After I boarded my train home from Surrey on Sunday I noticed that a beetle had hitched a ride on my rucksack. It could have jumped from a bush I'd brushed against, it could have worked its way up from my boots or it could have crawled on when I put my rucksack down on the platform - I suspect the latter. But my intervention meant it was now on a train heading into London, moving rapidly away from its familiar habitat and setting its future on an entirely new course.
It was a fine-looking beetle, all flat and angular and about a couple of centimetres long. I had no beef with it so I set my rucksack down on the empty seat opposite and let it roam, although initially it was only interested in exploring the outside of my bag. It followed the rim around the front and up the side and over the top and down and round without ever trying to leave the black fabric. "I'm not carrying you home," I thought, "you need to consider exploring elsewhere".
Eventually it tried venturing off onto the seat so I whisked my rucksack away and let it explore the red moquette instead. Again it focused on the rims and edges, never the centre, attempting to determine the boundaries of its new environment. After about five minutes it got bold and risked traversing the metal connector to the adjacent seat which it explored in a remarkably similar way... round, back, up, along and down. Nobody interrupted it because nobody else had yet boarded the carriage, until a single female passenger claimed the seat on the other side.
I wondered what the beetle's new destiny would be. Would it make it all the way to London and alight there, would it escape at some intermediate station or would it shuttle back and forth forever in its new artificial environment? Alternatively, given it was a beetle on a train, would a single passenger take offence and end its life with a single squish? I had, simply by taking a day trip to Surrey, changed its life irrevocably.
The beetle clambered repeatedly to the top of the seat, clever thing, until a particularly jolty section of track caused it to lose grip and disappear over the back. I tried looking under the seat but I couldn't see it anywhere. I also watched my fellow passengers, whose numbers were now increasing, but none of them made any beetle-related grimaces or flicks. It was only a four carriage train - it had been longer on the way out - and as we crossed the zone 6 boundary all the seats inexorably filled up. By the time we hit Raynes Park it was standing room only, which isn't something I thought a roaming beetle would appreciate, so I hoped it had fallen into that first lady's open handbag and she'd carried it off to a new life in Wimbledon.
I made sure I was the last one out of the carriage at Waterloo and scanned the seats for signs of insect movement. Then I spotted an ominous looking splat in the centre of the floor, precisely where a succession of feet had been standing, and peered down at the brown mark in the laminate pattern. My companion the beetle had come to an irrefutable end, squashed by sole or heel, and would be returning to Surrey only as a flattened husk. I hadn't killed it directly but without my intervention it would be 20 miles away and still alive. This sat uncomfortably, but what can you do?
When I got home I inspected my photos of the beetle and tried to match it to a species, which isn't easy when beetles are the most diverse insect on the planet. But I reckon I've identified it and I think it's... oh, a brown marmorated stink bug, an undesirable invasive species from east Asia. They arrived in the US in the mid 1990s, most likely arriving on imported timber, and have since spread unwelcomely to 44 states. Here in the UK they were first spotted in 2020 and one of the first reports was from Wisley in Surrey, not far from where I caught my train.
It might just have been a more common shieldbug, but if it was a brown marmorated stink bug then I did the nation a service by luring one onto a train so it could be comprehensively slaughtered. Watch your gardens, watch your bags, and if you're travelling through Surrey watch your train seat too.
