I have a relatively brief post for you today, mostly because this week has thrown me some curve balls and, as I’m sure most everyone on the east coast can attest to, everything is just that much harder when it “feels like” 103°. This kind of heat can turn even the most joyful tasks into harrowing slogs—consider baking (and icing!) a birthday cake in a kitchen without air conditioning. That said, I’m very, very aware of my privilege on weeks like this. It feels wrong to complain about the heat as someone whose family has abundant, clean water to drink, to play in, to un-salt our skin with come evening, when those basic human rights aren’t assured for so many.
My experience with the creature in question this week constitutes a very classic example of the “frequency illusion”—that thing where you learn something, maybe a random word you would swear you’ve never heard before, and then proceed to encounter it constantly for the next week. It begs the question—where has this word been all my life? Is the universe conspiring to prank me, or have I really been just constantly tuning it out up until now? The answer to that last part is, of course, yep! Moving through the world successfully requires filtering out a huge amount of the ~eVeRyThInG~ bombarding our senses every minute, and most of that work happens automatically.1 We’re not aware of what we’re not aware of, as that would very much defeat the point of selective attention.
Of course this constant filtering has downsides: Delimiting our field of perception can’t help but boundary our imagination, to some extent. But there are some pretty simple workarounds…namely, just keep learning things. Once you internalize new information, it no longer registers as background noise. Of course we might forget the name of a song we loved in 7th grade, but we’ll for sure notice when it comes on at the grocery store. Once you learn a word, or a tune, or say, the appearance of the larval stage of one of the most common garden insects around, it suddenly and irrevocably becomes a part of your daily experience.
I’ve always lived with ladybugs. I remember being told it was good luck for one to land on you, and the feeling of being blessed whenever a tiny polka-dot bowl alighted on the back of my small, freckled kid hand. Then when I was a bit older, a colony of ladybugs infested the window of my childhood bedroom several consecutive years, as adult beetles looking for a comfy place to overwinter are known to do.2 I remember distinctly my revulsion at the smell when a few dead ladybugs on the sill became many dead ladybugs. As a grouping they are properly called “a loveliness of ladybugs,”3 but unfortunately that was not my experience.
Which is all to say, I considered myself well-versed in the lives (and deaths) of ladybugs when I brought in some lifecycle figurines to my shop a couple of years ago and took a good look at them. Examining the larval stage, I thought to myself, “I’m quite sure I’ve never THAT before.” Based on for sure never having ever encountered it, and the fact that it resembles a tiny evil alligator complete with spikes, I imagined it must be the kind of creature that spends that part of its lifecycle hiding between rocks, emerging only to hiss quietly and scuttle backwards into its little cave. Imagine my surprise meeting one that very spring, on the spirea bush in my own yard. It was pretty clearly hunting the aphids that the ants were assiduously working to farm.
I was so excited that I actually kidnapped that ladybug larva, thinking I could keep it until it pupated—doing the beetle equivalent of forming a cocoon to undergo metamorphosis—ostensibly so my toddler could see it happen. I returned it to my garden maybe fifteen minutes later, though, after reading that it would need to be provided more than 400 aphids before pupating.4 I like a pet project, but even I couldn’t commit to that. After that, though, I found them everywhere—on the hibiscus, the locust, the fences, the kiddie slide. For a couple weeks of the late spring and early summer, I now find them just about everywhere—hanging out on the window screen next to me while I make my coffee in the morning. Where have they been all my life? Or I suppose more rightly, how did I render all these small, strange friends invisible?
Gone now is my initial fear of their appearance. When I find a ladybug larva on my car window, I just shuffle it onto my hand and escort it to the garden. Not too many aphids around these parts.
https://news.mit.edu/2019/how-brain-ignores-distractions-0612
https://biocontrol.entomology.cornell.edu/predators/ladybeetles.php
https://thrasherpestcontrol.com/a-loveliness-of-ladybugs/
https://www.planetnatural.com/what-do-ladybugs-eat/
Yep, that smell. It's quite something!