A little Gray Building
88
My last reason for liking bugs is a bit deeper. I acknowledge that without them I literally would not exist and could not survive. This may sound like either exaggeration on the one hand, or a tautology on the other—we know that all life is connected, so the same could be said for trees or birds or bacteria. This is true, but I find that people are more willing to accept that they owe their lives to trees than to spiders, despite both things being true. Bugs were the very first land animals, and as early colonizers they began to transform the continents in ways that paved the way for our ancestors to follow. Their burrowing, decomposing, and excreting tilled and enriched soils with nutrients, allowing for further plants to grow and new habitats to develop. They continue to act as a major force of decomposition, taking the nutrients that are locked within the bodies of dead plants and animals and recycling them into a usable form again. Aside from preparing and modifying the land’s environment, bugs are part of practically every food chain—acting as an essential food source for many of the cuddlier creatures we tend to care more about. A variety of species act as pollinators keeping wild plants and our domestic crops in fruit. Bugs are also a significant source of protein in the diet of about two thirds of the world’s human population. We Westerners would do well to overcome our squeamishness about eating bugs, because insect protein is more sustainable to produce than mammal or bird meat.
Finally, I will acknowledge that some bugs are pests. Even I don’t enjoy flies and mosquitos buzzing around my head or a stinkbug infestation in the house. But perhaps you can develop a new respect for spiders and the thankless work they do which benefits us. They make bug pests occasional annoyances, rather than our daily existence. Swiss scientist Martin Nyffeler has estimated that worldwide, spiders consume between 300 and 800 million metric tons of food each year. For perspective, the weight of the meat and fish humans consume in one year (and also the weight of all living humans) is about 400 million metric tons. Put another way, without spiders dining on other bugs, we would add about 2000 kilograms (4400 pounds) of bugs per year to every square mile of land on the planet. So the next time you see a spider, you can thank it for the fact that you aren’t wading through ankle-deep bugs (even if some of us might be okay with that . . . ).