The Dancing Bees: Karl von Frisch and the Discovery of the Honeybee Language
296
The Dancing Bees: Karl von Frisch and the Discovery of the Honeybee Language
296Paperback(Reprint)
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226526508 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 10/23/2017 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 296 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Coming of Age in Vienna
Karl's father, Anton von Frisch, was a nineteen-year-old medical student when he first met Marie Exner. She was the sister of a friend who'd invited him to spend part of his summer vacation in the beautiful Salzkammergut region of Austria. For the previous five summers, Marie and her siblings had left Vienna to spend their holidays there, either by invitation or, as they got older, by renting accommodations. The five Exner children had been orphaned almost a decade earlier when the youngest boy was only ten. The siblings closed ranks after the tragedy and formed a close-knit unit. Despite growing up with guardians in separate homes, they remained close throughout their adolescence and adulthood. That summer, in 1868, they rejoiced at once again being united. Spirits were especially high as various friends, including Anton, joined them to swim in the nearby lake and roam the wooded mountains.
Marie, aged twenty-four, was the only girl of the bunch and the middle child. According to family lore, the attraction between her and Anton was as immediate as it was overwhelming. But the two kept their affections secret at first, even from each other. Marie, as Anton soon learned, was already engaged to a young philosopher and family friend, Ludwig Zitkovsky, who was hoping to secure a teaching position so they could marry. And if Ludwig was not yet able to provide Marie a secure future, Anton was even further from marriage material. Although he came from a well-to-do Viennese medical family, he was only in his second semester of medical school.
And yet when Ludwig and his family also arrived at the holiday destination, the contrast between the two men struck Marie with painful clarity. She later acknowledged that in Ludwig, "a certain feebleness and weakness of will had bothered me all along." With her feelings for him so diminished and no obvious way to extricate herself from the promise of marriage, she sank into despondency. Ludwig sensed her withdrawal and tried to make sense of the change. One day, when he and his mother were about to confront the unhappy young woman about her intentions, it all became too much — Marie escaped from the room and "ran into the forest, up the mountain, until she could no longer." After that summer, the two muddled on with Marie feeling increasingly distant and Ludwig still hopeful that they might overcome whatever had come between them. Marie felt trapped.
The following spring, her oldest brother, Adolf, came home to Vienna for the Easter holiday. He had just started a professorship of jurisprudence at the University of Zurich and now invited Marie to join him there for a visit. She gladly accepted the invitation to escape her increasingly oppressive ties to Ludwig. On the train to Switzerland, she finally broke down. She confessed to her brother that she could no longer get herself to love Ludwig and that she had fallen for their friend Anton. Her brother took the sobbing girl into his arms and comforted her as best he could: "You've just grown apart. You're no longer suited for each other, nobody is to blame." Marie found much-needed solace in her brother's support and finally composed a letter to break off the engagement after her arrival in Zurich. She later remembered feeling "like someone who was finally free after a terrible incarceration."
Adolf would remain in Zurich for three years. His youngest brother, Franz Serafin, soon joined him there to study physics at the newly founded Polytechnic University, later known as the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (or ETH). During this time, Marie came for a second extended visit, and the siblings imbibed the rich intellectual life of the city. Through Adolf's juridical and Serafin's scientific colleagues, they became part of a lively circle. Among their friends from this time, they counted the famous architect Gottfried Semper, the archeologist Karl Dilthey, and the well-known poet, writer, and politician Gottfried Keller. Though Keller had already turned fifty by the time he met Adolf, a warm friendship developed between the two, and he would carry on a charming correspondence with Adolf and especially Marie until shortly before his death in 1890. The writer also joined the Exners over the summer of 1873 in the Salzkammergut and again in 1874 when he visited them for three weeks in Vienna.
By the time of Keller's second visit with the Exners, much had changed for the siblings. Adolf had left Zurich for a position at the University of Vienna, and he and Marie were now sharing part of a house in the city. They had prepared a room for Keller's visit, "completely quiet and friendly with a rose bed in front of the window." Marie's life, too, had moved in significant directions. Once she had freed herself from her ties to Ludwig, her relationship with Anton von Frisch blossomed. The two planned to marry in late fall of 1874. Anton had by then advanced to an assistantship under the famous Viennese surgeon Theodor Billroth. The same year he and Marie married, he was named professor of anatomy at the Art Academy (Akademie der Bildenden Künste), a position he would hold for the next twenty-five years. His career would continue to flourish. He published widely on topics that ranged from bacteriology and diagnostics to surgery and emerged as a central figure in the establishment of the modern discipline of urology. Anton's professional success ensured that the von Frisches enjoyed a high standard of living. While Karl would later remember them as never having been overly wealthy, he acknowledged that his upbringing was privileged, with the family's social and intellectual lives ably facilitated by Marie.
