How significant is the loss of insect life in our gardens?
When I was a kid, insects were all around me in our garden, and they totally fascinated me. Of course I didn’t associate them with anything important – they were just there.
We didn’t know much about them, only a rough idea of the insect cycle that sometimes took in four stages, the egg, the larvae, the chrysalis and then the final insect. We also knew in a vague way that the cicada lived underground for seven years before it emerged out of its brown shell, a fully-fledged solid green body with transparent green veined wings and knobbly brown red eyes, and that it made a fantastically loud noise by drumming its legs against its abdomen.
In summer when it was hot I rescued cicadas from hungry birds who often dropped them in mid-flight. Usually they were too mauled to save, and I’d lay them down respectfully in shallow-dug graves. If I happened to find one in an open space where it might be easy prey for a sharp eyed bird, I’d pick it up, delighting in the way its tiny but very strong claws clung to my skin before I detached it onto a green leaf amongst others, hoping that it would be safe there to live out its brief life as it deafened with its shrill mating call.
And there were the harlequin beetles zipping around minding their own business. I dug earth barriers to round them up so I could study their brilliantly diamond patterned red and black, or orange and black backs. But they never stayed still enough for me to make any serious discoveries about them. And the gorgeous shiny green Christmas beetles that took off if you tried to catch them They were like the butterflies, the flamboyant, swaggering, over-colourful celebrities of the garden. You just had to stand and breathe quietly and watch as they landed on a flower, but before you could truly take in their beauty, they were fluttering off to another flower.
More contemplatable were the bees that hovered and buzzed over a flowering bush with seemingly more purpose, the spiders with their amazing webs that were speckled with diamond dewdrops in the morning sun, the praying mantis, and other stick insects and the moths at night, much grander but more muted in their wing design than the butterflies, and somehow more mysterious. There were caterpillars galore, the most wondrous among them the Emperor Gum moth caterpillar, brilliantly fat and blue and green with orange knobs, and if you had a mulberry bush, as we did, we could collect the leaves to feed to our silk worms, to watch them spin themselves into white silky cocoons.
And the worms, don’t let me start on them, their long smooth bodies winding sinuously out of the compost so assiduously manufactured by my parents, to slide almost invisibly into the earth around; Also conspicuous by their numbers were the many kinds of ants trecking backwards and forwards across the cracks in the concrete, and inclined to find their way into the kitchen, which we took as a sign that it was going to rain.
The green aphids on rosebuds that my mother squished between her fingers also intrigued me. They were such complete tiny little creatures it seemed terrible to murder them en masse. And then there were the days when my father used to spray the garden, presumably to destroy the nasty insects like the aphid, and the annoying gnats, so the plants could grow. Being an industrial chemist, he made sure that we were all inside the house, windows closed, before he donned full protective clothing to do the spraying. Those were the days of DDT, and while I didn’t understand the devastating implications at the time, that image has stayed with me.
At one point someone gave me a book by Eleanor Doorly. ‘The Insect Man’ was the biography of Jean-Henri Fabre (teacher, physicist, chemist and botanist 1823-1915), written for children. Fabre was known for his ‘passion for scientific truth’ and his engaging colloquial style of writing. Often considered the father of modern entomology, he once wrote:
‘Others … have reproached me with my style, which has not the solemnity, nay, better, the dryness of the schools. They fear lest a page that is read without fatigue should not always be the expression of the truth. Were I to take their word for it, we are profound only on condition of being obscure.’
I remember loving Doorly’s biography, and while I have forgotten everything about it and Fabre himself, it has dwelt somewhere in the back of my mind throughout my life as part of the treasure trove of insect-intrigue that I discovered as a child in my own Melbourne garden.
That same excitement and sense of discovery were re- ignited a couple of years ago when I heard Dr Don Sands from CSIRO waxing lyrical on the life story of the bulloak jewel butterfly, the second most endangered butterfly in Australia. The Jewel has the temerity to depend on one particular bird, two kinds of tree and a particular species of ant for its existence, hence its downward spiral into almost extinction. It brought to mind the thousands of ecological webs of life that are all around us, on which we unwittingly depend for our own existence, and which are so fragile that any small disturbance in a particular web of dependency will tip yet another insect, creature or plant into becoming endangered or, worse, disappearing forever. The effects on us humans are not always clear, and so insects often fly under the radar. Their press is usually bad. I mean who really cares about spiders, mosquitoes, ants and all those other stinging, annoying ‘pests’?
The one insect that stands out from this is the bee, a very small insect on which the production of almost every kind of plant and crop depends, and which of course has direct implications for us as humans. Everyone loves honey! I read recently that entomologists are studying the unusually high reproduction rate of the bumble bee in Tasmania. The bumble bee is that rather gorgeous black furry bee with yellow stripes, much larger than our native bees, or indeed the bees who do the heavy ‘legwork’ on pollinating most of our plant food. European in origin, the Bumble Bee was illegally imported into Tasmania from New Zealand and is proliferating at such a rate that it threatens to destroy all the other bees. Scientists have developed tiny electronic saddles to attach to these bees in an attempt to discover how and why they are so successfully reproducing, so that they can counter the bumble bee’s power in the insect world. The story sent a shiver of delight down my spine. The extraordinary science that is developing to explore the secret life of insects reminded me of Fabre and his talent for telling stories about insects that would have intrigued children several generations ago, some of whom must have grown up to be entomologists or scientists of some kind.
In the case of the bulloak jewel butterfly, I wanted to tell its story in a way that would inspire children, as Fabre did. But I am not a scientist or a botanist, and times have changed. One worrying change is that there aren’t so many insects around in our everyday lives, in fact many species have just disappeared. I first attempted to describe the bulloak jewel in picture book form for small children, but it was too static with not much excitement to be got from the pictures. As I searched for another vehicle to tell its story, I realised that the butterfly story on its own was not enough to engage the modern reader. It had to involve other issues that would resonate for the age group to whom I wanted to talk. And out of the backblocks of my mind came twelve year old Holly who befriends Azita, an Iranian refugee, and is the same age I was when I discovered the fabulous world of insects. For six months, while I wrote the book, I lived in Holly’s skin, bringing together remnants of thoughts and happenings from my own childhood and from other people’s childhoods. But because Holly is an original creation, her life took on its own shape. The butterfly’s story became only a part (although significant) of her journey towards independence and self-belief. Remembering Fabre who was intent on making his information lively and readable, I gave her the chance to discover the world of insects in a contemporary setting which brought her face to face with issues I’d never had to face back in the 1950s. I hope, like Fabre must have hoped with his stories, that Holly’s insights might inspire others of her generation to invest emotionally and intelligently in insect life, because more than ever it is essential to develop minds that can invent tiny saddles for bumble bees, and search out the fragile interconnected ecology of insects with plant and animal life. They are needed to keep us safe in these uncertain, changing times.
Sarah Martin’s novel for middle readers Azita and Me is published by Sid Harta Books and is available here.
Find out about Azita and Me here.