Featured Thought Leader: John Kane, Urban and Structural Entomologist at Orkin
John Kane is a Division Technical Services Manager for Orkin, and a structural and urban entomologist. In short, he knows his bugs—and he’s passionate about maintaining respectful human-insect relations. We spoke with him about some fascinating arthropods, tips for preventing a home infestation, and the frustrating misconceptions that people often have about the pest-control biz.
CURIOSITY: Can you describe your role at Orkin?
JOHN KANE: I prefer to say Division Entomologist, but [my title is] Division Technical Services Manager, or Division Technical Director. I get involved in the difficult pest-related problems, the most seemingly mysterious problems, and problems that are subject to the most regulation or the highest risk. For example, I would get called in to a hospital setting or pharmaceutical production facility where health was at stake. Or into a museum setting where a priceless artifact is being threatened with damage.
C: Woah, has that ever happened?
JK: Oh, absolutely. In every museum out there, the curators are battling against entropy and trying to preserve those relics as well as possible. There's risk everywhere.
I come from a background of research science, so my role is also to keep up with the most current research, to synthesize it and condense it into how it relates to the pest management industry, and deliver that information to the field in digestible packages. And I also do training.
C: What drew you to insects, initially?
JK: A general fascination with the outdoors. If you go outside and overturn any rock, or dislodge some leaf litter on the ground, you'll see a whole little ecosystem occurring. And that kind of thing is invisibly happening at all times, around everyone. It goes largely unappreciated—to many people it's disgusting, and they're afraid of it, so they'd rather not think of it. But to a scientifically minded person, it's just tremendously cool. I got involved [with entomology] so that I could go on a walk in the forest and really appreciate and understand the things I was seeing.
Part of the appeal of the entomological discipline was the fact that it is a microcosm: insects are easy to rear, easy to breed in a laboratory setting. We can do studies on them and improve upon ecological theories [in a way that] you couldn't with large mammals. The things we've learned in ecology, for example, using fruit flies, are enormous.
C: How did you go from studying entomology to going to work with Orkin and pest control? I'm curious as to whether it's a common career path, it seems a little counterintuitive.
JK: There can be some tension, but maybe not in the way that you think. It's not an issue of valuing the sanctity of the bugs, of their lives. I haven't found any conflict with my ideals or morals in that regard. But in academia, there's a little bit of stigma associated with going into industry. I was focused on public health. I was particularly interested in disease-carrying and transmitting insects, so I was looking at mosquitos, malaria, and West Nile virus; that was the thrust of my research. There was some hesitation getting into pest management on my own part, because I wasn't sure what form that would take. But it ended up being a great amount of fun, and I'm educating all the time.
C: You're a structural and urban entomologist. What does that entail? How does your focus differ from that of an entomologist who’s trekking around in the rainforest?
JK: Well, there are many insects out there, and most of them don't affect humans in a negative way. The last estimate I heard was 1.5 million species of insects and rising. Beetles alone, some people estimate that there are 350,000 species of them, and that figure is maybe eight years dated. The point is, if you have 3,000 species of moth, only 2 or 3 of them are adversely affecting you. Those are the clothes moths that damage your clothes. So, they're not all negative, and many of them can be beneficial, especially when in their native habitat.
One big example of that is termites. Out in the forests, they do tremendous work in nutrient recycling. Without wood-destroying insects, these trees would just take forever for bacteria to turn them over. Termites perform a very valuable service—except when they overlap with our lives. Some of the filth insects that people naturally find disgusting, things like filth flies, flesh flies, blow flies, they’re some of the few insects that can turn over connective tissue in animal flesh. They're performing a valuable service too, but they can spread disease when they overlap with our lives.
Our goal is to keep them separate, to keep them out of the sensitive areas, because they're still doing quite well out in the woods. We want to keep them out of the hospital or the cafeteria.
C: So humans and insects can totally coexist, we just need this level of management from you guys.
JK: Right, and pest control in a real sense is a branch of public health and healthcare. It's a necessary part of any civilization. Some of the earliest civilizations, one of the first moves they make is separating their garbage from where they live. That's the reason for a lot of disease-carrying vermin and bacteria. To the extent that we prevent transmission of pathogens by doing good pest control, we're definitely a part of health care.
C: What are the basic steps that someone should take to guard their home against pests?
JK: This one's fairly easy. The first thing I should say is that homeowners, at least yearly, should go around and take a hard, long look at their homes for changes. Has a squirrel chewed a hole through an overhang or an eave or a faucet? Do they see wasp nests? Do they see droppings in the attic? A good home inspection can take an hour, an hour and a half, which is totally doable.
Part two of that is, an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. It's amazing what kind of real problems can be prevented with 80 cents worth of metal screen installed with a staple gun. A quick visit to the hardware store, $1.50 worth of parts, and you can prevent that mouse from getting in in the first place. I've seen many businesses look back and think, “Wow, we just had to reimburse a wedding party $40,000, and it could have been prevented by 80 cents worth of screening.”
