Everything about Nature is a miracle!! … “But aphids, an indistinct haze, will swarm at densities up to 250 times greater than that of butterflies. In fact, these tiny ones — the aphids, the thrips, the microlepidoptera, the smallest beetles, the smallest parasitic wasps, all barely visible to the human eye — form the overwhelming majority of species and individuals of the class Insecta […].
– Hugh Raffles, Insectopedia. (Vintage; June 26, 2010)
Stop. If you’re inside, go to a window. Throw it open and turn your face to the sky. All that empty space, the deep vastness of the air, the heavens wide above you. The sky is full of insects, and all of them are going somewhere. Every day, above and around us, the collective voyage of billions of beings.
…There are other worlds around us. Too often, we pass through them unknowing, seeing but blind, hearing but deaf, touching but not feeling, contained by the limits of our senses, the banality of our imaginations, our Ptolemaic certitudes. […]
They had heard about the butterflies, gnats, water striders, leaf bugs, booklice, and katydids sighted hundreds of miles out on the open ocean; about the aphids that Captain William Parry had encountered on ice floes during his polar expedition of 1828; and about those other aphids that, in 1925, made the 800-mile…
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It Is What It Is 