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Photograph by Roswell Angier

A bald-faced hornet's nest in a day-care center. Bats in a Divinity School belfry. A hawk in the Law School library. A six-foot boa constrictor escaped from a student's room and now lodged in a wall at the Medical School. A Mexican tarantula with orange legs at large in a House entryway. Skunks, raccoons, opossums, and of course rats roaming the halls of academe. Call Gary Alpert, Ph.D. '81, Harvard's entomologist/pest-control officer. He will leave his microscope and computer at the Office of Environmental Health and Safety on Oxford Street and sally forth to respond to such emergencies. That's one part of his job. Another is to identify any insect presented to him by a member of the Harvard community. Another is to train people--teaching groundskeepers, for instance, how to avoid getting stung, or food-service personnel how to spot strange bugs come in on the cauliflower. Another is to advise managers of Harvard real estate how to find and reason with an environmentally sensible outside pest-control contractor. Alpert is proud that since he began his work in 1981, Harvard has largely abandoned the use of conventional pesticides inside and out. "The more you know about the biology of bugs," he says, "the less pesticide you have to use." Alpert's academic interest is social insects, especially ants. Just after he dealt with the hornet's nest above, he went off to search for unnamed species of ants in the tree canopy of French Guiana. No doubt he found some.

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