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"!

Insects — worthy of more respect

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, insects, ecology, entomology

To a first approximation, the average animal on Earth seems to be an ant of medium size, a little smaller than a rice grain. According to Steve Nicholls, as he writes in Alien Worlds: How Insects Conquered the Earth & Why Their Fate Will Determine Our Future, ants make up one-third of the total biomass of all insects (p. 439). The total biomass of insects, around one billion tons, equals the total mass of all humans plus all domestic animals.

As these leafcutter ants illustrate, insects were farming millions of years before humans began doing so. Leafcutter ants chew up leaves to grow nutritious fungi. Other insects carry out similar kinds of agriculture. 

Insects, again illustrated by ants, also took up ranching long, long ago. As we see here, these ants guard and "pasture" aphids and drink the honeydew they provide (others care for mealybugs).

Alien Worlds is a heavy book; the paper is supercalendered, meaning it is loaded with clay to make photographs look better. It is also more dense. This 500-page book, which doesn't look much larger than a typical novel, weighs almost three pounds; the novel would weigh a pound and a half. The quality of the images makes it all worth it.

About a third of the "real estate" of the pages consists of eye-popping photos. Mr. Nicholls is a documentarist who has traveled the world preparing programs, and he has a wealth of material on which to rely. I'll resist the temptation to scan a bunch of the pictures, and just tantalize you with one, this Hummingbird Clearwing moth, Hemaris thysbe, feeding. It is a type of hawk moth, and is about this size. This image is cropped from one page of a two-page spread showing two of these moths feeding.

The obligatory historical review in the first few chapters presents the place of insects in the arthropod phylum, a basic history of their development, and discusses some of the reasons that they became the most successful class of animals (basically: extreme flexibility of foods and conditions they can endure).

Those who are familiar with biological classification can skip a few paragraphs to the arrow below. Biological entities are named with two Latin or Latinized words, such as Tyrannosaurus rex or Homo sapiens, and the words are (or ought to be) italicized whenever possible. The first word of the scientific name, the capitalized word, is the Genus, and the second, uncapitalized word is the Species. Homo is a genus of primates that presently includes only the species sapiens, but in the past there were other species such as neanderthalensis and ergaster. A scientific name, the genus and species, must be unique, to avoid confusion.

The plural of genus is genera and the plural of species is species (no inflection); they are Latin plurals. The hierarchy of major groupings is, from top down:

• Kingdom – There are 5 or 6; here we are interested in Animalia, the kingdom of animals.
• Phylum – There are about 40 phyla of animals. Most of the creatures people call "animals" are in the phylum Vertebrata, animals with backbones. Earthworms are in the phylum Annelida. Insects and related creatures are in the phylum Arthropoda.
• Class – In the Arthropoda there are five classes. More on that below. Insect species make up about 70% of the total.
• Order – The class Insecta includes 29 orders. For example, Lepidoptera includes the moths and butterflies, and Hymenoptera includes wasps, bees, and ants.
• Family – Too many to count, and the number changes almost weekly as naturalists find new species and taxonomists (systematists) regroup existing ones.
• Genus 
• Species

The phylum Arthropoda has these groups:

These are not exactly the classes. Chelicerata, Crustacea and Insecta are classes. The myriapods are made up of two primary classes, Diplopoda (millipedes) and Chilopoda (centipedes), plus a few very minor but very distinct classes. The extinct class Trilobitomorpha  rounds out the bunch. All the living classes include members that live on land; the little "pillbugs" or wood lice, for example are crustaceans, related more to crabs than to insects.

→OK. The author, having brought the evolution of insects and their arthropod kin up to date, dwells for a chapter on the co-development of insects (and some other arthropods such as ants) and flowers. The rest of the book works its way up the ladder of social organization, finishing with bees, wasps and termites. A major aim of the author is to show how insects are integrated into every aspect of life, and how much of our "civilized" lifestyle depends on them. A few tidbits:

• Do you like almonds, a trendy superfood? Honeybees pollinate them, and the almond groves of central California need to have millions of beehives trucked in to provide a sufficient number of bees. Although other species of bee are good pollinators—sometimes working five times as hard—only honeybees exist in numbers sufficient to pollinate the almond crop. About half our plant foods require pollination by bees.
• Dung beetles and related beetles and other insects keep us from being awash in cow poop.
• Burying beetles (sexton beetles) and other members of the "cleanup squad" dispose of the bodies of little animals that die "out there", and the remains of larger animals after vultures and coyotes have picked their skeletons almost clean.
• In many cultures insects or their larvae are a necessary food item.

