Now i'm not a 'nature lover' by any means, but I do respect it, and I am fascinated at times by the things I see.
Consider the humble ant, if you will, and even if you really don't like insects, you have to admire their persistence, strength and intelligence.
I sat on the balcony of my apartment last Sunday with a cup of tea and watched as ants came from the planter in the front, down a half metre high wall, found some crumbs and returned, along the same route, but this time up the wall, carrying what amounts to, in human terms, two people. Now that's some feat, even without the wall!
Put this into human terms. You leave home at 7am. You jog 50km across a barren landscape in search of potatoes, using only your sense of smell. You find (more luck than judgement in our case) a pile of sacks of potatoes, and you lift two of them (56k each) on to your back, and you jog the 50km back home, remembering the direction and location, somehow, and you manage all this in about 50mins. Sound like you? If it does, enter The Worlds Strongest Man competition, you're a sure winner.
I've also seen, on one of my summer Sundays in the past, a group of ants gather round a piece of vegetation which would, scaled up, be around six metres across and half a metre thick, holding it like firemen around a jump net. In this fashion they carry it, twisting and turning, up the wall. Now the even more amazing thing is the way they all work together on this. When one gets weary (do ants get weary?) it peels away from the piece and another from the following group takes its place, and so on until the wall is scaled.
It might not seem much, as they are only lowly ants, but consider the intelligence and teamwork involved and maybe they are not so lowly after all!
Moving on, there are many creatures, great and small, that I have encountered, since moving to Cyprus, and if you really think about it, each one has its purpose in nature, its 'rasion d'etre.'
Cockroaches, (shudder!) seem to exist only to upset us, but they (apparently) do serve a purpose. In years gone, not so much now, houses and the like relied on cesspits to dispose of 'waste'. Apparently, so I'm told, cockroaches 'eat' this waste, and make cesspits more efficient. Now personally, I'd prefer a good modern system, with water treatment works etc, but we can't always have what we want, so we rely on nature, or we should.
On many occasions I've ventured onto my balcony in the early morning to find a 30cm lizard basking in the sun, I don't know the species, and I know I should find out, ( I think they're Gekos) but it's nice to see, and they eat flies, and other insects, so to encourage them could be good.
Many may be old enough to remember the song by Burl Ives "There was an old lady who swallowed a fly, I don't know why, she swallowed a fly" If you do know it, think about the words, it's a mother nature song. Each creature is there for a purpose, each creature forms a link in the food chain, to eradicate one would mean an abundance and 'plague' of the next, so next time you're having your holiday or weekend BBQ, and are complaining about the flies, remember, to break one link, breaks the chain. If we kill all the flies, the next up, the fly eating creatures starve, and the next down proliferate, so we may end up with a master race of ????
Consider the humble ant, if you will, and even if you really don't like insects, you have to admire their persistence, strength and intelligence.
I sat on the balcony of my apartment last Sunday with a cup of tea and watched as ants came from the planter in the front, down a half metre high wall, found some crumbs and returned, along the same route, but this time up the wall, carrying what amounts to, in human terms, two people. Now that's some feat, even without the wall!
Put this into human terms. You leave home at 7am. You jog 50km across a barren landscape in search of potatoes, using only your sense of smell. You find (more luck than judgement in our case) a pile of sacks of potatoes, and you lift two of them (56k each) on to your back, and you jog the 50km back home, remembering the direction and location, somehow, and you manage all this in about 50mins. Sound like you? If it does, enter The Worlds Strongest Man competition, you're a sure winner.
I've also seen, on one of my summer Sundays in the past, a group of ants gather round a piece of vegetation which would, scaled up, be around six metres across and half a metre thick, holding it like firemen around a jump net. In this fashion they carry it, twisting and turning, up the wall. Now the even more amazing thing is the way they all work together on this. When one gets weary (do ants get weary?) it peels away from the piece and another from the following group takes its place, and so on until the wall is scaled.
It might not seem much, as they are only lowly ants, but consider the intelligence and teamwork involved and maybe they are not so lowly after all!
Moving on, there are many creatures, great and small, that I have encountered, since moving to Cyprus, and if you really think about it, each one has its purpose in nature, its 'rasion d'etre.'
Cockroaches, (shudder!) seem to exist only to upset us, but they (apparently) do serve a purpose. In years gone, not so much now, houses and the like relied on cesspits to dispose of 'waste'. Apparently, so I'm told, cockroaches 'eat' this waste, and make cesspits more efficient. Now personally, I'd prefer a good modern system, with water treatment works etc, but we can't always have what we want, so we rely on nature, or we should.
On many occasions I've ventured onto my balcony in the early morning to find a 30cm lizard basking in the sun, I don't know the species, and I know I should find out, ( I think they're Gekos) but it's nice to see, and they eat flies, and other insects, so to encourage them could be good.
Many may be old enough to remember the song by Burl Ives "There was an old lady who swallowed a fly, I don't know why, she swallowed a fly" If you do know it, think about the words, it's a mother nature song. Each creature is there for a purpose, each creature forms a link in the food chain, to eradicate one would mean an abundance and 'plague' of the next, so next time you're having your holiday or weekend BBQ, and are complaining about the flies, remember, to break one link, breaks the chain. If we kill all the flies, the next up, the fly eating creatures starve, and the next down proliferate, so we may end up with a master race of ????
No comments:
Post a Comment