Earlier this month, my boyfriend and I went to see the second-to-last performance of Bug on Broadway. I had never seen the play or the William Friedkin adaptation, and all I really knew going into it was that it was written by Tracy Letts, sort of but not really about literal bugs, and more about government surveillance (the title being a clever double entendre, get it). It turns out, Bug isn’t really about either of those things at all. Instead, it’s mainly a very frightening, very tragic tale of two people who accidentally trap themselves in a paranoia-fueled folie à deux—a phrase everyone else learned when the Joker sequel came out, but that I learned all the way back when Fall Out Boy released their fourth album.

In Bug, a woman named Agnes who lives in a motel hiding from her abusive parolee ex-husband meets a Gulf War veteran named Peter who believes himself afflicted with bloodborne microscopic insects manufactured by the U.S. government that spread through physical and sexual contact. The two wake up one morning certain that they’ve been bitten in the night by tiny bugs—they call them “aphids” in both the play and the movie (probably the most wrong type of bug you could blame for a situation like this, but I’ll let it slide) and they “see” them everywhere. They set glue traps and flypaper all over the motel room, replace their lamps with bug-zappers, and pick patterns of sores into their skin, convinced beyond all doubt that bugs are living on and inside their bodies. I won’t spoil the ending, but it doesn’t end well.

I loved the play, which starred Letts’ wife and prolific Letterboxd poster Carrie Coon (awesome) as Agnes and Namir Smallwood as Peter. It was about as intense as it sounds, but also very moody and sad, with a fantastic single motel room set that was somehow wallpapered entirely with aluminum foil during a particularly harrowing scene change. They locked our phones in Yondr pouches before we took our seats, which had the added effect—maybe intended, maybe not—of further putting us off balance without the security of scrolling before the play had even started.

A few days after, I watched the movie on Tubi, which was not quite as emotionally affecting but equally intense—Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon (who originated the role onstage) are a crazy combo of actors and Friedkin plays them off of each other really well. If I didn’t already know Michael Shannon was a movie star I would 100% believe he was a guy who thought he had bugs swimming around under his skin.

I found both Bug (play) and Bug (movie) personally affecting, not because they’re “about bugs,” which they’re not, but because they’re a very vivid dramatization of the paranoia that really does come with an actual bug infestation in your home. A few years ago, I was victimized by clothes moths, a colony of which took up residence on a section of my living room rug that was under a piece of furniture and so didn’t get vacuumed as often as it should have. If you haven’t had them, clothes moths are horrific: they’re small and avoid light so they can’t be dealt with by any traditional means; they reproduce rapidly, finding any crevice of your home that might house a few edible morsels; and they eat any clothing and decor made with natural fibers, so good luck to all your wool coats and cashmere sweaters. I found a hole in a beloved cable-knit from Ireland that was so big my mom had to patch it up for me.

I researched these moths so thoroughly and so obsessively over a period of 18 months that I’m pretty confident I know more about them now than even a professional exterminator might. I know what they look like, what their larvae look like, what their eggs look like, how long their life cycle takes to complete, what kinds of fibers they prefer over others, what time of year they’re most active. I can tell the different species apart (there are three) just by watching how they fly through the beam of light cast by my lamp. If I saw one perched on a wall or flying around my apartment at night, I wouldn’t be able to go to bed until I had killed it.

People who have dealt with bedbugs say that the psychological toll an infestation like that takes on you is worse than any physical discomfort. My moths are not the biting kind, but I would say my experience was similar. I would see them out of the corner of my eye even when they weren’t there. I would scour my rug with my fingers, pulling apart fibers to see if I could find their cocoons. My cat Seb got so used to seeing me paw around on the furniture—I would let him eat them when I found them—that he gets excited now even if I’m just rearranging a blanket. When he stops and stares into the distance, I wonder for a second if he sees a moth, not unlike Agnes taking her cues from bug-obsessed Peter. Or maybe Seb is Agnes and I’m Peter. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

Because of this, I felt a kinship with both of Bug’s characters that maybe I wouldn’t have felt if all insects were to me were fun, friendly little creatures who lived outside and didn’t bother me in the comfort of my own home. Because I know what it is to be parasitized against my will, and to annihilate my tiny enemies with my bare hands, I understood, to a degree, how easy it was for Agnes to slip into Peter’s madness. My moths taught me that all things have a dark side, even me. Even bugs.

Hello again!!! No, your email has not been hacked. This is real. Yes, Bugstack and I, Emma Stefansky, are both back in action. Around this time last year I was freezing my extremities off waiting in the snow and cold to see a half-deflated corpse flower bloom at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. My subsequent total radio silence on this front would suggest that I had perished in the attempt. Good news: I am alive! Even better news: So is Bugstack!

I do want to make clear that I didn’t take a year-long hiatus on purpose. In fact, I had “Bugstack issue 44 just post it oh my god” written on my weekly to-do list almost every week since then, at first ambitiously, then hopefully, then somewhat guiltily as the months went on and on and on and I felt very little inspiration for what to write about. (To those who have stuck around, thank you from the bottom of my heart.) As it turns out, guilt is a pretty okay motivator, eventually. Having a lot of time on my hands after cycling through a bunch of gig jobs is a good one, too. (This will be the first and last time I mention my job search (active!!! I am available!!!) here, as I am trying very, very hard not to become too blackpilled about this whole “having a career” enterprise.)

I did think a lot about what I really wanted out of this blog. Should it be about bugs? Should it be about other stuff? I enjoyed researching and writing the bug-specific posts that Bugstack started out with just as much as I enjoyed the occasional bug-centric film review and weird museum scene report, and I would like to continue this as a mix of both. Mainly I want to broaden the scope of what a “Bugstack” can and should be about. I like science, I like entertainment, I like gardening (more on this soon), I like walking around and looking at stuff. Basically, I’d like to try and integrate more stuff into this whenever I can. We’ll find out together what that ends up looking like.

One final motivator turned out to be the release of another Avatar movie. If James Cameron continues making these for the next 50 years, as he should, I will go see them all, multiple times, so that I can pretend just for a couple of hours a day that the jungle moon of Pandora is a real place and that I have a Na’vi body waiting for me floating in a big tube somewhere up there.

