Insects – making friends of foes

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, insects, entomology, surveys

Books about insects usually focus either on their beauty and diversity, or on problems and pests. Metamorphosis: How Insects are Changing Our World, by Erica McAlister with Adiran Washbourne, introduces us to the mysteries of metamorphosis before focusing on the usefulness of certain insects. (Image produced using Dall-E3, after lengthy negotiations and creative prompting. The text was added afterward.)

More than 80% of insect species undergo complete metamorphosis, in which the life stages are Egg, Larva, Pupa, and Adult. The rest have incomplete metamorphosis, in which instead of a larva (such as a caterpillar or grub or maggot), there is usually a nymph that looks more and more like the adult as it grows, and there is no pupa stage. A major chapter of the book outlines the history of discovery of the stages of metamorphosis. Note that many creatures other than insects have metamorphosis, sometimes with many more than four stages.

Do you get itchy just thinking about fleas? So do I. The way they store energy to be suddenly released in an astounding jump was studied, which revealed resilin, the most elastic protein known. It can release very nearly 100% of the stored energy, very fast. It required numerous advances in photographic technology to develop camera systems that could take images fast enough to record an event that takes just one or two thousandths of a second, so the takeoff mechanism could be studied properly. Scientists also needed to learn how to induce a flea to jump on demand, in the presence of large, noisy pieces of equipment and large, looming humans! Synthetic resilin and resilin-like polypeptides are revolutionizing the elastomer industry.

Where would the genetics revolution be without the lowly fruit fly? The species used for decades now to winkle out the laws of inheritance, Drosophila melanogaster, actually a vinegar fly, has four gigantic chromosomes, rather than the dozens of more tightly-wrapped ones found in other critters. These flies also have the virtue of short lives and tiny size, so you can keep hundreds in a small space and feed them bananas, and do multi-generation studies in months rather than decades.

I'll skip forward to the last chapter, about cockroaches. (Ugh! you say...me, too.) They have a distributed nervous system that (this is my take) seems to act like a meta-brain, which makes a roach quite a bit smarter than other insects of comparable size. They also react faster; in my experience (when I lived in Houston), while I can usually swat a fly, I had no better than 50% success swatting roaches.

And what might we say of blowfly maggots (bigger Ugh from most), which help forensic detectives estimate how long ago a murder victim died; or soldier flies, which don't carry disease and whose maggots are super-nutritious and very fast-growing, so that they are called "ultimate upcyclers" as they turn food waste into food (I don't know about you, but I'd cook them first); or metallic colors on blue butterflies and green beetles (and many others) that have led to the development of color-shifting coatings for autos and dazzling paints that won't fade; or the unique hydrophobic-hydrophilic array on Namibian beetles that can harvest water from misty air?

The usefulness of insects has not been surveyed before in the way I find here. This book is way beyond just "fascinating"!