Marie was also instrumental in the purchase and running of what would become the von Frisch family's permanent summer residence and safe haven during the world wars, as well as the site for many of Karl's most important experiments. Shortly after she and Anton married, they acquired an old mill in Brunnwinkl nestled by the picturesque Wolfgangsee in Austria's Salzkammergut where they had first met. Gradually the family acquired more property surrounding the mill, and eventually their country residence included five houses around the lake. The houses became an enduring vacation spot, not just for the von Frisches but also for their varied and influential friends. In this setting, Marie ran a sort of country salon — the von Frisches' guests included Marie's own learned family as well as the likes of Theodor Billroth, the composer Johannes Brahms, and the Austrian writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, who read to the Brunnwinklers from her manuscript in progress.
The von Frisches' own family would also expand over the next decade and a half. The summer after Anton and Marie married, they welcomed their first son, Hans. A little less than two and three years later, Marie gave birth to their second and third sons, Otto and Ernst. The youngest, Karl, was born after a gap of eight years in November of 1886. As the youngest of the family, he grew up surrounded by nature and animals as well as the intellectual guidance of Marie and her brothers, who all held university professorships.
During his childhood, Karl planted deep personal and intellectual roots in the soil around the mill in Brunnwinkl. It was there that he performed his first research experiments on eels and started a collection of local fauna and flora, which over the years swelled to almost five thousand specimens. He was captivated by the abundance of natural life and recalled having "wanted to collect everything, not only, say, butterflies or any other selected group as most people do." It was also at Brunnwinkl that he delivered his first "scientific talk" to an audience that included his uncle Sigmund Exner, who would later become his physiology teacher and intellectual mentor at the University of Vienna.
Marie also encouraged her son's interest in animals. When she traveled to the coast of Istria to recover from an illness, she took the boy with her. Many years later, von Frisch recalled how he had lain "for hours between the cliffs, motionless, watching the living things I could see on and between the slimy green stones just below the surface of the water. I discovered that miraculous worlds may reveal themselves to a patient observer where the casual passer-by sees nothing at all."
Von Frisch began his studies with private tutors at home. Later he enrolled in the exclusive humanist Schottengymnasium in Vienna, where his future fellow Nobel laureate, Konrad Lorenz, would study some seventeen years later. Formal study was not an unambiguous pleasure and success for the young von Frisch, and he was especially tormented by the more theoretical subjects, such as Latin and mathematics. But his passion for all things living made him a diligent and able student of natural history and biology. These became his favorite subjects and allowed him to draw connections between the knowledge of books and what he encountered outdoors as well as the many animals he kept as pets.
By the time Karl entered secondary school, his home menagerie had swelled to impressive proportions. He had accumulated an astonishing 123 different species of animals, of which only 9 were mammals. Von Frisch was also an accomplished fresh- and saltwater aquarist, an experience that he later credited with having trained him in the art of careful observation. But he developed perhaps the most intimate connection with a bird: a small Brazilian parakeet named Tschocki that lived with the family for some fifteen years. The bird made a deep impression on the boy. He recalled how it preferred him to all other members of the family. Tschocki was his "constant companion at home, sitting upon my shoulder, dozing in my lap, nibbling at the papers and pencils on my desk, or otherwise engaged about my person. ... At night he slept next to my bed, and first thing every morning I would reach into his cage to pick him up and talk to him." His mother had served as an example in bird care — every year she would hand-rear a blue tit she bought from a pet store and then release it come spring.
In 1905, Karl von Frisch entered the University of Vienna medical school. At the time, Vienna had emerged as a bustling metropolis — from the composer Gustav Mahler to the architect Adolf Loos to Gustav Klimt and Sigmund Freud, the city teemed with the period's most important thinkers and cultural innovators. While this vibrant capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was neither the only nor, indeed, the first city in which these currents took hold, "European modernism reached its very purest and most concentrated expression in Vienna at the turn of the century." Natural science, too, was part of this flowering, and the Exners — Karl's mother's family — counted among the city's most illustrious intellectual families.
From the early nineteenth century through the Second World War, three generations of Exners would excel in physics, physiology, meteorology, avant-garde art, law, and medicine, and the family claimed no fewer than ten university professors. They were as intimately entwined in the intellectual currents of the city as they were to the growing summer colony in Brunnwinkl, with their private and professional lives seamlessly blending through work, leisure, and marriage. Together with others, including the physicists Ernst Mach and Ludwig Boltzman, the Exners strove to supply a liberal rejoinder to the specters of left-wing anarchy and right-wing clericalism that beset Austrian politics and culture by offering a probabilistic approach to science. "They 'tamed' uncertainty by quantifying it," in the words of the historian of science Deborah Coen.
