Though I am undoubtedly an insect, I do not inspire the same fear and revulsion as many of my cousins, unless I am infected with the horsehair worm. Then, my appearance is grotesque, the stuff of nightmares, and my suicidal behavior even more so.
I am a zombie cricket about to drown myself so the parasite I carry can, a horsehair worm, reproduce. My appearance is grotesque, the stuff of nightmares. The worm larva inside my digestive tract has grown into its adult stage, sticking out of my normally smooth exoskeleton like dozens of rotting hairs the species is named for, as if I was festooned with extra, reedy appendages, poking out random directions, none of them good, and this is only what you can see on the outside. The bright sheen of chitin, a protein shared by all insects to make our magnificent, whimsical, and at times fearful shapes, that protected me from the elements is dulled as well, mottled and brown as the parasite takes me over entirely, the hairs penetrating my every organ. So horrifying am I, my plight was the inspiration for the human zombies in “The Last of Us,” marking me as no longer in control of my actions in addition to hideously deformed. Rather than chirp for a mate as my healthy cousins do, I remain silent, possessed of only one purpose: Find water and jump into it, even if it will kill me. As a cricket, I have no memory and very little awareness to speak of. I do not know why I would normally chirp for a mate, or even if I ever did so myself. I am not aware that the song of a cricket fills summer nights across most of the world, a soothing sound of the season, capable of conjuring warm memories from a single note, or that it comes from rubbing our wings together, where specially evolved file-like serrations scrape to produce a lilting, specific, carefully crafted harmony. I do not know that most animals have chosen a less expressive mating dance, fearful of calling attention to themselves, or that my own dance has evolved special means of protection because it is so vocal. The sounds we make are very difficult for an organism like a human with “regular” ears to locate. When most animals hear our chirping, it seems to come from everywhere and nowhere because we use a specific periodicity and wavelength that is difficult to pinpoint using stereo hearing, where direction is determined based on the difference in pick up between the left and right ear. My ears work differently however. In fact, they are located in my front legs, and rather than two inputs, I use four. While you might not be able to find me singing my song, my mate can, initiating a timeless ritual. Once she is near, I will change my tune to a specific courtship melody, one that she hopefully cannot resist, compelled by evolution the same as I am. If she comes close enough, I will transfer my sperm to her in a package – and then promptly make a fast escape, as some females have been known to start devouring their mate’s wings shortly after they receive our sperm.
Speaking of wings, I was born without them. I begin life by crawling out of an egg, hidden in the soil or some other damp area, as a nymph, left to survive entirely on my own by parents that will never know me and I never know them. Like a human baby, I look like my parents, only smaller and without wings, born about the size of a fruit fly. Over the course of one to two months, I will molt my chitinous exoskeleton eight to ten times, growing substantially each time, before finally spreading my wings, ready to breed. Of course, all of this growth requires a lot of food and like most of my fellow insects, I am not picky in that regard. I will happily devour leaves, fruit, other insects, and even other crickets, basically whatever is at hand, whether it is live or dead. Though I am undoubtedly an insect, a part of the Grylloidea superfamily that is related to grasshoppers, dating back to the Triassic period some 200 million years ago, and today contains some 3,700 species arranged in over 500 genera, I do not inspire the same fear and revulsion as many of my cousins. There is something about my smooth, cylindrical shape and clean body, with a round head and protruding antenna, along with my powerful hind legs for jumping that humans have generally found cute. As such, I have frequently been featured in literature throughout the ages. For example, I have appeared in Charles Dickens’ 1845 Cricket on the Hearth, a Christmas book where the chapters are actually referred to as “chirps” and a cricket happily chirps away, beside the fire, during the holiday season. Perhaps most famously, a personified version of my kind features prominently in the Adventure of Pinocchio, where I live in Geppetto’s house for over a century, and serve as something of the famous wooden boy who wants to be real’s conscience. When I inform Pinocchio that he needs to either go to school or work to make it in this world, telling him that “You are a puppet and what’s worse is that you have a head of wood,” he crushes me with a hammer. I reappear as a ghost, however, helping to guide the wooden child who killed me.
