Ethan Xavier found his life’s calling by looking down at the civilisations crawling beneath his feet. The beetle carrying a burden many times its size. The moth that appeared only after dusk. The ant trail that reorganised with precision. To most people, they were creatures to ignore. To Ethan, they were neighbours, engineers, farmers, architects and survivors.
“I feel calm when watching insects,” he says. “They make me realise just how insignificant we are.”
He is currently studying Science in Class 12 at Don Bosco School, Goa, after being homeschooled. His days are divided between school assignments, rehearsing with his band, and building an insect collection, which he is now documenting along with every insect he comes across.
When he was five, his pets were garden snails. Many children collect toys or chase footballs, but Ethan crouched beside plants, watching caterpillars feed or beetles disappear beneath the soil. Family members soon realised that the easiest way to make him happy was to buy him books about insects.
Birthdays and Christmases slowly filled a shelf that he read cover to cover. Television became a classroom. National Geographic Wild, Animal Planet, documentaries narrated by the unmistakable voice of Sir David Attenborough. They expanded a universe that already seemed impossibly vast, and his fascination only deepened.
Ethan Xavier is a Class 12 student in Goa who plans to study entomology after school.
Ethan’s story is about attention. Children have that gift, but adulthood slowly trains it out of us. We stop noticing birdsong, flowers, changing clouds, or insects resting on tree bark. Ethan somehow held on to that childhood instinct. He never stopped observing.
“I love just waiting and observing,” he says. “In my daily life I say, ‘Only when you stop can you see nature move.’ That’s pretty much what I’m always doing. Whether it’s walking to the grocery store or just climbing the stairs, I wait, and look for insects.”
The worms that turned out to be webspinners
That patience has paid off. One of his favourite finds was a group of about a dozen webspinners, rare and elusive insects that spin silky, web-like structures to nest in. “Even though I had read about them, when I first encountered them I was very sure they were some kind of worm,” he recalls. “They produce the silk from specialised glands on their forelegs.”
Another memory involves a creature that isn’t technically an insect. On a walk with his mother, he came across a pill millipede. “Even though I knew it would curl up into a ball, seeing it happen in front of me for the first time was amazing,” he says. “What made it even more memorable was how the millipede rolled down the slope we were walking on, and how I ran after it.”
More recently, on a trip to Kerala, he saw both stick insects and tiger beetles in the wild on the same day, a first for him.
Ethan is building an insect collection and documenting the species he encounters in daily life.
Over time, he came to understand that insects are among the most successful life forms on Earth. Bees, butterflies and moths pollinate the crops that feed humanity. Countless insects decompose fallen leaves, dead wood and food waste, returning nutrients to the soil. Others aerate the earth, disperse seeds, regulate pests and occupy nearly every link in the food chain. We depend on them. Remove insects, and entire ecosystems begin to collapse.
Still, Ethan pushes back on measuring their worth only by what they do for us. “Something that really annoys me is how we humans try to find a ‘use’ for everything,” he says. “If we cannot find a use for something, we label it as useless. Not everything needs to have a human use to be useful in nature, and to be allowed to exist.”
He is fascinated by how human civilisation has borrowed ideas from insects. Watching paper wasps chew wood into nests led an 18th-century French scientist to suggest that paper could be made from wood pulp. Engineers studying ants and bees have developed models of decentralised communication that are now used in robotics. Researchers continue to look to insects for breakthroughs in waste management, biomaterials and medicine. Yet although millions of insect species share the planet with us, science has documented only a fraction of them.
What Goa’s insects are telling us
Goa has strengthened Ethan’s conviction that insects tell stories larger than themselves. Every year, parts of the Western Ghats become galaxies as fireflies synchronise their flashes. Across grazing fields, dung beetles perform one of nature’s least celebrated miracles, rolling and burying animal waste in a way that enriches soil, suppresses disease-carrying flies and keeps ecosystems working. In streams and backwaters, mayfly, caddisfly and damselfly larvae quietly monitor freshwater health. Their disappearance signals pollution long before laboratory reports arrive.
His collection includes beetles, moths, butterflies and other insects preserved for study.
The challenge is that while scientific research grows richer, public attention grows shorter. Ethan recognises this paradox. In an age shaped by artificial intelligence and scrolling, few people will sit through ecological journals.
Rather than resist this, Ethan wants to work with it. Many of the lessons he carries today came from educators on digital platforms, who showed him that knowledge and engaging storytelling can exist together. For Ethan, film is where research, education and activism meet. A camera can turn an overlooked insect into a protagonist, replacing fear with fascination and indifference with wonder.
“Just like Sir David Attenborough, my dream is to travel the world documenting insects and bringing the wonders of the insect world into many people’s living rooms,” he says.
He imagines cities that learn from insects. Organic waste would disappear into colonies of black soldier fly larvae, producing nutrient-rich animal feed. Buildings would borrow from termite mounds to regulate temperature, reducing dependence on air conditioning. Artificial lighting would be more thoughtful, preserving dark skies where nocturnal insects can navigate without confusion.
Urban architecture would include spaces where insects can nest. Gardens would welcome leaf litter, fallen logs and patches of bare earth instead of removing every sign of wildness. Rooftops would become habitats. Schools would teach children ecology. Governments would invest more seriously in insect research, recognising that some of the smallest organisms may hold the largest solutions.
Ethan hopes to document insects through film and later work in conservation and entomology.
For now, the path ahead is clear. Ethan isn’t part of a conservation organisation yet, but he hopes to join one once he finishes Class 12. He plans to study entomology, and perhaps specialise later.
Perhaps the future of conservation will be led by young people carrying cameras into forests, reminding us that humanity is inseparable from the creatures around it.
In teaching others to see them, Ethan offers something larger than knowledge. He offers hope that a generation raised amid artificial intelligence may still learn the oldest lesson of all: every living thing has a place in the story of our shared planet.
