Before writing this story, I closed my eyes and tried to remember the last place I had been to with absolutely no signs of human garbage. After nearly two hours of seeming like I came up with the best excuse to take a long nap at the office, I had nothing. An expected result considering the volume of rubbish humans generate and how we deal with it. In a publication aptly entitled “What a Waste 2.0: A Global Snapshot of Solid Waste Management to 2050”, researchers from the World Bank estimated that we produced 2.01 billion tonnes of municipal solid waste in 2016. A conservative estimate from the same publication suggests that at least one-third of that waste is not managed with environmental considerations. More alarming, this number is forecasted to grow to about 3.40 billion tonnes a year by 2050. For perspective on this sad statistic (with some emotional cushioning), by 2050, our annual waste will weigh as much as 100 billion adult Labrador retrievers. All this trash flows abundantly into every corner of our planet, from the remotest oceans to our neighbourhood streets, with devastating environmental consequences. Over eight million metric tonnes of plastic waste is dumped in our oceans each year. Microplastics choke marine life before making their way into our bodies when we consume various forms of seafood. A study in Australia found that humans are consuming enough plastic each week to make a credit card!
Trash is everywhere. With my penchant for moving painfully slow on nature walks, I began to see life in our discarded waste. Nestled amidst plastic and glass, tiny six- and eight-legged innovators demonstrated ingenuity and resilience at their finest. From spiders in garbage cans to weaver ants in beer bottles, resourceful little invertebrates had upcycled human garbage into something useful for themselves.
Weaver ants (Oecophylla smaragdina) are one of the most dominant creatures on Earth. They grow into colonies of up to half a million ants that take over tropical forest canopies with leafy strongholds. These great queendoms in the canopy have humble beginnings, with a mated queen usually finding a quiet crevice to lay her first clutch of eggs. On a remote beach on Havelock Island in the Andamans, we stumbled upon a vast patch of garbage that appeared to have washed ashore from lands far and near. About 20 metres from the shoreline, I saw a beer bottle that looked rather animated on the inside. A closer look revealed nearly a hundred curious eyes and antennae pointed in my direction. The abandoned beer bottle was the founding site of a new weaver ant colony. The translucence of the bottle presented an inside view of the rows and rows of eggs and helpful worker ants tending to them. From the mouth of the bottle, multiple lines of ants explored their surroundings; some had even begun the construction of leafy nests on nearby trees. Cover photo: Weaver ants emerge from a nest they created inside a discarded glass beer bottle. The bottle was a safe haven for the weaver ant queen to begin her colony.
All spiders produce silk; even the ones that do not build webs. Jumping spiders, for instance, use silk for a variety of reasons: as a safety line when they are jumping from one spot to another; to create protective egg sacs; and to build safe retreats for themselves. Myrmarachne plataleoides, a species of jumping spider that mimics the weaver ant, typically build their retreats on the surface of leaves. They line the surface with a thick coating of silk creating an elongated igloo-like structure. The spider then uses this silken refuge to rest when it is moulting (sheds its skin). In a rather bizarre turn of events, I found an M. plataleoides setting up its silken retreat inside an abandoned plastic soap cover. The crumbling plastic packaging presented the spider with a rather secure space with minimal entry points for aerial predators like wasps.
Caterpillars of the bagworm moth are among the finest artists in the natural world. They are self-styled art installations perched on branches, walls, wires and pretty much any surface that can hold a few grams of living art. The most popular visual most people have of these caterpillars is one with rows of sticks arranged around them like a wooden pan flute. In their larval stage, these caterpillars use a combination of sticky silk and any material they find in their habitat to create protective cases around themselves. However, these little body art enthusiasts happily adapt to any material that can be locally sourced, ranging from different shaped plant debris to abandoned snail shells and bits of plastic. One individual that lived outside our home in Bangalore had passed through an irresponsibly discarded bean bag. The result was a bagworm moth caterpillar that looked like a pocket-sized snowman.
Spiders are an incredibly adaptive bunch. There are species of spiders like the Himalayan jumping spider that lives in the freezing, high-altitude regions of the Himalayas, and there are wolf spiders that live in the blistering heat of the Thar Desert. Some groups of spiders have also adapted to thrive in urbanised spaces. Spiders from the Uloboridae family are commonly found around homes in India — typically in corners. These urbanised web-building wonders construct orb-webs to catch their prey. Unlike orb-weavers in the Araneidae family, Uloborids do not produce a gluey substance to make their webs sticky. Instead, they rely on woolly silk (cribellate silk) produced in a specialised organ called the cribellum. This woolly silk layered onto their orb-webs creates a highly effective net to capture small flying prey like fruit flies. A Uloborid at a resort on Havelock Island decided that an abandoned barbecue box (fashioned from an old cooking oil can) was the best place for its hunting operations. Interestingly, the box was close to the wet wastebasket of the resort, which attracted a host of potential meals for the spider.
As pollinators, bees are an integral part of many ecosystems, including urban ones. Stingless bees are a regular sight in wall crevices of cities like Bangalore. Tiny buzzing drones busily scuttle around the city for queen and colony. These fascinating creatures have also adapted to urban structures like concrete walls. On a routine morning coffee on the terrace of my home building, I noticed a few stingless bees buzz past me into a corner wall. After following the workers for a couple of minutes, I found that the bees had set up shop in an abandoned wire box. The bees had fashioned an upcycled home between the tubing for the wires and remnant electrical tape. These stories of innovative uses for trash are simultaneously saddening and heartening. While it is gut-wrenching to see a caterpillar covered in beanbag filling, it is intriguing to see such tiny creatures find clever ways of reusing material considered waste by humans. These instances serve as a reminder for us to do everything we can to stop our trash levels from reaching the weight of 100 billion Labrador retrievers. They also do well to remind us that inspiration for positive lifestyle changes like recycling and upcycling can come from tiny innovators that live in and around our homes.