The thing that I want to write about, though, is not just that I love these movies, which I do, but that as we explore further into what makes the quite literally interconnected world of Pandora so special, we begin asking some really weird questions. The most interesting debate I saw playing out on the site formerly known as Twitter (which I won’t link to for the usual sticking it to the man reasons and also because it’s impossible to search for any specific tweets on there and this was all happening a good month and a half ago) was about what the Na’vi nature deity known as Eywa actually is. We “see” her in the most recent movie Fire and Ash, and I’m using “see” in quotations because it’s unclear whether Eywa’s decidedly Na’vi-looking face is a true image or little more than a mystic vision, or some combination of the two.

But what is she? Is she a big lady? Is she tree roots? Is she even native to Pandora at all? This last question is the most interesting, and the stickiest. I saw one post basically saying that Eywa was likely an extraterrestrial parasite that has psychically taken over the minds, bodies, and cultures of Pandora’s native species, convincing them to care for “her” like an army of tiny servants, consuming their bodies when they die and sending them visions or signs when she wants them to do something for her. Obviously, the way this tweet phrased this concept, this parasitism was something creepy, something gross, something to perhaps be resisted, eventually. What I’d like to posit is this: If it is true, would that be so bad?

When I saw this conversation playing out it reminded me of a book series that I belatedly got into last year, a trilogy (the third came out October 2024) by the brilliant author Sue Burke collectively titled Semiosis. The series follows a civilization of humans who touch down on an uncharted and apparently uninhabited yet habitable world, which the colonists later realize is home to many species of seemingly conscious plants—some more intelligent than others. As their society grows generation by generation, the human interlopers learn how to integrate themselves into this plant-dominated ecosystem, even befriending and communicating with a sentient stand of “bamboo” whose territory spans miles, and whose rootbound mind makes it an equal and powerful member of their culture.

As the human society matures, some members wonder about the true nature of this human-plant symbiosis, and which side benefits from it the most. The humans save their plant allies from fire, animals, and rival species, and the plants repay them in turn with food, shelter, and early warnings of danger. Like Eywa, they also consume human remains after death. There is a perpetual tension in this arrangement that both sides are aware of to varying degrees, as the humans and the plants take pains not to let one side become too dominant over the other. The humans wonder if they’re cattle; the plants wonder if they’re fuel. The humans, refugees from a dying Earth, know what happens when plants succumb. It’s implied that the plants have observed the latter scenario play out between them and another sentient humanoid species, the remains of which are occasionally found by the new colonists. When one side wins, both sides lose. When both sides keep each other in check, they survive.

The vision of an environment or even a whole world that can protect itself against invaders is obviously something that delights creatives like James Cameron, who has put a triumphant “Eywa has heard you!!!” moment in all three of his Avatar movies. The notion of species of equal intelligence and power jockeying for a shaky equilibrium preoccupies the likes of Burke, and, similarly, Octavia Butler, whose Xenogenesis Trilogy in particular debates the many facets of this very topic. When an alien ecosystem can’t be reshaped and controlled by human will, the answer is, as it always has been: Adapt or die. Or, more fittingly: Adapt or be subsumed by your new plant hivemind overlords.

It’s good to be back!!

Well, it’s nearly an entire month late, but Happy New Year from all of us (me) at Bugstack! I’m attempting to keep to something of a monthly or bimonthly schedule with these this year, which is a very vague way of saying that you’ll hear from me whenever I have something to post about. Hopefully that happens on a somewhat regular schedule. I nearly took all of this month “off,” but I couldn’t let January pass by without writing about SOMETHING. The last couple of entries have been decidedly bleak, so I decided to lighten the mood by discussing the smell of rotting flesh.

Conveniently, the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens’ resident corpse flower decided to bloom this weekend. I had been on the lookout for corpse flower news for a while, after seeing the news about two of them blooming in the U.S. Botanic Garden in D.C. in September, 2020. (To confirm this, I found this Wikipedia page listing every bloom on record of publicly cultivated corpse flowers worldwide.) There is also one in the Bronx at the New York Botanical Gardens, which I’ve been telling people bloomed “five or six years ago,” but its last bloom was actually in 2023. Time has always been somewhat amorphous to me. I missed that one, and I’ve been kicking myself ever since, so when I saw on the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens’ Instagram last week that not only did they have one, but it was about to bloom, I resolved to see it in person by any means necessary.

Those means turned out to be waiting in the longest line I’ve ever stood in for more than three hours, outside, in below-freezing temperatures, with a bunch of strangers who all had the same idea. This is the thing about doing anything in New York: if you’ve thought of it, so has everyone else.

Corpse flowers, or titan arums (Amorphophallus titanum, because it looks like a, you know), are large single-leafed plants native to Sumatra that get their name from a signature death-like stench that emanates from their somewhat rare flowering. They don’t bloom all the time—some can wait for ten years between flowers, and others as soon as two—and their flowers, which can grow up to 10 feet tall, only last for about two or three days. When they’re about to bloom, they grow a tall pale yellow “spadix” enveloped by a bell-like “spathe,” which looks like a petal but is actually a protective sheath that shields the tiny flowers growing inside. Over about 24-36 hours, the spathe unfurls, pale green on the outside and dark burgundy on the inside, and the spadix heats up and releases the stink to attract its pollinators, which happen to be insects like carrion beetles and flesh flies that eat and lay their eggs on dead things. The overall look is both menacing and sort of sexy, like Mugler’s Birth of Venus gown.

On Friday, the BBG Instagram account confirmed that their corpse flower was opening up. They acquired “Smelliot” in 2018 from a Malaysian nursery, and at that time it was only a couple of years old, so this is its first ever bloom. A New York Times article about the event was also published on Friday, prompting a mad dash of Brooklynites who had nothing else to do (and some enthusiasts who called off from work). I was sadly busy on Friday but decided I would go on Saturday, which also happened to be the second-coldest day of an extremely cold week. When I got there in the early afternoon, the ticket clerk told me it would be about a 90-minute wait, which sounded fine until I actually got to the greenhouses and saw the line of chilly hopefuls that doubled back on itself two or three times and snaked around the corner and out of sight.

I ended up standing in that line for about three hours total. There’s still a lot of snow on the ground in the gardens, unmarked by foot traffic, and some ice on the pathways. I tried passing the time by reading this article about Greenland’s glaciers and got about halfway through before my fingers got too cold to scroll. After that, I just eavesdropped on other people in line, many of whom didn’t actually know much about the flower other than its rarity and odor (fake fans). One girl in front of me was telling her companion about her upcoming trip to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, which reminded me of the Ernest Hemingway story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which an adventurer climbing the mountain freezes to death on the slope. Relatable….

