ISSUE #14: Please Enjoy Some Bug-Centric Weather Folklore

And a woolly worm race!

It’s November now, and where I’m at in New York the days are officially cold. The shift from mild fall to chilly winter means a lot of us are wondering what the cold months will bring. We scour our weather apps and our news channels to see when we should switch out our summer t-shirts for winter sweaters, when we should start making soups, when we should buy our tickets home. 

It’s becoming increasingly clear in our era of climate change that weather is difficult to predict. But it’s always been that way. Before we had radar and mathematical prediction models we had other methods: clouds and wind and the leaves on the trees to tell us what was likely to happen the next day. We also had animals, who have always seemed to us to have some beastly intuition—how many stories have we heard of pets and livestock running to higher ground before an earthquake or a hurricane? 

Insects have also been used to predict the weather, their meteorological prognostications ranging from simple common sense to total rubbish. Bugs are inherently mysterious, their lives regimented according to some unknown plan, delicate and easily damaged. It would make sense if they had some innate, hidden knowledge of weather patterns so they’d know where and when to find shelter from, say, an incoming storm.