Saguaro Land: A bug that's big in the textile world

Saguaro Land is a series from The Show looking at the Sonoran Desert — the lushest, hottest desert in the world that happens to be our home.

In our newest installment, we’re finding color from a somewhat unusual source. If you have paddle cactus in your yard, like prickly pear, you may have noticed a white, almost web-like substance on the surface.

But what you can’t notice, at least just by looking, is that that web conceals a type of bug that’s played a critical role in the textile world for a long, long time. Cochineal has been a source of red dye for thousands of years and still is used today.

To get a sense of the insect’s history and role in our ecosystem, The Show sat down with Erika Lynne Hanson, an associate professor of Textiles and Socially Engaged Practices at Arizona State University —  who brought some show-and-tell along, as well.

Full conversation

ERICA LYNN HANSEN: So cochineal is a beetle like parasite that lives on prickly pear cactuses here in the Sonoran Desert and also through central and southern America.

BRODIE: And they are white when you look at them, right? 

HANSEN: The bug themself is actually like a purplish, dark purplish color. The white on the outside that we're seeing is the webbing that holds the insect to the paddle cactus. So it's sort of a protective webbing.

BRODIE: OK, and my understanding is all you need to do to create something totally different is just take one in your hand and, like, squeeze it between two fingers. Is that right?

HANSEN: Kind of. So if you were gonna be using cochineal for a dye, you would dry out the bug after being removed from the cactus. And once it's dry, you actually remove that white webbing, and then it's crushed up and boiled and ground and then turned into a dye.

BRODIE: How was it discovered that you could use these bugs to create dye?

HANSEN: I mean, it's been historically used in the Americas for centuries. So like thinking about natural dyes or organic dyes, however you want to classify them, there's sort of a whole, like practice of using dyes found in nature pre-industrially all over the world. We can, like, have an understanding of, sort of the local ecology of a place through the dyes that have been historically used there. So that's the thing that's really cool about cochineal. It's like one of the colors that is inherent in this place.

BRODIE: And how has it been used throughout history? Like, has it sort of been used for the same kinds of things over time?

HANSEN: Yeah, I mean, the short of it is, it was historically used as a dye for garments specifically, like thinking about special garments, because the size of the dye and the amount of dye that's extracted from the bug, it takes a lot of the substance to dye a thing. So if we think about like the best, like analog, we have to that is sort of the way that we understand, like, if you remember, like, learning about colors as a kid and thinking about purple as, like a color that was thought of and associated with royalty.

Yeah, that comes from the fact that, historically, before pre-industrialized dyes happened, purple was extracted from a small shellfish. So you would take mounds of the shellfish to create enough dye to make a garment. So thinking about the idea of labor and like, weight of thing and sort of like amount of thing that had to be collected to create that object. So cochineal existed kind of similarly. So thinking about in terms of like, what was sort of the access to this red dye, so being used for, like, very specific, like special, like ceremonial garments, then also just like, ways to color and pigment the world.

BRODIE: How prevalent are these bugs? Like you say it takes a lot to make the dye. Like, are there a lot of these bugs on prickly pears around the Sonoran Desert?

HANSEN: Yeah. So when we think about them in terms of, like, their presence in the Sonoran Desert, like prickly pears are interesting to think about in terms of like any sort of plant or animal, in terms of like wild versus cultivated. So there are farms still that exist, and Mexico and Peru elsewhere in Central and South America that specifically are, they're there to farm cochineal.

So they have specific paddle cactuses that are like, there's a whole process involved, like, if we think about any sort of farming practice, so that's how cochineal is used on an industrial scale. Still a small scale, because it's a cactus, it's growing these small bugs. But like in the Sonoran Desert, in your backyard, you will probably see this, like white fuzz on your paddle cactus.

And so for us, it's a pest, right? So if left, like, to its own devices, it's a parasite on that cactus, and it will, like, end up suffocating it. So a lot of people here, when they sort of interact with a cochineal, you know, it's sort of in the pest removal strategy, as opposed to thinking about it as sort of the most important way to color. Something red.