After my allotted 90 minutes had passed I was still only about halfway to the entrance and couldn’t feel my toes. Fortunately I ran into a couple of friends who thought they had arrived too late to see anything, so they waited with me, shuffling forward at a top speed of 3 feet every 15 minutes. The park had officially closed by the time we got to the door, but we were just happy to be inside, following the line around the greenhouses until we got to the Aquatic House, home of BBG’s collection of orchids and carnivorous plants and other curios.

There it was, watched over by an intense-looking security guard and a velvet rope. To keep things moving, guests got about 20 seconds with the plant before being asked to leave, which I understand, but next time this thing blooms I think they should notify only me. The Times article describes Smelliot’s height as “nearly six feet tall,” but I am six feet tall and it’s taller than me. By Saturday, the spadix had already started to collapse and was bent in half, but it was still impressive and, for me at least, worth the wait. The smell had also faded since Friday so you had to really get your nose in there to smell anything, but that meant that you could get up close to a rare flower, so I’m not complaining. The smell itself contains the same chemical compounds of things like limburger cheese, sweaty socks, rotting fish, and feces, and to me smelled sort of sharp and definitely unpleasant, like feet mixed with old compost and wet banana peel.

It is funny that thousands of people lined up in the cold this weekend to look at something that smells dead for less than a minute, but that’s New York, I guess! It’s cool to see this amount of hype over a plant whose vibes are decidedly forbidding and gross, but that also feels like an appropriate dead-of-winter activity, reminding us all not only of the inevitability of death but that there are so many little creatures out there waiting to feast on us that a plant has started mimicking the smell just because. Come inside where it’s warm, and also kind of evil.

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Another corpse flower, “Putricia,” bloomed last week at Australia’s Royal Botanic Garden Sydney, and they set up a whole Victorian funeral display for it, complete with red velvet curtains and a smoke machine.

I realized about a month ago that I read barely any nonfiction books in 2024, which, while I do tend to read mostly fiction, is unusual for me. My nonfiction count at time of publication is seven (I’m doing the Penelope hair twirl), which includes a book about the Museum of Jurassic Technology; Roger Deakin’s Waterlog, a richly detailed travelogue of British waterways; and The Cloudspotter’s Guide, an encyclopedia of clouds and atmospheric phenomena by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society. All three of these are great and come highly recommended from me, but none of them are specifically about the most important thing in my life, which is bugs.

I decided last month that I would finally read a book that I had honestly been putting off for some time: Oliver Milman’s The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World (subtitled more gently in European printings: Our Fragile Dependence on the Planet’s Smallest Creatures (which is the edition I have)). It was released in 2022, and I’d been putting it off because of the obvious fact that it’s about extinction, which is something I do enjoy reading about but also something that tends to bum me out.

Despite that, I think it’s good to regularly remind ourselves that what is happening in the world at this very moment is maybe not what is supposed to be happening, and that perhaps endless growth is not what our ecosystems, both natural and sociopolitical, are designed to sustain. The Insect Crisis is about one very specific aspect of our ongoing ecological collapse—the net loss of insects and insect diversity—that has ramifications that extend outward into all aspects of our lives.

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Last week, New York City was officially suffering a drought. We were advised to conserve water and take shorter showers because it hadn’t rained for real since September 29. (On October 29, Central Park recorded a rainfall of 0.1 inches, the lowest possible measurable amount.) Wind blew smoke from brush fires in New Jersey straight towards the city. Prospect Park caught on fire. The air quality index was stuck on “very unhealthy.” The mayor banned grilling in public parks until further notice. I had a severe weather alert on my phone for days.

The incoming president has again promised to remove America from the Paris Climate Agreement. On Monday, he appointed former New York Representative Lee Zeldin as the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency. During his tenure in the House, Zeldin received the worst score from the League of Conservation Voters out of the whole NY delegation in 2020. 

​​“It is an honor to join President Trump’s Cabinet as EPA Administrator. We will restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI. We will do so while protecting access to clean air and water,” Zeldin tweeted. 

That first point is an obvious dig at China, the only country to produce more energy than the U.S, and the world’s largest emitter of fossil fuels. We’re going to have to start employing more American workers in every industry once these looming tariffs make parts too expensive to import. And training a large language model AI program requires the same amount of energy consumed annually by a small country in units of fresh water, and that energy use is only increasing (on a trajectory that concerns even Goldman Sachs). 

The main part of this tweet, though, is the last part, the “protecting access” part. Taking single posts at face value and extrapolating the most evil meaning out of them is one of the reasons why being online is so generally bad, but the phrasing here is something I can’t get past. The sentence is not: We will clean the air and the water. There is no plan to fix anything. What matters most to this president and his cabinet is protecting access to what precious resources we have left. 

This is the climate crisis. This is how it will, ultimately, manifest—not with world-ending geostorms cinematically ripping through major cities, but with those with means jealously hoarding all the good stuff for themselves while the waters and fires inch closer to the rest of us. 

Don’t expect many tears for the climate’s dwindling stability to come from someone who spends most of his time at a golf course whose runoff drains into the waterway that surrounds the coastline of a state whose rampant industrialized destruction of its own natural storm barriers is one of the reasons why its residents will get walloped harder and harder by every hurricane that turns east across the Gulf. 

What do we do about any of this? I don’t know. We can wallow in despair about the destruction of the world and channel half of that energy into anger towards the political party so bent on destroying it, and the other half towards the opposition, whose main interest seems to be wasting money. We can talk hopefully about the 2026 primaries. We can stop giving what resources we do control—money, attention—to websites and politicians and public figures who don’t serve us. We can stop shopping. We can also stop posting on social media, or at least stop looking at it so much, both for our own mental health and to keep the bot farm grifters and the outrage bait leeches and the (alleged) blood emerald billionaires who proudly despise their trans daughters from stealing our waking hours away from us. We can spend less time online in general, (but not completely—how else would you read Bugstack??). 