But despite the growing intellectual and professional successes that surrounded him, young Karl felt far from sanguine about his own path at the University of Vienna. His heart was in zoology, but his physician father had convinced him that medicine would ensure a more certain future. These misgivings notwithstanding, his time at the university was not spent in vain. He acquired a firm grounding in anatomy, zoology, and histology. Most important, he worked with his uncle, the aforementioned experimental physiologist, Sigmund Exner. Exner had studied medicine at the University of Vienna under Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke and later at Heidelberg under Hermann von Helmholtz, two of the foremost physiologists of the nineteenth century.
The experimental rigor and elegant demonstrations Exner brought to his work deeply impressed the young von Frisch. Many years later, he would recall his uncle's course with enthusiasm. Exner had "conveyed the function of human organs with exemplary clarity and free of unnecessary baggage." And he praised his uncle for his ability to "compellingly support his claims with well thought-out demonstrations." Each night, von Frisch would recopy the notes from Sigmund's lectures and carefully study them. He was also "burningly interested in the physiological [laboratory] exercises" that accompanied his studies. In addition to these formal requirements, von Frisch also took up his first independent research project under Exner's guidance. In these experiments, he expanded on his uncle's own investigations of compound eyes to study the pigments in the eyes of moths, lobsters, and shrimp.
In a vertebrate's eye, the iris changes shape to regulate the amount of light that passes through the pupil to the retina. Invertebrate eyes lack this structure and instead depend on moving pigments to regulate light influx. Von Frisch set out to uncover the nature and cause of these pigment shifts. To this end, he moved invertebrate animals from dark to light and vice versa and then examined their eyes. The two different pigment configurations that resulted from these differing light conditions he termed "light eyes" and "dark eyes." He performed these examinations on both living animals in various stages of light and darkness and animals he killed at regular time intervals in the light-dark transition. In a subsequent set of experiments, he exposed living animals to lights of different wavelengths and determined that the pigments were most sensitive to blue-violet and violet light.
After studying the speed of pigment transitions, he went on to examine whether light itself or nervous stimulation triggered the pigment changes. He tested all the usual suspects for nervous stimulation — electrical stimuli, acids and bases, different temperatures, and even radium and X-ray radiation — but found that none of them caused a change in the animals' eye pigments.
When he published the results, he opened with a disclaimer: "The following experiments by no means led to clear results. If they are published nonetheless, it will be because in this case the negative and often inexplicable results appear to be not without interest and perhaps will stimulate further investigations." And indeed, the thorough and careful nature of the study showed a promising and diligent student of comparative physiology. Von Frisch systematically sought to isolate and examine the various factors that might be at play in the pigment changes of the eye. He took his uncle's work as a touch point, revising and expanding on his findings. The style is very clearly that of an experimental physiologist who studied animal organs in vivo and in vitro.
In addition to dutifully reporting the various pitfalls and failures of the experiment, the paper also gives a vivid sense of what it was like to work with these animals as the young scientist was learning to perform delicate surgeries. In a group of shrimp, for example, he severed the hairlike fibers of the animals' optic nerves. The text is not always clear as to whether the animals survived the procedures, or indeed, whether this was desired for the experiment. But we can glean that at least in some cases, he performed experiments with postoperative animals that had evidently survived the earlier procedures.
Even when von Frisch was not wielding a scalpel, manipulations of the animals required considerable skill and patience. To test the effects of partial illumination, he smeared a tacky alcohol-soot mixture on the animals' eyes. He described the procedure in some detail and deemed it "not entirely easy," as "the shape, smooth nature, and great sensitivity [of the eyes] to even the smallest amounts of light are challenging circumstances." The effort was made even more difficult by the animals' active resistance to the treatment: "Because the animals know to deftly remove the annoying cap, one also has to include the eyestalk." "After several failed experiments," he settled on a combination of soot, celluloid, and ethanol that made a "quick-drying paste, and with this the eyes are pasted over."
Although von Frisch in his scientific publication maintained a degree of detachment befitting a budding scientist of the time, his later reflections on these experiments tell a somewhat different story. He recalled how, although he "went to work with great enthusiasm," he "was very soon faced with a serious conflict. [He] had to stimulate the eyes of living crustaceans with electric currents, a manipulation which clearly was to them a most unpleasant experience." His reluctance was so strong that he wrote how "every single experiment cost me an effort. Though finally my scientific zeal got the better of my compassion, I believe that even in later years I could not have brought myself to undertake similar research on birds or mammals with their more highly developed and presumably more sensitive nervous systems." Von Frisch's sympathies were visceral but also strongly mediated by his scientific understanding of kinship and an evolutionary hierarchy that placed humans and mammals at the top of the pain-perceiving scale. And although the study was ultimately inconclusive, he later recognized that the work awoke in him an abiding interest in experimentation and sensory physiology.
(Continues…)
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