Summer is when the full arsenal comes out. Repellant and insecticide sprays, tablets, coils, citronella and a hundred other promises of an insect-free life find themselves promoted to the front shelves of supermarkets in a seasonal ritual which mirrors that of their intended victims.
The rhythms of insect life are not always so unwelcome. Summer wouldn’t be our summer without the sound of cicadas, so monotonous and yet so pleasantly lulling. Every year in the first week of July, the song of the cicadas returns. It’s a reassuring calendrical accuracy they share with damselfish (ċawl), whose cobalt-blue young hatch at exactly the same time of year.
Insects mark daily rhythms, too. As night falls, crickets take over from cicadas. While both are accomplished ventriloquists, crickets are the softer singers: to earn itself a mate, a cicada has to compete with other cicadas, but also with the unrelenting soundtrack of modern daytime life.
The story of the peppered moths which adapted to the soot-covered trees of industrial cities by getting darker is a staple of secondary-school evolutionary science. It makes me wonder if there is such a thing as a louder, city cicada.
In darker times, the cues were also visual. I’m not old enough to remember the flickering lights of glow-worms in country lanes. The Maltese name musbieħ il-lejl evokes collective memories of people huddled in homes dimly lit by tiny oil lamps. It tells of pinpricks of lights so intimate, they only come into their own at the darkest hour of night.
This insect-borne rhythmicity of day and night inspired what must be one of the most magical moments in literature: “the glow-worm shows the matin to be near, and ’gins to pale his uneffectual fire”.
When it can be found at all, the fire of glow-worms is nowadays rendered doubly uneffectual by artificial light – an impotence shared by stars, among other night dwellers. In this, glow-worms, like cicadas, find they have to compete with modernity, and its pollutants.
Even the plainest bug has about it the dignity of a perfectly formed living thing, confident and functional in its environment- Mark-Anthony Falzon
It’s a contest that goes beyond the poetic. An article in the May 2020 issue of National Geographic looks at the rapid loss of insect life worldwide. In many ways, insects rule the earth. They’ve been around for over 400 million years; by comparison, dinosaurs only appeared around 200 million years ago, and modern humans about 200,000.
If not surprisingly, given how long they’ve played the evolution dice, the number and diversity of insects is staggering to say the least. Just one family of wasps contains more species than all fish, mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians put together. Put it this way: on this planet, six legs seem to do the job best.
Certainly it makes insects adaptable. There are insects in Antarctica and in arid deserts. They’ve also taken wonderfully well to human environments: even as they threaten our homes, they insist on sharing them with us. To set up home, no matter how pest-controlled, is also to make multiple new homes for insects.
It’s the ultimate complicity between highly diverse creatures. Or maybe not, since insects follow as readily as they dwell. Few things do globalisation more effectively than tiger mosquitoes, or geranium butterflies, or palm weevils. None of which are fun, but the point is that they work – with deadly consequences, at times.
And yet, insects are in trouble. To say there were more butterflies and caterpillars and ladybirds around when you were a child is formulaic. It may have to do with scale, rather than the actual number of insects. If children make the world after their own image, miniature stands a better chance.
It is to science, rather than impressions, that we must look. In a famous study, scientists in one protected area in Germany found that insect life had declined by 75 per cent between 1989 and 2014. It’s the same story pretty much anywhere in the world.
My insect-loving friends often wonder why so many kinds of butterflies have all but vanished from the Maltese countryside. The answer is simple: butterflies are insects.
Butterflies and bees are charismatic and easily missed, but the loss is more troubling than that. For one, insects are their own value. Even the plainest bug has about it the dignity of a perfectly formed living thing, confident and functional in its environment.
It’s a matter of looking, and looking carefully – in this case, at the legacy of 400 million years.
There’s another thing. You can’t have the bees and butterflies without the wasps and bugs: nature is just too network-obsessive for that. Which means that the loss of insects does not stop there. In Europe as elsewhere, very many kinds of birds have declined sharply in recent decades. Scientists think that the loss is mainly down to shrinking insect numbers, for obvious reasons.
If there is hope, it lies also in technology. Recently, a team of scientists at the University of Washington successfully tested a wireless camera that is light and tiny enough to be mounted on live beetles. It’s now possible to see, using an average smartphone, that the loss of insects is also, and quite literally, that of a worldview.