I was sad when the results of the election were announced, because I knew what was coming in this case, and I’m even sadder now that I can see what kind of shape it will take. I’m sad that my and many other people’s main advice in times like these—go outside—might not be an option ten to twenty to fifty years from now. I’m sad that what is important to me seems to be a negligible issue to others, but then again I do publish a sporadic newsletter about bugs. 

Again, what do we do? Again, I don’t know. I try not to be too hopeless in situations like this, simply because we are living through things that have never happened before. The planet is resilient, and has suffered much worse. Ecosystems can be brought back to equilibrium. The whales came back. Bees are coming back. These things only happened because we took responsibility for the past and worked positively toward a better future. The only advice I have to give sounds too corny to post but is also too true to ignore. Cherish rainy days. Have conversations with real people—family, friends, neighbors, coworkers—about how great it is that water comes down from the sky and saturates the tiny, tiny layer of soil sitting on the crust of the planet that makes things grow. Care for a plant, or a garden. Cultivate your appreciation for everything tiny and small and vulnerable whose time on this earth is as temporary—and as precious—as our own. 

There’s a new Alien movie in theaters for the first time since 2017, and to celebrate the occasion I have been marathoning Alien movies all week. I had already seen most of them, except for Alien: Resurrection (need someone to explain to me why everyone hates this one??) and the AVPs (sounds dumb, can’t wait), and they’ve all been very fun to revisit. It got me thinking a lot about creature design, arguably the single most important aspect of this whole franchise, and everything that went into making the titular alien (sometimes referred to as the xenomorph) so gross and scary and disturbing. Also, I’ve been thinking a lot about how the alien is most definitely a bug. I will explain. 

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Hello! It’s been a minute (a month) since I have posted here, and for that I sincerely apologize. I unofficially took all of July off to focus on other, much less important journalistic work, which meant I actually missed the one-year anniversary of Bugstack (July 21), so happy belated one year to Bugstack, to me, and to you, my readers and my fans, all of whom I hope have chosen to stick around through this quiet period. But I am back, and so are the bugs, and I simply can’t stomach wasting the last two months of summer when there are still so many little guys crawling and flying and hopping around out there. 

I didn’t completely take July off—in case you missed it, Fran Hoepfner and I had our first Fran Magazine x Bugstack collab, in which we discussed all the bugs Fran saw and took pictures of during her stay in the Adirondacks in June, including a cyanide-spitting millipede and the internet’s sweetie-pie, the rosy maple moth. If you haven’t already, it’s definitely worth the read. 

During my unofficial hiatus, I started cooking with kale* again, and about a month ago, while washing the leaves of the latest batch I had just bought from the store, I saw that one of the leaves had a cocoon nestled right in the center of a leaf. It was a thin cocoon, and beneath the layer of webbing I could see the definite outline of a chrysalis, bright lime green with a couple of brown marks. I was sure it was dead, but when I went to gently peel it off of the leaf the chrysalis twitched in my hand. I’d had the leaves in the fridge for about a day, so it was cold, but not dead, and, warmed by my hand, it woke up. 

A bit of googling told me this was the cocoon of a cabbage looper moth, a common yet minor agricultural pest who chooses cruciferous vegetables—broccoli, cabbage, kale—as its preferred host plants. 

I put it in a tiny jar and wrapped a bit of cling film with air holes punched through it around the mouth, a reflex from a childhood spent catching anything I could get my grubby little hands on, and placed it on a shelf where I could check on it every day. Sure enough, a couple days later, I noticed movement in the jar. Some time during the night a mottled brown moth had hatched out of its chrysalis and was fanning its wings. I quickly took it downstairs to let it out, conscious of its fragile wings crammed into a tight space, but as soon as I took the film off it flew up and over the neighbors’ fence. 

I couldn’t help but take it as a profound reminder of the disconnect that exists between us and our produce: we only encounter our fruits and vegetables after they’ve been chopped from the vine, prepackaged and sealed, washed and chemically treated and preserved. But it all comes from the outside, and sometimes the outside gets its hands on it first. 

(I ate the kale leaf it came in on. There was nothing wrong with it.) 

The second bug I had a close encounter with was something of a trickster, and, delightfully, something I had never seen or even heard of before. A bit of backstory: I’ve been attempting to garden in what was once a big patch of dirt in front of my building, and have been pretty successful this year. I discovered a couple of months into this project that, along with a few returning plants that had been planted by previous residents, one of my neighbors’ decayed jack-o-lanterns had seeded in the dirt over last winter, and now volunteer pumpkin vines have been sprouting up and completely taking over the area. 

One morning, while walking down my front staircase, I saw what I thought was a huge wasp buzzing around the leaves. It was bright red and black and gray, coincidentally the same color combo as the spotted lanternfly invaders, and I took a few pictures from a distance so I could look it up later. When I finally discovered what it was, I was surprised to find out it wasn’t a wasp at all, but a wasp mimic moth somewhat un-appetizingly named the squash vine borer. 

They lay their eggs on the leaves of apparently any plant in the squash family and when the caterpillars hatch they chew tunnels into the thick stems of the vine, eventually killing any part of the plant separated from the roots. This was the final proof I needed that I am indeed growing pumpkins, whose fragrant orange flowers are attracting pests probably from miles away. I haven’t seen any damage yet, but I’ll be keeping an eye out. Ultimately, since I didn’t plant these myself, the squash vine borers are welcome to a little pumpkin vine, as a treat. 

IN BUG NEWS: 

Minnesota has a new invasive insect called an elm zigzag sawfly. Has anyone asked Minnesota governor and Kamala Harris running mate Tim Walz for his stance on this? 

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*Fry up some gnocchi in a pan with garlic and s&p, throw in a bunch of torn up kale leaves (wash them first), combine with half and half or heavy cream, parmesan, and a bit of lemon juice, thank me later. 

Directly in front of the Salt Lake Assembly Hall in Temple Square, a complex owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the middle of Salt Lake City, an obelisk stands with two bronze seagulls perched on top. It’s a monument to the miracle of the gulls, an event early in the history of the Mormon pioneers during which, according to accounts, a flock of divinely sent seagulls descended upon Salt Lake Valley to save the settlers from a plague of insects that were devouring their crops. 

I came upon this story after seeing a Tiktok of what appeared to be a swarm—and I mean truly a swarm—of large bugs inundating someone’s yard, carpeting the ground and crawling all the way up the outer walls of their house. 

