Bugs are Good, Bad, beautiful, or ugly, and some have big eyes and sharp teeth!

I hope we never come face to face with a bug that big, bad and ugly, but the way things are going, bugs might become insects on steroids if we don't stop raping the planet. Researchers estimate that there are more than 10 million insect species buzzing and crawling on planet Earth, but only 1 million have been officially named and described. Some pollinate our crops, help us digest food and kill the bad bugs. But some bring us pain, sickness and death.

BACTERIA ► The bacteria in your gut are beneficial, but bad bacteria can make you sick or kill you with diseases such as Cholera, Diarrhea, Gonorrhea, Leprosy, Meningitis, Plague, Pneumonia, Sepsis, Syphilis, Tetanus, Typhoid, Tuberculosis, urinary tract infections and Wound Infections. Diseases caused by bacteria are the second leading cause of death in the world. The first is heart failure.

BEETLES ►When agitated or attacked, Blister Beetles release a poison that can cause blisters, stomach pain, nausea, vomiting, bloody urine, diarrhoea, internal bleeding, kidney failure, coma and death.

BUTTERFLIES ► You probably don't like caterpillars eating your flowers, but without caterpillars there wouldn't be any butterflies to help the bees pollinate the flowers in your garden. And butterflies are beautiful!

CATERPILLARS ► The Assassin Caterpillar is the most dangerous caterpillar in the world. Their spear-like bristles carry a powerful anticoagulant venom. Touching one bristle can cause vomiting, internal bleeding and rupture of the red blood cells. Touching more than one bristle can cause internal haemorrhaging, renal failure and death.

FIRE ANTS ► are extremely aggressive and swarm when disturbed. Their sting is very painful and can kill you due to anaphylactic shock. They are native to South America but have migrated to other countries as well.

FLEAS & FLIES ► are blood-sucking vampires. Fleas caused the Black Plague, which killed one-third of the people in Europe in the Dark Ages. Flies can carry pathogens on their bodies and in their faeces, contaminating food. And who can look at maggots without saying "Yuck!"

HORNETS ► Asian giant hornets are dangerous to honey bees, not humans, but their venom is toxic. If you disturb their nest, run and keep on running because multiple stings can trigger anaphylactic shock or even death.

KISSING BUGS ► are so named because they bite us around our mouths. The blood-sucking kiss releases a parasite into our bloodstream. Rubbing the bite can push the parasite into your skin, causing an irregular heart beat and death.

LOCUST ► swarms are infamous for devastating crops for people and livestock, causing famine and starvation in places that depend on their crops for survival.

MOSQUITOS ► are vampires that inject disease-causing viruses and parasites, such as malaria, a serious and sometimes fatal disease, into your body. They are responsible for more deaths than all the man-eating animals in the world combined… drill, baby, drill!

SCORPION ► Stings are painful but rarely life-threatening, but the venom of the North American Bark scorpion can cause serious symptoms. There are about 100 species in the world that produce venom serious enough to be fatal.

SPIDERS ► like the Brown Recluse and Black Widow can cause serious reactions. The poison of the Black Widow is 15 times stronger than rattlesnake venom, and the bite of a Brown Recluse isn't noticed until an hour later when the pain and inflammation make themselves known with a large, circular sore.

TICKS ► like mites, are cousins of spiders. Unlike spiders, however, ticks carry parasites. Deer ticks, for example, can carry bacteria that cause Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever. In North America, some ticks secrete a toxin in their saliva that can cause paralysis of the muscles that control breathing!

TSETSE FLIES ► carry a parasite that can cause sleeping sickness. It can cause death if left untreated. They are indigenous to Africa, but global warming might cause them to spread to other tropical areas.

VIRUSES ► can cause life-threatening diseases like Anthrax, Cholera, Ebola, Flu, Gonorrhea, Lyme Disease, Syphilis, SARS, Tetanus and Zika. Dead or alive, they are the zombies of the microscopic world. They can't move, eat, reproduce, breathe, pee or poop, but they can transform your cells into virus-producing factories that multiply their numbers at warp speed and mutate in a heartbeat.

WASPS ► are not known to carry human diseases, but the venom in their sting can cause allergic, sometimes fatal reactions.

BUGS AND EVOLUTION

Bugs are evidence of the functional advantages of natural selection. The dragonfly, for example, evolved into an exceptionally beautiful but fierce carnivore and therefore a good survivor. Its four wings beat independently so it can manoeuvre with phenomenal dexterity, accelerate rapidly, stop on a dime, hover, fly backwards, and switch direction in a flash.

