Metamorphosis: A Pollinator’s Perspective

In classic pollinator fashion, my interest in pollinators happened unexpectedly.

I had just begun a trip in Japan, when I saw a giant wasp, the biggest I’d ever seen. I was sitting in a small, empty park just outside the buzz of the pachinko lounges and electronics stores in Akihabara, Tokyo. As I ducked to avoid its flight path, my partner leaned towards the flowers behind us for a closer look. He laughed, exclaiming that it was actually a hummingbird!

My feeling about this flying creature promptly went from “Get away from me!” to “Wow that’s the cutest little bird I’ve ever seen!” 

Now I was leaning in closer too, as it hovered in front of a flower, reaching its long tongue out to feed on some nectar. I noticed how its striped yellow and black wings moved so fast that it looked like it was floating. My partner turned to the internet to learn more about this bird, so tiny it felt improbable. That’s when he discovered this was not even a bird, but a moth! A hummingbird hawk-moth to be precise, named because it can hover mid-air to feed on nectar much like a hummingbird would. What I thought was a tongue was a proboscis, not too different from what a mosquito would use to suck my blood.

Apparently these moths are among the few diurnal moth species. Even so, their sightings are “relatively uncommon, not because they aren’t there, but because we frequently aren’t looking.”

My feelings about the creature shifted yet again, now to disappointment. I mean, who cares about moths, right?

We left the park and ventured into the neighbourhood known as the geek capital of the world. Despite the flashing lights outside manga bookstores and the dozens of young women dressed in maid costumes advertising cosplay cafes, I couldn’t get over how the exact same striped critter brought out three totally different experiences in my mind, based solely on what I thought it was. 

This piqued my interest in hawk moths. I followed my sudden, newfound interest and was surprised to learn that the intoxicatingly fragrant flowers on my favourite trees, plumeria, have evolved to specifically attract them.

Moths pollinate much like bees — essentially by inadvertently transferring pollen that has attached itself to their fuzzy bodies from one flower to another as they forage for food. But until quite recently, most research and attention has been devoted to understanding bees as pollinators. This is slowly changing, however, especially as some studies are beginning to show that moths transport pollen from a wider variety of plants than bees, making them more “efficient” pollinators. 

The American inventor and futurist Buckminster Fuller wrote that “there is nothing in a caterpillar that tells us it’s going to be a butterfly.” He could just as well have said there is nothing in a caterpillar that tells us we will have gardens that smell like heaven.

Trust me when I say I never in a million years thought I’d be learning from insects. But the more I listened to my own instincts, the more I found kinship with these other beings who follow their intuitions. When we do that, pollination ensues. And it is a gift to the world.

There are an astounding 350,000 known pollinator species in the world; far too many to ever meaningfully understand in a single lifetime. But what I’ve learned about a small fraction of these pollinators has turned my worldview, and self-awareness, quite literally upside down.

I’m sharing those lessons with you here because I strongly believe that pollinators can teach us everything we need to know about a life well lived.