A pioneering entomologist,
cinematographer and writer.
Lee Sung-yang, an 83-year-old entomologist, once proposed a radical idea: insects have minds, they get emotional and they can perform simple math. Having studied insects for more than six decades, he is convinced that they can be happy and sad, learn and forget things, and do things that mindless creatures could not.
Born to a wealthy family in Chiayi County in 1922, Lee first encountered entomology reading the Souvenirs Enthomologiques by Jean-Henri Fabre (1823-1915) when he was a high school student. Fabre brought up this question in his work: can insects think? He designed different experiments and concluded that insects only follow their biological instincts and do not respond to changes.
While admiring Fabre's devotion to the pursuit of knowledge, Lee was neither really interested in real-life bugs nor convinced by the biological-instinct theory, though he could not argue against it at the time.
Rejected at home by an agricultural university for being Taiwanese during the Japanese colonial period, Lee went to Japan to join his brother who was there preparing for the medical college entrance examination. Ironically, he gained entry to the Tokyo University of Agriculture and majored in plant pathology. After graduating, he came home and found work as a researcher at the Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute (TARI). He was assigned to research noxious insects.
His work involved catching specific insects, raising and observing them in laboratories so he could identify their weaknesses and thereby prevent them from devouring crops. "I actually thought that researching insects was by no means an ideal career for a plant-pathology major," Lee says. "The deeper I went into it, however, the more I was fascinated by the behavior of insects, and the more I wanted to know." Several of Lee's research papers were published in the Journal of Economic Entomology, which earned Lee his doctorate from the Tokyo University of Agriculture in 1961, and made Lee Sung-yang a name known in the agricultural entomology world.
Academic achievement, however, was not necessarily financially rewarding. It was tough to support four children on a researcher's salary. To ease the burden, a friend suggested that Lee try making insect films for foreign chemical companies advertising their pesticides in Taiwan. Lee was interested in the idea not only because it sounded like a solution to his money shortage, but also because he was interested in photography. Although a 16mm camera cost the equivalent of all his assets, Lee decided to go for it anyway.
Lee's first customer was happy with the film, and the handsome pay filled his bank account, but something was not quite right. "I liked insects, and I liked photography, but making a film for commercial advertising was not what I really wanted," Lee says. "I wanted my films to contribute in a more meaningful way." That "more meaningful way" became clear after Lee saw True-Life Adventures: The Living Desert, a 1953 Disney documentary about the hidden life in a desert. "Most people consider a desert to be a wasteland, but it's such a fascinating world," he says. "The insect world is the same: it's ignored by people, but it's just as fascinating."
His project started in 1968. The first step was to storyboard the scenes Lee wanted to film: where insects live, what they eat, and how they hunt and survive. Then the appropriate "actors" had to be cast, found and raised. In the end, Lee's cast boasted 230 actors.
At the beginning of the actual shooting, Lee tried to film all the insects in their natural environment but failed since there were so many factors that could not be controlled. Lighting, for example, was difficult, and a gentle breeze would make the actor on the tip of a leaf look like it was encountering a typhoon. So Lee decided to take them to his studio--a cage made of glass.
Filming insects in a controlled environment presented its own problems; the actors could not be controlled at all. Waiting for days to get a few-second shot was common, but patience was not enough with production costs running and time going by. A 165-second film, including overseas development, was about NT$2,000 (US$50) then, or more than a third of Lee's monthly income as a researcher. To reduce costs and expedite the filming process, Lee had to stimulate his actors' performances by inducing the appropriate behavior for corresponding scenes. Freezing flies made them stay put until hunters were ready to enter the scene. A preying mantis is more likely to hunt better when starving than one that has just been fed.
In addition to directing the actors, production factors had to be dealt with. Taking film quality into consideration, Lee upgraded his camera to an Arriflex--the best there was--only to find that there were no close-up lenses on the market capable of shooting objects as small as insects. He finally found a Japanese company that custom-made a lens and an extension ring. On arrival, however, it was a little thicker than the specifications so Lee had to spend a week grinding it down to the desired size.
Handling both the camera and directing the bugs was more than one man could do; Lee had to have an assistant. "Spending hours or days staring at bugs wasn't really a pleasant job," Lee says. "I could be sensitive and very difficult under pressure." After his first assistant quit, Lee asked his children to help. They were by no means enthusiastic about it, so his wife reluctantly pitched in. Liao Man-ling, Lee's wife, recalls that one of her jobs was to hold an umbrella to block the sun until the camera was about to roll, and to catch the bugs if they flew away. "Making this kind of film is really tough," she says. "Thinking back now, well, I actually prefer not to think about it."
