Truly vibrant red was elusive for many years: until a mysterious dye was discovered in Mexico. Devon Van Houten Maldonado reveals how a crushed bug became a sign of wealth and status. Although scarlet ...

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Until Europeans started exploring the Americas, long lasting red dye was almost impossible to come by.

Have you ever heard of cochineal? And I am not referring to the upscale restaurant in Marfa, Texas, but to the small, scale insect native to our area. This insect lives on nopal, prickly pear, Opuntia ...

Samantha Nadel in front of a nopal cactus at the archaeological site of Cuicuilco in Mexico City. Each white spot on the nopal is a cochineal insect. PHOTO: Courtesy of Samantha Nadel. Long before ...

In this video, I create a dye from the cochineal insect to paint art on three different materials. Cochineal is a parasitic scale insect that produces a crimson dye, significant to Aztec and Mayan ...

Amor Nouira, a farmer in Tunisia's Chebika village, has lost hope of saving his prickly pear cacti, ravaged by the cochineal insect spreading across North Africa. The 50-year-old has seen his ...

In Chebika, as in other rural areas in central Tunisia, many farmers' fields of prickly pear have been spoiled by the cochineal insect, which swept through North Africa 10 years ago, beginning in ...