Harry the Horsehair Worm

 

What you're looking at is Harry after being scooped from the tub. That background mesh is a kitchen sieve. Harry is about 6-8 inches long. Click to enlarge.

Horsehair Harry—Part 1

I recently met Harry the horsehair worm, the morning after a hot tub. I had never known such a creature existed, until I saw him squirming about at the bottom of the tub, as I began to drain it. I took a photo of him—later to investigate and discover what he was. Here’s some of what I found.

   

A horsehair worm is related to the nematode—a type of parasitic worm. It is extremely thin (about 1/16 inch) and several inches long… up to as much as a foot long. They writhe about, twisting themselves into a tangled blob that looks like a knotted cord. In fact, a common name for them is Gordian worm. An ancient myth has the worm spontaneously come alive from a horse’s tail hair—hence the name. In the fall they are usually found in pools of water (say, a horse drinking trough, in the old days), where they hunker down over the winter.

In the spring the horsehair worms get nasty. I last wrote about how we humans sometimes tend to romance nature. Here’s an example where nature gets pretty violent and ugly.

A group of worms will coil and knot themselves into orgiastic clumps, wherein the females become inseminated. Each mom then lays about  a million eggs that soon hatch and yield larvae—100 of them lined up end-to-end would hardly extend an inch. Biologists are not sure how, but the surviving larvae soon find their way into the gut of an insect—such as a cricket or a katydid, where they begin their odious parasitic life.

They first chew their way through the insect’s stomach wall and take up residence for a few weeks to a few months in the insect’s body cavity. The larvae have no food processing system—no stomach, no intestine, no anus. They have no circulatory or respiratory system either. They simply soak up nutrients from the interior of their hosts—absorbing food through their skin as they slowly destroy the host.

The larva molts several times and eventually grows into an adult worm—tightly coiled inside the insect’s body. It exudes a chemical that goes to the cricket’s brain—causing it to seek water and then drown itself, whereupon the worm breaks out and goes its way, leaving behind a hollowed-out, dead cricket.

It is now called a free-living worm, because it no longer lives the life of a parasite—when it was fully dependent for its existence on a host. Each mature worm lives through the winter (free at last!), never eating or excreting, just living on stored fat.

More on Harry next time…

Snake Climber

 

Can a snake climb a tree? This one did.

Romancing Nature—Part 2

Real nature can be scary—rather than cute and cuddly. To our deep ancestors, nature was an awesome place that called for a healthy level of fear—not what is imagined as the “Peaceable Kingdom,” where the lion reposes compliantly with the lamb. Our ancestors understood nature in its “red in tooth and claw” quality. In our attempts to enforce our dominion over the world, we have domesticated it and largely eradicated our fear and awe.

Thus we have people wandering through the wilderness, coming upon a grizzly bear and trying to get close for a photograph. So we read in the news about another person killed by a bear, and wonder if something should be done about it. Many people are unaware of the various kinds of parasites who invade a critter and slowly and painfully kill their host. This is not the kind of nature we want to hear about.

We have done our best to terminate what we perceive to be animal-to-animal cruelty in nature, while at the same time overlooking our cruelty toward it and each other. We have interfered with God’s sacred world and imposed our misplaced values on it.

If, on the other hand, we were to open ourselves to the reality of nature, we could not only see its beauty, but also what’s not cozy out there: the scary predators, the violent deaths, the scavengers who feast on dead bodies, the nasty parasites, etc. We could learn to accept these unpleasant realities, along with the enchanting antics of birds, chipmunks, and other cute critters. When we come to understand that we are a part of the natural world and that it’s a world containing both peace and killing, we can see the wholeness and realize that nature is sacred and beautiful in its own right. We don’t need to romance or idealize it. We don’t need to force it to conform to some fictitious and gentle image that we’ve created.

Our ancestors were in close touch with real nature. They dealt with threatening predators, as they simultaneously felt a sense of peace and awe. It was not a nature stripped of its threats, or of their immediacy and deep connection to it. We can reacquire our ancestors’ awe of nature, as well as thrill to its beauty and serenity. We can learn to appreciate its wholeness—by getting back in touch with it, by dropping our idealized picture and opening to the complete story. It’s both tame and wild.

Injured Nuthatch

This white-breasted nuthatch flew into the window and stunned himself. He can't close his beak. I held him, hoping he'd recover. A bird in the hand is worth two....

Click to enlarge.

A few minutes later he is recovering.

Then he flew off.

Romancing Nature—Part 1

Many people in modern society have developed a quixotic view of nature—a perspective that is both idealistic and unrealistic, because it views nature primarily as a nurturing, gentle, and innocent realm. While that can certainly be true, it’s a very limited understanding. It’s also a kind of quasi-religious or new-agey belief that can allow people to interpret nature from a secure distance, as a cuddly place of sanctuary and safety.

This perspective interestingly seems to bubble up most often in those people who regret our modern disconnect from the natural world and who lament the preponderance of society’s soulless, mechanical perspective. Yet these same individuals continue to hang onto a belief in a type of outdated spirituality that has placed us apart from and superior to all other creatures—a belief that has significantly contributed to that disconnect. It’s a viewpoint that can create a false understanding of the natural world and our place in it.

We in America have a long tradition of enjoying fine nature writers such as Thoreau, Emerson, John Muir, and Wordsworth, who compellingly described the sacredness of the wild. Their words have drawn many of us closer to nature than our urban-technological society would otherwise allow. We feel the tug of their depictions of the natural world—exacerbated by the separation that many of us have from nature and our minimal ability to experience it directly.

But this romantic perception of nature, while comforting, can blind us to seeing the reality of the world that is outside the influence of humans: a wild and raw nature. We have distanced ourselves from this true nature, so we have come to romanticizing it. We lack a tangible connection to nature and have, in the vacuum, created an imaginary connection. It is a fanciful perception that is exemplified in Disney’s cute, animated movies.

The unfortunate truth is that the only nature most of us can experience today is a human-altered nature, in which we have eliminated most of the large, predatory mammals from the wild. In so doing, we have created a subdued nature. The British Isles, for example, were once home to numerous large predators and were covered by primeval forests. One can walk the length of Britain today and never fear an attack from a threatening critter, while enjoying the fabulous gardens carefully cultivated by their accomplished horticulturists.  

We have removed the majority of those large predators—the denizens of the top of the food chain—without understanding their evolutionary role in the ecological balance. We have impoverished nature, while simultaneously remaining blind to our role in the depleted natural scene. We put attention to isolated problems in the natural world—how to deal with the plethora of deer in suburban neighborhoods, for example—ignorant of what has really been lost or unbalanced in nature by our actions. We have tamed nature and subsequently have transformed it into a place of comfort. What we see is not real nature.

More romance next time…