Much maligned bugs deserve their due

Growing up in Salisbury, Md., Patty Cunningham spent countless hours out in the woods hunting for garter snakes - and learning not to fear things that creep, crawl, fly and buzz.

"Insects are cool," says the Exton mother of two, whose 2/3-acre property is two-thirds conventional lawn, one-third gardens planted to attract bugs and wildlife.

For many folks these days, playing in the woods is a quaint fantasy, less accessible - or desirable - than the centrally-air-conditioned life. In this scenario, insects aren't cool. They're icky and scary, something to instinctively squish and spray or otherwise kill.

Too bad. Because, as Cunningham says, "Bugs are the natural order of things. You can't kill off one part of the food chain and expect us up here to have the same life."

Were Doug Tallamy to meet Patty Cunningham, he'd rejoice. His life is an ode to creepy, crawly critters both good and bad, and though the central-air crowd might disagree, he knows most insects are very, very good.

Tallamy's no dope, though. He understands "the ick factor" his heartthrobs elicit. So, at parties, when people ask what he does, he responds generically: "I work at the University of Delaware."

He no longer volunteers, "I'm chairman of the entomology department and I study insects," because people look at him funny and stammer, "I knew an exterminator once."

And he certainly doesn't say, "I love bugs. You?"

But visit him at work, and he declares his major in a placard right there on the desk: "The Bug Stops Here." It's an entertaining entree into Tallamy's world, which, despite the laughs, is quite intense.

Bugs matter. More accurately, insects do because, scientifically speaking, all bugs are insects but not all insects are bugs. You can explain why they matter with lofty language, but for Tallamy, the truth is devastatingly simple:

We need a healthy ecosystem to survive, and insects are an essential part of a healthy ecosystem. They, like humans, are one of many different parts that, woven together, make up the complex and mysterious web of life we call nature.

"Forget the moral issue of having creatures on the planet other than us," Tallamy broods.

Then he brightens. Gardeners understand all this! Gardeners get the idea that, to keep our ecosystem healthy, we have to share space with other species. And that, as Tallamy says, "because so much of our space is disappearing, a logical place to share is in the garden."

Dave Zelinger shares his half-acre in Schwenksville with honeybees and tiger, black and yellow swallowtail butterflies, along with frogs, toads, snakes and birds. They meander through his 60-foot-by-45-foot vegetable garden and forage in his fish pond, which is circled with bee balm, butterfly bush, and cattails.

"I like a lot of beneficial insects," says Zelinger, medical-affairs manager at Centocor Inc., who grew up gardening, fishing and hunting in Racine, Wis.

He especially likes praying mantises and predatory wasps, which lay their eggs on the hornworm caterpillars that eat their way through his tomatoes.

"The wasps end up eating the caterpillars from the inside out, more or less," Zelinger says, letting out an evil-sounding chuckle that indicates he rather enjoys the carnage.

The praying mantis, with its monster-flick eyes bulging out of a triangular head, is pretty fierce in its own right. It ingeniously camouflages itself in the garden, waiting for insect prey, then springs quickly to snatch and devour.

Any wonder the praying mantis has taken a hit for all insectkind in the entertainment media? Anyone familiar with the video-game character Psycho Mantis? How about the TV show Big Bad Beetleborgs?

Like many in the insect world, the praying mantis needs better PR. He's actually a good guy in the garden, eating large quantities of nasty insects: aphids, fruit flies, mites, gnats and mosquitoes.

Bees, wasps, thrips, butterflies and moths are good guys, too, top-notch pollinators who carry pollen from flower to flower. Not a bad way to earn a living - and this allows the plants to reproduce.

It's estimated that 65 percent of all flowering plants need insects for pollination, a number that only grows when you're talking about economically important fruit and vegetable crops.

Insects are bird food, too. About 96 percent of terrestrial birds - as opposed to water birds like ducks or geese - feed protein-rich insects to their young, Tallamy says, "and they can't eat these 'alien' plants everyone has."

There goes Gloomy Gus again, but he has a point. Forty million acres, or eight times the size of New Jersey, are devoted to environmentally useless lawn in this country, he says. And these days, city and suburban flower beds are dominated by ornamental plants - Tallamy's "aliens" - that originated somewhere else.

In other words, if you're an insect, the buffet's pretty skimpy.

"All plants are not created equal in terms of supporting biodiversity. Insects from North America will not eat plants from Europe," says Tallamy, whose book, Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens (Timber Press, $27.95), will be out this fall.

Patty Cunningham has taken this message to heart and is buying more native plants all the time. But even she has limits to her entomological affections.

"Bugs belong outside," she says. "If they come in the house, they're fair game."

Seeking perennials for fall? Check Master Gardener Marion Yaglinski's blog, http://go.philly.com/

gardenerjournal.

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