Read Online Invasive Species by Joseph Wallace - Free Book Online

building, the right floor, but the wrong office. Cockroaches are down the hall.”
    He laughed. “Cockroaches
and
the men who love them.”
    Jack was a senior scientific assistant in the Department of Entomology at the American Museum of Natural History. Short, squat, bearded, with a bald head and a barrel chest, he looked like a battering ram and had a personality to match.
    The two of them were sitting in Jack’s office on the fifth floor, where most of the museum’s staff scientists worked. Its anthropologists and paleontologists and ichthyologists and experts in biodiversity and extinction, all laboring away here, mostly hidden from the public.
    And entomologists, too. The people who studied insects, bugs, and spiders.
    There were more entomologists at the museum than scientists in any other field. This made sense, since at two million species (give or take thirty million), there were more insects, bugs, and spiders than all other creatures in the animal kingdom combined.
    â€œThey should make a permanent exhibition about cockroaches,” Trey said.
    Jack growled. This was a sore subject for him.
    No visitor to the museum would realize the abundance—or importance—of entomology at a glance, since there wasn’t a single permanent exhibit anywhere in the public areas dedicated to bugs. Dinosaurs, of course. African mammals, sure. Meteors and gems and ancient peoples and even New York trees. But no cockroaches or butterflies or walking sticks or rhinoceros beetles. When it came to arthropods—insects and spiders, basically—no nothing.
    Jack had a simple theory about why this was: People were idiots.
    â€œThey fear what they don’t understand,” he said. “And you don’t go to museums to see things that terrify you. You make horror movies about them.”
    Jack would know. He could recite the dialogue from just about every grade-Z movie ever made.
    The people who were terrified of bugs would have fled screaming from Jack’s office. It had originally been a nondescript room like so many others in the building: four peeling walls, linoleum floor, grime-streaked windows overlooking Central Park West and the park across the way. Just another chamber in the hive, until Jack had decorated it with mementos of his own area of expertise: the order Hymenoptera. Bees, wasps, and ants.
    Specifically: wasps.
    On his big oak desk were trays of specimens borrowed from the collections room, each containing rows of little yellow-and-black hornets whose black-eyed gazes seemed filled with rage even in death. The bookcases were filled with everything from reference books to penny dreadfuls (“Attack of the Wasp Woman!”), and every other surface was covered with sculptures, postcards, beer cans, and other knickknacks, all variations on the theme.
    â€œWhat have arthropods ever done to deserve their evil reputation?” Jack asked.
    â€œI’m about to tell you,” Trey said.
    *   *   *
    THE TWO OF them had met more than a decade earlier. Trey, emerging from four weeks assessing a vast, empty stretch of foothill thorn scrub in northern Peru, had encountered a multidisciplinary museum expedition that included Jack. No one there ever forgot the contrast between Trey’s dirty, ragged, half-starved condition and the opulently equipped expedition.
    Unexpectedly, the chance meeting had also marked the beginning of a friendship. Just about the only lasting friendship Trey could claim, and one that most people didn’t understand. How could the explosively, unstoppably enthusiastic and talkative Jack have anything in common with Trey, who spent so much time observing and analyzing the world around him that sometimes you forgot he was there?
    Trey had wondered about that himself.
    Jack’s thick arms were crossed over his chest. “What are you talking about?”
    Trey didn’t answer.
    After a moment, Jack said, “People are