@dailymailThis is what nightmares are made of! #mormoncrickets #crickets #swarm #infestation #nevada #hospital #insects

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In case you haven’t heard, a new spider dropped! It’s the Joro spider, and it’s coming to an Eastern American metropolitan area near you. Specifically, it’s coming to New York and New Jersey, allegedly, this summer—this spider has already dropped in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Maryland, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, so it’s old news there by now. But because NYC is the center of the universe, the Joro spider is national news. 

Bugstack has already been scooped by Gothamist and various other news outlets with sensationalist fearmongering headlines, but I will provide a short yet comprehensive recap here all the same. The Joro spider, Trichonephila clavata, is an invasive spider from East Asia—a native of China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan—and has been introduced to North America as recently as 2013, when the first sighting was confirmed in Hoschton, Georgia. Since then, it’s been steadily moving up the East Coast, and many scientists believe it will become naturalized here, thriving like any native spider. 

The biased lamestream media has attempted to make a meal out of three of the Joro spider’s main characteristics: it’s really big, it’s venomous, and it moves around by “parachuting” on strands of web. This is all true, but it’s not as life threatening as some would have you believe. 

Joro spiders are quite big. The females’ bodies are nearly an inch long, with legs that can span up to four inches (the males are smaller, as is tradition), and they spin large orb webs that can span up to three meters. But we already have big spiders here, wolf spiders and tarantulas and enormous yellow garden spiders that spin zigzag patterns in the center of their webs. What’s one more? Also, their webs are cool—where regular orb weaver spiders spin flat webs like the sort you’d draw on a piece of paper, Joro webs have three layers: one in the center, and two irregularly shaped layers in front and behind. 

Joro spiders are also venomous, but so are basically all spiders, so I don’t get why this is the thing everyone keeps fussing over. They will bite, but are apparently pretty docile as spiders go, and completely harmless to humans. Get over it! They are, however, the inspiration for the Jorōgumo, a legendary Japanese entity that can shapeshift into a beautiful woman to seduce young men, trapping them in her web and eating them. 

The third little factoid everyone keeps bringing up is the fact that they move by parachuting through the air with their webs, which is a real thing that a lot of spiders do, and not as crazy as it sounds. Due to the steady way the Joro spiders have creeped up the coast of the U.S., it’s believed that they move around by “ballooning,” literally attaching themselves to strands of web and letting the wind blow them around until they land on something. But they do it when they’re tiny babies, not giant adults, which would weigh an airborne web down. We don’t necessarily have to worry about an infestation of giant spiders zooming around our precious Manhattan skyscrapers, though that would probably lower the rent citywide, so hmmm. 

Here’s a video of some spiders ballooning, which looks just as funny as it sounds. 

This behavior has given life to an urban legend beloved by Reddit about a “layer of spiders” floating around in the atmosphere, made up of billions of tiny arachnids that got caught on a breeze and never came down. It’s not real, but it does sound like the kind of thing that wouldn’t be out of place in a Dark Tower novel. 

The thing that I personally think is interesting about the Joro spiders is that, while they’re invasive, they don’t seem to be making a pest of themselves as much as other invasive species tend to do here (I’ll get to the lanternflies, I promise) and have even been making themselves useful, catching other invasives our native predators tend to shun, like the brown marmorated stink bug. Our world is more interconnected than ever, and foreign bugs making their homes on our turf is just something we ought to get used to. New York can stand to add one more spider to our cultural melting pot. 

IN BUG NEWS:

[Wilco voice] They’re putting cicadas in Malört. 

I watched Madame Web! Another of Sony’s Spider-Man-less Spider-movies, Madame Web is set in 2003 and gives us the backstories of four Marvel comic book characters in the “Spider-Verse,” starring a bunch of actors we will never see in a Marvel movie ever again. I didn’t see it when it came out earlier this year, but it’s on Netflix as of this week, and I had heard so much about it in the last few months, none of it good, that I had to give it a go. 

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Hello again! It’s been a minute, not because I lost any interest in this Substack, but because I have simply been very busy. It’s hard to believe that other things besides bugs occupy my time, but that’s the sad truth of the world we live in. I also don’t want this blog, which is fun recreation for me (and hopefully for you as well) to become a burden, so I save the writing of these posts for when I have something I’m actually excited about. 

Last month, I visited a Bugstack subscriber who is also my boyfriend in Los Angeles, and one of the must-do’s on our list was the Museum of Jurassic Technology. I don’t remember where I had first heard about this place, or from whom, but the way it was described to me—or, rather, not described—was enough for me to know that it would probably be something I’d be into. In short, I was right. It’s one of if not the coolest museum I have ever been to, though the word “museum” is a bit of a stretch for what this place really is. Or is it a stretch? I still haven’t figured that out! 

The museum itself sits in the middle of a strip of storefronts along Venice Boulevard in what people who live in LA know as “Palms,” on the “Westside,” whatever any of that means. I would be hard-pressed to tell you on what side of the city it is, or where it is relative to any other place. I just get into Ubers and tell them to take me places. The facade is easy to miss: It looks like a lawyer’s office, or maybe a funeral home. If you go inside on a sunny day, which we did, you won’t be able to see anything at first before your eyes adjust to the general gloom. 

You enter into a foyer which is also a gift shop, and the receptionist takes your tickets and tells you no photography is allowed, and that they are serving tea and cookies in the Tea Room. You can take any track you want through the museum, and we started in a section full of “micromosaics,” microscopic images of flowers and birds created from butterfly scales and diatom exoskeletons; which led into an exhibit on trailer homes complete with dimly lit dioramas; which led into a small chapel with frescoes of medieval beasts on the walls, which led into an exhibit on “vulgar remedies,” folk medicine and superstitions like sticking a pin into the post of a gate a corpse has passed through, or whispering family gossip to the local bees. 

That’s maybe half of the first floor, and I’ll try not to describe too much more of the museum, since I think the whole point of the thing is to experience it for yourself. Elsewhere, there’s a hall filled with dice donated by the magician Ricky Jay, an exhibit on string art that reminded me of the Knot Store from Portlandia, a room of portraits of the dogs used in the Soviet space program. The Tula Tea Room, which is situated on the roof and open to the outside, is a reproduction of the study used by Tsar Nicholas II in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, complete with nesting doves. Very little of it has anything to do with anything else, except that it was either donated by a collector of eccentric interests, or itself collected by the eccentric who started the museum in the first place. 

