Nature’s World:  A REASSURING ABUNDANCE OF INSECTS

by Susan Tweit

Richard and I drove to Arkansas last month to celebrate his parents’ 60th wedding anniversary. During late September, the weather in central Arkansas could best be described as warm, with highs in the mid-eighties, and very muggy.

While we were there, the relative humidity never dropped below 98 percent. With so much water in the air, it was tactile, soft and sticky.

Warm and muggy, it seems, also equals buggy. We saw more insects that weekend than we normally see in Salida in a whole summer.

Around the food at the anniversary picnic, held at a pavilion on a lake, we saw thread-waisted wasps, mud-dauber wasps, and yellowjackets. (The latter seemed especially fond of a brandy-soaked fruitcake.)

The trash cans attracted green bottle flies, house flies, and robber flies, the latter there to catch smaller insects draw by the sticky refuse. Those humans who came to deposit trash attracted mosquitoes, also members of the fly order.

(Flies, to entomologists, are insects that as adolescents are legless, wriggling larvae and as adults, are distinguished by possessing just two wings, instead of two pairs of wings, like butterflies, dragonflies, and other non-fly insects.).

A huge orb-weaving spider—not an insect entomologically speaking, but it in the spider order, Arachnida—hung in its web over the back deck of one of the cabins. Despite their impressive size—this one’s legspan would have easily reached across a silver dollar—and its dramatic yellow and brown markings, these spiders are harmless to humans.

The bugs that bugged us most, however, were chiggers. (Chiggers are popularly called bugs, but, like spiders, are not insects. They are related to spiders and ticks.)

Although we never spotted any chiggers, these blind mites found us, judging from the itching welts. Like ticks, chiggers climb up into tall plants and hang out there, waiting for a carbon-dioxide-exhaling being to pass by.

Then they drop off and explore their host, searching for a suitably tender spot on which to feed. Unlike ticks, which drink blood, chiggers prefer to consume the contents of skin cells.

Once a chigger finds a feeding spot, it injects an enzyme into the victim’s skin that literally causes cell walls to disintegrate. Then the chigger, which looks like a tiny red speck smaller than the period at the end of this sentence, sucks up the “juice.”

By the time you notice the damage, the tiny mite has eaten its fill and dropped off, burrowed into the ground, and begun its molt into a harmless adult. (Adult chiggers live only to reproduce.)

Not all of the bugs we encountered were unpleasant. Driving back to our motel in the dusk one evening, we spotted brief green flashes of light in the long grass at the edge of the woods.

Each tiny light flashed once, then drifted through the night air just above the grass, flashed again, drifted, and flashed again. They were male fireflies, signaling for mates, flickering like fairy lights in the dusk.

On our drive home across Oklahoma, we passed through the fall monarch migration. Orange and black butterflies fluttered across the twin ribbons of the interstate by ones and twos, headed steadily south.

When they hit the turbulent backwash of the speeding vehicles, the palm-sized insects were tossed about, their delicate wings flapping wildly in an attempt to remain airborne. Once they reached calmer air and safety, they continued on, flying towards wintering areas in Mexico’s Sierra Madre. 

In this time of terrorist attacks, wars, and economic uncertainty, I found the abundance of insects and arachnids—even the ones that bugged us—reassuring. Regardless of what happens in our lives, no matter the tragedies and grief, the fanaticism of all sorts, the cycle of life goes on.

Wasps still congregate to feed on brandy-soaked cakes, spiders weave intricate webs to catch their prey, chiggers prowl blindly for meals, fireflies signal for mates, and butterflies still flap hundreds of miles on wings as delicate as origami paper.

Some things have changed, but not the rhythms at the heart of life.

   © 2003 Susan J. Tweit