Zombie Earwigs

  Earwigs!  Have you ever stopped to wonder about these little critters?  Nope? Well, don't feel bad.  Most folks don't.  I do, however, as I ponder most critters.  I ponder about the whys and wherefores of each thing that creepy-crawls, flies or swims around the Bayou.  Why?  I don't know but maybe it is just because they are there.  The earwig just happened to be crawling around under a bag of potting soil and begged to be pondered.

  First, where in the world did this thing get its name?  Break that word down and you have ear and wig.  The bug does not have ears like ours (has tympanal organs but not ears) and it definitely does not wear a wig.  That procedure was no help, whatsoever.  So pondering the name became a moot point and was soon abandoned.  The critter was not.  I watched the little one scurry about as it searched for a place to hide.  I already knew that the earwigs eat other insects and sometimes a bit of plant matter so that pondering was out.  I knew that they are mostly nocturnal as it provides some protection...another no go.  Aha!  The folklore!  There is a pondering point!

  There is a bit of folklore that still lingers in some folks' brains.  "Earwigs seek out human ears and bore holes through the eardrum to infest the human brain."  What??  Well, that is ridiculous!  Where did that bit of hogwash originate and why?  Well, it seems that recorded history of the 1700s relates people were sure that the critters had a fondness for human ears and eventually brains.   Their gnawing away at the brain gave great pain and potentially death.  This was a common way that doctors of the day explained migraines.  An occasional discovery of an earwig actually being in the ear did nothing more than keep the myth alive.  Why would an earwig ever seek out a human ear?  Commonsense would tell us that the critter was seeking refuge from an otherwise terrifying situation of finding itself on a human in the first place.  Most reports of an earwig even being near an ear come from those camping out in the earwigs' territory.  The poor, hapless critter was lost and scared and, well, here was this handy dark hole in which to hide.  The earwig had no intention of being trapped in earwax and surely did not wish to eat a brain.  (Leave that for the zombies.  Earwigs are not zombies.)  

  Yeah, my ponderings take weird turns at time but, after long nights with an frail dog and even longer days cleaning up after him, I need some sort of distraction.  The earwig provided that so I happily accepted.