Reader Kevin sent me this 4.5-minute video about two species of insects, earwigs and rove beetles, and how they fold their wings. It’s amazing, and I knew nothing about this. To quote Kevin:
Yesterday I saw this remarkable video on wing complexity in beetles and it really astonished me. Perhaps you’ve already seen it, but wanted to share it in case you haven’t. They guy has loads more great videos on his channel, too.
I sent the video to reader Robert Lang, among the very best origami experts in the world, thinking that he’d be interested in the folding. But of course he knew all about this (and more), for his folding knowledge and interests are wide, including designing a lens for a space telescope that can be folded up inside a rocket.
This all demonstrates Orgel’s Second Rule: “Evolution is cleverer than you are.” Natural selection sculpted these folds, presumably to allow a flying insect to scuttle through the leaf litter.
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There are superb videos nowadays if we know where to look – wasn’t this channel highlighted previously? I think the jumping insect one…
The scientist/videographer is Adrian Smith, from NC State and the NC Museum of Natural Sciences. He’s done some really interesting work:
https://bio.sciences.ncsu.edu/people/aasmith7/
https://publicscience.ncsu.edu/people/aasmith7/
https://www.pbsnc.org/watch/sci-nc/
Aren’t you just full of fun today? Fits my mood perfectly and I thank you. Oh, and I had no idea that earwigs had/have wings. Now I really don’t like them. I’m just kidding, sort of. I have a lot of earwigs living under my bedroom window around the green thing that’s growing there (I don’t know whether it is a bush or a tree because I keep forgetting to research what it is that makes a tree a tree as opposed to a really large bush like the one growing just outside my bedroom window which now is taller than the roof). Sometimes, the earwigs work their way into my bedroom where I inevitably step on them and I’m always afraid they’ll pinch me, but so far none has. They’re never displaying their amazing fold up wings in my bedroom. Not under the bush or tree, either.
Likewise, I have rove beetles in my house and yard, stunning iridescent blue ones, and with their tiny wing covers (elytra) I figured they had lost their ability to fly. I had no idea there were functional wings underneath those covers!
I think some Earwigs can use their pincers (cerci) to pinch in defense, but I’ve never seen one that could do more than just ever so slightly tickle. The cerci are used to hold prey while they eat it, and apparently males use them in jousting. A selling point for Earwigs is that the females show very endearing parental care, guarding their eggs and hatchlings.
I’ll keep that in mind, Mark and try to develop a little earwig love.
Amazing!
I just saw a video by Ze that is partly about wing folding! I meant to send you a link before this, but here it is.
AntLab’s most impressive and complex wing-folding video is one with an earwig (Dermaptera).
Getting the wings folded away must be far more complicated than just the folding itself. I wonder if there are little muscles in the wings to help tug them into place. Or maybe there is negative blood pressure to get them to collapse.
Cool!
Earwigs in Scottish English are called forkytails. Unlike the English name, the Scottish name doesn’t suggest the insect is likely to find its way into people’s ears. But it is a belief there, as in England, that they do crawl into people’s ears.
Earwigs and evolution. There is a very fascinating piece about the remarkable evolution of earwigs on a group of islands off the British coast. This is in University of St. Andrews news, 27 October 2004. The report brings out the parallel with evolution on the Galapagos, studied by Darwin. The St. Andrews piece refers to a fuller report of the earwig study in Nature.
Ah, had seen this guy’s videos about wasps a while ago. Sadly nowhere near enough wasp content on youtube, parasitic ones in particular. Comics (Sloam Tomlinson, although he has since moved on to videos… on instagram. Ow) and various blogs (e.g. Bug Guy Eric, on blogspot) have it covered quite decently, however.
Shoutout to maculifrons, whose little videos with hardly any viewers (his memetic handfeeding polistes wasps video excepted) never stop coming. I really enjoyed his covering of ultimately failing Polistes colonies a while ago.
Ants and bees get all the love, it’s just not fair.
I am now subscribing to maculifrons. I relate to their sort of weirdness!
As Haldane was saying…
In addition to the cerci at least two species of earwig secrete/spray nasty benzoquinones from a pair of abdominal glands that are quite effective in persuading predators to leave them alone and inquisitive chemical ecologists to bring them into the lab. Hat tip to Dr. Tom Eisner