Insect Eating Quotes

Female fireflies draw in strange males with dishonest signals and eat them; mantis females devour their own mates. Female insects, Kya thought, know how to deal with their lovers.

I'll stop eating steak when you stop killing spiders." Absurdity: comparing cows to spiders. Arachnids are pure evil. They're like a cigarette manufacturer or a terrorist. They're organized religion on eight legs.

Will you show me what you really look like? You don’t sparkle, do you? And please tell me I didn’t almost kiss a giant brain-eating insect, because seriously, I’m gonna—” “Kat!” “Sorry,

Michael Pollan likens consumer choices to pulling single threads out of a garment. We pull a thread from the garment when we refuse to purchase eggs or meat from birds who were raised in confinement, whose beaks were clipped so they could never once taste their natural diet of worms and insects. We pull out a thread when we refuse to bring home a hormone-fattened turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. We pull a thread when we refuse to buy meat or dairy products from cows who were never allowed to chew grass, or breathe fresh air, or feel the warm sun on their backs. The more threads we pull, the more difficult it is for the industry to stay intact. You demand eggs and meat without hormones, and the industry will have to figure out how it can raise farm animals without them. Let the animals graze outside and it slows production. Eventually the whole thing will have to unravel. If the factory farm does indeed unravel - and it must - then there is hope that we can, gradually, reverse the environmental damage it has caused. Once the animal feed operations have gone and livestock are once again able to graze, there will be a massive reduction in the agricultural chemicals currently used to grow grain for animals. And eventually, the horrendous contamination caused by animal waste can be cleaned up. None of this will be easy. The hardest part of returning to a truly healthy environment may be changing the current totally unsustainable heavy-meat-eating culture of increasing numbers of people around the world. But we must try. We must make a start, one by one.

But look around at this world, how perfectly it's made. Flowers can't move, yet the insects come to them and spread their pollen. Trees can't move either, but birds and animals eat their fruit and carry their seeds far and wide.

The male doesn't eat - it doesn't even have a mouth or an anus - so it does nothing but mate until death.

The more one learns of this intricate interplay of soil, altitude, weather, and the living tissues of plant and insect (an intricacy that has its astonishing moments, as when sundew and butterwort eat the insects), the more the mystery deepens. Knowledge does not dispel mystery.

What gives a wriggle And makes you giggle When you eat'em? Whose weensy little feet Make my heart really beat? Why, it's those little creepy crawlies That make me feel so jolly. For the darling centipede My favorite buggy feed I always want some more. That's the insect I adore More than beetles, more than crickets, Which at times gives me the hiccups. I crave only to feed On a juicy centipede And I shall be happy forevermore." -Soren

Looking a dead insect in the sack of basmati that had come all the way from Dehra Dun, he almost wept with sorrow and marvel at its journey, which was tenderness for his own journey. In India almost nobody would be able to afford this rice, and you had to travel around the world to be able to eat such things where they were cheap enough that you could gobble them down without being rich; and when you got home to the place where they grew, you couldn't afford them anymore.

I was glad that I was able to erase your voice. Did you know that an insect will fall silent if you cut off its antennae? It will just sit there, as if frozen, and even refuse to eat. The same as you, really.

because when i feel the human world is doomed, has doomed itself by its own mingy beastliness, then i feel the colonies aren't far enough. the moon wouldn't be far enough, because even there you could look back and see the earth, dirty, beastly, unsavory among all the stars: made foul by men. Then i feel i've swallowed gall, and its eating my inside out, and nowhere's far enough to get away. but when i get a turn, i forget it all again. though it's a shame, what's been done to people these last hundred years: men turned into nothing but labor-insects, and all their manhood taken away, and all their real life. i'd wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake. but since i can't, an' nobody can, i'd better hold my peace, an' try an' life my own life: if i've got one to live, which i rather doubt.

Will you show me what you really look like? You don’t sparkle, do you? And please tell me I didn’t almost kiss a giant brain-eating insect, because seriously, I’m gonna—” “Kat!” “Sorry,” I muttered.

My painting is not violent, it’s life that is violent. Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves, the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life. We are born with a scream; we come into life with a scream and maybe love is a mosquito net between the fear of living and the fear of death.

The ringtone was a dead giveaway, emphasis on dead . . . creepy organ music. She didn’t even have to glance at the image of fanged bunny slippers on the screen to know who was calling. She just sighed, thumbed it on, and held it to her ear. “Claire! I need you here immediately. Something’s wrong with Bob.” Myrnin, her mad-scientist, blood-addicted boss, sounded actually shaken. “I can’t get him to eat his insects, and I used his favorites. He just sits there.” “Bob,” she repeated, looking at Shane in wide-eyed disbelief. “Bob the spider.” “Just because he’s a spider doesn’t mean he deserves any less concern! Claire, you have a way with him. He likes you.” Just what she needed. Bob the spider liked her. “You do realize that he’s a year old, at least. And spiders don’t live that long.” “You think he’s dead?” Myrnin sounded horrified. So wrong. “Is he curled up?” “No. He’s just quiet.” “Well, maybe he’s not hungry.” “Will you come?” Myrnin asked. He sounded calmer now, but also oddly needy. “It’s been very lonely here these past few days. I’d like your company, at least for a little while.” When she hesitated, he used the pity card. “Please, Claire.” “Fine,” she sighed. “I’m bringing Shane.” After a second of silence, he said, flatly, “Goody,” and hung up.

Of the thousands of flowers that blossom on a tree only a few will bear fruit. And out of those few fruits, insects and squirrels will eat some. The tree does not keep anything for itself. Does that mean that the life of the tree is wasted?

The time of dangling insects arrived. White houses with caterpillars dangling from the eaves. White stones in driveways. You can walk at night down the middle of the street and hear women talking on the telephone. Warmer weather produces voices in the dark. They are talking about their adolescent sons. How big, how fast. The sons are almost frightening. The quantities they eat. The way they loom in doorways. These are the days that are full of wormy bugs. They are in the grass, stuck to the siding, hanging in the hair, hanging from the trees and eaves, stuck to the window screens. The women talk long-distance to grandparents of growing boys. They share the Trimline phone, beamish old folks in hand-knit sweaters on fixed incomes. What happens to them when the commercial ends?

Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life.

A forest is a living thing like a human body...each part dependent on all the other parts. A forest needs its birds, its beaver...all its animals and plants. The forest gives shelter to the birds, but they repay the debt with the insects they eat, the droppings they leave, the seeds they carry off to plant elsewhere. The beaver builds dams for himself, but the dams keep water on the land, and although the beaver cut trees to use and to eat, their ponds provide water for the trees during the hot, dry months....Listen, and you can hear the forest breath.

The question of chemical residues on the food we eat is a hotly debated issue. The existence of such residues is either played down by the industry as unimportant or is flatly denied. Simultaneously, there is a strong tendency to brand as fanatics or cultists all who are so perverse as to demand that their food be free of insect poisons. In all this cloud of controversy, what are the actual facts?

Love is like a white geranium. It grows like a weed overpowering the ground– if you don’t take care of it prune it shape it it climbs walls and hides insects that slowly eat at it making it die. Easily grown and easily withered.

The Night Vale Unified School District indicated that fewer than one in five tarantulas graduate from high school. Indeed, most spiders never even enroll in public education, choosing to instead spin webs and eat smaller insects.

It would be an idyllic tropical paradise if not for the malaria, the insects, the constant diarrhea and resulting hemorrhoids, and the fact that the people are dirty and smell bad and eat each other and use human heads for decoration.

It doesn’t eat only birds—it mostly eats rats and insects—but they still call it the “Bird-Eating Spider” because the fact that it can eat a bird is the most important thing you need to know about it. If you run across one of these things, like in your closet or crawling out of your bowl of soup, the first thing somebody will say is, “Watch it, man, that thing can eat a goddamned bird.” I don’t know how they catch the birds. I know the Goliath Fucking Bird-Eating Spider can’t fly because if it could, it would have a different name entirely. We would call it “sir” because it would be the dominant species on the planet. None of us would leave the house unless a Goliath Fucking Flying Bird-Eating Spider said it was okay.

Some female insects eat their mates, overstressed mammal mothers abandon their young, many males design risky or shifty ways to outsperm their competitors. Nothing seemed too indecorous as long as the tick and the tock of life carried on. She knew this was not a dark side to Nature, just inventive ways to endure against all odds. Surely for humans there was more.

If a fox shall bear down upon the rabbit and take its neck between its teeth, the rabbit shall understand, for the rabbit itself bites down upon the grasses of the field. And as the large insect eats the smaller, it too is eaten, by a bird that flushes down from the air to complete a cycle.

Your garden is a protest. It is a place of defiant compassion. It is a space to help sustain wildlife and ecosystem function while providing an aesthetic response that moves you. For you, beauty isn’t just petal-deep but goes down into the soil, farther down into the aquifer and back up into the air and for miles around on the backs and legs of insects. You don’t have to see microbes in action, birds eating seeds, butterflies laying eggs, ants farming aphids….Your garden is a protest for all the ways in which we deny our life by denying other lives. Plant some natives. Be defiantly compassionate.

My painting is not violent; it’s life that is violent. I have endured physical violence, I have even had my teeth broken. Sexuality, human emotion, everyday life, personal humiliation (you only have to watch television)—violence is part of human nature. Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life. You are born, you fuck, you die. What could be more violent than that?

My painting is not violent, it’s life that is violent. Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves, the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life. We are born with a scream; we come into life with a scream and maybe love is a mosquito net between the fear of living and the fear of death.

On average, animals that eat 30 percent fewer calories live 30 percent longer. This has been amply demonstrated with yeast cells, worms, insects, mice and rats, dogs and cats, and now primates. In fact, it is the only method that is universally accepted by scientists to alter the life span of all animals that have been tested so far.

New York is where it is going to begin, I think. You can see it coming. The insect experts have learned how it works with locusts. Until locust population reaches a certain density, they all act like any grasshoppers. When the critical point is reached, they turn savage and swarm, and try to eat the world. We’re nearing a critical point. One day soon two strangers will bump into each other at high noon in the middle of New York. But this time they won’t snarl and go on. They will stop and stare and then leap at each others

There are two Gods,' she'd told me once, sotto voce in case our father heard her uttering such an impious thought. 'There is the God of inside — the God of churches, and prayer meetings and all that — and then there is the God of outside, the God that lives in the trees and in the dirt. And the insects, and the birds, and the things that eat them too.

A half-moon hung in the sky. Dozens of insects were chirping and buzzing in the garden. I'm so confused, I muttered, leaving Sensei's house. The air rising off the river carried a crisp hint of autumn. Good-night, Sensei. [...] Autumn is here, so at Satoru's place there will be warm things to eat while we drink. Turning in the direction of Sensei, who was now several hundred metres away, I kept speaking to him. I walked along by the river, as if I were having a conversation with the moon. I kept talking, as if for ever.

So where does one begin if one wants to eat something as unusual and traditionally reviled as bugs?

Anyway, our fellow apes eat insects out of each other’s fur; maybe bath bombs and body glitter are the modern human equivalent.

Ninja beats pirate. Pirate beats ghost. Ghost beats zombie. Zombie beats most. Werewolf beats vampire. Vamp beats Imp. Imp beats fiend. Fiend beats wimp. Wizard beats cyrborg. Cyborg surely beats troll. Troll beats goblin. Goblin eats a hermit’s soul. Hermit beats child. Child beats wagon. Wagon beats moon snake. Moon snake beats dragon. Dragon beats hydra. Hydra beats sailor. Sailor beats teacher. Teacher beats tailor. Tailor beats sun worm. Sun worm beats clown. Clown beats robo-squid. Robo-squid beats town. Town fights jackals. Town will win. Town fights mummies. Town won’t fight again. Zookeeper beats hell hound. Hell hound beats giant. Giant beats accountant. Accountant beats client. Client beats frog. Frog beats himself. Knight beats Big Foot. Big Foot beats elf. Elf beats pixie. Pixie beats specter. Specter beats sea hag. Sea hag beats Hector. Hector beats serpent. Serpent beats rat. Rat beats Grandma. Grandma beats cat. Lava beats demon. Demon beats warlock. Warlock beats dinosaur. Dino beats Spock. Spock beats Lando. Lando beats Qui-Gon. Qui-Gon beats Jar-Jar. Jar-Jar beats none. Rock beats scissors. Scissors beat paper. Paper beats insect. Insect beats vapor. Wood Woman beats Tree Man. Tree Man beats the dark. The dark kills spider-fish. Spider-fish beats shark. You beat me. I beat a dentist. The dentist beats the barber. The barber is menaced. These are the rules, and never forget. Now hand over your money and place your bet.

Be wakeful and watchful, she heard Henry say. Make sure you are not the only member of your party who can write or read a letter. If you need to find water, follow a dog. If you are starving, eat insects before you waste your energy on hunting. Anything that a bird can eat, you can eat. Your biggest dangers are not snakes, lions, or cannibals; your biggest dangers are blistered feet, carelessness, and fatigue. Be certain to write your diaries and maps legibly; if you die, your notes may be of use to a future explorer. In an emergency, you can always write in blood

Men today were half-made, and women were half-made. Creatures that existed and functioned with certain regularity, but which ran off into a hopeless jumble of inconsequence. Half-made, like insects that can run fast and be so busy and suddenly grow wings, but which are only winged grubs after all. A world of half-made creatures on two legs, eating food and degrading the one mystery left to them, sex. Spinning a great lot of words, burying themselves inside the cocoons of words and ideas that they spin round themselves, and inside the cocoons, mostly perishing inert and overwhelmed.

When a bird is alive, it eats insects. When it's dead, insects eat it. Similarly, when soul is aware, it chooses the scenes it wants to live. When it is unaware, scenes drag it into a spiral path.

A world like that is not really natural, or (the thought strikes one later) perhaps it really is, only more so. Parts of it are neither land nor sea and so everything is moving from one element to another, wearing uneasily the queer transitional bodies that life adopts in such places. Fish, some of them, come out and breathe air and sit about watching you. Plants take to eating insects, mammals go back to the water and grow elongate like fish, crabs climb trees. Nothing stays put where it began because everything is constantly climbing in, or climbing out, of its unstable environment.

I saw her kiss him,’ said Susan. ‘I looked between the leaves and saw her. She danced in flecked with diamonds light as dust. And I am squat, Bernard, I am short. I have eyes that look close to the ground and see insects in the grass. The yellow warmth in my side turned to stone when I saw Jinny kiss Louis. I shall eat grass and die in a ditch in the brown water where dead leaves have rotted.

the food movement needs people who can do the dirty work: hunt wild boar, gut deer, eat invasive species, try insects, raise animals the right way, and pay for ethically raised meat. That role falls to us.

There exists in this world a spider the size of a dinner plate, a foot wide if you include the legs. It's called the Goliath Bird-Eating spider, or the "Goliath Fucking Bird-Eating Spider" by those who have actually seen one. It dosen't eat only birds--it mostly eats rats and insects--but they still call it the "Bird-Eating Spider" because the fact that it can eat a bird is probably the most important thing to know about it. If you run across one of these things, like in your closet or crawling out of your bowl of soup, the first thing somebody will say is, "Watch it, man, that thing can eat a fucking bird." I don't know how they catch the birds. I know the Goliath Fucking Bird-Eating Spider can't fly because if it could, it would have a different name entirely. We would call it "Sir" because it would be the dominant species on the planet.

We assume that a large brain, the use of tools, superior learning abilities and complex social structures are huge advantages. It seems self-evident that these have made humankind the most powerful animal on earth. But humans enjoyed all of these advantages for a full 2 million years during which they remained weak and marginal creatures. Thus humans who lived a million years ago, despite their big brains and sharp stone tools, dwelt in constant fear of predators, rarely hunted large game, and subsisted mainly by gathering plants, scooping up insects, stalking small animals, and eating the carrion left behind by other more powerful carnivores.

When they turned off, it was still early in the pink and green fields. The fumes of morning, sweet and bitter, sprang up where they walked. The insects ticked softly, their strength in reserve; butterflies chopped the air, going to the east, and the birds flew carelessly and sang by fits. They went down again and soon the smell of the river spread over the woods, cool and secret. Every step they took among the great walls of vines and among the passion-flowers started up a little life, a little flight. 'We’re walking along in the changing-time,' said Doc. 'Any day now the change will come. It’s going to turn from hot to cold, and we can kill the hog that’s ripe and have fresh meat to eat. Come one of these nights and we can wander down here and tree a nice possum. Old Jack Frost will be pinching things up. Old Mr. Winter will be standing in the door. Hickory tree there will be yellow. Sweet-gum red, hickory yellow, dogwood red, sycamore yellow.' He went along rapping the tree trunks with his knuckle. 'Magnolia and live-oak never die. Remember that. Persimmons will all get fit to eat, and the nuts will be dropping like rain all through the woods here. And run, little quail, run, for we’ll be after you too.' They went on and suddenly the woods opened upon light, and they had reached the river. Everyone stopped, but Doc talked on ahead as though nothing had happened. 'Only today,' he said, 'today, in October sun, it’s all gold—sky and tree and water. Everything just before it changes looks to be made of gold.' ("The Wide Net")

For a few days after getting into the water the toad concentrates on building up his strength by eating small insects. Presently he has swollen to his normal size again, and then he goes through a phase of intense sexiness.