Another couple of interesting items: Firstly, tool use. Some insects use pebbles or bits of twig, though these behavior probably evolved and don't seem to be learned as cultural attainments the way tools are used and learned by various birds and mammals. Secondly, language. I think most of us know about "waggle dancing", a communication method among bees, to indicate the direction and distance to a productive patch of flowers. Many insects also communicate by sound, although none have a humanlike vocal apparatus. Most insect sounds are stridulation, the rubbing of legs or wings against other body parts, which makes sounds that are often amplified by resonance. Apparently, bess beetles in particular use different sounds for different purposes. These beetles are 1-1.5 inch (25-40 mm) in size, usually shiny and black, but they are seldom seen because they tunnel in rotting wood. One North American species, Odontotaenius disjunctus, makes seven distinct sounds, combined into as many as 13 utterances for different contexts (such as "food here" or "danger"). The beginnings of language? The author doesn't mention if these "words" are learned, but does tell us that each species has its own dialect.

Many have noticed that taking a drive in the countryside can now be done without the need to clean your car's windshield every 50 miles or so. When I was a child this was not so. This is often decried as an indicator that insects are in steep decline. They probably are, but I wonder to what extent we killed off all the low-flying ones, and if cars were 20 feet taller, maybe there are still plenty of critters in fight to run into. However, cars and their windshields aren't much of a culprit. Habitat destruction and overuse of pesticides take a much greater toll. I find it quite distressing to see farm after farm and orchard after orchard being sold to developers, who build housing developments or even mini-towns complete with apartments and retail outlets and office plazas. In my view, turning agricultural land into hardscape is criminal. Mr. Nicholls probably believes this also, though he doesn't state it the same way.

Besides the visual appeal of hundreds of photos, the discussions and explanations are enjoyable and impel one right along through this briefest of summaries of the vast subject of insect lore.

================

If you don't care about errata, you can stop already. I am a compulsive proofreader, so I noticed a few things, a few more than I find normal:

First and foremost, discussing insect sizes, which range from 0.129 mm for a species of fairyfly (a tiny wasp) to 110 mm for the largest species of goliath beetle (stick insects can get 2-3 times this long, but they weigh much less), he states in page 45, "The size range of insects covers only three orders of magnitude, small compared to fish, for example, whose size range covers eight orders of magnitude." This is just nuts. Eight orders of magnitude is a range of 100 million to one. If the smallest fish is 1 mm in size (it's larger than that), then is the largest fish 100 km in length? He seems to have used the lengths of insects, but the weights of fishes. Let's investigate.

• Fairyfly length and weight: 0.129 mm and 25 micrograms (0.000025 g).
• Goliath beetle length and weight: 110 mm and 100 g (larva) or 60 g (adult).
• Dwarf goby length and weight: 7.9 mm and 60 g.
• Whale shark length and weight: 18 m and 20,000 kg (18,000 mm and 20 million g)
• Orders of magnitude for these insects: log(110/0.129) = 2.93, which is close to 3 for length; log(100/0.000025) = 6.6, so between 6 and 7 orders of magnitude for weight.
• Orders of magnitude for fishes: log(18,000/7.9) = 3.4, or something over 3 for length; log(20,000,000/60) = 5.5, so between 5 and 6 orders of magnitude for weight.

All this indicates that the extrema for length are in the range of three orders of magnitude for both fish and insects, and the extrema for weight are in the range of six orders of magnitude for both, with the insects having a greater range of weights! I have no idea where "eight" came from. This is worse than a simple cross-category error.

Lesser items that ought to have been caught by a copy editor:

• p125: The word for a gripping tool is "vise". The word "vice" was used, an error I see frequently, but "vice" is a sinful tendency such as over-drinking.
• pp200 and 305: At the beginning of a sentence, the starting letter was not capitalized.
• pp211 and 432: The footnote is a copy of the one on the prior page.
• p422-3: The phrase in parentheses "(soccer against)" should be "(soccer again)", as he'd made a comment about soccer a few sentences earlier. 

