The moss wētā - highly camouflaged and often less than one centimetre long - is among the creatures featured in Lily Duval's new book Six-legged Ghosts: The Insects of Aotearoa
How did a Kiwi woman scared of bugs end up writing a book about them? Kim Knight talks to author and illustrator Lily Duval about Six-legged Ghosts and its call for greater insect appreciation.
We landed to a text from the neighbour. Our burglar alarm had gone off, but a property check revealed nothing untoward.
At home, the warning light for the backdoor flashed. And on the floor, near that door - a winged cockroach only slightly smaller than a mouse.
I stomped. Who wouldn’t?
“That’s a hard one,” answers Lily Duval. “I’m going to leave that to your discretion.”
Duval is an artist, author and staunch defender of insects - even the ones the rest of us hate. Yes, she agrees, there are invasive, introduced species of cockroach. And, she suspects, living in Lyttelton means she has fewer encounters with the burglar alarm-activating behemoths that plague Auckland homes.
Still: “Cockroaches are a pretty demonised species. I think, around the world, they even top spiders. But our New Zealand native cockroaches are not interested in coming inside your house. They’re hanging out on tree trunks, they’re breaking down organic matter in the forest and they’re a really vital part of the ecosystem. And I just recently learned there’s an alpine species that can freeze and come back to life - so they also have some crazy superpowers!”
Duval’s new book, Six-legged Ghosts: The Insects of Aotearoa, begins with a surprising confession.
“I am not a lifelong insect lover.”
Allergic to bees, afraid of creepy crawlies and plagued by dreams of ants invading her bed, Duval began confronting her entomophobia when she took up organic gardening (“There is no way to avoid being around bugs in an organic garden”). In Australia, she went hiking in the outback with the deliberate aim of exposing herself to her worst insect nightmares and was living in Senegal (she wanted to learn French somewhere interesting) when she embarked on the art project that eventually led to her new book.
When Duval set out to paint all of Aotearoa’s endangered and extinct species, she thought the focus would be birds. Instead, she was confronted with a long list of invertebrates and what she describes as a “slow, silent dying”. Duval began to learn more about the insects humans either don’t notice or actively avoid: “Animals whose only mark on the human world was a scientific paper or two and the name a taxonomist gave it”.
It’s her insect research (from frozen cockroaches to sexually acrobatic damselflies to a psyllid named for a hobbit) that forms the backbone of Radio NZ’s Critter of the Week show. Some of that makes its way into the new book, but Six-legged Ghosts is not so much a natural history lesson, as a challenge. Put simply, Duval wants us to better appreciate insects.
“I know statistics aren’t the thing that moves people, but with insects, the numbers are quite fascinating.”
Only 1-3 per cent of insect species, for example, could be classed as pests.
“That means the vast majority of them are out there kind of for our benefit, working away thanklessly, slaving away for our beautiful ecosystems. They’re pollinating, they’re breaking down waste; insect larvae in streams are really important, they’re filtering our water . . . "
More statistics - 80 per cent of food production depends on some kind of insect pollination. And in New Zealand, where the first honey bee hives were only introduced in 1839, that meant flies.
“Flies are incredibly important pollinators in New Zealand,” says Duval.
Meanwhile: “When you shrink in horror from a mass of maggots swarming over a piece of meat,” writes Duval, “try to bear in mind they are doing exactly what we need them to - breaking down dead matter and recycling the nutrients . . . a world without insects to break down the dead would not be a pleasant place.”
So why do insects have a PR problem?
“I think it’s their ‘otherness’,” says Duval. “They have so many legs, their bodies are put together in ways that we can’t even comprehend. Some of them have ears on their forelegs, or multiple brains. There’s something unrelatable about them - even that name ‘invertebrate’ - they have an external shell.
“And I think there is a hygiene thing, which is a real concern because some insects can cause a lot of suffering to people, and there’s definitely an element of the power of insects when they get together en masse. An individual insect is conquerable, but when they are all together . . .”
There are more than one million named species of insects around the world (some scientists believe there could be up to 30 million species in total) and around 20,000 of them are found in Aotearoa. By contrast, we’re home to 2500 species of spider (technically not insects), 1400 species of slugs and snails (also technically not insects) and just 250 species of bird.
And yet, we love pīwakawaka more than peripatus. Kākapo are way more famous than the Cromwell chafer beetle. And the extinct Stephen’s Island wren always gets more press than the extinct Mecodema punctellum - last seen on the same island habitat in 1931, pronounced extinct in 1997, and recently reimagined back into life via a Duval painting.
“A lot of our more relatable or charismatic species have either disappeared, or are quite invisible because they’re nocturnal and they’re camouflaged,” says Duval. “We just don’t get that much opportunity to encounter some of our native insect species, outside of the butterflies.”
She suggests the tide is, slowly, turning. Kids appear to have a natural curiosity about insects, but Duval says adults can redevelop that interest.
“People need access to the outdoors, but what’s beautiful about insects is that can just be your backyard. Let things go a little. If things are a little bit less mown or trimmed, you’d be surprised what will come back.”
Having someone to “impart enthusiasm” is also helpful, she says.
“I did a job with the Department of Conservation last year on the Paparoa Track . . . as part of it, we took groups of hut users out on night walks to look at bugs. A lot of people weren’t that interested, but it kind of grew into a pack mentality. We ended up with groups of 15 or 20 people and people got more and more enthusiastic as the trip went on.”
Bug-loving New Zealanders are, she says, especially lucky.
“It’s an insect-lover’s paradise. You can go out and observe or interact with our species, without that fear that they’re going to do you some harm.”
Duval hopes that, one day, invertebrates will be as cherished as birds.
“My understanding is that the kākapo, for example, weren’t particularly loved. If you go back to the 1970s, nobody would have really known what they were. People thought they were a bit smelly and weird. So there have been transformations in wider societal attitudes to birds.”
In 2022, the Entomological Society of New Zealand borrowed a marketing plan from the birds, and launched Bug of the Year. The first competition attracted 6000 votes; last year it received almost 17,000. Duval is a member of the organising team. She confesses to casting in favour of the peripatus or “velvet worm” - a personal protest against the poster-child charm of the eventual winner, the kahukura red admiral butterfly.
“I voted for peripatus because I think they’re incredible. They’re sometimes called ‘walking worms’. They shoot a slime thing at their prey which immobilises them and then starts breaking them down and then they eat the slime back up to recycle nutrients. They’re just cool.”
Six-legged Ghosts examines the cultural standing of insects - from the negative words we use to describe them (think ”creepy crawlies” and “plague”) to how they are depicted in art (including a 1665 engraving of a flea, the first illustration people ever saw of the misery-making insect). Duval draws on everything from te ao Māori to the work of amateur European entomologists to the role of museums and public institutions play in shaping our view of insects. At one point, she even invokes Alice in Wonderland - the girl who, once, famously, had a chat with a gnat. What would Duval’s first question be if she could suddenly talk to a fly?
“Mostly, I just want to be able to see through its eyes, that incredible compound eye structure . . . I would maybe want to know what we taste like? They’re landing on us and eating bacteria or whatever on our skin. That would be quite fascinating.
“I mean, how humancentric is this, but I’d love to see what we look like and what a fly’s experience of us is. Because I think they’re not very interested in us, really. We flatter ourselves that they’re here to annoy us!”
Six-legged Ghosts: The insects of Aotearoa by Lily Duval (Canterbury University Press, $55).
Kim Knight is an award-winning senior feature writer in the NZ Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special interest in food, environmental and arts reporting.
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