You no longer hit bugs when you drive. Where have all the insects gone? My ducks didn't eat ALL the bugs, so where are they? They are all in your NEW hamburger-flavored synthetic meat products. Add "cheese" for ONLY 99 cents.

The transmission of SARS, Dwyer said, seems to depend much on super spreaders—and their behavior, not to mention the behavior of people around them, can be various. The mathematical ecologist’s term for variousness of behavior is “heterogeneity,” and Dwyer’s models have shown that heterogeneity of behavior, even among forest insects, let alone among humans, can be very important in damping the spread of infectious disease. “If you hold mean transmission rate constant,” he told me, “just adding heterogeneity by itself will tend to reduce the overall infection rate.” That sounds dry. What it means is that individual effort, individual discernment, individual choice can have huge effects in averting the catastrophes that might otherwise sweep through a herd. An individual gypsy moth may inherit a slightly superior ability to avoid smears of NPV as it grazes on a leaf. An individual human may choose not to drink the palm sap, not to eat the chimpanzee, not to pen the pig beneath mango trees, not to clear the horse’s windpipe with his bare hand, not to have unprotected sex with the prostitute, not to share the needle in a shooting gallery, not to cough without covering her mouth, not to board a plane while feeling ill, or not to coop his chickens along with his ducks. “Any tiny little thing that people do,” Dwyer said, if it makes them different from one another, from the idealized standard of herd behavior, “is going to reduce infection rates.

The train gives off an earsplitting insect hum. It seems like you’re watching something physically impossible, like a person lifting a house, or hearing a joke so funny the laughter threatens to rip you apart, and then, with a puff of air, it’s over. When

The soldiers had, apparently, been given beehives filled with the honey of bees that had feasted on rhododendron and azalea, plants that produce neurotoxins so potent that they remain active in the honey. Those who eat the honey succumb to honey intoxication, also called grayanotoxin poisoning.

If a giraffe starts eating an African acacia, the tree releases a chemical into the air that signals that a threat is at hand. As the chemical drifts through the air and reaches other trees, they “smell” it and are warned of the danger. Even before the giraffe reaches them, they begin producing toxic chemicals. Insect pests are dealt with slightly differently. The saliva of leaf-eating insects can be “tasted” by the leaf being eaten. In response, the tree sends out a chemical signal that attracts predators that feed on that particular leaf-eating insect. Life in the slow lane is clearly not always dull. But

Our duty is to teach men to see whatever is lovely and truly wonderful in life, and not to become prematurely ill-tempered and spiteful. We wish fully to enjoy what is beautiful, to cling to it—and to avoid, as far as possible, anything that might do harm to people like ourselves. If to-day you do harm to the Russians, it is so as to avoid giving them the opportunity of doing harm to us. God does not act differently. He suddenly hurls the masses of humanity on to the earth, and he leaves it to each one to work out his own salvation. Men dispossess one another, and one perceives that, at the end of it all, it is always the stronger who triumphs. Is that not the most reasonable order of things? If it were otherwise, nothing good would ever have existed. If we did not respect the laws of nature, imposing our will by the right of the stronger, a day would come when the wild animals would once again devour us—then the insects would eat the wild animals, and finally nothing would exist on earth but the microbes.

Wait—no, not drifting. Following us. “We have an audience,” I said to Reth, nodding at the clusters of flying insects. “I suppose we can’t make the Dark Queen any angrier with us than she already is,” he said, then his perfect mouth moved, silently forming words, and he gracefully waved his hands through the air in a semicircle. The warm breeze suddenly froze, and I saw frost eat across the nearest butterflies’ wings. They stopped midair, then dropped to the ground with tiny clinking noises, frozen solid. A serene smile spread across Reth’s face. “I’ve always disliked insects.” “If the whole being-a-faerie thing doesn’t work out for you, you definitely have a future in pest control.

It was the mystery that biologists from Darwin onwards had been longing to solve. How could we understand the ability of fish and seals to survive in the cold dark waters of the Antarctic? How could humans see inside a biotope that was sealed with layers of ice? What would the Earth look like from the sky, if we crossed the Mediterranean on the back of a goose? How did it feel to be a bee? How could we measure the speed of an insect’s wings and its heartbeat, or monitor its blood pressure and eating patterns? What was the impact of human activities, like shipping noise or subsea explosions, on mammals in the depths? How could we follow animals to places where no human could venture?

If you’ve heard the deafening wall of sound cicadas create in southern climes, bear in mind that it would be twice as loud if the ladies joined in. But as an ancient Greek saying has it, “Blessed are the cicadas, for they have voiceless wives.” Controversial as we may find this statement in modern society, let me just add that it may be pretty smart of the females to keep their lips zipped. Lovesick fellow cicadas aren’t the only ones attracted by the song. Scary parasites lie in wait listening, then sneak up to lay a tiny egg on the soloist. And although it might look quite innocent, it’s game over for the singer. The egg hatches into a hungry larva, which eats up the cicada from the inside out.

Duroy, who felt light hearted that evening, said with a smile: "You are gloomy to-day, dear master." The poet replied: "I am always so, young man, so will you be in a few years. Life is a hill. As long as one is climbing up one looks towards the summit and is happy, but when one reaches the top one suddenly perceives the descent before one, and its bottom, which is death. One climbs up slowly, but one goes down quickly. At your age a man is happy. He hopes for many things, which, by the way, never come to pass. At mine, one no longer expects anything - but death." Duroy began to laugh: "You make me shudder all over." Norbert de Varenne went on: "No, you do not understand me now, but later on you will remember what I am saying to you at this moment. A day comes, and it comes early for many, when there is an end to mirth, for behind everything one looks at one sees death. You do not even understand the word. At your age it means nothing; at mine it is terrible. Yes, one understands it all at once, one does not know how or why, and then everything in life changes its aspect. For fifteen years I have felt death assail me as if I bore within me some gnawing beast. I have felt myself decaying little by little, month by month, hour by hour, like a house crumbling to ruin. Death has disfigured me so completely that I do not recognize myself. I have no longer anything about me of myself - of the fresh, strong man I was at thirty. I have seen death whiten my black hairs, and with what skillful and spiteful slowness. Death has taken my firm skin, my muscles, my teeth, my whole body of old, only leaving me a despairing soul, soon to be taken too. Every step brings me nearer to death, every movemebt, every breath hastens his odious work. To breathe, sleep, drink, eat, work, dream, everything we do is to die. To live, in short, is to die. Oh, you will realize this. If you stop and think for a moment you will understand. What do you expect? Love? A few more kisses and you will be impotent. Then money? For what? Women? Much fun that will be! In order to eat a lot and grow fat and lie awake at night suffering from gout? And after that? Glory? What use is that when it does not take the form of love? And after that? Death is always the end. I now see death so near that I often want to stretch my arms to push it back. It covers the earth and fills the universe. I see it everywhere. The insects crushed on the path, the falling leaves, the white hair in a friend's head, rend my heart and cry to me, 'Behold it!' It spoils for me all I do, all I see, all that I eat and drink, all that I love; the bright moonlight, the sunrise, the broad ocean, the noble rivers, and the soft summer evening air so sweet to breath." He walked on slowly, dreaming aloud, almost forgetting that he had a listener: "And no one ever returns - never. The model of a statue may be preserved, but my body, my face, my thoughts, my desires will never reappear again. And yet millions of beings will be born with a nose, eyes, forehead, cheeks, and mouth like me, and also a soul like me, without my ever returning, without even anything recognizable of me appearing in these countless different beings. What can we cling to? What can we believe in? All religions are stupid, with their puerile morality and their egotistical promises, monstrously absurd. Death alone is certain." "Think of that, young man. Think of it for days, and months and years, and life will seem different to you. Try to get away from all the things that shut you in. Make a superhuman effort to emerge alive from your own body, from your own interests, from your thoughts, from humanity in general, so that your eyes may be turned in the opposite direction. Then you understand how unimportant is the quarrel between Romanticism and Realism, or the Budget debates.

When a fly settles upon the blossom, the petals close upon it and hold it fast till the plant has absorbed the insect into its system; but they will close on nothing but what is good to eat; of a drop of rain or a piece of stick they will take no notice. Curious! that so unconscious a thing should have such a keen eye to its own interest. If this is unconsciousness, where is the use of consciousness?[1]

In this archaic religious system there were, as yet, neither gods nor priests, but only a universal goddess and her priestesses, women being the dominant sex and man her terrified victim. Fatherhood was not honoured, conception being attributed to the wind, the eating of beans, or the accidental swallowing of an insect; inheritance was matrilineal and snakes were regarded as the incarnations of the dead.

The custom of eating the lover after consummination of the nuptials, of making a meal of the exhausted pigmy, who is henceforth good for nothing, is not so difficult to understand, since insects can hardly be accused of sentimentality; but to devour him during the act surpasses anything the most morbid mind could imagine. I have seen the thing with my own eyes, and I have not yet recovered from my surprise.

My impressions were this: There is an insect called the hunting wasp. The female hunts for spiders and other insects and preys on them in an unusual way. She stings them in the large nerve ganglion on the underside of the thorax so that they are not killed but only paralyzed. She then lays an egg on the paralyzed victim (or within it’s body) and seals the prey up in a nest. When the egg hatches, the wasp larva commences to eat the prey, slowly, gradually, in a highly systemized way. The nonvital tissues and organs are eaten first, so that the paralyzed creature remains alive for a good many days. Eventually, of course, its guest eats away so much of it that it dies. During the whole long process of consumption, the prey cannot move, cry out or resist in any way.” “Now, suppose we view the Church as the hunting wasp, it’s stinger being represented by the nuns and priests who teach in the schools. And let us view the pupils as the paralyzed prey. The egg that is injected into them is the dogma, which in time must hatch into the larva-personal philosophy or religious attitude. This larva, as that of the wasp eats away from within, slowly and in a specialized manner, until the victim in destroyed. That is my impression of parochial education.

But humans enjoyed all of these advantages for a full 2 million years during which they remained weak and marginal creatures. Thus humans who lived a million years ago, despite their big brains and sharp stone tools, dwelt in constant fear of predators, rarely hunted large game, and subsisted mainly by gathering plants, scooping up insects, stalking small animals, and eating the carrion left behind by other more powerful carnivores.

One day, after the Buddha and a group of monks finished eating lunch mindfully together, a farmer, very agitated, came by and asked, "Monks, have you seen my cows? I don't think I can survive so much misfortune." The Buddha asked him, "What happened?" and the man said, "Monks, this morning all twelve of my cows ran away. And this year my whole crop of sesame plants was eaten by insects!" The Buddha said, "Sir, we have not seen your cows. Perhaps they have gone in the other direction." After the farmer went off in that direction, the Buddha turned to his Sangha and said, "Dear friends, do you know you are the happiest people on Earth? You have no cows or sesame plants to lose." We always try to accumulate more and more, and we think these "cows" are essential for our existence. In fact, they may be the obstacles that prevent us from being happy. Release your cows and become a free person. Release your cows so you can be truly happy.

The only proven way in which to lengthen the life span of an animal is through caloric restriction. In other words, if you eat 30 percent fewer calories, you can live roughly 30 percent longer, depending on the animal being studied. This general rule has been tested across a vast array of species, from insects, mice, dogs and cats, even to apes. Animals eating fewer calories live longer than their counterparts that gorged themselves. They have fewer diseases and suffer less frequently from the problems of old age, such as cancer and hardening of the arteries.

Such professors as are at this moment, in almost every newspaper in the country,—scientific journals among the number,—abusing and ridiculing the poor farmer for destroying the birds that destroy his grain; and telling him, if he were to let the birds alone, they would eat the insects that commit far greater devastation on his precious cerealia! Conceited theorists! it has never occurred to them, that the victims of the farmer’s fowling-piece—the birds that eat corn—would not touch an insect if they were starving! The farmer does not make war on the insect-eating birds.

Most chemicals that give humans a buzz evolved to disrupt insect nervous systems. If our brains used different chemicals, we would not be so vulnerable. However, we have common ancestors with insects. It was long ago, about 500 million years ago, when our ancestors split off from the arthropod lines that became modern insects. However, our neurochemicals remain about the same as theirs. Fortunately, most plant neurotoxins don’t kill us. We have evolved to eat plants, and we are much larger than insects, so low doses are not fatal. But drugs can hijack our motivation mechanisms and take control of our lives.

One article on reproductive strategies was titled "Sneaky Fuckers." Kya laughed. As is well known, the article began, in nature, usually the males with the most prominent secondary sexual characteristics, such as the biggest antlers, deepest voices, broadest chests, and superior knowledge secure the best territories because they have fended off weaker males. The females choose to mate with these imposing alphas and are thereby inseminated with the best DNA around, which is passed on to the female's offspring- one of the most powerful phenomena in the adaptation and continuance of life. Plus, the females get the best territory for their young. However, some stunted males, not strong, adorned, or smart enough to hold good territories, possess bags of tricks to fool the females. They parade their smaller forms around in pumped-up postures or shout frequently- even if in shrill voices. By relying on pretense and false signals, they manage to grab a copulation here or there. Pint-sized male bullfrogs, the author wrote, hunker down in the grass and hide near an alpha male who is croaking with great gusto to call in mates. When several females are attracted to his strong vocals at the same time, and the alpha is busy copulating with one, the weaker male leaps in and mates one of the others. The imposter males were referred to as "sneaky fuckers." Kya remembered, those many years ago, Ma warning her older sisters about young men who overrevved their rusted-out pickups or drove jalopies around with radios blaring. "Unworthy boys make a lot of noise," Ma had said. She read a consolation for females. Nature is audacious enough to ensure that the males who send out dishonest signals or go from one female to the next almost always end up alone. Another article delved into the wild rivalries between sperm. Across most life-forms, males compete to inseminate females. Male lions occasionally fight to the death; rival bull elephants lock tusks and demolish the ground beneath their feet as they tear at each other's flesh. Though very ritualized, the conflicts can still end in mutilations. To avoid such injuries, inseminators of some species compete in less violent, more creative methods. Insects, the most imaginative. The penis of the male damselfly is equipped with a small scoop, which removes sperm ejected by a previous opponent before he supplies his own. Kya dropped the journal on her lap, her mind drifting with the clouds. Some female insects eat their mates, overstressed mammal mothers abandon their young, many males design risky or shifty ways to outsperm their competitors. Nothing seemed too indecorous as long as the tick and the tock of life carried on. She knew this was not a dark side to Nature, just inventive ways to endure against all odds. Surely for humans there was more.

She heard her father's voice as she prepared, remembering all the times she had taken dictation for him, or had overheard him instructing young botanists. 'Be wakeful and watchful,' she heard Henry say. 'Make sure you are not the only member of your party who can write or read a letter. If you need need to find water, follow a dog. If you are starving, eat insects before you waste your energy on hunting. Anything that a bird can eat, you can eat. Your biggest dangers are not snakes, lions, or cannibals; your biggest dangers are blistered feet, carelessness, and fatigue. Be certain to write your diaries and maps legibly; if you die, your notes may be of use to a future explorer. In an emergency, you can always write in blood.

Have you ever seen a hawk catch a bird in your back garden? I’ve not, but I know it’s happened. I’ve found evidence. Out on the patio flagstones, sometimes, tiny fragments: a little, insect-like songbird leg, with a foot clenched tight where the sinews have pulled it; or – even more gruesomely – a disarticulated beak, a house-sparrow beak top, or bottom, a little conical bead of blushed gunmetal, slightly translucent, with a few faint maxillary feathers adhering to it. But maybe you have: maybe you’ve glanced out of the window and seen there, on the lawn, a bloody great hawk murdering a pigeon, or a blackbird, or a magpie, and it looks the hugest, most impressive piece of wildness you’ve ever seen, like someone’s tipped a snow leopard into your kitchen and you find it eating the cat.

