There's a cockroach in Cuba that's green,
and a tarantula in Asia that's blue.
I wish I were there, to see your expression,
and hear your emphatic EEWWW!
I wrote that to a dear friend who didn't like bugs. She liked to bug me about life, and I loved bugging her about, well, bugs...
Like the fact that all of us have follicle mites living on our foreheads and eyebrows. Here's a fun article in National Geographic about that.
And while I hate mosquitoes, ticks, chiggers and fleas, the bug that bugs me the most is the human botfly, whose eggs are carried by mosquitoes to human hosts where the larvae hatch and burrow into the skin unnoticed, feeding for about 6-weeks, but as they grow, the area becomes a very noticeable lesion that festers until an inch long maggot pops out! I'll second that EEWWW!
It's bad enough we have bugs attacking us and living on us daily but we certainly don't have to eat any, right? Actually, all of us eat bugs daily. It's practically impossible not to, not with the millions of dust mites crawling on our beds and around the house, and all the acceptable levels of insect parts that the government permits in our processed foods like grain and even ketchup. So if you eat bread, which comes from grain, you're eating insects. To illustrate the issue, a famous entomologist told a story about a colleague who was allergic to cockroaches. He couldn’t drink preground coffee because it was processed from huge stockpiles of coffee beans, which gets infested with cockroaches; so beans and cockroaches get ground up together. Don’t fret. Chocolate lovers have the same problem because cocoa beans are processed the same way. Anyone for a fresh, hot cup of Cockroaches? Of course, humans have been eating bugs for ages. Only in the US and Europe is there a stigma attached to it.
So you wouldn't intentionally eat a bug. Well, some common candies actually use insect excretions to make the candy. I'm not referring to honey, which comes from bees, but the red coloring called carmine, from the cochineal bug, or the lac coating from scale bugs used to cover some popular candies. Although, there is a popular myth that this coating, sometimes called confectioner's glaze, is used on M&M's, Mars Inc. claims they have never used it. Here's more information about bugs in our candy.
And while all this may seem creepy, bugs actually have it worse. Some bugs are parasitized themselves in grizzly ways, like the lancet fluke that forces ants to climb grass so they'll be eaten by cows, or the Sacculina barnacle that turns male crabs into barnacle bearing zombies. Wow. Now that really bugs me!
Here are some pictures of bugs that often cause people to think they've discovered something new:
But not all bugs are creepy. Some are quite stunning:
And though most bugs are small, at one time some were giant. Below are drawings depicting a human with various extinct bugs, although the coconut crab still exists today:
There are many other creepy and neat things bugs do, but I'm going to save those for the novel. I hope you'll give it a try. You'll learn a lot about insects, and have a good time doing it!
