LOVE BUGS

            In her fascinating book, Sex on Six Legs: Lessons on Life, Love and Language from the Insect World, entomologist Marlene Zuk posits that humans have trouble relating to insects because they’re so difficult for us to anthropomorphize. Mammals are easy to love, even de facto nasty ones like pandas and koala bears. We can even stretch our affections to reptiles and amphibians, demonstrated by that adorable GEICO gekko, the teenage mutant ninja turtles, Majolica Palissy ware, and the explosion of frog-themed garden ornaments. That third pair of legs, however, apparently cancels out any hope of potential cuddliness. (Snakes elicit the same emotional disconnect because they lack “hands” or “feet” all together.) Zuk cites a 1973 survey that puts bugs at number three—tied with “financial problems” and “deep water”—on a list of things people fear most. “Public speaking” and “heights” beat out the six-legged ("death" came in sixth, in case you were wondering), but she says if spiders had been lumped in with insects, they may have soared to the number one spot.  

            The more contemplative yogic disciplines emphasize opening ourselves to the beauty and harmony in all things, a practice I have a lot of trouble with when it comes to people-in-general and politicians-and-bureaucrats-in-particular. Bugs, not so much. Entomologists have found evidence that insects can communicate, learn, teach, and manipulate their environments. Some species make very good parents, a finding that more daring scientists think may indicate personality and emotions. On the other hand, people who love sci-fi films that depict evil, alien creatures as insectile would appreciate the more grisly aspects of reality in Bug-World: sexual deviancy and cannibalism, despotism, chemical mind-control, slavery, live sacrifice. Hey, bugs are sounding more human all the time!

            Like most gardeners, I have only a nodding acquaintance with most of the bugs passing through my yard. We wave, but don’t know each other’s names. A comprehensive reference work with photographs—either print or online, Bug Guide notwithstanding—doesn’t exist yet. The undertaking is too massive. Insects account for more than 80% of known species on Earth. They were here long before us and will be here long after.  Naturalist E.O. Wilson said, “If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”

            Kind of rips a huge hole Homo sapiens’ carefully cultivated superiority balloon, doesn’t it?     

            Read Zuk’s book. She’s a decent writer with a flip sense of humor, and her subject will broaden your mind.

            Meanwhile, crawling around in my own yard, I make an effort to notice bugs. I take pictures of the ones I don’t recognize, and send them off through the ether to the entomologists manning the Plant Disease and Insect Clinic (PDIC) at North Carolina State University in Raleigh for identification. The Extension specialists there also offer control solutions, if any are necessary. Me, I just want names. (See my posts Bugged and Bugs, the Good for more information on PDIC.) I encourage all enquiring gardeners to do the same, because once you know who they are and their place in the scheme of things, six- and eight-legged creatures become less threatening, less, well, other. No, really, they do.

            Here are some of the beautiful animals to whom PDIC has formally introduced me this season.

            Two caterpillars, and the moths they metamorphose into:

Eight-spotted forester caterpillar
(Alypia octomaculata)

Eight-spotted forester moth

      

Saltmarsh caterpillar
(Estigmene acrea)

Saltmarsh caterpillar moth

         


         









       

            Two larvae, and the adults they become:

Wheel bug (an assassin bug larva)
(Arilus cristatus)

 Wheel bug (assassin bug) adult

           

      

Euphorbia bug larva
(Chariesterus antennator)

Euphorbia bug adult

Green stinkbug, ovipositing
(Banasa dimidata)

            
            
            An egg-laying (ovipositing is the technical term) stinkbug (an alert anole ate all the hatchlings, though):

         

Leaf-cutter bee
(Megachilidae family)

            A leaf-cutter bee:

      

Narwhal-nosed bee fly
(Dave didn't know what species)

            A narwhal-nosed bee fly:

Basilica orb weaver
                (Mecynogea lemniscata) 

            Two spiders, the first very common in my back yard, the other seldom seen:

Spiny-backed orb weaver
                (Gasteracanthus cancriformis)

What's your name?

            And the latest, not-yet-identified submission, a black-and-white wasp-like creature:

None of these guys require controlling: only the stinkbug and euphorbia bug have even the potential to hurt my plants, and neither is likely to be present in sufficient numbers for any damage to be significant. And isn't that nice to know?

