Bugs Unseen

The best gifts come in small packages.

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.
—Edward O. Wilson

And we’re back to bugs. Who knew I was so fond of them? I always thought I was a mammal gal. (Quick question: if you had to be killed by an animal, which would you pick? Me, I go with the cougar: quick, stealthy, clean—you’d be dead before you knew you were in danger.) But no, apparently, it’s bugs. At least learning about them; can’t say I want too many of them around.

I joined the Sierra Club out of respect for a friend who suffered a horrible and premature death last year. Giving to Sierra had been the “in lieu of flowers” ask in her memorial program. I’m glad I joined, not so much for the addition of yet more depressing emails urging me to march, write, click, petition, etc. as for the beautiful and well-written quarterly magazine I get for my tiny donation.

You should subscribe, too. Then you will learn about things like the fairy wasp. “The smallest insect in the world is a blind, wingless fairy wasp, its total body length the width of a human hair,” the article tells me. Yeah. Its body length is the width of a hair. Eat your heart out, Dr. Seuss—this takes Horton’s Who-hearing to a whole new level.

Even more astonishing, into these tiny bodies goes much of the same stuff that fits into ours: digestive tracts, respiratory and circulatory systems, and a central nervous system. But they’re too wee to manage things like embryos and their nutrients, so they sniff out the eggs of larger insects and pop their own inside of them.

Here’s why some farmers like them: their parasitism stops the host insect’s larvae from forming. So presto chango, goodbye beetles, leafhoppers, and other crop destroyers.

This site offers information about the fairy wasp. It also clarifies that it is the male of the species that is technically the smallest; females “are much larger than the record-breaking males, and have wings.” You go, girls.

This site’s article also notes that the smallest recorded winged insect is the female Kikiki huna, discovered in Hawai’i and named from the Hawaiian words for “tiny bit.” And a 2013 discovery added a closely related species “named Tinkerbella nana, after Peter Pan’s fairy friend.”

The deck introducing an article on the BBC’s Discover Wildlife reads: “Discover the fairy wasp, a dastardly winged insect that parasitises beetle eggs in the depths of garden ponds.” I don’t happen to think these fairy bugs are “dastardly.” Does anybody seriously believe that the amount of larvae aborted by fairy wasps has dampened the world’s bug population?

Which takes me to a whole nother topic about how news publications and sites—even the BBC, apparently—use hyped up scary-words to sell papers/clicks. There are alternatives if you aren’t, you know, lazy.

An example? The lede sentence to the Sierra article that got me interested in the first place: “The fairy wasp is camp.” Right? Who wouldn’t continue reading this article?

You can see just how small these little guys are in this video from The Global Zoo. Or, of course, if you subscribe to Sierra, you’ll see a gorgeous drawing of the fairy wasp in all its glory; plus, you also will understand why these male fellas are “camp.”

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Lagniappe: More bug news. The headline and deck of an article from a January New York Times reads: “The World Hasn’t Seen Cicadas Like This Since 1803.” “Brood XIX and Brood XIII will both emerge this spring. The last time these bugs showed up at the same time in the United States, Thomas Jefferson was president.”

Their flights are both scheduled to take off in late April, so keep your ears open. Alas, they won’t make it west of the Mississippi, but I’ll be thinking about you lucky ducks to the south and the east.