Last year, I went to Stanford’s campus with Liz’s parents and a family friend, just to walk around and see the school. While we were there, we had to dodge a handful of particularly wooly inchworms hanging from the campus trees. They seemed to be all over. One of them even hitched a ride on my shoulder as we walked into Liz’s building and into her lab.
A week or so later, Liz and I went to the art museum on campus, and it was like a minefield: you couldn’t walk anywhere without having to dodge hundreds of silken strands, each with a wooly inchworm at the end. It was almost scary. We saw them on the surfaces of every sidewalk, and they were absolutely wall-to-wall in the shade. There are waist-high painted cement pylons at the ends of the pedestrian-only roads, to keep cars out. On the shadow-side of each of these, there were hundreds of these fuzzy worms. Infestation doesn’t begin to describe it.
This past winter, when Liz and I visited my sister in Denver, we drove up to Keystone to go snowboarding. On the way back, my sister pointed out the huge swaths of dying trees on either side of the highway. Apparently, there’s a huge problem that will cause entire populations of this type of tree to die out within the next few years. The cause: beetle kill. All those thousands of trees will be destroyed simply by beetles.
And today, in sharp contrast to last year, I had to dodge dozens of silken strands with inchworms at their ends (not the fuzzy kind). Right outside my house, as I was walking back and forth to my car. This wasn’t a real problem last year, not this far into the hills.
Do the bugs know something we don’t? What’s going on?
About a two weeks ago, I noticed that someone had parallel-parked their Honda Insight in front of the building next to my office, where parking has always been diagonal (like the rest of the neighborhood). Mind you, there are no lines painted on the pavement, but I’ve worked here for a year and it’s always been diagonal parking.