Kindness and Cruelty in the Animal Kingdom
When you take a close look, the insect world is a very strange place. I just finished a story about parasitoid wasps. These charming little buzzers inject their eggs into living insects. When the eggs hatch, the baby wasps eat the host from the inside out.
There are a ton of different kinds of insects, and they’ve evolved many, many different ways of getting on in the world, although it’s disturbing that so many of them go about it in such grisly ways. (Eating other insects alive is common in the insect world.)
But don’t sink into despair about the cruelty of nature. Many animals are downright kind. In one experiment, parrots were given tokens they could exchange for food. Without any prompting from the researchers, the parrots shared their food tokens with parrots who had no tokens.
Vampire bats, who must eat fairly often to survive, will often regurgitate some food to share with fellow bats who had an unsuccessful night hunting. I’m sure the bats don’t mind the used food. I mean, is eating puked up blood any grosser than eating it the first time?
Cockroaches make collective decisions about where to live and what to eat based on what’s best for the entire group. I’m wondering if they vote by waving their little antennae. And rats, whose name has become a synonym for dastardliness, will pass right by a pile of chocolate chips to help another rat who’s caught in a trap. If giving up chocolate to help another isn’t altruism, I don’t know what is.
All the cruelty in the world can sometimes push me to the edge of despair. But there’s kindness, too. Lots of it. I guess humans are not that much different from other animals in that regard. We just have to decide whether we want to be wasps or rats.
Stay curious,
Avery