Wild kingdom, writ small

June 27, 2010|On Science, Anthony Doerr

Summer has just landed and with it comes bugs. Legions, hordes, swarms of bugs. They’re coming to eat our lettuce, spread our pathogens, gnaw our roofs, raid our cabinets, presage our plagues, and drink our blood. Who needs ’em?

We do, actually. Without insects we’d have no vegetables, no birds, no flowers, no hamburgers, no cotton, no trout. No ice cream! No rose bushes! Terrestrial ecosystems would collapse. Dead bodies would rot in the streets.

So we take the bad with the good, the stings with the honey. But insects can offer us less material gifts, too, if we make a bit of time now and then to peer into our yards and consider the world in their dimensions. Place, for example, becomes a wholly different concept when we consider it on the scale of insects. The larva of certain moths, for example, will spend their entire lives chewing the cells of a single leaf in your backyard. The larva of a species of wasp is smaller than an amoeba. And other bugs are globe trotters: Nearly every monarch butterfly you see either flapped into your neighborhood from thousands of miles away or descended from a butterfly that did.

“There are other worlds around us,” writes anthropologist Hugh Raffles in his erudite new book, “Insectopedia.’’ “Too often, we pass through them unknowing, seeing but blind, hearing but deaf, touching but not feeling, contained by the limits of our senses, the banality of our imaginations, our Ptolemaic certitudes.”

“Insectopedia’’ is Raffles’s effort to extend his imagination and peer into a handful of those worlds. His book has 26 chapters, an essay for each letter in the alphabet, and the topics he examines are as diverse as the phylum Arthropoda itself. “Generosity (the Happy Times),” for example, is a long piece about cricket fighting in China. “Jews” is about the association of Jewish people with lice during the Holocaust. “The Quality of Queerness Is Not Strange Enough” is about insect homosexuality.

Sometimes “Insectopedia’’ is beautifully lyrical, and occasionally it is extremely esoteric. Ultimately it’s less about insects and more about the intersections of our worlds with theirs, about folk tales that draw moral lessons from insect behavior, artists who paint insect bodies, and sound engineers who record the epidemic destruction of our forests by bark beetles.

Another fascinating new book about bugs is “Tracks and Signs of Insects and Other Invertebrates: A Guide to North American Species,’’ by Charley Eiseman and Noah Charney. This is a field guide, but an unusual one. It’s a guide not to insects themselves, but to the myriad traces they leave behind.