A Natural Historyof Fleas and Butterflies

The house at Ashton Wold iswild, outside and in. Althoughit is muddy midwinter and the

twisting branches and vines are bare, itis clear that the garden is a lush, unrulytangle in the spring and summer, thatthings are just let be. In the large livingroom, too, things are everywhere: animposing pine tree hung only with its

own cones, a sideboard with cakes andcoffee, walls of bookshelves as well aslong tables piled high with books—aboutfleas, birds in Israel, mother-daughter re-lations, Beatrix Potter’s botanical draw-ings, and memory. There are pictures ofbirds and butterflies and photographsof the children and grandchildren andone of Walter Rothschild on the backof his giant tortoise Rotumah, a stuffedowl, vases of yellow flowers and star

lilies, many small jars of seeds, two bark-ing dogs, myriad couches.

And Miriam Rothschild, whose in-terests, accomplishments and moodsare as diverse as her sitting room. Sheeven has another last name, Lane, thatshe uses when it suits her—sometimeswhen callers ask if they are speaking toMiriam Rothschild, she will answer, “Itdepends. Who are you?” (“Lane” waswhat the British Commandos dubbedher husband during World War II, be-cause his Hungarian name sounded sodecidedly un-English.) It is the name“Rothschild,” however, that appears on

her some 350 papers aboutentomology, neurophysiol-ogy, chemistry and zoologyand on the roster of the Roy-al Society.

And it is as a Rothschildthat she is known for her doz-en books, much of her conser-vation work, her advocacy forthe better treatment of ani-mals, her gallery devoted tothe artwork of schizophren-ics, her political activism onbehalf of homosexuals, andall the other hundreds ofthings she has done in hernearly 90 years. “I am a tilterat windmills,” Rothschild as-serts from her wheelchair,where she is temporarilystuck because of an injury.No matter that the furniturehas been rearranged to ac-commodate the large Christ-mas tree, Rothschild takesthe same path as ever to theever ringing telephone, push-ing chairs and small tablesout of her way. “I alwayshave had some cause or oth-er which I really get terriblysteamed up about.”

Her expansive interests, herenergy and her activism are

in keeping with her lineage. The Roth-schild family—famous for banking andpolitics—has produced astounding nat-uralists: Walter, whose collections in-cluded 2.25 million butterflies, 30,000birds and 300,000 beetles; and Charles,Miriam’s father, who assembled themost comprehensive flea inventory inthe world. Rothschild’s first memoriesare of being obsessed with nature andwith collecting specimens. Her parents

believed that a formal education wouldbe too stifling, so she was free to pursueher interests and to read widely. At 17she decided to take some courses.

“Right in the beginning of my univer-sity life, if you call it that, I tried to taketwo degrees at once: English literatureand one in zoology. But it became im-possible. You could never get the lec-tures synchronized. You always wantedto hear somebody talk on Ruskin, andat the same time you had to dissect theentrails of a sea urchin. It was hopeless.”

Rothschild ultimately chose marine bi-ology because of a field trip to Plymouthand a chance meeting with naturalist G.C. Robson. “He offered me the world ifI would stick with his marine snails,” sherecalls—and he packed her off to Italyto do so, as the winner of an all-paid po-sition. “I went home to my mother andsaid, ‘You will be very pleased to hearthat I have been awarded the LondonUniversity Table in Naples.’ I didn’t tellher I was the only applicant. I thought itwas high time she thought I was clever,instead of being the stupid one in thefamily.”

There were no such snails, but Roth-schild had a wonderful time: “My trou-ble at Naples was that I merely went intoeverything because it was all so fascinat-ing.” She returned to England, workingon snail-borne parasites for seven years,until her lab at Plymouth was bombedin 1940. Rothschild has written aboutthe sudden destruction as horrible butalso liberating: “Without realizing it Ihad gradually become an appendage ofmy trematode life cycles.” She then didsome wartime work. “I made a foodfor chickens out of seaweed, and I wasasked, ‘Do you think this is a success?’And I said, ‘I don’t know. It gives methe hiccups.’ ” Rothschild stops and lis-tens as the dogs begin to bark, high-pitched and persistent; when they calmdown, she continues.

Rothschild was asked in the early1940s to join Enigma (or Ultra, a proj-ect to decode German communications)with, oddly, a bevy of marine biologists.“There was the champion chess playerof Ireland, and there were all these topmathematicians. But on the whole themarine biologists came out way ahead.It was very funny.” The work was wor-rying, she says tersely. “Look, I can sumup my views on Enigma: we didn’t winthe war, but we shortened it.”

News and Analysis36 Scientific American May 1996

PROFILE: MIRIAM ROTHSCHILD

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Copyright 1996 Scientific American, Inc.

She left Enigma to marry her husbandand to work on an agricultural council,studying wood pigeons. She discoveredthat the birds carried bovine tuberculo-sis. “People said there was a differentbreed of wood pigeon, a different strain,that came to this country in the winter,which had darker plumage.” To her, thecoloring suggested addisonism, whichpeople have when their adrenal glandsare infected with TB. “I went to the meatmarket, and I dissected an awful lot ofpigeons there. And then I found this TBin the adrenals.” (She was not allowed topublish her results, because, she confides,“it gave the enemy information, whichI thought was remarkably funny.”)

Rothschild does not characterize herhunch about the TB—or any of her re-markable hunches—asintuitive. “I think if youhad to describe any tal-ent I might have, it isthat I am a good observ-er. And that means thatyou don’t only notice things, but youthink about what you have noticed.”