In 1995, the writer Lawrence Weschler attempted to get to the bottom of this, and his conversations with the museum’s founder, David Wilson, over many visits to the museum itself, were collected in the book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology, which I am currently reading. It’s a short book, but full of information, real and unreal. Wilson was inspired by the cabinets of curiosities of the Renaissance, in which their curators would amass vast collections of stuff that couldn’t be categorized—books, animals, insects, plants, bones, preserved body parts, ancient artifacts, fossils, rocks, artwork. It was all thrown together into one space, to be examined at leisure, defying explanation. The German word for such rooms was Wunderkammer, or wonder room. 

In his book, Weschler seems both perplexed and charmed by the ways in which the Museum of Jurassic Technology pushes aside the pure scientific truth we’ve come to expect from modern museums in favor of mythmaking and storytelling. Some of the descriptions of various items are completely made up, and some of them are completely factual. You can either choose to take it all as fact or fancy, or a mixture of both. By the time you leave, all you’ll have to go on is your semi-reliable memory. 

“The museum affords this marvelous field for projection and transference,” Marcia Tucker, former director of the New Museum in New York, told Weschler. She had met Wilson at a curators’ conference in Germany where he had completely confounded his audience. “It’s like a museum, a critique of museums, and a celebration of museums—all rolled into one.” 

One of the first exhibits you’ll find past the entryway is a reproduction of Noah’s Ark in miniature: a long, rectangular slab of boat, completely different from the rounded galleon most of us would imagine, with a cross section of the hollow inside where you can see all the tiny individual stables where the animals would have been kept. The Ark would have been the world’s first curated collection, the first ever museum of natural history, gathering together all of the world’s most precious things under one roof. The Museum of Jurassic Technology is itself an ark in miniature, full of things to look at, wonder about, and remember. 

IN BUG NEWS: 

RFK Jr. had a worm in his brain, but he says it will not impact his ability to run the country if elected in November. Sounds fine to me!

You have all heard by now that the cicadas are coming. I reported the big news in this very blog two months ago, and since then the American Midwest, the site of this year’s double brood emergence, has been waiting with bated breath. Some are calling it “cicada-geddon.” I am calling it a cool time to go outside and look at bugs—some of which will probably be afflicted by a very gross condition. 

When great Biblical masses of living things gather together in one place, stuff tends to start spreading around. In this case, experts believe that the double broods of periodical cicadas climbing out of the earth this summer will bring with them a particularly upsetting fungal pathogen that makes their butts fall off while also causing them to exhibit particularly randy behavior. 

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If you find yourself “getting into bugs” at any stage of your life, it won’t be long before you start learning more than you ever thought you would about their mating habits. Insect sex is fascinating and strange, appearing in infinite variations all over the world, to such unholy and alien degrees of weirdness you will think to yourself, “How did they even figure that out?” Insect romance is timid, aggressive, tender, violent, lightning-fast, arduous, and unlike anything else on the planet. The possibilities are overwhelming. Thank goodness we have Isabella Rossellini to show us all how it’s done. 

Back in 2008, Rossellini began a series of short films in collaboration with Robert Redford and his Sundance Channel, which at the time was working on a number of projects with an ecological slant. Rossellini named her series Green Porno, and it is exactly that: each 2-minute short dramatizes an act of insect or animal copulation by dressing up Rossellini in elaborate and colorful costumes while she explains exactly how these creatures do it. 

Most of the videos are available on YouTube, and all are currently streaming on the Criterion Channel in higher definition as part of their series of Surreal Nature Films (which also includes both Phase IV and Microcosmos, essentials for all Bugstack subscribers). Green Porno Season 1 focuses entirely on insects, Season 2 is all about marine life, and Season 3 features sea animals that are threatened by overfishing. Criterion Channel also has both seasons of Seduce Me, more short films about even more animal rituals, and Mammas, films about animal parenthood.

With costumes made out of sheets and wire, and sets cut from slabs of painted cardboard, each video has a delightfully low-budget feel, like something you could make yourself with things around your house. Being hosted by Rossellini, an Italian actress and the daughter of filmmaking royalty, gives the whole thing the appearance of surreal high art. 

Rossellini chose to focus on the familiar, showing how even the most commonplace creatures can have the most fascinating habits. “If you go to the animals that surround us everyday—like fly, earthworms, starfish, barnacles—they have this incredible variety of mating, which is very scandalous,” she explained in an interview with Vanity Fair. Her three criteria were whether the animal is familiar, whether it has an odd way of coupling, and whether she could actually make a wearable costume out of it. Her most difficult was the earthworm, the outfit for which was a giant 35-foot-long tube with no arm- or leg-holes that she was stuck inside for twelve hours at a time. 

Do you think she and Heidi Klum have compared notes?? I’m dying to know. 

Watching any of these short videos will teach you more than you ever wanted to know about how snails or shrimp get it on, while highlighting Rossellini’s sneaky sense of humor. The videos are meant to be informative, and also funny, taking a lighthearted approach to some supremely odd subject matter. “I think that if you know how incredibly mysterious and varied and eccentric and strange and fascinating nature is, you hopefully will take care of it,” Rossellini said in that same interview. “I mean, I hope. I don’t know how to dictate that. But I try to convey my emotion when I see animals, which is that somehow animals strike me as funny.” If only the bugs knew how we love to laugh at such serious matters. 

Earlier this week, the Dutch Queen Maxima, known for her sartorially daring looks, stepped out in a monochrome gray outfit with two enormous spiders pinned to her shoulder. The size and detail of the beaded brooches led commentators to describe them as “horrific” and “the stuff of nightmares,” yet others begrudgingly admitted they were also “cool.” (You can buy them for $450 each from Argentinian jeweler Celedonio.) Queen Maxima has a collection of insect pins: she has been spotted sporting a giant amber beetle, a diamond sphinx moth, and a trio of colorful spider brooches similar in design to vintage pins from the 1930s. 