It is hard to keep up with her, to be honest. My sister. Life. She is an over-achiever, little Miss Abundance. My sister! Imagine growing up with that, with her for a sister! Just imagine if Life was your sister! Eggy little goody two-shows eggy fart face. The earth would be horribly over-crowded if U didn’t eat her eggs and destroy her spawn and do my job efficiently. She is constantly vomiting, and puking cherry pips and cherry blossoms everywhere. Every time Life lays an egg, Death eats an egg. All who come from eggs are connected, every creature, every egg, every mammal and fish and insect. Eggs. Salt. Birth. Blood. Death. And on and on it goes, never ending . . . eggy eggs eggy eggs . . . What came first, the chicken or the egg? Life came first! She always comes first! Ha! Selfish fish fishy eggy fart face.

Look at the thrush.” The young man glanced at the small speckled bird as it cocked its head to the side, observing the two men as they moved up the stairs. “What of the thrush?” “What lessons might be learned from living in such a small, weak body?” The old monk smiled at the bird, which flicked its tail before flying to perch on the branch of a low-hanging conifer. “The thrush has a most beautiful song, Master. One could learn to appreciate that.” “You are correct. And is it a powerful bird?” The young man smiled. “Of course not. It darts along the branches and eats only seeds and insects.” “And yet, it does not worry about its life. It is a humble bird, as many small creatures are humble, but it has a beautiful song.” He paused to catch his breath on the stairs and looked up at the young man beside him. “We gain more enlightenment from weakness and loss than we do from strength and victory.

Tadpoles. Crickets. Toads. Centipedes. Mice. Rats and scorpions. We eat anything. As we till the earth, we look upon bugs as buried treasure. Our eyes scan the soil, tucking any edible treat in a waistband, a pocket, tied into a scarf. Later the prize is retrieved, skewered on a stick, and stuffed into the fire. Those who haven’t caught anything watch, their begging eyes following each move. We must ignore them, and also ignore what we eat. There is no revulsion. Food is food. Anything, everything tastes good—even the smell of roasting crickets makes stomachs rumble with desire. Yet even the smallest creatures, the rodents, the insects, are becoming scarce. Some days, our meals for the entire day consist of boiled leaves. Our lives are reduced to a tight circle. Each day revolves around what we can find to eat for the following day. And until it comes, we think about food. All day. All night. Hunger owns us.

Another misconception is that we don’t need to worry about the local supply of insects because insects are everywhere all the time. If this is true, where do all those insects come from and what do they eat? Do they just appear out of nowhere? Is Aristotle’s theory of spontaneous generation alive and well in our popular culture? I hope not. The fact is that all insects, every last one of them, are produced directly or indirectly by plants. They either eat some plant part, or they eat another animal that ate some plant part. What follows logically, then, is that when we reduce the amount of plants in any given place, we reduce the diversity and abundance of insects. Alarming headlines from around the world are reminding us of the critical linkage between plants and insects; we have removed more than half of the forests on earth and, not surprisingly, insect populations have declined globally by at least 45% since 1979

A Meal We sit at a clean table eating thoughts from clean plates and see, there is my heart germfree, and transparent as glass and there is my brain, pure as cold water in the china bowl of my skull and you are talking with words that fall spare on the ear like the metallic clink of knife and fork. Safety by all means; so we eat and drink remotely, so we pick the abstract bone but something is hiding somewhere in the scrubbed bare cupboard of my body flattening itself against a shelf and feeding on other people’s leavings a furtive insect, sly and primitive the necessary cockroach in the flesh that nests in dust. It will sidle out when the lights have all gone off in this bright room (and you can’t crush it in the dark then my friend or search it out with your mind’s hands that smell of insecticide and careful soap) In spite of our famines it keeps itself alive : how it gorges on a few unintentional spilled crumbs of love

researchers had found promising indicators of memory in plants. Others found that a wide variety of plants are able to distinguish themselves from others, and can tell whether or not those others are genetic kin. When such plants find themselves beside their siblings, they rearrange their leaves within two days to avoid shading them. Pea shoot roots appeared to be able to hear water flowing through sealed pipes and grow toward them, and several plants, including lima beans and tobacco, can react to an attack of munching insects by summoning those insects’ specific predators to come pick them off. (Other plants—including a particular tomato—secrete a chemical that cause hungry caterpillars to turn away from devouring their leaves to eat each other instead.) Papers probing other remarkable behaviors were growing from a trickle to a fairly robust stream. It seemed like botany was on the verge of something new. I wanted to stick around and watch.

Such professors as are at this moment, in almost every newspaper in the country,—scientific journals among the number,—abusing and ridiculing the poor farmer for destroying the birds that destroy his grain; and telling him, if he were to let the birds alone, they would eat the insects that commit far greater devastation on his precious cerealia! Conceited theorists! it has never occurred to them, that the victims of the farmer’s fowling-piece—the birds that eat corn—would not touch an insect if they were starving! The farmer does not make war on the insect-eating birds. Rarely, or never, does he expend powder and shot on the swallow, the wagtail, the tomtit, the starling, the thrush, the blackbird, the wren, the robin, or any of the grub and fly-feeders. His “game” are the buntings and Fringillidae,—the larks, linnets, finches, barley-birds, yellowhammers, and house sparrows, that form the great flocks afflicting him both in seed-time and harvest;

You Are What You Eat Take food for example. We all assume that our craving or disgust is due to something about the food itself - as opposed to being an often arbitrary response preprogrammed by our culture. We understand that Australians prefer cricket to baseball, or that the French somehow find Gerard Depardieu sexy, but how hungry would you have to be before you would consider plucking a moth from the night air and popping it, frantic and dusty, into your mouth? Flap, crunch, ooze. You could wash it down with some saliva beer.How does a plate of sheep brain's sound? Broiled puppy with gravy? May we interest you in pig ears or shrimp heads? Perhaps a deep-fried songbird that you chew up, bones, beak, and all? A game of cricket on a field of grass is one thing, but pan-fried crickets over lemongrass? That's revolting. Or is it? If lamb chops are fine, what makes lamb brains horrible? A pig's shoulder, haunch, and belly are damn fine eatin', but the ears, snout, and feet are gross? How is lobster so different from grasshopper? Who distinguishes delectable from disgusting, and what's their rationale? And what about all the expectations? Grind up those leftover pig parts, stuff 'em in an intestine, and you've got yourself respectable sausage or hot dogs. You may think bacon and eggs just go together, like French fries and ketchup or salt and pepper. But the combination of bacon and eggs for breakfast was dreamed up about a hundred years aqo by an advertising hired to sell more bacon, and the Dutch eat their fries with mayonnaise, not ketchup. Think it's rational to be grossed out by eating bugs? Think again. A hundred grams of dehydrated cricket contains 1,550 milligrams of iron, 340 milligrams of calcium, and 25 milligrams of zinc - three minerals often missing in the diets of the chronic poor. Insects are richer in minerals and healthy fats than beef or pork. Freaked out by the exoskeleton, antennae, and the way too many legs? Then stick to the Turf and forget the Surf because shrimps, crabs, and lobsters are all anthropods, just like grasshoppers. And they eat the nastiest of what sinks to the bottom of the ocean, so don't talk about bugs' disgusting diets. Anyway, you may have bug parts stuck between your teeth right now. The Food and Drug Administration tells its inspectors to ignore insect parts in black pepper unless they find more than 475 of them per 50 grams, on average. A fact sheet from Ohio State University estimates that Americans unknowingly eat an average of between one and two pounds of insects per year. An Italian professor recently published Ecological Implications of Mini-livestock: Potential of Insects, Rodents, Frogs and Snails. (Minicowpokes sold separately.) Writing in Slate.com, William Saletan tells us about a company by the name of Sunrise Land Shrimp. The company's logo: "Mmm. That's good Land Shrimp!" Three guesses what Land Shrimp is. (20-21)

You know, one time I saw Tiger down at the water hole: he had the biggest testicles of any animal, and the sharpest claws, and two front teeth as long as knives and as sharp as blades. And I said to him, Brother Tiger, you go for a swim, I’ll look after your balls for you. He was so proud of his balls. So he got into the water hole for a swim, and I put his balls on, and left him my own little spider balls. And then, you know what I did? I ran away, fast as my legs would take me “I didn’t stop till I got to the next town, And I saw Old Monkey there. You lookin’ mighty fine, Anansi, said Old Monkey. I said to him, You know what they all singin’ in the town over there? What are they singin’? he asks me. They singin’ the funniest song, I told him. Then I did a dance, and I sings, Tiger’s balls, yeah, I ate Tiger’s balls Now ain’t nobody gonna stop me ever at all Nobody put me up against the big black wall ’Cos I ate that Tiger’s testimonials I ate Tiger’s balls. “Old Monkey he laughs fit to bust, holding his side and shakin’, and stampin’, then he starts singin’ Tiger’s balls, I ate Tiger’s balls, snappin’ his fingers, spinnin’ around on his two feet. That’s a fine song, he says, I’m goin’ to sing it to all my friends. You do that, I tell him, and I head back to the water hole. “There’s Tiger, down by the water hole, walkin’ up and down, with his tail switchin’ and swishin’ and his ears and the fur on his neck up as far as they can go, and he’s snappin’ at every insect comes by with his huge old saber teeth, and his eyes flashin’ orange fire. He looks mean and scary and big, but danglin’ between his legs, there’s the littlest balls in the littlest blackest most wrinkledy ball-sack you ever did see. “Hey, Anansi, he says, when he sees me. You were supposed to be guarding my balls while I went swimming. But when I got out of the swimming hole, there was nothing on the side of the bank but these little black shriveled-up good-for-nothing spider balls I’m wearing. “I done my best, I tells him, but it was those monkeys, they come by and eat your balls all up, and when I tell them off, then they pulled off my own little balls. And I was so ashamed I ran away. “You a liar, Anansi, says Tiger. I’m going to eat your liver. But then he hears the monkeys coming from their town to the water hole. A dozen happy monkeys, boppin’ down the path, clickin’ their fingers and singin’ as loud as they could sing, Tiger’s balls, yeah, I ate Tiger’s balls Now ain’t nobody gonna stop me ever at all Nobody put me up against the big black wall ’Cos I ate that Tiger’s testimonials I ate Tiger’s balls. “And Tiger, he growls, and he roars and he’s off into the forest after them, and the monkeys screech and head for the highest trees. And I scratch my nice new big balls, and damn they felt good hangin’ between my skinny legs, and I walk on home. And even today, Tiger keeps chasin’ monkeys. So you all remember: just because you’re small, doesn’t mean you got no power.

We have been removed from the environment within which we evolved and with which we are uniquely designed to interact. Now we interact and coevolve with only the grosser, more monolithic, human-made commercial forms which remain available within our new laboratory-space station. Because we live inside the new environment, we are not aware that any tradeoff has been made. We have had to sacrifice the billions of small, detailed, multispectral experiences—emotional, physical, instinctive, sensual, intuitive and mental—that were appropriate and necessary for humans interacting with natural environments. Like the Micronesian islander in Chapter Four trapped between two modes of experience, we have found that functioning on an earlier multidimensional level has become not only useless but counterproductive. If we remained so attuned to the varieties of snowflakes that we could find fifty-six varieties as the Eskimo can; or to dreams so that we could find hundreds of distinct patterns as the Senoi Indians can; or to the minute altitude strata, inch by inch above the ground, occupied by entirely different species of flying insects as the California Indians once could; all this sensitivity would cripple any attempt to get along in the modern world. None of it would get us jobs, which gets us money, which in turn gets us food, housing, transportation, products, or entertainment, which are the fulfillments presently available in our new world. We have had to re-create ourselves to fit. We have had to reshape our very personalities to be competitive, aggressive, mentally fast, charming and manipulative. These qualities succeed in today’s world and offer survival and some measure of satisfaction within the cycle of work-consume, work-consume, work-consume. As for any dormant anxieties or unreconstructed internal wilderness, these may be smoothed over by compulsive working, compulsive eating, compulsive buying, compulsive sex, and then our brands of soma: alcohol, Librium, Valium, Thorazine, marijuana and television.

There are tiny mites living in our eyelashes. Hal Roach was a famous director who used to hire drunk and insane people to generate creative ideas. To attract female goats, Billy goats urinate on their own heads. Jewish people do not eat pork. Khazaria was a medieval Turkic kingdom that adopted Judaism as its official religion; it was the only non-Semitic state to become Jewish after Israel. The largest economy in the United States is California. More deer are killed by drivers than by hunters. The automotive center of the world is in Detroit. If the earth were ever to stop spinning, all the oceans would flow to the north and south poles. Around 16 to 20 percent of the terms searched on Google are said to have been never searched before. Bamboo can grow 35 inches per day making it the fastest growing woody plant in the world. The heaviest insect found on the earth is ‘Giant Weta’. It weighs more than a pound and is found in New Zealand. The CIA is expected to release the JFK assassination records to the public no later than 10/26/2017.

Once, on the road, Prim met a meditating sage who had spent most of his life on top of a flat rock. They had black bread and shared some ajash, as was custom. The sage was thankful, as the road was not very frequently traveled in those days and he was very near the point of starvation. During his conversation, he was delighted to learn of Prim’s extensive mastery of Empty Palms and the fifty five earthly purities. Delighted, and as payment for his meal, he taught Prim the meaning of watchfulness. This was the old breathing and cold-atum technique often used by warrior monks in those days. It ran through the following methodology: Build a tower, and make it impregnable. Make every stone so tightly sealed that no insect can squeeze through, no grain of sand can make it inside. Your tower must have no windows or doors. It must not accept passage by friend or foe. No weapon, no act of violence, and not one mote of love may penetrate its stony interior. “Why build the tower this way?” said Prim? “It will make you invincible,” said the sage, “This is the way of Ya-at slave monks. Their skin is like iron, and so are their hearts. They are inured to death and fear. Grief shall never find them, and neither shall weakness.” Prim thought a moment, and came upon a realization, for she was wise, obedient, and an excellent daughter. “If a man built a tower this way, he would quickly starve, no matter how strong he became.” The sage was even more delighted. “Yes,” he said, “There is a better way, and I will teach it to you: Once you have built your tower, you must deconstruct it, brick by brick, stone by stone. You must do it meticulously and carefully, so that while you leave no physical trace of it remaining, your tower is still built in your mind and your heart, ready to spring anew at a moment’s notice. You can enjoy the fresh air, and eat fine meals, and enjoy a good drink with your friends, but all the while your tower remains standing. You are both prisoner and warden. This is the hardest way, but the strongest.” Prim saw the wisdom in this, and quickly made to return to the road, but the sage stopped her before she left. “As you to your earlier remark,” the sage said, “The man who builds his tower but cannot take it apart again – that man is at the pinnacle of his strength. But that man will surely perish.” – Prim Masters the Road

The words of Nils Hellstrom. There is another respect in which we must guard against becoming too much like the insects upon whom we pattern our design for human survival. The insect has been called a walking digestive tract. This is not without reason. To support his own life, an insect will consume as much as a hundred times his own weight each day—which to each of us would be like eating an entire cow, a herd of thirty each month. And as the insect population grows, each individual naturally needs more. To those who have witnessed the insect’s profligate display of appetite, the outcome is clear. If allowed to continue on his reproductive rampage, the insect would defoliate the earth. Thus, with our lesson from the insect, comes a clear warning. If the race for food is to be the deciding conflict, let no one say it came without this warning. From the beginning of time, wild humans have stood helpless, watching the very soil they nurtured give birth to a competitor that could outeat them. Just as we must not let our teacher the insect consume what we require for survival, we must not launch a similar rampage of our own. The pace of our planet’s growing cycle cannot be denied. It is possible for insects or for man to destroy in a single week what could have fed millions for an entire year.

When the “screech owl” calls, “villainous” Eve, described by Tertullian as the “devil’s gateway,” enters the labyrinth of her own narcissistic wounding, rewinding the threads of a lifetime of unravelling. Ariadne, Persephone, Inanna, Ereshkigal, Shapash, Ameratsu, Walu, Isis and Hecate have been here before, out with their lanterns, brewing and simmering, re-wilding the stars and constellations in their own image, fermenting their power. Downwards and inwards becomes upwards and outwards. This is why the underworld works for women. Why have we forgotten how to listen to Mother Nature? In Genesis 1:28 God tells man to “fill the earth and subdue it.” Man has permission to rule over [and therefore exploit] every living creature and red Mother Earth herself. From rotting flesh apple trees grow. Asherah as Tree: roots in the underworld; canopy in the cosmos; branches sagging under the weight of apples, dates and berries, ripe for eating, brewing and rotting back into the soil, is a multilayered eco-system nurturing life. A cornucopia of animal and planet familiars circle in her orbit: Moon, Sun, Venus, Ibex, lion, dove and serpent. Rivers of consciousness flow through all creatures. We are the flowers, the trees, the animals, the tides, the nature spirits. When all plants, animals and insects are equal the cycle of ownership is broken. Hierarchy falls.

