Bug Races

The first bug races were held on a hot day in July, probably in 2014. It was definitely July, because the swallowtails were still caterpillars, but the zinnias weren’t in bloom. It was probably 2014, because that was the summer that nobody had jobs. It was definitely too hot to do anything. There was probably ice tea, but it may have been bourbon. Regardless, the ice had long since melted.

The bases in that first match were a clump of bolted spinach and two pots of Home Depot marigolds. Records show that Salvador’s first team was comprised of a cabbage moth and a hover fly. Lottie’s was a bumblebee and a dragonfly, which— with the benefit of hindsight— was almost certainly a damselfly, most likely Coenagrionidae. The results were predictably lopsided.

By the end of the summer, Julie, Lorna, Joshy, and Dax were all regular competitors. The rules had evolved to include forward and reverse encirclements, offsides, and draft compensation for predatory events. Matches were moved to Black Basin prairie. Lottie edged out Dax in the final week of the season to win the first Linneaus Cup, which did not yet physically exist. This presaged the rivalry between those two in the early years, before Lorna’s adoption of more rigorous statistical methods allowed her to run off four consecutive titles.

Specifically, her insight that the ratio of Encirclement Opportunities to Reverse Encirclement Opportunities (EO:REO) tended to revert to a species-specific baseline allowed her to exploit market inefficiencies in a league where her competitors were trying to eke out increasingly tiny qualitative advantages in the entomological and botanical realms.

Lorna’s dominance catalyzed an explosion in predictive modeling. Radial Bias (RB) and Spectrum-Adjusted Stationary Affinities (SASA) were developed in this era, along with a host of less enduring statistics. The greater statistical texture led, in turn, to a new breed of analyst. The mutual disdain between traditional analysts and the new caste, with their data-driven methods, was aired publicly and dramaticly, but was quickly overshadowed.

Pauline— in just her second year of competition— developed the Ground Game Contingency strategy and rode that revelation to a title. The attendant controversy is said to have begun the fissures that caused the league to split. Cooler heads contend that the schism was inevitable, as the number of competitors had become unwieldy. In the years following, Lottie continued to be competitive in the Sunflower League, whereas Salvador sank into humilitating obscurity in the upstart Apidae Confederation. Sadly, they were unable to salvage their friendship.