Tiger bee fly
               (Xenox tigrinus)

            A note about bee flies, a category of insects I’d never heard of before NCSU’s entomologist extraordinaire Dave Stephan clued me in to the identity of this impressive screen-sitter last summer. Members of the family Bombyliidae (pronounced bom-bi-LIE-ih-dee), stingless bee flies eat nectar and pollen, making them important pollinators. Their larvae are parasitoids of other insects (what’s “parasitoid"? See Chatter from OG). That uncanny resemblance to bees may be a defense mechanism, to throw predators off track. Not a whole lot is known about this group, because they are not seen in great numbers. Keep your eyes peeled, you citizen-scientists, and you can help increase mankind’s knowledge of the world around us before we do ourselves in.

Not to worry: the insects will clean up the mess we leave.

Thanks for dropping by.

                                                                        Kathy

DEAR DIARY

             Ever wonder what goes on in someone else’s mind? Ever pick up somebody’s journal and start reading? Would you interested in a peek at mine?

*****

February 2, 2012

Dear Diary,

The International Food and Agriculture Organisation  

classifies clear-cut monocrop plantation sites,  

like this one, as “forests.”

What is wrong with this picture? Literally?

            After a long spell of silence, the Irish-by-way-of-New-Zealand Cathy Fitzgerald churned out two An Art and Ecology Notebook posts in four days. As blogger, filmmaker and Green Party activist, her focus is the plight of global forests. She worries about the contributions human short-sightedness and greed make to the health of “our finite biosphere.” By continuing to buy (cheap) wood products from countries whose logging practices—including clearing old-growth areas—are unsustainable, Western economies are essentially financing what is becoming known as the sixth great extinction of species, habitat and cultures, the Anthropocene Age. (See “In Other News,” Nov. 7, 2011.) Immediate implementation of sane, long-term forest management policies could slow our pell-mell rush toward rendering Earth uninhabitable, Cathy says.

            She quotes Derrick Jensen, author of A Language Older than Words:         

I thought… of our fundamental inversion of all relatedness, of how we nearly always ask the wrong question—What can I get from this?—and so rarely the right one—What can I give back? Even when we try to learn from others, it is from the same spirit of acquisition: What can I learn from this forest ecosystem that will teach me how to manage it for maximum resource extraction? Rarely: What can I learn from this forest community that will teach me better how to serve it?

I don’t know. It’s rare in human history that doing what’s right trumps making a profit. I find solace in that the planet will heal itself once the last money-grubbing, self-involved poophead is gone… hard as it is to believe that could actually happen, especially in an election year. 

February 3, 2012

Dear Diary,

            Note to self: be sure to thank Joseph Cooper-Silvis, who signed up to follow the blog yesterday. Stupid Google won’t allow me to log in to send a personal email through friendconnect, and won’t say why. Yeah, I’ll sign up to put my life in the hands of cloud computing. Just not in this lifetime.

            Anyway, Joseph, I do thank you for signing up. Comments, questions and constructive criticisms are always welcome. And that is one yummy-looking cake in your picture. Is that a frozen chocolate-covered banana on top? Do you bake? Do you sometimes mail goodies to friends?

February 6, 2012

Dear Diary,

            The Grow-Bags have arrived from Gardeners Supply! I broke the news to Tim that they’ll be adorning our front yard in all their cylindrical blue, orange and tan splendors, filled with potato, tomato and pepper plants. Whether or not they produce potatoes, tomatoes and peppers, however, remains to be seen.

            Peas are up in the back yard, but somebody keeps nibbling away the leaves as they open. Too dainty a bite to be deer: bunnies maybe? Covered most of the sprouts with leftover Remay scraps. Perhaps it’s time to set up the bird-netting fences, so the poor darling peas have half a chance.

Fall-planted potato harvest

            In anticipation of a package from Irish Eyes Garden Seeds, I dug up the experimental fall-planted crop of potatoes. Not a bad harvest, considering I broke all the rules. What rules? Why, The Potato Rules:

1.  Never use grocery-store potatoes for seed. They’re not certified virus-free!

2.  There’s no point in planting in September: seed eyes go dormant in the fall.

3.      Plant in full sun, not in the shadow of a hedge.

4.      Plant six inches deep initially, then hill, hill, hill.

Okay, so I only pulled in enough spuds for half a loaf-pan of Tim’s famous au gratins: but the experience of digging potatoes in February—priceless. Besides, I’ve never been good at rules anyway.