In the Brhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad7 the first form of the doctrine of transmigration is given. The souls of those who have lived lives of sacrifice, charity and austerity, after certain obscure peregrinations, pass to the World of the Fathers, the paradise of Yama; thence, after a period of bliss, they go to the moon; from the moon they go to empty space, whence they pass to the air, and descend to earth in the rain. There they “become food,… and are offered again in the altar fire which is man, to be born again in the fire of woman”, while the unrighteous are reincarnated as worms, birds or insects. This doctrine, which seems to rest on a primitive belief that conception occurred through the eating by one of the parents of a fruit or vegetable containing the latent soul of the offspring, is put forward as a rare and new one, and was not universally held at the time of the composition of the Upaniṣad. Even in the days of the Buddha, transmigration may not have been believed in by everyone, but it seems to have gained ground very rapidly in the 7th and 6th centuries B.C. Thus the magnificently logical Indian doctrines of saṃsāra, or transmigration, and karma, the result of the deeds of one life affecting the next, had humble beginnings in a soul theory of quite primitive type; but even at this early period they had an ethical content, and had attained some degree of elaboration. In

No, you do not understand me now, but later on you will remember what I am saying to you at this moment. A day comes, and it comes early for many, when there is an end to mirth, for behind everything one looks at one sees death. You do not even understand the word. At your age it means nothing; at mine it is terrible. Yes, one understands it all at once, one does not know how or why, and then everything in life changes its aspect. For fifteen years I have felt death assail me as if I bore within me some gnawing beast. I have felt myself decaying little by little, month by month, hour by hour, like a house crumbling to ruin. Death has disfigured me so completely that I do not recognize myself. I have no longer anything about me of myself—of the fresh, strong man I was at thirty. I have seen death whiten my black hairs, and with what skillful and spiteful slowness. Death has taken my firm skin, my muscles, my teeth, my whole body of old, only leaving me a despairing soul, soon to be taken too. Every step brings me nearer to death, every moment, every breath hastens his odious work. To breathe, sleep, drink, eat, work, dream, everything we do is to die. To live, in short, is to die. I now see death so near that I often want to stretch my arms to push it back. I see it everywhere. The insects crushed on the path, the falling leaves, the white hair in a friend's head, rend my heart and cry to me, "Behold it!" It spoils for me all I do, all I see, all that I eat and drink, all that I love; the bright moonlight, the sunrise, the broad ocean, the noble rivers, and the soft summer evening air so sweet to breathe.

Virtually every version of CBT for anxiety disorders involves working through what’s called an exposure hierarchy. The concept is simple. You make a list of all the situations and behaviors you avoid due to anxiety. You then assign a number to each item on your list based on how anxiety provoking you expect doing the avoided behavior would be. Use numbers from 0 (= not anxiety provoking at all) to 100 (= you would fear having an instant panic attack). For example, attempting to talk to a famous person in your field at a conference might be an 80 on the 0-100 scale. Sort your list in order, from least to most anxiety provoking. Aim to construct a list that has several avoided actions in each 10-point range. For example, several that fall between 20 and 30, between 30 and 40, and so on, on your anxiety scale. That way, you won’t have any jumps that are too big. Omit things that are anxiety-provoking but wouldn’t actually benefit you (such as eating a fried insect). Make a plan for how you can work through your hierarchy, starting at the bottom of the list. Where possible, repeat an avoided behavior several times before you move up to the next level. For example, if one of your items is talking to a colleague you find intimidating, do this several times (with the same or different colleagues) before moving on. When you start doing things you’d usually avoid that are low on your hierarchy, you’ll gain the confidence you need to do the things that are higher up on your list. It’s important you don’t use what are called safety behaviors. Safety behaviors are things people do as an anxiety crutch—for example, wearing their lucky undies when they approach that famous person or excessively rehearsing what they plan to say. There is a general consensus within psychology that exposure techniques like the one just described are among the most effective ways to reduce problems with anxiety. In clinical settings, people who do exposures get the most out of treatment. Some studies have even shown that just doing exposure can be as effective as therapies that also include extensive work on thoughts. If you want to turbocharge your results, try exposure. If you find it too difficult to do alone, consider working with a therapist.

What do you call an evil leader digging a hole? Darth Spader   What do you call Obi Wan eating crunchy toast? Obi Crumb   What do call a padawan who likes to play computer games? i'Pad' me   What do you call a starship pilot who likes to drink cocoa? Han Coco   What starship is always happy to have people aboard? The Millennium Welcome   What did Yoda say to Luke while eating dinner? Use the fork Luke.   What do you call a Sith who won't fight? A Sithy.   Which Star Wars character uses meat for a weapon instead of a Lightsaber? Obi Wan Baloney.   What do call a smelly droid? R2DPOO   What do call a droid that has wet its pants? C3PEE0   What do you call a Jedi who loves pies? Luke PieWalker?   What do call captain Rex when he emailing on a phone? Captain Text   What evil leader doesn’t need help reaching? Ladder the Hutt   What kind of evil lord will always say goodbye? Darth Later   Which rebel will always win the limbo? Han LowLow   What do you call R2D2 when he’s older? R2D3   What do you call R2D2 when he’s busting to go to the toilet? R2DLoo   What do call Padme’s father? Dadme   What’s do you call the Death Star when its wet? The Death Spa   What do call R2D2 when he climbs a tree? R2Tree2   What do you say a Jedi adding ketchup to his dinner? Use the sauce Luke.   What star wars baddy is most likely to go crazy? Count KooKoo   What do call Count Dooku when he’s really sad? Count Boohoo   Which Jedi is most likely to trick someone? Luke Liewalker   Which evil lord is most likely to be a dad? Dadda the Hutt   Which rebel likes to drink through straws? Chew Sucker   Which space station can you eat from? The Death bar   What do call a moody rebel? Luke Sighwalker   What do you call an even older droid R2D4   What do call Darth Vader with lots of scrapes? Dearth Grazer   What call an evil lord on eBay? Darth Trader   What do call it when an evil lord pays his mum? Darth Paid-her   What do call an evil insect Darth Cicada   What sith always teases? General Teasers   Who's the scariest sith? Count Spooko   Which sith always uses his spoon to eat his lunch Count Spoonu   What evil lord has lots of people living next door? Darth Neighbour   What Jedi always looks well dressed? Luke TieWalker   Which evil lord works in a restaurant? Darth waiter   What do you call a smelly storm trooper? A storm pooper   What do you call Darth Vader digging a hole? Darth Spader   What do you C3PO wetting his pants? C3PEE0   What do you call Asoka’s pet frog? Acroaka   What do you call a Jedi that loves pies? Luke Piewalker   What rebel loves hot drinks? Han Coco   What did Leia say to Luke at the dinner table? Use the fork Luke.   What do call Obi Wan eating fruit? Obi plum   What do you call Obi in a band? Obi Drum   What doe Luke take out at night? A Night Sabre   What is the favourite cooking pot on Endor? The e Wok

The "kindness of giving you a body" means that, at first, our bodies are not fully matured nor are our pleasant complexions. We started in the mother's womb as just an oval spot and oblong lump, and from there we developed through the vital essence of the mother's blood and flesh. We grew through the vital essence of her food while she endured embarrassment, pain, and suffering. After we were born, from a small worm until we were fully grown, she developed our body. The "kindness of undergoing hardships for you" means that, at first, we were not wearing any clothes with all their ornamentation, did not possess any wealth, and did not bring any provisions. We just came with a mouth and stomach-empty-handed, without any material things. When we came to this place where we knew no one, she gave food when we were hungry, she gave drink when we were thirsty, she gave clothes when we were cold, she gave wealth when we had nothing. Also, she did not just give us things she did not need. Rather, she has given us what she did not dare use for herself, things she did not dare eat, drink, or wear for herself, things she did not dare employ for the happiness of this life, things she did not dare use for her next life's wealth. In brief, without looking for happiness in this life or next, she nurtured her child. She did not obtain these things easily or with pleasure. She collected them by creating various negative karmas, by sufferings and hardships, and gave them all to the child. For example, creating negative karma: she fed the child through various nonvirtuous actions like fishing, butchering, and so forth. For example, suffering: to give to the child, she accumulated wealth by working at a business or farm and so forth, wearing frost for shoes, wearing stars as a hat, riding on the horse of her legs, her hem like a whip, giving her legs to the dogs and her face to the people. Furthermore, she loved the unknown one much more than her father, mother, and teachers who were very kind to her. She watched the child with eyes of love, and kept it warm in soft cloth. She dandled the child in her ten fingers, and lifted it up in the sky. She called to it in a loving, pleasant voice, saying, "Joyful one, you who delight Mommy. Lu, lu, you happy one," and so forth. The "kindness of giving you life" means that, at first, we were not capable of eating with our mouth and hands nor were we capable of enduring all the different hardships. We were like feeble insects without strength; we were just silly and could not think anything. Again, without rejection, the mother served us, put us on her lap, protected us from fire and water, held us away from precipices, dispelled all harmful things, and performed rituals. Out of fear for our death or fear for our health, she did divinations and consulted astrologers. Through many ritual ceremonies and many other different things, in inconceivable ways, she protected the life of her child. The "kindness of showing you the world" means that, at first, we did not come here knowing various things, seeing broadly, and being talented. We could only cry and move our legs and hands. Other than that, we knew nothing. The mother taught us how to eat when we did not know how. She taught us how to wear clothes when we did not know how. She taught us how to walk when we did not know how. She taught us how to talk when we did not know how to say "Mama," or "Hi," and so forth. She taught us various skills, creative arts, and so forth. She tried to make us equal when we were unequal, and tried to make the uneven even for us. Not only have we had a mother in this lifetime, but from beginningless samsara she served as a mother countless times.

Wise men in their bad hours have envied The little people making merry like grasshoppers In spots of sunlight, hardly thinking Backward but never forward, and if they somehow Take hold upon the future they do it Half asleep, with the tools of generation Foolishly reduplicating Folly in thirty-year periods; the eat and laugh too, Groan against labors, wars and partings, Dance, talk, dress and undress; wise men have pretended The summer insects enviable; One must indulge the wise in moments of mockery. Strength and desire possess the future, The breed of the grasshopper shrills, "What does the future Matter, we shall be dead?" Ah, grasshoppers, Death's a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made Something more equal to the centuries Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness. The mountains are dead stone, the people Admire or hate their stature, their insolent quietness, The mountains are not softened nor troubled And a few dead men's thoughts have the same temper.

It was the water, the cleanliness. We didn't have any soap and water. We doused down with insect repellent every night. We didn't bathe like four, five works at a time. We didn't change clothes. The heat, the dehydration. The living situation was just as bad on us as facing the enemy, because you weren't always facing the enemy and you were always facing these conditions of jungle rot, dysentery, dehydration, hunger, fatigue despair, all the time. Almost wishing you'd get hit.... One of the most outstanding things ... was that the conditions we had to live under were animal, purely animal. And your thoughts went to the same way. You live like an animal, you start thinking and eating like an animal and heaving like an animal. Filthy rotten pig, pig, stink! And then how're you supposed to feel good about anything? Y'know, you can't feel good. You always hoping something would happen so you could fall down and get a rest.

Anno Domini 2017 In the year 2017, 9 million people died from environmental pollution. Over 20,000 researchers and scientists issued a sharp warning to humanity and explained that we’re heading for a climate and sustainability catastrophe; time is running out. In the year 2017, German researchers determined that 75–80 per cent of insects had disappeared. Not much later came the report that the bird population in France has ‘collapsed’, and that certain bird species have been reduced by up to 70 per cent because they have no insects to eat. In the year 2017, forty-two individuals had more money than half the world’s population combined and 82 per cent of the world’s total increase in wealth went to the richest 1 per cent. Sea ice and glaciers were melting at a record rate. 65 million people were displaced. Hurricanes and torrential rain claimed thousands of victims, drowned cities and smashed whole nations to bits. It was also the year when the emissions curve again turned upwards, at the same time as the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere increased at a velocity which, from a larger geologic perspective, can only be compared to pressing the warp button in a Star Trek movie.

D.D.T., which is sprayed on food while it is growing up from the earth, is also a poison that should not be put into the human body, regardless of the desire to kill insects, that loves to dine on the same food on which we dine.

Self-Portrait as Mango She says, Your English is great! How long have you been in our country? I say, Suck on a mango, bitch, since that’s all you think I eat anyway. Mangoes are what margins like me know everything about, right? Doesn’t a mango just win spelling bees and kiss white boys? Isn’t a mango a placeholder in a poem folded with burkas? But this one, the one I’m going to slice and serve down her throat, is a mango that remembers jungles jagged with insects, the river’s darker thirst. This mango was cut down by a scythe that beheads soldiers, mango that taunts and suns itself into a hard-palmed fist only a few months per year, fattens while blood stains green ponds. Why use a mango to beat her perplexed? Why not a coconut? Because this “exotic” fruit won’t be cracked open to reveal whiteness to you. This mango isn’t alien just because of its gold-green bloodline. I know I’m worth waiting for. I want to be kneaded for ripeness. Mango: my own sunset-skinned heart waiting to be held and peeled, mango I suck open with teeth. Tappai! This is the only way to eat a mango.

restaurant where we could eat tasty little insects all day long. Except for mosquitoes, of course!” he added, glancing quickly at Munchy. Munchy laughed. “I’d like a soda fountain where we garden creatures could order sugar-water shakes and other yummy treats!” she

Bears in Ohio? There were at least 65 black bears sighted in Ohio in 2012, and their numbers are increasing, according to the Division of Wildlife. Most sightings near the Buckeye Trail have been in southeastern Ohio. In 1999 a black bear was spotted east of Athens, gorging itself on the 17-year cicadas that emerged that spring over much of Ohio. Bears eat mainly insects and grubs. They normally avoid people. If you spot one, simply back off and do not try to take photographs. Report the sighting to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources as soon as possible. And remember, always being quiet and considerate of the wildlife around you, large or small, is in your own best interest.

Cass couldn’t deny it: she had been disturbed by the project. It wasn’t just the garage; she was up to her neck in climate change too. Looking at Instagram, eating an ice cream, switching on a light: her most casual act left a toxic trace behind – as if she had a marauding shadow-self that choked the very world she lived in. For weeks she had moped around, paralysed by the inescapability of her own evil. She would stand on the threshold of the back garden, looking at the flowers and grass and the trees in the distance, imagining everything turning black, the birds and the insects falling out of the sky. Even on good days, like when Elaine gave her a bracelet she had two of, she would remember suddenly all of the animals that were going extinct and how the earth was going to flood and everything was doomed – because of the Barnes family.

Millions of acres that are now lawn in the United States once supported the native herbaceous plants that fed lots of grasshoppers and crickets. Grasshoppers, despite their name, depend primarily on broadleaved forbs, while crickets mostly develop on dead plant material. In pursuit of our obsession for neat landscapes, we have eliminated both in too many places. Finally, areas overrun with invasive groundcovers such as Japanese stiltgrass, vinca, or English ivy wouldn’t support grasshoppers because the plants grasshoppers depend on have been replaced by species they cannot eat. We can bring grasshoppers and other insects back if we plant more of our private and public spaces with the native plant species they require.

He was burning, and then freezing. His nails were torn out together with his eyes. Something was crawling inside of him, like thousands of tiny little insects, and eating him alive.

they liked to listen to the kids who played in the backyard. The kids were always talking about how they had done this or that, or gone here or there, downtown. Wiggly knew that towns had parks and stores and restaurants and bakeries and places to get sweet treats. That sounded wonderful to him! “All we have here is plants,” he said to his friends. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if we had all kinds of special places to go, like the kids always talk about?” “I’d like that,” said Rattles. “Imagine a five-star restaurant where we could eat tasty little insects all day long. Except for mosquitoes, of course!” he added, glancing quickly at Munchy. Munchy laughed. “I’d like a soda fountain where we garden creatures could order sugar-water shakes and other yummy treats!” she chimed. “I’d like a park,” said Wiggly. “A beautiful park with a maze of fun tunnels to wiggle through.” Munchy’s eyes lit up. “Oh, that would be so much fun! What would you like, Snarky?

