they're out there. Every moment of the day and night they crawl, squirm, flitter, scramble and tiptoe just outside your awareness: in the lawn, behind the bed, beneath your eyelashes. They are the invertebrates, the billions of multi-celled creatures without backbones who are tolerating the current brief intrusion of humans into their turf. We in turn have spent most of our history reviling such organisms, but now that we've temporarily gotten them off our backs, there come periods when we appreciate their otherworldly beauty and sheer strangeness. Now is one of the rare moments of invertebrate chic, particularly for
< href="http://www.ex.ac.uk/~gjlramel/six01.html">insects. A clutch of books has been hatched for the upcoming holiday market, and the most universally praised movie of the fall, "Microcosmos," has a cast with too many legs or none at all.
What unites all these projects is the underlying assumption that people do not understand, and unfairly loathe, insects and their spineless ilk. People absorb the antiquated notion of the Great Chain of Being as they grow up. This medieval theory held that mankind ruled the earth as the peak of terrestrial beings, just below angels. Worms and bugs and snails and misidentified invertebrates like snakes ranked far below the mangiest yellow dog in the gutter. These were beasties born spontaneously from mud and slime and shit. To consider that such vermin had lives — and their own kind of grace — was heresy.
As the eminent natural historian and popular science writer Stephen Jay Gould frequently argues in his books, the grip of the Great Chain of Being is hard to break. His most unsettling argument against it appeared in his survey of some extremely ancient fossils, "Wonderful Life." Gould noted that many different designs for organisms appeared for the first time 530 million years ago in the so-called Burgess Shale deposits. Some designs made it, others did not. A species long classified as a worm turned out, on closer inspection, to be the earliest known chordate — a creature with a stiffened rod of nerve that would evolve into our backbone. Called Pikaia, it was quite rare, and Gould underscores its import: "Wind the tape of life back to Burgess times and let it play again. If Pikaia does not survive in the replay, we are wiped out of future history — all of us, from shark to robin to orangutan." There were many more types of backbone-free arthropods in the Burgess sea, and they became everything from crab to spider to insect. The odds have favored them a long time.
The latest fascination with invertebrates is partly an acknowledgment of their preeminent numbers and partly an aspect of the ever-expanding drive for understanding and tolerance in America. Why, insects might even enter our cuisine as they have in many cultures. David Gordon's "The Compleat Cockroach" and Richard Conniff's "Spineless Wonders" celebrate unloved animals, while Evans and Bellamy's "An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles" buff up a category of bugs relegated to the neutral zone.
Most folks gets the creeps from insects that scuttle furtively away from light, leave droppings everywhere and reproduce in unwholesome numbers. Ages ago, that applied to many creatures. The Greek term blattae meant, basically, "all the little things that crawl around the house in the dark." Now the zoological order Blatteria refers only to cockroaches, and rightly so — they're the one ancient pest we just can't seem to shut out after nightfall.
David Gordon would brand my view as typical — considering cockroaches only as freeloaders in human habitations. So he introduces hissing jungle roaches, and prehistoric giant roaches, and roaches of song and stage and comic books, making the case that grudging amusement rather than repulsion is the better, even more widespread, attitude toward la cucaracha. "The Compleat Cockroach" is a more dutiful than dazzling read, however, and he can't get away from the fact that cockroaches are ultimately dull insects, a 340-million-year-old model that doesn't even metamorphose, just hatches, molts and gets bigger.
He's also just careless enough with details to make you worry. Gordon writes "My favorite cockroach song is by — who else? — the Roches, an all-female a cappella group from the Bay Area." The bulk of Maggie, Terre, and Suzzy Roche's songs use instruments and the sisters are quintessential New Yorkers. "The Compleat Cockroach" does give an honorable hearty nod to Archy, a roach poet created in 1913 by newspaper man Don Marquis. Samples of Archy's work, with exquisite illustrations by George Herriman, can be found here. Otherwise, pass the Raid.
