Bob Mount: Snakes, insects don’t bug me

Someone recently referred to me as a “bug man.” He was pretty close to being accurate; my M.S. degree was in entomology. He could have called me a “snake man,” which would have been even more accurate, because my Ph.D. was in herpetology, and three of my pets are snakes.

I developed an interest in critters of all varieties at a very young age. When I was 6, I was fascinated with the behavior of tumblebugs, which, unfortunately, no longer occur in our area. I and my companions would attach threads to the hind legs of green Junebugs and reward them for their flying performances with a ripened fig or peach.

Praying mantises, which were called devil’s horses, fascinated me, but I heeded the warnings of elders not to approach them closely, lest they spit in my eyes, causing blindness.

Centipedes and millipedes are not insects, but belong to the same order, Orthropoda. We called them “thousand legs.” Should one be encountered, we were careful to keep our mouths closed, fearful it would count our teeth resulting in certain death, or so we’d been told.

Once common but now rarely seen are the large, hairy predatory robber flies we called “fly in front of you bugs.” When walking along a dirt road or path, a robber fly would often be encountered. Upon approaching one, it would take off and light about ten feet away, over and over, resulting in the vernacular name we applied to the insect.

Much of our spare time was spent wading in a nearby creek catching snakes and turtles. Two species of snakes, queen snakes and midland water snakes, occurred, neither of which is venomous. But we had been warned that a third species occurred, the venomous blunt-tailed water moccasin. Actually, individuals of both of the aforementioned species occasionally had blunt tails, probably the result of a disease known as tail rot. Nevertheless, we refrained from attempting to catch any water snake that did not have a pointed tail.

Dragon flies and damsel flies were common and were called “snake doctors.” One, a blue-winged damsel fly, we were told, was a specialist which restricted its practice to the treatment of water moccasins. We were especially watchful when this snake doctor was present.

Bob Mount is emeritus professor of zoology and entomology at Auburn University and writes a weekly column for the Opelika-Auburn News.