Let's recognize that wolves which are often hungry for chickens, will probably eat the chickens if allowed to carry the keys to the hen's house. For similar reasons the senile and the clumsy should probably not be allowed to walk freely around sensitive equipment. The protector of dangerous means such as nuclear weapons or other powerful decisions which may affect thousands, millions or billions of lives through a simple order or press of a button ought therefor be screened regularly, very thouroughly through a strict protocol regarding mental, physical, social and spiritual health/status. On top of this we are not fully aware of all the currently unknown dangers such as external manipulation of our own biology [as already witnessed in small scale with certain parasitic venoms in insects], the universe is colossal and there is almost certainly a few exotic, unseen and unexpected threats. Likewise, human psychology can in some ways be easy to predict, opportunity to soften otherwise perpetuated tragedies caused by the mismatch between individuals with certain characteristics and certain responsibilities. Let's also recognize that even if each of us were shipped with previously necessary primal flaws [which coincidentaly, may be highlighted as sins] also includes a very real ability to manipulate our biology and circumstances through various forms of voluntary discipline or exposure. Furthermore, while it is more comfortable to rely on our strengths perhaps we should also make an effort to explore our weakneses. Let's not forget that babies are all bundles of confusions, struggling to find their ways [and if someone has lost their love for babies they should be executed on the spot, or somewhere nearby]

always talk about?” “I’d like that,” said Rattles. “Imagine a five-star restaurant where we could eat tasty little insects all day long. Except for mosquitoes, of course!” he added, glancing quickly at Munchy. Munchy laughed. “I’d like a soda fountain where we garden creatures could order sugar-water shakes and other yummy treats!” she chimed. “I’d like a park,” said Wiggly. “A beautiful park with a maze of fun tunnels to wiggle through.” Munchy’s eyes lit up. “Oh, that would be so much fun! What would you like, Snarky?” Snarky rolled his eyes. “That’s all fool’s talk,” he replied. “Garden folk like us can’t have towns, no matter how badly we want them.” Wiggly sighed. “But if we could have a town, what would you want in it?” he pressed. “A store, I suppose,” Snarky answered after a moment. “A store where I could sell pretty pebbles to customers.” Everyone knew that Snarky’s favorite hobby was collecting shiny pebbles. “That’s a great idea!” Wiggly told him. He sighed again. All of his friends had had great ideas. “There has to be some way…” he began slowly. “To build a town?” asked Munchy, finishing his thought. Wiggly grinned at her. “Exactly! We, the creatures of the garden, are going to build a town!” he declared suddenly. Snarky rolled his eyes and muttered some comment about how impossible that was going to be, but no one paid attention. They were determined to follow through with Wiggly’s plan. And so they did. Over the next several weeks, the garden friends collected trash that they found

For example, long-distance migrating birds commonly eat more prior to their big flights. These birds become quite fat, which provides the energy they need to make the journey. The European garden warbler will risk crossing the Sahara Desert to its winter habitat in tropical Africa once it has enough fat stores. But the record breaker for distance is the bar-tailed godwit, a seashore bird that uses its long beak to probe sand or mud for insects and crustaceans and builds up fat stores in both its body and liver in late fall before migration. One godwit was documented to have flown seven thousand miles in an eight-day nonstop flight from Alaska to New Zealand.

Life is running away from us, and it would be one thing if we had something to look forward to, if you and I could enjoy a bit of luxury once we're fifty or sixty, but that's never going to happen, is it? This is what life is like now, and it's only going to get worse. All of it. The best we can hope for is that we die before it becomes completely unbearable. With the heat, the water, the food. That we can keep society functioning for a few more years, until the next pandemic shuts everything down again. That we don't have to eat insects. That the racists and lunatics don't take over even more of the world. That there's still coffee in the rest home . . . And ultimately it doesn't really matter all that much, the fact that hu anity is collapsing isn't a problem, not from a cosmic or evolutionary perspective, the planet will still be here, life will go on, for millions of years I'm sure, it's just us that doesn't have a future . . . So I want to enjoy myself. I want to live life to the max. I want to burn through every last krona. I don't want to waste a single day on a life I'm not happy with. There's no point waiting for things to get better, because nothing is going to get better. This is the world we live in now. Don't be ashamed to be human, be proud." - Didrik

Life is running away from us, and it would be one thing if we had something to look forward to, if you and I could enjoy a bit of luxury once we're fifty or sixty, but that's never going to happen, is it? This is what life is like now, and it's only going to get worse. All of it. The best we can hope for is that we die before it becomes completely unbearable. With the heat, the water, the food. That we can keep society functioning for a few more years, until the next pandemic shuts everything down again. That we don't have to eat insects. That the racists and lunatics don't take over even more of the world. That there's still coffee in the rest home . . . And ultimately it doesn't really matter all that much, the fact that humanity is collapsing isn't a problem, not from a cosmic or evolutionary perspective, the planet will still be here, life will go on, for millions of years I'm sure, it's just us that doesn't have a future . . . So I want to enjoy myself. I want to live life to the max. I want to burn through every last krona. I don't want to waste a single day on a life I'm not happy with. There's no point waiting for things to get better, because nothing is going to get better. This is the world we live in now. Don't be ashamed to be human, be proud." - Didrik

Recently, as I came across in my reading, researchers had found promising indicators of memory in plants. Others found that a wide variety of plants are able to distinguish themselves from others, and can tell whether or not those others are genetic kin. When such plants find themselves beside their siblings, they rearrange their leaves within two days to avoid shading them. Pea shoot roots appeared to be able to hear water flowing through sealed pipes and grow toward them, and several plants, including lima beans and tobacco, can react to an attack of munching insects by summoning those insects’ specific predators to come pick them off. (Other plants—including a particular tomato—secrete a chemical that cause hungry caterpillars to turn away from devouring their leaves to eat each other instead.)

This compassion, or sympathy with the pains of others, ought also to extend to the brute creation, as far as our necessities will admit; for we cannot exist long without the destruction of other animal or vegetable beings either in their mature or embryon state. Such is the condition of mortality, that the first law of nature is 'eat, or be eaten.' Hence for the preservation of our existence we may be supposed to have a natural right to kill those brute creatures, which we want to eat, or which want to eat us; but to destroy even insects wantonly shows an unreflecting mind, or a depraved heart.

The mating rites of mantises are well known: a chemical produced in the head of the male insect says in effect, 'No, I don't go near her, you fool, she'll eat you alive.' At the same time a chemical in his abdomen says, 'Yes, by all means, now and forever yes.

All good Buddhists undertake to abide by the Five Precepts: not to take life, not to steal, not to commit adultery, not to tell lies, not to take intoxicating drinks. Although the taking of life is considered such an evil that many Burmese will go out of their way to avoid stepping on an insect, there are few who avoid eating meat. This is considered inconsistent by some people. The Burmese would probably argue that the Lord Buddha himself ate meat. The Burmese are a practical people. They have also been described as happy-go-lucky. As

If we were walking here together, I’d point out the carnivorous plants that grow on this spot: sundews with sticky red leaves, eating insects to sustain them because the soil is so poor. If you were with me, I’d take you to the Doubler Stones, where thousands of years ago, Neolithic peoples carved channels in the rock to drain away the blood from their sacrifices. I would show you where the plover nests, and the green hairstreak butterfly lays its eggs. I love this place. I love this land. It’s part of me, it’s part of who I am. But it’s no place for you: a seven-year-old girl in a princess costume.

Ecosystems are amazingly complex, from climate, geography, and geology down to the insect and microbial level. This makes particular places better or worse than others at growing particular things. There

Perhaps the ghastliest disease endemic to mosquitia is Mucocutaneous Leishmaniasis, sometimes called white leprosy, caused by the bite of an infected sand fly. The Leishmania parasite migrates to the mucus membranes of the victim's nose and lips and eats them away, eventually creating a giant, weeping sore where the face used to be.

Commercially raised chickens are also kept confined in cages and fed on denatured feed contaminated with antibiotics, hormones, and pesticides. Chinese physicians have always recommended 'earth chickens' (tu-jee) as the only safe dietary source of chicken and eggs. Called 'free-range chickens' in the West, they run free around the farm, eating wild vegetation, insects, and worms, and getting plenty of fresh air and exercise.

Researchers developed ways to extract genes from one species and insert them into the genetic code of another—a technique that can, among other things, cause invading insects to kill themselves. The organisms produced in this fashion, which we eat, are called Genetically Modified Organisms or GMOs, sometimes Genetically Engineered Organisms (GEOs) or, for this chapter, Genetically Modified Food (GMF).

Thus humans who lived a million years ago, despite their big brains and sharp stone tools, dwelt in constant fear of predators, rarely hunted large game, and subsisted mainly by gathering plants, scooping up insects, stalking small animals, and eating the carrion left behind by other more powerful carnivores.

Wiggly Worm lived in a backyard garden with his best friends, Snarky Snail, Rattles Snake, and Munchy Mosquito. As much as he loved wiggling around in the mud, Wiggly often wondered what it would be like to live in a town. Wiggly and his friends knew all about towns because they liked to listen to the kids who played in the backyard. The kids were always talking about how they had done this or that, or gone here or there, downtown. Wiggly knew that towns had parks and stores and restaurants and bakeries and places to get sweet treats. That sounded wonderful to him! “All we have here is plants,” he said to his friends. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if we had all kinds of special places to go, like the kids always talk about?” “I’d like that,” said Rattles. “Imagine a five-star restaurant where we could eat tasty little insects all day long. Except for mosquitoes, of course!” he added, glancing quickly at Munchy.

Sometimes the strength will be less obvious. Consider Charles Darwin's finches, a subject you may vaguely remember from high school biology class. When Darwin first encountered these birds on the Galapagos Islands, he gathered numerous specimens, not quite realizing what he had discovered. Upon his return, he presented these specimens to the famous English ornithologist John Gould for identification. Gould's analysis revealed that the specimens Darwin had submitted were in fact highly variable. What at first glance were all just "finches" turned out to be twelve different species. There were similarities, but evolution had allowed each to develop a distinctive strength. Each species had a novel beak structure that allowed it to exploit a specific food resource. Some evolved to eat seeds, others fruit, others insects, and others grubs. In business terms, they all had similar core competencies (feathers, wings, feet, beak), but it was a distinctive, seemingly subtle strength—the type of beak—that allowed the finches to effectively compete for a specific type of food.

DENGUE FEVER (BREAKBONE FEVER) Dengue fever is a viral infection found throughout Central America. In Costa Rica outbreaks involving thousands of people occur every year. Dengue is transmitted by aedes mosquitoes, which often bite during the daytime and are usually found close to human habitations, often indoors. They breed primarily in artificial water containers such as jars, barrels, cans, plastic containers and discarded tires. Dengue is especially common in densely populated, urban environments. Dengue usually causes flulike symptoms including fever, muscle aches, joint pains, headaches, nausea and vomiting, often followed by a rash. Most cases resolve uneventfully in a few days. Severe cases usually occur in children under the age of 15 who are experiencing their second dengue infection. There is no treatment for dengue fever except taking analgesics such as acetaminophen/paracetamol (Tylenol) and drinking plenty of fluids. Severe cases may require hospitalization for intravenous fluids and supportive care. There is no vaccine. The key to prevention is taking insect-protection measures. HEPATITIS A Hepatitis A is the second-most-common travel-related infection (after traveler’s diarrhea). It’s a viral infection of the liver that is usually acquired by ingestion of contaminated water, food or ice, though it may also be acquired by direct contact with infected persons. Symptoms may include fever, malaise, jaundice, nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain. Most cases resolve without complications, though hepatitis A occasionally causes severe liver damage. There is no treatment. The vaccine for hepatitis A is extremely safe and highly effective. You should get vaccinated before you go to Costa Rica. Because the safety of hepatitis A vaccine has not been established for pregnant women or children under the age of two, they should instead be given a gammaglobulin injection. LEISHMANIASIS Leishmaniasis occurs in the mountains and jungles of all Central American countries. The infection is transmitted by sand flies, which are about one-third the size of mosquitoes. Most cases occur in newly cleared forest or areas of secondary growth. The highest incidence is in Puerto Viejo de Talamanca. It causes slow-growing ulcers over exposed parts of the body There is no vaccine. RABIES Rabies is a viral infection of the brain and spinal cord that is almost always fatal. The rabies virus is carried in the saliva of infected animals and is typically transmitted through an animal bite, though contamination of any break in the skin with infected saliva may result in rabies. Rabies occurs in all Central American countries. However, in Costa Rica only two cases have been reported over the last 30 years. TYPHOID Typhoid fever is caused by ingestion of food or water contaminated by a species of salmonella known as Salmonella typhi . Fever occurs in virtually all cases. Other symptoms may include headache, malaise, muscle aches, dizziness, loss of appetite, nausea and abdominal pain. A pretrip vaccination for typoid is recommended, but not required. It’s usually given orally, and is also available as an injection. TRAVELER’S DIARRHEA Tap water is safe and of a high quality in Costa Rica, but when you’re far off the beaten path it’s best to avoid tap water unless it has been boiled, filtered or chemically disinfected (iodine tablets). To prevent diarrhea, be wary of dairy products that might contain unpasteurized milk; and be highly selective when eating food from street vendors.

The future Buddha was once born as a rabbit, who vowed that he would give his own flesh to any beggar who came to him, in order to protect the beggar from having to break the moral law by taking animal life. To test him, Indra, the Hindu king of the gods, took the form of a Brahmin and came to him; the rabbit offered to throw himself into a fire and roast himself so that the Brahmin could eat him. Indra conjured up a magical fire; when the rabbit—who first shook himself three times so that any insects that might be on his body would escape death—threw himself into the fire, it turned icy cold. Indra then revealed his identity as Indra, and so that everyone would know of the rabbit’s virtue, he painted the sign of a rabbit on the orb of the moon.

Many of those insects have critical impacts on their ecosystems. They are the Pleistocene megafauna writ small. They chew up and decompose the dead to keep things clean and keep energy circulating through its natural cycle. They riddle the soil with holes to aerate it. They spread seeds. They pollinate a third of the foods Americans eat. They are useful, in other words. But the large majority are also characterless and ugly—not quick to draw our sympathy. And

When we reach the fence, we see the Dauntless standing in our headlight beams, blocking the gate. Their blue armbands stand out against the rest of their clothing. I try to keep my expression pleasant. I will not be able to fool them into thinking I’m Amity with a scowl on my face. A dark-skinned man with a gun in hand approaches Marcus’s window. He shines a flashlight at Marcus first, then Christina, then me. I squint into the beam, and force a smile at the man like I don’t mind bright lights in the eyes and guns pointed at my head in the slightest. The Amity must be deranged if this is how they really think. Or they’ve been eating too much of that bread. “So tell me,” the man says. “What’s an Abnegation member doing in a truck with two Amity?” “These two girls volunteered to bring provisions to the city,” Marcus says, “and I volunteered to escort them so that they would be safe.” “Also, we don’t know how to drive,” says Christina, grinning. “My dad tried to teach me years ago but I kept confusing the gas pedal for the brake pedal, and you can imagine what a disaster that was! Anyway, it was really nice of Joshua to volunteer to take us, because it would have taken us forever otherwise, and the boxes were so heavy--” The Dauntless man holds up his hand. “Okay, I get it.” “Oh, of course. Sorry.” Christina giggles. “I just thought I would explain, because you seemed so confused, and no wonder, because how many times do you encounter this--””Right,” the man says. “And do you intend to return to the city?” “Not anytime soon,” Marcus says. “All right. Go ahead, then.” He nodes to the other Dauntless by the gate. One of them types a series of numbers on the keypad, and the gate slides open to admit us. Marcus nods to the guard who let us through and drives over the worn path to Amity headquarters. The truck’s headlights catch tire tracks and prairie grass and insects weaving back and forth. In the darkness to my right I see fireflies lighting up to a rhythm that is like a heartbeat. After a few seconds, Marcus glances at Christina. “What on earth was that?” “There’s nothing the Dauntless hate more than cheerful Amity babble,” says Christina, lifting a shoulder. “I figured if he got annoyed it would distract him and he would let us through.” I smile with all my teeth. “You are a genius.” “I know.” She tosses her head like she’s throwing her hair over one shoulder, only she doesn’t have enough to throw. “Except,” says Marcus. “Joshua is not an Abnegation name.” “Whatever. As if anyone knows the difference.

It is not as cruel as it appears, Arisha.” “But all animals are the sacred creatures of Mother Earth,” she repeated back to him. His teaching flooded her memory. He had always stressed the holiness of animal life, even plants and insects. This seemed to be a violation of that sacred truth. “Yes, that is true. But some creatures are more sacred than others. Do you remember how we have talked about the nature of evil men?” “Yes.” She was realizing that not all of life was good and that some people wished to hurt others. “Well, many human beings are bad to Mother Earth. They cut down trees, kill and eat other animals and spoil the land. This is the price we must pay to appease the goddess Gaia. In a way it is really—justice.

