Yu No Kick Part 9: Critters

I remember a time, not too long ago, when finding ants in a house was cause for great consternation. Little white ant gazebos housing ant poison were purchased from the super market and laid around the house in heavily ant-trafficked areas in an attempt at enticing ants to carry toxic substances back to their nest and do themselves in. When this failed, we had to take all the food out of our pantry and cupboards, stack it on the kitchen table, cover everything with a sheet and asked a man in a haz-mat suit and breathing apparatus to come spray chemicals all over our house and make it uninhabitable for the better part of a day. Flies inside the household were stalked and hunted with green plastic fly swatters and killed. Cockroaches, spiders, and other larger critters were trapped under and glass or tupperware and re-released into the wilds of the back yard on the grounds that nobody wanted to clean up the cockroach guts that would result were they to be squished. I remember days when cakes, cookies, and even defrosting meat was left unattended on kitchen counters over night, a daring and brazen taunt to insects everywhere to just try and come inside the house.

Truth is, these days I have no idea how we manage to keep our homes so immaculately free of insects and other critters. Even houses in the suburbs and in more rural areas, whose surrounding greenery no doubt abounds with such beasts, they manage to keep nature strictly outside the home. In Vanuatu, we open our houses to any creature tenacious enough to make it inside. Rather than being a mono culture consisting solely of homo sapiens, and perhaps a dog, a Vanuatu household is teeming with biodiversity. Arthropods (arthropods are a class of animals that includes insects, spiders, centipedes, millipedes, scorpions and some others. Although we commonly group all of these animals together, this is not technically accurate. However, often I find it convenient to refer to all arthropods together as opposed to just insects and, so as not to sully an otherwise light-hearted and sophomoric blog with fancy science words, I shall use the term “bug” as a replacement for arthropod) are by far the most common type of animal on the land, and they are well represented inside of my house. I've heard it said that bugs will take over the world once humans are dead and gone, a saying that is wrong only in that it implies that bugs do not already own the world. I think everyone instinctually feels the truth of this, which accounts for most people's fear of bugs. Just as we become anxious and uneasy in the presence of our bosses or other authority figures, we are made uncomfortable when we must share a room with bugs, who we know to be the true masters of the earth. Sometimes our fear causes us to lash out as we try to assert our dominance and, while we may be able to easily destroy a single bug, or even a hundred bugs, our feeble attempts at violence are generally ignored by the larger body of the bug population who knows that we are completely incapable of inflicting any sort of real or lasting harm on it. Although people tend to fear large and exotic bugs such as cockroaches, tarantulas, or centipedes, in my opinion the real danger comes not from the big and unusual (the fact that they're big makes them easy to see and avoid and the fact that they're exotic means that they're unlikely to be encountered on a daily basis), but from the small and commonplace, the mosquito. We're all familiar with these little flying vampires, they're something that brings us together as a species. No matter what continent you live on, what culture you belong to, or whether you're rich or poor, everyone can get behind hating mosquitoes. In Vanuatu, and in other tropical areas, mosquitoes are hated not only for being annoying but also for their ability to transmit malaria and dengue fever. To be honest, however, it's difficult to say which is worse: malaria, that obnoxious buzzing noise mosquitoes make when they're flying around your ears while you're trying to sleep, or those persistently itchy little bites. Fortunately, you don't have to worry about choosing, because you can get all three at once. My experience with American mosquitoes than that with Vanuatu mosquitoes. In the States, the mosquitoes were relatively large and somewhat dumb, slow moving, and easier to swat. Their bites left large, red welts that itched for days. In Vanuatu the mosquitoes are smaller and more wily, killing a mosquito is decidedly harder. However, their bites are smaller, less itchy, and fade faster. In the beginning of my service, the large water tank that collects rainwater from my roof was uncovered, providing a perfect breeding ground of mosquitoes. Consequently, there would always be a cloud of them hovering around my door waiting for a chance at entrance to my house so that they could annoy me. I finally got around to cleaning out the water tank, killing all the mosquito larvae inside of it, and putting a cover on it, which has done a good job of thinning out the mosquito crop in the vicinity of my house. Nowadays, the mosquitoes show up only two or three at a time, making them easier to hunt down and kill.

