Table Manners

or On/Off

Being human has so many lovely perks:  opposable thumbs, brains that can (sometimes) solve complex problems, the capacity to create and enjoy art.  Even better, even more exciting and convenient, we don't have to stand on our food and eat it out from under us.  I'd never really fully appreciated that last perk until this week, when I watched a juvenile angle-wing katydid going through contortions while it ate.  The leaf it was standing on kept getting smaller and smaller as the katydid devoured more and more of it.  About halfway through it either had to stop eating or fall off.  Without even the tiniest pause, it moved on to another floor-table-casserole (or "leaf") and started over again.  I have been fondly patting the kitchen chairs in passing ever since.

Theoretically this katydid should be hanging out in a tree somewhere.  Instead it's settled into the amaranth patch in the microgarden for the last few days.  The amaranth is just a small patch, about two feet long by six inches wide, but intensively planted, with plenty of leaves for a hungry young katydid to stand and/or dine on.

And dine it does, with the relentless precision of a machine, its mandibles perforating a leaf and meshing together, drawing food up and in, up and in, without pause, without a change in rhythm.  It works its way from one side of a leaf to the other and then, like a typewriter carriage, swings back to the starting point.*  During a windstorm the other evening I watched it sheltering on the middle tier of leaves, clinging with its feet to the leaf below it and with its mandibles to the one above.  While the wind blew the katydid was anchored in two directions; when the wind paused it would take a bite.

To eat the shelter from over your head while you still need it—that's some hunger at work.  Watching the katydid this week, I've been aware of its instinct as an implacable, almost mechanistic force.  When that insect is ready to eat, nothing slows it down; it's on automatic pilot.  The sense of robotic drive is all the more striking as the only other thing I have seen this living creature do is sit.  Admittedly, it has a splendid physique, and when it sits it looks like the kind of intricate jade carving that ought to grace an emperor's palace, but still, all it does is sit.  It's as if the katydid is on a toggle switch:  when the switch is on it eats, when the switch flips off it comes to a dead halt.  There's no middle ground, no competing instinct to moderate the hunger, no secondary activity to occupy it.

Other insects, just as driven, still seem to acquire character as a species.  No one can tell me praying mantises aren't hungry, yet they're also curious and engaged.  The baby ones that used to live in the chard in the microgarden would pounce on me when I watered and then be startled at what they'd caught and run away.  No matter how driven ants may be, they still manage to find time to be irritable.  Waterbugs are gregarious—really surprisingly friendly (such a pity they're vermin); bumblebees can be flat-out hedonistic when they think no one is looking.  Character comes from movement, but stasis?  What does stasis produce?

What does a katydid do but alternately eat and look like a jade carving?  To have no one be "home" in a creature of that size—it's unnerving.

Maybe still waters run deep?

_________________
* Youngsters, ask your parents to tell you about typewriters.**
** Or better yet, just don't worry about it.


A postscript:  Look what the katydid accomplished today while I was gone!

All grown up

It isn't half-bad at camouflage...

Denizens

Praying mantis studying me through the study window

or When Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

When Alice talks with the White Queen in the famous scene from Through the Looking Glass, she clings to realism for all it's worth:  "One can't believe impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen.  "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day.  Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

I'm always intrigued in a work of art—whether fiction, film, opera, or anything else—at the fine line between what's believable and what isn't, and the tipping point between the two.  You go along through the whole work, perfectly willing to suspend disbelief, and then suddenly wham!  As far as you're concerned it has "jumped the shark," and it's all downhill from there.  There may have been half a dozen equally over-the-top moments along the way, but for some reason one feature among the rest swings the balance for you between "coming along for the ride" and "give me a break."

Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code was like that for me.  I was happy to go along with logical fallacy after logical fallacy for the sake of a fast plot and cloak-and-dagger intrigue, but when it was revealed (possible spoiler alert, but not a very big one) that Debussy had been a keeper of the great secret, I threw the book down in disgust.  Debussy was a jerk, a nasty piece of work; no one in his right mind would have given him a sacred trust.  If Brown was fool enough to believe that Debussy was a trustworthy and noble fellow just because he composed some nice music (rather than being a creep who happened to be handy with notes), I was done with him.

Reality, of course, is sometimes even stranger than fiction.  Take giraffes, for example.  It's easy enough to believe in each individual feature of a giraffe, but added up they come to something a little too over the top—about 15 feet over the top, in fact, and most of it neck.  (It's odd how the balance can tip back toward belief, too.  The last time I was at the zoo to disbelieve in the giraffes, one came over to say hello, bent down its head, and dribbled a bunch of green plant gunk all over the enclosure railing.  There's something all too real about dribbly green plant gunk, and now I believe in giraffes again.)

Or flamingos.  As if their color isn't startling enough, the way they sleep on one leg with their necks turned around 180° and snaked along their backs—sorry, but that's just a little too Maurice Sendak (or Roald Dahl) for me to accept.  I used to find the way their knees bend backward to be a little too strange and then discovered that those are their ankles; their knees are right under their hips and hidden by feathers, which doesn't exactly make things any better.

But even in our own backyards, there are plenty of creatures I'm not quite ready to suspend disbelief for.  Spittle bugs are a case in point.  The thought of an insect surrounding itself in a cloud of spit for protection ("You can't tell I'm here, Mr. Predator, because I'm hidden in my own saliva!")...Hmm.

Spittle bug(s?)

How about twig caterpillars?  They're a kind of inchworm.  This one seems to have gotten a little confused by the concept of camouflage—it's not enough to look like a twig, little caterpillar; you also have to hang out with the twigs.  I've only seen this kind of inchworm once and have no idea what its moth form looks like.  It's sufficiently twig-like that the moment when it started "measuring" was pretty disconcerting—I almost expected it to snap in half.

Redroot amaranth flowers with out of place camouflaged twig

Praying mantises?  Albuquerque is probably too close to Roswell for me to see them as anything other than space aliens, come to study our culture and then report back to the mother ship.

"Interesting.  Ve-ry interesting."

Then we have this little spider, which was (and still is, for all I know) about half an inch long.  If a sock monkey were crossed with a tarantula and then shrunk in the wash, this is what we would get.

And it has this gorgeous mask on its back (as if its front weren't scary enough).  Tattoo?  Gang symbol?  Tribal marking?  (You can click on the photo to enlarge it.)  (If you're into that kind of thing.)

I've been practicing believing in them all before breakfast—before I've even finished my coffee on the patio, no less, because that's when I always see them.  (I'm up to four unbelievable things now—two to go, and I tie the White Queen!)  For me, they're all right on the cusp of credibility.  One more oddity, one more human-common-sense defying quirk, and they'd jump the shark.

They'd better not make any silly claims about Debussy.