Saw-Scaled Viper     Alternative Names: Echis, Carpet viper, Little Indian viper Where in the world? Africa, Middle East, Central Asia and Indian subcontinent Habitat: Desert, fields, towns and cities Common prey: Lizards, frogs, scorpions, centipedes and large insects Size: 40 to 60 cm (15 to 23 inches) Lifespan: 25 to 30 years Conservation status: Not classified   Description: The saw-scaled viper or carpet viper may be a small snake, only able to grow as long as 60 centimeters or a little less than two feet, but it is considered one of the deadliest snakes in the world. In fact, some scientists say that wherever this snake is found, it is responsible for about 80% of human deaths from snake bites.   There are three main reasons why the saw-scaled viper is so deadly. Firstly it is the saw-scaled viper’s aggressive behavior. It has a nasty temper and is easily provoked.   Secondly, it has a very quick strike, which when combined with a very defensive attitude, can be lethal to humans living nearby. The saw-scaled viper strikes so quickly that even the distinctive sawing sound it makes with its scales when agitated is not warning enough.   Thirdly, the saw-scaled viper’s venom is highly toxic to humans, with the venom from the females being two times more toxic than the venom from the male snakes. Its venom destroys red blood cells and the walls of the arteries, so within 24 hours, the victim can die of heart failure. There is an anti-venom available, and as long as this is administered very shortly after the bite, the victim can be saved.   Like other snakes, the saw-scaled viper’s diet consists of small animals like mice and lizards, as well as large insects. It hunts at night, hiding behind rocks and when it sees its prey, it coils and launches itself quickly and with accuracy, often biting its prey at the first attempt. The bite kills the prey within seconds, making it easy for the viper to drag it away or eat it on the spot.   Visit IPFactly.com to see footage of the saw scaled viper in action (Be Aware: your method of reading this kindle book may not support video)

It is this capacity that now matters most to our future as a species: the part of us that feels awe in the knowledge that a simple clam, Arctica islandica, can live for as long as four hundred years, that the gingko tree has remained essentially unchanged through million years of evolution, but also that some insects have adult lives so brief they are born without mouths to eat with.

Now she could smell what the jaguar could smell, odors deeper and richer than anything she had experienced before, layers of smell she could read like Fray Tomás had read the words in her father’s book: the wet decay of leaves, the death fear of a mouse, the poisonous cloy of datura, water and mud and insects, the wind carrying the smell of other animals, the wind itself, and the girl, of course, always the girl with her juicy flesh. The girl smelled incredibly good. Should the jaguar do this? Should Teresa eat herself?

Males approach with caution, first assessing whether the female has had anything to eat lately. If she looks well fed, the male has some hope of getting through the ordeal alive.

I kept a wary eye on the large huntsman spiders, which grew as big as your hand. It took me a long time to get my mind around the fact that Steve wasn’t going to come running every time I saw a spider or a big bug. After a while I figured out that there was really nothing from which he needed to save me. Neither the strange insects nor the spiders were dangerous. In fact, eventually one of the giant spiders would eat one of the giant cockroaches. The subtropics featured great indoor ecosystems, as well as outdoor ones. Steve always patiently explained to me that the giant huntsman spiders rarely bit humans. One night he had the opportunity to prove himself wrong. He rolled over one in his sleep, and the next morning he had a bruise and two little fang marks on his body. He was most concerned because of the specific location of the bite. I gleefully explained to anyone who would listen that Steve had this giant spider-bite bruise on a part of his anatomy that “will remain undisclosed.” That story made the rounds for a long time.

Would the savage have enough sense of what is right and wrong to allow the learned man to share his knowledge and enrich the savage? Of course not! He would beat the man about the head with his makeshift club and start devouring him. It wouldn’t even register on the mind of the devourer. He would remember the day as any other day; he ate, he walked around looking for other stuff to eat, and he slept. He would not lose any sleep over the thought of taking another human life. To him, it would be no different than taking the life of an insect.

What am I supposed to eat? How can it be that every beast, every fish, every insect—every other critter on the face of the planet—can figure this out so easily, and yet here we are, still wondering?

lowering the calories we eat by 30 percent or more) increases the life span by 30 percent. Every organism studied so far—from yeast cells, spiders, and insects to rabbits, dogs, and now monkeys—exhibits this strange phenomenon.

The Bull Ants love to eat other small insects, as well as seeds, sweet nectar and fruit.

This ability to produce different compounds is another feature that helps trees fend off attack for a while. When it comes to some species of insects, trees can accurately identify which bad guys they are up against. The saliva of each species is different, and trees can match the saliva to the insect. Indeed, the match can be so precise that trees can release pheromones that summon specific beneficial predators. The beneficial predators help trees by eagerly devouring the insects that are bothering them. For example, elms and pines call on small parasitic wasps that lay their eggs inside leaf-eating caterpillars. As the wasp larvae develop, they devour the larger caterpillars bit by bit from the inside out. Not a nice way to die. The result, however, is that the trees are saved from bothersome pests and can keep growing with no further damage. The fact trees can recognize saliva is, incidentally, evidence for yet another skill they must have. For if they can identify saliva, they must also have a sense of taste.

Roscoe had fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion. He awoke to find persistent itching on his stomach. He scratched it through his T-shirt. He went back to sleep. But dreams kept him from sleeping soundly. That and the itching. He woke again and felt the itchy spot. There was a lump there. Like a swelling. And when he held still and pressed his fingers against the spot he could feel something moving under the skin. The small room was suddenly very cold. Roscoe shivered. He went to the window hoping for light. There was a moon but the light was faint. Roscoe pulled his shirt over his head. He looked down at the spot on his stomach. It was moving. The flesh itself. He could feel it under his fingertips. Like something poking back at him. But he couldn’t feel it from the inside, couldn’t feel it in his stomach. And he realized that his entire body was numb. He could feel with his fingertips but not the skin of his stomach— The skin split! “Ahhhh!” He was touching it as it split, and he shrieked in terror and something pushed its way out through a bloodless hole. “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, no no no no!” Roscoe screamed and leaped for the door. His hand clawed at the knob as he babbled and wept and the door was locked, locked, oh, God, no, they had locked him in. He banged at the door, but it was the middle of the night. Who would hear him in the empty town hall? “Hey! Hey! Is anyone there? Help me. Help me. Please, please, someone help me!” He banged and the thing in his belly stuck out half an inch. He was scared to look at it. But he did and he screamed again because it was a mouth now, a gnashing insect mouth full of parts like no normal mouth. Hooked, wicked mandibles clicked. It was inside him, chewing its way out. Hatching from him. “Help me, help me, don’t leave me here like this!” But who would hear him? Sinder? No. Not anymore. That was over. All over. And he was alone and friendless. No one even to hear as he screamed and begged. The window. He grabbed the pillow from his bed and pushed it against the glass and then punched it hard. The pane shattered. He took off his shoe and smashed at the starred glass until most of it fell tinkling to the street below. Then he screamed for help. Screamed into the Perdido Beach night air. No answer. “Help me! Please, please, oh, God, please help me! You can’t just leave me locked up!” But still, no answer. Fear took hold of him, deep crazy-making fear. No. No. No no no no, this couldn’t be happening. He hadn’t done anything to hurt anyone, he hadn’t done anything awful. Why? Why was this happening to him? Roscoe fell to his knees and begged God. God, please, no, no, no, I didn’t do anything wrong. I wasn’t brave or strong but I wasn’t bad, either. Not like this, please, God, no no no, not like this. Roscoe felt an itching in the middle of his back. He sat down and cried.

The only way to ensure that our existence creates no harm in the world is…not to exist. Whoa. There was more to it than that, but that was the gist: I kill stuff (whether actively or passively), therefore I am. For the first time in twenty years of meat avoidance, I wondered: Is abstaining from meat more hypocritical than helpful? Was I pretending to help the world while denying the fact that my very existence caused, by extension, the death of animals, plants, insects, and microorganisms all the time? Another of my favorite writers, the farmer-philosopher Joel Salatin agrees: “The most inhumane perspective is the one that denies the life-death-decay-regeneration cycle. Everything is constantly eating and being eaten.”61

Have you heard of a pitcher plant? It’s a deadly, meat-eating plant native to India, Madagascar, and Australia. Imagine you are walking by a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop, and you smell the doughnuts frying. It’s hard to resist the smell of doughnuts. A pitcher plant is like Krispy Kreme for insects. You are an unsuspecting bumblebee flying through the woods. Suddenly, you fly through blissfully perfumed air. It makes your little bee tummy start to rumble, and you want to get a taste. You fly closer to the plant; it looks like a delicious treat of fresh nectar. It smells great. To get a taste you must fly inside the rim. You land in the nectar and start to drink. But you don’t notice the gradual slope under your feet. You are caught up in the moment, enjoying the treat. You begin to slide down into the plant without realizing it. You only notice the intoxicating nectar. Then you begin to sense the slight slide; gravity conspiring against you, but you have wings. You are confident you can fly out of the plant at any time. You need just a few more sips. The nectar is good, so why not enjoy it? You think, as most drinkers do, that you are in control; you can leave the plant at any time. Eventually the slope becomes very steep, and the daylight seems farther away as darkness closes in around you. You stop drinking just enough to see dead, floating bodies of other bees and insects around you. You realize you are not enjoying a drink; you are drinking the juices of other dead and dissolving bees. You are the drink.

Squirrels eat a lot of other things besides tree nuts: plants, underground fungi, insects, bones, sometimes baby birds, and even in some cases each other.

Aphid Herding Insect livestock are the most reliable source of sugar for many ants. Ants most frequently herd insects from the order Hemiptera, of which aphids are one example. They are herbivores that suck the juices from plants and excrete the excess sugars in the honeydew. Some aphids produce their body weight in honeydew every hour, and if ants aren’t harvesting it, the sugar can pile up to such an extent that it makes it worthwhile for people to gather it. According to Wilson and Hölldobler, “The manna ‘given’ to the Israelites in the Old Testament account was almost certainly the excrement of the scale insect Trabutina mannipara, which feeds on tamarisk. The Arabs still gather the material, which they call man.” In Australia, honeydew is called sugar lerp, and one person can collect three pounds of the stuff in a day. If you turn up your nose at eating excrement, you should know that you may have already done it: A lot of honey comes not from the nectar of flowers, but from this honeydew, which bees collect from leaves. Essentially, this honey is insect poop that’s been processed inside another insect and then vomited up.

Interdependence  When you look at an ecosystem—say at a meadow—when you study it and try to understand what it is, the first thing you will recognize is that there are many species there. There are many plants, many insects, many microorganisms. And they’re not just an assemblage, or collection, of species. They are a community, which means that they are interdependent. They depend on one another in many ways, and the most important way, in which they depend on one another, is a very existential way: they eat one another. That’s the most existential interdependence you can imagine.

If the bible is correct and Noah saved one pair of each of the animals we have still on earth by taking them aboard his ark, I wonder what madness made him choose to save the mosquito. That was a great foolishness on his part. After all, what purpose do they serve? The birds eat them, I suppose, but there are other insects they might eat instead, that do not bite me before they are eaten.

they (the insects) are an essential link in the Great Food Chain, wherein all life forms are dependent on each other via complex and subtle interrelationships, as follows: Man gets his food by eating cows, which in turn eat corn, which in turn comes from Iowa, which in turn was part of the Louisiana Purchase, which in turn was obtained from France, which in turn eats garlic, which in turn repels vampires, which in turn suck the blood out of Man. So we can see that without insects there would be no … Hey, wait a minute! I just noticed that there are no insects in the Great Food Chain. Ha

Like dogs, seals and weasels, bears evolved from the miacids – small, insect-eating animals with long tails and long bodies.

steadily increased over the years as the sensitivity of detection methods has improved. These methods are still less sensitive than the human nose, and the number of truffle volatiles is likely to increase yet further in the future. For white truffle volatiles see Pennazza et al. (2013) and Vita et al. (2015); for other species see Splivallo et al. (2011). There are a number of reasons why it is risky to pin all of truffles’ allure on a single compound. In the study by Talou et al. (1990), a small sample of animals was used and only a single species of truffle was tested, at a single shallow depth, at a single site. Different subsets of the profile of volatile compounds might be more prominent at different depths or in different places. Moreover, in the wild, a range of animals are attracted to truffles, from wild pigs to voles to insects. It might be that different elements of the cocktail of volatile compounds that truffles produce attract different animals. It may be that androstenol acts on animals in more subtle ways. It might not be effective on its own, as tested in the study, but only in conjunction with other compounds. Alternatively, it may be less important in finding the truffles and more important in the animals’ experience of eating them. For more on poisonous truffles see Hall et al. (2007). Besides Gautieria, the truffle species Choiromyces meandriformis is reported to smell “overpowering and nauseous” and is considered toxic in Italy (although it is popular in northern Europe). Balsamia vulgaris is another species considered to be mildly toxic, although dogs appear to enjoy its aroma of “rancid fat.

Therefore, we must invest in research that allows us to grow more healthy food and transport it more effectively. And please make no mistake: that includes accepting genetically modified crops, those engineered to include a trait in the plant that doesn’t occur in its wild form, such as resistance to insects, tolerance to drought, greater vitamin A production, or more efficient use of sunlight to convert CO2 to sugar—as an absolutely necessary part of our food future. With more efficient plants, we could feed up to 200 million additional people, just from plants grown in the US Midwest. 33 These crops have gotten a bad rap for being “unnatural,” although many people who hold this view don’t recognize that most of the food we think of as “natural” has already been subject to significant genetic manipulation. The ears of corn you see at the grocery store look nothing like the wild plant from which modern corn came; over the course of nine thousand years, the spindly finger-length grass known as teosinte was cultivated to evolve larger cobs and more rows of plump, soft, sugary kernels, a process of modification that significantly altered the plant’s genome.34 The apples we’ve grown accustomed to eating have a bit more resemblance to their small, wild ancestors, but good luck finding one of those ancestors; they have been nearly wiped off the planet, and that’s no great loss to our diet, since the biggest genetic contributor to modern apples, Malus sylvestris, is so tart it’s darn near inedible.

Anxious to let my features show': Asian American woman shares fear of harassment - CNN - YouTube channel - Comment for this video with broader perspective, Part 1 Not only America, but in many white countries, other races are getting attacked is happening here and then, Once in Australia, Indians were targeted, In USA before few years black people were targeted (Kindly stay away those genocide things - For example LTTE, Russia - Ukraine, Hindu - Muslim , these things are multi dimensional issues and can not be solved by anyone that soon or that easily), Now I focus only on racist attacks whether it happens in USA or India or Any countries, Not only asian women, all races are attacked somewhere, but why it happens? 1) Not understanding other cultural values, (For example Asian/ China food style is more unique (Noodles, spices, insects and all) why did they develop such food habit is a long way debate, because of evolution, In ancient time most of chinese and Mongolia land was affected by many pandemics and insect attacks due to so many ecological, evolutionary and spiritual reasons, thus their food habits became unique like eating insects and all, Now USA or Strong white people, they eat too much fats such as Burger, Hotdog, clarified butter, pork, beef steak, eggs and more and more eggs, alcohol, etc., their food habits are mostly attacking type or anti predatory type, why did they develop such attitude, it is because of White people that settled in North American land after defeating red - Indians or Native American or Geronimo , so after defeating those native people although America is cool place to live there are many places in America are extremely harsh not like India, those extremely harsh conditions, ecology, evolutionary, adaptation, and even spiritual reasons made them with strong life style and although they understand humanism as well they also protect neutral and orthodox Christianity within themselves just like UK, So when other races or other country people are taking jobs, places or even becoming dominating or some people are pervert in sexual relationships which may pollute society as well, extreme science which is against orthodox Christianity (If it is India , extreme science is against orthodox Hinduism), these are all some of the factors behind racist attack, the solution is understand other culture and try to assimilate and embrace rather than oppose it. Because in this world there is no perfect culture,

An article in this month’s National Geographic magazine quotes a scientist referring to the “undistractibility” of these animals on their journeys. “An arctic tern on its way from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska, for instance, will ignore a nice smelly herring offered from a bird-watcher’s boat in Monterey Bay. Local gulls will dive voraciously for such handouts, while the tern flies on. Why?” The article’s author, David Quammen, attempts an answer, saying “the arctic tern resists distraction because it is driven at that moment by an instinctive sense of something we humans find admirable: larger purpose.” In the same article, biologist Hugh Dingle notes that these migratory patterns reveal five shared characteristics: the journeys take the animals outside their natural habitat; they follow a straight path and do not zigzag; they involve advance preparation, such as overfeeding; they require careful allocations of energy; and finally, “migrating animals maintain a fervid attentiveness to the greater mission, which keeps them undistracted by temptations and undeterred by challenges that would turn other animals aside.” In other words, they are pilgrims with a purpose. In the case of the arctic tern, whose journey is 28,000 miles, “it senses it can eat later.” It can rest later. It can mate later. Its implacable focus is the journey; its singular intent is arrival. Elephants, snakes, sea snakes, sea turtles, myriad species of birds, butterflies, whales, dolphins, bison, bees, insects, antelopes, wildebeests, eels, great white sharks, tree frogs, dragon flies, crabs, Pacific blue tuna, bats, and even microorganisms – all of them have distinct migratory patterns, and all of them congregate in a special place, even if, as individuals, they have never been there before. -Hamza Yusuf on the Hajj of Community

The demon in me is probably a solitary animal. In popular culture, people like me are always associated with bats, and maybe that's fitting. I can imagine hanging upside down in this studio for hours at a time, dribbling white saliva from my mouth, then flying solitary in the night, picking insects out of the sky.