C: What are the most common pests you deal with?
JK: Mice are probably the most common, and then there's ants, small beetles of various kinds, flies … Termites are not something that a homeowner can do much about, unfortunately. That really does take a specialist. There's different kinds of termites, but the one that we interact with the most in this part of the world is the subterranean termite. They're true to their name, they're in the soil, and they’re hard to monitor for and protect against.
They say there's two kinds of homes: those that have had termites, and those that will have termites. That's not just a soundbite, that's unfortunately true. They're very widespread. I've seen some studies that have found as many as 17 colonies of subterranean termites on a single property. I could talk about nothing but termites for an hour or two … I shouldn't do that.
C: I think a lot of people have a skewed image in their heads when they think of pest control. Are there common misconceptions about the occupation or the pests themselves that frustrate you?
JK: I think my main frustration is that people often think chemistry should be the first solution: “What should I spray?” They'll go to Home Depot and ask, “Who's your resident bug guy?” And human nature being what it is, someone there will consider themselves the resident bug expert, and they'll give their best suggestion on what chemical to use, and the person will go home and misuse that chemical, maybe give themselves a sublethal poisoning. That’s the kind of thing I see again and again, sometimes with highly intelligent people!
Another one is that, there’s much more fear of insects than is actually warranted. That's something I wish I could help with. I might see a honey bee foraging around and it wouldn't scare me at all. But I've seen a honey bee fly into a subway car, and everyone's terrified. Terrified! There's any number of completely harmless insects out there, and not everything is an infestation. With something like roaches, if you see one, there are probably more. But there are plenty of insects who are solitary wanderers. They're predators looking for other bugs to eat, and if you see one, it's probably just one! You don't have to hit the panic button for everything.
[Finally,] contrary to what people think, [pest control] is not blunt and imprecise. What people get from movies and TV is the image of an exterminator wearing dirty coveralls and spraying indiscriminately. When it's done right, that's just no longer the case.
We're also pretty deeply involved in pollinator protection: colony collapse disorder and the decline of the honey bees, those are topics that we routinely discuss, and we train to get pest management done without posing risk to natural pollinators. It's not an exciting news story, so most of the public will think that pest controllers don't care about that, that they're insensitive to that kind of thing, and that's not true.
C: Do you ever have any advice for people who are scared of bugs?
JK: Try to get information from good sources, such as university extensions, the CDC, or the WHO. Don't go to a website that's trying to sell you something.
I myself used to be afraid of spiders when I was young. I read a really good book called Spiders of the World, and by the time I put it down I was no longer afraid of spiders at all. For me, when I learn about something, what it can do and what it can't do, it takes away the mystery and fear. But not everyone seems to work that way.
I still don't like centipedes, because they're very aggressive. The house centipede is not a threat to anybody, but if I was traveling through the tropics, I would not want to tangle with any of the tropical centipedes. They bite, they get big, they can take down spiders and snakes. They make spiders look tame.
C: Do you have a favorite bug?
JK: Hard to say! Probably the honey bee, different kinds of bees. They're among the most intelligent of insects, so that earns them a place of fondness for me. They forage in such a complex, three-dimensional environment, and then they have to communicate with their hive-mates. A flower might produce nectar at a certain time of day, and the bee will have to find it, remember the shape and color of that flower, its rough height from the ground, its distance from the nest, and its angle from the nest. Then it goes back and communicates that: “This is the quality of the nectar, it's wonderful, it's really rich.” Or, “it's not so rich.” They are just really amazing, adaptable insects.
C: I learned recently that most bee species don’t have hives—that they’re solitary bees.
JK: Yeah, I used to study stingless bees. They're mostly tropical, and there are some 400+ species of them. There's a kind of stingless bee that makes honey by visiting dead animals. It just fascinates me how diverse life is in general.
C: How do you stay curious?
JK: Thankfully, it happens organically as I go about my day. When I solve a puzzle, when I figure out what's going wrong, that feels really good, and it helps keep me young a little bit. When I'm looking through a microscope at an interesting insect that came from a pharmaceutical plant, there's many times that I'll say, “Wow, this is so beautiful.”
I get reminded daily of why I got into entomology. Because it's really cool, the diversity of life. If you imagine something, some way of living, something bizarre, chances are there's some insect out there that gets pretty close to what you're thinking. Like the movie Alien, for example! The premise behind that is common in nature: parasitoid wasps. Insects that lay their eggs in another insect, which will either be comatose in a paralyzed state, or walking around none the wiser until at one point it bursts open and all these other bugs emerge. It's a horrible way to go, but it's really common.
And that's just one thing, there are so many insects out there, you could never become familiar with them all. There's always another one, something else to learn. A person never stops learning—or they shouldn’t, if they're doing things right.
Interview conducted by Melanie Kassel