February 7, 2012

Dear Diary,

            The moon goes full this afternoon at 4:54 EST. In folklore, February’s full moon is called the Hunger Moon, with good reason back in the day before the advent of 24-hour supermarkets. We are so freakin’ spoiled.

            Another little marker on the way to global warming occurred today. The new 30-year “normal” (average!) temperatures for Wilmington, NC, showed that both the “normal” (average!) high and low for this date are one degree warmer than the previous decade’s readings. You may recall I said (in “Scientific Citizen,” Jan. 8, 2012) December “normals” (AVERAGE!) had grown incrementally chillier: well, that’s true, too. What does it all mean? No one really knows.

Sweet box (Sarcococca hookeri var. humilis)

February 8, 2012

Dear Diary,

            In response to yesterday’s post, “Do You Smell Something?” my dear friend Judy out in Bothell, WA, wrote to tell me her sweet box is blooming. Only she—show-off—used its botanical name, Sarcococca. That’s Sarcococca hookeri var. humilis, to be preciser (if not grammatically correct). She rekindled the flame of my Sarcococca envy. I’ve never lived anywhere where this shiny-foliaged, vanilla-scented, evergreen beauty was common. I may have to order one or two from some Oregonian nursery to plant here, just to prove to myself they really don’t care for our 16 consecutive weeks of miserably hot nights.

February 9, 2012

Dear Diary,

Oh, goody! New books!

            Despite the overloaded night-table and jam-packed bookshelf beside the bed, Amazon sent me two new books today: Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants by Brit Richard Mabey; and Marlene Zuk’s Sex on Six Legs: Lessons in Life, Love and Language from the Insect World. Bugs and weeds—as fodder for the blog gristmill, it just doesn’t get any better than that.

Fungus gnat, we hardly knew ye

February 11, 2012

Dear Diary,

            Didn’t water the houseplants this week. Didn’t water the houseplants last week either. The tapeworm fern looks a bit end-crunchy, off-color and out of sorts, but everyone else seems fine. I mention this for two reasons. One, no unintentional drownings have taken place in the three months since overwintering began. Two, the fungus gnat population is ’way, ’way down. When I cleaned house, not a single fungus-gnat carcass was found peppering any light bulb element. I brush my teeth and wash the dishes mostly unobserved these days. No one “bugs” me (haha) when I read in bed at night. The few stray gnats still around cling to windows, looking out at… what? Perhaps Marlene Zuk (see yesterday’s entry) will enlighten me. Just as soon as I finish reading Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing.

            Our neighbors across the street moved out a few weeks ago—he got a job offer he couldn’t refuse in Harrisburg, PA—and they bequeathed us a bunch of potted plants. Two figs (!), a blueberry, an Alberta spruce (?), a Korean boxwood in a bulb pan surrounded by Asian jasmine, an Endless Summer hydrangea, various other bits and bobs, and a tropical collection: a five-foot-tall ti tree (Dracaena something-or-other), a good-sized double-stemmed ponytail palm (Beaucarnea recurvata), and a sago palm (Cycas revoluta).

My newest best plant-friend, the ponytail palm

These last three are now crowded into the kitchen with the leafless Tibouchinas and the self-resurrecting Solanum pseudocapsicum. Isn’t it wonderful how things you never would have chosen if left to your own devices get thrust upon you; you grudgingly accommodate them; and come to love them to the point you can no longer imagine life without them and the things they have to teach you? How do people divorced from the plant world manage this?

February 12, 2012

Dear Diary,

            Tonight is the opener for Globe at Night's February 12-21 Worldwide Star Count, featuring Orion the Hunter. During four annual winter-to-spring observation periods over the past six years, more than 66,000 citizen-scientist reports of night-sky brightness have been submitted from 115 countries.   Why bother to document light pollution? Because too much light at night not only impacts energy consumption levels, but affects the health of humans and wildlife.

 

            Who’d have thought it? Apparently not being able to see the stars drives us bonkers. That certainly explains a lot.

*****

             

            So there it is, 10 days inside the rambling thoughts of yours truly. Now, feel free to share some of yours. And Joseph, you feel more than free to share a slice or two of that cake.

Thanks for dropping by.

                                                                        Kathy