In an insect apocalypse, the buzzing you will hear comes from the data centre that turned your local lake into a cyanobacteria biohazard and killed your dog. The thing that flies past your face will not be a dragonfly on a single-minded hunt but a drone delivering a neighbour’s hfcs honey substitute.
Everything will chirp and buzz and rumble and whine but nothing will be alive.
Except mosquitoes. And without predators they will evolve to be larger, covering more ground, biting and infecting more humans, humans who have forgotten what it’s like to be a part of an ecosystem. We’ve forgotten what intimate, intricate good it does for us.
In part, the challenge is that what we love can be difficult to spot.
But we are also just not looking.
Some insects are breathtakingly tiny and still, difficult to spot until you have given your boredom sufficient time to become curiosity, then wonder.
Some insects are so full of personality, so nostalgic, that we do see them, and even love them. We would miss them if they all disappeared.
But if you can only grieve what you know, isn’t it better to know less? That will ease the wound of loss, we think. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.
Still, we do love them.
Many insects know what it is like to look like another, to imitate it and borrow its threat, your appearance your only defence. A hornet fly says, “Better fuck off. See these stripes? You know that means danger!” It hopes you fuck off, because it has no stinger, no venom. So many of nature’s threats are empty, relying on camouflage, mimicry, acrobatics. We are not conscious of what our own threat behaviour looks like.
Spiders do not want to have a web torn down twice. They are very clever at not being where you do not want them, and therefore unfortunately good at surprising us in unexpected places.
If a web is in your way, take a stick and detach its scaffolding. Keep doing that until the spider sets up its web somewhere you don’t mind. A broad web catches many mosquitoes. You are an animal in an ecosystem too.
We all want to be safe.
Have you ever seen one of these before? Would you miss it if it disappeared, this therion circumflexum? No common name but known deeply by some. I tell you its name so that you will mourn it with me.
Flies? Who would miss flies?
How dare we humans not live in peace among the things we call pests?
How dare I think about how to ease or delay the hatpin stabs of grief over all we have lost, are losing, will lose?
How could I think that a bird brain is really that different than my own?
I know this mother’s instinct and effort is toward the same goal as my own mother’s. Survival of her offspring. Birth her, feed her. Keep her safe.
When you watch a squirrel mother fight and strive and succeed, seeing her inside out on the side of the road is agony.
It hurts it hurts it hurts I’m sorry
I know so many of us are trying. More would care, if only they knew.
These photos are obituaries. They are worship. They are lore.
I do not want to say goodbye.
Though I know we all die anyway.
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