After the war, at the age of 44, shewrote her first book, Fleas, Flukes andCuckoos, about parasites, and then con-centrated on the family fetish: fleas.Charles, who, among other things, iden-tified the flea that carried the plague,had housed his tiny millions at the Nat-ural History Museum in London, butthey had yet to be catalogued. Being themother of six posed no challenge toRothschild. “I guess roughly I gave up10 years to the children. And I have al-ways been quite honest about this: Imuch prefer children to the fleas. It wasnot a sacrifice to me at all. And I neverreally believed a word of these womenwho said they could not give up theircareers; it is obvious the children aremore interesting than the careers.”

She does admit that she is a chronicinsomniac. “One thing that made it easywas you could look after the children inthe daytime, and you could do your mor-phology and your microscopy at night.”She apparently also dispenses with time-consuming chores like choosing clothesby wearing one outfit that she designedand had made up in various fabrics.

Working with a collaborator for 20years, Rothschild catalogued and inves-tigated the peculiarities of fleas: “I dis-covered, just by accident, that if youknew the histology of the flea you couldpretty much know the histology of anyother insect.” She points to some draw-ings. “Look at their lovely mouthparts.

They have got such beautiful mouth-parts, fleas. Really, they have.” Roth-schild also discovered how fleas jumpso well. They have a ball of resilin be-tween their back legs; this elasticlike sub-stance allows them to jump from bend-ed knee off the ground at more than140 times the force of gravity. Some dothis 30,000 times without stopping.

In the midst of studying rabbit over-population in Australia, Rothschild dis-covered the first example of a parasiterelying on its host’s hormones. “I wasable to show that the flea has turnedover the control of its breeding cycle tothe rabbit. Its ovaries only mature un-der the influence of the pregnant rab-bit’s hormones,” she explains in crisp,clear manner. “During copulation be-

tween adult rabbits, thefleas all move off the buckonto the doe—she seemsto attract them at thatstage. Then, when she be-comes pregnant and be-

gins to mature her baby, so to speak, thefleas gradually go through her cycle.And their ovaries begin to develop. Bythe time she is ready to give birth, thefleas respond to this and instead of re-maining attached to the rabbit ear, asthey do normally, they break loose, rundown the rabbit’s nose and drop off onthe babies just as they are born. Therethey receive another set of hormonesthat enables them to copulate.” (Roth-schild has said that this synchronicitymay explain why women are more of-ten bitten by fleas than men are.)

She stopped her work on hormoneswhen her collaborator at the Universityof Oxford, Geoffrey W. Harris, died.“Somehow the gilt was off the ginger-bread, you know.” Rothschild attrib-utes much of her luck to collaborators.“Without the enthusiasm, I mean, youknow. I am an amateur, I have no de-grees.” With Nobel laureate TadeusReichstein, Rothschild determined thatthe poison of monarch butterflies comesfrom their diet of milkweed. She contin-ues to study butterflies—her first love,she says, and the subject of her most recent book, Butterfly Cooing like aDove—as well as toxins and chemicalsignaling in insects and plants.

Plants, in fact, are a current obsession.Rothschild is revisiting 180 of 280 sitesin the British Isles that her father de-scribed in 1912 as areas vital to preserve.She hopes to determine which forms ofland management failed. She has alsodevoted 150 acres of her estate to rare

wildflowers and is selling the seeds soas to preserve genetic diversity. General-ly, population growth and the destruc-tion of the natural world depress her.But “there is only one single, slight goodthing. And that is that a different class ofperson now is interested. I hate the word‘lower classes,’ it is a horrible word, butit is true,” she says. There are “more un-educated people who have become in-terested in the environment.”

Her other concerns of the moment arememory (how certain chemicals triggerrecall) and the plight of animals. Roth-schild argues compellingly for animalconsciousness and is trying to reformhow farm animals are housed andslaughtered in England. She is remorse-ful about some of the experiments sheconducted in the past. “People should betaught when they are young that theyhave to consider the value of the exper-iment before they start in on it. It is ab-solutely not enough to be interested. Butyou get so carried away with interestthat you lose all sense of proportion.”

Further, Rothschild is studying telep-athy in several dogs and cats that ap-pear to be able to tell when their own-ers are returning from a trip or are tele-phoning, even though no one else in thehousehold knows of these events. Shehas put out ads (“Anyone whose dog orcat anticipates their return, please com-municate”) and is trying to design ex-periments to test her theory. “There arequite a few funny things about dogs andtelepathy,” Rothschild remarks and re-counts how early one morning she wasawakened in London, far from home, byher dog barking. She called her staff atAshton Wold and discovered the dog hadbeen barking for a while. “Probably co-incidence, but now I feel as though Ineed to look into it.”

And then there is the paper on lady-birds she needs to look into, as well aslost papers of her father’s that have justbeen found and the meadow of Biblicalflowers she would like to create and thebook she is writing about Proust andthe weather. “There comes a momentwhen counting the bristles on fleas be-comes a bore,” Rothschild says, explain-ing why she has always veered off into“corny” writing. But then art and scienceare not really so far apart. “My greatthing is that I believe the two are verysimilar and should go together,” she says.“You see, I am an amateur, not a profes-sional zoologist. Because if I was one,life would have made me specialize moreseverely.” —Marguerite Holloway

News and Analysis38 Scientific American May 1996

“I am a tilterat windmills.”

Copyright 1996 Scientific American, Inc.