Insect Insight

Speaking of hives and insect colonies, here are some pictures of our class trip to the insectarium at the botanical gardens. It's a fascinating place and I encourage you to go... if you like insects. It's not all pretty butterflies and honeybees down here, but I spared the images of the real monstrous and unearthly-looking creatures for the faint of heart (actually, the only pictures of tarantulas and ten-legged eight-eyed four-toothed whatchamacall-its all came out blurry, lucky for you). When you're separated from these bizarre animals by walls of glass and plastic, you realize there's no rational reason to fear them.

As a child I had an intense fear of spiders, but come to think of it I can't recall every being bitten by one. Now I just think they're creepy, and most people will agree with that. But as we learned from one of the insectarium employees, less than one percent of all spiders are capable of inflicting serious harm to human beings. Indeed, the vast majority of insects are essentially harmless. So why are things like spiders, centipedes, and scorpions the "stuff of nightmares"? Is it merely their alien appearance? Why is arachnaphobia so common?

I have a little hypothesis that it has something to do with evolution. You see, there are remnants of the reptilian and early mammalian layers of the brain that emerge in dreams. I mean, how often do we dream of being chased? Beyond that, how often do we dream of being chased by wild animals? Don't quote me on this, but I think it's a phenomenon that occurs across all cultures. But for most of us in the 21st Century, running from a predator does not occur in everyday life. And yet it still happens all the time in our dreams. And millenia ago while our ape ancestors (even neanderthals for that matter) in the wild were sleeping and dreaming, they would have to be ready to awake and protect themselves from any threat. To avoid predators, apes would sleep in trees, and there's a hypothesis that falling dreams are an evolutionary device designed to wake us up before we fall out of the tree. The only reason we still have falling dreams is because it's left over from our tree-dwelling ancestors in the mammalian part of the human brain. On the other hand, neanderthals slept in dark and enclosed areas - caves and huts and so forth. All these sleeping spots in our evolution - the trees, nooks and crannies, caves, and huts - while they were perfect for hiding from the big predators, they were also perfect habitats for spiders and scorpions and most insects. So while apes and neanderthals were sleeping and dreaming... they would often wake with the sense that something foreign was crawling on the skin... and immediately the reptilian part of the brain shouts "predator, predator!" And so they would quickly brush it off and go back to sleep. But these constant interruptions in sleep must've left an evolutionary mark, so that's my hypothesis of how spiders became a symbol of fear, the stuff of nightmares.

Or maybe they're just really creepy looking.

Anyways, it's around this point in my Montreal experience that my camera broke. Well, semi-broke... I can't see what I'm taking pictures of, so if any image from this point on looks a little off-centered, it's not any new artistic style, it's just the slow expiration of the cheapest digital camera available. That would also be why all the pictures of ten-legged eight-eyed four-toothed whatchamacall-it insects came out blurry.