Just

Have you ever wondered how many bugs you kill in one day?

I'm not trying to be gross or silly or anything; I'm being completely serious.

The thought occurred to me as I was driving home tonight. Here in the south, on summer nights, ---especially on country back roads where there is not much traffic--- bugs come out and fly, hop, crawl, flutter, buzz, and drift across the road and inevitably, but usually always wind up splatting against my car as I make my way home. I must kill tens, if not hundreds of bugs during a summer drive home at night. And what about when I cut the grass? I have about four acres of grass to cut. That's four acres of grass metropolis for bugs. Ants, grasshoppers, crickets, spiders, ticks, worms, just to name a few; they're there going about their daily business when along come the steel tornadoes. The bugs' skyscrapers of grass shredding and being blown around violently into a vortex of destruction under the mammoth blades. Many bugs make it out unscathed, but still many more die from severe blunt trauma and smushing.

To us, we're just going about our day, doing the things we do without much thought to the rest of the living things around us. We rationalize that they are just bugs, or more than likely, we go without really thinking about them at all. The grass must be cut, and we must have transportation. Too bad for the bugs. They're too small and insignificant for us larger lifeforms to even notice or care about.

What if large moving machinery the size of several city blocks randomly took out entire neighborhoods, and we were left helpless to do anything about it, other than continue to go about living on in our existence?

This is what the bugs have to contend with.

But how do they contend with it? They reproduce like crazy.

You think there are a lot of people on this planet? Well, there's roughly 6.8 billion of us here.

That's a lot... to us.

For insects that's nothing. At any time, it is estimated that there are some 10 quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) individual insects alive.

That's more than 1.4 BILLION BUGS for every ONE person.

So I guess it doesn't make a difference how many bugs I kill in one day, one month, one year, or my whole lifetime. There's just so many of them, it will never even put a dent in their numbers. Several hundred of them killed while driving, or thousands killed by cutting the grass is insignificant compared to their total number.

No wonder they are thought of really as just bugs.