What would eventually crumble his walls was time. Time eating into stones with its insistent teeth. The wind-affirming impermanence with its constant seduction. The sun chasing ancient insects into cracks, rocks coercing them into fossils. Time wearing away his fortress in the only way that time exhibits its linearity. Walls resist. Time insists. Both persists. But the walls still crumbles.

there was simply no ethical reason to consume a mammal, whether a cow, pig, dog, or dolphin. Each of these intelligent species deserved security from slaughter, even if the responsibility for managing their numbers still lay with Humans. But drop down to a bird or fish, and a fair argument for harvesting could be made. Drop further to an insect or nematode—if that’s what someone really wanted to eat—and they wouldn’t get any argument at all, at least not from Daniel.

59. We eat insects on a daily basis. Sure, there are cultures where insects are either presented as a delicacy, especially to rich tourists. There are also cultures where insects are one of the most important source of vital nutrients, such as proteins. But would you believe you eat insects even in the Western culture? Evidently, there is no 100% certain way to remove insects out of natural foods, such as meat – especially ground meat – and vegetables. Most of these foods were insect-infested even before they were harvested, and the FDA (Food and Drug Administration in the United States of America) allows a certain portion of insects in every single food product. For example, it is allowed to have up to 60 insect parts (leg bits, wing parts, etc.) in 100 grams of chocolate! On average, a person living in the Western world eats between 400 and 450 whole insects per year – which is around 1.1 – 1.25 insects daily. This would go a long way to explain why some foods have a certain crunchy quality to them.

It doesn’t eat only birds—it mostly eats rats and insects—but they still call it the “Bird-Eating Spider” because the fact that it can eat a bird is the most important thing you need to know about it.

Giving food to the birds, who had an endless supply of insects to eat at the park, still nagged at her, since she considered it an injustice to the thousands of hungry people.

Eat bees and you will have a stinging appetite.

+1-(866)-228-4467-Termite Control in La Palma, California (CA): Protecting Your Home from Silent Destroyers Termites are among the most destructive pests homeowners can face, and in La Palma, California, these wood-eating insects are a serious concern. With a warm, dry climate that termites thrive in, homes and businesses in La Palma are at constant risk of infestation. Investing in effective termite control in La Palma, California (CA) is essential for protecting property, preventing structural damage, and preserving long-term value. Why Termite Control is Critical in La Palma Termites are often called “silent destroyers” because they can eat away at wood structures for months or even years before being noticed. In La Palma, both drywood termites and subterranean termites are commonly found: Drywood termites nest inside dry wood and don’t require contact with soil, making them difficult to detect and eliminate. Subterranean termites, on the other hand, live in the soil and build mud tubes to reach wood above ground. They’re the most aggressive and destructive species in the U.S. Because termite damage is often hidden behind walls, under floors, or within wooden beams, homeowners often don't discover a problem until the damage is extensive and costly to repair. Signs of a Termite Infestation Some common signs of a termite problem include: Hollow-sounding wood when tapped Mud tubes along walls or foundations Discarded wings near windows or doors Visible damage to wood structures or furniture Small holes or frass (termite droppings) near infested areas If you notice any of these signs in your La Palma home or business, it’s crucial to contact a termite control professional immediately. Benefits of Professional Termite Control While DIY termite treatments exist, they are often ineffective against larger or hidden infestations. Professional termite control services offer: Thorough Inspections – Licensed technicians use specialized tools to detect termite activity behind walls and under flooring. Customized Treatment Plans – Based on the type of termite and level of infestation, professionals choose the most effective treatment, such as localized spot treatments, fumigation, or baiting systems. Long-Term Prevention – Many pest control companies in La Palma offer ongoing monitoring and preventative treatments to ensure termites don’t return. Safe, Proven Methods – Professionals use EPA-approved products that are safe for your family and pets. Choosing the Right Termite Control Service in La Palma When selecting a termite control provider, look for: California-licensed pest control operators Positive local reviews and testimonials Experience with both drywood and subterranean termites Free inspections and warranty-backed services Conclusion Termite control in La Palma, California is a necessary investment to safeguard your property. Termites can cause extensive, expensive damage if left unchecked—but with professional help, they can be effectively eliminated and prevented. Don’t wait until the damage is done—schedule a termite inspection today and protect your La Palma home from these destructive invaders.

+1-(866)-228-4467--Termite Control Agency in La Palma, California (CA): Your First Line of Defense Against Termite Damage Termites are one of the most destructive pests facing homeowners and property managers across California, and the city of La Palma is no exception. These wood-eating insects can silently cause thousands of dollars in structural damage before they are even noticed. That’s why partnering with a reliable termite control agency in La Palma, California (CA) is critical for protecting your property and peace of mind. The Importance of Termite Control in La Palma La Palma's warm, dry climate provides the perfect breeding ground for termites, particularly subterranean termites and drywood termites. These pests feed on wood, compromising the structural integrity of homes, businesses, and other buildings. Because termites often remain hidden until serious damage has occurred, proactive inspections and timely treatments are essential. Signs You Need a Termite Control Agency While termites can go undetected for a long time, there are warning signs that indicate a potential infestation: Hollow or damaged wood that sounds papery when tapped Discarded wings near windows or entry points Mud tubes along walls or foundations (typical of subterranean termites) Tiny holes in wood or visible frass (termite droppings) Sagging floors or doors that no longer close properly If you notice any of these signs in your La Palma home or building, it's time to call a professional termite control agency. What a Termite Control Agency Offers Hiring a licensed termite control agency in La Palma offers several key advantages: Expert Inspections: Professional technicians can detect hidden termite activity using specialized tools and experience, even in hard-to-reach areas. Targeted Treatment Plans: Depending on the type and severity of the infestation, agencies may use spot treatments, fumigation, or bait systems to eliminate termites effectively. Preventative Services: Many agencies offer long-term protection plans, including barrier treatments and regular inspections, to ensure termites don’t return. Safe, Certified Solutions: Reputable companies use environmentally responsible, family-safe products that meet California’s pest control regulations. Choosing the Right Agency in La Palma When selecting a termite control agency in La Palma, CA, keep these tips in mind: Ensure the company is licensed and insured in California. Look for local experience and positive customer reviews. Ask if they offer a free inspection and written estimate. Choose an agency that provides warranties or service guarantees for added peace of mind. Conclusion Termite infestations can cause extensive and costly damage, but with the help of a trusted termite control agency in La Palma, California, you can protect your property before the damage becomes severe. Don’t wait until it’s too late—schedule an inspection today and let the professionals handle the problem with proven, effective solutions.

We had a hell of a time trying to solve it. You probably know that in Africa there is a specific insect, the dung beetle, which eats elephant feces. Many other large species have associated creatures that have evolved to eat their excrement. Well, it turns out that compys will eat the feces of large herbivores and redigest it. And the droppings of compys are readily broken down by contemporary bacteria. So, given enough compys, our problem was solved.” “How many compys did you make?” “I’ve forgotten exactly, but I think the target population was fifty animals. And we attained that, or very nearly so. In three batches. We did a batch every six months until we had the number.

Birds tend to have similar hearing ranges that top out before 10 kHz. So either these hummingbirds have very unusual ears or they can’t actually hear what they’re saying.[*21] And if the latter is true, then why are their songs so high-pitched? Calls demand listeners. If the hummingbirds’ tunes lie beyond their own Umwelten, who’s the audience? Maybe it’s insects? Even though most insects can’t hear at all, many of those with ears can hear ultrasonic frequencies. More than half of the 160,000 species of moths and butterflies are so equipped. The greater wax moth can even hear frequencies near 300 kHz—the highest limit of any animal by some margin. Hummingbirds eat insects as well as nectar, so perhaps they produce ultrasonic calls that they can’t hear to flush out the insects that can. But why did so many insects evolve ultrasonic hearing, especially since most of them can’t hear at all? It certainly wasn’t to hear hummingbirds, which are relatively recent evolutionary arrivals. It probably wasn’t to hear each other, since many of them are silent.[*22] The most likely answer is that their ears were tuned to extremely high pitches to listen out for their nemeses, which appeared around 65 million years ago—bats. Bats evolved the ability both to call and to hear at ultrasonic frequencies, and they combined these traits into one of the most extraordinary animal senses of all.[*

In their great herds, caribou and reindeer spread like the tributaries of a river; where the gray strands pool, they are indistinguishable at a distance from the land. It is more than an illusion. In life, as the herds paw and yank at their fodder, they churn nutrients and dead vegetation into the earth, where it rots in summer, raising the soil temperature. In the presence of scarce warmth, seeds germinate. A grazing herd, where it does not eat foliage to the quick, amplifies tundra productivity.' Alive, reindeer feed swarms of mosquitoes so massive, the insects can drain half a liter of blood in a day. In death, reindeer muscle becomes bears, eagles, foxes, lynx, people, ravens, wolverines, wolves. The wolf pup grows and drags down a reindeer. Around the stripped carcass, arctic poppies bud. Rangifer migration is the tundra respiring, an oscillation of energy rather than air.

Sara knelt. She was becoming smaller, lighter, and then she was down among the insects, and the only thing in the world was the noise of them, the churn of their bodies upon one another, the clack of their black hulls, a heavenly vibration that resounded only because they were pushing in the same direction, and they were invincible. They crawled onto her legs and began eating her cotton skirt. She placed her hands down for them to crawl upon her, some of them swarming by and others stopping to chew at her clothing or hang from her skirt, and she was surrounded, feeling the scratch of their legs and the points of their antennae and their light husks. Her mind calmed, and she felt herself lifted into the air by the hand of God.

God is not a robot. He isn’t a comptroller of an accounting company trying to make things add up or work out. He is a being full of deep emotion, longing, and memories of what it used to be like. The incarnation therefore isn’t about an equation but about remembering what home used to be like and making a plan to get back there. Consider this reboot of the Genesis creation account. It may help you see God’s emotion a little better. First off, nothing … but God. No light, no time, no substance, no matter. Second off, God says the word and WHAP! Stuff everywhere! The cosmos in chaos: no shape, no form, no function—just darkness … total. And floating above it all, God’s Holy Spirit, ready to play. Day one: Then God’s voice booms out, “Lights!” and, from nowhere, light floods the skies and “night” is swept off the scene. God gives it the big thumbs up, calls it “day”. Day two: God says, “I want a dome—call it ‘sky’—right there between the waters above and below.” And it happens. Day three: God says, “Too much water! We need something to walk on, a huge lump of it—call it ‘land’. Let the ‘sea’ lick its edges.” God smiles, says, “Now we’ve got us some definition. But it’s too plain! It needs colour! Vegetation! Loads of it. A million shades. Now!” And the earth goes wild with trees, bushes, plants, flowers and fungi. “Now give it a growth permit.” Seeds appear in every one. “Yesss!” says God. Day four: “We need a schedule: let’s have a ‘sun’ for the day, a ‘moon’ for the night; I want ‘seasons’, ‘years’; and give us ‘stars’, masses of stars—think of a number, add a trillion, then times it by the number of trees and we’re getting there: we’re talking huge! Day five: “OK, animals: amoeba, crustaceans, insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals … I want the whole caboodle teeming with a million varieties of each—and let’s have some fun with the shapes, sizes, colours, textures!” God tells them all, “You’ve got a growth permit—use it!” He sits back and smiles, says, “Result!” Day six: Then God says, “Let’s make people—like us, but human, with flesh and blood, skin and bone. Give them the job of caretakers of the vegetation, game wardens of all the animals.” So God makes people, like him, but human. He makes male and female.… He smiles at them and gives them their job description: “Make babies! Be parents, grandparents, great-grandparents—fill the earth with your families and run the planet well. You’ve got all the plants to eat from, so have all the animals—plenty for all. Enjoy.” God looks at everything he’s made, and says, “Fantastic. I love it!” Day seven: Job done—the cosmos and the earth complete. God takes a bit of well-earned R&R and just enjoys. He makes an announcement: “Let’s keep this day of the week special, a day off—battery-recharge day: Rest Day.”2 I’m not normally a paraphrase guy, but we always read the creation story like a textbook. I love this rendition because it captures the enthusiastic emotion that God felt about everything He created, especially humans. He loved it all. He loved us. Most of all, He loved the way things were.

The whole world always burns...Or it floods. Or some insect eats the crops and you starve...Every baby you have dies eventually, no matter what you do. Yet we have babies and try to go on.

But originally, "impurity" is not impure. Our ideas about pure and impure come from thinking and are determined by our thinking. Human beings don't like shit. But there are many kinds of animals that actually like to eat shit. Maggots eat shit. Ants eat shit. Flies eat shit. Also, many dogs like to eat cat shit. Horses will stay away from grass that has their own waste on it, but many sheep will happily eat grass that is smeared with their own waste. There is a special kind of pork you can buy in certain parts of Asia that is made from pigs raised on human excrement. The pigs are fed human shit every day. Later they are butchered, and this pork is a delicacy in parts of Asia. It is very expensive pork. That is very interesting. Some people will pay a lot of money to buy this pork in restaurants. So these animals and insects have some kind of consciousness, and this consciousness likes shit. Their sense of impurity is not the same as our own.

The electrical impulses that pass through the roots of trees, for example, move at the slow rate of one third of an inch per second. But why, you might ask, do trees pass electrical impulses through their tissues at all? The answer is that trees need to communicate, and electrical impulses are just one of their many means of communication. Trees also use the senses of smell and taste for communication. If a giraffe starts eating an African acacia, the tree releases a chemical into the air that signals that a threat is at hand. As the chemical drifts through the air and reaches other trees, they “smell” it and are warned of the danger. Even before the giraffe reaches them, they begin producing toxic chemicals. Insect pests are dealt with slightly differently. The saliva of leaf-eating insects can be “tasted” by the leaf being eaten.

More birds on a farm mean fewer insects, but most birds won’t venture more than a couple hundred yards from the safety of cover. Like many species, their preferred habitat is the edge between forest and field. The biodiversity of the forest edge also helps control predators. As long as the weasels and coyotes have plenty of chipmunks and voles to eat, they’re less likely to venture out and prey on the chickens.

Unfortunately, it makes as little sense to offer this kind of explanation as to say that we have become too "civilized " to eat insects or horses.

Opposition to animal research ranges considerably in degree. “Minimalists” tolerate animal research under certain conditions. They accept some kinds of research but wish to prohibit others depending on the probable value of the research, the amount of distress to the animal, and the type of animal. (Few people have serious qualms about hurting an insect, for example.) They favor firm regulations on research. The “abolitionists” take a more extreme position and see no room for compromise. Abolitionists maintain that all animals have the same rights as humans. They regard killing an animal as murder, whether the intention is to eat it, use its fur, or gain scientific knowledge. Keeping an animal (presumably even a pet) in a cage is, in their view, slavery. Because animals cannot give informed consent to research, abolitionists insist it is wrong to use them in any way, regardless of the circumstances. According to one opponent of animal research, “We have no moral option but to bring this research to a halt. Completely. . . . We will not be satisfied until every cage is empty” (Regan, 1986, pp. 39–40). Advocates of this position sometimes claim that most animal research is painful and that it never leads to important results. However, for a true abolitionist, neither of those points really matters. Their moral imperative is that people have no right to use animals, even if the research is useful and even if it is painless. The disagreement between abolitionists and animal researchers is a dispute between two ethical positions: “Never knowingly harm an innocent” and “Sometimes a little harm leads to a greater good.” On the one hand, permitting research has the undeniable consequence of inflicting pain or distress. On the other hand, banning the use of animals for human purposes means a great setback in medical research as well as the end of animal-to-human transplants (e.g., using pig heart valves to help people with heart diseases) (Figure 1.12).

