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| Spacey Tracy hands out head lamps and brings light to the creepy crawly dark. Enlarge photo |
Tracy the Bug Lady meets her nightly bug tour group in the open living room of our lodge deep in the rain forest of Costa Rica. A moth is slamming spastically at the lamp shade. Spacey Tracy, as if in a trance, gets eye contact with the six of us, silently pulls out her keychain, and shakes it like a tambourine. The moth dives to the floor and freezes. Tracy says, “I didn’t know if this kind of moth had ears. It does. When it heard the ultrasound from my keys, it thought I was a bat honing in on it…and dove for cover.”
Looking at our no-longer-reluctant kids, and realizing we were in for an unusual experience, we embarked on a two-hour tour. Donning our headlamps, we followed Tracy through the ferns into the dark. She stopped, shone her light 20 meters down the trail, turned to us saying, “Check this spider out,” and walked over to a fallen leaf. She turned it over to reveal a spider. I asked how she knew it was there from such a distance. She said, “Eye shine…crushed-emerald eye shine.” The bugs and frogs that surround us all have mirrors at the backs of their eyes, so that when you shine a light on them, they shine back. Moths are gold. Frogs are orange. Spiders shine emerald-green. Looking around again, I saw crushed emeralds sprinkled through the jungle.
This spider was a tarantula. Picking him up, she said, “Not the tarantula of your imagination, just a small burrowing guy…mildly venomous. Who wants to hold him?” After a stunned pause from the group, I offered, and she placed him — half the size of my thumb — on my palm.
Farther down the trail, Tracy stopped at a moss-covered bank of red clay. She played with a tuft of moss with her pointer, and whispered, “If you count yourself as a spider enthusiast, we have here perhaps one of the five best in the world — the trap door spider. Right now he’s holding his hatch down with his fangs…14 ounces pull-down strength.” Later she got the hatch open, revealing a slick, round passage (about half an inch in diameter) and a sneaky spider waiting for his dinner.
Next we looked closely at a nearby spider web as Tracy said, “In nature, it’s the very rare insect that dies of old age.” What looked like a stick fallen on the web was a carefully gathered line of body parts — bits of critters the spider caught but chose not to eat. Tracy hit the fake stick and revealed part of it was the actual spider — patiently waiting to make his stick of victim debris a little longer.
On another web, a spider looked like a dew drop. As Tracy began pulling out an almost microscopic line of silk, she said, “I’m harvesting spider silk from a dew drop spider’s butt. This stuff is stronger than Teflon. The US military is the biggest researcher of this stuff. From it, they could make the ultimate light-and-comfortable bulletproof vests…perhaps even superlight airplanes.”
A bug landed on Tracy and crawled into her safari shirt. She pulled it out and revealed a tiny ladybug with a black-and-white Lego-man face on its back. Getting closer to her little Lego man, she pointed out how the wings came together to make a straight line. That means it’s a beetle, not a roach. If you lined up all the species of animals on earth, every fifth one would be a beetle. There are over 500,000 types. Rove beetles were used in China 2,000 years ago to remove unwanted tattoos. She looked at me and said, “Got a loved one with tattoos? Remember the Rove beetle.”
I walked back to our lodge with a new appreciation of the generally unseen side of life in the tropics…through a treacherous wonderland of crushed emeralds.
Wow, what a trip. God’s creation is pretty amazing.
I don’t think so . . .
I guess I’m dense. After reading Rick’s lovely account of his time with the bug lady, does Audrey object to the use of the name of God as creator or does she think what Rick saw was not so amazing. Help?
Audrey doesn’t appreciate creepy crawly insects. I lived in the tropics and it was enough for me. I sometimes get “bug” nightmares. Night tours of bugs just aren’t my thing. Sorry, can’t help myself because I typically avoid such comments, but why does one try to read so much into a simple comment? I don’t get it.
Audrey, I think it was the ambiguity of the remark because of the order of posting. What I find amazing (besides the incredible things that bugs can do) is our ability to discover these wonders and find ways to turn them to our advantage.
Nancy, I think you and others read too much into Audrey’s post because you thought her post was in reference to the post above. That is your’s (and others’) fault for thinking that. After all, according to forum guidelines, we don’t respond to posts that others make as we might go off topic. :)
Coool! Love jungles. Costa Rica sounds great. Nice writing.
As an arachnaphobe, I felt myself freezing in horror …
Jeremy B (as I blatantly AGAIN go against the guidelines), I was merely trying to explain where I thought Louisa’s confusion came from. Even if you don’t read Audrey’s initial remark as a response to the first posting, it is still a pretty ambiguous comment. More to the point of what she meant would have been to say, “ewww, bugs.” Then we all would have understood. :-)
OMG looks like you got out of there just in time with the earthquake that hit today
Nancy, I knew what you meant and understood why people were questioning Audrey. I just thought I would chastise you for violating forum guidelines as I am hypocritically doing now. :) To get back on topic, this was an interesting read. The bug lady came across as a female, bug version of the Crocodile Hunter (R.I.P Steve Irwin – he actually died while I was on a Rick Steves’ tour. The news spread while we were all on the bus).
Our “framily” (family + close friends) spent the holiday in Costa Rica this year, too! A week in Nosara on Pacific beaches, complete with egg-laying Olive Ridley sea turtles on Christmas Eve; a night hike through the Monteverde rainforest; hot springs and spectacular midnight lava-viewing at Arenal; and New Year’s Eve watching fireworks over the Papagayo Gulf. And all without, as my teenagers remarked, “being bombarded with holiday commercialism everywhere you go.” Good times!
Great descriptions and fun photo of Tracy. But now can you please put up a picture of some of those spiders or other creepy crawlies. I gotta see some of those!
Very interesting about the bugs. I’m not a hugh bug fan. My budget to do something like that would be for free or #5. Happy travels!
Fascinating. I love people who have an interest in the unusual… I’m not a big bug person myself – but then again, I’d probably have far more respect for them if I were to take a tour like that.