Zoological Correlative

I miss the insects of the north: the praying mantis, the delicate diamond-needle, the spotted ladybug. There are ladybugs here but they have no spots, like the ghostly plastic action figures, sold loose in the market, run off as mold testers by Chinese fabricators and left unpainted. If you know what you’re looking at you can identity Batman (the ears) or the Terminator (sunglasses, the ragged flesh around the hydraulic arm) in these smooth blue or green or gray simulacra, like Platonic forms of Hollywood properties. The bugs here are larger and hungrier and while there are some truly beautiful specimens, like the butterfly as big and bright as a tennis ball, they are mostly skulking beasties. There are invasive nightgoing scorpions, serpentine centipedes, heavy-duty grasshoppers a little too eager to become locusts. These kick so powerfully at the touch that I was reminded out of the blue one day of that ‘field goal’ sequence in the classroom-desk game of paper football. There are also the amazing little herps that prey on them. The geckos run the gamut from little-finger length to about six inches and eat their young. They will crawl under doors and behind picture frames. Their cardinal virtues are secrecy and patience. The skinks in the garden are territorial and only come together to mate (I understand). Caught by the tail they cut their losses and leave it thrashing like a cool special effect. Then there are the bats, who skim the plunge pool at dusk for drowning bugs, dropping from palm fronds and describing figure-eights. They are as big as pigeons and fly as low. As with the sign-painters I get an unrequited thrill being near them.

The mosquitos deserve special mention because as rarely as you get a glimpse of them, you feel their presence all the waking day long and then again when they wake you up in bed. They may enjoy the rare tang of furiously boiling blood.They are so hard to get away from that when they are not biting you, you are always conscious of your relief. I have wondered whether it would be possible to plant some weed or spray some elixir or install some electromagnetic field and kill them all to the very last, though if this method existed I assume it would have been advertised to me. In grocery stores I inspect all the products for sale in the anti-insect section, which I once used to do only to remind myself how obliviously wicked and intolerant my countrymen were.

There are two ways to go with repellent: the natural stuff, which seems to attract bugs, maybe as a test to their courage, and the synthetic stuff, which doesn’t actually attract them but doesn’t do anything to stop them and seems like too much to pay for the privilege of absorbing exotic toxins. The strongest synthetic bugspray always comes in a shrink-wrapped aerosol can, because its manufacturers know their customers aren’t worried about the long-term environmental effects of shrink wrap or aerosol propellant.


There are large nocturnal mosquitos and smaller, banded diurnal ones. The day mosquitos are plague-ridden. Dengue is a disease like the flu (which, come to think of it, also has an evocative foreign name), a virus I think, that pirates the mitochondria and causes aches, fatigue, stomach upset, and acute photosensitivity. In my lifetime I’ve had plenty of the first three symptoms, but something about this last intrigues me, and I suspect I could find it in myself to wring some perverse delight out of staying confined all day in a dark room, listening to traffic, aching. An objective correlative. Knock on wood.