FLORIDA INSECTS

Summary

As I worked on the creation of this online research guide, I became very familiar with the many and varied insects that are native to or have taken up permanent residence here in Florida. I learned which are the pests and discovered the sometimes surprising beneficial insects. In creating the photo gallery I saw for the first time the beauty of many of these insects that often escapes our notice because of their small size and often overwhelmingly large numbers. I learned of their importance as decomposers and consumers in the fragile and easily disrupted ecosystem. And I also learned of alternatives to destroying them.

I remember very well a story by Ray Bradbury that I read as a child. The title was A Sound of Thunder and the tale was set in the distant future. Citizens of that future world could, for a price, travel back in time with the proviso that they never step foot off of the conveyer belt that served as their transport through the past. One of the travelers stepped off, inadvertently killing a butterfly. The death of this one butterfly irrevocably changed the future into a world of darkness and despair. The story impressed upon me the interconnectivity of everything in the natural world and how precarious this interconnectivity is. We can seldom see the entire picture of how one thing in the natural world relates to and affects another. Instead we focus on what affects us personally in the short term. But destruction of what we consider pests now can affect the future in ways we do not begin to see or understand.

It is time for all of us here in Florida to learn to live in peaceful co-existence with our state's smallest creatures, not in some distant future, but now…before it is too late.

Works Cited