The Urban Pantheist

Chinese mantid Tenodera aridifolia sinensis

This mantid perches on a jar of fruit flies provided as easy prey. It and its many brothers and sisters hatched from an ootheca produced by this large female. Chinese mantids are becoming the most common mantids in North America, due to deliberate releases to control garden pests. I heard of more folks encountering mantids this year than any time since I was a child.

Mantises used to be lumped in the same Order as cockroaches and termites, and the information on Bugguide.net makes it sound like they still should be: "The concept of an order that includes at least cockroaches, termites, and mantids is nowadays widely supported by scientists." Furthermore, mantids "can be reasonably described as predatory roaches."

That last part doesn't quite pass the sniff test for me--the elongated thorax, the mobile head, the raptorial forearms...Even if it is correct taxonomically, it's a violation of the language: calling a mantid a predatory roach robs both words of their meaning.

Yesterday's zebra post, all of three sentences, took way too much effort. I got stuck on wanting to refer to the Grevy's zebra as the largest horse. I knew that if I did that, it would cause some discomfort among certain of my readers. But all living equids (ugh, that's so unsatisfying) are not only in the same Family (the way that foxes and dholes are in the dog Family) but they are in the same Genus (the way that wolves and coyotes are in the same genus as domestic dogs). So donkeys, domestic horses, wild asses, and zebras are all in Genus Equus, and there should be a single word to refer to them--and there is, it's Equid. No one gets upset when you refer to lions and jaguars and pumas and snow leopards as "cats."

It's complicated, and it has to do with the great closeness humans feel for domestic horses. They are to be elevated above all others in their Genus, the lowly asses and burros. And just look at the brouhaha that ensues when you suggest that they are as edible as cows.

There's also the complication of taxonomic correctness, the itchy brows that people get when you call a beetle a "bug" or a gorilla a "monkey." There's really no danger in calling a non-hemipteran a "bug" or calling a great ape a "monkey." (The animals that are "correctly" called monkeys are in two widely divergent groups that really have no business sharing a name. Why should a marmoset and a mandrill get the same common name and not share it with a siamang or a sifaka?) Calling a whale a "fish" is more egregious, as it betrays an ignorance of the animal's essence, and serves to unjustly distance the creature from its kinship to us.

I reserve the right to call a fox a "dog," an ocelot a "cat," and a zebra a "horse." To resist is to succumb to arbitrary convention, my least favorite convention.