Cockroaches are some of the most adaptable creatures on Earth. They can tolerate climates from Arctic cold to tropical heat, hold their breath for hours, go without food for a month, and live without their head because they breathe through holes in their body segments. And their high resistance to radiation means they could inherit the Earth if we destroy ourselves in a nuclear war. These ugly critters are not particularly dangerous to us, but the only good cockroach is a dead cockroach!

The scary bug you met at the beginning of this article was the artist's creation of a praying mantis on steroids. The real mantis isn't that scary or as beautiful as a dragonfly. Their appearance, however, makes it obvious that they, like the dragonfly, have evolved into very aggressive carnivores. Those arms can grab prey faster than Matt Dillon can draw his gun.

BUGS AND EXTINCTION

You might be shrugging your shoulders, saying… "Okay, bugs are good, bad, beautiful or ugly. So what?" Well, that opens the door to the next phase of my article. The pictorial/textual tour is over. Now it's time to explore the possibility that bugs could cause the extinction of humans if we don't stop raping the planet. The fate of insects and humans is like a coin that reads You lose! on both sides. If the number of bugs decreases, we die. If their numbers increase, we die. Let's break it down.

Humans are putting bugs at risk of extinction by cutting down forests, spraying crops with insecticides, polluting the air with carbon monoxide and so forth. But bugs might put humans at risk of extinction because global warming allows disease-carrying insects to live longer, reproduce more frequently and occupy wider tropical areas. Bacteria, for example, typically produce one billion daughters in less than 10 hours!

With an estimated 10 quintillion (10) bugs crawling, creeping, and buzzing around the world, insects rule our planet. And that doesn't include 48,000 species of spiders, which are technically arachnids, not insects. That means there are approximately 1.4 billion bugs for every person on Earth — they could collectively squash us any time they please. It's no wonder that with those kinds of numbers, they play a vital role in our ecosystem, and any calamity that might befall them due to climate change or cosmic disaster is intrinsically linked to the fate of mankind.

We need healthy forests if we want to protect our climate. As the climate changes, forests become more vulnerable to insect outbreaks, droughts and wildfires. Simultaneously, when our forests are destroyed, their carbon is released back into the atmosphere, further impacting climate change.

Insects clean up waste products, feed us directly and indirectly through pollination, and provide new medicines — bugs are the foundation of the food chain for fish, birds, mammals and each other. If every insect on the planet stopped what it is doing, growing food for humans would quickly become impossible. If we don't stop what we are doing, an apocalypse for bugs and humans is imminent.

Natural variation alone cannot explain the dramatic warming trends of the last fifty years. But when we include greenhouse gas emissions, we find the smoking gun is our dependence on fossil fuel energy.

BUGS AND ENERGY

Four billion years ago, Earth's atmosphere was unsuitable for life as we know it today. There was no oxygen, so organisms had to use the minerals in the ocean to generate energy without oxygen. Then, about 2.7 billion years ago, a little blue-green bug called Cyanobacteria evolved the ability to generate energy from sunlight using photosynthesis and the energy they generated from water by splitting H2O water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen.

The oxygen released by Cyanobacteria gradually oxygenated the oceans. Then the oxygen in the oceans started escaping into the atmosphere, where it reacted with methane. As more oxygen escaped, methane was eventually displaced, and oxygen became a major component of our atmosphere. Voila! We can breathe! These little blue-green guys are still releasing oxygen and hydrogen as a byproduct of photosynthesis. Today we call them algae, the most widespread and ancient life-forms on Earth. If you're once again saying "So what?" let me shift gears to…

WHAT IF?

Our fossil fuels are being rapidly consumed. If there's nothing to replace them, the world's economy will collapse. But rising global temperatures are triggering the growth of algae, which you now know is Cyanobacteria. You also know that algae produces hydrogen from water. The water molecule isn't easy to crack. It takes more energy to pry water molecules apart than the hydrogen you get to burn as fuel. But Cyano Bugs have been splitting water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen for 2.7 billion years and doing it for free.

If we could harvest massive blooms of Cyano Bugs, we'd be free of our dependence on fossil fuel energy. Unless we, like Frankenstein, create an Alga Bloom Monster…yikes!

Direction's Weekly Writing Challenge > Open Voice #1

Direction's Weekly Writing Challenge: Open Voice #1 No theme. No limits. Just your words and a chance to be featured by Direction

Submission Guidelines — Direction Write for Direction: Submission Guidelines