They're small.
They're mindless.
They don't bite.
They don't carry disease.
They can be squashed easily between our fingers or under our shoes.
We're terrified of them.
The caterpillar epidemic over the last few weeks in Prince George has brought out some deep-seated fears about creepy-crawlies. Many people laugh at the idea about elephants being afraid of mice (according to the Mythbusters crew on TV, there seems to be some truth behind the notion), but most folks stop laughing at the idea of touching caterpillars, spiders and other insects.
They may be gross, they may be squishy, they may smell but what really scares us is how foreign they are. People can relate to mammals because we're one of them, too, and we have a lot in common with most of them. Environmentalists go to great lengths to save baby seals but would they do the same if baby seals looked like caterpillars, only bigger? No, chances are they'd grab a spike and help bash some heads in.
The basis of cute starts with being able to see ourselves in others and the further we drift across the animal kingdom from homo sapiens, the more foreign and ugly the critters become to our eyes. Evolutionary biologists are quick to point out that babies are adorable because it fires a protective urge deep in our brains. We then extend those feelings to domesticated animals and spread that out further to other mammals.
Birds enjoy a little bit of our empathy, reptiles and fish a little less than that, with insects and their kin at the bottom of the heap.
Our hatred of caterpillars and other bugs also has a basis in evolution. Caterpillars are just annoying but some of their cousins are deadly. It's likely that even the ancestors of humans were aware that bugs can spread illness, carry disease, ruin food, pollute fresh water and are capable of causing great harm when they spread across the environment in huge numbers.
Hello, mountain pine beetle.
Put in a modern context, caterpillars are zombies.
They mindlessly spread everywhere, relentlessly looking for food and killing one or one thousand of them seems to do nothing to affect the immediate population. They consume everything they can, as fast as they can, and spread to other areas until their population collapses.
Some might say that describes human beings as well as it does zombies or caterpillars.
Agent Smith drew a similar parallel between humans and viruses in The Matrix, calmly pointing out that humanity is nothing more than a disease, a plague upon the planet.
But we humans clearly recognize the difference between us and bugs...and that difference is frightening.
When an outbreak occurs, we are quickly reminded of something we often forget about bugs in our sanitized homes and workplaces. There are many, many, many more of them than us. From a biological standpoint, Earth's land mass is dominated by insects, not mammals or reptiles. Insects are more biologically diverse - about 30 per cent of all identified species in the world are beetles alone - and scientists estimate that the mass of all the insects in the world is 300 times greater than all of the world's human beings.
Caterpillar outbreaks, like tornadoes in Oklahoma and tsunamis in Japan, range from annoyances to deadly threats to us but all of these natural phenomena point to difficult truths.
Humans exist on Earth because natural forces allow us to but those same natural forces could eliminate us overnight.
And despite our intelligence and our technical skills, humans are little more than clever ants, incredibly new to the life of this planet, which existed for billions of year before our arrival and will revolve around the Sun for billions of years after the last one of us dies.
The bugs have been here longer than we have and they'll likely last longer, too.
We're right to fear and hate them as much as we do.
