The Demon Crown

NOTES FROM THE SCIENTIFIC RECORD

What’s the deadliest animal on the planet? Let’s take score. Sharks kill about six people a year, while lions account for roughly twenty-two deaths. Surprisingly, attacks from elephants cause five hundred fatalities each year. Snakebites double that number with a thousand deaths annually. We humans, of course, outdo that considerably by slaughtering four hundred thousand of one another every year. But the true assassin of the animal world is much smaller and far deadlier. Namely, the lowly mosquito. As vectors for a slew of diseases — malaria, yellow fever, West Nile, and now Zika — these flying bloodsuckers alone account for more than a million deaths each year. In fact, mosquito bites are the leading cause of mortality in children under five.

Still, other tiny beasts also vie with the mosquito for this deadly crown. Tsetse flies cause ten thousand deaths each year. The aptly named assassin bug (Reduviidae) does a bit better with twelve thousand. Ultimately, some insect will kill one person out of sixty every year.

Why is this important? It serves as a cautionary reminder that we are not living in the Age of Man, but rather — as has been true for more than 400 million years — in the Age of Insects. While humans have been on this planet for a paltry 300,000 years, insects existed eons before the dinosaurs, multiplying and spreading, filling every environmental niche. In fact, it is now hypothesized that insects contributed — if not led — to the extinction of the dinosaurs. How? From analysis of recent fossil records, it has been discovered that these tiny predators attacked those lumbering saurians while they were compromised and weakened by the climatic changes at the end of the Cretaceous Period, contributing significantly to their demise through predation, disease transmission, and sickness. At that opportune moment in prehistory, insects took advantage to finally rid the planet of their main competitor for all those new plants and flowers — and in one fell swoop, ended the Age of Dinosaurs.

Which, of course, begs the question concerning the insect’s latest competitor for the earth’s dwindling natural resources: Could we be their next target?