New Scientist

Date: 15 March 2011 21:48:55

The hunter stalks her prey through the long grass, head titled slightly in order to catch the characteristic sound of its call. Zzzt-zzzt. There! Listen more carefully. Zzzt-zzzt. There it is again. Over there! The hunter draws silently closer to the source of the sound. Slowly, slowly and pounce! Her hand closes over – nothing, the creature has leaped away. Drat!

Again, the hunter advances, approaching the location that her prey has been seen to land. So well cam-ou-flaged, she thinks to herself, so hard to spot. Reaching forth her hand, she sweeps it slowly back and forth along the tips of the grassy seed heads. They tickle in a pleasant manner and send up a faint dusting of pollen, catching in her throat and making her sneeze.

There, again! Her quarry has made the mistake of choosing that moment to move. She is upon it like a flash, hand rapidly shut. Gotcha!

Leaning back onto her haunches, the hunter opens her cupped hand to reveal the captive. There, resting tentatively on her outstretched palm, is a buff coloured grasshopper. Suddenly, realising that it is no longer confined, the creature leaps back into the grass. It leaves nothing but a peculiar sensation on the skin of the hunter, from the slightest pressure of its departing feet.

Satisfied, the hunter gets to her own feet and ventures off in search of her next quarry – the ladybird.

. . .

I always knew just where to find them, these brightly coloured jewels of the invertebrate kingdom; they were guaranteed to be nestled amongst the sword shaped leaves of the acrid smelling bush by our front door. This bush gave off the kind of smell that could almost be tasted, lingering unpleasantly in the back of the throat. The fact that I associated this bush, and hence its smell, with its semi-permanent population of ladybirds, led me to conclude that the ladybirds themselves gave off the smell. Ladybird smell. It made perfect sense to me at the time, and I refused to believe my mother when she insisted that ladybirds did not smell of anything!

Smell or no smell, they were always easy to locate. They would stand out like shiny porcelain beads against the dark green of the bush. I felt no compunction to handle these particular insects, the thrill being derived not from the chase, but rather from study.

I remember one particular summer very clearly indeed; it would have been harder to avoid ladybirds that year than to find them. The bush was absolutely covered. The rotund seven-spot beetles became so commonplace as to almost be boring, although the little red two-spots still retained sufficient scarcity to interest me. I derived the most joy at that time from the appearance of more exotic looking ladybirds; tiny and yellow with black spots, brown-black with orange spots and even the occasional larva.

. . .

Lar-va. The young professor rolls this new word around in her mind. What ladybirds looked like before they became ladybirds.

Amazing. This requires further investigation.