard for those outside the field to grasp the popularity of the hobby, but amateur entomology has its own strong culture with an infrastructure of clubs and societies as well as scientific journals. A lot of people really like looking at insects. But why?

One answer is that there is still a lot to discover about insects. There are more than one million species of insects already described — 75 per cent of all known animal species are insects — but it is believed there are approximately another four to nine million unidentified insect species out there. A large number of all these insects are at risk of extinction because of humans. 

These facts themselves come from entomologists. Everything we know about the vast number of insect species on Earth is thanks to their efforts. This work forms part of “natural history,” an ancient art that has fallen slightly out of step with much of contemporary science. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (the organisation that produces the Red List of endangered species) produced a report in December 2022 on the worrying decline in insect taxonomists — experts who can identify known species and describe new ones. Remaining taxonomists are very skewed in gender (82 per cent male) and are not being replaced quickly enough, indicating that the problem is getting worse, not better. Taxonomists are, ironically, an endangered species.

Losing apparently obscure knowledge may seem like a trivial loss. But to dismiss it is to fail to see not only the importance of cataloguing insects for wider ecosystems, but also the value in lives dedicated to close study of our world. What’s more, insect taxonomy and conservation itself is often dominated by amateurs rather than institutionalised conservationists or scientists. 

The dedicated time of a single person or a group of people makes a huge difference to maintaining an unbroken knowledge base about that group of insects. Localised knowledge also helps to see the global picture: take, for instance, the recent discovery of a new species of moth in a London park by Barbara Mulligan, an amateur entomologist, which turned out to originate from Western Australia. Entomology in this sense is a truly living culture, one that is endangered by a lack of new members in its ranks.

To understand the attraction of insects, researchers have tried to understand the emotional connection amateur entomologists have with their subject, as in a paper in 2022 on Insect Affects: A Study on the Motivations of Amateur Entomologists and its implications for Citizen Science. 

The author Minna Santaoja tried to find out what the emotional content of being an entomologist is by talking to the people involved in the entomology scene in Finland. What is it that motivates these people to undertake such a deep study of insects? Is there something they “get” that we don’t? 

Santaoja identified three key positive feelings associated with entomology which they call “charismas”: the ecological, the aesthetic and the corporeal. The meanings of these terms aren’t immediately obvious, but can be broken down fairly easily. 

“Ecological charisma” — the interest and pleasure of understanding about insect species and ecology, identifying and understanding their interaction with nature and us ourselves. “Aesthetic charisma” — whether cute or weird or scary-looking, the face-to-face interaction with an single insect. “Corporeal charisma” — the social interaction with other humans about insects, in mentorship and training or just discussion, and the internal, intellectual stimulation of discovery or illumination in understanding more.

Natural history observations made by trained taxonomists are often independent of the classic “scientific method” — the formation of a hypothesis, then prediction, experimentation, and collection of evidence confirming or denying the theory. Natural history consists of detailed observations that may or may not tie into this process. And yet, these observations are still required by the experimentation and collection of evidence stages within the more formalised scientific method.

Scientific training in many fields still requires the patient slog of repetitive menial tasks, and the slow accumulation of expertise through practice. However, a modern trend in science has also opened up the collection of large data-sets of these observations from people without science or natural history training in the form of “citizen science.” 

In these exercises, people participate by making observations in their neighbourhood, or through sorting through a semi-public database of raw data. Santaoja’s study highlights that this newly formalised practice of citizen science has a strangely ambivalent relationship to the non-professionalised people who are already carrying out their own research by watching insects. 

Although nominally opening up science to non-experts, citizen science used as a research tool by professional scientists can also reduce participants to cogs in a machine without giving them any new knowledge or information. Unlike the passion of a hobby, it often holds no promise of making a participant into an expert. Rather than diminishing the knowledge imbalance between “experts” and “citizens,” it may in fact widen the gap. 

At its worst, the effect is pure extraction, reducing the goodwill and enthusiasm of people who want to know more about the world to the logic of free labour. 

This is where understanding the experiences of entomologists becomes particularly important. Entomologists willingly dedicate huge portions of their lives to the sort of menial, repetitive work that professionalised scientists also do. Despite the apparent obscurity of their passion, what they know and do is important. Conservation relies heavily on their expertise. 

The Finnish study indicated that this work done voluntarily by entomologists is at risk of being undermined, as wildlife surveys are commissioned with a view to doing the bare minimum to conserve the environment, rather than doing deeper, more involved work in order to protect the insects that entomologists love. As Santaoja notes, the voluntary work of entomologists can be interpreted either as “exploited neoliberal subjects” or as active members of a self-realised community. 

You may or may not be an entomologist yourself, but this dichotomy strikes at the heart of the knowledge and expertise we all develop about the world for ourselves and for the benefit of others. There is value in what we know (or could know) through our own experiences, it is for us to claim it.