The Stinger: marvel of evolution

I went camping last weekend in the Pisgah National Forest and Mitchell State Park. It was a much needed break from school - I'd been working 18+ hour days for three weeks without a day off and had to get in some mountains. I pointed the car west towards Asheville, NC, the only town east of Denver where I'd ever considering living long-term.

I went solo, visionquest-style, parking the car in a bank parking lot in the town of Old Fort (named for the roots of the town - an Revolution-era Cherokee fighting outpost) and walking off into the woods with a backpack. There are few greater feelings than trudging off on your own away from civilization with nothing to do and nowhere to be for two days.

Anyways, now to the point of my post: after I found a good "home base" spot to pitch my tent at the foot of Mt. Mitchell, I starting unpacking the non-essentials for climbing the mountain into the tent. While doing this a hornet got into the tent.

I would've loved to have been a fly on the wall (or tree, given the location) to watch what happened. I dropped everything and ran like a madman out of the tent, hat in hand swinging wildly at the wind, just generally freaking the fuck out. I'm terrified of stinging insects because I get stung a lot and usually not for any good reason (unless you call Karma a good reason), so I REALLY make sure to get out of those bastards' way. The hornet left and I didn't get stung.

Hiking by yourself lets you think. On my way up Mitchell, I thought about my encounter with the hornet earlier, and about stinging insects in general. Then it hit me: the stinger is perhaps the most amazing evolutionary development ever in terms of evening up inter-species conflict.

Let's take a look at my situation to flesh this out a bit: I am a human being, a homo sapien to those of you not afraid of gay jokes. Our species is a highly evolved bunch of mammals, a group that ditched insects to start the long slog towards world domination about 400 million years ago. Our brains are so advanced that they've allowed members of our species to travel to the friggin' Moon. As a particular example of my species I'm well within human norms: I stand just over six feet tall and weigh about 200 pounds.

The hornet, by comparison, just can't keep up. It's species has remained virtually unchanged for over a hundred million years. It's "brain" is really just a simple, non-vertibrate nervous system, that functions almost entirely on pre-programmed instinct rather than innovation and decision-making. What I'm trying to say is, they ain't going to the Moon anytime soon. On top of that, they're only about an inch long and weigh about a tenth of an ounce, one 74th of my height and one 32,000th of my mass.

Alright oddsmakers: who should be running from who?

Behold the stinger. Marvel of evolution.

Then, while thinking about that, I got within 10 feet of a black bear. But that's for another post.