Picking up from where I left off in Rant 1.
Diversity? Let Me Show You Diversity.
Biologists refer to insects as belonging to the Kingdom Animalia. The Animalia are subdivided into roughly 33 smaller groups called phyla. Phyla are subdivided further in to a myriad of subphyla. To even get anywhere near insects, we have to rummage in a remote subphylum called Arthropoda (with jointed feet) consisting of:
Crustacea: things like prawns, crabs and woodlice;
Myriapoda: centipedes, millipedes and the like;
Chelicerata: (Arachnida), spiders, scorpions and harvestmen, etc.
Uniramia (Insecta): things like beetles, bees and flies.
Uniramia or Insecta, which just happen to make up the largest class under the entire Arthropod subphylum, account for 75% of all types of animals on earth with something like 10 millions species.
We are not trying to explain why prawns and such are not splattering our windscreens, so we move on. We are only mildly interested in woodlice. While they are bugs so far as we are concerned, they are flightless and cannot splatter windscreens. Despite the fact that Myriapoda and Chelicerata are also bugs, we are going to ignore them because they too are flightless.
We focus therefore on the Uniramia or Insecta - we are, after all, discussing insects? You may be as surprised as I was to discover that not all bugs are insects - science is both wonderful and confusing.
The insecta just happen to make up the largest class under the entire arthropod phylum. Astonishingly, they account for 75% of all types of animals on earth with something like 10 millions species. They include the only arthropods capable of flight, but not all insecta can fly. The flea, for example, is flightless, but makes up for it by leaping tall buildings. Just to confuse, the Insecta are sometimes referred to as hexapoda - having six legs.
Allow Me Now To Present The Phylogentic Tree Of The Insecta
Does that seem diverse enough for you? The next time your HR mollusc accuses you of not being sufficiently diverse, tell it you identify as an insect.
It’s Not Just About Butterflies
Too much of what is written about insects begins and ends with beautiful butterflies and perfectly groomed butterfly-friendly gardens. They are unrealistic, shallow and completely ineffective ways of conserving insect life, albeit well meaning.
We all love butterflies and should conserve them, but even they have a repulsive side to them that we need to tolerate for their sake and ours.
But we cannot hope to discuss the lives of the entire subphylum, so we will have to be content with the life of the animal introduced in Part 1, the Red Admiral butterfly.
The Red Admiral’s Energy Budget - It’s Complicated.
Each stage of metamorphosis needs energy, whether it be energy stored by a previous stage or energy acquired by feeding. It is also obvious that an insect must have sufficient energy to complete each metamorphic stage. Let’s see what that takes, using the Red Admiral butterfly, Vanessa atalanta, as an example. BTW, Red Admiral was originally Red Admirable - once again mispronunciation beats making sense.
The Adult Stage or Butterfly
Since very few manage to overwinter in the UK, most Red Admirals seen here will have migrated from North Africa and the South of France; a testimony to their hardiness and robust foraging habits.
Once fully established and able to take wing the female butterfly must find time and energy to forage for food and water, mate, avoid predators, lay eggs on a suitable host plant and even migrate to and from better weather. Adult butterflies of both sexes (yes, there are only two) do a lot of travelling and need a lot of energy to do it.
The Red Admiral feeds on tree sap, bird droppings (ugh) and fermenting fruit - I told you they have a repulsive side - and they only sip on flower nectar if there is nothing else.
From this we may conclude that tree sap, bird crap and fermented fruit have higher nutritional value than nectar.
It is worth mentioning that the butterfly only has two jobs - lay eggs and look beautiful. For this reason many species do not feed at all during the adult stage, living entirely on reserves that have survived the pupal stage. They never live long.
To optimise her number of offspring, the Red Admiral female must lay as many eggs as possible - on the order of 500 eggs.
She lays a tiny egg (top right in above image) often less than 1mm in diameter, on the upper surface of the preferred host, which is nettle. Hops are a secondary host plant, along with false nettle, Pennsylvania pellitory and flowering ivy.
Red Admirals are unpopular with hop farmers for obvious reasons. Maybe hop farmers should stop killing the nettles?
As though migrating, eating bird poo and laying 500 eggs after hunting for nettles are not enough trouble, Red Admirals are predated by many species of birds, bats, wasps, spiders and other large insects.
