Interesting Bugs!

We went through a ton of bugs in our reading, but of all the bugs we read about my favorites were the dragonflies, the crickets, and the flies. Like, these bugs are almost like superheroes. They each have their own unique powers! Even though some of the reading was boring, at times I felt like I was reading a comic book.

Reading about dragonflies totally blew my mind. I didn’t know that people in Asia and part of the East Indies ate dragonflies. A dish of fried dragonflies served with onions sounds sort of appetizing to a starving college student. I also thought I was interesting that when dragonfly larvae are roasted they taste like crayfish. Now I really want to try them! Learning about the eyes of the dragonfly was also really cool. The fact that their wounds never heal really freaked me out too. I thought “hmm, what if humans never healed from their wounds?” I guess I would’ve died a long time ago because I hurt myself a lot so that little fun fact was really interesting.

I still think crickets are scary and I would probably still be freaked out if I saw one, but there are a lot of really cool facts about them. The formula for figuring out the number of chirps per minute really fascinated me. For something so small, there sure is a lot of science behind crickets! I didn’t realize that cricket chirps were so important. At one point Evans even says that a mute cricket is “as badly off as a blind dragon fly or a roach that cannot smell” (91). I also thought the fun fact about female brown bush crickets chewing off the wings of male crickets so they can no longer attract other mates was really funny. Even crickets get jealous.

The part about flies was disturbing that it caught my attention, like a car wreck. They’re disgusting and disturbing. I feel like flies are the villains of the insect world and maggots are the bumbling henchmen. The diseases that they spread are gross. The amount per year that reproduction takes place is staggering. If all the eggs of a female survived in a year, there would be almost five trillion flies. The section about bot flies really did it for me. That whole section was just really uncomfortable.