Pentatomidae, Murgantia histrionica, Harlequin Bug, 1992, watercolour, 49 x 38 x 3 cm.
This Hareleqin Bug was collected near the nuclear power plant Three Mile Island called Governor’s Stable. The shield is bent and the yellow form is asymmetrical.

Our relationship, which means the relationship of the white man to Nature has been like a master to its servant or even a master to its slave.

But the servant has become rebellious. Whenever he gets hurt, he retaliates and in areas we do not expect. In 1950 a man called William Vogt wrote a book called ‘Road to Survival’ in which Bernard M. Baruch writes in his introduction: (translated by Cornelia) “The large abundance of natural resources enticed us to take them for granted. Now we face – as this book proves- almost on all our earth a serious exhaustion of this ‘earth-capital’. More than one country is already bankrupt.”

Working as a scientific illustrator for zoologists and geneticists for 25 years, it was understood, that all that came from scientists was ‘scientific’ ‘objective’ and relevant for society. It was also taken for a fact that art was imaginative and belonged in the realm of phantasy. Art was not reliable and not inventive in the sense of being useful to society. It was only a decoration. Photography was considered objective compared to a painted picture. But already when I was 20 years old (1964), I had to retouch photos to make the picture better understandable. It also occurred very often, that an assignment to draw a statistic, contained mistakes I found while making the drawings. At that time of course there was no computer, all was handmade.

From this time on I started to contemplate what objectivity and scientific really meant. I concluded that the process of making an image also was a means to ask questions and to find possibilities.

In my work I tried pair the scientific world and the art world. For my field research, there was no role model after the accident in the nuclear power plant Chernobyl. 1986 the question whether nuclear radiation spread over Europe from the nuclear accident could have an impact on Nature was alien.

I was in a singular position, as I had to draw and paint mutated flies already in 1967 and could as such imagine how a deformation in an insect could look like. The flies, Drosophila subobscura were at that time poisoned with Ethyl methanesulfonate. The mutations were drastic mostly on heads and called ‘Quasimodo’. As I learned later, this poison was not only mutagenic but also very similar to Agent Orange which was abundantly used in the Vietnam War and created an atrocious number of malformed and disabled children not only among the Vietnamese people but as well among US Veterans.

Two Heads of the Fly Drosophila subobscura with Mutation ‘quasimodo’, 1967, aquarell, 42 x 60 cm.
Two heads of the fly Drosophila subobscura. The left head is the mutation called quasimodo mutated with EMS in the laboratory of Zoological Institute of the University of Zürich, right siede a normal head.

In 1985 I painted mutated laboratory flies which at that time were not poisoned anymore but irradiated externally by x-rays. When I was just painting one of those mutated flies, the accident at the nuclear power plant Chernobyl happened on April 26, 1986. I imagined that now a sort of laboratory situation had occurred everywhere the cloud, filled with radioactive material, had dropped its content. The scientists with whom I worked for years were convinced that the radiation was too low to have any effect, even less on insects.

Only … all their studies had been made with x-rays and never with artificial, man-made radiation. They extrapolated from their studies to the happenings around the nuclear power plant Chernobyl, or the fallout in Europe.

Later, I learned that at the time only one scientist in Sweden had made any research concerning the radiation from Chernobyl.¹ All rest was hearsay.

Homoptera, Spittlebug from Rancate Switzerland, Chernobyl Fallout, 1988, aquarell, 29,7 x 21 cm.
Homoptera, Spittlebug with a stump of a leg growing out of the joint of the left middle leg.

My first study brought me 1987 to Sweden where the highest fallout from all western Europe had been measured. It was there I found the first deformed insects and plants. I concentrated my work on true bugs, Heteroptera, because they have no pupal stage. When they hatch, less than one millimetre long, they sap the liquid from their host plant. If the plant is irradiated, the true bug will be as well. When I published my watercolours and suggested that the deformations could originate from the radiation from Chernobyl, I was castigated and blamed that I was only trying to terrify people without any scientific degree to show off. Also, it was emphasized, that the radiation was way too low, even lower that the fallout from Swiss atomic power plants and everybody know how clean they were.

Fortunately, I met independent scientists from whom I learned what the effect of low doses of artificial radiation means. To study and emphasize these findings, I went from one place with a bad reputation to the other: Swiss nuclear power plants; Sellafield, UK; Chernobyl, Ukraine; Three Mile Island, USA; La Hague, France; Gundremmingen Germany; Nevada Atom-Bom Test area, USA; Hanford, USA; Fukushima Japan and finally South Vietnam to look for the effect of Agent Orange.

Pentatomidae, Carpocoris purpureipennis Tree Bug near Anse St. Martin in the middle of the bay, near nuclear reprocessing plant La Hague, France, 1999, aquarell, 47 x 38,5 x 3 cm.
Deformation and disturbed chitin on the right side of the thorax on a Tree Bug Larva Carpocoris purpureipennis .