Getting to know bees

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, natural history, entomology, native bees, bees

Starting in 2009 I joined The Great Sunflower Project and participated for three summers. At the time we had to get seeds for a sunflower called Lemon Queen, which bears plenty of pollen, but has no nectar. The aim of the project is to take a weekly census through a summer of the pollinating bees that would visit the blooms, once they opened.

Data collection meant standing in the sun in July and August for 15 minutes and recording what kinds of bees visited the flowers. Most of them would be native bees, since honeybees are looking for nectar along with their pollen.

This image shows a sweat bee, one of many species of ground-nesting bees that live in this area. When I lived west of the Mississippi, the sweat bees I remember are tan or brown, not metallic green with a striped abdomen like this one.

After 2012 life got busier as I prepared to enter retirement—and has remained busy—so I didn't continue with the project. But I retained an interest in native bees. Here are a few others, on other flowers around my yard:

The two on the left are on apple blossoms. Upper: a bee, probably a mason bee, with very full pollen baskets. Lower: an Eastern Bumblebee. At right, on garlic chive flowers, a honeybee and a smaller bee I haven't identified to its left.

It was a thrill to find Dancing with Bees: A Journey Back to Nature by Brigit Strawbridge Howard. Ms Howard lives in North Dorset, England. The book's illustrations were drawn or painted by John Walters. Considering that the author mentions photography in nearly every chapter, I was disappointed that there are no photos. However, good plates, even in monochrome, greatly increase the production cost of a book.

The author tells of her girlhood love of nature, a two-decade hiatus amid the busyness of life, and her re-discovery of nature and bees in particular. This is scattered among nineteen chapters that tell us of many sorts of bees, and some wasps and other creatures.

There are about 20,000 species of bee, so far described. Possibly as many, or twice as many, species remain to be discovered and described. That compares well with the 30,000 to 60,000 individual bees in a single hive of honeybees! If you are ever near a honeybee hive, watching the workers zip out and in by the thousands, think, "For each bee I see, there is a whole species of bee somewhere, perhaps known, perhaps not yet known."

In the book we learn of bees that sting, those that don't, and those that can sting repeatedly the way wasps can (honeybees usually die after stinging once). We learn of male bees, which usually can't sting; most die soon after mating. Of bumblebee queens that begin the spring by foraging for food to start a nest. Some species' queens continue to forage through the summer but others get down to egg-laying only. I have seen bumblebees of various sizes in my yard, and thought they were different species. It turns out, the queen who emerges from hibernation (or diapause) in the spring is very large, but the quality of the foraging (pollen and nectar available) determines how much food she offers each offspring. Her workers are smaller than she, and sometimes a lot smaller, even as small as honeybees.

It took me a while looking at the insect pictured here, to determine it is a bee. The rear wings were in motion and hard to see, so I thought at first it was a hoverfly. The author writes of hoverflies also, and I can tell you they are hard to photograph. They seldom sit to sip.

We learn of cuckoo bees, which either add an egg or two to a victim's nest, or lay enough eggs that their own larvae will take over the nest and kill the larvae of the "owner". We learn of carder bees. At first I didn't know what was meant: we learn that carding by bees refers to processing plant fibers—the hairs on stems and leaves—into little felt pouches into which the bee lays an egg each and puts pollen and other food inside. A luxurious birthplace for the baby bee!

Here is one of my favorite bee photos. This big bumblebee on a coneflower is typical of the pollinators in this area. I see many more of these than honeybees. This one is a brown-belted bumblebee, perhaps as common as the Eastern bumblebee.

A first stage of learning about native bees is just getting to know the ones that frequent an area. Then, one may learn of their life cycle. Do they live in the ground, or in old mouse nests? Do they nest alone (most do), or in small social nests (like bumblebees), or in huge aggregations like honeybees and other eusocial bees and wasps?

At a later stage we may notice, as the author tells on her own behalf, that some bees may be getting out of sync with their preferred flowers. This can be a signal of climate change. For spring to arrive early or late a few times in a row is one thing. For the change to continue into a trend is another. The author tells of several such changes, such as a certain species of large bumblebee that has abandoned its southern range, but is only expanding slowly northward. She fears it will be pinched out of existence.

This is one of the most lyrically written books I've ever read. Even the bittersweet stories are a pleasure to read. We humans, so full of pride and hubris, need to get used to the fact that we share this planet with a few million species of animal, and an almost-equally huge number of plants. They can get by without us. We cannot get by without them.