Whole, giant hives of squick!

Doing some publisher support today, in a small way—well, they took a chance on my work, the least I can do is drop by the odd loop day and say hi—and one of my old friends there referred to me as the Science Nerd. It’s not an insult; I’m proud to claim that title. Thing is, it made me realize that I haven’t written anything particularly nerdish in a bit. So I migrated over to the overloaded science section in my RSS feeder, and found...

Scientists claiming that termites are “social cockroaches.”

I nearly lost my lunch.

Not entirely sure I could explain that so-extreme reaction. Termites have never affected me that way before! I don’t exactly like termites, or insects generally, with the exception of those six-legged sea creatures cooked and swimming in drawn butter, but, at least from a distance, I can appreciate the design of some of them. I even appreciate some insects, the ones I know are beneficial, so long as they stay outside where they belong. But cockroaches?

No.

Not the little ones, not the giant sort we call waterbugs or Palmetto bugs out here, none of them. A cockroach is a pest is a pestilence, and must be destroyed—unless it’s a giant outdoor one and it really is out of doors, in which case it’s sometimes easier simply to run. And if you think I’m kidding, then I hope that someday you’re out when the damned things take flight, wearing shorts and a tank top or some similarly abbreviated outfit. They will knock into you!

Nasty things.

And let’s not even think about the Madagascar Hissing Cockroach, okay? (Though at least they don’t fly.) There’s an old theory that fear of sharks is hard-wired into the human brain, from the days when we, too, were sea-creatures. Perhaps cockroaches share some ancestor, or perhaps they give off ultrasonic threat-signals; whatever the reason, a great many more people are disturbed by cockroaches than seems logical, and I’m among the more severe sufferers.

They make my skin crawl. And apparently, it’s enough to label something a cockroach—because termites never used to squick me out! Actually, I’ve always found them rather interesting. They build amazing structures, at least some of them eat literally twenty-four hours a day, archaeologists and environmental scientists find them useful... Do a search for termites and “biomolecular archaeology”; you’ll be amazed. And, just because I like the article title, check out “Termite Guts Can Save the Planet”

But now that they’re being classified as cockroaches, I can’t think of them without getting queasy. Ain’t the power of suggestion a wonderful thing?

What I find strangest about this is that I know the mantids are related to roaches, but I don’t have that same response to them; in fact, I kind of like the praying mantis. Why, then, should I be so freaked out about what’s really nothing more than a slight shifting in classification that puts termites in pretty much the same degree of relationship to the so-scary cockroach that the mantid has?

Maybe I’m neophobic? No, that can’t be it; I like (some) new things. Maybe I’m just disturbed by people messing with the classifications? No, it’s probably not that, either; this is hardly the first re-classification I’ve been around to see. Maybe it’s just that damnable phrase. “Social cockroaches.”

Yep. By the full-body shudder as I typed those words, that’s the issue. Imagine if cockroaches learned from their newly acknowledged cousins and ganged up on us!

Oh, ick. I really wish I hadn’t said that...

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