Thursday, July 04, 2019

Why Bugs Deserve Our Respect

https://longreads.com/2019/07/02/why-bugs-deserve-our-respect/

Jessica Gross
July 2019

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ecologist Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson’s new book, Buzz, Sting, Bite: Why We Need Insects, which first came out in her native Norway last year. With a combination of delight and passion, Sverdrup-Thygeson makes the case that, first, insects are fascinating creatures who deserve our curiosity, and, second, they are essential to our survival and deserve our protection.

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Sverdrup-Thygeson suggested that the disdain for insects that I and so many others have grown into isn’t natural or necessary, but a learned response. Witnessing her awe, as she put it, for these tiny creatures, it was hard not to feel that she was right.

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I am awed by the all the fancy details that have evolved in the relationship between flowers and insects, for instance, and how finely tuned they are. All these beautiful ways they look, all these innovative ways they can hide or pretend that they are something else. You have butterfly larvae that look like a snake to scare away any hungry birds. You have beetle larvae that actually will hide underneath a sort of wig made by their own poo, actually. All these strange things! The way that they are built: the fact that they have completely different bodies than us. I think it’s fascinating that they can have ears on their legs or, in the case of some butterflies, ears in their mouths. The fact that they can taste with their feet like a common housefly does — actually having your tongue underneath the sole of your feet! So it’s fascination, partly, and then, yes, respect for the greatness of life and all these intricate details and interconnections out there in nature.

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why is it important to understand the magnitude and diversity of insect life — what, to you, is the significance of it?

It’s like thinking about people working in a city. People do different jobs that all matter for society to run. Some clean away the waste in a city, just like insects do in nature. Some are midwives in hospital, sort of like insects do with pollination, which helps the plants have babies, to put it very simply. And insects are very important as food for other larger animals. When you understand that, it’s very easy to see that if there are less of them, a lot of birds would go to bed hungry because there wouldn’t be enough for them to eat. If you weigh the amount of insects birds eat in a year, it actually equals the weight of all us humans on the planet. If that number is halved, what will happen with the birds? You don’t need to be a biologist to understand that that is quite crucial. So the sheer numbers are important in order for insects to give us these gifts and services that they’re contributing, and that are an advantage for us

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Plants need soil to grow, and somebody has to make that soil from the dead plants, and that’s where all these tiny ones come in — the insects and other invertebrates. And they of course need the plants to eat. This dependency has been there for so many millions of years, and it’s still what runs our world today.

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I would also add that, aside from the benefit to us, there’s the ethical point of taking care of insects as a species. We humans are so lucky. We live in this one single spot in the universe where we know that there is life. I think that gives us the responsibility to step down a little bit in our resource consumption and prioritize the way we treat nature so that all these millions of other tiny species will have a possibility to live out their strange lives.

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