The Urban Pantheist

The day before Irene blew into New England, there was a mysterious storm of flying insects over the Boston area. Just at dusk, the insects hung in the air lazily, not flying strongly nor appearing to orient toward anything in particular. A few randomly stuck to my sweaty skin, and I examined them not particularly rigorously, deciding they were ants.

A sudden appearance of hundreds of thousands of insects is usually a reproductive event. Male non-biting midges gather in enormous hovering columns, for example. Ants, which spend most of their time inconspicuously on and under the soil, suddenly irrupt by the thousand, bearing wings. These reproductive flights are brief, and the ants live only long enough for the one event, being snapped up by bats and swifts and other opportunists. It's likely that the strangely coordinated appearance of so many insects included large groups of predatory bugs taking advantage of the sudden increase in the food supply.



The photos are from the kiddie pool in our yard. Almost all the insects seen are winged ants ("alates" the entomologists call them) but a few, including the one on the far left of the first photo are other creatures.

I don't know if the impending storm had anything to do with the insect swarms, but everyone in Boston was aware of Irene, and many had felt an earthquake only a few days earlier. The apocalyptic sense of it all was hard to dismiss. For me, natural occurrences always turn out to be much more interesting than our fantasies about them.