Bitten by the Bug Bug: An Entomologist's Life

He wasn't a boy fascinated by bugs, not the one with the junior microscope or jars of captive insects in his bedroom. In fact he grew up -- son of a doctor, survivor of polio -- believing that medicine was his calling. Just a few months of pre-med convinced him otherwise, but when he happened to take an entomology class, Arias remembers the hallelujah moment, the recognition of a life's singular passion.

He completed his doctorate at the University of California at Riverside, where he met and married Kathy, and the young newlyweds joined the Peace Corps. Posted to Brazil, Arias built a lab and established a graduate entomology program. The Peace Corps stint led to scientific appointments in Panama, Venezuela, then back to Brazil again.

Along the way, he won the admiration of so many proteges and colleagues that 16 bugs were named for him, and though he dips his head modestly when describing his personal book louse, he can also print the entire 16-name list of Coniopteryx jorgeis and Peritropoides ariasis with a single computer command.

Arias is uncharacteristically quiet if you ask what insects have taught him, and the scientist hesitates to offer the private conclusions he has drawn, the ones whose premises cannot be analyzed or graphed or proven.

He begins by mentioning, too casually, the near-death experiences of 26 years in the sweltering tropics. He recalls the member of his field team killed by a lightning strike, and how the others tried CPR in vain, then carried his body a kilometer back out of the jungle. He recalls the Brazilian gold mine where a man was shaking with malaria and Arias knew, just knew, the minute his own fever began to flame, that he had contracted it, too.

And then there was the hepatitis. Arias was in the field again, Kathy back home, nine months pregnant with their second child. Arias felt the fever grab him. His vomit was black. He suspected hepatitis and confirmed it with the medical manual he carried. His symptoms, the reference book explained, gave him a 30 percent chance of survival.

"I went to sleep that night, and I knew," he remembers."I said, 'God, I know this is it, please take care of Kathy and the kids.' " He was 33 years old.

The next morning, "it was like one of those cinematic, movie moments," he says. "I opened my eyes. I looked at my hand, wiggled my fingers. I was alive!"

And so he believes, not officially, not as a government employee, not scientifically, but deeply, that life is part of a "fantastic plan," not something coincidental, not random. He sees magnificence in the snowstorm recaptured by his computer screensaver, or in the weird fly someone brought him the other day, a tiny insect "with great big colorful spines all over its body, and I thought: Wow."

More than 30 years have passed, and he and Kathy have raised two sons and two daughters. Now everyone is back in the States, and there are three grandsons to dote on and teach about the mysteries of small things. The mosquito hunter is content in these gentler woods, where the heat and buzz of life, in high summer, draw him.