Richard Conniff expands the range in "Spineless Wonders." Puking and preening houseflies are just a warm-up for him. In livelier prose than Gordon's, Conniff makes the requisite treks into the itchy, biting tropical wilderness in search of small fauna, and his adventures are vivid without ever becoming extraordinary. When he latches onto a particularly nasty critter, though, his selection of detail and narrative flow satisfies. Conniff excels with leeches and worms — he'd be right at home at the yuckiest site on the web. His fire ants are admirably macho and his moths tender in the night. A few times, the tales stumble into that eerie, guy-writer anxiety about the sexuality of female insects. Remarking on the fecundity of a queen fire ant, Conniff blurts: "This is roughly the equivalent of a 120-pound woman giving birth to 500,000 eight-pound babies a year. I looked at the queen and thought, 'You can do it honey, just keep panting.'"
Conniff correctly explains that you encounter the most dangerous insect on earth every summer but rarely think of it. (No, I won't say what it is.) The most horrid beast in the book, however, is not an insect at all, but the gruesome hagfish. In no way a fish, it's a wormlike, slime-oozing thing that doesn't bleed though it has seven hearts and spends its mysterious life eating the guts out of dead fish at the bottom of oceans all over the world. By the way, hagfish are probably close relatives of our venerable ancestor, Pikaia, from the Burgess shale.
There will never be a festive picture book devoted to hagfish. But beetles deserve a full-color look every so often, and "An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles" sets the standard for now. The text by Arthur Evans and Charles Bellamy is just thorough enough and employs a light touch suitable for alert casual reading. The fundamental point is that beetles eat everything imaginable and fill, fill, fill those ecological niches from mountain top to swamp bottom (skip the seas, though).
Charles Darwin once said that if the atlas beetle was as big as a dog or horse, "with its polished bronze coat of mail and its vast complex of horns ... it would be one of the most imposing animals in the world." He was wrong. It's one of the most imposing animals just the way it is. The riot of designs and colors in beetles' shells, legs and antennae captivate immediately. Even the drab ones are jewels. My only gripe here is that photographer Lisa Watson's subjects are all dead and dried, pinned to cloths. A corresponding survey of mammals would not concentrate so much on stuffed specimens. For those who want quick proof of beetle beauty, some other portraits are available here.
"An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles" belongs in every insect fan's library, but none of this season's bug books is a scientific landmark to rival Wilson and Holdobler's massive and awesome "The Ants," admittedly directed at dedicated readers. For those who crave a work of enduring literature about insects, the very short shelf would have to include Fabre's "Book of Insects" — intended for children but filled with poetic reflections beneficial for adults — preferably with the illustrations by E.J. Detmold. And there are a few other contenders.
The French film "Microcosmos" is not really a documentary so much as a lyric meditation on fields and streams with the audience's viewpoint dropped down to the scale of insects. This is the real deal for those who would have preferred the lawn sequences in "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" without the kids for comforting anthropomorphic reference. Also, it provides a beneficent follow-up to the 1971 oddity, "The Hellstrom Chronicles," which featured miraculous bug photography as well, but with the implication that they were menacing mini-monsters who would win the upcoming ecological showdown with humanity.
"Microcosmos" is shapely and succinct, with insect-precise timing. Its vital currents run hard. The snails getting it on is the hottest love scene in a French film since the early '70s (and bisexual, too!). But everyone will have personal revelations: Mine was the uncanny delicacy and precision of a caterpillar's soft feet wrapping around a narrow stem. Another was how immaculately clean all the bugs looked — the bigger something is, the more schmutz it accumulates, obviously. Finally, without intending it, "Microcosmos" makes one of the strongest arguments ever that birds are descended from dinosaurs, by showing a pheasant looking twice the size of a Tyrannosaurus as it pecks up ants. With a sparse few minutes of narration, the film also points out how the droning explainery of TV nature shows saps wonderment in the name of education. This superb family movie is an immortal gift to, and from, invertebrates.
Despite any amount of artful celebration and cleverly written propaganda, I suspect we will never be entirely comfortable with bugs. "The Hellstrom Chronicles" did get at a niggling nugget of truth. Insects are a continual reminder that the Creator has an alternate plan for the dominant life form on earth, and our rivals are very patient and persistent. If we foul up and go extinct (and every single species-type like us does, sooner or later), the insects will chitter on — just as they did when the dinosaurs flopped.
Milo Miles' music commentary can be heard on National Public Radio's "Fresh Air." He is a regular contributor to Salon.
CALL OF THE WILD:
The Quest for the Giant Squid By Laura Miller
Animal Magnetism By Sally Eckhoff
