Author’s insights won’t bug you out
Even the most insectaverse are likely to find something fascinating in this enthusiastic tribute to the billions of parallel lives going on, often undetected, around us.
Anne Sverdrupthygeson, a Norwegian professor of conservation biology with a special interest in the microhabitats set up by fallen trees, provides an intelligent, lucid overview of the world of insects and zooms in with gusto on some of the more unusual, and sometimes appalling, behaviors of her subjects.
“Earth is the planet of the insects,” she writes. “As you sit reading this sentence, between 1 trillion and 10 trillion insects are shuffling and crawling and flapping around the planet, outnumbering the grains of sands on all the world’s beaches.”
Insects, in fact, account for half of all known • “Buzz Sting Bite: Why We Need Insects” (Simon & Schuster, 256 pages, $26) by Anne Sverdrup-thygeson
multicellular creatures. Compare that to plants, which make up 16%, or vertebrates, at 3%.
After briefly and clearly summarizing the differences between various types of insects, the author goes on to devote a chapter to insect sex (often dangerous for both males and females) and insect eating, which includes the many ways insects have contrived to “keep on the right side of life’s brutal but simple eat-or-be-eaten rule.”
The second half of the book is devoted to the many roles insects play in making human life as we know it possible. Pollination by insects, of course, is key to the reproduction of many plants that we rely on for food. And insects provide food for fish and birds.
Insects also can serve as food. Grasshoppers, the author notes, are “twelve times as efficient as cattle at converting fodder to protein.”
Insects also are indirectly responsible for producing flavors humans have come to crave. Plants such as oregano, mustard and peppermint have developed their flavors as a defense against insects.
Insects, along with fungi, also play a key role in decomposition, and keep us, as Sverdrup-thygeson succinctly puts it, from “drowning in dung.”
Although this is not particularly an alarmist book, the author makes it clear that climate change and human activity are both having a detrimental effect on insect life. Insect numbers have been halved in the past 40 years, and an estimated one-quarter of insect species are threatened with extinction as a result of “increasing land use, intensive farming and forestry practices, pesticides, and the decline in natural remnant habitats.”
In a worst-case scenario, of course, insects are far likelier to survive on this planet than are humans. So it might be to our advantage to make peace with them rather than attempting to fight them.
Sverdrup-thygeson’s cheerful appreciation of insects is contagious, and it’s likely to prompt readers to take a closer look at these tiny neighbors of ours. If it also makes us eager, or at least willing, to coexist with them harmoniously, the book will have accomplished its goal.
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