Opening to the World's Wonders...
How our most villainized creatures shifted my perspective
“How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.”
- Buckminster Fuller
Part 1: Mistaken Identity
In September of 2023, a chance encounter with a flying creature in Japan turned my world upside down.
My partner Ahishar and I had just landed in Tokyo, the first stop in a larger trip around Asia that we had planned with our toddler.
On our first morning in Tokyo, I saw a giant wasp. The biggest I’d ever seen.
We were sitting in a small, empty park just outside the buzz of the pachinko lounges, video game arcades, and electronics stores in the Akihabara neighborhood.
At this point, my interest in bugs was limited to whatever product promised to keep them (far) away from me. In fact, I left my hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba when I was eighteen in large part because of its bugs. If I were to direct a sequel to Guy Maddin’s cult classic My Winnipeg!, insects would be the main characters.
Manitobans are notoriously easy going and accommodating (the licence plate slogan is Friendly Manitoba after all). Not so of Manitoban bugs. They have big city energy. They demand your attention, get in your way, and aren’t ashamed to keep you up at night.
After I spotted the huge wasp in Tokyo, Ahishar followed it to the bush behind us to get a closer look. Then, from a few feet away, I heard him laugh.
“It’s not a wasp,” he announced, ”it’s a hummingbird!”
I couldn’t believe it. My thoughts about this flying creature promptly switched from Get away from me! to Wow, that’s the cutest little bird I’ve ever seen! I rushed to the bush to get a closer view of the tiny, yellow and black hummingbird hovering in front of a flower.
In this video from that morning, you can hear my amazed reaction. “Wow it’s so small. I’ve never seen such a small hummingbird!”
Ahishar then turned to the internet to learn more about this bird, so minuscule it felt improbable. That’s when he proclaimed this was not, in fact, a bird, but a moth!
A hummingbird hawk moth to be precise, named because it can hover mid-air to feed on nectar, much like a hummingbird would. And what I thought was a tongue was actually a proboscis, not too different from what a mosquito would use to suck my blood.
Apparently these moths can be found both where I grew up in Manitoba and where I live now, in NYC. Even so, I had never seen one. Not because they are rare or endangered, but because I suppose I hadn’t been paying close enough attention.
My feelings about the critter shifted yet again, now to strange disappointment. I mean, who cares about moths, right? Like most nocturnal creatures, I thought they were creepy. Unlike butterflies, I thought they were drab. And where I grew up, we experienced moth caterpillar outbreaks worthy of a horror movie. No thank you.
Long after that hummingbird hawk moth disappeared from sight, and despite the allure of being in the world’s largest city for the first time, I could not get over how I had three completely different reactions to the exact same striped being.
I didn’t like this. I wanted to be evolved enough to love a creature for what it was, independent of whatever it happened to be called. So when I returned to our AirBnB that evening, after putting my son to sleep, I googled hummingbird hawk moths to learn more about them.
The first thing that I learned surprised me: hawk moths are the primary pollinators of a tree I had recently fallen in love with.
It turns out, the white, intoxicatingly fragrant flowers on plumeria trees have evolved to specifically attract hawk moths. They depend on these flowers for nourishment, and these same flowers depend on hawk moths for pollination.
Learning about this co-evolution led me to Charles Darwin’s famous prediction in 1862: that an orchid in Madagascar with a foot-long tube may have evolved alongside a moth with a foot-long proboscis to pollinate it.
Sure enough, in 1907, more than twenty years after Darwin died, the orchid’s pollinator was discovered: a giant hawk moth.
Now I was interested. I knew that approximately one third of the food that ends up on our plates is dependent on the pollination from honey bees. And that in the USA alone, honey bees are responsible for 75% of the economic value of pollinated crops.
I also knew that insects other than honey bees were pollinators, but I couldn’t honestly say I realized moths were. This prompted me to dig through scientific papers to better understand moth pollination. Eventually, I found emerging evidence that moths transport pollen from a wider variety of plants than bees, and that they are more “efficient” pollinators than bees.
I was astounded. Until then, I understood moths to be a good source of food for birds, but mostly, I understood that they were native pests. Especially since I spent many summers in my youth trying to dodge the moth larvae hanging from trees and picking them out of my hair when I failed to do so.
But having learned just this little bit more about moth pollination, suddenly the concept of a native “pest” struck me as an oxymoron. I know a whole ecosystem could be disrupted by an invasive species, but surely it was kept in an intricate balance by a native one?
