Extraordinary Insects: The Fabulous, Indispensable Creatures Who Run Our World - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson is a professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences near Oslo and a scientific advisor to the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research. She holds a doctorate in conservation biology and teaches nature management and forest ecology. The author of Extraordinary Insects, Anne is also an ultra-marathon runner.

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Extraordinary Insects

Introduction

There are more than 200 million insects for every human being living on the planet today. As you sit reading this sentence, between 1 quintillion and 10 quintillion insects are shuffling and crawling and flapping around on the planet, outnumbering the grains of sand on all the world’s beaches. Like it or not, they have you surrounded, because Earth is the planet of the insects.

There are so many of them that it’s difficult to take it in, and they are everywhere: in forests and lakes, meadows and rivers, tundra and mountains. Stone flies live in the chilly heights of the Himalayas at altitudes of 20,000 feet, while brine flies live in the piping hot springs of Yellowstone National Park, where temperatures exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit. In the eternal darkness of the world’s deepest caverns live blind cave midges. Insects can live in baptismal fonts, computers, oil puddles, and the acid and bile of a horse’s stomach. They live in deserts, beneath the ice on frozen seas, in the snow, and in the nostrils of walruses.

Insects live on all continents—although they are admittedly represented by only a single species on Antarctica: a flightless midge that can’t survive if the temperature happens to creep up to 50 degrees for any length of time. There are even insects in the sea. Seals and penguins have in their hides various kinds of lice, which remain in place when their hosts dive beneath the surface. And we mustn’t forget the lice that live in a pelican’s pouch or the water striders who spend their lives scudding six-legged across the open sea.

Insects may be tiny, but their achievements are far from trifling. Long before human beings set foot on this planet, insects had already taken up agriculture and animal husbandry: termites grow fungus for food, while ants keep aphids as dairy cattle. Wasps were the first creatures to make paper from cellulose, and caddis fly larvae were catching other creatures in netlike webs millions of years before we humans managed to weave our first fishing nets. Insects solved complicated problems of aerodynamics and navigation several million years ago and learned if not how to tame fire, at least how to tame light—even within their own bodies.

Insects Assemble

Whether we opt to count them by individual or species, there are good grounds for claiming that insects are the most successful class of animal on the planet. Not only are there incredible numbers of individual insects, they also account for well over half of all known multicellular species. They come in around a million different variants. This means that you could have an “insect of the month” calendar that featured a new species every single month for more than 80,000 years!

From A to Z, insects impress with their species’ richness: ants, bumblebees, cicadas, dragonflies, earwigs, fireflies, grasshoppers, honeybees, inchworms, jewel beetles, katydids, lacewings, mayflies, nits, owl moths, praying mantises, queen butterflies, rice weevils, stink bugs, termites, urania moths, velvet ants, wasps, xylophagous beetles, yellow mealworms, and zebra butterflies.

Let’s do a quick thought experiment: to get an impression of how species diversity is distributed among different groups of species, imagine if all the world’s known species—big and small alike—were given UN membership. It would be an awfully tight squeeze in the assembly chambers, because even if there were only a single representative for every species, that would still add up to well over 1.5 million representatives.

Let’s say we distributed power and voting rights in this “United Nations of biodiversity” according to the number of species in the different species groups. That would create new and unusual patterns, predominantly because insects would dominate, comprising more than half of all votes. And that’s before we consider all the other small species, such as spiders, snails, roundworms, and the like, which alone would account for a fifth of the votes. Next up, plant species of all kinds would total roughly 16 percent, broadly speaking, while known species of fungus and lichen would command around 5 percent of votes.

Where do we fit into this picture? When we look at species diversity like this, humanity doesn’t amount to much. Even if we were counted along with all the rest of the world’s vertebrates—with animals such as elk and mice, fish, birds, snakes, and frogs—we would still end up with a minuscule share of power, constituting a mere 3 percent of known species diversity. In other words, we humans are totally dependent on a host of tiny species, a significant proportion of which are insects.

Dwarf Fairies and Biblical Giants

Insects come in all shapes and hues, spanning a range of sizes that is barely matched in any other class of animals. The world’s tiniest insects, fairy wasps, live out the whole of their larval existence inside the eggs of other insects, which gives you a good idea of just how small they are. One of them, the teeny Kikiki huna wasp, is so tiny at 0.16 millimeter that you can’t even see it. It takes its name from the Polynesian language spoken on Hawaii, one of the places where it is found. Logically enough, it means something like “tiny dot.”

A sister species among the dwarf wasps has an even prettier name. Tinkerbella nana takes its genus name from the fairy in Peter Pan, while the species name, nana, is a pun referring to both nanos, the Greek word for “dwarf,” and Nana, the name of the dog in Peter Pan. The Tinkerbell wasp is so small that it can land on the tip of a human hair.



It’s a giant step from there to our biggest insects. There are several rivals for this title, depending on what “biggest” means. If we’re talking longest, the winner is the Chinese stick insect Phryganistria chinensis Zhao: at 24.5 inches, it is longer than your forearm—but no thicker than an index finger. The subspecies was named for the entomologist Zhao Li, who spent six years of his life hunting down the super–stick insect after a tip from locals in the Guangxi region of southern China.

But if we’re talking about the heaviest insect, the Goliath beetle is well placed. The larvae of this African giant can weigh up to 3.5 ounces, roughly the same as a blackbird. The beetle was named after Goliath, the ten-foot-tall giant of biblical fame who struck terror into the hearts of the Israelites but was nonetheless slain by a stripling named David, aided only by a sling.

The Very First Insects Predate the Dinosaurs

Insects have been around for a long time, infinitely longer than us humans. It’s difficult to get a proper grasp on deep time: eons and eras, millions and billions of years. So perhaps it won’t mean all that much if I say that the first insects saw the light of day around 479 million years ago. Maybe it’s more helpful to point out that insects saw the dinosaurs come and go, by a long margin.

Once upon a time, long, long ago, the first plants and animals emerged from the sea and onto dry land. It was a revolution for life on Earth. Imagine, like Shaw in his book Planet of the Bugs, if we could have filmed that fateful moment—what an iconic video clip that would be: “One small step for bugs, one giant leap for life on Earth.” Unfortunately, we’ll...