Humans also had a far easier time chewing and digesting old favourites such as fruits, nuts, insects and carrion if they were cooked. Whereas chimpanzees spend five hours a day chewing raw food, a single hour suffices for people eating cooked food.

Judy dumped all the markers, crayons, colored pencils, and pastels she had on the floor. Stink grabbed the first blue marker he saw and started to draw. “What are you drawing?” “Bats,” said Stink. “Blue bats.” “You’re bats,” said Judy. “People don’t like bats.” “But bats eat millions of insects,” said Stink. “People should like bats.

a rival line, on his small beginnings out at the dam. Even his tools should be of wood and leather and gut, materials the insects would eat when one day he no longer needed them.

Now and then we know a moment of supreme bliss, when we ask nothing, give nothing, know nothing but bliss. Then it passes, and we again see the panorama of the universe moving before us; and we know that it is but a mosaic work set upon God, who is the background of all things. Vedanta teaches that nirvana can be attained here and now, that we do not have to wait for death to reach it. Nirvana is the realization of the Self, and after having once known that, if only for an instant, never again can one be deluded by the mirage of personality. Having eyes, we must see the apparent, but all the time we know what it is; we have found out its true nature. It is the screen that hides the Self, which is unchanging. The screen opens and we find the Self behind it. All change is the screen. In the saint the screen is thin, and the reality can almost shine through. In the sinner the screen is thick, and we are able to lose sight of the truth that the atman [Self] is there, as well as behind the saint’s screen. When the screen is wholly removed, we find it never existed—that we were the atman and nothing else, even the screen is forgotten. The two phases of this distinction in life are: First, that the man, who knows the real Self, will not be affected by anything; secondly, that that man alone can do good to the world. That man alone will have seen the real motive of doing good to others, because there is only one. It cannot be called egoistic, because that would be differentiation. It is only selflessness. It is the perception of the universal, not of the individual. Every case of love and sympathy is an assertion of this universal. “Not I, but thou.” Help another, because you are in him and he is in you, is the philosophical way of putting it. The real Vedantist alone will give up his life for a fellow being without any compunction, because he knows he will not die. As long as there is one insect left in the world, he is living; as long as one mouth eats, he eats. So he goes on doing good to others, and is never hindered by the modern ideas of caring for the body. When a man reaches this point of abnegation, he goes beyond the moral struggle, beyond everything. He sees in the most learned priest, in the cow, in the dog, in the most miserable places, neither the learned man, nor the cow, nor the dog, nor the miserable place, but the same divinity manifesting itself in them all. He alone is the happy man; and the man who has acquired that sameness has, even in this life, conquered all existence. God is pure; therefore such a man is said to be living in God.

Here it says that snapping turtles eat crayfish, snails, insects, fish, frogs, salamanders, reptiles, birds, mammals, and aquatic plants. Gee, with a diet like that, we ought to be able to argue that they won’t be eating many fish.” “That’s good,” Greta agreed. “We could also make the case that they control snakes. My mom would go for that.

Nematodes are microscopic worms that like to eat flea larvae. They can go a long way in cutting down your outdoor flea population.

In the ninth century, Ethiopian shepherds noticed their flocks acting unusually frisky after eating wild red berries in the highlands. Those plants were domesticated and coffee is now cultivated in 80 countries. Today, it is said to be the most traded commodity after crude oil. Every year, 400 billion cups of the beverage are drunk by people seeking a caffeine fix. Others prefer caffeinated tea or soft drinks for the same reason – to attain a heightened state of alertness. Ironically, the cup we drink to refresh ourselves when our energies flag is an alkaloid produced by plants to put to sleep insects that have designs on their seeds. In other words, we are addicted to an insecticide that evolved to paralyze and kill.

Pirahãs eat fish, bananas, wild game, grubs, Brazil nuts, electric eels, otters, caimans, insects, rats — any sort of protein, oil, starch, sugar, or other foodstuff they can hunt, fish, or gather from their environment — though they avoid reptiles and amphibians, for the most part.

Primitive man has never been able to limit his needs to what is strictly necessary. His friendships among the souls are not confined to the creatures that are useful to his body or dangerous to his life. When we see how man in his poetry, his myths and legends creates an imaginative counterpart of his surroundings, how he arranges his ceremonial life, at times indeed his whole life, according to the heavens and their movement, how at his festivals he dramatizes the whole creation of his limited world through a long series of ritual scenes, we gain some idea how important it was to him to underpin his spiritual existence. His circle of friends spans from the high lights of heaven to the worm burrowing in the soil; it includes not only the bug that may be good to eat, but also innocuous insects that never entered into his list of delicacies; it comprises not only the venomous snake, but also harmless crawling things that have no claim on his interest save from the fact of their belonging to his country.

While lawn is often an unnecessary element in many gardens, it is actually an important design element to consider for a garden with free-range chickens. Chickens and organically maintained lawns will have a good symbiotic relationship if they are managed well. Chickens graze on the grass blades as a choice food source for greens, which can also be collected and dried for food. Chickens will keep the lawn mowed, so to speak, because they will make the lawn a frequent stop in their daily foraging. Chickens will search out and eat insects in lawns, and leave behind their manure, which is an excellent fertilizer for lawns. The height of your lawn is critical: the blades need to be long enough to photosynthesize in order to be healthy and grow—3 inches is ideal; and chickens prefer a certain height of grass blade—5 to 6 inches is too tall for them to graze, and letting them graze below 2 inches can damage the grass. So for chicken foraging, it is best to keep your lawn about 3 to 4 inches, which may be a bit longer than you are used to cutting it, but the turf will be healthier and withstand the chicken’s grazing better.

Against my will, the kids got me laughing that day. When we stopped for gas after crossing the border, I discovered Canadian currency was worth only slightly less to them than pirate treasure. The ancient, cracked, and yellowed bug screen on the van was plastered with layers of splattered insects. For two dollars Canadian, I got Kai to eat a dead bug. For six dollars, I got him to lick the length of the bug screen. Money well spent, as far as I was concerned, or at least better than doing something lame like kicking in for their college funds.

Ninety-six percent of songbirds have young that can only eat insects, and 90 percent of these insect species can only feed on native plants.

Once someone asked a farmer if he had planted wheat for the season. The farmer replied, “No. I was afraid it wouldn’t rain.” The man asked, “Did you plant corn?” The farmer said, “No. I was afraid that insects would eat the corn.” Then the man asked, “What did you plant?” The farmer said, “Nothing. I played it safe.

After the Civil War battle at Shiloh, Tennessee, in 1862, thousands of injured soldiers were left lying in the mud, in some cases for two days and two nights, as the number of casualties on both sides was so great that it overwhelmed their armies' capacity to retrieve and treat them. Many died from their injuries and the consequent infections. But at night, some of the injured men noticed a strange blue glow emanating from their wounds. Their ghostly penumbra could be seen from a distance. Field surgeons observed that the soldiers who luminesced healed more quickly and had a higher survival rate than those who didn't. They called it the Angel's Glow. An explanation for the Angel's Glow was proposed 139 years later, when a seventeen-year-old high-school student, William Martin, acting on a hunch, persuaded his friend Jonathan Curtis to help him investigate. Their paper, which won a national science prize, argued that the soldiers appear to have been attacked by insect-eating nematodes in the soil contaminating their wounds. The nematodes regurgitated their bacteria, and the antibiotics these microbes produce are likely to have destroyed the other pathogens infecting the wounds. Because the luminous bacteria have evolved to infect insects, whose body temperature is lower than that of humans, the students speculated that only hypothermic soldiers were inoculated. When they were brought in for treatment, and warmed up, the bacteria that had saved them died, preventing complications. (A related species, adapted to mammalian temperatures, causes severe infections.)

There are five precepts taught by Buddhism that all Buddhists should follow: 1. Kill no living thing (including insects). 2. Do not steal. 3. Do not commit adultery. 4. Tell no lies. 5. Do not drink intoxicants or take drugs. There are other precepts that apply only to monks and nuns. These include: 6. Eat moderately and only at the appointed time. 7. Avoid that which excites the senses. 8. Do not wear adornments (including perfume). 9. Do not sleep in luxurious beds. 10. Accept no silver or gold.

As such, most insects can taste with their feet and legs. Bees can detect the sweetness of nectar just by standing on a flower. Flies can taste the apple you’re about to eat by landing on it.

This thirty-six-hour adventure was an important lesson, because in recent years the word adventure has come to mean going very far, in as inconvenient manner as possible, and punctuating the whole ordeal with photo opps like eating insects, shooting guns and clinking beer bottles with the long-suffering local sherpas. Today there's a sense that unless you have three months off work, long-haul flights and a motorbike, you aren't having a real adventure. This is a phenomenally narrow, decidedly macho and unmistakably elitist definition of an adventure. Not all of us have the funds or the time to cross the Arctic Circle with nothing but our own big-chinned selfies for company.

If you go to the grocery store and buy food, the ingredients are on the label, and you can look at it and determine if you want the item for yourself and your family. This should be done with vaccines as well.... ...Perhaps the reason Big Pharma, the doctors, and the nurses make the ingredients more difficult to find is that the recipients of these vaccines would be more reluctant to take these products if they knew what was in them. Eating genetically modified organisms (GMOs) does not seem like such a big deal when you compare this with injecting formaldehyde and insect poison directly into your veins.

In playback mode I watch her decay. The bugs swarm all over her face, eating her flesh and then moving on. It is like an ocean wave made up of insects.

Insects will spill from the mouths of children.

No temple is permanent; no god is permanent. Even if there is an ever-lasting god, we can never fathom his nature. After having created numerous gods that mirror our limited intelligence, like fools some say 'This is truth', 'That is truth.' These very fools, whenever they meet with calamities, rush to those gods and beg them to 'do this for me and do that.' What else can they do but beg? They have suffered enough in this world and should have some hope to feed on. If they get such satisfaction they will say, 'God gave me this.' It really means that the 'Paramatma' or the Supreme Soul was highly pleased with their devotion and rewarded them. Suppose not such thing happens; then they simply say: 'It did not appeal to Him; so God did not fulfil my desire.' Since we created this 'Paramatma' and began to worship Him we have not given Him a single day's respite. We have begged of Him ever so many things continuously. Some sensible people like the sages did not do such things. But they threw upon Him the burden of punishing the wicked and protecting the weak. What does that mean?" "You mean that begging even of a god is wrong?" I asked. "I feel so. It would be a nice thing if we did not beg of any one. We are not children. Children plead with their mother, 'Mummy, I feel hungry, please give me something to eat.' If we were children we also could have asked things of God. "We are born with legs, arms, eyes, a nose and a mouth. Why do we have them all? Should we still pray to God for a tiger's mouth that we may bite and an elephant's body to carry things? How is it ever possible for God to fulfil so many wishes? If it is 'He' who has created us, why not think that He has provided us the wherewithal to exist? This begging business is ugly. There are millions and billions of living things like birds and insects. Do you see them ever begging? Do they even beg for food? Even when a tiger appears before a doe, the doe does not seek God's help. Should man who has intelligence not have at least as much self-respect as these creatures?

let’s not allow insects like lust, anger, greed, illusion and envy to eat us from within and wreak havoc in our lives. Rather, let’s develop positive

The thought crawled out of the wet black loam of her brain like some horrid new insect. It scrabbled unchecked through her mind, eating everything clean and good in her, laying clutches of wet, mucousy eggs in its stead.

For the general orcs, the human food wasn’t spicy enough – they just found it very bland. That difference in tastes is the main reason that humans don’t get invited to orc potluck dinners very often. And goblins don’t like human food at all. The problem was that it contains absolutely no rodent or insects, at least as far as the humans would admit. So it just doesn’t sit right with the goblins. I could eat it though, if I were hungry enough. Even human food was better than what they served at the university dorms.

The Greedy Merchant Once upon a time, there was a rich merchant known for his extreme greed, despite having accumulated great wealth over the years. He never wanted to spend even a cent more than absolutely necessary. He led a very simple and frugal life, depriving himself of many pleasures to save every possible coin. One day, the merchant heard about a Zen master renowned for his wisdom and ability to teach important life lessons. He decided to visit the master and seek advice about his attachment to greed. He wanted to free himself from the prison of his material desires and find greater happiness and inner peace. The merchant arrived at the monastery where the Zen master resided and was welcomed kindly. He asked the master how he could rid himself of greed and find inner peace. The master, smiling, said to him, "I have a challenge for you. Tomorrow morning, put a handful of rice in your pouch and carry it with you throughout the day”. The merchant was perplexed but decided to follow the master's advice. The next morning, he put a handful of rice in his pouch and began his day. Throughout the day, the merchant realized he was hungry but refused to eat the rice in the pouch because he didn't want to “waste” it. The day passed, and the merchant returned to the monastery, exhausted and famished. He told the Zen master about his dilemma and how he had refused to consume the rice in the pouch. The master, with a compassionate smile, said, "Look inside your pouch." The merchant opened the pouch and realized that the rice had become unusable. It had turned into dust and was full of insects. His attachment to greed had prevented him from enjoying the rice when he had the chance, and now it was too late. The Zen master said to the merchant, "Greed has imprisoned you in a mindset of lack and fear. Material wealth is worthless if not shared and appreciated. Learn to enjoy the small joys of life and share them with others.

Later Siddhartha was to recount how the most crucial incident of his childhood occurred when he was nine. In the spring he was taken to the ploughing festival. This was a very important day for the Shakya people who were agriculturalists. On this day, the ploughing season began. The king, Siddhartha's father, would ceremonially cut the first furrow with a special plough. It was the occasion for a great spring festival and everybody was celebrating. Siddhartha was taken along by his nurse maids to watch his father perform the all important symbolic act of making the first cut in the ground. As Siddhartha watched, what this sensitive child saw was the beautiful earth being cut open: cut open in order that the people might grow crops and so live; cut open just as, perhaps, he knew that his mother had been cut open to give him life. He saw insects turned up by the plough, ejected from their homes. He saw worms cut into pieces. He saw the birds descend and eat the little creatures squirming on the broken soil. He saw that in this cutting there was much suffering. He felt the suffering himself. He felt a great urge to remove himself from this painful spectacle. He slipped away from his nurse maids and went to sit under a tree. Later they came looking for him and found that he had gone into a deep state of concentration. As he reflected upon what he had witnessed he was unaware of their approach or of them observing him. This was the first time, he entered into the kind of intense rapture we call samadhi. So Siddhartha grew up with a deep concern about the meaning of suffering in his heart. He knew that he was alive because his mother had died. He knew that people were only able to feed at the expense of the cutting of the earth. He felt the unavoidability of much suffering acutely. He went out from the palace and he saw people who were sick and he learned how nobody is immune to sickness. He saw how people grow old and how nobody is able to avert doing so if they live long. And if they do not live, then they die and this too is an affliction, both for the person who dies and for those who grieve. Siddhartha was certainly sensitive enough to grieve. The great mass of suffering in the world seemed to weigh upon him.

Like many before me, I had come to the slow acknowledgement that the mind-altering substance of choice in a pressured, successful middle life is alcohol. Licit, social, with one's mild addiction easily concealed among everyone else's, and in all its infinite, ingenious manifestations, so colorful, so tasty, the drink in your hand triumphs by its very form; its liquidity is at one with the everyday, with milk, tea, coffee, with water, and therefore with life itself. Drinking is natural, whereas inhaling a smoldering vegetable is at some remove from breathing, as is the ingestion of pills from eating, and there is no penetration in nature that resembles that of the needle, except an insect's sting. A single malt and spring water, a cool glass of Chablis, may improve your outlook by only a modest degree but will leave unruffled the glassy continuum of your selfhood. Of course, there is drunkenness to consider, its boorishness, vomiting, and violence, and then craven addiction, physical and mental dereliction, and degrading, agonizing death. But these are the consequences of simple abuse, which flows, as surely as claret from a bottle, out of human weakness, defect of character. You can hardly blame the substance. Even chocolate biscuits have their victims, and I have one elderly friend who has led fulfilling and useful life on thirty years' supply of pure heroin.

I hate insect. That's surprisingly girly of you. They eat my childrens! Gnawing and bitting! Termites are the worst! Ah. I can understand when you put it like that.

It's only humans that do this," said Kostas. "Animals don't. Plants don't. Yes, trees sometimes overshadow other trees, compete for space, water and nutrients, battle for survival... Yes, insects eat each other. But mass murder for personal profit, that's peculiar to our species.

Female fireflies draw in strange males with dishonest signals and eat them; mantis females devour their own mates. Female insects