Tom Myers makes a living as president of a Lexington pest control company, but he also is known as a world-traveling photographer of insects, spiders, scorpions and ticks.
Among his subjects: termites that shoot glue out of their heads, an African spider that throws a web over its prey, an ambush bug that covers itself in debris to disguise itself.
His pursuit of exotic bugs has taken him to all seven continents (yes, there are tiny insects that live in icebound Antarctica). His photos have been exhibited in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and published in USA Today, National Geographic’s Traveler magazine and “Truman’s Scientific Guide to Pest Management Operations,” the “bible” of the industry.
The Fall 2018 issue of American Entomologist had a cover photo of a treehopper that Myers photographed in a Peruvian rainforest. An entomologist is a scientist who studies insects. Myers often speaks at conferences, training courses and in presentations to schools and civic groups.
Myers, 67, said he wants his photos to convey the incredible array of colors, shapes and behavior in tiny creatures.
“It’s something that people don’t notice on a regular basis,” he said. “When people see the insect diversity, they’re in awe because they’ve never seen anything like that close up.”
Myers shoots with a Canon camera, and uses a macro lens to take magnified portraits of his miniscule subjects. But perhaps the most important tool is patience.
“You can’t train insects or other wildlife,” Myers said. “They’re moving constantly so it’s always a challenge. It can be frustrating.
“As with most animals, you have a comfort range, so you have to figure out what the comfort range is. A lot of times when you’re photographing an insect, you may start out photographing from farther away, and then you move a little bit closer and a little bit closer. When he starts reacting, you may have to back off a little bit.”
The most extreme environment in which Myers has taken pictures was in Alaska where it was 50 degrees below zero when he shot the Northern Lights.
Dan Moreland, publisher of PCT Magazine, a trade publication for the pest-control technologies industry, said photos by Myers have been published repeatedly in that journal.
“What makes him so good is he’s able to shoot insects in the wild, in their natural habitat,” Moreland said. “There are a lot of photographers who will shoot dead specimens of insects because you can shoot them easily. But what makes Tom so incredible is he shoots insects in the wild. That’s hard to do and it’s hard to do well.”
The Myers home is decorated with his photos of larger wildlife, such as penguins, polar bears, a tree frog and a mountain gorilla.
A native of Salem in southern Indiana, Myers grew up on a farm that raised cows, sheep and ponies. He got interested in bugs as a boy during his time in 4-H. His mother was familiar with insects from her time at a research orchard.
“It helps a lot when your mother is tolerant of insects,” he said. “If I collected stuff, I would put it in the refrigerator to keep it inactive, to slow it down, until I could study it later. She didn’t seem to care about it, which was good.”
After graduating from Purdue University, he did graduate studies at Iowa State University. There he did research on agricultural insects.
He came to the University of Kentucky in the 1970s to conduct research on alfalfa weevils and potato leafhoppers, and to train people in the pest control field. He started All-Rite Pest Control Inc. in 1977.
He said the public needed a company with a certified entomologist who could give better identification of bugs and better advice about pest control.
“If you don’t understand the pest, your chance of control is probably very slim,” he said. “If you don’t understand where the bugs will hide, the environments they like and how they multiply, then your control program is probably not going to work.”
Although he’s made a living killing bugs, Myers said people should know the importance of insects. As the New York Times Magazine put it in November: “Trillions of bugs flitting from flower to flower pollinate some three-quarters of our food crops, a service worth as much as $500 billion every year.”
“Without insects the entire ecosystem would collapse,” Myers said. “Ninety-eight or 99 percent of insects are of no harm to humans. We have a lot of flies that spread diseases. But we have insects that destroy dead animals. Buzzards can’t eat it all. In a lot of these places, without dung beetles, you’d be up to your waist in droppings.”
Myers plans to travel in 2019 to take more photographs but he acknowledges that crouching down to insect-level is getting more difficult.
“My knees are not as good as they used to be.”
This story was originally published December 27, 2018 1:05 PM.