by Gordon Grice
Ballooning into a cannibalistic frenzy may seem a strange way to control population, but the phenomenon has parallels in the behavior of diverse animals. Scientists have long known that rats, when crowded into spaces too small for their number, begin to rape and murder their fellows. Their social structure breaks down; mothers stop protecting their young; males betray their allies. Something similar happens in rabbit plagues, the population explosions that often follow such human shenanigans as the mass slaughter of predators. The rabbits raze all vegetation, then chew the limbs off each other.
Most revelatory are the several species of grasshopper called locusts. Usually the individual hoppers reach adulthood and live solitary lives, stuffing their gullets with as much food as they can find before mating. But when they find themselves surrounded by fellow grasshoppers—a circumstance that comes about when the weather’s right for overpopulation—the individuals physically transform. Their color alters; their anatomy shifts. They’ve become that pestilence known in old times as a plague of locusts. They migrate for hundreds of miles as a swarm, enabling themselves to survive even though their numbers divest the land of vegetation. The swarming state is like an extra phase in the life cycle, one that’s activated only if conditions warrant.
Scientists have tended to see behavior as either normal or abnormal—an unstated assumption that has slowed our understanding of aggregate behavior. Many animals have different sets of behaviors for different population densities and food supplies. For the locust, the solitary life and swarming are both “normal”—and adaptive. The recluse’s population booms and cannibalistic die-offs occur so consistently they can’t be considered “abnormal” either.
The same is true for mammals. That’s an uncomfortable idea, because scientists like to draw parallels between rat and human behavior in high-density populations. If intraspecies violence is in some sense “normal,” we have to reorder our ideas about human nature.
Serial murder, war, genocide, and even witch hunts have all been linked to population changes and competition for resources. We let ourselves off the hook when we define such killing as “abnormal.” We put the behavior at a distance, letting ourselves think of it as something alien, something we normal folk could never do. We think of the Nazis who murdered millions in death camps as demons, instead of people who faced choices like ours. But the capacity to murder, to become demonic, is in our nature.
One of our natures, anyway.
I returned to the shed this spring. It had been three years since I found it in the lifeless aftermath of the brown recluse population explosion. I was shocked to find the building repopulated in predators.
I spotted a fresh-looking black widow egg sac. I used a stick to pull the sac free of its web, which ripped like a rusty zipper, and as I did I disturbed several baby widows that had been feeding on a carcass. When the knobby little widows had cleared away, I recognized the carcass as a brown recluse. As I reached for a jar to collect some of the widows, a big recluse charged over the horizon of the box the jars were in and stood there as if daring me. I backed him down with the stick.
As I searched the walls of the place, I found about twenty widow webs, most of them weighted with last year’s dust. Half of them contained swaddled remains I recognized as recluses. I also found enough of the recluses’ softer silk to suggest a population in the hundreds. Stuck to a two-by-four with recluse silk was a male widow. Several other bits of exoskeleton littering the walls looked like widows killed by recluses as well. This accounting includes only the remains I picked up. I left a great many patches of wall alone, because I saw enough live examples of both types of spiders to give me a healthy dose of caution and a serious case of the willies.
Besides the spiders, I also found a mud dauber’s nest, probably from the previous year. The cells were packed with exoskeletons, which were all that remained of the recluses that had been devoured from the inside by larval wasps. I didn’t see any black widow remains in the dauber nest, though the wasps are known to prey on widows.
I also found fresh mantid egg cases and crickets and leafhoppers and some tiny flying insects I couldn’t get a good look at. The predators far outnumbered the vegetarians.
GORDON GRICE is a contributing editor at Oklahoma Today. His work has appeared in Harpers, Granta, and other magazines and has been anthologized in Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Essays and in college readers. He teaches film, humanities, and English at Seward County Community College in Liberal, Kansas. He lives in rural Oklahoma with his wife and two children.
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Copyright © 1998 by Gordon Grice
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