The Atacama Desert in Chile gets about 0.6 inches of rain per year. That’s not a typo—it’s one of the driest places on Earth, and yet insects thrive there on volcanic slopes that haven’t seen a proper storm since before your great-grandmother was born.
When Lava Cools Down and the Weird Stuff Moves In
Darkling beetles scuttle across obsidian fields at dawn, doing headstands. Literally. They tilt their bodies at forty-five-degree angles so fog condenses on their backs and trickles down into their mouths—a trick researchers documented in the Namib Desert in 1989, though the Chilean species perfected it over milenia of evolutionary tinkering. These aren’t your backyard bugs; they’re survivors custom-built for landscapes that look like Mars had a bad day.
Turns out volcanic deserts are ecological puzzles wrapped in sharp rocks.
On Mount Etna in Sicily, the flightless moth *Eremochroa charlottae* exists nowhere else on the planet. It lives exclusively in the lava fields between 1,200 and 2,100 meters elevation, feeding on plants that colonize fresh basalt within years of an eruption. The last major eruption was in 2021, and researchers watched these moths reappear on cooled flows within eighteen months—faster than most scientists predicted possible.
Here’s the thing about volcanic soil: it’s terrible. At first. Fresh lava is basically sterile rock with the nutritional value of concrete, yet pioneer species—including certain flies and ants—arrive almost immediately. They’re not eating the rock (that would be ridiculous), but they’re feeding on airborne organic matter, dead insects blown in from elsewhere, and microscopic algae that somehow take root in mineral crevices. It’s a food web built on scraps and desperation.
The Galápagos carpenter bee (*Xylocopa darwini*) doesn’t care about your ecological theory. Darwin himself collected specimens in 1835, and modern studies show these bees nest in the porous volcanic tuff despite having zero wood available—hence the irony of being called “carpenter” bees. They’ve adapted to drilling into soft volcanic rock instead, creating galleries that can house up to fifteen brood cells. The islands are only about 3-5 million years old, geologically speaking, which means these bees evolved their rock-drilling habits faster than the Rockies rose.
Wait—maybe the real story isn’t adaptation but pre-adaptation.
The Crickets That Sing on Ground Still Warm from Yesterday’s Magma
In Hawaii, lava crickets (*Caconemobius*) have colonized flows from Kilauea’s 2018 eruption—the one that destroyed over 700 homes and added 875 acres of new land to the Big Island. Entomologists found cricket populations established on six-month-old lava, hopping across rock still radiating heat like pavement in July. They’re opportunists, sure, but they’re also somehow thriving where soil temperature can hit 140°F just below the surface. Their diet? Mostly blue-green algae and windblown seeds, supplemented by cannibalizing each other when times get tough (which is often).
The paradox is that volcanic deserts are simultaneously hostile and weirdly nurturing. Fresh basalt heats up fast during the day and radiates warmth at night, creating microclimates that insects exploit. Cracks in cooling lava trap moisture from rare fog events, and those damp pockets become insect oases in otherwise apocalyptic terrain. Scientists in Iceland documented over thirty species of springtails and midges living in geothermal areas around Askja volcano, where ground temperatures fluctuate between freezing and scalding within meters.
And then there’s the ant that farms fungus on volcanic ash.
*Cyphomyrmex* ants in Ecuador cultivate fungal gardens using volcanic debris as substrate—a behavior ecologists at the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador documented in 2003 near Cotopaxi volcano. The ants collect ash particles, dead plant material, and insect frass, creating compost heaps underground where they grow specialized fungi. When Cotopaxi erupted in 2015, researchers worried the colonies would be buried, but many survived by temporarily relocating their fungus farms deeper into pre-existing lava tubes.
None of this makes intuitive sense. Volcanoes are geological blowtorches that regularly reset entire ecosystems to zero, yet insects return like they’re attending an exclusive party where the dress code is “fireproof exoskeleton.” The Canary Islands have at least forty-seven endemic insect species found only on volcanic slopes, including a katydid that’s completely black—not for camouflage, but probably for thermoregulation on dark basalt backgrounds. Evolution doesn’t wait for perfect conditions; it works with what’s available, even if that’s nothing but solidified magma and stubbornness.
The takeaway? Insects are better at colonizing hostile real estate than humans will ever be, and they do it without spreadsheets or environmental impact reports.