The natural lifespan of this butterfly is typically 10 months, climate, habitat and predators permitting. They usually do not survive the UK’s cold winters unless they find a warm spot to overwinter and most will migrate to find warmer areas further south.
Red Admirals will happily live in your home if you can find something for them to eat. Maybe if you have a budgie to poo up the place?
The Egg
Not much to say - the egg can produce a hatchling using stored energy and any warmth it can harvest from the environment. Incubation takes typically 8 to 10 days but in late autumn many will overwinter unless frozen. They are not usually predated, at least not until they hatch.
The Larval Stage - Bottom Left
From the time that it hatches until it pupates, the larva lives to eat, which it does endlessly voraciously with short breaks to moult. They go through five stages of growth from hatching to pupation, which entails four moults. Each stage is referred to as an instar; Latin for “of an equal form”.
This is the most vulnerable stage of metamorphosis for the Red Admiral. It is heavily predated by wasps which lay their eggs in them. The result of this abuse is a yellow or pale larva, perhaps as a signal to deter other predators from double predating - I am guessing.
In an attempt to avoid predation, they use silk to fold leaves, resulting in a cocoon within which they live until they moult, at which time they make a larger one
In the final stages they will sew two leaves together in order to make enough room - by the fifth instar they are usually pretty obese. The fifth instar will not make a cocoon, instead it makes a kind of umbrella, under which it will enter the pupal stage. This ensures that the butterfly can emerge from under the umbrella instead of being trapped in a cocoon. The larval stage lasts 25 to 30 days.
Metamorphosis from larva to pupa is an amazing transformation to see. From watching the time lapse video below, it seems to require a lot of energy. That enough energy is left for the next stage must be due to the large amounts of food consumed and stored during the five stages of larval growth.
The following time lapse video is 1 minute and 14 seconds in length
The Pupal stage - Bottom Right
The pupal stage lasts from two to four weeks, during which some energy is consumed to complete the change in readiness for the adult to emerge. Clearly there must be sufficient energy left over for the equally dramatic process of hatching. The following video is quit wordy, but well worth watching - if you have 18 minutes and 49 seconds.
The final stages of emergence or eclosion, (from French éclosion, from éclore to hatch, ultimately from Latin exclūdere to shut out) are fascinating, as described in How Butterflies Work,
At first, the wings are wet and wrinkled. The butterfly has to expand and dry them as soon as it emerges from the chrysalis. To do this, it uses its body as a pump and forces fluid through a series of tube-like veins. It's a little like inflating a balloon -- as the veins fill with fluid, they slowly stretch the surface of the wings.
This is just one of the things a butterfly has to do as soon as it emerges to prepare for its life of flight. The butterfly also must also get rid of the waste produced during its transformation and the remains of its last meal as a caterpillar. This waste is known as meconium, and it has a bright red, often bloody appearance. Then, the butterfly has to thoroughly clean all its sensory organs so it can find food. Finally, it has to get its proboscis in working order. When the butterfly emerges, its proboscis is in two separate pieces that join together with tiny hooks and fringes. The butterfly has to curl and twist the two halves of its proboscis to create one drinking tube.
All this work takes place before the butterfly even takes flight.
I marvel at the fact that butterflies survive at all.
What You See Is Not All You Want
What we see in our gardens or on our windscreens are flying insects. We hardly ever see a maggot or any other kinds of larvae - and might want to unsee them if we do. We just have to put up with them all because they are really one thing.
To take your mind off maggots, pause here to admire this handsome fellow and its earlier incarnation.
Just remember that all insects, and I mean all, are utterly dependent upon what is at the bottom of the food chain. At the bottom of the food chain are the lowly and despised weeds, munched on by larvae - worms and caterpillars, weeds eaten by beetles, grasshoppers, crickets, locusts and their nymphs. They in turn are food for the insectivores furthers up the food chain, like predator insects, birds, amphibians, shrews, hedgehogs and us, if we are to believe our betters at the WEF.
It’s a deadly serious game requiring not just energy at every stage, not just protection to survive to the next and not just the time and opportunity to mate but also the ability to survive bad weather, whatever the stage of metamorphosis may be. On top of that, it requires the ability to produce the unimaginably huge and diverse biomass of insects required to sustain the lives of the insectivores of the planet.
