Free Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert Page B

( Euphydryas editha ) can now be found at an elevation three hundred feet higher than it was a hundred years ago. Any one of these changes could, potentially, be a response to purely local conditions—shifts, say, in regional weather patterns or in patterns of land use. The only explanation that anyone has proposed that makes sense of them all, though, is global warming.
    The Bradshaw-Holzapfel Lab occupies a corner on the third floor of Pacific Hall, a peculiarly unlovely building on the campus of the University of Oregon in Eugene. At one end of the lab is a large room stacked with glassware and at the other, a pair of offices. In between are several workrooms that look, from the outside, like walk-in refrigerators. Taped to the door of one of them is a handwritten sign: “Warning—if you enter this room mosquitoes will suck your blood out through your eyes!”
    William Bradshaw and Christina Holzapfel, who run the lab and share one of the offices, are evolutionary biologists. They were introduced as graduate students at the University of Michigan, and have been married for thirty-five years. Bradshaw is a tall man with thinning gray hair and a gravelly voice. His desk is covered in a mess of papers, books, and journals, and when visitors come to the lab, he likes to show them his collection of curiosities, which includes a desiccated octopus. Holzapfel is short, with blond hair and bright blue eyes. Her desk is perfectly neat.
    Bradshaw and Holzapfel have shared an interest in mosquitoes for as long as they have been interested in each other. In the early years of their lab, which they set up in 1971, they raised several species, some of which, in order to reproduce, required what is delicately referred to as a “blood meal.” This, in turn, demanded a live animal able to provide such a meal. For a time, this requirement was met by rats sedated with phenobarbital, but, as rules about experimenting with animals grew more stringent, Bradshaw and Holzapfel found themselves forced to decide whether it was more humane to keep sedating the same rat over and over again, or to use a new rat and let the old one wake up to find itself covered with bites. Eventually, they grew weary of such questions and decided to stick to a single species, Wyeomyia smithii , which needs no blood in order to reproduce. At any given moment the Bradshaw-Holzapfel Lab houses upwards of a hundred thousand Wyeomyia smithii in various stages of development.
    Wyeomyia smithii is a small and rather ineffectual bug. (“Wimpy” is how Bradshaw characterizes it.) Its eggs are practically indistinguishable from specks of dust; its larvae appear as minuscule white worms. As an adult, it is about a quarter of an inch long and in flight looks like a tiny black blur. It is only when you examine a Wyeomyia smithii very closely, under a magnifying glass, that you can see that its abdomen is actually silver, and that its two hind legs are bent gracefully above its head, like a trapeze artist’s.
    Wyeomyia smithii completes virtually its entire life cycle—from egg to larva to pupa to adult—inside a single plant, Sarracenia purpureaor , as it is more commonly known, the purple pitcher plant. The purple pitcher plant, which grows in swamps and peat bogs from Florida to northern Canada, has frilly, cornucopia-shaped leaves that sprout directly out of the ground and then fill with water. In the spring, female Wyeomyia smithii lay their eggs one at a time, carefully depositing each in a different pitcher plant. When flies and ants and occasionally small frogs drown in the leaves of the pitcher plant— Sarracenia purpurea is carnivorous—their remains also provide nutrients for developing mosquito larvae. ( Sarracenia purpurea does not digest its own food; it leaves this task to bacteria, which don’t attack the mosquitoes.) When the young mature into adults, they repeat the whole process, and if conditions are favorable, the cycle can be completed four or five