Levels of Looking

©2019 Karen Richards

Lately I’ve been aware of my awareness of insects. If I go back to the same location more than once, I notice I’m paying attention to different things. I figure I’ve progressed through three levels of looking so far:

1. When I first started taking pictures of insects, I scanned for movement or color. I spotted a fly because it landed on a zucchini flower or I noticed a beetle because its coloring stood out from the deck furniture. I was thrilled to look up the basics about flower flies, happily learning how to tell the difference between flies, bees, and wasps and not ready for deeper details.

Agapostemon ©2019 Karen Richards

2. When I joined the Oregon Bee Project, it meant camping out in front of a particular flower for an hour at a time. I started noticing the variety of bees and other insects that showed up. I wondered where certain bees went when the early flowers stopped blooming. How did they know where to go next? I wondered what their adult life cycle looked like. Why were some bees out earlier in the spring (andrena) and some I didn’t see until mid to late summer (agapostemon)? I started to differentiate between families of bees and to learn the scientific names. I was and still am enamored at the variety of color, size and detail of all insect species. 

©2019 Karen Richards

3. Now, I’m starting to be aware of interspecies stories that play out and the drama that ensues. 

There’s a vine that blooms in the alley behind our house. I think it’s Hahn’s ivy. Late in the summer, it’s one of the few local sources of pollen / nectar and it thrums with insect activity. I’ve noticed these things:

There’s a hierarchy for time on the flowers. Bees chase away flies. Yellow jacket wasps scare away bees. And I once saw a bigger black wasp (top photo: still unsure of the species) merely gesture toward a yellow jacket and send it fleeing. 

There are some insects that aren’t there to feed on flowers. I’ve seen a large jumping spider eating a fly (above), and an assassin bug (below) waiting for its next meal. Some of the wasps, too, are not there to get plant food, they’re looking for insect food for their larvae. They don’t land, they scout.

©2019 Karen Richards

Some of the flies and bees (the males?) don’t land on the flowers either, but patrol. They’re looking, I think, for a mate. On sunny and warm early fall days, I’ve seen mating flies and dragonflies. They’re trying to ensure they reproduce before the weather turns, I’m sure. 

There are levels of awareness I haven’t achieved. Many of them. I’m not very good at spotting insects that aren’t on flowers. There are very few insects I know at even the genus level. I don’t know how to look for eggs or larvae and the timing of most life cycles. I can’t wait to grow insect-friendly greenery and do experiments over time. I look forward to every step of the adventure. 

Larval Thoughts

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Cinnabar moth caterpillar and adult.

I’ve been reading about insect metamorphosis lately. It’s mind altering how utterly different many adult insects are from their younger selves. The way an insect transforms from one stage to the next is perhaps even more fantastical. You could say my own thoughts have been rearranged by learning about what goes on inside a pupa. I’ll talk about insect larvae vs. adults first.

It makes sense a few larval stages of insects have their own common names, like mealworms —> darkling beetles. I think more of them should. In fact, many adult insects should be known by larval names. Take the crane fly. I made this chart to show just how incidental its adult life is:

Not only does it spend the vast majority of its life as a larva, it’s underwater. It’s a predator. When it’s an adult, it can’t survive in the water, and it doesn’t eat other animals. In fact many crane flies don’t have functioning mouth parts because they don’t eat, period! Females can be born with eggs at the ready, so all they have to do is reproduce.

Insects that fully metamorphose or have a pupa stage (the scientific term is holometabolism) include flies, beetles, wasps bees and ants, and of course moths and butterflies. Many of these insects live in different habitats in each form,

Damselflies, like crane flies, live underwater
until they’re adults

eat different diets in each form,

Most wasps, like this pimpla are parasitic. They’re carnivores as larvae, but only eat pollen as adults.

and can have different structures as larvae (mosquito larvae have siphons, or breathing tubes for living underwater). Not only that, the adults look nothing like their younger selves. You could never, ever pick out a adult from its elementary school composite photo. Caterpillar coloring isn’t any indicator of the butterfly pattern or color, as shown in the first photos.

Some people argue that insects are basically reborn between stages, that they are two different individuals. The logic for this is pretty sound. When a larva goes into the pupa stage, the insect completely rearranges its cells to morph into a new creature. The old creature basically digests itself into a blob of unconsolidated mush, and genetics take over to reprogram the cells to form the adult. Wow, Mother Nature, that’s creative! In fruit flies, according to this 2010 study, there are 19 “imaginal discs” that separate starter cells into sacs. Each sac develops its specialty, whether wings, thorax, etc.

I understand why each insect is known by one scientific name: The larval forms can’t reproduce. But, I think more larvae should have distinct common names. At the very least, more attention should be paid to, and research conducted on, the earlier life stages. There isn’t a lot of research since 2010, that I’ve found, about how imaginal discs work.

P.S. If you do an internet search on “imaginal cells,” you’ll find a lot of talk about how humans should / could use a similar process to rearrange ourselves into a new form, from mindless consumers to a new way of being. I get the sentiment, but the analogy falls apart in a couple of ways.