I pulled up the City of Winnipeg Insect Control website and learned that my hometown was still actively using insecticide to control not just “nuisance” mosquitos and native moth caterpillar outbreaks, but also a whole host of other “common pests” including ants and wasps.
At this point, I felt compelled (there’s that word again…) to better understand the difference between pests and pollinators.
That’s when I recalled a recent New York Times article that reported on a surprising discovery about rats. The same rodents that are abundant in cities around the globe, and widely villainized as pests, also pollinate feijoa—a tropical fruit known as pineapple guava that is widely consumed around South America and New Zealand.
This led me down a rabbit (rat?!) hole about “pollination syndrome” (a set of floral traits like color, shape, and scent that have evolved to attract a specific group of pollinators like bees or birds). Rodents, for example, tend to be attracted to plants featuring dull ground-level flowers with musty scents. Meanwhile, plants with pale but large flowers and strong fruity scents (like those of cacti and agave) tend to attract nocturnal bats.
Now, over 150 years since Darwin’s prediction, we have countless studies proving mutualistic evolution between specific plants and specific pollinators. For instance, did you know that almost every one of some 1,000 species of tropical fig trees has its own unique fig wasp?!
Once I began considering the inexhaustible variety of ways plants had evolved not just to survive, but to attract hunger, I couldn’t help but wonder, how did we know whether a creature’s hunger was helpful or harmful?
I spent the next year trying to answer that question.
Part 2: Pest or Pollinator?
I found some early validation that hunger was worth investigating further when I learned about crab spiders.
Naturalists had long believed that these spiders were essentially pests to the plants where they waited, camouflaged, to ambush pollinating bees. Because a crab spider’s venomous bite quickly paralyzes its victim, they prevent any further pollination.
But recent research has found there is in fact a synergistic relationship between flowers and crab spiders.
It turns out that crab spiders actually reflect UV rays, the same signals bees use to find nectar-rich flowers. As a result, flowers with crab spiders lying in wait are much more likely to be visited by their pollinators.
Not only that, crab spiders prey on insects that are harmful to a plant. Plants even call out for crab spiders’ help with a stronger scent when they are under attack.
This discovery made me wonder if there might be other creatures we had vilified for the damage they caused while eating, only to find out their diets were critical to maintaining an ecosystem’s balance.1
This question led me to India, where palm squirrels were long reported to inflict significant enough damage to coconuts that they resulted in economic losses for growers.
Then, in 2011, researchers found that these squirrels do not feed on nuts at all. In fact, they are the primary pollinators of cultivated coconut palms. Not only that, like crab spiders, they feed on insects that could otherwise harm the palms.
I then learned that the world’s largest bats—flying foxes—had long been seen as an agricultural threat because they feed on fruit trees like almond, guava, and mango.
In the Maldives, conflicts with fruit growers led to 80% of the flying fox population being culled. For similar reasons, these bats were classified as vermin in India under the Wildlife Protection Act—making their killing acceptable. In Indonesia too, they were frequently killed by farmers trying to protect their crops.
Finally, in 2017, researchers investigating how to improve the yield of small-scale Indonesian farms were surprised to discover that these supposedly destructive mammals were actually vital to the pollination of the world’s smelliest and most polarizing fruit: durian.
In 2023, $6.7 billion of durian was exported from Southeast Asia to China alone, pointing to just how economically important it could be to extend the benefit of doubt to every one of our world’s hungry creatures.
The more I followed my curiosity, the more I saw that each time scientists took it upon themselves to look deeper into what role hunger was serving in our ecosystems, they found yet more proof that it is truly essential, not some defect in nature.
With each paper I read, my mind would drift to a woman in Winnipeg who I didn’t personally know but whose name I still remembered–Glenda Whiteman. She made headlines each summer for lying in the street, just outside the exit of a city-owned parking lot, to prevent insecticide trucks from starting their shifts.
What did she know that I didn’t?
Until 2016, Winnipeg was one of the few remaining places in the world that still liberally sprayed Malathion, a known carcinogen, to control its mosquito population.
It’s not that we didn’t know about the insecticide’s harmful side effects (including the fact that it was “likely to cause harm to 97% of the 1700 most endangered plants and animals in the U.S.”).
We did.
It’s just that the mosquitos were that bad.
But Glenda Whiteman was not seen as a protector of the field mice, bees, burrowing owls, and aquatic life that were known to die when the city was doused with Malathion. No, she was seen as a nuisance. Every year, citizens demanded that she, and the few protesters who supported her, be arrested.