It’s a game requiring staggeringly large numbers and a stupendously diverse ecosystem. Our neat gardens and sterile cities can’t hack it. Manicured “wildlife reserves” can’t do it. Carefully managed, diverse artificial habitats might, at a stretch and at huge cost.
Only wildernesses do it effortlessly.
Who Will Survive, Insects Or Homo Insapiens? Place Your Bets Now.
Humans are a single species with a single life stage made up of an infinity of developmental phases, some imaginary, some self-terminating.
The phylogentic tree of Homo Insapiens1 is stiflingly boring, consisting of a single un-diverse branch. To make it seem more diverse, authors like to combine it with the equally un-diverse branches of the other allegedly great apes, like gorillas and chimpanzees. Some such renderings somewhat desperately include the highly speculative, branches of extinct animals, the hominids.
To make up for this utter lack of phylogenetic diversity, latter day bureaucracies resort to constructing a vocabulary of human diversity out of whole cloth. This is done by denaturing the term to mean differences in race, skin colour, hair tint, wealth, education, social status, unusual placement of hideous tattoos and piercings, degrees of personal hygiene or lack thereof and even differences occasioned by elective and irreversible surgical procedures. Unfortunately, as of this writing, none of these are genetically replicable, to the dismay of Ivy League and Oxbridge professors.
For what it is worth (and I believe it to be worth very little) the inhabitants of Africa are genetically the most diverse of all humans on earth, despite not being sufficiently diverse to be afforded even a small twig on the branch of the tree.
Geneticists like to make out that genomic differences are evidence of diversity - they ignore the fact that a great deal of genomic function or purpose is, to put it mildly, unknown - my comments and emphases below in bold or [].2
After the Human Genome Project, scientists found that there were around 20,000 genes within the genome, a number that some researchers had already predicted. Remarkably, these genes comprise only about 1-2% of the 3 billion base pairs of DNA. This means that anywhere from 98-99% of our entire genome must be doing something other than coding for proteins – scientists call this non-coding DNA. [Others call it Junk DNA] Imagine being given multiple volumes of encyclopedias [sic] that contained a coherent sentence in English every 100 pages, where the rest of the space contained a smattering of uninterpretable random letters and characters. You would probably start to wonder why all those random letters and characters were there in the first place, which is the exact problem that has plagued scientists for decades.
Sociologists contradict the whole diversity campaign by insisting that there are no differences between humans despite the obvious, such as gender and skin colour. Conversely and without shame, HR departments use gender and skin colour, among a plethora of other contrived characteristics, as evidence of diversity. Coherent use of language seems to be absent in this species, considering that many HR molluscs also identify as sociologists.
To reproduce, the species requires genetic material from a biological male to fertilise at least one egg produced by a biological female. There are both natural and artificial ways of bringing this about.
The other 30 or so recently invented genders are either uninvolved in reproduction or are faking their genders.
Humans employ an unseemly number of contorted mating positions and arcane procedures in bizarre rituals, all of which are gross and many of which have nothing to do with reproduction. In fact, the human sexual act now has so little to do with reproduction that the future of the species depends almost entirely on the fertility rates on a single continent, albeit the largest one, Africa.
Don’t hold your breath; African fertility rates are dropping like lead balloons as you read this.
The male fertilises the female’s egg by depositing genetic material, vulgarly referred to as jizz, scientifically sperm, using an appendage which, on an insect, would be termed an ovipositor. Since the male has no ova, one assumes that the technical term for said appendage might better have been termed a jizzipositor or spermipositor, were it not for the fact that it is referred to, bizarrely, as a penis.
According to Wikipedia, the authoritative source of all knowledge, the term ‘s strange etymology reads as follows:
The word "penis" is taken from the Latin word for "tail". Some derive that from Indo-European *pesnis, and the Greek word πέος = "penis" from Indo-European *pesos. Prior to the adoption of the Latin word in English, the penis was referred to as a "yard".
Anthropologists have speculated that a common expression used by males of the species, “going to do some yard work”, might mean something other than mowing the lawn.
