Bouquet of Caterpillar: or, The fennel of youth

I had come to photograph the fennel wasps again: the yellow blossoms seem to exert an irresistible force over the insects, and on my first afternoon visit the whole garden had vibrated with their buzzing.

This time, however, the wasps were sparser, and I had the leisure to observe these subtle soft-bodied creatures clinging unobtrusively to stems.

For such dramatically colored animals they blend into their surroundings remarkably well. It was luck when I found the first, and the result of much effort to find two more. For all I know there were a good dozen (at least) that I didn’t spot.

Their heads were tucked down as if they were bashful or playing a game of hide-and-seek.

Perhaps they’re hoping that they can camouflage themselves even against metamorphosis: that if they conceal themselves cleverly enough, the summer will go on forever, an eternity of long warm days and drowsy twilights and ripe green plants to gorge on, and they’ll never age or change or lose themselves to the betrayals of the flesh.

Each day that the light dies earlier, I understand that hope a little more.

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One good shot: caught in the act

Unlike Blake's "invisible worm," this one is all too blithely apparent.

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The many modes of devouring

In farmers’ markets the strawberries are plump and bursting with flavor; the tomatoes swell on the vine; eggs when cracked spill yolks gold as suns. It is the season of lusciousness and gluttony.

We are only one of many species stuffing our faces with the summer’s bounty. Caterpillars are chomping holes through the succulent flesh of new leaves until the rose bush is airy as lace; robins grip slick, wriggling worms in their beaks and glare at me suspiciously; ladybugs crush the fat green bodies of aphids between their mandibles with an almost palpable glee.

There should be something disturbing about this orgy of gorging, and yet I can’t find it in me to be unsettled.

Instead, I’m impressed by the sheer diversity of creatures eating and the various kinds of eating they engage in. It serves as a much-needed reminder that the world is vast, and mysterious, and full of mouths.

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Missing summer

I was lucky enough to receive a monarch caterpillar in a wildflower bouquet friends bought at the farmers' market this past August. I hope that in posting this photo of it I might conjure forth those summer months a little sooner...

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Imaginal Discs (or, Why You Should Never Believe Phrases Written in Calligraphy)

You know those inspirational cards and posters that say something like, “Just when the caterpillar thought the world was ending, he turned into a butterfly”?

I understand the idea—that sometimes tremendous and painful or frightening upheaval leads to wonderful things—but I think people need to stop using insect metamorphosis as the comparison.

Why, you ask? Because insect metamorphosis is horrible. And the final product not only bears very little resemblance to the initial one, but it is only in the loosest sense the same creature at all.

Here’s what happens: in the pupa, the caterpillar doesn’t just go through some dramatic changes akin to the special effects we see in werewolf movies, where, as it grimaces, its legs lengthen and its wings sprout from its back. No, the caterpillar dissolves. Literally.

All that’s left of it, apart from a liquid mess, are these clusters of cells called “imaginal discs” that contain all the genetic information and coding necessary to create a butterfly.

The cells in these discs divide and develop into body parts by sucking up energy from the swampy (but proteineous) remains of what was once the caterpillar—and it is the product of the development of those discs that is the emerging butterfly.

Not exactly inspirational, is it? More like a horror movie, right? I mean, here’s this caterpillar, going about its business, living its life, and all the time inside it are these little clusters of cells just waiting for the time-bomb of the caterpillar’s developmental cycle to make it disintegrate into a sack of ooze so they can become a beautiful flying creature.

Imagine being seeded with the germs of your own destruction—or ascendance, depending on how much importance you place on the fact that the butterfly shares its genetic material with the caterpillar. Imagine being just the vehicle—and food truck—for the real, reproductive, snazzily winged main event.

Maybe it is a transcendent sort of a concept. But, I don’t know; it just doesn’t say “greeting card” to me.

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Splendor in the Grass

Last week, displaying the kind of frugality that I am known for, I bought a macro lens (hey, there was a sale).

Now, although I have longed for a macro lens for a long time, I didn’t think I needed one in order to recognize and value the world around me. After all, didn’t I have a Ph.D. in biology? Wasn’t my dissertation research focused on intertidal marine invertebrates? Hadn’t I attended an extremely small liberal-arts college? Surely I was already well-primed to appreciate microcosms.