Very few insects are accorded this level of affection, however. Most of my kind are reviled, and perhaps not surprisingly so, because we are strange and alien. Our bones are on the outside of our bodies, and almost every organ we have works differently, though their basic building blocks and even some of the genes are the same. I already mentioned that my ears were in my legs. As if that weren’t weird enough, also have dozens of eyes, made up of hundreds of tiny lenses, each with their own cornea and light receptive cells; these compound eyes are more visible and recognizable staring at a fly. These are supplemented by three “simple” eyes mounted on top of my head, between the compound ones, that can detect changes in light and dark, a dorsal rim area that allows me to orient myself in my environment by polarizing light, and a special circadian rhythm oscillator that lets me know what time of day it is, so that I may sing almost exclusively at night, were I not a slave to a parasite. I use my antenna for detecting movement and differentiating between females, prey, and predators, and to smell. Otherwise, I have no sense of touch. Inside my body, I have two brains, known as ganglia. Both are in my head, but are separated by the ventral nerve cord and are much, much smaller than anything you would find in a mammal. As a result, I am not very smart or capable of learning new things. In fact, we may seem like mere automatons to humans, completely devoid of anything resembling sentience and reason. The naturalist and author, C. H. Eisemann described our seemingly mindless and brutal behavior in 1984, “No example is known to us of an insect showing protective behavior to injured body parts, such as limping after a leg injury or declining to feed or mate because of general abdominal injuries. On the contrary, our experience has been that insects will continue with normal activities even after severe injury or the removal of body parts. An insect walking with a crushed tarsus, for example, will continue applying to the substrate with undiminished force. Among our other observations are those on a locust that continued to feed whilst itself being eaten by a mantis; aphids continuing to feed whilst being eaten by coccinellids; a tsetse fly which flew into feed although half-dissected; caterpillars which continue to feed whilst tachinid larvae bore into them; many insects which go about their normal life whilst being eaten by large internal parasitoids; and male mantids which continue to mate as they are being eaten by their partners.” Recently, however, some like Professor Jonathan Birch have concluded that our behavior is far more complex, especially our reactions to pain, and we might be sentient like our mammalian “friends.”
At the same time, we should all hope that isn’t the case after I have become infected with horsehair worm larva. If you think insects are alien, you ain’t seen nothing yet to use the old expression. These worms, which are not actually worms but nematodes, a very simple and ancient race of creatures, of which there are over 350 species in the horsehair family, who begin their lives under water. After their eggs hatch, they float around, presenting themselves as tasty little morsels, attractive to aquatic insects including mosquitos and mayflies, also in their larval stage. The unsuspecting baby insect eats the worm larva, only to have it encyst in their digestive tract for their entire lives. Strangely, the cysts presence doesn’t hinder the insect in any way. Unlike me, the mosquito or mayfly goes about their business as though the parasite inside them wasn’t there, living, eating, mating, and then dying as they normally would. After they die, however, their decaying exoskeletons make an attractive meal for an enterprising cricket like myself, not above scavenging for what looks like a free meal. Unknowingly, I devour the carcass and consume the cyst. Once inside my body, the cyst activates, prompting the larva to mature into the adult form of the worm, sticking through my organs and my own exoskeleton, transforming me into a monster, and taking control of all my actions. I lose all interest in mating or even eating. In a classic case of what the famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’ referred to as The Extended Phenotype, the genes of the worm hijack my own nervous system, transforming me into a suicidal slave. First, it prevents me from chirping to avoid predators. Second, it forces me to find water, water I am normally afraid of because of predatory fish and that I am not a good swimmer. Under control of the horsehair worm, however, I jump right in, only to drown, where the worm will lay eggs again and restart the cycle.
By any standard, this is a gruesome end, but fortunately or unfortunately, I am a cricket and I don’t know anything about beginnings or endings, life or death, I simply am or I guess in the case of a cricket infected with horsehair worm, am not. There is, necessarily, a biological, evolutionary, and philosophical lesson here. The horsehair worm is fully dependent on me for reproduction, but it doesn’t reproduce the same way I do, therefore it has evolved to manipulate and discard me, a mere carrier to be disposed of. Dr. Dawkins believes this distinction is critical to how all life has evolved. While my very existence as a cricket is dependent on bacteria and organisms that I am not directly related to, for example E coli bacteria in my digestive tract the same as humans, other parasites like the horsehair worm are not so accommodating to the point of forcing other organisms to commit suicide. Why the difference between friendly and unfriendly? Dr. Dawkins attributes this to how they replicate themselves, either vertically through us or another animal, or horizontally by spreading from individual to individual like the common cold. In his view, the “goal” of both types of genes is to achieve a sort of immortality by copying themselves into infinity. If they propagate vertically, vertico as he calls it, we should expect their fates to be linked to our own reproductive fate, leading to a high level of cooperation and a vested interest in creating order out of chaos, resulting in a fitter, more finely tuned, and more reproductively successful organism, cooperation rather than competition. If, however, they spread horizontally, horizonto, we should expect the opposite, resulting in disease, manipulation, and even death. Dr. Dawkins believes this framework is the overall guiding principle of evolution, that all complex organisms are immense societies of “cooperating viruses,” united by their shared need to pass on genes through reproduction. At the risk of repeating myself, I know none of this and no one will mourn me when I am gone for the world has no shortage of crickets. Philosophically speaking, however, I might be reminded of William Shakespeare if I was capable of such things. In Hamlet, the Danish Prince, doomed just as I am, remarks that “A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.” What might he have said about my fate in the hands of a worm that progressed through the guts of two insects before forcing me to commit suicide?
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 