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Erin Pearce’s Etsy store is called “What the Hell Is This?” That’s the best possible name for an Etsy store. Or a blog. Or a restaurant. It’d be a terrible baby name, but a great restaurant name. Anyway, she sells beetles that she’s dressed up like Jurassic Park characters.
Link -via The Mary Sue
In this crazy world of ours, I’m always surprised how so many animals and plant species interact with one another. Sometimes two things that seem to have no connection are actually directly dependent on one another. When I recently learned that beetles, bees and beets have more in common than just a few letters in their name, I was eager to share what I learned with you guys.
Image via Thomas G. Moertel [Wikipedia]
Beetles are one of the most common types of animals in the world. There are already 350,000 known species, but scientists believe there could be up to 8 million more. New beetle species are discovered at an amazing rate of about one per hour. With so many different types of beetles, it’s hardly surprising there are around 750,000 trillion beetles on earth!
The secret to the beetle’s success is its ability to adapt to almost any environment. They can fly, swim and burrow and different species can survive on anything from tobacco to bonemeal to carpet to strychnine to fiber insulators on cables. The also survive in all types of habitats. One species, the zonocopris gibbicolis survives exclusively on the feces of land snails, living in the best possible place to get that meal –inside the snail’s shell.
As if their diets and living quarters weren’t weird enough, some beetles also have seriously strange breeding habits. The flour beetle (seen above) has sperm that attaches to the members of other beetles that breed with the same female. The sperm has a long shelf life and can then go on to fertilize the eggs of other female beetles. In fact, the female flour beetle has a one in eight chance of being fertilized by a male she never even encountered before.
Image via ©Entomart [Wikipedia]
The blister beetle spreads its larvae with the help of digger bees (pictured above) in what is called a honeytrap. The larvae cling together and form the shape of a female digger bee while emitting bee pheromones. A male digger bee will then approach the trap and attempt to mate with it, giving the larvae a chance to cling onto his chest hairs and hitch a ride to an actual mate. When they get the chance, the larvae then grab on to the female bee and catch a ride to the inside of the hive where they can feed on young bees and honey.
Don’t think for a second that bees are always the innocent victims of beetles though. The stingless bee (pictured below) takes revenge on invading beetles not by striking them down, but by mummifying their bodies in large amounts of resin, mud and wax. The beetle then slowly suffocates before shriveling up like a mummy corpse.
Image via Muhammad Mahdi Karim [Wikipedia]
Bees are fascinating creatures aside from their fighting skills. Outside of humans, bees have the most sophisticated communication systems in the animal kingdom. They can tell each other exactly how to get to a food source and how good the food is using a series of different movements. This method of communication is known as the “waggle dance.” Humans can actually translate the waggle dance and scientists can actually track down a specific flower that one bee mentions to another while under observation.
more …
In his Micromachina project Australian artist Scott Bain creates pieces of art using taxidermy beetles as tiny machines to illustrate the negative effects of man’s disregard for nature.
Once the stuff of science fiction, today flying and crawling insects are used by the military, fitted with audio and video devices. This exhibition experiments using real taxidermy beetles as mechanised shells, to show how we mistreat our fellow inhabitants, forcing them to do our will.
Link – Via Who Killed Bambi
Engineers at the University of California at Berkeley have developed remote-control beetles that can be used as spies! They aren’t just robots, either. These are cyborgs, real beetles that have implanted electrodes that control their flight muscles.
With the mind of a machine and the nimble body of an insect, this bug-bot may be the perfect scout: inexpensive, expendable, and capable of surreptitious reconnaissance. The Berkeley researchers, led by Michael Maharbiz, note that beetles are strong enough to carry useful payloads, such as a miniature camera.
(image credit: Hirotaka Sato and Michel M. Maharbiz, U. C. Berkeley)
