Lessons of a Child Entomologist :: Personal Narrative Bugs Essays

Lessons of a Child Entomologist The screaming began after someone on the playground killed a stinkbug. With looks of horror and disgust on their faces, my classmates who had been near the insect fled, pinching their noses as they shouted, "Ew! Stinkbug!" I witnessed the chaos from another section of the playground, where I had been kicking the sand around in search of colorful rocks. I watched the scene with curiosity. Did stinkbugs really smell so vile? I wanted to find out, but I couldn't very well rush towards the scene as the others raced away, otherwise I would be nicknamed Stinkbug Lover forever and ever (at least a week in kid years). I waited until my peers were distracted with some other activity, when I could safely study the creature without attracting attention. But when I got there, I was disappointed to discover that it no longer smelled foul. However, upon closer inspection, I noticed that oozing out of its cracked exoskeleton was an opalescent substance. How pretty, I thought. Like any other eight-year-old child, I was enthralled by beautiful colors. I built Lego houses with bright blocks of red, yellow and green; I drew butterflies with pastel pencils; and, when my mother wasn't looking, I covered my eyelids with the frosty blues and pinks found in her makeup palettes. To discover a shimmering substance hiding inside an otherwise drab beetle was indeed a treat. And so began my rampage: for weeks I stomped on nearly anything that crawled, hopped, or wriggled, all to get a look at its innards. The bottoms of my jelly sandals had accumulated a fair amount of bug parts before I began noticing that the insides of insects were nearly always either white or dark brown—not the wide array of colors I had expected. This realization reduced my eagerness to squash immediately whatever insect I encountered, and instead I slowed down enough to make observations about my prey before I killed them. On one occasion, I watched a trail of ants carrying off the remnants of a dead insect I had squished a few days earlier. The ants marched in a single-file line up to their meal, and then, after collecting a tasty portion of it, circled back around in the opposite direction. I flicked one of the ants off its path and observed its reaction. Ordinarily, I would have thoughtlessly pressed down on the ant with my thumb, but that day I waited, fascinated, as I saw it skitter this way and that, frantically waving its antennae in the air.