It’s hard to mount a persuasive argument on behalf of mosquitos when they are the planet’s most lethal animal, killing up to one million humans each year by transmitting diseases like malaria, dengue, and Zika.
But after what I had just learned about bats, rats, spiders, and squirrels, I wanted to believe there was more to mosquitos than I had previously thought.
Soon enough, I learned that the vast majority of mosquitos don’t even bite humans. Only females do, and only about 100 of the over 3,500 known mosquito species transmit diseases.
But my mind was really blown when I learned more about elephant mosquitos.
These particular mosquitos use their proboscis to sip nectar from flowers, not blood. That’s right, these pests are pollinators. They are found around the world and, as their name suggests, can grow to be quite large, up to 20 millimetres long.
What makes them even more interesting though is that their larvae hunt down the larvae of disease-carrying mosquitos using their incredibly sensitive antenna.
In other words, they are a natural form of mosquito control for humans, but with stealth precision. !!! They have already been deployed in places like Texas, Uganda, and Vietnam (where we were based when I learned this) to manage mosquito populations.
This discovery really shook me. How much energy had we wasted blindly killing the very things that could save us?
When I asked myself this question, I found example after example of society doing just this (don’t get me started on Varroa mites!!). But I had no idea I would eventually stumble upon one that really stung:
My nature-loving mom used to liberally apply Roundup to rid our lawn of dandelions and other weeds. When I looked into what value dandelions might have in our ecosystem, I found a peer reviewed study showing evidence that dandelion root extract induces programmed cell death in aggressive colorectal cancer cells, impairs the migration of colon cancer cells, and delays the growth of human colon tumors.
Unfortunately, this was only discovered in 2016, six years after my mom died of colon cancer.
To rub salt in the wound that this discovery opened up for me, around the same time that scientists discovered the cancer-fighting properties of dandelions, Roundup—the most widely used herbicide in the world—was categorized as “probably carcinogenic,” according to the World Health Organization.
Unfortunately, it gets worse. In the last decade, several studies have also concluded that glyphosate—the primary chemical in Roundup—is harmful to honey bees. In this same period of time, a number of peer-reviewed studies have found that those honey bees produce a compound—propolis—with anti-cancer effects on colon cancer cells.
In what feels like a particularly cruel twist of fate, propolis is now recommended to suppress the secondary tumors that eventually killed my mom.
But back in 2010 when my mom died, we didn’t know that killing pests could also be killing her, nor that saving pests could also have saved her.2
I remember what it was like to read headlines like these and convince myself that they had nothing to do with me. I used to trust that the people developing, manufacturing, selling, and green-lighting pesticides (which includes herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, and rodenticides) had society’s best interests in mind. I used to think that the people who objected to these chemicals weren’t taking enough factors into consideration. They were kooky, at best. Paranoid, at worst.
Now I am one of those people. And while I may be kooky to some—but really, who do we think we are to label creatures that were here millions of years before us as pests?!—I am sure I am not paranoid. I just care.
Spend as much time looking at close-up images of bugs as I have (all the ones below are from the incredible photographer Ben Salb) and it’s hard not to see just how alive and evolved they are.3
It is truly striking how much we have learned about the incredible power latent in the more-than-human world around us in just these last ~15 years. (A few of my favourite recent discoveries are included in the footnotes below!)
For example, despite being the most abundant creature on the planet, we only just started taking the possibility that ants could be pollinators seriously.4
Even with more and more studies like this one from 2016 (showing that a common fly was critical to the survival of a range of plant species which in turn are critical to the survival of all other species in the Arctic),5 the most shocking thing I learned across my research is, ironically, that we know virtually nothing about the creatures our lives quite literally depend on.6
In particular, all the ways their hunger might not be destructive, but generative.
Still, I am not sharing all of this to implore you to also care about bugs—all bugs (though it’s a little that, not gonna lie…and I promise your life will become richer if you do).
So why am I bothering to share this?
I’m mainly fascinated by all that can unfold from the simple act of paying attention, as Ahishar did back in Tokyo. To the hummingbird hawk moth itself, yes, but also to the pang of curiosity that first rose inside him. How often do we ignore or downright suppress such pangs?
Taking his lead, I have been paying closer attention (including to what I give my attention to), and a whole new world has opened up to me.
