 My
wife has moved the two green pepper plants into the room with our hot
tub. Our hot tub is indoors, overlooking the back yard, in a room
glassed in on all sides. We keep it covered when not in use, but I use
it every day when I'm thinking about my blog articles. The pots with
the plants are large, a couple of feet in diameter.
Each plant
has a colony of aphids living on it. The one with the most fruit on it
has green peach aphids, like the one pictured above right. The other
one has orange aphids, which I can't find pictures of online, though
except for colour they are identical to the green ones, and there are
also some of the winged variety, which are only slightly larger and
black, with fragile, single-veined wings.
Aphids are pretty
smart. They won't kill the plants they feed on -- when there are too
many of them to keep their host plant healthy, or if the host plant is
sick, they will start breeding mostly the winged variety and leave the
plant. That's one of the reasons they've been around for 280 million
years, I guess. They are astonishingly prolific. They reproduce both
sexually and asexually (self-cloning), through both live birth and
eggs, and embryos often carry daughter-embryos and grand-daughter
embryos within them, just waiting their turn to be born (the vast
majority of aphids are female). The so-called 'honeydew' they secrete
is the excess sugar from the plants they suck nutrients from. They can
only fly at 2 mph on their own steam, but will often take the night air
currents up 3,000 feet and then average 30 mph following the jetstream
over a 9-hour overnight flight, descending in the morning and picking
out their new host plant by colour as they land. Some aphids will, in
times of stress, breed up to 50% of a stronger 'soldier' variety, which
defend the colony and neither eat nor breed during their short lives.
We
all learn about aphids as 'ant cows', though it's not slavery. Ants can
quickly become addicted to the sugary aphid 'honeydew', and spend
enormous effort overfeeding 'their' aphids so that the aphids excrete
not only the addictive sugar but enough other nutrients to keep the
ants alive. The instinct in ants is so strong that they will look after
and feed aphids even if the aphids fail to give them their 'fix'. What
kills some plants are the viruses that aphids carry, and a fungus that
grows beneath the 'honeydew' if it's not eaten by wasps, ants and other
insects. But spraying is futile, as it is more likely to harm ladybugs,
lacewings and other insects and birds that eat the aphids than the
aphids themselves, and hence often backfires.
I watched a single
aphid exploring the side of the hot-tub cover. It took the creature 20
minutes to traverse from one side to the other, and I'd say it found
the journey interesting. What is this giant hot puddle, so intense that
its condensation alone is enough to slake the thirst of any creature of
a size fathomable by an aphid? And this strange flat skin, with the
smell of hydrocarbon instead of living flesh -- What kind of beast is
this? Why are my brethren content to spend most of their lives on that
one plant over there, when there are so many other wonders in this
world to discover and investigate?
As tiny as it is (it would
fit comfortably on the head of a pin, and the photo above is magnified
hundreds-fold) it packs a lot into a small package: in addition to its
sophisticated and multi-faced reproductive biology, it has two compound
multi-lensed eyes, an elephant-like proboscis, two complex four-segment
antennae, wings (when needed), a five-segment body, six legs, two
pheromone-secreting cornical tubes for sending alerts to other aphids,
and a tail (cauda). And it has a brain that has been extensively studied. So it seems to me it must live a rich sensory life, both conscious and sub-conscious.
What does an aphid think?
I have hypothesized before that the basis for emotions is sensory, not
rational, and that most animals probably feel emotions more varied and
profound than we relatively sensory-deprived humans. I find no reason
to believe that tiny creatures can't feel emotions just because there's
no room for the requisite chemicals in their brains -- nature is able
to scale extremely powerfully, and if there's room for sophisticated
language, ruse, and reasoning capability in the brains of parrots and
corvids I think it's likely there is also room for very powerful
emotions, and more 'intellect' than we might imagine, in the tiniest of
creatures.
So I imagine that while aphids probably don't imagine or invent (not because they couldn't,
but because from an evolutionary perspective there's no reason, no need
for them to have developed this faculty, so they haven't), I believe
that they think and feel. If they didn't, what reason would they have
to live, to procreate, to evolve as they have done for a period 100
times longer than humans? It makes no sense to me that nature would
have evolved 'dumb' species that followed a prescribed program without
thought or feeling. Like many human 'programs', such un-self-correcting
creations would be very dangerous, integrate poorly into life
communities, and act excessively in ways that would often be
detrimental to life as a whole. Self-managing systems need their
intelligence and sensitivity highly devolved and decentralized, for
resilience and adaptability, and to optimize the success of the whole.
This
is just a theory, of course, a hunch, an instinct, something that just
'makes sense' to me in the context of everything else I know and
believe. Either I'm inappropriately and immodestly idealistic in
believing this theory, or else it is correct.
If I'm correct,
then the aphid I'm looking at right now does think and feel. She
wonders. She is curious. She experiences the profound joy of living,
and the commensurate desire to go on living. She enjoys the company of
and communication with others. She is driven to learn and gets
satisfaction from doing so. She experiences emotional grief and/or
physical pain at being lost, separated, witnessing the death of a
fellow creature, or being stepped on. She cares about all the life she
can fathom, and as long as she lives she fathoms more, and passes along
more knowledge, and more reason to care, in her DNA. That is why she is
here.
What she doesn't do, I'd guess, is worry. It seems to me
worry requires an arrogance of control, an assumption that there is
something we (or some other human) could be or should be doing or could
have or should have done, different from what we actually 'choose' to
do. The opposite of worry is acceptance. My aphid accepts the
inevitability of death, with equanimity (a composed mind) and grace (a
composed heart). I find that kind of humbling.
I suspect, too,
she does not fear death. She wants to live, and she is not ignorant of
the fact and the sting of death (if you doubt this, just observe how
quickly and cleverly the
tiniest of creatures secret themselves away when they 'smell' a human
or other predator close at hand). But as she scurries along the edge of
the hot tub, inches away from a strange and certain death by drowning,
she knows that every action in life, every step, every exploration, is
a calculated risk. But she knows that she must
do these things, utterly new things, death-defying things, and what we
might see in another creature as acts of astonishing courage, are to
her simple imperatives, thrilling, wondrous, terrifying, remarkable,
pulse-pounding must-do's. The
aphid philosophy, one that perhaps we could learn from, were we not
so cowed by our bloated, disconnected, over-rationalizing brains: Do it or die. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
