 "Photo: Mark Mulligan")
Editor's Note: The Texan has come to understand that several of our readers felt the following article on Dr. Singer misrepresented his personality and achievements. The intention was never to diminish Dr. Singer or his accomplishments. While we stand by the integrity of our story and feel we did not misrepresent Dr. Singer, the Texan regrets any misunderstanding caused by this piece.
Professor Mike Singer looks nothing like the Quino Checkerspot. Singer has two rather squatty legs that he uses to tumble down stairs and scramble under lab tables after escaping Quino Checkerspots; the Quino Checkerspot has six legs, the front two of which it uses for examining plants it may lay eggs on. Singer does not lay eggs. Singer is short and balding and rather beefy; the Quino Checkerspot, on the other hand, has delicate wings that fan out in bands of orange, black and white. They do not share many habits: Singer eats anything but spicy foods, while the Quino Checkerspot prefers nectar from flowers or made artificially from honey, sugar and amino acids. Singer drives a 1956 French roadster named Rosalie, with Dick Tracy-like running boards, while the Quino Checkerspot doesn't even know how to drive stick.
But it is the hands, Mike Singer's thick Yorkshireman's hands with their dirty fingernails, where he and the Quino Checkerspot come together. This man can snatch a butterfly out of the air, deposit it on a plate of nectar and get it to mate, all without damaging its tiny wings. He is an old butterfly hand who began raising butterflies at the age of nine and working professionally with the Quino Checkerspot in 1967.
Singer's is not the kind of work that has obvious social relevance: He examines the relationships between insects and plants, with an eye on the habits and distribution of insect populations. He once described his life in biology as "burying [his] head in the sand" to study butterflies. In fact, Singer usually plays second fiddle in the media to his wife, Camille Parmesan, a UT professor whose research on butterflies and other animals has made her a world-renowned expert on the impacts of global warming. Parmesan is currently giving a flurry of interviews on the Kyoto Protocols.
But Singer does get out of the butterfly shed from time to time. He was the keynote speaker at the 2003 International Symposium on Biocontrol, where he spoke about how his work can be used to help curb the damage done by species that have been introduced artificially into new habitats. And, as a professor who teaches biology classes for non-majors, he daily encounters one of modern science's most public controversies: How to handle the "unfortunate manner" in which evolution and religion are linked.
Parmesan says Singer has "a bit of a special talent" - that is, his patience with students who do not accept the theory of evolution. Singer encounters a fair number of students who, primarily for religious reasons, do not believe in evolution.
"It's a shame if people can't learn science because it's against their religion, and it's a shame if science shakes their faith and that's bad for them," he says.
Singer, who is not religious himself, does not insist that students accept the theory of evolution, merely that they understand the logic behind it. However, he does not accept arguments that the scientific evidence supports creationism. "They're simply wrong," he says.
Rumors abound
At biology tea time on Wednesday afternoon, where biology grad students gather to eat cookies and talk about DNA, Singer stories abound. Singer once got down on his knees and barked back at a small dog while he was in California being interviewed for a professorial appointment. Singer once began a speech on butterfly behavior with a testicle joke. Singer sometimes wraps a rubber band around the top of his bald head so a disk of flesh wells up and turns purple. Singer makes dinosaur noises that reverberate through the labs on the sixth floor of Patterson Laboratories Building. And have you seen his car?
Singer affirms the dog story. "The dog barked first," he says.
He denies the dinosaur noises. "I do not make dinosaur noises," he says. "I make some noises that other people don't make."
He hoots. It is a high, clear, full-bodied hoot that he emits in bursts of about two seconds apiece. He and Parmesan use the hoots to communicate when they are on different hills while working in the field. One hoot means, "Here I am." Two hoots mean, "Look what I found." Three hoots mean, "Help."
Singer's ebullient personality may be in part a reaction against his upbringing. His father was a World War II refugee, a Jewish Austrian who escaped to England by motorcycle in 1939. Singer says he was a "rigid" man, perhaps too rigid. Singer's mother is from Yorkshire, where the family settled. Singer recalls at least two major injustices from his English boyhood: compulsory boxing and being forced to wear shorts in the winter. "Northern England," Singer says, "is very cold."
Northern England is so cold, Singer says, that the first butterfly of each spring would always be shivering. That shivering inspired a deep empathy in Singer, who was shivering in his shorts. From that empathy rose an interest in collecting butterflies, which led to a lifelong scientific interest in them. Not even family could discourage him. "Butterflies?" his grandmother once asked. "Hmph. Very pretty, but what are they for?"
At the time, Singer wasn't sure what butterflies were for. He was nine. Now he's sixty, and he would say that butterflies don't have to be for anything. But if you want to know, you should ask the butterfly.
Singer's domain
Singer's office looks like the remains of a professor's office after a major windstorm. Papers spill out of filing cabinets and onto floors, where they drift up against the walls. Scattered among the debris are three unmatched shoes, a hot pink hat, a bottle of honey, a sink, some aloe vera, dead butterflies encased in plastic, a "mango fandango" can, one Brazilian real, photos of flowery landscapes, specimen tubs, some apple stickers, half a telephone, a picture of Parmesan and a loaf of black bread. There are two signs on the door: one with a Bertrand Russell quote, and one that reads "Dyslexics of the world untie!" Singer says his office is not always like this. Parmesan says it is.
