Today I’m going to share a story about an experience I had at my field site a few years ago.  It’s about a young scientist trying to do field work for her Ph.D. and a determined father giant water bug who took great offense at her attempt to remove his eggs from the pond for study in her lab.  This particular story has the makings of an excellent bad, B-grade horror movie, so I hope you will enjoy it!

For those of you who don’t know, Arizona is an area of high traffic for illegal immigrants.  We get all kinds of people wandering into our country from other locations, stumbling through the desert looking for a better life in America.  Unfortunately, it means we also get some hefty drug trafficking.  The area where I do my field work is a high-traffic area, so I always make sure I have someone with me when I do field work.  I also like to have another person with me in case I get stuck in the mud in bottom of the pond and need to be pulled out (see my post about my field site if you don’t know why this is important!).  On the day in question, I had a friend with me, another environmental physiologist who works on insect eggs.  I’ll call her K for the sake of this story.

K and I made the 45 mile drive out to the pond.  We chatted about work and our lives on the way there and were in a generally good mood by the time we arrived.  I put on my very stylish chest waders (see image at right), and wandered out into the pond.

When I pull sticks out of the pond, it is common to find the father clinging to the bottom of the stick.  They frequently sit still for only a few seconds before dropping back into the pond.  Occasionally, one will hold on a bit longer and I’ll have to shake the stick a bit to get him off.  The emergent brooders are well-known for protecting the eggs they have fathered.  If you tap a stick with eggs on it, you can frequently get the water bug to rush out of the water and up the stick in an attempt to protect his eggs from predators.   They can actually be rather ferocious.

On this particular day, I pulled a stick out that had a male attached to it.  He didn’t come loose with my usual shaking method, so I wasn’t sure what to do.  I had a handful of sticks with eggs in the other hand, so I couldn’t just push him off the stick.  I poked him with one of the sticks in my other hand, certain that he would be startled and fall into the water.

Instead, he crawled up the other stick.  Fast.  Right toward my hand.  Doing that “How dare you mess with my kids!” behavior.  I started shaking the stick really hard, trying to knock him off, but he still kept coming for me.  Not wanting to be bitten (and not wanting him to screw up the eggs I’d harvested when he crawled over them), I whacked him gently with another stick and he fell into the water with a satisfying “plunk.”  I waded back out of the water with my sticks, and knelt on the bank to trim them down.

If you thought the story was over at this point, think again!  A few minutes into trimming sticks, I felt something scrabbling around my neck area, scrambling over the straps of my waders toward my head.  Something big and strong.  Something that felt suspiciously like a certain angry giant water bug that had already tried to attack me…  I asked K, “Whoa!  What’s on my neck?” as I reached up and flicked whatever was on my neck off.  I was horrified to see that what fell to the ground WAS the giant water bug!  He’d climbed all the way up my waders and had ended up inches from my jugular!  He was clearly out for my blood.  :)  I may have let out a little shriek of horror and K laughed.  She knew full well that she would have done exactly the same thing if it had come after her.

So I grabbed the persistent little guy and tossed him back into the pond, thinking that was that.  I went back to stick trimming and egg counting, but a few moments later, I heard K laughing.  “He’s coming back!” she said.  I didn’t believe her, but I turned around anyway, ready to be a sucker since she’d already made fun of me that morning.  Sure enough, there was the darned water bug, climbing out of the pond, onto the shore, and headed right for me.  Again.  Now this is where I think the B-grade horror movie would come in.  If the water bug was a couple of feet long, it would have been perfect – me sitting on the ground, helplessly scrambling to get up, while the giant water bug bore down on me!  You’d see him crawl onto me and a few scenes later, some random hiker would find my dead body, sucked completely dry, as ominous music played in the background.

In reality, I picked the bug back up and chucked him back into the pond.  AGAIN.  Surely he was finished trying to exact his revenge for stealing his eggs from him.  Hadn’t I clearly demonstrated that I was the bigger, stronger opponent in this confrontation?

Apparently not.  A few minutes later, the bug came for me again.  He crawled out of the pond once more and headed straight for me.  This time, I was finished with my sticks and was watching the shore.  I saw him emerge and let him get a couple feet out of the water, marveling at his tenacity, before I picked him back up, yet again, and tossed him back into the water,  yet again.  If there was an award for the most protective giant water bug father, this would clearly be the winner.  He was quite determined.

K and I packed our stuff up and went back to the car.  Who knows.  The bug may have crawled out again and started looking for me one more time, but we weren’t there to see it.  We joked all the way home about the incident.  We kept imagining the bug clinging to the back of the seat, ready to reach his raptorial forelegs around the headrest as he grappled with me, his sworn enemy, as I drove home.  That was one persistent little bug!

In the horror movie version of this incident, the giant bug would have indeed clung to the back of the seat, then slipped out of the car and into the house while I unpacked my gear.  He would waited until dark, after I’d fallen asleep, then attacked.  Neighbors would notice that they hadn’t seen me for a few days and call the police.  An officer would calmly open the door and jerk back in horror as a gigantic beast rushed past him, eager to find new victims as he wandered the streets of Tucson…

_______________

Text and images copyright © 2009 DragonflyWoman.wordpress.com