(1/25) Appreciating Nature’s Tiny Workers

Insects! People have many different reactions to insects, everything from creepy-crawlie (cringe) to way cool! From "How do I get rid of them?" to "Beautiful!" and "Fascinating!" From "Ick!! Get it away!" to "I’m glad I have this beneficial garden helper." I imagine the reaction has more to do with how old the person is, with most kids finding them finding them fascinating. Or how adults in our life reacted to them when we were kids. Or whether a farmer finds them making a serious dent in his bottom line.

There are about 900,000 species of living insects that have been described and named; that’s 80 percent of the world's known species. Conservative estimates suggest that there are at least 2 million yet to be discovered, described, and named.

How do we humans compare to insects? Insects have been present for about 350 million years, and humans for only 300,000 years. They have had a chance to evolve to inhabit almost the entire world, to fly long before small dinosaurs glided from trees, and to develop an impressive number of shapes and ways to thrive. Humans needed to invent technologies to match the capabilities of insects. As strange as it sounds, the biomass (i.e., the weight) of all living insects in the entire world is greater than the biomass of all humans. Well, consider the number of insects in the world compared to the human population.

Most people really don’t recognize many insects. Folks living in urbanized areas see very few different species, while those in rural areas encounter many more. This may be changing since many cities are realizing the value of planting native and pollinator friendly public gardens and community gardens. I don’t know how many insect species you have living in your piece of the world, but it’s likely to be more than you realize.

That might get us wondering how all these insects exist together without interfering with each other. Ecologists describe the concept of an organism’s niche, or all the interactions an organism has with the living and nonliving world. Because any organism has numerous encounters with other organisms in every kind of habitat, they each carved out a piece of that environment in which to live, eat, and reproduce. No two species can have exactly the same niche, though the niches of two or more species often overlap. No matter how similar two species are in their appearance, habits and food preferences, their niches are not the same.

Here’s an example of two similar beetles you have probably seen in your garden; you will readily recognize one but you may not be familiar with the second. They are the Pennsylvania firefly and the Pennsylvania soldier beetle (a.k.a. Pennsylvania leatherwing beetle). Each species has its own niche so they each inhabit our gardens at the same time.

They’re similar in size, but the adult soldier beetle has much less black in its shorter wings. How are the niches different? The firefly inhabits both fields and open woods; the soldier beetle is found in fields and gardens. The firefly larvae eat soft-bodied insects, snails, slugs, and worms, while the soldier beetle larvae eat aphids, small caterpillars, and other soft-bodied insects. Both eat at pollen and nectar as adults. I like to have both beneficial insects around my yard, so I garden in a way that makes it inviting to soldier beetles, fireflies, and my other garden helpers.

These are just two of the many beneficial insects that can be found in a typical Adams County garden. I’m not patient enough to be good at insect identification, and I realize there are lots of insects whose names I don’t know in my garden. But I know more of them are helpful than harmful.

Besides pollinating and preying on pests, there are other important chores that insects and their kin handle. We rely on Arthropods – insects and their jointed-legged kin – as well as a host of smaller forms of life – for their soil building and aerating. With the help of soil microorganisms, they shred and consume compostable debris (both animal and plant debris!), recycling it into soil nutrients.

Several orders of insects have a clever strategy of dividing food resources: the soft-bodied larvae (caterpillar, grub or maggot) consume different food than the hard-bodied adult (butterfly, beetle, or fly). Since caterpillars eat mainly foliage, we notice them but don’t consider the detritus-ingesting grubs and maggots. Nature enables prolific reproduction for insects that start life as caterpillars, grubs, and maggots, which are the best foods of several animals further up the food chain.

Do you appreciate songbirds in your yard? Plants transform sunlight energy into the stems, leaves, roots, flowers, and seeds of plants. Much of this energy becomes available to songbirds, especially the chicks, as consumable insects, mainly caterpillars. Nestlings need a lot of nutrition in an easily digestible form to quickly become flying birds, and caterpillars are nature’s most efficient choice.

There are several other insect species providing soft-bodied larvae for their young, particularly wasps. Many wasp species, both colonial and solitary, lay their eggs in chambers along with food in the form of a paralyzed beetle grub or other larva. Parasitoid wasps lay their eggs directly in a caterpillar, allowing their young to eat and grow inside the safety of their victim. Wasps are not as mean as you might think, and they are as interesting as bees. Most are solitary and don’t want to sting you; social wasps – e.g., yellow jackets – are social and defend a nest.

Insects – in all their life stages, soft-bodied and hard-bodied – are food for spiders, many small mammals, frogs, fish, salamanders, lizards, bats and other insect-eating animals. They are the most efficient link taking sunlight energy in the form of plants and making it available further up the food chain.

This year make a garden resolution that you will start watching insects more. You will see beautiful and dull, large and small, slow and fast, fascinating and, most of all, helpful.