my instinct with creepie crawlies is always to scoop them up and let them go in the neighbourhood park, but not for nothing have i watched a lot of doctor who and the twilight zone. yesterday morning i found these minute longhorned beetles on our front door, new-hatched and wiggling (vide seven egg cases and only six insects — if someone is not a precocious vanguard gone to range the unknown world then in pace etc to the lone unborn.) i had no doubt that they would turn out to be dangerous and vicious mutant creatures of alien origin, that ought have been killed on sight but will now swell to a hundred times their size and lie in wait attacking schoolchildren and small dogs, multiplying and taking over the world and revealing themselves new masters of colony earth, and i will of course be interrogated by government scientists (but why didn’t you report it!) and reviled by humanity for bringing the scourge upon us. (galena h declared them elegant looking, and i comfort myself that if conquest by our insectoid overlords is unaverted they might as well be elegant ones.)

despite knowing no entomologist (one would like a theo stephanides as friend) identification was swift in coming with facebook’s cumulative two-cents: 天牛 is the common name in chinese, corresponding to a species (i know not exactly which) in the longhorn family, one apparently described by the great naturalist alfred wallace himself. vaughn then informs me they do indeed wreak havoc on earth, not as in a b movie plot, but that they are ruthless woodborers and are destroying the hardwood ash forests of the american northeast with every tick of the clock. when i said blithely that i was unconcerned because my front door is plastic he reproached me for a small-minded approach (“this small-minded approach has destroyed whole continents!“) in any case, when i went down to look again, all the beetles had gone (i felt a little like wilbur the time charlotte’s aeronautical children all went ballooning off into the blue.)

two days later, on the same spot on the door, i find one large and violently green grasshopper, watchful and sinister. perhaps my front door is marked with some invisible rune in insect language saying ‘here be sanctuary.’

**a longhorn, it turns out, is also the name of a kind of american cattle. the horns are uncannily like beetle antennae. (wouldn’t it be great if, in the way it was believed that the barnacle goose came from barnacles, cattle begin life as beetles?)