Part 3: The Wisdom of Hunger
Just a few months since that encounter, what I was paying attention to had completely shifted. I was now looking for insects any time I was outside. And observing how they interacted with the plants around me. In doing so, I started noticing ever finer-details in nature.
I went from seeing this:
To seeing this:
!!!
Interestingly, my newsfeed began to adjust too. The algorithms that once fed me a steady diet of content about how polarized everyone and everything was, now almost exclusively served me stories about the wisdom of nature. I can’t tell you how refreshing this was.
The world started to feel more alive, more loving, more magical, more purposeful.
Then, in the midst of this perspective shift, an intruder entered our AirBnb in Da Nang, Vietnam.
I woke up to the unmistakable sound of someone shuffling around in our kitchen. Ahishar was lying right next to me, and he too had just woken up from the noise.
“Do you hear that?” I whispered, my heart pounding out of my chest.
“Yea,” he replied, throwing back the blankets.
I took a deep breath, knowing I would need to stay clear-headed to survive this home invasion. My hands were already shaking. As Ahishar went to the bedroom door to poke his head into the hallway to investigate, I began to plot how I would get to my son down the hall, then somehow scale the wall outside his second floor bedroom window down to safety.
This was my worst nightmare.
When Ahishar came back to bed a few seconds later, I was surprised to see him looking so relaxed. He was supposed to be gearing up for the fight of our lives.
“What’s happening?” I asked, in a voice that gave away how not relaxed I was. I knew what I heard came from inside, and not from some appliance or quirk of the home.
“It’s just a beetle,” he replied.
“What!” I said. It was impossible a beetle could make that much noise.
“Yea, a really big one. Like, the size of my ear.”
This should have come as a relief, but amazingly, a part of me still wanted to run away. How could either of us expect to sleep in a house infested with bugs the size of his ear?!
“You’re not going to kill it?” I asked.
“No.”
“But what if it gets into our room?”
“I grew up with these rhino beetles. Trust me, they’re harmless.”
He pulled out his laptop to work off the adrenaline rush, while I lay awake thinking of how often I have been a bug’s worst nightmare. Invading their homes, declaring war on their babies, supporting middle of the night eradication campaigns, killing them without a second thought.
It was a wonder this giant beetle was alive at all.
The next morning, I got a closer look at our intruder before we released it outside.
After seeing how helpless it was in that bucket, I needed to learn more.
I read, among other things, that rhino beetles are considered the strongest animals on the planet, able to lift up to 850x their own body weight. That’s the equivalent of a human lifting 30 full-grown mammalian rhinos at once! 🤯
And Ahishar was right, these massive nocturnal beetles don’t bite or sting because they are herbivores. Their diet consists of fruit, sap, and nectar.
Might they be pollinators? I wondered.
Unsurprisingly, there was only one single study from the Ivory Coast investigating their role as pollinators.
At first I was disappointed that my research quickly hit this dead end.7 Then I asked myself why I was so eager to be able to label this bug as a pollinator in the first place. Would that distinction make them any more worthy of my attention (and protection)?
That’s when I realized that I had been so keen to distinguish between pests and pollinators because truthfully, I felt like both. I wanted to prove that I was the latter, that I had value. Beyond the number in my savings account. Beyond what I could produce for an employer. Beyond the help I could offer a colleague or friend.
Research is me-search, as they say. And I’d long been afraid to give in to my own hunger (I’m not referring to caloric hunger here—don’t worry, I will always eat if I’m hungry—but more broadly to that which gives me energy), lest it make me well, a pest. (If we want to get all analytical about it, I was afraid of becoming my dad. There, I said it!)
But given how much I’d already seen the line between pests and pollinators shift, it dawned on me that one day, it might disappear altogether. How can we possibly distinguish between what hunger is helpful or harmful when there is so much yet to learn?
With this in mind, I finally gave in to my hunger to learn more. I mean fully gave in, for what felt like the first time in my life. Without concern for how I might one day monetize this particular interest of mine, or what others might think of all the time I was “wasting.”
In following that hunger, I was upset to learn that the pesticide Winnipeg uses to fight “pest” caterpillar outbreaks (Foray 48B) incidentally kills all moth and butterfly larvae, including Monarchs and hummingbird hawk moths. Which is to say nothing of the birds, beetles, bats, and other wildlife who feed on those caterpillars.
