BUG WALK | 1, 2, 3

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In a city where only one in three kids graduates from high school, Eastside College Preparatory School opened in 1996 to provide a rigorous, tuition-free education to 105 students. Its earth-science class visits Stanford's nearby 1,200-acre Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve eight times a year, studying a different aspect of nature each time. A grant from the Community Foundation Silicon Valley covers transportation, lunches, educational supplies, and stipends for teaching assistants like 20-year-old Stanford junior Zoe Bradbury, who masterminded these Jasper outings so Eastside kids could learn firsthand how living things rely on each other. "We start with how everything depends on the soil, and get into biological interactions that way," says Zoe.

Today's trip is a bug walk, a hands-on hunt for creeping critters that makes the dynamics of an ecosystem clearer than any classroom lecture could. "It's humbling to learn how these little creatures you squish between your fingers have an enormous impact on ecosystems," laughs Philippe Cohen, director of Jasper Ridge, after a recent bug ramble. These miniature wilderness adventures are catching on across the country, providing a bug's-eye view to families and curious adults as well as inner-city teens, allowing even the eco-elite to shed their scientific demeanor while peering in the grass on their hands and knees. "The chance to poke around with a purpose is important for many adults who would otherwise feel too self-conscious," says Ron Lyons, who has "bugged" for nine years at San Diego's Carpinteria State Beach. "And bug walks provide an opportunity for children to bring adults into their world."

At the Chicago Field Museum, bored birders are exploring the world another step down the food chain. In Lansing, Michigan, the Young Entomologists' Society offers bug walk how-to's, lesson plans, bug swaps, edible "insect" snacks like butterfly cookies, plus "Bugs on Wheels," a traveling minibeast zoo. North Carolina State University entomologist John Meyer uses bug walks to convert horticulture students who think the only good bug is a dead bug, and the Smithsonian's Gary Hevel gives racy prewalk talks about pheromone trails that get adults pretty excited. "They actually pay for the experience," Hevel boasts.

Kids, however, don't need much convincing; Nate just gets his young explorers on all fours looking for "anything small and weird" as he explains how the little things are more important than the big things-including people. Especially people. How do humans dominate ecosystems? By cutting down trees and putting up parking lots. Insects dominate nature in good ways, Nate explains-by decomposing dead matter, recycling nutrients into the soil, pollinating plants, and providing food for birds and other animals. Ants in particular are an ecosystem's movers and shakers, bulldozing even more soil than earthworms and performing the valuable service of deconstructing dead insects, birds, and mammals. "Imagine going out to get the newspaper with all that stuff still on the ground!" says Nate.

And unlike a $10 ticket to the San Francisco Zoo, bugging out comes at the low cost of just looking down. "People are attracted to big game, but those animals just stand around," says Nate. "There's drama and action with bugs. Nature's most voracious predators are wolf spiders and army ants, not polar bears." Army ants, for example, function as a "superpredator"-staging group raids to kill and dismember small mammals, lizards, and even baby birds many times their own size.

Nate peers at the ground beyond his magnifying glass, the portal to this Alice-in-Wonderland world. In a forest of thistles, ant troops carry off seeds and grass shreds, and pick apart a lizard carcass. Not quite dead, a termite struggles in an ant's jaws. A spider ambushes an ant soldier, tearing its head off but leaving behind the poisonous gland, like a child eating around the creamy filling of a Hostess Ho Ho. Nestled in the fork of a native grass, slender insects spin frothy homes, safe from predators and sunlight. Nearby, a Zarhipis beetle's furry black antennae sprout from its red head, while just beneath it a scrub jay snatches up an armored black beetle and flies off, the bug's legs irately churning on either side of the jay's beak. "NASA is trying to discover life in outer space," Nate tells the kids. "But we can just crawl around here and look at as wacky a world as any science-fiction movie."

Miguel has wrangled the foot-long, thrashing alligator lizard, his hand protected by a wadded T-shirt. It's fair game for a bug walk by virtue of the 20 western black-legged ticks it hosts. If one hooked onto Miguel, Nate explains, he'd be unlikely to contract the Lyme disease sometimes carried by ticks. The lizard's blood contains a substance-probably a heat- sensitive protein-lethal to the Lyme bacterium. (In fact, University of California, Berkeley, entomologist Robert Lane credits alligator and western fence lizards with reducing Lyme disease in the western United States.)

Cure-all lizards! Blue dragonflies with wraparound eyes! Star Wars aliens! The promise of more wonders sends everyone snaking down the forest trail. Although Jasper Ridge's redwoods were heavily logged in the 19th century, a cathedral-like oak canopy overhead still shades the cool, dark forest floor tangled with rotting logs and branches. Owls hoot across Searsville Lake, and Steller's jays hunt overhead. Nate touches a three-inch, gourdlike orb dangling from an oak branch that contains oak gall wasp larvae. When this tree produced new foliage, a wasp drilled into what was then a soft twig, depositing her eggs before the bark toughened. The tree isolated the wound with this scab-like gall, he explains, leaving the wasp an incubator and edible home for her offspring, which later chew themselves to the outside.

Frantically tapping Nate's shoulder, a petite girl with hair pulled back Audrey Hepburn-style daintily presents an ant on a leaf, extending her arm forward and her disgusted face as far back as possible. "This ant's from Argentina," says Nate, relieving her of the burden and spinning a tale of ant stowaways disembarking in New Orleans from a sugar or coffee ship in the 1890s. Migrating west, they forced out native ant species by out-competing them for the available food. Unlike the single-queen colonies of most ant species, the Argentines' hundreds of egg-laden queens make them virtually impossible to exterminate with the usual method of poisoned ant bait carried back to the nest.