The fifth nature
- nirjesh gautam
- Nov 17
- 3 min read
When I think about my everyday schedule, I seem to be performing like a machine. There are so many tasks that I do every day, exactly in the same way. But what makes me different from an ordinary machine is that while doing these repetitive tasks at the same hours, I am able to observe complexity in triviality.
Recently, I had one such experience inside my own house.
For the past seven or eight months, every morning I have been opening an airtight container filled with walnuts. Cracking four of them with my palm. Extracting walnuts from their shells is usually uneventful. But about a month ago, something began to change.
When I crushed the kernels, I started noticing a fine dust on the black kitchen slab, something like sawdust. My curiosity made me examine it more closely. Further, as I broke a walnut into smaller pieces, I found delicate silken threads inside, as if forming a tiny web. And then I saw movement. Hidden within was a small, caterpillar-like organism. Becoming aware of them, I checked every walnut I came across from then on.
A few days later, something even stranger happened. As soon as I opened the lid of the container, a couple of tiny moths shot out—startled, perhaps, as much as I was. When I reached in to pick walnuts, more moths emerged. I noticed that many of them did not attempt to escape. They hovered just a few centimetres above the walnuts, circling the resource they depended on.
I wondered—they must be desperately needing these walnuts. But I also need my four walnuts a day. Yet, beyond this conflict of who gets what, I found myself increasingly drawn toward the resilience of the Indian meal moth. Known by names such as pantry moth or kitchen moth, Plodia interpunctella is a common, destructive, and universal pest of stored food products. Its food habits and adaptability to varying conditions have ensured an almost global distribution. Interestingly, the losses caused by this species arise not because they consume large quantities, but because they degrade the quality of the stored food.
Two of the most impressive things about this moth are that, within hours of birth, they begin feeding and establishing themselves, adapting to whatever conditions they find. My kitchen simply became one such place. Another impressive thing is that it has repeatedly defeated humans. It was described as a pest as early as 1895 and has posed large-scale losses to the dry-fruit industry at various instances. We have lost battles with cockroaches, termites, and ticks, but I never imagined a defeat of human beings by moths over dry fruits. Our weapons—pesticides and other treatments—couldn’t produce any meaningful results.
All of this, happening on and after 9 November, reinforced a truth I often return to: humans and nature are not separate. Even in our most curated spaces—kitchens, bedrooms, airtight containers—other species live, thrive, and evolve. And it’s not just that we aren’t separate from nature; natural processes cannot be halted by something as trivial as a plastic lid.
Now, these walnuts are no longer just walnuts for me. They are perhaps a micro-ecosystem—alive with larvae, moths, silk, and the entire life cycle of a species coexisting with me in the most intimate space of my home.
Nature and its processes unfold within our cities and inside our homes. It’s just that we prefer to look for nature separate from dense human habitation, forgetting that the fifth nature (home nature) — messy, persistent, uninvited — lives with us every day and deserves our attention.
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Image credits: All images were clicked by the author.
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