The Last Word On Nothing

Disclaimer: chiggers are not actually insects as the title suggests, but arachnids, and insects are not a kingdom, but a class. I personally classify them all together into one creepy kingdom of small mechanical exoskeletal pests up to no good.

They wear their skeletons on the outside and inside are nothing but goop. They bite each other’s heads off and inject digestive juices reducing that goop to liquid that they drink through their horrible mouth parts. They are an affront to all that is acceptable in the world. Pollinators and protein for the masses, whatever, they are hideous.

The other day, an enormous fly bumbled into the house and I caught it under a glass. What a beautiful and robotic creature, I thought. Its face was banded black and white, thoughtful, pensive even. With its facial bisymmetry and wrap-around eyeballs, it was almost panda-like, or raccoon. I felt an inkling of affinity. Hi, what must you be thinking? With some searching, the amazing beast came up as a bot fly. That is the fly that lays eggs beneath your skin, producing a larva the size of an almond or a walnut that writhes as it grows and breathes through a blowhole in your flesh before bursting out as big as your thumb and lumbering through the air to find a mate and more living flesh to keep the savagery going.

Others in the house urged me to kill it. But what if, as a class, Insecta knows when it’s been wronged? What if insects are part of a cyborgish circle of invertebrate hexapod karma and will someday rule the surface of the planet, and then we will pay?

They already rule the planet. Insects used to be much larger, wingspans up to 30 inches, but the evolution of birds kept them small. Though they are now smaller, they are more numerous, maybe worse. Thanks, birds. At any moment, an estimated 10 quintillion individual insects are alive. Human biomass worldwide is around 287 million metric tons. In comparison, an estimate of just those insects eaten annually by spiders around the world comes to 400 to 800 million tons.

We are already paying. Have you been to the Alaskan interior in July, hundreds, no thousands, of mosquitoes dancing on your surface greedily plumbing their alien proboscises into whatever gap in thread and weave they can find? They are all thinking the same thing as that bot fly: zut.

Chiggers, the worst, are trombiculid mites. I have always lived in dry places where grass barely grows, and I was raised innocent of the chigger menace. A few years ago, I walked across the New Jersey Pine Barrens and my innocence was lost. I trekked entirely in sandals, taking five days, my pants rolled up to my knees. I lounged in pine duff and lichens. It was September and the mosquitoes were down, which I took as a sign that we’d appeased the Bug Gods. I was wrong. The first night I sat in my tent with a headlamp and a magnifying glass, honing on a tiny reddish fleck on my fingertip that I swear was moving. It looked like a nano-scorpion, an arachnid, tick-like, searching through the chasms of my fingerprints. What are you?

Chiggers are arachnids, the class Arachnida, its own brand of monstrosity. Evolved from ancient, pre-dinosaur sea floor predators, they are in the subphylum Chelicerata, directly related to horseshoe crabs who have blue blood.  You look into the eyes, the many eyes, of a jumping spider and think you could befriend it. You can’t.

It is commonly thought that chiggers burrow into you and live in your skin like tiny bot fly larvae. They don’t. It’s worse. They insert their feeding structures through the flesh and inject enzymes that kill surrounding host tissue, liquifying it. That tissue gradually hardens to form a feeding tube called a stylostome, through which they eat you.

The itching began on the second day. It started at the ankles and spread both directions. My traveling companion, who wore socks and long pants, was not afflicted, while I scratched with greater intensity. I can Zen my way through a lot of outdoor traumas, bones snapped, sun burning me to a crisp, but my mind was not prepared for this. Not a moment passed without full awareness of being eaten alive. The scratching turned bloody, every oozing entry point infected and sore from mid-calf to my toes. By the time you start scratching a chigger bite, the offending creature is long gone. You are dealing with the aftermath.

Chiggers inflict what is known as Summer Penile Syndrome, usually in kids, where chigger bites on soft penis skin causes terrible swelling. Pictures are not included in this post for obvious reasons. Some of these kids look like they are wearing two or three extra penises.

I mean, why? For the love of God, why? They could go in, do their thing, and get out. But they have to inject cocktails of irritants and poisons. Same for mosquitoes and all other biting insects, anticoagulants to keep host blood from clotting, histamines to enlargen blood vessels near the surface, better rendering ourselves to them. It’s not enough to use us as hosts and food. We must suffer.

On the other side of the Pine Barrens, we landed in a park where I sat down and went furiously at my foot skin. I could have degloved my feet, thinking I should wrap my hands into clubs of duct tape to stop myself. A good Samaritan, a middle-aged woman, walked by and paused. It must have been like coming upon a rabid and wretched animal dying on the ground. I looked up at her with bewilderment, not knowing what was happening to me. I had not connected the fascinating little arachnid in my magnifying glass to the atrocity happening on my feet.

Chiggers, she said.

What?!?

You’ve got chiggers.

I’ve got them? As in, I’m infected with them?

Yep, you have chiggers.

This is how I feel about the whole world. We’ve got bugs. I try not to kill them, escorting spiders and that giant fly out of the house, even wishing the fly well as it droned away. I believe all living things deserve concern. The flowers would wither untapped and the fruit would not return, ecosystems of the world collapsing without them. They rule the world. I grew up in a country where we are taught to question, even despise our rulers, so here goes: Insects, though I am amazed at your existence, even the most exquisite of you are disgusting.

Photos by Craig Childs: top, chigger bites in the Pine Barrens, bottom, bot fly in the kitchen.