June 30, 2014
Greetings from the Moth,
Summer is here and with it comes one of the mysteries of
nature. I am not talking about why some
men wear socks with sandals, or why there is never any ice cubes in the tray in
the freezer. I am referring to the
flurry of bugs around the porch light.
That chaotic, no-air-traffic-control-over Atlanta melee that repeats
itself night after night around my house.
Bugs have the attention span of a gnat; they just go pell-mell from one bright
thing to the next.
I have always been curious about this and somehow I got the
idea that bugs were drawn to the light because of the heat. Yes, it’s like 80 degrees already, but maybe
they have some kind of slow metabolism.
These bugs are basically sunning themselves on my screen, is what I
thought. The fact that I’m wrong doesn’t
keep me from thinking it, which is a gift that I have perfected.
They show up and gyrate and bounce and careen around the
light on the porch, and congregate around the kitchen window. In the morning there are casualties, but I
don’t think about that much, being a superior specie and all, and there seems
to be an endless supply of bugs to replace them.
Many mornings I find the quitters in the kitchen sink,
fluttering around in circles, ricocheting between the dirty dishes. Somehow they have breached the high tech security
of my window screen to achieve some unknown bug goal, and then exhausted
themselves bouncing against the light bulb inside. Then comes the ethical dilemma. Compassion or convenience? Carefully tweeze them out of their porcelain
purgatory and release them back into the wild, where they can fulfill their zoological
destiny? Or get the spray nozzle out and
swirl them down into wherever water goes when it disappears below the counter? And then there’s the question of whether to
run the garbage disposal. But I digress.
You’d think that after a bazillion years of evolution that
bugs would have seen the folly in this activity. Which made me wonder.
So I did some research.
I drove to the library and went into the Science department and found
several books on entomology. I brought
them home and spread them on the kitchen table and searched through each one,
reading about the various species and orders and families of insects, learning
about the specialized study of each. I
took copious notes, cross referencing the research done on the subject, and
then diagrammed the findings so I could easily see the consistencies and any contradictions.
I mean I Googled it.
I learned some words that I didn’t want to look up because I
ran out of time when I stumbled across a video on YouTube of a cat playing a
little piano. But I did learn about ‘phototaxis’. Because of my deep grasp of etymology (the
one that isn’t about bugs) I immediately thought that this word had something to
do with how the paparazzi chases after famous people in Manhattan. Or maybe it’s an innovation in public
transportation where you can also get prints of you and your friends making
goofy faces while sitting in the back seat.
But I may be digressing.
Phototaxis is an organism’s automatic movement toward or
away from light. Many insects
automatically are drawn toward light, but not for the reasons I formerly
believed.
Some scientists say that most insects navigate by the light
of the moon. Which makes them far
superior to my friend Scott who must use a GPS and he is still always late. I don’t know where these insects are going or
why, but evidently they have some built in Mapquest software that they synch
with the position of the moon that allows them to get to their destination. Not sure about their punctuality in comparison
to Scott’s.
So, when these bugs see the light on my porch, they think it’s
the moon. I know what you’re thinking,
how stupid is that? The moon is way
bigger. Well sometimes it is bigger than
others. That’s another mystery I don’t think
we’ll ever explain, how one night the moon is like as big as, like, a planet,
and others it’s just a dime-sized circle in the sky. Sheesh.
We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t explain why it shrinks and
grows. But I digress.
The bugs see the light bulb and think it’s the moon and so
they get into a traffic jam, circling the moon looking for a place to park, or
whatever it is that bugs do at night. If
I wasn’t a superior specie I might feel a little guilty about distracting them
like this. But luckily for me (not so
much the bugs) I have developed a bug free conscience after years of swishing
them down the drain to become part of the circle of life via the garbage
disposal.
Dang, I just remembered Scott’s birthday was this week. I knew there was some reason I was thinking
of him. I meant to get him a card, then
I was going to send one of those e-card things but I couldn’t get it to work on
my phone so I was asking this waiter at the restaurant about it and we got to
talking about cheez poppers. Well, one
thing led to another and then I started thinking about the short attention span
of bugs these days.
Hope this finds you fluttering,
David
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