We may conclude then, that using its tail or yard, the male deposits genetic material through a canal in the female, referred to, not as a jizzireceptor, but as a vagina. As further informed by the aforementioned fount of all knowledge, we then learn that:
The term vagina is from Latin meaning "sheath" or "scabbard".
I have to leave it to my long suffering readers (assuming there are any) to make sense of an otherwise perfectly simple procedure that is described as “inserting a tail or a yard into a sheath or scabbard”.
Reproduction is sometimes effected by equally gross artificial methods, requiring in-vitro egg fertilisation followed by surgical implantation into a designated hostess, which may be a surrogate and/or a gold digger.
There are no known male gestation hosts for either method of reproduction.
Gestation takes nine months and, on average, results in one naked and very noisy grub-like organism, referred to as an infant or child. Birth is by expulsion or surgical extraction, both painful, from the female, usually through the same canal through which male genetic material had been injected nine months previously.
Hence the saying “easy come, not so easy go”.
After birth, the child is useless for all practical purposes other than feeding, making an amazing variety of messes, annoying its parents and as a vessel to carry genetic material into its own reproductive cycle. It remains in this state for at least 10 but up to 30 or more years, judging by contemporary reports.
Some male offspring will squat unproductively in the deeper reaches of the parental dwelling, referred to as a home, unless ejected by force, which may require intervention by unrelated humans, followed by fumigation of the premises.
Eventually, males might take on something called a career, profession or job for the practical reason of having to eat. This is referred to as the get a job phase. The job may or may not entail doing something called work in return for receiving an income, which is always fractionally less than is required for comfort.
Many immature females do something called influencing or tik-tok-ing until they attract the attention of a suitably gullible male, which will be used as a kind of status symbol that can be traded for more powerful models as time goes on. Whilst thus engaged, such immature females expect to be kept in luxury for doing what they would do anyway for free, which is mate. Failing that, they too will join more conservative sisters and enter the get a job phase. There they automatically qualify for positions of great authority over any males within their vocal range. They enjoy their superior status over males by virtue of being life members of a secret society known as the matriarchy.
There are an astonishingly large variety of jobs, spanning a broad continuum from productive through pointless to criminal.
Males and females may, or may not, cohabit. Cohabitation may be according to an unenforceable contractual relationship referred to as marriage. If they cohabit, an activity called bickering may occur from time to time. It is a form of exercise which involves belittling and accusing each other of various things both real and imagined. Cohabitation inevitably results in a power struggle from which the female most often emerges victorious - see matriarchy above. Cohabitation may be a short term activity, initiated only for the purposes of mating. Cohabitations may be abandoned due to boredom or something referred to as “familiarity breeding contempt” and are referred to as divorce or separation.
Boredom is a common human malady for which there is no permanent remedy.
Humans have, throughout their geopolitically sordid history, practiced abortion in modest numbers and as quickly as possible after conception. Infanticide used to be quite rare and frowned upon by something called society. In modern times humans do both on an industrial scale in pursuit of something called choice. In 2023 over 1 million abortions were performed in the USA alone, compared to 41,000 traffic fatalities. Infanticides are not counted or reported because they would be prosecuted as hate speech.
Homo Insapiens has no predators other than each other. Their skilful and diligent pursuit of warfare, violent revolution, murder, drug abuse and other self destructive lifestyles, have made the ecological niche that might have been occupied by predators completely unnecessary. These factors, added to recurring manmade and natural plagues, abortion, infanticide and declining fertility, bid fair to ensure that once all the females have passed child bearing age, the extinction of the species will have been assured. So much for brave new world.
By all the evidence, Homo Insapiens is hellbent on bringing about self extinction. The insects will not miss us or even notice our absence, except maybe the ones that dispose of our corpses.
Post Script
This post has become much too long for comfort. Contrary to my promise in Part 1 to also explain why the rumoured extinction of all insects is drivel, poppycock, bull and horseshit, I have reluctantly decided to make a Part 3 for that purpose. I hope you care enough to come back for it - eventually.
Modern Latin: insapiens, present participle of insapere; "unwise"
I learned a lot from the first part - just brilliant. And I laughed myself silly while reading the second part. Everybody should read this, if not for the education then to get a good laugh. Looking forward to part three.