Ghoulies and Ghosties in the Roanoke Valley

I’ve always been enchanted by an ancient Cornish Litany that goes like this:

“From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties,

and things that go bump in the night,

Good Lord, deliver us!”

As an aside, I would love to hear Cornish actress Kristin Scott Thomas recite this ditty!  She’s one of my favorites with her accent and stage charm and talents.

I’ve been enchanted by this Litany because of its raw mix of metaphors, so to speak.  Few of us have encountered ghoulies and ghosties, whatever these may be, but I’m betting nearly all of us have stumbled upon long-leggety beasties and things that go bump in the night.  Spiders, ticks, mosquitoes, roaches, mice, and bats all seem to qualify.  In our imaginations, these represent the ugly side of nature.  They’re not eagles and pandas.  They’re not out of inspiring vistas of wild landscapes.  They’re creepy things, hairy things, blood-sucking things, repulsive things, nightmarish things that seem to emerge from filth and decay.  How can any reasonable person love such lurid aspects of the natural world?  Further, how can anyone argue their importance in human settings?  Yet that is exactly what I’m going to argue in today’s column.

In the economy of nature, the long-leggety beasties play as significant a role, perhaps even more so, as eagles and pandas.  In fact, Pulitzer-prize winning scientist E.O. Wilson has argued convincingly that “it’s the little things that run life.”  Instinctively, we identify with the world’s sexy megafauna because they’re most like us; after all, at least they have a backbone … and they’re warm-blooded!  Yet in their hidden worlds the creepy-crawlies effect changes in ecosystems fundamental to system health and integrity.  They pollinate, decompose, recycle, build, and control populations in ways that instill a sense of wonder about their overall disproportionate importance in the Earth’s ecology.

As many of my readers know, my professional training is as a tropical ecologist.  Years ago, while on expedition into the cloud forests of Ecuador, I picked up a nasty parasite called a botfly.  In its larval stage, the botfly is a flesh-eating maggot that breaths through a snorkel and feeds on the living muscle of its host – my wrist, in this case!  The little monster could not be easily extracted due to its powerful anal hooks and rows of tiny black barbs that held it firmly in place.  Eschewing surgery or other modern medical practices, I employed what the locals called the “meat treatment” to remove the beastie.  I used a piece of raw steak, fixing it over the breathing pore with Vaseline and gauze.  As it began to suffocate, the botfly maggot then wriggled its way into the slab of bloody meat that I later pulled off – a sinister kind of Bruegelesque birthing process.

I can imagine the scurrilous tabloid headlines: “Man gives birth to fly maggot through his arm.”  Later I fixed the maggot in a little jar of preservative … that I still occasionally pull out to entertain my students!  And what about the hole in my wrist?  While inside me, the botfly maggot exuded a natural antiseptic to keep the wound clean.  From an evolutionary point of view, this made perfect sense.  Otherwise, the larva would find itself in an infectious soup of pus and dead tissue that might kill it.  Thankfully, for my dozens and dozens of expeditions into the tropics, this was the only instance to-date of parasitism.  Yet what a story!

One of my favorite “mind games” that I play with my students is to pretend that they have absolute power over any species on Earth, that with a mere blink an entire group of organisms could be wiped off the planet instantly.  If you had such power, would you use it to rid us forever of … mosquitoes, ticks, spiders, roaches, or, in this case, botflies?  I am happy to report that most of my students wisely refuse to accept such power.  Most understand that such “long-leggety beasties” play significant ecological roles and, in their absence, might disrupt entire natural systems irreparably.  But would the average American exercise such wisdom?

We didn’t think twice about the human-caused extinction of the passenger pigeon or the Caroline parakeet in the early 20th century so why would we give a thought to the demise of a disease-carrying mosquito or a meat-eating fly maggot?

It’s time now to reorder our thinking about the natural world.  The natural world is more complex than we can ever imagine so it’s important to save all the cogs and wheels, no matter how distasteful we find them, as we tinker with Earth’s living systems.  Let’s change that Cornish ditty to “For ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties, and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, we thank Thee!”