TM

A Buzz in the Meadow

Rating

9/10

I enjoyed this book because I am a nerd and I like to listen to other nerds telling me about their nerdy stuff. I also enjoyed it because it’s an inspiration to set up a wild garden and provide a sanctuary for insects that they so desperately need in a world of cities, large-scale agriculture and seemingly uncontrolled pesticide use. Unfortunately, it also paints a bleak picture of our future, since very few of us seem to be concerned about biodiversity collapse and the effects it will have on our own survival.

The day I finished reading this book, the following headline appeared on the front page of Guardian: UK bumblebee numbers fell to lowest on record in 2024 shows data

So everything that Dave Goulson warns about in this book has been and still keeps coming true… the insect populations are collapsing and all we are worrying about is the next iPhone and whether some crazy narcissist in Kremlin or Washington won’t decide to press a red button and blow it all up… sadly and worryingly so! The book is over 10 years old when I am writing this - it was written in 2014 - and since then it seems we changed very little in our pesticide use, waste processing, nature conservation, and I could go on and on. I’m personally sad and worried the more I learn about all the problems we find ourselves in due to short-sighted decisions we took at the beginning of the last century. The plastics are biting us back in our asses. The pesticide are doing the same. The Co2 is accumulating beyond any historical measures in the past million or so years. We are killing biodiversity at an estimated 100,000 higher rate than would be expected without all of our activity. On one hand we are fighting cancer, on the other, we are creating it, being it.

This book is a gentle and genuine love letter for insects and their beautiful diversity and function they serve in the web of life. But it is also a warning message from one of us to all of us. From a guy who studied a tiny part of the whole web of life, but realized that every piece in it is as important as any other, and collapsing one, leads to a cascade of effects we don’t and probably never will understand. So I’m both happy I read it and sad that I read it because 10 years have passed and we seem to be in even deeper shit than we were in 2014. At what point do we cross all the tipping points and there will be no going back? I want to live in a world full of diversity and beauty created by millions of years of evolution instead of man-made, bleak, one-dimensional world of concrete, plastics and cigarette butts.

Synopsis

An introduction to the world of insects by an “insect professor” who bought a farm in rural France and built a wild meadow sanctuary for flowers and bumblebees. Expect to learn a lot about the world of insects, from their navigational skills to their sexual appetites. And then have your dreams of wonderful insect world crushed by the realization of how our own activity is encroaching on their space and slowly but surely exterminating them all… :(

Notes

  • of 1.5 million known species of plant and animals about 1 million are insects and of those about 800,000 are either flies, beetles, moths or wasps! (p. 28 - numbers as of 2014)
    • looks like since 2014 we managed to identify way more species. According to Our World in Data we know of more than 2 million animal and plant species of which over 1 million are still insects!
  • praying mantis males can cum even after their lady decapitates their head - dedication!
  • Chapter 6 makes me wanna do a PhD that involves some field study! What a cool life - half the time you are doing statistics, the other half you are walking through nature, counting some random ass plant, making a dataset for yourself - love it! :)
  • it’s fascinating how pollination is kind of an involved game between plants and pollinators where plants are trying to maximize their reproductive success and pollinators their foraging yield. Nature found so many different ways to achieve each of these goals and created an intricate web of interactions we will never truly understand. It’s beautiful, both intellectually and to the eye. It reminds me of the Feynman’s quote about the beauty of a flower: 
    I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.
  • due to their shifted vision spectrum, bees and bumblebees don’t see red and prefer yellow or purple flowers. They also see in ultraviolet. It has likewise been observed that they prefer bilaterally symmetric flowers over other symmetries or asymmetric flowers
  • some ant species breed aphids in their nests, essentially creating an aphid farm, because these aphids go on to suck sap from plants and they provide excess sugars back to the ants
  • aphids reproduce by cloning and baby aphid can already be born with baby aphids inside of it - what?!
  • an insect is defined as: a small arthropod animal that has six legs and generally one or two pairs of wings
    • and arthropod is an invertebrate with an exoskeleton, aka skeleton on the outside instead of on the inside
  • The SLOSS debate is an argument from the 1970s between two tribes of ecologists arguing either for one large protected habitat or many smaller ones for the most optimal conservation of species. The current consensus is that neither is superior and depending on the species and their habitat, one or the other might be better suited for conservation.
    • many small habitats that are divided but with connected corridors may be suitable for species that live in so-called metapopulations, like e.g. some butterflies. Metapopulations are populations were seemingly disconnected smaller groups of the same species live in small areas were they pop in and out of existence every now and then. They maintain their genetic diversity by few individuals migrating between these disconnected groups and restarting new populations elsewhere
  • at any point in time a species might be doomed to extinction due to low genetic variation remaining in its population. So even if it’s not yet extinct, there is pretty much nothing we can do to stop it from disappearing. This is especially true for organisms like bees and bumblebees where reproduction is achieved by a single queen and thus many nests in one area are needed for genetic mixing to occur. If only a few nests are left in the general living area of a bumblebee population the whole population will slowly but surely degenerate until it vanishes. This is precisely how we might be slowly and painfully exterminating many species by use of pesticides and pollution that impedes their reproductive ability, reduces their genetic variety and sends them down a degenerative spiral of doom
  • p. 243: the notion that our primitive ancestors were climate conscious or lived non-exploitatively towards nature is apparently just wishful thinking. We’ve been exploiting our environment ever since we “colonized” the world. There is plenty of evidence that we are responsible for the extinction of most if not all of the large mammals in Europe, North America and Australia