Would you believe me if I told you that amidst the hustle and bustle of Bengaluru, there’s a whole world of tiny architects, serial killers, woodworkers, and coordinated dancers, each leading very peculiar lives? Their small size often helps them escape detection, but they are hard to miss once you train your eyes to notice them. A new guide, Commonly Spotted Insects and Spiders in the City of Bengaluru, can help you tune in to this fascinating world of many-legged, antennaed and often winged creatures.
And maybe, with the interesting nuggets that the book provides about each animal, you will go from considering some of them as ‘pests’ or ‘creepy crawlies’ to understanding their lives and appreciating the important role these creatures play in the natural world.
The pocket guide, written by Vena Kapoor, Priya Venkatesh, and Vaidya R, is supported by a small grant from the Bengaluru Sustainability Forum (BSF). It is available as an online PDF, which can be downloaded from the BSF website for free.
Interesting nuggets of information
The book features sections for various groups of insects and arachnids commonly found in Bengaluru, such as ants, wasps, bees, butterflies, bugs, and spiders. Each section covers their characteristics, behaviour, and habitats, helping the reader identify them by group and better understand their ecology.
Read more: Living and learning with Nature: Experiences from home
While browsing through the book, I identified the ants around a tree in my garden as Brown Droptail Ants, which build amphitheatre-like nests around tree trunks. They are among the many architects of the insect world. I also regretted not looking closer at the egg cases of praying mantises I’ve come across because, as the book explains, tiny Podagrion mantis wasps might have been inspecting the egg cases, preparing to lay their own eggs inside. As with many other wasps, the mantis wasp larvae eventually devour the praying mantis larvae alive! This makes parasitoid wasps not just serial killers, but inter-generational serial killers!
Grim details like these make my eyes widen, my heart flutter a bit, and my mouth stretch into a smile.
Who can benefit from this book?
Vena, Priya and Vaidya decided to create this guidebook for beginner naturalists interested in discovering and understanding more about the insects and spiders around them, and for nature educators. “We wanted to put together a book about the lives of these animals that we often take for granted even though they are so ubiquitous,” says Vena Kapoor. “When you start looking for and observing them, you will find their diversity and lives to be mind-boggling.” Vena and Priya are naturalists and nature educators themselves, and Vaidya is an erstwhile techie who currently works on open public data.
You will be surprised at how easy it is to find these many-legged creatures around you. According to the book, you can find them on “the leaves and crevices of plants, on the base, barks, and branches of trees, crawling around, under and on leaf litter and soil, on chain link fences, on concrete stone and mud walls, and ceilings of houses and buildings.” Looking for movement, stepping close to a plant to turn a leaf over, or peering closely at a wall makes me feel like the world around me is in sharp focus, and my busy mind quietens.
Often, spotting one animal will lead you to another, or be a window to the goings on of their lives as they interact with different plants and animals. Stingless bees collecting pollen in little baskets on their legs while pollinating flowers in the process, ants being treated to sugary treats excreted by aphids that feed on plant juices, wasps bringing their paralysed prey to their carefully constructed nests
How the book helps us appreciate our surroundings
The book will arm you with information and interesting details that will help give more context to what you are looking at. This makes it even more enjoyable to watch nature around you as you go to work, wait for the bus or stroll around your neighbourhood, adding another layer of familiarity and understanding to your city.
The authors suggest in the introduction to their book that as nature observers, we “resist the immediate urge to whip out your phone camera. Spend time observing closely and paying attention to what you have spotted, making associations and linkages to other invertebrates you observed.”
If you shudder at the thought of encountering six- or eight-legged creatures, Vena suggests that observing them from a distance, perhaps with someone else, and recording their behaviour might help. “Sometimes, just learning about the fascinating behaviour, mimicry, and camouflage of some of these creatures helps to lessen the initial fear that some people feel.”
I had a similar transformation with spiders long ago—creatures I used to run away from—when a naturalist shared how fascinating they are and made me see them in a new light. Did you know that not all spiders build webs? And that some spiders mimic ants? That the jumping spider is quite adorable?
Understanding Nature in Bengaluru
Commonly Spotted Insects and Spiders is part of a growing list of nature guides to help you understand Bengaluru’s natural ecosystem better, including Discover Avenue Trees by Karthikeyan Srinivasan, Trees of Bangalore by K. Sankara Rao, and Early Birds’s pocket guide on the common birds of Karnataka.
If you are in Bengaluru and would like to go nature sleuthing in a group, you can choose from many different activities. Spiders and the Sea conducts paid nature walks in small groups in different parts of the city. The All Women’s Nature Walk is a free monthly walk run by and for people who identify as women. Suchi Govindrajan also conducts paid tree walks in Indiranagar.