The film Your Hidden Neighbors took eight years to make. Lee used more than 300 rolls of film and came up with less than two hours of usable footage. He sent it to the BBC to see if they were interested in it. The company was amazed that an amateur photographer could have made such a film because a lot of the insect behavior in the film had never previously been documented. In addition to buying Lee's film, the BBC sent a team to Taiwan to interview Lee and document his shooting process. A 50-minute program combining Lee's film and the BBC documentary, "The Insect World of Dr. Lee," was aired on BBC TV in January 1976.
Lee gained international fame after the BBC program aired. As praise rolled in from academics and audiences around the globe, Lee re-edited his film, retitled it The Hidden Events , and sent it to an international film festival held by the Photographic Society of America (PSA). He originally entered the film in the non-professional category, but was informed by the PSA that the film was of such high quality that it was put into the professional group. Lee won first prize.
Research at the TARI and eight years of filmmaking allowed Lee a lot of time to reconsider Fabre's biological-instinct theory. He had now gathered enough evidence to challenge it. Lee observed that Anterhynchium flavomarginatum, a species of wasp commonly found in Taiwan, used mud from the same location to build two nests. When building the second nest, wasps supposedly taking mud directly to it would every so often fly toward the first nest, then turn to the new one. "The wasps forgot, then remembered," Lee says. "It requires something more than just biological instinct to forget and remember."
There is also evidence that insects--or at least the smarter ones--do math. Lee observed a wasp deliberately catching extra worms to replace the ones he had "stolen." He found that some insects adopted certain hunting strategies in which they make adjustments in response to the varying reactions of their prey. On several occasions, Lee observed that the insects reacted as if "shocked" or "puzzled" and adjusted their behavior. "Following instinct means that the insect would repeat the same behavior over and over again despite changes of circumstance," Lee says. "The ability to make adjustments proves that they have minds."
Since the BBC production, Lee's film and obsession with insects have been reported by many local and international publications including Reader's Digest and the Smithsonian . The Smithsonian story "A Man's Obsession Reveals the Riches of a Hidden World" drew the interest of an American company that wanted Lee to write a book about his findings. The plan was never realized, but a local publisher later translated Lee's English script into Chinese and published Lee's first book in 1981. Instead of dry entomology theories, the book employed more than 200 pictures to explain Lee's viewpoint that insects can think. It was a best seller as soon as it hit the bookstores.
Although the book was not reprinted, Lee kept receiving positive feedback from readers as well as entomologists. Many of them, fascinated by Lee's theory and extraordinary photos, encouraged him to write another book.
Lee's first book is hard to find, but entomologists who have read it are intrigued. Christopher Starr, a Canadian entomologist who is now a senior lecturer in the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago, glanced through Lee's first book by chance when he was a visiting researcher at the National Museum of Natural Science in Taichung in the early 1990s.
Starr was fascinated by the pictures in the book, paid Lee a visit and was shown the script of Lee's English book that was never published. After reading it, Starr told Lee that no similar research had been done since Fabre, and urged him to publish an English version, focusing on his findings about whether insects have minds. Lee valued the comments of a practicing entomologist and actually started rewriting an English version based on Starr's suggestions. Old age and an eye problem that has been troubling him for years, however, have kept him from completing the work.
Chao Jung-tai, deputy director of Taiwan Forestry Research Institute and an entomologist, notes that research has shown that a few insects may have the ability to think. Chao personally finds Lee's theory very interesting but thinks it needs more experimentation and further evidence to be proven. He says it is a pity that Lee has never sent his findings to major science journals for publication and peer review, which is essential in establishing any scientific theory.
When he was well over 70 and several years into his retirement, Lee did again pick up the pen. The resultant book, titled Lee Sung Yang's Souvenirs Enthomologiques, along with a biography by Chuang Chan-peng and a DVD, was published earlier this year. "I believe that knowing insects have minds and spiritual lives just like people helps us understand what human beings really are," writes Lee in the preface. "That's why I wrote this book."
Lee's motivation for writing the book may have been different from Fabre's, and their conclusions are certainly opposed. But the two entomologists share a dedication to the pursuit of knowledge.