Peek into the world of Bengaluru’s smallest inhabitants Premium

Did you know ants once shared the planet with dinosaurs like the T-Rex and the Velociraptor? Or that termites cultivate food gardens of fungi within their large, intricately constructed mounds? And that it isn’t just honey that will go missing in a world without bees, but also many fruits, vegetables, grains and nuts. Also, not all spiders build webs, cockroaches are a lot more than irritating house pests, butterflies can taste food with their feet, and male cicadas serenade potential mates using a unique sound-producing organ on their abdomen called the tymbal?

Did you know ants once shared the planet with dinosaurs like the T-Rex and the Velociraptor? Or that termites cultivate food gardens of fungi within their large, intricately constructed mounds? And that it isn’t just honey that will go missing in a world without bees, but also many fruits, vegetables, grains and nuts. Also, not all spiders build webs, cockroaches are a lot more than irritating house pests, butterflies can taste food with their feet, and male cicadas serenade potential mates using a unique sound-producing organ on their abdomen called the tymbal?

The world of these minibeasts is indeed both enigmatic and fascinating, as a new book, Commonly Spotted Insects & Spiders in the City of Bengaluru, reinforces repeatedly. “The lives, survival strategies and nature history stories of insects and spiders can range from the calmly simple (or at least what we know so far) to the bizarrely complex,” states the introduction to the book, which has been co-authored by Vena Kapoor, Priya Venkatesh and Vaidya R., designed by Pratyush Gupta and enabled by the Bengaluru Sustainability Forum’s Small Grants Programme.

Filled with mind-boggling facts and gorgeous pictures, it offers a ringside view of the lives and natural histories of some of the city’s many six- and eight-legged creatures — around 135 insects and 25 spiders — serving as “an easy-to-use tool to help you identify and get to know more about the some of the commonly found insects and spiders living their lives around us.”

As Vaidya points out, most of the images in the book were not shot in far-flung, wooded areas with many trees but bang amid the concrete jungle that is Bengaluru. “Most of them have been shot right at homes or just outside them, in gardens, etc,” says the Bengaluru-based nature enthusiast and photographer. “The main point we are trying to emphasise is that there is a lot of biodiversity, even in your backyard.”

Arthropods, the phylum which includes insects, spiders, scorpions, centipedes, millipedes, crabs, prawns and even head lice, is the most successful animal group on the planet, consisting of over 800,000 described species, with many still undiscovered. First emerging in the water around 500 million years ago, before colonising land a few million years later, arthropods are found in every nook and cranny of the planet today. So ubiquitous are these tiny creatures that the combined biomass of terrestrial arthropods alone is believed to be roughly 1 billion tonnes, roughly equivalent to the biomass of all human beings and livestock put together, according to a study published in the open-access journal Science Advances in 2023.

Insects, which form the majority of the arthropods, “pretty much rule the world,” says Priya, the founder-director of The Naturalist School (TNS), Bengaluru. She considers them “the most diverse and fascinating creatures we have on Planet Earth: they come in all shapes, sizes and colours, are also found everywhere, in the air, land and water” and are “a very important part of the entire food chain because of which the whole planet is going around,” she says. Not only are they both prey and predators, but they also play an important role in helping many plants propagate. “Most of the plant kingdom, as you know, are producers, without which there would be no food on this planet,” says Priya. And many of these plants, particularly those that make fruits, depend on insects for pollination. “In that sense, they are very intricately connected to life on earth.”

Vena, a city-based conservationist and independent nature educator, believes that observing and learning about arthropods is also a great way to get people interested in nature and natural systems. Often, too often, there is a deep cognitive dissociation between human beings and insects, she says. “They are all around us but are often kind of hidden. We don’t notice them as much because of their size or the associations we have with them.” She finds it pretty humbling to know that there are millions of organisms around us, playing such crucial roles and that we are only just scratching the surface and getting to know them. “They are as messy as human beings with bizarre habits and behaviours.”