love to see a bunch of ecology posts on my feed <3 im not going to go off about it again until next year but here are my two wildly polarized views on invasive insects:
my oldest gripe (which i’m happy to say has been slowly working its way into the public opinion): european honey bees are a huge problem and every time someone finds out i’m into bugs/did entomology and tell me all about their aunt/friend the beekeeper i am filled with barely restrained spite. “save the bees” is on thin fucking ice.
my newest anxiety: spotted lantern flies are alarming in their rapid expansion, yes. promoting a public-smashes-bugs campaign as part of their control is fucking horrific. it’s in-comprehensively unethical to me to encourage people to destroy insects and egg cases that they almost certainly misidentify in a world where insect populations and diversity are taking a nose-dive.
have you ever been sent a picture of a small beetle that an otherwise intelligent person is panicking about because they think they have a flea infestation? or a harmless mite they think is a tick? or a (insert countless misidentifications that lead to someone killing an animal and then contacting me with pictures of its corpse here)(my own partner whom just this week helped me revive a ground beetle that’d gotten into ant poison and cares about bugs more than most still regularly panics because something might be a roach or a flea or a bedbug and it has never once been a roach or a flea or a bedbug)
the only meaningful result of this that i can foresee is a renewed public enthusiasm for insect smashing - and it’s a righteous violence too. i hate it. do not engage with this post if you want to tell me i’m wrong: you won’t convince me and it will do irrevocable damage to how i’m able to conceive you as a person (and i’m not out there spreading my opinion anyway! it’s just not worth it. let me be insane about this if that’s how you see it)
and the worst part is: they can spread themselves just fine and a public effort is simply not going to do shit about it! they aren’t emerald ash borers; they’re very visible and they aren’t unpalatable. spiders and birds and frogs eat the hell out of them???? they’re exploding, it’s scary to see - i get it! but telling people (who WILL redirect and kill other insects through either misidentification or a normalized comfort with the act of crushing the life out of a small non-threatening animal) that they can personally make a positive ecological impact is a horrific joke.
now i’m going to shut the fuck up about it and remind myself to mute/silence/whatever ‘spotted lantern fly’ on cohost so i don’t accidentally see people i otherwise respect gleefully mentioning how many animals they’ve killed over the next few months lol