Yes, yes, I know that beetles aren’t “true” bugs; I was just testing you (beetles are in the order Coleoptera, while “true” bugs are Hemiptera). Here’s a tw**t from Jolie Jolies (via Matthew Cobb) showing two gorgeous blue beetles:
I have no idea what these colors mean in an evolutionary sense. They don’t seem to be sexually dimorphic, so they probably didn’t evolve by sexual selection. One could make several other guesses, but I’ll leave that to your fertile imagination.
Here’s another photo of this species from Project Noah:
If you liked this one, go over to Living Jewels and click on the scientific names. The website’s title is accurate: photographer Poul Beckmann shows some gorgeous animals.
If the nonexistent creator had an inordinate fondness for beetles, he would also have had an inordinate fondness for beautiful beetles.
They look like something I would buy for my granddaughter in a toy store.
wow!
Wow, what a fabulous creature!
They are however, RGB animals, not CMYK ones.
(‘Printing’ gag there)
Don’t bright colors often mean “poisonous”, or at least “I look like something that’s poisonous”?
You beat me to it!
They look like they’re wearing tiny little sweaters…
OMG that is exactly what I thought.
The beetle on the right is going home because he got to work and saw his pal had put on the same sweater.
“Damn it Bert, now I have to go home and change. Can you punch in for me?”
The beetle returning home is also okay with cheating on his time sheet. I think Bert is uneasy with the request though.
I have a rich inner life. 😉
You need to get out more. 😉
Their feet look like they are wearing sneakers too!
Their feet are amazing.
AND… you make my point for me.
Blue blue, blue suede shoes
Diana, I love it! Don’t ever change, we need you here.
Ditto!
🙂
You’re adorable, Diana!
That is exactly what I thought too – remembering a specific sweater that my Mum brought for me when I was about 8.
Weevils are my favorite. Interestingly, except for the color, they look almost identical to a couple of weevil species I once studied in the Mojave.
But I have to take exception to this:
They don’t seem to be sexually dimorphic, so they probably didn’t evolve by sexual selection.
Sexual selection can act on both sexes in similar ways. There are certainly a great many cases of birds with uniformly colorful plumage*. All that’s required is that both sexes contribute some costly, limited resource and that there be some variance in the abilities of individuals to contribute that resource. Eggs and parental care are the most common such resources, and if males contribute parental care, they may have reason to be choosy about whose eggs they spend it on.
*though some of them are not uniform to birds’ eyes, which might, as far as we know, be true of the beetles too.
Well, you may take exception to that, but if sexual selection can act on both sexes in similar ways, why is it the case, when one sex is ornamented or brightly colored and the other is not, that it is the male sex that is the gaudy one. If your caveat that sexual selection can act on both sexes (which indeed can occur) were generally true, you should often see females ornamented or colored and males not. We almost never do, and in some of those cases, like seahorses, the males are actually the ones who invest more in offspring, so are the exception that proves the rule.
I know of only one documented case of mutual sexual selection (puffins), so I don’t think that we can use it as the default option when both sexes are brightly colored.
Whole textbooks could be written answering these questions!
I thought first of other cases where sexual selection acts strongly on both sexes, but the result produces a distinct sexual dimorphism because selection on one sex is still different from the other sex. Female baboons are under selection to display a bright red butt when in estrus. Male baboons are under selection for dominating their group with extra big canines.
Actually, there are tons of monomorphic colorful birds in the tropics and the fact that mutual sexual selection has only been documented in a few seabirds (auklet, not puffin) does not mean that it is super rare. All of this said, it seems to be more common in birds than other taxa, probably due to high parental care and resource defense by both sexes. I believe that some beetles might also meet this condition (Necrophorus beetles?) so perhaps there are other beetles as well.
Well, of course it’s usually the male, but there are a fair number of cases of reversed sexual dimorphism with regard to bright colors and fancy ornaments. Jacanas and phalaropes come to mind immediately.
I don’t see why this should often be the case, as it requires the males to provide a limiting resource while females do not, and this seems a rare thing, eggs being by themselves generally limited.
It would seem much more common for both sexes to have valuable and limiting contributions. It hasn’t been rigorously tested enough, but isn’t it at least the most plausible prior explanation for species with fancy males and females? What other default option would you initially suppose? One that comes to mind is that males are sexually selected and females are just along for the ride, but that too makes sexual selection the cause of the relevant feature. Of course sexual selection on females can involve female-female competition as well as male choice. But I see that Bruce Lyon prefers to call this “social selection”.
John
Whether I consider it social selection depends on what the competition is about. If it is over mates, then it is sexual selection, clear and simple. If it is competition over resources for eggs or babies then I prefer social selection. Otherwise, things like all female social insect colonies—where females compete to be the reproductive individuals-become hotbeds of sexual selection. With this, all of reproduction essentially becomes sexual selection. Matter of taste (and semantics).
I believe Padian and Horner disagree, but I haven’t been following the details of the argument for the last decade or so.
This question has been discussed at Tetrapod Zoology, and there have been a number of recent papers on which Darren Naish was one of the authors, considering whether absence of sexual dimorphism is an argument against sexual selection (their answer: no).
See this and this. Both paywalled, unfortunately.