Pyrrhocoridae, Pyrrhocoris apterus, Fire Bug from Séljony Mys, Ukraine, 1990, aquarell, 42 x 29,7 cm.
This Fire Bug was collected north of the entrance of the 30 km exclusion
zone, called ‘Check Point Charlie’ and has a disturbed thorax on the left
side and the black pattern is disturbed too.

Newborn Child from The War Museum Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, 2004, colour sketch, 29,7 x 21 cm.
This child is a victim of the spraying of Agent Orange by the U.S. Military
during the Vietnam War. It was born in the TU DU Hospital in Ho Chi
Minh, December 10th 1981.

I learned that artificial radiation way below the amount of natural radiation can cause terrible deformations. In Sweden I discovered even disturbed spider nets. The worst I found in the Fukushima area, outside the 20 km exclusion zone where people live a ‘normal’ life. There were practically no insects or birds seen. There was one survivor, a leaf hopper, Cicadella viridis. They were deformed and most of the without pigment, without their bright colours. But they survived. How – is a miracle. It showed me that if the insects are deformed, there is still hope, perhaps it could even be reversable if we stop the radiation. In areas with such heavy radiation and no insects anymore, how can we let people live there? How will our children know we care for them? Do we care at all?

Cidada, Cicadella viridis from Shinobu Spa near Fukushima City, Japan, 2017, aquarell, 42 x 29,7 cm.
The animal is pale without its natural colours.

Two cidada from Shinobu Spa near Fukushima City, Japan, 2017, aquarell, 42 x 29,7 cm.
The left cicada has two feelers on the left side and a dak patch on the right wing. The right cicada is too small writh a growth on the thorax.

Penatatomidae, Tree Bug from Palouse Washington USA, Hanford area, 1998, aquarell, 31 x 24 cm.
The second section of the right feeler is too short. The third has a normal length and the fourth is missing.

Phymatidae, Ambush Bug, near the nuclear power plant Three Mile Island, 1991, aquarell, 42 x 29,7 cm.
Ventral: the left forefoot is disturbed and brown, the other legs look stiff and disordered even when the animal was living at the time when I drew it. On the trunk is a black patch.

Phymatidae, Phymata fasciata, Ambush Bug, 1998, aquarell, 42 x 29,7 cm.
Found near the Atom Bomb plants Hanford, Washington USA. Ventral: the right foreleg is crippeled and on the abdomen on the left side is a dark patch.

7 – spot Ladybird Beetle, Coccinella 7 – punctata, 1989, colour sketch, 27,7 x 36,2 cm.
The right cover wing of this Ladybird Beetle from the area near the reprocessong plant Sellafield in Cumbria UK, has an indentations and dark patches.

Scorpionfly, Panorpidae, 1988, aquarell, 29,7 x 21 cm.
Scorpionfly, Panorpidae from Reuental, Canton Aargau, near nuclear power plant Leibstadt. Both wings on the right side are deformed and the abdomen looks blown up and deformed.

Wing and Scutellum of four tree bugs, Pentatomidae, Carpocoris, 1999, aquarell, 47 x 38,5 cm.
Wings of four adult Tree Bugs with deformed wings, found near the nuclear reprocessing plant La Hague in Normany France.

Soft Bug, Miridae, Deraeocoris ruber, 1988, aquarell, 29,7 x 21 cm.
Soft Bug, Miridae, Deraeocoris ruber from the area near the nuclear power plant Gösgen. The wings are uneven in length.

Miridae, Soft Bug, 1989, colour sketch, 29,7 x 21 cm.
The left wings of this green Soft Bug Larva, found in Ponsonby opposite the nuclear reprocessing plant Sellafield UK, are deformed.

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1        Anssi Saura, Bo Johannsson, Elinor Eriksson, et al. Genetic load in northern populations of Drosophila subobscuraFirst published: August 1990 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1601-5223.1990.tb00068.x

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More Literature: 

Hesse-Honegger, Cornelia, Heteroptera: The Beautiful and the Other, or Images of a Mutating World, Scalo 2000

Hesse-Honegger, Cornelia; Wallimann, Peter: «Malformation on True Bug (Heteroptera): A Phenotype Field Study on the Possible Influence of Artificial Low-Level Radioactivity». In: Chemistry & Biodiversity, Helvetica 2008

Alfred Körblein und Cornelia Hesse-Honegger Morphological Abnormalities in True Bugs (Heteroptera) near Swiss Nuclear Power Stations https://doi.org/10.1002/cbdv.201800099

Timothy A Mousseau, Anders P Møller, Genetic and ecological studies of animals in Chernobyl and Fukushima, PMID: 25124815  DOI: 10.1093/jhered/esu040

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All images copyright and courtesy of Cornelia Hesse-Honegger

Art, Creativity, Ecocide, Ecology, Environment, Nature, Science