TKM

I had a dream last night that our home was infested with giant cockroaches that I could not kill. They were too smart and agile to stomp on, and spraying them with Raid only pissed them off. In sharp contrast to the other dream I remember from last night, in which my supervisor told me I should definitely ask for a $20,000 raise and that he’d make sure I got it, the cockroach dream was one of sheer terror.

I’ve never thought twice about stomping cockroaches when I see them in our detached garage; if I let them live out there, I figure, it’s just a matter of time before they’ll ask to come inside. And actually, they won’t ask.

Spiders, on the other hand, I’ve always treated with a kind, if not downright welcoming, manner. When I see one in the house I generally go find a newspaper or Dixie cup to gently scoop it up so that I can release it into the backyard. If you’re a bit of an arachnophobe and don’t want to get quite that close to the little guy, here’s a transfer gadget that probably breaks when you look at it funny.

Me, I don’t even bother depositing spiders far from the house; I just open the door and set them down to make their merry way where they will. There are times when I see a spider far up the bathroom wall and think, Meh, let it be, but that’s usually because it just seems like too much trouble to go get a stepstool. I may even feel a little lazy or guilty in those instances because I know that the spider needs insect prey to survive—I really ought to put it outside where it can thrive, but again, I have to go get the stepstool.

Concern for insects’ nutritional needs, I’ve recently learned, is not a personal quirk. On Friday night my wife and I went to see Cheryl Wheeler play live at McCabe’s Guitar Shop, where Wheeler asked whether anyone in the audience followed her practice in hotel rooms whereby when she encounters a fly and can’t manage to shoo it out a window or door, she goes to the vending machine to buy it something to eat—usually a granola bar—because she worries that it will starve in the sparse confines of a hotel room. I adore Cheryl Wheeler.

I have to admit that I kill indoor flies, and even outdoor ones if they get to be a nuisance on the patio. Choosing a fly-control method is its own nuisance. I’ve always thought of fly strips as trashy and bug zappers as cruel, so last summer we purchased a trap that you load with bait-infused water; flies enter for the delicious attractant (which smells like sewer water, but no one ever accused fecal-dwelling flies of having good taste), find themselves unable to escape, and drown in the water. That’s cruel too, I realize, but it was one of the few truly effective solutions out there (said online knowers) that I thought wouldn’t be gross to look at and handle. Besides, at least the poor fellas would have a good meal before they died.

I was wrong about the not-gross part. As the dead flies collected in the reservoir they became a liquefied pool of death, and if I was tardy in emptying the container—for which I wore a dust mask and Playtex gloves—maggots would begin to spawn in the death pool. It was, frankly, one of the most disgusting tasks I’ve ever been forced to confront.

This summer, with due diligence, I discovered (through other online knowers) a not-at-all-gross fly deterrent that seems to work pretty well. Apparently, the crap-eating, garbage-loving, maggoty little beasts despise basil. Enter basil plant on patio. Not so much trouble with the flies this year, though I’ll admit to some suspicion that the enormous number of flies trapped on our patio last season was in part a result of the trap’s bait attracting more flies to our patio.  At any rate, even if our relatively fly-free summer wasn’t really about the basil, the plant smells great and can be useful in cooking besides. Win-win.

But the question remains, why so hostile toward flies and cockroaches while kind toward spiders and “cute” insects like butterflies and ladybugs? There’s a good argument to be made for usefulness to the environment. Spiders control insect populations, butterflies help pollinate gardens, and ladybugs eat aphids, a common garden pest (in the 1980s, after Southern California was blanketed with several cycles of overnight malathion spraying via crop planes to control a fruit fly infestation, ladybugs also disappeared, after which aphids ran rampant in household gardens and commercial orchards; when humans mess with shit, other shit gets messed up).

Flies and cockroaches, on the other hand, are omnivorous refuse dwellers who spread germs and disease. That’s probably why we have a superhero called Spider-Man and not one called Cockroach-Man.

Sing it with me: “Cockroach-Man, Cockroach-Man, does whatever a cockroach can!”

But eating garbage is purposeful, and we humans produce an awful lot of it. We also happen to be omnivorous consumers who efficiently spread germs and disease. So we either discriminate against flies and cockroaches because they’re ugly (and we’re shallow) or because we’re competitively jealous.

Consider the cockroach, which can survive for up to a month without food, up to 45 minutes without air, and up to 30 minutes underwater. It can slow down its heart rate at will and can withstand up to 15 times the amount of radiation that would be lethal to the average person. It is one of the fastest insects (or animals) on the planet, clocking speeds of 50 body lengths per second, the equivalent of a human running 205 miles per hour. And unlike their relatively short-lived insect pals, a cockroach can live for up to a year.

The housefly, by contrast, lives only 15 to 30 days, but what it lacks in life quality it makes up for in reproductive quantity, with the ability to lay up to 500 eggs during a single cycle—oh, and females reach sexual maturity at 36 hours old. Here’s a couple of flies getting some.

Houseflies are really anything but common: They can walk on walls and ceilings and, of course, they can fly, all feats of storied human fantasy. They’re also pure ninjas. Professor Michael Dickinson of the California Institute of Technology released a study in 2008 revealing that a fly’s brain is able to anticipate a threat, calculate the angle of attack, and evade the maneuver in the course of 100 milliseconds. Though Dickinson has an affinity for flies owing to their technical talents and claims that he personally never swats them, his research has at last given humans’ fly-swatting technique game.

Given all that potential, Dickinson might ask, what’s not to like about the housefly—except for the fact that they constantly vomit and deposit fecal matter on household surfaces?

It’s not like spiders are Polly Perfect. Some of them bite, as I was reminded Thursday night when I couldn’t get comfortable in bed and discovered an irritated red bump on my rump. I’m fine now, thanks. Apparently it wasn’t a brown recluse spider, a species whose bites can kill you dead. I would post a picture here of an advanced BRS bite, but I don’t want to ugly up my blog that much—and I say that having posted that cockroach picture. But go ahead, take a moment now to look up “brown recluse spider bite” in Google images, then try to come back and not hate on me.

The good news is that, as implied by their name, brown recluse spiders don’t so much like people…or other animals or insects for that matter—they prefer to scavenge for dead insects rather than live prey. But they take up residence in dark, undisturbed spaces like attics and basements, and they hunt for food far from their webs—which they use for nesting, not trapping—and tend to take temporary refuge during hunting expeditions in bedding and such. So while they would just as soon not come in contact with humans, and humans would way rather not come in contact with them, the opportunities during which we might meet each other unexpectedly are rife—and then they try to kill us.

My spider bite has proven unfatal thus far. Still, I feel utterly betrayed. After all that not-killing, some spider up and bites me on the ass. It was probably one of those that I saw in the house and ignored—now starving because I killed all its flies—and if the bite wasn’t enough to get my attention, now the little fucker is sending giant cockroaches to haunt my dreams. A fitting retribution, I imagine, for our delineation of good insect from bad, beautiful from ugly, friend from nuisance, welcome guest from marked for death.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 13th, 2009 at 11:00 pm and is filed under home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.