BUGGING OUT

When our kids were 3, 9 and 11, and the airlines had more lenient luggage policies, we lugged our camping gear on a train to the airport and flew to Florida. Our load was so excessive that we looked like refugees. In the stations and airports, strangers approached and asked if they could help by carrying an item. I replied, “Yes, thanks.”

Our first day in The Sunshine State was magnificent. We rented a car and drove to the Canaveral National Seashore. The mid-November, mid-week weather was beautiful: warm but not hot. A blue sky reflected on the light blue water. The surf was foamy, warm and fun to swim in. To top it off, there was a beautiful, steady breeze.

I threw a tennis ball on the beach with our son as Ellen frolicked with our daughters. Then we frolicked together. More than a dozen fishermen were casting their lines into the water. They pulled from the water a superabundance of an unfamiliar, pretty, silvery, yellow-tinged fish and placed them in icy picnic coolers. One of the surfcasters told me these were pompano.

As the sun approached the horizon, we pitched our tent in the deep, fine white sand. We were the only ones staying overnight. Sitting on a sheet, we ate an uncooked dinner on the beach. When night fell, we entered the tent and laid down. As we did, I don’t know if I was ever happier.

As we had awakened at 4 AM to catch the flight south, we all quickly dozed off.

In the darkness, I woke up, sensing that I hadn’t slept for more than a few hours. The air had become still and I felt itchy, as if bugs were biting me. Ellen and the kids also started to stir. Within a few minutes, we were all awake. And scratching.

I was mystified. The tent was in good condition and I didn’t hear any mosquitoes. I grabbed a flashlight and shined it onto the tent’s interior. Looking closely at the screened entry, I saw dozens of tiny insects jumping through the tiny squares of the door’s netting, resembling, in miniature, World War II soldiers scrambling down those grids of rope ladders from battleships. I realized these bugs were the “no-see-ums” others had talked about and that we had to flee. I told everyone to gather their stuff and run with me to the car, which was past a gap in the dunes 75 yards away.

We did so. I figured we’d drive to a hotel and rent a room.

But Canaveral Seashore is an island. When we tried to leave the park, we found it barricaded. Huge boulders had been placed on both sides of the gate. There was no way to drive around it. We were cut off from the mainland. Our hearts sank.

Lacking an escape route, we drove back to the parking lot, which was adjacent to the ranger’s house. Around 11 PM, I knocked loudly and repeatedly on the door. Though I’m fairly certain there was a night ranger inside, no one answered.

There was a cinderblock restroom on the other side of the parking lot. I approached the opaque, white, steel women’s door and pulled on it. It didn’t budge. Denying reality, I pulled on it a second time, harder. Same result. My heart sank again. If the women’s side was locked, so must the men’s side be.

But just to make sure, I went to the men’s side and tugged the sturdy steel handle. Stunningly, miraculously, the door opened! The windowless men’s room was small: probably just big enough to fit five bodies, in a non-linear, interlocking puzzle arrangement.

I rejoiced and told everyone to enter. I went to the car and fetched our bedrolls and sleeping bags.

While the concrete floor wasn’t comfortable the room wasn’t visibly dirty and didn’t smell bad. And because the door had a rubber strip along its bottom, no bugs could get in. I locked the door so no people could get in either. Over an hour after we had initially awakened under siege, we all fell back to sleep. Another good thing: when I got up in the middle of the night to take a whiz, it was a very short trip.

After some more sleepy hours had passed, I heard a key in the door, which was abruptly flung open. A large, portly, uniformed man entered. Seeing five bodies filling the floor, he made a shocked face and called out, “What the hail?!”

I sat up and said, “I can explain everything.”

And did, briefly.

We itched all day. Our 9-year old’s face remained swollen for several days. But if someone had locked the men’s room door, as they were supposed to, things would have turned out much worse.

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I’ve been swarmed by other insects in other locations: mosquitoes at Cape Hatteras, black flies in the White Mountains, greenheads at the Jersey Shore and multiple bee stings—sometimes several at a time, including one inside my mouth—while tending bee hives at the community gardens. I’ve also had bugs wipe out plants there. I’ve walked, with and without a flashlight, at night in sandals on dirt roads in Nicaraguan forests with tarantulas underfoot. And I’ve lived in apartments with cockroaches.

I suspect you’ve had similar experiences. During such bug onslaughts, one is tempted to wish there were no insects.

And many enforce a year ‘round, zero-insect-tolerance policy. They grab a can of Raid and apply a puddle-making dose just to kill a wasp.

But we need bugs. They’re crucial to the food web, nourishing birds, fish, amphibians reptiles and mammals such as bats. Even humans eat about 2,000 species of insects. Fried grasshoppers (“chapulines”) are sold by the kilo in Mexico’s markets. They’re surprisingly expensive but also surprisingly tasty. Their crunchiness, fattiness and salt and lime seasoning make them so.

Farmers depend on insects to pollinate 75% of the types of crops—one-third of the overall amount of food—we eat, as well as 25,000 other environmentally important, flowering non-edibles. And beetles and flies break down smelly animal manure and churn rangeland soil, to make it loose and healthy.

