My friend hosted a “house cooling” party last weekend. It’s what happens at the end of an era. I admired her dedication to marking the moment and it was interesting how the party had a different tone to the ones she'd hosted when there was no end in sight. For one thing, the music was louder, probably because she didn't have to make nice with the aggressively sound-sensitive neighbour anymore.
I spent some time standing in the kitchen chatting to one of the high-performing youths who's taken up the study of entomology at university. Entomology is the study of insects. She told me it's not a popular course of enquiry these days, and people are often surprised that this is the subject matter she's turned her attention to. The problem, according to the young entomologist, is that most of us only encounter the dodgy representatives of the insect world in our day-to-day lives: flies, mosquitoes and cockroaches. None of these creatures rank high on the popularity contest of most favoured living beings. If baby pandas and miniature hippos are at the top of the pile, a sweet baby maggot feeding at the trough of death is just not going to get a look-see. Try PR for a pest. We speak of infestations and work on ways to poison the living shit out of them.
Gallows humour abounds. In the battle of the species, we'll get rid of ourselves first before we manage to eliminate the wily cockroach. Still, we're doing pretty well with all the other insect species.
Our young entomologist confirmed what I have long suspected — the numbers of bugs in the world are seriously diminishing. I don’t see as many insects as I used to. This could be a function of height. When I was shorter and younger my concerns were more terrestrial and I was likely to encounter more creepy crawlies. But even butterflies, which are likely to occur at eye level, have taken a hit these days.
Scientists find it notoriously difficult to measure insect populations in the long term because their numbers are fickle and sensitive to gradations in temperature and climate change, but butterflies are popular and so there are better records for them. Things have become pretty bleak for insects, graphically speaking, over the past 50 years. As insect numbers go to ground the bird populations take a hit and so do the plants in all their multiplicity. Basically, mass farming, monoculture, pesticides, chemicals, global warming and weird weather patterns are doing everything the can of Doom didn't quite achieve.
In the midst of the entomological conversation at the party, I had to pause and go to the loo, as one does. On the floor a beetle was struggling upside down, little legs flailing around, panic coming off the chap in waves. Like a teeny Gregor Samsa, the guy who woke up as a beetle in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, it was entirely entrapped by his unwieldy body, wishing it had done more core exercises at the gym. I flipped the beetle over, and things went from bad to worse for it. This is what happens when the hand of God comes down from the heavens mid-struggle and sets you right. The beetle stood frozen in place. I could practically hear the internal dialogue. “WTF just happened? Who did that? Let me just play dead and maybe I can get away with it.” I thought I should leave the beetle to its existential crisis.
The wonderfully prolific evolutionary biologist JBS Haldane, responsible for stuff as diverse as in vitro fertilisation and the idea of cloning, said that if a god or divine being had created all living organisms on Earth, then that creator must have an “inordinate fondness for beetles”. These marvellous flying, crawling and sometimes swimming contraptions manifesting in wondrous iridescent colours and mind-boggling shapes account for a greater number of species than any other animal on Earth. One in four animals are beetles, and what a miracle they are. Perfectly packaged testaments to the great cosmic joke — hidden in plain sight everywhere.
Back in the kitchen the entomologist was talking about termite colonies. Some have been inhabited by the same family of termites for 40,000 years, while ant colonies run the length of the east coast of America.
I thought about the scale of things and how we galumph about like gigantic Brobdingnagians, entirely unaware of these parallel lives except when they bite us on our ankles or buzz around our ears and burgers.
Entomo is the Greek word for insect. It means the insides of the creature in question are raw. A description that sounds like it could double up pretty well for humans. Those little kids dying from pesticide poisoning on their snacks purchased on the way home from school make my insides raw. And on a more domestic scale, my friend’s insides were raw as she bid farewell to her house and all the stories in it, on a street in a town in a human colony that is only 127 years old. The beetle in the bathroom took the cue and was long gone the next time I looked.
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