Meet the beetles

Elizabeth Cook-Romero |

4/24/2008 - 4/4/08

About four years ago, after the bark-beetle infestation had peaked in the Santa Fe area, musician and composer David Dunn decided to listen to an infected piñon tree. He cobbled together a device consisting of a meat thermometer, a washer, an audio cable, and a few other items that collectively cost less than $10. He then plugged the tip of the thermometer into a tree and connected his invention to an amplifier.

"The first thing I heard was the background noise of the tree: needles moving in the wind and the creaking of swaying branches," Dunn said. "Then I noticed some crunching sounds, and I had no idea what they were. I sat listening; then I heard these little chirps. I couldn't help feeling they were communicative. That was early spring. As the weather got warmer, they [the bark beetles] got noisier."

After listening to many trees, Dunn said, he heard a correlation between the time of year, the condition of the tree, and the intensity of the infestation. "At full infestation," he said, "it's a cacophony of sound.

"In North America, bark beetles are probably the greatest nonhuman agent of change in forests. Their effects actually exceed fire from lightning strikes. And since all insects are coldblooded — and especially in the northern latitudes, where the temperature change has been the most radical during the last half-century — the bark beetles will continue to
be vastly affected by climate change."

Dunn decided to listen to and record beetles because the acoustic aspect of their life cycle has been largely ignored. He suspected that oral communication probably affected the beetles' evolutionary adaptation. In his garage-turned-studio, shelves holding electronic equipment reach to the ceiling, and every surface is covered with homemade devices, including circuit boxes designed to produce chaotic sound. Those circuit boxes and a small laser that converts sound into light and then back into sound are prototypes for a future installation, Dunn explained.

Dunn slipped his CD The Sound of Light in Trees: The Acoustic Ecology of Pinyon Pines into his computer. (In scientific jargon, piñon is spelled pinyon, so that's what Dunn uses.) A soft whoosh filled the studio. "To my knowledge, these are the first recordings of that noise; that's the tree moving," Dunn said. Then beetle chirps and clicks became audible, and the room filled with robust insect communication, intensifying into a wall of seemingly endless sound.

Dunn pointed out that the crunches, chirps, whooshes, and clicks oscillate between chaos and predictable patterns. He pressed the fast-forward button, and the gentler chirps of spring gave way to the roar of summer inside a beetle-infested tree. "Now there are these large aggregates of sound; they're clouds of noise," he said. "I'm fascinated by these sounds. On a human level, I first became interested in the beetles because I was looking for a means of control. But after listening for hours and hours,
I have come to have tremendous affection for them."

Why listen to bugs?

Human language, Dunn said, most likely developed from song. "I think that other life forms have communication measures that are more like music than speech." Although he was classically trained on the violin and viola, Dunn said he has no interest in the kinds of self-expression that were central to Western music before the 20th century. Dunn is interested in the phenomenon of music itself.

"From a very early age, I did not see art and science as separate," Dunn said. "They are different, but they can be united in one individual." As a child, he said, he collected insects and plants. "By high school, my bedroom looked like a scene out of Bride of Frankenstein. I was doing chemistry experiments that looked — and were — dangerous." Dunn's father worked in a military metallurgy lab, where the chemists, eager to encourage a budding scientific mind, supplied the high-school student with materials.

But, ultimately, Dunn chose music as a career. "I've always been interested in how artists and scientists can come together in problem solving." Twenty-five years ago, while living in Los Angeles, Dunn served as vice president of a think tank called the International Synergy Institute. There he met James P. Crutchfield, a physicist whose research areas included nonlinear dynamics, chaos, and pattern formation. Dunn and Crutchfield have collaborated on many projects, including a working paper called "Insects, Trees, and Climate: The Bioacoustic Ecology of Deforestation and Entomogenic Climate Change," which can be read on the Santa Fe Institute Web site (www.santafe.edu).

That paper, Dunn explained, looks at bark-beetle acoustics and how insects can become a driving force for climate change. A tree weakened by drought sounds different from a healthy tree, according to Crutchfield and Dunn. And the first beetles to bore into a tree may make a distinct chirp that tells other beetles where to attack and lay their eggs. As a tree becomes fully infested, aggressive chirps might indicate that newly arriving beetles should attack neighboring trees. Bioacoustics, Dunn said, may help beetles kill a tree more quickly, allowing them to establish a strong colony before cold weather arrives. Or, as happened at the height of Santa Fe's infestation, acoustic communication might have allowed beetles to speed up their reproductive cycles, producing four generations during a summer instead of the usual two, he said.

Insects can become a source of positive feedback that accelerates climate change. "As bark beetles survive warmer winters, their population dynamics bloom," Dunn said. Then bark beetles expand their territories and kill trees on an ever-larger scale, setting the stage for exceptionally huge and hot forest fires that release more carbon into the atmosphere.

Trees that grow at high elevations, such as the white pine, are defenseless against the beetles, because such trees evolved at altitudes that until now were too cold for bark beetles, Dunn said. And trees that have evolved at high latitudes face the same fate. Without white pines, grizzly bears will probably not survive in Yellowstone National Park, he said, and closer to home, the high-altitude trees that hold winter snows in place keep our watershed healthy and prevent devastating spring floods.

During the height of Santa Fe's beetle infestation, media outlets reported that piñon trees died from the blue fungus carried into the trees on the beetles' bodies. "In normal circumstances, almost all beetles maintain a background relationship with the forests," Dunn said. "They clear out weakened trees and transport various fungi, some of which are destructive. ... We really don't know for sure if it's the fungus that kills the trees. There's a constantly shifting relationship among trees, beetles, fungi, mites, nematodes attached to the beetles, and bacterial elements."

Healing our thinking

According to Dunn, scientists use a mechanistic language, and artists think and speak in terms of metaphor. When a culture becomes fixated on purely rational thinking, it becomes pathological, but the absence of rationality leads to ungrounded states — and eventually to insanity, he said.

Dunn stressed that he's not suggesting we combine mechanistic and metaphorical language, as some New Age theorists suggest. "The truest understanding of a tree includes botany and myth," he said, adding that it's important to remember that botany and myth are two distinct things.

Studying the current climate change will be the largest project the human race has ever attempted, Dunn said. "Climate change is not separate from issues of economics and environmental justice. We don't have easy, facile solutions for this. ... We are never going to have enough biologists, field observers, and paraprofessionals to do this work. It's a tremendous opportunity for artists to participate — artists very well trained in sensory awareness."

details
David Dunn performs new work with F/M, 8 p.m. Saturday, April 26; $8
"A History of the Use of Electronic Technology in Music," lecture by Dunn,
2 p.m. Sunday, April 27; $8
Center for Contemporary Arts, 1050 Old Pecos Trail; 982-1338