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Researchers say insect populations are shrinking. According to a February 2020 study in the journal Biological Conservation, the world has reportedly lost 5% to 10% of all insect species in the last 150 years. An April 2020 analysis in the journal Science suggested the planet is losing about 9% of its land-dwelling insect population each decade. Another January 2021 meta-study found that insect abundance is declining around 1.5% per year. Over time, these losses are trending toward a Bugpocalypse.

Anecdotally, I see and feel fewer insects around than a decade ago. On summer nights, I used to sit on my front porch and, while getting bitten by the odd mosquito, see dozens of lightning bugs at once. Now I see about ten on a good night and seldom get bitten. There are few sights as pretty as a large batch of twinkling fireflies, like the one I saw one July night in the hillside Central Pennsylvania cemetery where my grandparents and other family members are buried. Because it’s dynamic and spectral, I like this spectacle more than I like seeing mountains or canyons.

Several factors are blamed for insects’ demise. Habitat is being lost to urban and suburban sprawl. Industrial agriculture, golf courses, homeowners and pet owners (for flea and tick control) apply heavy amounts of insecticides, including neurotoxic neonicotinoids, which became widely used in the 2000s. These “neonics,” which—unlike their fat-soluble organochlorine antecedent insecticides, e.g., DDT, Dieldrin and Chlordane—are water soluble and thus, are easily transported through the environment. Both classes of insecticides kill not only the targeted insect species but others in the vicinity. Notably, sublethal effects from chronic low-level exposure to neonicotinoids in the environment are thought to be more common in bees than directly lethal effects. For example, neonics may confuse honeybees, which must fly up to four miles to forage for nectar or sterilize bees and interfere with a hive’s production of queens.

Additionally, nitrogen overloading from sewage and fertilizers has turned wetlands into dead zones. And artificial light disrupts insects’ hormones and sleep cycles and locational sense, causing them to lay eggs in unsuitable environments and makes them more vulnerable to predators. All of the above-listed effects lessen bug populations.

As insects die off and fail to reproduce, so do the predators that need to eat them. In North America, nearly all songbirds feed insects to their young. But since 1970, the number of birds in the United States and Canada has fallen by 30%, or roughly 2.9 billion, in part due to shrinking insect populations. Cats and wind turbines also kill birds.

Given bugs’ wide range of environmental benefits, bug eradication is narrow-minded and short-sighted.

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Just as many wish to eliminate all bugs by draining wetlands, spraying insecticides, swinging swatters and plugging in electronic zappers, many naively imagined that a submicroscopic virus could be crushed with lockdowns, masks, tests, disinfectants and shots.

Insect/bugs and human viral “bugs” are ubiquitous. The notion that humans should exercise full dominion over nature is unrealistic and dysfunctional. As a kid, during various summers in our malaria-free Northeastern US town, I watched a small truck circling the 56-acre recreation field and superstitiously spraying a thick cloud of foggy, acrid white insecticide on parts of it. A small group of boys would run or ride bikes behind it. Even as an eight-year-old, this seemed like a bad idea. And not, as was riding bikes down unlit hills at night during that unhelmeted era, nearly as much fun. Risk versus reward.

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From the beginning, the Covid interventions and later, the vaxxes, also seemed to me like bad ideas and the opposite of fun.

Much of the aversion to insects is an esthetic or emotional preference. Many see insects as creepy. Though they can’t see viruses, they perceive them in the same prissy, phobic way. If science, not social and political control, had driven the Covid reaction, our officials wouldn’t have wrecked society in a vain attempt to eliminate a virus.

The public itself should have accepted that, like insects, viruses are ubiquitous. Our bodies harbor 380 trillion viruses, many of which perform life-sustaining functions. They keep disease-causing bacteria and viruses in check. Just as bugs have predators to balance insect populations, humans have immune systems to manage the relatively few harmful viruses that invade their bodies. And just as insects and weeds develop resistance to pesticides, humans seem to develop resistance to coronavirus “vaccines.” The shots that everyone had to have not only failed to stop viral infection, spread and death, they seem to have had the opposite effect in all three categories. The lockdowns purported to protect the old resembled broad-spectrum insecticides: they hurt everyone.

Durin Coronamania, humans needed to recognize that it’s futile, harmful and anti-science to try to manage the world to advance their comfort at all times and in all settings. Striving to eliminate intrinsic, limited forms of suffering like getting colds or itchy bug bites imposes many indirect costs. Ecosystems, societies and economies are more complicated than meets the casual observer’s eyes. And as with neonics, sublethal effects of lockdowns, school closures and vaxxes can be more damaging to the general population than are natural deaths of some aging members.

Execrable “experts” like Debbie Birx, who preached and pushed coronavirus eradication, cynically exploited the public’s OCD/phobic, zero-tolerance, anti-science approach to bugs, both animal and microbial. But an affinity for visible, ostensible, imposed control and a low discomfort threshold are poor bases for public health policy. Human efforts to subdue both animal and viral “bugs” undermine baseline biological, social and economic function. During Coronmania, the ostensible, but not actual, lockdown and vaxx “cure” was far worse than the disease. And the damage caused by the Covid response will long plague humanity.