Who Doesn't Love Bugs?

Once again I find myself reading such a good book that just I have to tell everybody, in hopes that at least one of you out there will be "infected" by my enthusiasm enough to actually read it too.

This one is called Insectopedia by Hugh Raffles.

“As inventive and wide ranging and full of astonishing surprises as the vast insect world itself. Raffles takes us on a delirious journey” –the New York Times.

Here’s a quote:

They estimated that at any given time on any given day throughout the year, the air column rising from 50 to 14,000 feet above one square mile of Louisiana countryside contained an average of 25 million insects and perhaps as many as 36 million.

They found ladybugs at 6,000 feet during the daytime, striped cucumber beetles at 3,000 feet during the night. They collected three scorpion flies at 5,000 feet, thirty-one fruit flies between 200 and 3,000 feet, a fungus gnat at 7,000 and another at 10,000. They caught wingless worker ants as high as 4,000 feet and sixteen species of parasitic ichneumon wasps at altitudes up to 5,000 feet.

At 15,000 feet, “probably the highest elevation at which any specimen has ever been taken above the surface of the earth,” they trapped a ballooning spider, a feat that reminded Glick of spiders thought to have circumnavigated the globe on the trade winds and let him to write that “the young of most spiders are more or less addicted to this mode of transportation.” an image of excited little animals packing their luggage that opened a small rupture in the consensus around the passivity of all this airborne movement and let to Glick’s subsequent observation that ballooning spiders not only climb up to an exposed dist (a twig or a flower, for instance), stand on tiptoe, raise their abdomen, test the atmosphere, throw out silk filaments, and launch themselves into the blue, all free legs spread-eagled, but that they also use their bodies and their silk to control their descent and the location of their landing.

Thirty-six million little animals flying unseen above one square mile of countryside? The heavens opened. The air column was “a vault of insect-laden air” from which fell “a continuous rain.”