It’s the dizzying transitions of scale that best characterise our complicated relationship with insect lives: zooming in, to peer in ghastly fascination at parasitoid fairy flies, small enough to parasitise not the bodies but the eggs of other insects; zooming out, to gawp at the boggling vastness of insect populations (there may be as many as – or indeed more than – 10 million species; the total weight of ants in the Amazon is about four times the combined weight of all the vertebrates there). Entomologist and filmmaker Steve Nicholls handles all this, and much more, with considerable deftness in this exhilarating gallop through the hexapod cosmos.
A well-judged introduction (‘Insects 101’) leads us gently into chapters exploring the extraordinary everyday lives of Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera, Coleoptera and the rest: how they’re made, what they do, how they reproduce, and – here’s the rub – how we’d cope without them (not well, is the answer here: ‘the simple fact,’ Nicholls writes, ‘is that we need insects far more than they need us’).
Two questions are likely to recur to the reader as they pass from the ‘controlled plummets’ of gliding ants to the diving abilities of brine flies (observed by an impressed Mark Twain) to the virgin births of webspinners to the sad predilection of some Australian jewel beetles to try to have sex with discarded beer bottles. One, how did this come about? Two, how on earth do we know this?
On the first point, Nicholls, like any good Darwinian, doesn’t shy away from difficult questions; rather, he sees them as intriguing – if intractable – puzzles. He walks us thoughtfully through the probable evolutionary pathways of the insect body-plan, arthropod mouthparts, wings and flight, plant-pollinator relationships, grasshopper songs and locust swarming. Here, again, he demonstrates his mastery of scale and scope, skilfully evoking the depths of evolutionary time as well as the breadth of entomological diversity.
But it’s on the second point that Nicholls really excels. His knowledgable and good-humoured engagement with the human side of entomology elevates Alien Worlds above the ranks of insect primers and handbooks. He has a fund of his own stories to tell from a long and globetrotting career in wildlife filmmaking – like the time he set up a colony of termites in a Borneo hotel room, only to find that his ‘escape-proof’ polythene sheeting was less than 100% effective – but the book also illuminates the startling lengths to which other scientists and naturalists have gone in order to enrich our understanding of life on six legs. Counting the chambers of ant nests (7,864), measuring the running speeds of tiger beetles and the G-forces undergone by planthoppers, redirecting mayfly swarms using LEDs, building robot dragonflies, developing a ‘barfing blue jay’ test to assess the efficacy of insect warning signals – it’s clear from all this that entomology, like any science, is a living process, an on-going exploration, and not something pinned, preserved, and reeking of mothballs. Real ecological heroes emerge, too: Fred Urquhart and Ken and Cathy Brugger, for instance, finally pinpointing the remote winter home of the monarch butterfly in the Sierra Madre, or – no less heroic, in a different sense – Justin Schmidt, creator of the Schmidt Pain Index, which ranks insect stings on a scale of one to four (along with a pithy review: ‘Shockingly electric’, ‘Torture. Why did I start this list?’). Underpinning all this strange and terrible wonder is the knowledge – set out clearly, starkly, but never sensationalised or over-egged – that this alien world is under terrible strain. Globally, insect populations ‘have crashed in an alarming way’. Nicholls again draws together the human and the ecological: ‘In some places,’ he writes in conclusion, ‘there were ten times as many insects crawling, hopping and flying about when I began my studies as there are now.’ Alien Worlds is an entrancing, moving exploration of the insect story – of the innumerable little lives flickering about us, how they came to be here, and how they may soon be lost forever.
This review was first published in New Scientist in 2023.
Richard Smyth 