Just yesterday, Britain’s Queen Camilla, not to be outdone, visited a Shrewsbury farmers market wearing two insect pins: a large bee made of diamonds, tiger’s eye, and rubies (likely a nod to the local BeeKeepers’ Association), and a smaller housefly made of diamonds and sapphires that had apparently never been seen on her before, but possibly belonged to Queen Elizabeth II. Bug jewelry is something of a tradition in the royal family, with bees, butterflies, dragonflies, and moths adorning the lapels of everyone from Queen Camilla to Princess Anne to Princess Beatrice. (If the designer of the stunning £50,000 stick insect Camilla wore to Elizabeth’s funeral has any extras lying around, I wouldn’t say no.) 

So, are monarchs of various European kingdoms just entomology enthusiasts in disguise? Yes and no. 

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This week’s cold, windy weather (hello, False Spring) has given me the driest eyes known to mankind, so please forgive me if this entry turns out shorter than normal. Don’t make your job “reading on a screen” if you have a hard time retaining moisture. 

Anyway, longtime fans will already know that I love a good stick insect, so it was with great joy that I read in my colleague Fran Hoepfner’s Fran Magazine earlier this month a request to feature a frankly stunning bug currently on display at the NYC Natural History Museum. It’s the golden-eyed stick insect, also known as the black beauty stick insect, and both of those names are flattering and accurate. 

The golden-eyed stick insect, Peruphasma schultei, is a native of Peru and feeds on pepper trees in the forests and grasslands of the Cordillera del Condor, a mountain range in the eastern Andes that sits on the border between Peru and Ecuador. It’s one of the most ecologically significant locations on the planet, home to a large concentration of plant species unknown to science that have drawn biologists and botanists for decades, and parts of it are protected areas closed (on paper) to human agricultural or mining activity. 

It’s also a very small area in a very threatened environment, and as such the golden-eyed-stick insect is listed as critically endangered by the IUCN. Fortunately for the insects, they thrive in captivity, and since their discovery in 2004 (and official species listing in 2005 by Rainer Schulte, the biologist who gave it its Latin name) they have become one of the most popular stick insect species in the pet trade. 

It’s not hard to see why: they’re eye-catching even for a large bug. As adults, their bodies are long (females can grow longer than 5 centimeters) and hefty, and their back ends curl upwards like crooked fingers. They have large, bright yellow eyes and two pairs of small vestigial wings, which flash red when they’re extended in a threat display. In captivity there is a second color morph of stick insects with pink wings, a genetic trait that breeders believe is recessive and therefore hard to find in the wild.

They aren’t necessarily social animals but because they have such a specific food source they tend to live in groups and seem chill with other members of their species. They don’t fight each other, but they do have a special defense mechanism apart from the shocking red wings. When messed with, they will spray a corrosive, stinky fluid from glands on the back of their head that irritates the skin and eyes of anything standing too close. Since they’re such a relatively new species and since their native habitat is so difficult to get to, we don’t know all that much more about the behavior and preferences of golden-eyed stick insects—other than, like some other stick insect species, females can reproduce sexually and asexually, cloning themselves. 

The newness and popularity of golden-eyed-stick insects also indicates to us the wealth of ecological diversity still unknown to us within hard-to-access regions of the world that, like the Cordillera del Condor, can house a broad diversity of species in a small area. Places like these, hidden away from the avaricious industry of the global north, are worth leaving undisturbed as long as possible. 

IN BUG NEWS:

If you don’t already subscribe to the Criterion Channel I can’t recommend it highly enough, especially since they’ve just announced a critter series starting on April 1, which I WILL be covering extensively. 

Not to start this post off with “I just read this great New Yorker article” but I just read this great New Yorker article from last August that I stumbled upon while looking for inspiration for today’s Bugstack (sometimes I literally google “insects” and see what comes up). The piece, “What Insects Go Through Is Even Weirder Than We Thought,” is written by Rivka Galchen and summarizes the recent research of entomologist James Truman, whose studies focus on insect metamorphosis. His team found, by studying the changes of fruit fly brains from tiny grub to adult, just how dramatically an insect’s neural pathways are rewritten once it completes its final, most complex physical change. 

This entry, while not a “Bugs on Film” post like previous entries, was also inspired by a new and very good movie out this week, Rose Glass’s lesbian crime drama Love Lies Bleeding, in which Kristen Stewart falls in love with a girl bodybuilder played by Katy O’Brian. More importantly it’s about Ed Harris playing a guy who keeps giant beetles as pets. Multiple people who saw this movie before I did (rude) told me about this, and it is indeed true: there’s a scene where Harris lets a huge beetle crawl around on his palm. 

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You thought Dune Part Two was gonna come out and I wouldn’t write about the sandworms?? I bet you all feel very silly. I know that as recently as last week I wrote a post about bugs in movies/television, and here I am doing it again, but there is no way I wasn’t going to address the worms, and there’s no better time for that than now. 

Sandworms, the giant slithery natives of Arrakis, the desert planet created by Frank Herbert and the sole reason that the Star Wars movies are so preoccupied with Tatooine. We love them! They’re big, they’re iconic, and they, like most other things Herbert sprinkled into his vast space opera, have a complex and fascinating connection to everything that goes on in the Dune books. I’m not going to go into an exhaustive biology of a fictional animal here, since there are plenty of wikis online if you’d rather read all of that, but I do want to talk about one thing that both the books and the new movies address only subtly, and that will require a little bit of context. Like a worm into desert sands, we’re diving in. 

The sandworms are the largest native animal living on the surface of Arrakis, a.k.a. Dune, a planet known for two things: being almost completely inhospitable, and being the only home of the valuable hallucinogenic drug spice. Arrakis is the most important planet in the universe because spice occurs nowhere else, and it’s essential for space travel (long story short, there are no computers in Dune, so all the computing to jump spaceships from place to place is done by mutated humans who subsist on a constant, heavy dose of spice for their entire lives). 

No one except the Fremen, the native people of Arrakis, know where spice comes from—it basically pops up in “beds” on the surface of the sand, and is found by scouts and mined by machines that sift through the deposits. The Fremen know (and this is a spoiler, so if you don’t want to know yet, there’s your warning) that spice comes from the sandworms, a waste byproduct that comes from the worms’ bodies as they drift through the sand, leading the Fremen to nickname them “makers.” 

The sandworms are responsible for spice, and they’re also responsible for Arrakis’ ecology. Arrakis is a desert planet because of the sandworms, which it turns out were nonnative species introduced millennia earlier, and in their moisture-sucking larval forms (sandtrout) were able to systematically remove all traces of water from the surface of the planet. Arrakis was once a lush paradise not unlike Earth, but water is poison to the sandworms, so they terraformed it away. 