BRODIE: That's really interesting, that it has this great use. But if you don't use it for that, it can really be damaging to the plant. Yeah. So you mentioned that there are still farms in parts of Central and South America where they have paddle cactuses to basically, not to breed cochineal, but to collect, to collect them, to farm them. Yeah. So, like, is it still fairly prominent that people use this bug for this kind of dye now?

HANSEN: Yeah, yeah, totally. And there's sort of like two avenues that it's used in. I mean, there's kind of constantly been a practice of textile practitioners using natural-based dyes to use it on a sort of small scale, thinking about like handmade goods artists. But then also, like cochineal has been used in manufacturing of, like our everyday goods.

And there was sort of like a peak, sort of mid 20th century, and then it fell off a little, and now there's sort of a rise in it again. It was used very heavily in cosmetics and food coloring and across, like whole spectrums of things like that, where there needed to be a safe additive that was read before, just using sort of a synthesizer. Synthesized color. And there's a resurgence again, of using it again. So people try to not use these, like chemically produced color ways, but then use that.

BRODIE: Right. I was going to ask you if it's now seen as sort of a cool, maybe retro, natural kind of way to dye, because obviously there are plenty of other ways to make the color red?

HANSEN: Yes, yeah, 100% there's, like, a huge resurgence in people using plant-based dyes and doing research in that. I mean, there's something really interesting about using natural-based dyes in thinking about it as a larger practice. And if you use the dyes that are local to where you live, sort of thinking about what that local palette looks like. And that's one of the things we're really lucky about here, is we have this as one of the elements of our natural palette.

BRODIE: So you brought a little bit to demonstrate here. Can we see how this actually works?

HANSEN: Yeah, yeah, totally. And I also, I brought some paddle cactuses with the cochineal on them, but I also brought some industrially farmed cochineal so we can just see the size difference.

BRODIE: Great. All right. So we have here before us, we have two paddles. You have a mortar and pestle, and as you said, you brought some, some other cochineal. So how do you go about trying to remove the bugs from the cactus?

HANSEN: So first of all, because this is a demonstration, I usually would not have removed the paddles from the cactus. So usually I would take a paintbrush and just sort of swipe them off, or like a plastic knife and just pull them off. Okay, but for demonstration purposes, it's really easy to do with your fingers. So these have tiny little spikes. So I'm going to try and be careful not to touch them. But right here we can see the cochineal on how the webbing is attaching to the cactus.

BRODIE: Yeah, it's like a fluffy white almost like a little tiny, little fluffy beard.

HANSEN: Yeah. And I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be curious to see how big the bugs are here, just because it's been summer and we haven't had a lot of rain, and they feed off the cactus. And a lot of these cactuses have been a little drier, so it's sort of interesting to sort of track the size of the bug where they're at in their cycle. This cactus I pulled this from. It is usually covered in them. Very few are there now, so usually when we look at them, we'll just pull this off a little bit and see if we even get any, right.

BRODIE: So now you're sort of like going through it in your fingers there. This is almost like a cotton swab.

HANSEN: Yeah, very cottony. And so we try to just remove this to get to the bug itself.

BRODIE: It looks like there might be something in there.

HANSEN: Yep, there is a little guy.

BRODIE: And that's like a tiny, like black speck, almost.

HANSEN: Exactly, so it's super small. And if we pull just this up in relation to one of these, so this cochineal that I just pulled out, it's going to be fleshy, and it's going to be wet, essentially, because it was like, so I just pulled it off of a cacti. But these ones we're going to pull out are the dried beetles. So imagine they're shrinking and that happens in the drying that's much bigger. It's much bigger, and it's dried out because it's been farmed. It's been like, bred for size, as we think about all agricultural practices.

BRODIE: Still very small, but much bigger than the one that you just pulled off the pad.

HANSEN: Exactly. So here's a dry one. We'll set that aside and so once. So if we're gonna make dye out of this dried one, we take the dried cochineal, put them in the mortar and pestle, grind them up, and you want to do that. But with this little wet guy, we can just look at the sort of color that instantly leaves it.

BRODIE: Oh, yeah, it's like a maroonish color on your finger.

HANSEN: So even though, like this is a deeply inefficient practice, and you would probably not be doing this as a way to like dye your clothes red by the cacti in your yard, it gives you a different appreciation for the things that make up your world.