Bugs He Loves

Mr. Rodriques wrote his master’s thesis at New York University about hornworms. “They have an amazing defense where they collect the nicotine found in the tobacco they eat and exhale it as a gas to scare away predators.” But they are also his friends. “If I’m feeling stressed out, I might take one out and they’ll calm me down,” he said.

A gentle, quiet man with a bushy Afro, Mr. Rodriques marks his life by the bugs he has loved. When he was 4, he would scoop up pavement ants in front of his house and keep them in jars. “They looked like a weird combination of robots and aliens,” he said.

“Every major event in my life,” he said, “has been around insects.”

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