You Matter
How much time do you spend thinking about insects? Just give me like a weekly average. Minutes? Seconds? What? Can you name the twelve main types of antennae? The three segments of the thorax? The relationship between the mandible and the maxillae?
One of my favorite things about human beings is that we somehow produce a certain very very small (but enthusiastic) percentage of eleven-year-olds who become experts in this kind of arcane information. They’ll tell you: “Oh no, that’s not a ‘bug’, that’s a ‘true bug,’” and they’ll tell you why, citing things like forewings and metamorphosis stages. Meanwhile, all you can do is wonder how they have time to learn all of this stuff in between soccer practice and managing their myspace pages. These kids are wonderful because they grow up and discover that desert ants are in fact counting their steps to find their way back to the nest. They (the kids, not the ants) also produce guidebooks like the one my brother bought me for my birthday.
It’s the National Audubon Society Field Guide to Insects and Spiders, and it holds such valuable information as: Adult Sandhill Hornets sip nectar (which sounds nice) while their larvae eat food pre-chewed by the adults (which doesn’t). This book also has a picture of the Ferocious Water Bug (with eggs) and the Mormon Cricket (he’s being carried off by a seagull).
The creepiest pictures, by far, (and that is saying a lot in a field guide such as this) are the ones taken of insects that have landed on people. They are massively enlarged photos of things like the Bodega Black Gnat crawling through a thicket of someone’s arm hair (But whose? Is this person a professional? Does he have “arm hair model” on his resume?), or the Deer Fly resting next to an irregularly shaped mole that someone really ought to get checked out. I hope it’s not too late.
What else do you want to know? There are incomprehensibly complex economies of flying insects with transparent wings eating aquatic insects that are also eating their own offspring. There are 40 to 100 oval white eggs clinging to the bark after the female Oyster Shell Scale has died from frost – from these eggs whitish nymphs will disperse over the course of two days in the spring. Bark Beetles are boring into trees. Scorpion Flies are scavenging for food on the surface. The larvae of Drone Flies are underwater, breathing through exceptionally long snorkel-like tubes. And, Wooly Bear Caterpillars are methodically, bravely, crossing roads on warm days in late fall.
Meanwhile you are paying your bills online. You are ironing shirts and packing your lunch for tomorrow. You are trying to decide between Grey’s Anatomy and CSI, wondering why would they put those shows on the same night? Or, maybe you are eleven and you are busily committing a bunch of information that nobody else cares about to memory. Even so, you matter. But you’re not in a field guide, are you?
How much time do you spend thinking about insects? Just give me like a weekly average. Minutes? Seconds? What? Can you name the twelve main types of antennae? The three segments of the thorax? The relationship between the mandible and the maxillae?
One of my favorite things about human beings is that we somehow produce a certain very very small (but enthusiastic) percentage of eleven-year-olds who become experts in this kind of arcane information. They’ll tell you: “Oh no, that’s not a ‘bug’, that’s a ‘true bug,’” and they’ll tell you why, citing things like forewings and metamorphosis stages. Meanwhile, all you can do is wonder how they have time to learn all of this stuff in between soccer practice and managing their myspace pages. These kids are wonderful because they grow up and discover that desert ants are in fact counting their steps to find their way back to the nest. They (the kids, not the ants) also produce guidebooks like the one my brother bought me for my birthday.
It’s the National Audubon Society Field Guide to Insects and Spiders, and it holds such valuable information as: Adult Sandhill Hornets sip nectar (which sounds nice) while their larvae eat food pre-chewed by the adults (which doesn’t). This book also has a picture of the Ferocious Water Bug (with eggs) and the Mormon Cricket (he’s being carried off by a seagull).
The creepiest pictures, by far, (and that is saying a lot in a field guide such as this) are the ones taken of insects that have landed on people. They are massively enlarged photos of things like the Bodega Black Gnat crawling through a thicket of someone’s arm hair (But whose? Is this person a professional? Does he have “arm hair model” on his resume?), or the Deer Fly resting next to an irregularly shaped mole that someone really ought to get checked out. I hope it’s not too late.
What else do you want to know? There are incomprehensibly complex economies of flying insects with transparent wings eating aquatic insects that are also eating their own offspring. There are 40 to 100 oval white eggs clinging to the bark after the female Oyster Shell Scale has died from frost – from these eggs whitish nymphs will disperse over the course of two days in the spring. Bark Beetles are boring into trees. Scorpion Flies are scavenging for food on the surface. The larvae of Drone Flies are underwater, breathing through exceptionally long snorkel-like tubes. And, Wooly Bear Caterpillars are methodically, bravely, crossing roads on warm days in late fall.
Meanwhile you are paying your bills online. You are ironing shirts and packing your lunch for tomorrow. You are trying to decide between Grey’s Anatomy and CSI, wondering why would they put those shows on the same night? Or, maybe you are eleven and you are busily committing a bunch of information that nobody else cares about to memory. Even so, you matter. But you’re not in a field guide, are you?
posted by kyle at 9:52 PM
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