Yes, but if sexual selection operated equally strongly on both sexes, one would expect to see cases in which, when only one sex was ornamented or colored, you’d see it in females as often as in males. That’s certainly NOT the case.
I agree that this is good evidence that sexual selection is not equally likely to affect males and females across all species. Clearly, males are more often the targets. But all my original point requires is that the number of species in which females experience sexual selection is not negligible. Now, I’m woefully ignorant of most taxa except birds, but within birds there are lots of species in which only males are fancy, a few species in which only females are fancy, and a fairly large number of species in which both sexes are equally fancy, or nearly so (as well as a good number in which both are equally drab, which we can ignore). I think that’s evidence that in many species of birds, at least, females experience sexual selection.
There are other potential explanations, especially if you consider social selection to be separate from sexual selection.
There is other evidence, though. In many species of birds, males make costly contributions, and might be expected to be choosy therefore. (Choosy in choice of social mate, that is. In most socially monogamous species, extra-pair paternity is common; sperm is cheap, but paternal care is not.) It’s also my impression that sexual dimorphism is highest in species in which the male makes no contribution other than sperm, while almost all monomorphic, colorful species have biparental care.
How beautiful. They look as if someone caught them and painstakingly painted them for a photo shoot.
Wow! I have a stuffed toy of this weevil. I always thought the color scheme was created by humans. Nice to know the animals really are that color.
I wonder if the reason for these bright blue colors is similar to why tropical fishes often have very bright colors (including stunning blue colors), because they live in an environment with low levels of filtered sunlight. If the beetles live in a dense forest, with light filtering down through the canopy, they may need to ‘shout’ their identity with colors like this.
First thing that came to mind after–what is that pigment that makes such gorgeous color? Turns out, after quick Googling, it’s just chitin-based 3D photonic nanostructures. Cool!
No doubt that’s why the colours look different from different angles.
Makes sense. Almost all blues, in terrestrial animals at least, are structural colors, not pigment.
Why did I read that first as “chitlin-based”?
I must’ve been thinking of doubting Thomas or something…
“just”? “JUST”? “JUST?” 😻 “U+1F63B SMILING CAT FACE WITH HEART-SHAPED EYES”
OK, Newton did the basic maths in the 1660s IIRC (1650s? Something like that.) But it took another 330 or so years before we could actually image these structures, and it’s only really in the last decade or two that we’ve been able to make anything like these structures.
The bugs have been doing this for hundreds of millions of years – there are fossils with preserved structural colours – and we’re barely catching up. Viva technology ⚒ !
They remind me of booties grandma would knit, or snazzy Nike footwear or something.
As a high school student back in 1970, I had a summer job at the county mosquito commission in NJ identifying various species of mosquitoes under a microscope that were caught in light traps throughout northeastern NJ the previous night. The one that always made be gasp at its beauty was a Uritania Sapharina (not sure spelling is correct, its been 45 years!) Of course, from the name, there’s sure to be blue on it. I found a picture on google:
http://www.phsource.us/PH/ME/PH_Entomology/mosq/Ur_sapphirina2.jpg
That is cool. It looks like the colors from from scales (mosquitoes are scaly like lepidopterans), so the color is probably a structural color like one would see in a blue morpho butterfly.
As for the ‘purpose’, I suppose it could be for sex. Of course we are safe to assume that for just about everything in the animal kingdom. If it is not concerned with feeding, or for defense, its for gettin’ it on.
I didn’t know mozzies were scaly! New fact sinks slowly into brain …
… Says the person named after an arthropod which may well have had structural colours of it’s own.
Awww, you remembered!
‘Course I did.
Marella splendens, IIRC. Walcott, about 1909?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marrella
OK, 1912.
Yeah, except I spelled it wrong, Marrella splendens is the right spelling.
Ooops ; I was sweating the small stuff and not noticing the elephant in the metaphorical butter dish.
That is one awesome beetle.
This ensemble comes complete with beetle boots.
I wondered if the colouration and pattern was to do with simply being able to pick out mates and competitors in the bright and gaudy world of the tropics.
Dr Suess should have written about beetle boots.
One weevil, two weevil, red weevil, blue weevil
Let’s have a little talk about booty beetles
Oh, nothing could be sweeter and they’d make the best Adidas if the booties matched the hoodies and the sweaters could be better if the beetles had the needles for to make the hoodies cooties that would match the cooties booties.
My fingers get tongue twisted.
It should read …for to make the cooties hoodies..
Kevin- the next Dr. Seuss!
The magnificus beetle should be the official bug of Chelsea FC. The colors are almost perfect.
Why do I feel the blue bug’s color schema reflects Professor Jerry Coyne’s dress code? I think they are very cute! :))
But does Jerry have shoes/socks like that?
If anyone here knows how to wield a pair of knitting needles … and with a retirement party looming …
What might the blue color look like to predators. etc., that have UV reception?
There’s a chunk of a PhD thesis in there, if you can find funding.
I’d be really curious to know the mechanism generating the color. Visually, it looks fluorescent, which would be remarkable in an animal. I’m guessing, though, it’s probably structural…but it’s still stunning. That kind of saturation is hard to achieve….
b&
How much of the color is diffractive? How would most of their plausible predators see them?
I think if I ate them I would get sicker than a d*g.
There are more species of weevil than any other beetle I think…