The Strange Case of the Rorschach Ladybug

ONE OF THE LESSER-KNOWN MYSTERIES OF SCIENCE is <i>Cocinella psychoanalytica</i>, order Coleoptera, fam­ily Coc­cinel­l­i­dae, com­monly called the rorschach lady­bug. Why would such a com­mon insect be absent from the ento­mo­log­i­cal lit­er­a­ture until recently. It is impos­si­ble that no one had noticed it before now since it is actu­ally quite com­mon in it’s range–all of tem­per­ate North Amer­ica east of the Mis­sis­sippi River. This attrac­tive bee­tle seems to have appeared out of nowhere on the evo­lu­tion­ary tree of life. At first con­sid­ered an iso­lated muta­tion, C. psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ica has recently been des­ig­nated a dis­tinct species, amid much schol­arly spec­u­la­tion about which nat­ural selec­tors caused such rapid adap­tive radi­a­tion, and cre­at­ing intense dis­putes among evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gists between pro­po­nents of punc­tu­ated equi­lib­rium, quan­tum evo­lu­tion, salta­tion­ism, and pre-Lyellian catastrophism.

First described in the early 1970s by ento­mol­ogy grad­u­ate stu­dent Stan­ley Woj­ciechowski at Yale Uni­ver­sity from spec­i­mens col­lected on the lawn out­side the Peabody Museum, C. psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ica soon became the single-minded focus of his research. Work­ing day and night, he col­lected and cat­a­loged over 145,000 spec­i­mens. Each one had to be care­fully scru­ti­nized, because the pat­tern on the ely­tra of each indi­vid­ual bee­tle is different.

After months of work alone in his lab, Woj­ciechowski began to notice effects in his per­sonal life that, at first, he attrib­uted to sim­ple over­work. As he explained later, after star­ing at those bee­tles all day, he began to recall his dreams in great detail. He also spent hours of wak­ing time rumi­nat­ing on his life, start­ing from his ear­li­est mem­o­ries, star­ing into space, unaware of his surroundings.

He began to be plagued by doubts, even about his research, call­ing into ques­tion every­thing he knew. Ulti­mately his col­leagues found him in the insect col­lec­tion hav­ing what they described as “some kind of break with real­ity.” “No one really knew him very well. He was a polite, quiet guy, usu­ally kept to him­self back then, sleep­ing a lot dur­ing the day,” they reported.

After his release from the hos­pi­tal, Woj­ciechowski never returned to aca­d­e­mic research. “I real­ized that it would be impos­si­ble to prove whether the mate­r­ial world has any objec­tive exis­tence in itself, or if it is sim­ply a reflec­tion of con­scious­ness, like a dream, a rain­bow, or an infi­nitely detailed mirage.” he said in an inter­view soon after­ward. “You can see what I mean if you just watch Star Trek, episodes 11 and 12,” he added.

He started to date, hang around at bars, make friends, and got invited to par­ties. He even learned how to dance. After his return from India, Stan­ley took a job as a gar­dener, let his hair and beard grow, wore a wreath of flow­ers, and even­tu­ally became quite pop­u­lar as a yoga teacher. You could say he accu­mu­lated a small fol­low­ing, but he paid no atten­tion to his ris­ing fame. Peo­ple from all over the coun­try sought him out for advice and answers to ques­tions about life. He never said any­thing, but he lis­tened to every­one who came to him. His pay­ment was always sim­ple, some flow­ers, some food, or a painting.

The exis­tence of the Rorschach lady­bug has never been con­firmed by other sci­en­tists. Stan­ley had not taken any pho­tographs of it.

Stan­ley Woj­ciechowski is now the well-known author of 43 self-help books, among them the inter­na­tional best-seller, co-authored with the Dalai Lama, “Make Me One With Everything”.

And if you believe in the Rorschach lady­bug, well, then it exists for you too.