The big value of the tiny things that crawl
With their razor-sharp specificity, insects pull the threads of destiny for most things in the living world—despite their declining numbers seeming inconsequential to us
You always felt they outnumbered you. They were determined and resilient in a way you felt you were not. They were blindingly fast, hiding in places you couldn’t find, and they sprang at you when you were least prepared. Despite their small size, they presented seemingly insurmountable problems. Sometimes, a single one was enough to give you nightmares. They wiggled their antennae at you in a way that felt exceedingly personal—like the cockroach on your kitchen floor stood for the enmity of all cockroaches ever. They found the chinks in our armour (and our home’s armour) to face us when we least expected it. In short, insects can be a map of our vulnerabilities—interrupting hard-won sleep or midnight trips to the loo with giant tremors of discomfort.
And yet, what if I were to tell you that despite our conditioning, and our inherent fear of things that crawl rather than walk, insects are so much more than pests?
Also read: ‘Biophilia’: Nature asserts itself in Gigi Scaria’s latest work
This is the time of the year that our gardens and lakes are alive with wings. Butterflies flutter through lawns on their own time, dipping, swerving, pirouetting, like falling-pulsing heartbeats drawn on the air. And in wetlands and ponds, dragonflies zoom sternly, their efficiency soldier-like to the butterfly’s whimsy. If the cockroach was the first insect you screamed at, the dragonfly might well have been the first one you admired. You might have seen the brilliantly scarlet, fat-bodied Ruddy Marsh Skimmer shining in the sun like a piece of stained glass. Or perhaps you saw the slender-bodied Green Marsh Hawk, sunning itself on a clothing line. If you looked up, you may have seen droves of dragonflies in the air—the Wandering Gliders that astonishingly migrate from one continent to the other.
This month, I stood near a waterbody, waiting for dragonflies. They make a rasping sound, like the buzz of a nail filer over wood. The sound is a giveaway that a dragonfly is nearby. And so I waited. Soon, an orange-coloured Ditch Jewel dragonfly arrived. It perched itself on a stick of wood emerging from the water, training its compound eyes around its body, seeming to see everything at once. At the slightest disturbance, it would fly off in a powerful, swishing arc, always to return. It was like watching a drone patrol its area in military sweeps. Looking for dragonflies, I also saw something else over the water. They were like dots and dashes made by a calligraphy pen—a line with a blue dot at its end. These insects were like dragonflies, but much more slender. Almost invisible, like a new moon through the clouds. They rested their ephemeral bodies on water lily leaves, as still as the dragonflies were active. These were damselflies, related to dragonflies.
This month, citizens have been counting and observing dragonflies for the Dragonfly Festival, which happens annually in India in October and November. In September, they got together to observe butterflies, for a national citizen science event called Big Butterfly Month. Among dragonflies, the Ruddy Marsh Skimmer might be the most common. And in butterflies, the Plain Tiger, with orange and black wings, is among our most abundant. Worldwide though, we are witnessing the quietest local extinctions we haven’t yet missed. The collapse of insects.
They seem uncountable, coming in wave after inexhaustible wave, but insect numbers have crashed worldwide. Take a second and recall your childhood. Was there a slender, slim-waisted wasp that made mud nests in your electric socket? Was there a locust that came into the drawing room after the monsoon? Was there a bee that came to your garden, only to cut circles out of your leaves? Did all your lamps get clogged with black insects in September? Where are these insects—the Mud Dauber wasp, the grasshoppers and locusts, the Leaf-cutter bee, and the gnats—now?
In Europe, butterflies have declined by a third, and other parts of the world report similar crashes in bees, butterflies, ants and other insects. Over 40% of the world’s insects are threatened by extinction today—this outpaces extinctions of mammals, birds and reptiles. Scientists call it the insect apocalypse.
I was in Telangana recently, spending time with cotton farmers. In many areas, farmers were planting flowers around their crop to attract pollinators like bees and butterflies, which also pollinate crops. Not all bugs are good for crops—aphids destroy plants, for example. But no farmer will say there shouldn’t be any insects at all.
I have learnt that insects live at a scale that is tiny yet valuable. They use their deft mouths and legs to create microscopic and specific change which moulds ecosystems. Their numbers add to this industry, creating ripple effects that can never be substituted. In many parts of the world, insects are being used to solve problems that we have created. For example, in California, the Cottony Cushion Scale insect was devastating orange crops. The insect had been brought in by people. Mass spraying of pesticides would not do; it causes accumulation of poison—and can also kill beneficial bugs. It’s the sort of solution in which you hold a hammer and look at the whole world as a nail. Instead, ecologists brought in the red ladybug, Novius cardinalis, from Australia. This ladybug has a small range of insects it preys on. It got to work and brought scale insects under control. The same sequence of events also worked in the Galapagos Islands: The idea being to bring in only those insects that wouldn’t harm other native fauna. And this year, wasps have saved the lives of an endemic bird on a remote island.
The Wilkins’s bunting is a yellow-coloured small bird that lives on Nightingale island in the Atlantic ocean. You’d think the bird has an island paradise all for itself, but populations were affected by a problem which nearly escaped the human gaze. Another scale insect, brought in by people, secreted a substance which caused mould to grow on the island’s fruit-bearing trees. This affected the forests on which the birds depended. In 2021, ecologists introduced a parasitic wasp on the island to contain the spread of the scale insect. Today, the trees and the Wilkins’s bunting are rebounding.
And so, here is how it goes: insects have a razor-sharp specificity which has direct links to the world around it. The decline of bees and butterflies cannot be concealed by the (apparent) increase of insects like flies and mosquitoes that do well in dirty water sources and garbage. We might think the decline of the former has little to do with us, but little bugs pull the threads of destiny of most things in the living world.
This week, I went to my garden to look for aparajita flowers. There were indigo-purple flowers on the vine, but so too were other things. Most of the leaves had circular cut-outs, a crochet pattern made by a busy mouth. Some leaves were left intact, as they always are. As I went about life, a bee that cuts leaves to build nests was raising a brood in this very garden. Here was evidence of thriving life: a Leaf-cutter bee had been here, and she had taken only as much as she needed.
Neha Sinha is a conservation biologist and author of Wild And Wilful: Tales Of 15 Iconic Indian Species.
Also read: Snorkelling in the Maldives’ new, young coral reefs
topics