But the macro lens has not only brought into gorgeously clear focus the majesty of creatures I might usually dismiss as pests—it has made me realize that I too can look more closely at and see more of the beasts who go about their business all around me.

For example, during my lunch break on Friday, I happened to pass by some of the many ornamental grasses that homeowners in DC seem obsessed with planting. Because I had my new lens with me, I decided to give the grasses a second look, even though I was pretty sure there couldn’t be anything much in them

Imagine my surprise, then, to find a grasshopper—one of many—peering out at me as it clung to a blade of grass.

And that’s not all. In the few days since I’ve gotten the lens, I’ve seen more spiders, caterpillars, and bizarre shield-shaped beetle-y things than I’ve ever seen before.

[this tiny caterpillar is eating a rose petal]

And here I was, someone who was so smugly certain that I noticed what others didn’t—the hawk stooping for a kill, the snail poised on a stem.

It’s always nice to be reminded of the power that a new perspective—whether it’s brought about through a telescope, a magnifying lens, or a state of mind—has to make visible the humbling complexities of a universe in which other worlds exist below, above, within, around, and in the interstices of our own.

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Why I’ll Miss Being Able to Walk to Work

In the morning, admiring the flowers that lit up the otherwise less-than-thrilling sidewalks and byways, I spied a couple of animals I don’t usually expect to see hanging out on black-eyed Susans.

The first is at least an insect:

-But the second is one of those rare land-dwelling crustaceans, the wood louse…

…also known as the potato bug, pill bug, or roly-poly, depending on where and how you grew up. (Did you know it was a terrestrial crustacean? Isn’t that cool? It’s a kind of isopod, which will mean something to beachcombers but probably no one else.)

I don’t think I’ve ever seen traversing a blossom before.

And on my way home to work I spotted this lovely creature hanging out on a (morning glory?) growing on a chain-link fence:

There’s nothing like a little urban wildlife—coupled with the smug sensation of being the only one to have spotted it—to improve one’s commute.

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Can’t You See I’m Trying to Write??

Knowing as I do that invertebrates represent the vast majority (over 97%) of animal life, and knowing too that invertebrates are everywhere, I cannot in good conscience say that there are “more” invertebrates in North Carolina than there are here. I can, however, say that from my visit I’m convinced that there are many more visible invertebrates in North Carolina, and that their abundance and diversity surpasses anything I’ve seen in DC.

For example, I’ve never seen so many kinds of spiders before. I don’t have a lot of photograph evidence of this, though—since, not being skilled at instant arachnid identification, I hesitated to bring my lens too close to them for fear one would bite me in an excessively venomous manner. –But trust me, there were a lot of spiders.

There were also slugs, bees (carpenter, honey, and bumble), flies, and a variety of other multipodal creatures, like this huge and amazing millipede:

And these (perhaps-tent) caterpillars:

I was very excited about these caterpillars when I saw them along the small portion of the Appalachian Trail on which I wandered one afternoon; I also spotted lots of other cool insects, like this…um…katydid, perhaps…?

And this enormous (and slightly camera-shy) beetle:

After a while, though, I decided that I wanted to sit, eat an apple while admiring the river, and write. Unfortunately, the invertebrates had not been informed of my new agenda.

There I was, sitting on a rock near the water, trying to concentrate, and all these creatures were getting in my way.

The caterpillars landing on my jacket weren’t so bad, but the spiders that decided to colonize my rock were a little more alarming. And the tiny biting flies that landed all over and—well, bit me—were just too much.

[they even landed on my pen; how shameless can you get?]

I was in a state of incredible indignation for quite a while. Then, slowly—ever so slowly—my incredible temerity dawned on me. Here I was in the great outdoors, scandalized that these organisms were present in their own habitat. –How dare they treat me like the interloper that I was? Couldn’t they understand that I wanted to commune with nature? –And here was all this wildlife getting in the way!

Once I realized what I’d been doing, I was able to be a little less critical and a little more appreciative of this opportunity to be surrounded—albeit very closely—by nature.

It didn’t reconcile me to the biting flies, though.

[big scary hairy spider on my raincoat]

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