Two doors down, a sign in the hallway reads, "This is not a lab. This is NOT a lab. This is not a LAB... Laboratory protocol will NOT be observed." Singer says it's not a lab. It's a potting shed. In the walk-in refrigerator there, among the jars and pots and the odd apparatchik, there is a purplish-red beet root wrapped in plastic. Singer says he bought it in France to eat on an airplane, but he never got around to it. Now, apparently, he's preserving it.
Butterfly sex
Some biology people really take their animal research subjects to heart. After biology tea time, for example, one ant researcher called her specimens "the prettiest ants ever." Another imitated a maggot thrashing frantically during a bowel movement, then said, "They're so cute!" Singer cares about his butterflies, but he doesn't say their bowel movements are cute.
The Quino Checkerspots aren't very intelligent, for butterflies. The tropical butterflies - not Singer's - in the next greenhouse over live for a year as butterflies, and they learn to fly safely inside the glass walls. Singer's Checkerspots would bash their little brains out against the glass before they learned not to hit it, he says, so he keeps them in small mesh cages.
Singer spends his days "interrogating butterflies." One imagines the butterfly strapped into a tiny chair, one bright light swinging on a chain, Singer menacing the butterfly with a tiny metal rod. But what he means is something far less sinister. Singer places the butterflies, which have numbers marked in red Sharpie on their wings, onto different plants and observes and records the butterflies' reactions to the plants. Pregnant females, for example, are checking to see if the plant is a good one to lay eggs on.
Lately, Singer is encouraging the Checkerspots to mate. Because Checkerspots are endangered, Singer wants to mate each female with a different male to discourage inbreeding and increase the genetic diversity of the species. Sometimes Singer has to get rough with the butterflies, especially those who are reluctant to mate. If a butterfly still "says no" after Singer has warmed up the greenhouse a bit and made sure the butterflies are well-fed, He may arouse the male by grasping the female by the wings and rubbing her back end on the male's front. "This wouldn't be very PC if they weren't just butterflies," Singer says. "She's a virgin."
Wild butterfly sex ensues. Standing beside the female, the male begins flapping his wings to court her. Shortly, his back end begins to curve around towards the female's back end, and he inserts his genitals. The butterflies maneuver around until they are back to back. "Now she's saying 'yes,'" Singer says, chewing on the arm of his spectacles. A sizeable portion of the male's rear torso is submerged in the female butterfly.
The butterflies will continue to have sex for 20 minutes. When the male finishes, he will insert a wax plug into the female to ensure that no other male can inseminate her. Singer, on the other hand, will head over to greenhouse No. 9 to feed his caterpillars. Singer spends two hours a day feeding chunks of leaves to caterpillars. "A fool and his larvae are soon parted," he says. It seems like a pleasant life.
Endangered eggs
After his first marriage broke up, Singer was single for a few years. "It was very un-sexy to be a professor," he says. He had a sports car but was still un-sexy. He used to have a terrible fantasy where he would meet an attractive woman at a party, and he would say to her, "Oh, well, what do you think of the role of mathematical theory in modern ecology?"
Parmesan would have known what to say. She and Singer have been married since 1992, and Singer says she is lovely and brilliant, and she recently cursed at a taxi driver for bumping into Singer's beloved car, Rosalie. He was proud of that. "She said some things you could not print in The Daily Texan," he said.
When asked to describe Singer, Parmesan comes up with the words funny, warm and smart. "And very dedicated to his butterflies," she adds. She and Singer once drove across Europe in a trailer with 1,000 caterpillars, which kept escaping from their bed into Singer and Parmesan's bed. By the time they arrived in Finland, they had 1,000 butterflies.
In Singer's rooftop greenhouse, the endangered Quino Checkerspots are busily reproducing. A female lights on a plant and moves along with her ovipositor, which is the egg-laying appendage on her tail. Singer peers down over his little charge, speaking softly to her: "There you go, girl. Come on, girl." The butterfly begins laying her eggs. A raft of tiny greenish-yellow orbs appears on the underside of a leaf, each orb thrumming with the possibility of butterfly. Singer leans closer, still chewing on his spectacles. "Look at that," he says. "Can you see that?" His eyes are bright as pin balls. The endangered butterfly labors on, oblivious.
Odd facts about Michael Singer:
* He says butterflies make a figure-8 shape with the tips of their wings as they fly. He calls it "the butterfly power stroke."
* He caught tuberculosis in college and had to drop out and drive a bread truck for a living.
* He often wears the same clothes for days in a row, " until they start to bother someone."
* He makes butterfly food out of honey, sugar and amino acids.
* He once drove 1,000 caterpillars in a trailer across Europe to Finland. The caterpillars underwent metamorphosis and became butterflies in Sweden. Their nationality is unknown.
* His house was once condemned by the University to make room for new development.
* His Yorkshire accent is very slight.
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