THE CREEPY-CRAWLIES WE CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT
ENJOYING those green herbs on your pizza? The distinctive flavour of oregano comes from carvacrol, a substance the plant produces to defend itself against insects.
How about that bar of chocolate? There would be no such thing without little rainforest-dwelling midges small enough to crawl into the flowers of cacao trees and pollinate them.
To produce enough cacao for just one Kit-Kat takes a tree three months, so we need a lot of these midges. And there are many other examples of how insects are important to us.
In 1235, the murder of a man in a Chinese village was solved when the local peasants were called into a meeting one hot summer’s day and the surrounding flies all congregated on the sickle belonging to the culprit.
With their peerless sense of smell, the flies had been drawn to the traces of blood, even though the sickle had been cleaned by its owner. He was so shocked, he confessed on the spot.
Today, the use of insects in criminal investigations is well established and we also have them to thank for Shakespeare’s plays, Beethoven’s symphonies and the American Declaration of Independence. These and many other documents were written in ink derived from the gall wasp, a minuscule, red-tinged parasite commonly found on oaks.
Unlike previous inks, like those made from soot mixed with water, this was insoluble, so thoughts, tunes and texts couldn’t be washed away if someone happened to spill a cup of tea on them.
Some insects have yet to prove themselves useful to mankind, including the mosquitoes that reside in the tunnels of the London Underground.
They are thought to have made their way down there when the Tube first opened in 1863 and, although they all had the same forebears, genetic analysis has shown that their DNA now varies: the Piccadilly Line mosquito is different from the Central Line mosquito.
That is an example of how quickly evolution can work. So who knows what lessons we may one day learn from those Tube-dwelling mosquitoes and the myriad other insects on earth?