Explaining invasive species to toddlers

“They are dying. These are not good people,” says my daughter Marigold solemnly.

I nod.

“We put them in soap,” I tell her and her sister Juniper.

Marigold is 2 years old and sometimes it is difficult to decipher her speech. He forgets verbs. When she wants to be picked up, she shouts, “I’m carrying you!” And when I ask her for anything, she almost always responds with a resounding “WHY?” – just like she is now.

“They’re eating our plants, Gogo!” Juniper exclaims, deftly picking up the shiny beetle and tossing it into the bucket.

Throughout the summer and fall, our evenings had a certain order. The girls ate dinner and then we ate ice cream on the terrace. While they ate the sticky treats, I filled two small beach buckets with dish soap and water. I handed them the buckets and they each took an end of our bush cinquefoil, picking off the Japanese beetles and dropping them into the bubbles. They moved from plant to plant and I always hoped it would extend the time between dinner and bed.

At 4 years old, Juniper is fearless: she eagerly picks beetles from leaves. Marigold points to them and asks me to put them in her bucket. In the sun, the beetles take on a metallic, copper-green color. They’re easy to catch. I begin to feel bad about the murderous task I have given them, then I look at the yellow cinquefoil flowers in the shape of a circle – now like lace, a skeleton of old leaves and petals.

We collect them by the dozens.

“But why are we killing them?” – Marigold asks. He points to Daddy Longlegged resting on a nearby flower pot. – Will we get it?

“No, Gogo, let’s leave Mr. Skinny alone,” Juniper says. “He’s a good guy!”

I point out the honeybees and swallowtail bees on the sunset hyssop and coneflowers, the ladybugs on our penstemon and goldenrod – the other good guys.

“Japanese beetles are not native.” I say. “They are killing our plants!”

“But Why?” – Marigold asks.

“They’re not from here. They don’t belong here. They moved here from…”

“We’re moving Colorado!” was her reply.

WHEN I FIRST SAW IT on the bumper sticker that proudly read WYOMING NATIVE, I asked my mom if I was one too. I was 11 years old and figured I was taking my first steps in Wyoming as a child. I thought of 20 mph winds as winds, knew jackalopes weren’t real, and realized that in the West, distances aren’t measured in miles, but in hours. I called Coke “pop”.

“No, no, native means you were born there,” she explained.

I thought of Singapore, the country of my birth, a place full of orchids and warm air. A place I knew nothing about. That evening I looked it up in the large atlas on our coffee table. A small island in the South China Sea.

Soon after, I started hanging myself National Geographer maps around my room. I loved lying in bed and looking out at other worlds, imagining that I was a child somewhere far away from Wyoming. I traced the Nile on a map of ancient Egypt, and later that year my parents took me to the Ramesses II exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. I asked my mother if I could buy a little something in the gift shop, a necklace with a small scarab. She said no and I bought a scarab postcard instead. I later read that the ancient Egyptians considered scarabs—or “fantasy beetles,” as I called them—as a divine manifestation of the morning sun. They signified rebirth and transformation, and people wore them for good luck and protection.

I wasn’t a child who grew up visiting my parents’ homeland. My dad was a petroleum geologist, and we spent most of my childhood in the oil crisis, counting pennies, occasionally going to Denver for a long weekend at a hotel with a pool. I was 23 years old when I made my first trip to India. The first morning I was standing on the sidewalk, I saw a woman making Kolam designs in front of her house. I saw a rickshaw driver sleeping on the seat of his car. And people going to work, to school. It was a lifetime. I realized that for the first time in my life I was not in the minority. That morning on the street in India, I remember for the first time being surrounded by people who looked like me. For the first time I didn’t feel different.

But my joy was short-lived. Being a Wyoming girl through and through, I was surprised by the sound of car horns and the mosque calling to prayer. The noise and crowds made me run back to my aunt’s house. I needed silence and emptiness. I realized that I felt more comfortable in a bar in Medicine Bow, Wyoming than on this street in India. I got used to the silence and open space. I may not have been from Wyoming, but I didn’t know what to do with the city.

They signified rebirth and transformation, and people wore them for good luck and protection.

OF COURSEThe Japanese beetle is not a pest in its native Japan. It has natural predators there. He came to America by boat on an iris bulb around 1912. Insects spread quickly, partly because they have no natural enemies (the exception being my two young children). If you look at the list of invasive terrestrial invertebrates published on the National Invasive Species Information Center, many of them are exotic: African honey bee, Asian citrus plantain, Asian jumping worm, Asian long-horned beetle, Asian tiger mosquito, Mexican fruit fly and our new bedtime ritual, the Japanese beetle. They all have different names. Everything definitely not from here.

But how do you explain invasive species to a young child? That they are not welcome here? In this country – and in our family with Irish and Indian roots – it’s about being able to raise the stakes and move towards a better life. Only indigenous people are truly indigenous. To everyone else, a bumper sticker with the word “native” seems fake. The rest of us come from elsewhere. Some arrived by wagon, others by ship or plane, and some attached themselves to the roots of the iris.

Some evenings I reach for the beetle to throw it into the bucket and it flies away. Instead of falling into the bubbles, he escapes.

“He flies!” Marigold exclaims with joy.

I respect this beetle. I still don’t want it to eat my plants, but I reluctantly admire something with thick skin that can adapt to harsh conditions and thrives even though no one wants you.

We are all invaders, all guests on this Earth, I say Marigold. We all do everything we can to survive. Maybe there are no good guys and bad guys. Maybe there’s just a big, branching family tree of species, all of which stick to what’s beautiful, always adapting, and living the best way we can.

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This article appeared in the October 2024 print issue of the magazine under the title “Origin Stories.”