Because the worms are so massive and so important to the ecology of their world and to the creation of the thing that makes Arrakis so special, they’ve taken on a special sacred significance to the Fremen, who call them Shai-Hulud, “Old Man of the Desert,” and see them as a physical manifestation of their god. But there is another part of the Fremen religion that exists at odds with the sandworms. Because Arrakis is so precious to the empire, it’s in its wealthy noble houses’ best interest to keep the planet as dry and uninhabited as possible. The Fremen, on the other hand, dream of a thriving homeworld full of water, and believe that, eventually, their messianic Kwisatz Haderach will lead them there. The only problem is, if you allow oceans and forests and rain to take over Arrakis, you lose the desert, and you lose the sandworms, and you lose the spice. 

It’s a conundrum that will preoccupy the latter books in the Dune series—the ethical impasse between giving the Fremen the world they’ve always wanted, and thereby doing away with not only their way of life, but also the way of the rest of the human universe. Space travel, trade, government, and even communication between planets would be impossible if Arrakis didn’t remain a desert. Herbert steeped his books in a lot of the contemporary concerns of his day (many of which remain the concerns of our day), and one of those was environmentalism, the different forms it takes, the different questions it engenders. It was environmental tampering that allowed the sandworms to proliferate, and it is environmental tampering of a greater magnitude that will be their undoing. With the sandworms, Dune demands its characters and its readers to decide what’s more important. 

For those of you who don’t know, I am, for the time being, still attempting to make a living as a culture writer/entertainment journalist/freelance blogger during the day when I’m not poring over scholarly journals (Wikipedia pages) doing research for this Substack. It basically means I watch a lot of movies and TV shows, both for work and for leisure, making sure I keep up with what everyone’s talking about. Sometimes the things I watch feature bugs, and that often means that they’re top of mind whenever I’m casting around for a subject to write about for Bugstack. Is this gonna be a regular thing? I don’t know! Could be fun. 

I genuinely hope for your peace of mind that you were not on Twitter/X last week when the big Starship Troopers hoopla went down. As far as I can tell it started because of some thread that fundamentally misunderstood the movie, according to everyone else I saw posting about said thread, and then they all argued about it for a little bit. The fallout took about three days to dissipate. Aside from the fact that I feel like this debate happens once every couple of years, it made me realize that I’ve never actually seen Starship Troopers all the way through. Not for any reason. I just never got around to it. 

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Odds are anyone reading this has seen it before: You’re walking down the street at night, or sitting in the stands at a sports tournament, or chilling on your porch, and you see a bug, or two, or ten zooming around any source of artificial light they can find. Nocturnal insects like moths and flies and beetles are irresistibly attracted to streetlamps and porch lights, and while we’ve found this endlessly fascinating since humans were able to generate light at night, we’ve never hit on an exact reason why. 

Before electricity was commonplace, when we’d use oil lanterns and candles and bonfires to illuminate the dark, we thought bugs were attracted to the warmth. “Like a moth to a flame” is still a common adage for self destructive behavior, based on the tendency for moths and other flying insects to occasionally burn themselves up fluttering too close to the firelight. While many living things are indeed attracted to sources of heat, including some bugs, the theory doesn’t really hold up. If an insect wanted to get close to a light for its warmth, then it stands to reason that its goal would be to land on it, whether it’s a candle flame or a lightbulb. But that’s not what happens. 

When a bug flies around a source of light in an otherwise dark space, it charts an elliptical path, flying in loops up and down and around the light instead of directly towards it. For a long time, this led many to believe that insects, like some migratory birds, used the light from the moon and stars to navigate at night. The moon and stars move across the sky, but only by increments because of how far away they are. When you walk or drive around after dark, the moon stays in pretty much the same place in the sky, allowing you to orient your position by the direction of its light. Entomologists thought bugs did something similar, so that when they encountered a streetlamp and flew past it, thinking it was the moon, they would have to turn, and keep turning, and keep turning, to keep the source of light in the position they thought it should be. 

Except that’s also not what they’re doing. According to new research published in Nature Communications last month, nocturnal flying insects aren’t making constant circuits around random artificial lights because of some complex navigation system. The truth, perhaps, is much simpler: They just think the light is the sky. 

By filming a number of flying insects both in a laboratory and in the field in a bunch of different locations, these researchers discovered that the insects tended to turn their backs to the light, instead of flying towards it. This is called a dorsal light response, the ability for an insect or any other motile creature to orient themselves based on the location of the sky and the location of the ground. The sky, usually, is the brightest “direction” no matter what time it is, so to fly straight and horizontal with the ground, all an insect would have to do would be to keep their back to the light. When the insects that the researchers studied flew around and around a brightly shining artificial light, what they were actually doing was trying to keep their back turned toward it, thinking it was the sky, and trapping themselves in perpetual erratic loops. 

These light traps can be exhausting for an insect after a while, and many who get caught flying in constant circles around an outdoor lamp will die before sunrise can reorient their senses. I’ve mentioned the perils of light pollution on Bugstack before, explaining how fireflies can confuse faraway lamps or windows for potential mates and waste time and energy trying to find them. For other bugs, artificial nighttime lights are a more immediate death trap, killing by confusion. Bright lights at night are also known to have detrimental effects on humans, throwing off our circadian rhythm and making us groggy and depressed. The darker we keep our streets at night, the better it is for our bugs, and for us. 

IN BUG NEWS:

They did surgery on a jumping stick. When a Peruvian jumping stick (a sort of combination of stick bug and grasshopper) molted, one of her keepers at the Houston Zoo noticed a weird dent in her neck that caused her head to flop, and fashioned a tiny neck brace out of a Q-tip and some tape to keep the bug’s head pointed straight up while her new exoskeleton hardened. 

There aren’t exactly sporting events in the insect world. No species of insects organize themselves into teams to stage elaborate tournaments held at certain times every year. The only thing about a football game that would potentially interest a bug is the wattage of the floodlights on the field. 

That’s not to say that insects don’t participate in a sort of sport of their own. Mating displays are common in many bug species, and some take the tradition to extremes, staging elaborate duels for territorial supremacy and mating rights—which one could argue is the same general origin of human sports in the first place. 

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