Slightly less annoying than the mosquito is the ant. For my entire tenure in Vanuatu, my house has been infested with doggedly determined little brown ants. These wily little scavengers are almost inspiring to watch. Able to reach almost anywhere in the house and defeat even the most clever ant-prevention technologies to find food, it's easy to see why these little guys are thriving whereas lazy, slow, picky animals, like the panda, are not. For some reason, the one place where these ants won't venture is on top of my stove, which means that my stove is often home to large, precarious stacks of tupperware containers and plates of food which I want to be spared from the wrath of the ants. Leave something on the floor or on the table, however, and it will be covered in teeming brown bodies in a matter of minutes. Often I just have to resign myself to the fact that I'm going to be eating food covered in ants, especially if they manage to worm their way into, say, my stash of Snickers bars. More annoying than the fact that they get into my food, is their occasional tendency to crawl over me while I'm sleeping. It's not unusual to wake up to an odd, tickling feeling that slowly creeps along my body. They're small enough that you can *almost* ignore them, but the sensation of them walking over you is just a little too strange to be ignore an they can make falling asleep difficult. Recently, a new variety of ant has been trying to muscle it's way into my house. These large, black ants may not be as numerous as the brown ones (their ant trails tend to look more like small city roads, with only one ant passing by every few seconds, as opposed to the bulging ant superhighways which the brown ants tend to form), but they must be packing some serious heat as they seem to have forced the brown ants out of my common room completely. Although the brown ant hold on my kitchen is still very strong, the black ant territory seems to be slowly expanding and they look like something of a force to be reckoned with. We'll have to see how the turf wars play out in the months to come, but it may be that the days of the brown ant are numbered.

Somewhat more pleasant to host than bugs are the numerous geckos that inhabit my house. There are two kinds. Small black geckos with bright, blue stripes like to hide in my curtains when I roll them up at night. When I left them down during the day, the geckos come tumbling out and thunk unto the floor, where the stand, dazed and confused for several seconds before quickly scurrying off to wherever geckos scurry to. More interesting are the ghostly-white geckos that dot my walls at night. These geckos are larger, chubbier, and more active than the black and blue geckos and they like to come out at night to catch insects. The sticky pads on their feet allow them to climb walls and stick to the ceiling and they make a light drumming sound as they scamper across my ceiling in search of food. Some geckos will park themselves next to a swarm on gnats and you'll see their little heads dart to and fro quickly as they gobble them up. Others go in search of larger prey. After it gets dark, the electric lights in my house attract a large number of moths. My bulbs are bare (ie not part of light fixtures), which allows the moths to get nice and close into them. A swarm of moths will be constantly orbiting my light bulb whenever it's on at night. Every few seconds, a moth will decide to try and go in and will make a quick and determined swoop into the light until it comes up hard and fast against the glass of the bulb with a satisfying dinging sound. They never really seem to learn, however, and after letting a few of their friends make a try for it and end with similar fates, they give it another go. Taking advantage of this confusion, the geckos will creep across the ceiling until they near the swarm of moths around the light bulb. As they approach the moths, their motions become slower and more deliberate so as not to startle their prey. Then, when the time is right, they'll seize upon a moth's momentary confusion after running headlong into a piece of glass and strike, grabbing a startled moth in their mouths. The work's not done yet, however, as often the moth is a half or three quarters the size of the gecko, so subduing it is no easy feat. What ensues is like a miniature Godzilla versus Mothra as moth and gecko duke it out. Sometimes the battle becomes so fierce that the gecko looses its grip on the ceiling and splats on the floor, where the fighting continues unabated. Finally, either a successful gecko will forcefully stuff the moth entirely in it's mouth and begin munching contentedly, or a successful moth will battle its way to freedom and fly off, leaving the gecko to start the whole process over again. With a few shells of kava in me, I've spent many an hour watching the geckos war with the moths.

The largest inhabitants of my house, aside from myself, are the mice and rats. The rats live in my attic and, at night, you can hear the sounds of them running around echoing through my ceiling. I'm not sure what they do up there at night, but they certainly can make quite the ruckus. Sometimes you'll hear them pounding across the attic at full speed, followed by loud crashes that seem to indicate some sort of tussle and then silence. Moments later they're booking it across the attic again and another tussle ensues. It's almost like they're playing tackle football or something. Sometimes these games can go on for upwards of an hour and I fall asleep to the soothing clatter of rats doing whatever rats do. I bought a box of ramen noodles when I first came to Vanuatu that I haven't been using nearly as much as I thought I would, and these packages of dry noodles have become a favorite of the rodents. The box which contains them has several holes gnawed into the side and by now most of the noodle packets are chewed through and a portion of the noodles missing. I don't really mind this all that much, actually, as it seems to distract them from the rest of the food in my house, some of which I'm much more attached to than ramen.

Some volunteers are more opposed to critters sharing their house than other. I get people giving me advice on how to get rid of my rats or my geckos or my ants, and I thank them politely and proceed to do nothing. Truth is, I've grown somewhat attached to my house guests. Fighting the ants for control of my food keeps me on my toes and watching an ant trail form can provide a solid half hour of entertainment. The geckos and moths provide my evening cinema and the scampering of the rats serves as a soothing cacophony to accompany me to sleep. Oddly, while I'm not the biggest fan of pets, I have absolutely no problem with pests. They don't need to be fed or walked or taken care of in any way. They're easy to ignore when I want to and they go about their business without any need for interference from me. In many ways, I admire their tenacity and self-reliance. While pets often die despite our best efforts to save them, these pests live on despite our best efforts to exterminate them.