Until I met that one hummingbird hawk moth in Tokyo 2.5 years ago, I couldn’t have named a single moth species. Not one. Even as someone who “loved nature,” I had no idea there were 341 moth species where I grew up, let alone an estimated 160,000 worldwide. I didn’t know how incredibly sensitive they were either. Would you believe a male silk moth can track a female pheromone scent through the air from an astounding 4.5km/2.8 miles away. Or that the Egyptian cotton leafworm moth can hear plants’ ultrasonic clicks. They use these sounds to determine where is best to lay their eggs.
Because they are so widespread, but also so sensitive, moths are widely considered to be an indicator species. Their presence—or absence—reflects the overall health of their ecosystems. Our well being depends on theirs.
Now, I’m afraid that just as I’ve become so eager to spot a hummingbird hawk moth in my brother’s backyard, I won’t ever see one again. And that makes me really sad.
I want to find a neon green cankerworm crawling in my son’s hair an hour after coming back from the park. I want him to enjoy dissecting it, guilt-free, because Winnipeg is in the midst of yet another Wormageddon. I want to be out on walks with friends and have to duck and sway to avoid worms, hanging by the thousands from trees, like we used to. I want it to be so uncomfortable that we can’t help but laugh about it.
To my great surprise, I’ve become quite attracted to the very things that once repelled me.
I want more caterpillars in my life. Really. I want there to be so many damn caterpillars that releasing 200 butterflies into the wild isn’t newsworthy.
These caterpillars have come to remind me of a time in my life when time wasted was time well spent.
What does it say about my life now that I hardly ever see them?
It’s not just moths and their larvae though. I so rarely see any bugs now, it’s easy to forget what central characters they were in my childhood. Splattering across the windshield of my mom’s car, hanging from trees in our backyard, banging against the windows of my bedroom on hot summer nights, slithering across wet sidewalks on my way to school, chewing up our back porch, seeking shelter in our basement.
After my year of looking more closely at “pests,” I can’t help but see how in punishing them for their hunger, we’ve inadvertently tampered our own.
Because the mindset that strives for a pest-free world is the same mindset that strives for a perfectly productive life. Speaking for myself anyway, that kind of life doesn’t leave much room for curiosity (say, for a moth) or creativity, let alone love or fun.
Why birdwatch or babysit for a friend when you could spend all that time/energy earning more money and increasing your “impact” (from the comfort of your pest-free home no less!)?
Counter-intuitively, I’ve found it’s much, much easier to have an “impact” on the world (it’s literally as simple as putting out a handful of hateful tweets or chopping down a bunch of trees), than it is to tread lightly in it.
Incredibly, treading lightly has left me feeling much more full than striving for (and achieving some measure of) impact ever has.
This ~6,000 word essay perfectly symbolizes my year of treading lightly.
It is pretty much all I have to show for over a year of full-time work. It will be read by a couple hundred of you, if I’m lucky.
By conventional measures, it’s laughably little for the amount of energy I put into it. It has earned me precisely $0, and has cost me much, much more. Even ignoring the opportunity cost of forgoing a salaried job, I paid for my son to be in daycare while I researched and wrote. I forfeited countless trips to temples in Thailand and to beaches in Vietnam. I can no longer, in good conscience, eat food that isn’t organic, though my wallet begs to differ.
I asked myself many, many times if this is really what I should be spending so much of my one precious life on. At least once a day through 2023 and 2024, I considered pivoting into something that would have a more obvious return on my investment.
The stakes got even higher in 2025, when I was faced with several rude reminders that life is terrifyingly short.
You might think that losing my second parent, or being diagnosed with cancer would leave me with some regrets for all the time I squandered studying ants and flies. But it only deepened my resolve to spend the rest of whatever time I have here in a deeply personal way.
Because if the world’s inconvenient creatures taught me one thing, it’s to trust hunger. Mine included. Because that hunger is wise. It is not a defect of nature, but the very thing holding this mysterious web of life together. It serves a purpose. And I’m tired of suppressing it.
I once thought I could control what gave me energy. That I could shift my interests from say dancing and photography to setting KPIs and sending Slack messages. And in so doing, make myself a little more desirable on the job market, or at a party. And I tried, trust me. But now I have a strong sense that just like the more-than-human beings I’ve written about here, I have co-evolved with that which gives me energy.
And guess what? I felt genuinely energized whenever I dedicated time to learning more about a critter I had previously written-off. I had fun working on this. I don’t know if it will have any “impact.” And if it does, whether I’ll live to see what that is. That’s ok with me.
