ROBERT SCHNECK: Insect artisans

Hi Jon,

Have you ever seen the work of French artist Hubert Duprat?

He gently removes caddis-fly larvae from their protective tubes and puts them in a tank containing gold, semi-precious, and precious stones. The larvae use these materials to construct new, more decorative, tubes.

Duprat's Wikipedia entry:

Hubert Duprat is a French artist known for his unusual work, an artistic intersection between caddisfly larvae and gold, opal, turquoise, and other precious stones.
Caddisflies naturally construct elaborate protective tubes from materials found in their environment. Left to nature, the caddisflies use twigs, snail shells, bits of sand and small stones - objects found in their stream bed homes. The tubes serve various purposes - they use stones to increase traction in fast-moving streams, and spiky twigs make the tube (and thus, the fly larva) more difficult for predators to swallow.

Duprat, born in 1957, began his work with caddisfly larvae in the early 1980s. He collects the larvae from their normal environments and he takes them to his studio. There he gently removes their own natural cases and puts them in tanks filled with his own materials, from which they begin to build their new protective sheaths. When he began the project, he only provided the caddis larvae with gold flakes. Since then, the larvae have enjoyed various semi-precious and precious stones, including turquoise, coral and lapis lazuli, as well as sapphires, pearls, rubies, and diamonds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Duprat

EDITOR'S NOTE: I think these are utterly exquisite. As a boy, when I used to keep aquatic inverts in the shed which is now the CFZ Museum (nothing much changes), I carried out experiments using little bits of plastic waste, and fine sand, and marvelled how caddis larvae, once ejected from their original homes, would make intricate new ones surprisingly quickly. But to use precious stones and gold leaf is the work of genius.