Once, in a dank and ferny corner of the greenhouse, I came upon a big beetle burying a wren. It was not so extraordinary that the little bird should have died (unable, perhaps, to remember the hole it came in by and eventually running out of spiders and moths), but the chance of watching such a burial by a sexton beetle – the name arrived from somewhere – was a one-off kind of occasion.
The insect was black-bodied, glossy, with bright-orange, bushy antennae. It was working alone, whereas the burying beetles more often celebrated on Google are a woodland kind with bright-orange bands on their bodies, seen working in marital pairs, and thus, perhaps, more likely to catch the human eye.
This one, Nicrophorus humator , had yet to attract a mate but meanwhile laboured on, using its pointy, jagged forelegs to drag crumbs of soil backwards from beneath the wren's feathers.
It was going to be a long job, but it didn’t mind me watching. Insects never do: it’s part of their otherness, like the disturbing animation that moves their robotic little legs.
As the wren sank crumb by crumb into the soil I went indoors to read up on burying beetles, the genus Nicrophorus .
I did know their purpose, to provide a hidden larder for their grubs, and thus, in the process, recycle the wren’s constituents, but not that they would spray its skin with antibacterial enzymes to slow the bird’s decay underground. These, apparently, are rich in lysozymes, also secreted in mammalian breast milk and human tears, such is the ramifying biochemistry of life.
Finding out about insects, so rich in the unexpected, has definitely improved some of my attitudes. A once-wincing distaste for earwigs, for example, has become somewhat more benign from knowing that, much like the burying beetles, they make fantastic mothers.
What more knowledge cannot assuage, it seems, is my lingering arachnophobia. Drawn to read a challenging new book called The Infested Mind: Why Humans Fear, Loathe, and Love Insects (Oxford University Press, £16.99), I had to cover the hairy tarantula on page 120 with my hand before I could learn more about the benefits of cognitive behavioural therapy.
Blind panic
The book's American author, Jeffrey Lockwood, a widely respected entomologist for decades, describes, as a prologue, his own episode of blind panic when a swarm of his professionally chosen species, the grasshopper, rose to envelop him from a gully on a Wyoming prairie. The irrational terror and revulsion as he fled to his vehicle haunted him for years. It helped, eventually, to move him on from science to teaching university philosophy and creative writing (which I'm sure he does rather well).
It certainly makes him a sympathetic analyst of the anxiety, fear and disgust that so often distort the human relationship with insects. How far we’re born scared, as a cautionary evolutionary reflex against harm or disease, and how much is culturally conditioned earns a wide exploration.
A mini-trauma of my own childhood, at a therapeutic "open air" school in Surrey, was the fluttering panic of nuns on discovering a big, black specimen of Tegenaria domestica , the house spider, in one of the dormitory washbasins. They ran to pour whisky on it – imagine! Is this why, while regarding spiders equably enough outdoors, a dark and twisted tomato calyx left casually on a kitchen counter can still arouse a split-second shudder?
Lockwood is persuaded that young women are especially prone to irrational fear of insects and snakes and so pass this on, as mothers, to the great bulk of humankind.
In highly urbanised society it can provoke the ultimate in paranoia, so that wildly excessive reactions to the recent rise of bedbugs in eastern US cities give Lockwood cause to drag in vampires, horror films and darker fears of sex.
Biophilia
How, then, does he think we should relate to insects, even those which so arouse our distaste? He deals coolly with the theorists of "biophilia", the notion that humans have an innate affinity with the natural world, integral to development of our species, if only we'd bother to learn more about it.
The term “biophilia” was coined by the great evolutionary biologist and student of insect societies EO Wilson, of Harvard University. Lockwood relates with some satisfaction how Wilson, offered a huge, hairy and leg-waving spider by children in New Guinea, felt – in his own later writing – “panicky and sick”.
“To each his own,” Wilson added.
Lockwood does his best to discover in the emotions of entomophobia – both Wilson’s and his own – the seeds of its opposite, entomophilia.
Meanwhile, day to day, a simple acceptance of insects might, he suggests, be a start for overcoming our fear of the unfamiliar and learning to tolerate differences.