He wouldn’t describe it as an epiphany, but it was nevertheless the moment that helped shape the life of Glasgow-born and Edinburgh-raised Professor George McGavin.
“It was in the second year of my degree in zoology at Edinburgh University, when we were on a field trip to the west coast of Scotland,” he explains. “All my mates were fascinated by badgers, owls, eagles and slowworms—and not actually seeing them, because large animals are quite rare and hard to see. Yet at our feet were just millions of wood ants doing very interesting things, and I realised then—why make your job hard?
“Less than 3% of all species have a backbone,” he adds. “These large furry or winged animals which people pick to get excited about actually only represent about 0.9% of all species on the planet, and insects—anthropoids if you include spiders and crustaceans—are a whopping 66%. Two thirds of all animals! If you want to call yourself a biologist, zoologist, or whatever, and don’t know about insects, you really don’t know very much at all!”
George McGavin is now well known to television viewers for presenting numerous wildlife documentaries, including a succession of “Lost Land” expeditions. He once cooked and ate insects on Richard & Judy, and has appeared frequently on The One Show. However, if his television work is in some respects a far cry from his 30 years in academia, even working among the dreaming spires of Oxford, at one point, appeared totally out of the question.
“I had a very bad stammer as a kid; ‘atrocious’ is probably the best word to describe it,” George explains. “It got worse and worse until I was about 14. I didn’t actually speak for about a year because there was no point, basically.”
It’s fair to say that his school years proved difficult as a result; he was bullied and didn’t stay on for sixth form at Edinburgh’s Daniel Stewart’s—now Stewart’s Melville College—because he wanted to get out as soon as possible. Luckily, he had earned sufficient qualifications to begin his degree at the age of 17. Nevertheless, the thought of eventually having to lecture students was “scary bananas”.
“Long story short; I still have the stammer, and still have a problem from time to time,” he adds. “To find a second dream career in TV is almost… absurd, and certainly isn’t something I ever planned to do.”
Having successfully earned his degree in zoology in 1975, he moved down to London to complete a PhD in entomology, attached to Imperial College London although his office was in the depths of the Natural History Museum. After that, unemployment apparently beckoned. “I mean, what sort of jobs can you get for somebody with a PhD in entomology?” George laughs. Yet, following five years at Imperial College’s field station at Silwood Park, Berkshire, he got his “dream job” at Oxford University. “It was a vindication of all my career path choices,” he says. “It was heavenly, being in charge of the insect collections at Oxford, and being able to teach and do research. I prayed that I would die at my desk, aged about 110, and have to be carried out…”
Television producers, however, began knocking on George’s door. “It started gradually,” he insists, “because when you become known as an expert in anything, you are immediately ‘on the radar’ of particularly news item editors, so if anything comes up they’ll try to get a couple of quotes from somebody who is supposed to know what they’re talking about. So I would do the odd news item, and it was… terrifying.
“It was a massive effort early on, but then David Attenborough asked me to the advisor on his insect series, Life in the Undergrowth. That didn’t actually involve me being on camera but the next year they decided to do Expedition: Borneo and they asked if I’d be up for it—and I was. That’s how it started.”
By the time George had completed Lost Land of the Jaguar, Lost Land of the Volcano, and Lost Land of the Tiger, he realised that television was rapidly becoming a new career. “I resigned my Oxford job in 2008—which I never imagined I would even contemplate, but it had to happen because I don’t think you can make a success of both at the same time.”
Having once described insects as “flying prawns”, you might think George is among the growing number of scientists hailing insects as an ideal solution to growing global food shortages. However, harvesting insects on an industrial scale strikes him as little more than a “sticking plaster” solution. “People want to have children. It’s an urge that you can’t avoid,” he says, “but when I was born in Glasgow in 1954, there were 2.4 billion people on Earth; now there are 7.2 billion—that’s almost a factor of three in the time I’ve been breathing. At some point, like any animal group that grows and grows, there will have to come a crash—something that will knock us back down. Whether that’s a volcanic eruption, or an asteroid strike, or disease or pestilence, or something else… it will happen. So all I’m saying is, enjoy yourself!”
Things certainly aren’t going well for insects, despite them having been around for considerably longer than us. “When I started my degree at Edinburgh in 1971, the thinking was that we would be able to describe, name and categorise all the species on Earth,” George says. “This will never ever happen. Partly because it’s an immense job and there are so few specially trained individuals who are up to it, but mainly because natural habitats are being lost at such a rate now that the majority of species on Earth will become extinct without us ever knowing they were there.”
Even in the UK, he sees clear signs of how things have changed. “When I was growing up in Edinburgh, we’d head off for a summer holiday and, during the drive from Edinburgh to Oban, the front of the car would be absolutely plastered in insects; you would have to scrape them off with a stick at the end of the day. I can drive around Oxfordshire, which is a lot warmer than Scotland, all summer now and you hardly get anything stuck on the front of the car.”
Nevertheless, George is still enthusiastic about the insects we do know about. “Take honey bees,” he says. “As a species we have interacted with them for thousands of years; yet we’re still finding out new things about them which we didn’t know. For instance—somewhat apposite to what’s happening in parts of the world just now—when times are good and there’s lots of food, a colony’s guard bees will allow in bees that are not necessarily part of the colony—immigrant bees, if you like. When times are hard, they get really tough; any bee that’s doesn’t smell and look exactly the same as the colony, will be killed. Now isn’t that interesting?
“I suppose ‘public education’ is pretty much what I do now,” he says. “I see myself as trying to get out there and make people realise just what an incredible place the world is, and what an amazing job these animals do. It’s not easy, because most audiences want to see big hairy things—bears, tigers, rhinoceros, that sort of stuff—but, I have to say, they’re not really interesting. If you want the really interesting stuff that’s just mind-blowingly weird, you really have to look at insects. To share that and get people inspired, that’s my life aim now.”
FAVOURITE INSECT
George McGavin insists he doesn’t have a favourite insect but, when pressed, opts for something… well, it wouldn’t be most people’s first choice!
“The human botfly [Dermatobia hominis], found in South America, is a large bee-shaped fly,” he explains. “Its larvae live in your skin, eat your flesh and then emerge through the hole—not very nice. But the way it gets its eggs into your skin is quite remarkable. Being a large bee-sized fly, it can’t lay its eggs directly—because it would be a bit obvious and you would brush it away. “So it catches a little midge, a gnat or mosquito, which it holds very gently in its little feet, and it lays its own eggs on the abdomen of the other fly, which it then lets go. When that tiny midge comes to you in your hammock after you’ve fallen asleep, it will feed on your blood and the warmth from you skin will make the Botfly eggs hatch, and they will then drill straight into your skin.
“Now that is an amazing piece of evolution, because the original botfly can have no idea what the midge is about to do. It’s not going to be a favourite of everybody, but it’s a very interesting insect and it highlights the amazing processes of evolution.”
First published in The Scots Magazine, #June 2017.
