Thursday at lunch I had an unexpected visitor.
I was dining alone. That morning I’d been running a chainsaw and had been soaked with sweat. I was dry but pungent. Not really fit for company.
A few years back, Dispatch page designer Matt Garner made yard furniture from the wooden pallets used in the delivery of advertising inserts. I was sitting at one of Matt’s tables under a large hackberry tree. Birds were chirping and a cool breeze rustled the leaves above.
If the setting sounds idyllic, well, I suppose it was.
On the menu was a tomato sandwich, featuring an extraordinarily good tomato grown by a friend. For protein, as restaurants now like to call it, I had a tin of sardines, Wild Caught Beach Cliff Sardines in Louisiana Hot Sauce.
I was most of the way through my meal when I looked down and there it was.
Some sort of fantastic creature with six legs and what looked to be small eyes on his torso.
I’d just finished listening to an audiobook of a Neil Gaiman novel, so I was “sensitized” for such an encounter.
When I offered the creature a fragment of sardine, it retreated. Maybe it was the hot sauce. It seemed to be wary of me, again retreating when I offered a crumb of my sandwich.
Eventually it decided I was not to be feared and approached.
I put my hand in front of it, and it climbed aboard, a solitary Lilliputian atop a seemingly benign Gulliver. It was as though it had suction cups on the bottom of each of its six feet.
It lingered on my left hand. With my right, I reached for my cell phone with its camera.
After tolerating a few pictures, it crawled over my hand, up my arm and around to the back of my neck, out of sight.
I stood up and carefully took off my shirt. It had gone on to the wrought-iron chair I had been sitting in.
When I extended my hand, it climbed on, and I returned it to the table.
We repeated the maneuver several times. Clearly the little fellow had gotten over his fear of me.
I sent a picture of my lunch companion to my 12-year-old granddaughter, who enjoys such things.
“Cool! I bet he seems pretty chill,” she wrote back.
“He wants to hang out with me. He’s crawling across my phone as I write this.”
“Hahahaha,” she replied.
Reluctantly, I took leave of my new friend and returned to the work at hand.
An hour or two later I noticed a text from my granddaughter.
It was a photo and in its center was the silhouette of a bug that resembled my lunch companion.
“I think your friend came to see me,” she wrote.
Later I sent a photo of the bug to Joe MacGown, a researcher in the etymology department at Mississippi State.
“It’s definitely Coreidae (family) in the genus Acanthocephala,” Joe replied. “I would be more confident of the species name if it were an adult.”
Is there a common name, one a layperson would stand a chance of pronouncing or spelling correctly?
“Giant leaf-footed bug,” Joe wrote.
What do they eat, I wondered. A Google search yielded the following:
All species of Coreidae are phytophagous, that is, plant-feeders. Like all true bugs, the adults are equipped with a beak, or rostrum, a hypodermic needle-like device carried under the head, which it uses to pierce the plant tissue and suck out liquids. They do not simply “suck out sap,” they inject a tissue-dissolving saliva and vacuum out the resulting slurry. Bugs cannot ingest solid food, and widespread damage to the plant is a result of these liquefying enzymes.
No wonder he took a pass on the sardines and tomato sandwich.
In his just published book on the sensory world of animals, Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Ed Yong wrote, “Every animal, including humans, can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness.”
How rewarding it can be when our reality overlaps with that of another living creature, and we get a small sense of the unseen wonders that surround us.
Birney Imes ([email protected]) is the former publisher of The Dispatch.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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