Splat | WiseTome.com

How beautiful can it get? How melodious can it be with its screeches and tweets all at the same time? How disciplined can it be during the creation and destruction process? How mysterious can its ways be? How can it bring together things seemingly so far fetched and totally unrelated as into one single entity?

Yes! You guessed it right. I’m referring ‘it’, to Nature- its ways and means that has held us spellbound for centuries and will hold us in awe for many a generation to come. And facilitating our awing experiences are the diehard nature lovers, conservationists and cinematographers, who make it possible for us to see the Spring Bucks of the Savannah, the burly Siberian Tigers of the freezing northern Russia, the majestic Elephants of the tropical Western Ghats of India, the Mountain Lions of the spring time North Americas, the Dingoes of the dry and arid Australian down under, the stealthy Leopards of the thick and lush green Amazonian South America, and the highly sensitive Barn Owls of the chilly Europe, all at the click of a simple TV remote button while sitting some place far from real action and yet so close to the breath taking actions of the “wild world” through modern electronics. This post is in toast to those brave hearts and wildlife aficionados who go to the ends of the earth for our “pleasure and awes”.

My early recollections of programs on wildlife and nature as a whole, involved a program on Discovery Channel that focused on the big cats of the world. Tigers, Lions, Cheetahs, Leopards, Pumas, Black cats and other felines were covered and each of them were talked about vis-à-vis their habitats, social nature, availability of prey, and the kind of threats they faced. My recent recollection however is about a program on the baffling world of insects and their parasitic behaviors in pushing for the cause of their specie’s survival. It is this second recollection that has acted as an immediate inspiration to me to write this post.

Narrated by the world famous entomologist, Sir David Attenborough, the program “Life in the undergrowth” on Discovery Channel, addressed the parasitic behavior among insects such as the wasps, the blue butterflies, cattle flies, etc. The most bizarre aspect about these insects is the interdependence among them as a cause for their respective species survival. A blue butterfly lays it eggs on plants. And once those eggs hatch, the larvae falls to the ground giving out pheromones to attract certain kind of ants. The ants from the nearby colonies take in to those pheromones - and start thinking that the butterfly larvae are the larvae of their own specie, somehow lost and to be brought back to the colony! In fact the pheromones reconfigure the ant’s brain so much so that they give more attention and care to the Butterfly’s larvae than their own! Once inside the colony the larvae grow at blistering pace feeding on what has been provided to them by their loving, albeit tricked, foster parents. The larvae also develop a cocoon around them which hardens as time passes.

During their growth the butterfly larvae may be visited by another of the strange bugs - the wasps. The female wasp with her belly full of eggs has devised a way of providing her progeny a safe birth. In a way, still not understood by entomologists, the female wasp finds the exact ant colony where the larvae of the butterfly are developing. In fact Sir Attenborough mentioned that the female wasps have this knack of finding the right colony among a thousand other ant colonies!

Once into the colony, the female wasp is, as expected, attacked by the soldier ants of the colony and just when you thought that the wasp would be killed by the ant stings, the female wasp releases pheromones into the air to create pandemonium in the colony, making the ants to fight among themselves! It is at this opportune moment that the wasp starts looking for the butterfly larvae. On finding, the wasp lays a huge number of her eggs inside one butterfly larva after another and once done flies off out of the colony-assured of a safe birth for her progeny. A few weeks later, the wasps eggs hatch into larvae inside the cocoon of the butterfly larvae feeding on the liquid available and at the same time seeing that they do not harm the butterfly within the cocoon. Astounding isn’t it? The two species in fact use each other for a safe birth. By eating the excess liquid inside the cocoon the wasp larvae saves the butterfly larvae from dying through rotting and the butterfly in turn gives the wasp a safe heaven.

A few weeks later a fully grown butterfly emerges out of its hard cocoon shell and stumbles its way out of the colony onto a nearby plant to expand and flutter its wings and fly away to begin the cycle of life all over again. Meanwhile, the crack left by the butterfly acts as an opening for the dozens of wasps inside the cocoon to emerge. The emerging wasps then go onto create their own cycle of life just as the blue butterflies did, all to begin a new circle of sharing and living.

Whatever I narrated above was just part of an hour’s program but the actual time taken to prepare such a program would have been in months, if not years. Phew! What amount of dedication and come to think of it, the awing experience occurs just for the simple fact that the whole understanding of the word Parasite takes on a new turn, for parasitic behavior does not necessarily mean sustenance of one life at the cost or termination of another, it also means the propagation of two or more lives through co-existence. And thus, is it any wonder that we owe so much to wild life enthusiasts such as Sir David Attenborough, Steve Irvin, et al., because of whom ordinary folks like you and I have a better understanding of the wild world of the past, present and hopefully with more such people being born and more wild discoveries made by them, the future too.

So go ahead, get awed and inspired in the company of the master depicters of the wild world!