I’m with Einstein, who once said “curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
Even if you, my dear reader, are the only person alive who reads this far, my year-long, unpaid foray will still have been worth it because I followed that which gave me energy. I trusted my curiosity had its own reason for existing, even if I couldn’t yet understand it or quantify its value.
As if I needed some validation that there was indeed value in trusting my hunger: giving in to my interest in pests/pollinators unexpectedly brought me closer to my father in the last year of his life. Not only because he had always represented someone who followed that which gave him energy—no matter the cost. But also because he was someone who dedicated his life to fighting for the dignity and respect of those who had been treated by society in much the same way as pests are treated—written off, vilified, taken advantage of, or just downright ignored.
This essay might not look like much, but it is my small way of reclaiming the nerd in me that I had long rejected precisely because it reminded me of my dad. It is my way of honouring his life, thanking him, and following in his footsteps.
I am proud of the courage and resolve it took me to do this, especially given what our society values. In fact, I am more proud of this than I am of any promotion I’ve received, any deal I’ve closed, or any client I’ve won. Those achievements drained me. This one made me feel more alive. Period.
I already knew that nearly every “pest” on earth is preyed upon by a species of wasp. But I also soon learned that ants are among the leading predators of other insects, helping control “pests” on a planetary scale.
Thousands of plants have small nectar-producing organs, called nectaries, outside their flowers specifically to attract ants that will protect them from various other insects. The northern Catalpa tree native to the midwestern USA, for example, shows a decreased loss of leaf tissue on branches protected by ants and an increase in the number of seeds produced. When the tree senses too much leaf damage from caterpillars, it dramatically increases nectar production to attract more ants that can kill and eat those caterpillars.
Their hunger also helps fertilize soil (by carrying bits of plants and animal remains into their nests), aerate soil (on a scale that is on par with earthworms), and plant seeds (by taking seeds into their tunnels to eat the the seed’s fleshy and nutritious attachment, effectively planting it). This seed dispersal process, known as myrmecochory, is just one example of the hundreds of mutualistic relationships ants have with plants.
Do I know for sure that propolis and/or dandelion root extract could have saved my mom? No, of course not. Nor can I be sure that glyphosate is to blame for her demise. I share this only to illustrate why I have begun to trust nature more, and our attempts to control it less.
A few of my other favourite insect photographers: Efraïm Baaijens, Laurent Hesemans, Thorben Danke and Pete Burford.
Until 2020, ants had not been considered as pollinators, given their size, small foraging ranges, and hairless bodies. But then researchers discovered that a threatened species of flowering shrub in Australia’s southwest had evolved specifically to enable ants to pollinate them. This research blew the doors open on ant pollination research.
Now, 70 ant species are known pollinators of 41 plants. It’s a tiny fraction of the ~25,000 ant species that are believed by myrmecologists to exist (only ~15,000 have been formally classified and described), but these very recent discoveries point to how much we have yet to learn about the 20 quadrillion ants alive today. That’s 20 with fifteen zeros. Enough ants to form a chain that would circle the Earth’s equator eight million times. Enough to outnumber humans 2.5 million to one. Their biomass is so great, it exceeds that of all wild birds and mammals combined.
Did you know that flies are actually the second most important visitors of flowers, after bees? But unlike bees, many fly species migrate up to thousands of kilometres, often in vast numbers, which allows plants to acquire genetic variants that may help them adapt to a changing climate.
As the planet’s climate becomes increasingly unpredictable, scientists are hypothesizing that fly pollination could become more important, as they provide more consistent pollination at cooler temperatures.
Even among non-insects, pollination is appallingly unexplored. It wasn’t until 2016, for example, that we learned pollination can also occur underwater, when scientists found zooplankton pollinating turtle grass in the ocean.
A few years later, in 2022, a French scientist confirmed that a tiny crustacean was responsible for pollinating a type of algae. And it was only in 2023, when researchers discovered what may be the world’s first pollinating amphibian—a tree frog in Brazil.
In 2024, researchers even revealed that wolves in Ethiopia are likely pollinating the red hot poker flower as they snack on its nectar and carry pollen on their snouts from one flower to the next. If confirmed, this would make them the world’s first (known) carnivorous pollinators.
To my dismay, my research hit many dead-ends. For example, when I was reading up on rabbits, I came to see that instead of studying their hunger, most scientific research studied how their eyes react to any and every chemical under the sun.
…what a radical looking moth…need to hear more about that bike ride…