Animals: Puck’s Backyard

A 200-lb. man sprawled on his stomach in the grass, wriggled forward, stared intently at a ladybug.

“As I watched,” he later wrote, “I began to wonder how the world must appear to a ladybug: what the sensation would be if my six feet of height dwindled down and down until I was hardly a quarter of an inch long; if I shrank to a thousandth, a ten-thousandth … a millionth of my present bulk. Like Alice, I began to feel I was ‘shutting up like a telescope.’

“Then, I imagined the quarter-inch insect expanding to my size, with everything around it enlarging in proportion. It was a curious sensation—like breathing in and out—this contracting and expanding viewpoint. The six-foot ladybug, I perceived, would live in a world where grassblades would be as wide as a highway and would tower hundreds of feet in the air. Crickets twenty-four feet long would crawl through the grassroot jungles. Moths, with wings stretching more than 100 feet from tip to tip, would soar through the air at dusk. Bushes would have the appearance of frowning cliffs; trees of invincible mountains. So the world must appear to a ladybug as it peers nearsightedly about it.”

Edwin May Teale did a lot more, however, than sprawl on his belly meditating, more than setting down his meditations on paper. He went about making his imaginings real for other men and last week published a book, Grassroot Jungles* the fruit of six years’ study and expert photography of what he saw.

Entertaining a whimsy that insects regard him as a sort of Puck, Bugman Teale proceeded to produce a primer of diminutive backyard life, free of entomological erudition. To be sure he recalls that nine out of ten living creatures are insects, that 6,500 new insect species are classified every year, that the total number of species may some day reach 10,000,000. More important, with sundry ruses and infinite patience he succeeded in photographing an insect-eye view of the world with which to illustrate lives of 18 wild beasts of the grassroots.

His villain of the garden world is an immigrant, the praying mantis, which compares to a bee as a dinosaur would to a man—were the dinosaur 60 feet long with eyes big as plate-glass windows and paws as long as automobiles. The praying mantis, harmless to man, has an insatiable appetite for insects, is willing to fight with anything edible up to cats and dogs—except ants. So voracious is the mantis’ appetite for live food that when mating is completed, or sometimes even during mating, the female attacks the smaller male, holds him between powerful pincers, calmly devours him.

Strangest of Mr. Teale’s beasts: the aphid (plant louse), which reproduces by parthenogenesis (without mating), gives birth to males only in autumn, is so prolific that if all descendants of one aphid could possibly survive throughout a summer, their mass weight would be 822,000,000 tons. Most intelligent insect: the ant, though the wasp and bee run it a close second. Most surprising insect: the dragon fly, which is so fond of live meat it will even eat parts of itself, starting at the tail and eating toward its mouth.

*Dodd, Mead ($3.75).