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Caroline Chaboo’s eyes light up when she talks about tortoise beetles. Like gems, they exist in myriad bright colors: shiny blue, red, orange, leaf green and transparent flecked with gold. They’re members of a group of 40,000 species of leaf beetles, the Chrysomelidae, one of the most species-rich branches of the vast beetle order, Coleoptera. “You have your weevils, longhorns, and leaf beetles,” she says. “That’s really the trio that dominates beetle diversity.”

An entomologist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Chaboo has long wondered why the kingdom of life is so skewed toward beetles: The tough-bodied creatures make up about a quarter of all animal species. Many biologists have wondered the same thing, for a long time. “Darwin was a beetle collector,” Chaboo notes.

Despite their kaleidoscopic variety, most beetles share the same three-part body plan. The insects’ ability to fold their flight wings, origami-like, under protective forewings called elytra allows beetles to squeeze into rocky crevices and burrow inside trees. Beetles’ knack for thriving in a large range of microhabitats could also help explain their abundance of species, scientists say. (credit: Bugboy52.40 (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia Commons )

Of the roughly 1 million named insect species on Earth, about 400,000 are beetles. And that’s just the beetles described so far. Scientists typically describe thousands of new species each year. So—why so many beetle species? “We don’t know the precise answer,” says Chaboo. But clues are emerging.

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Brace yourselves, Illinoisans: A truly shocking number of cicadas are about to live, make sweet love, and die in a tree near you. Two broods of periodical cicadas—Brood XIX on a 13-year cycle and Brood XIII on a 17-year cycle—are slated to emerge together in central Illinois this summer for the first time in over two centuries. To most humans, they’re an ephemeral spectacle and an ear-splitting nuisance, and then they’re gone. To many other Midwestern animals, plants, and microbes, they’re a rare feast, bringing new life to forests long past their death.

From Nebraska to New York, 15 broods of periodical cicadas grow underground, quietly sipping watery sap from tree roots. After 13 or 17 years (depending on the brood), countless inch-long adults dig themselves out in sync, crawling out of the ground en masse for a monthlong summer orgy. After mating, they lay eggs in forest trees and die, leaving their tree-born babies to fall to the forest floor and begin the cycle anew. Cicadas don’t fly far from their birthplace, so each brood occupies a distinct patch of the US. “They form a mosaic on the landscape,” says Chris Simon, senior research scientist in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut.

Most years, at least one of these 15 broods emerges (annual cicadas, not to be confused with their smaller periodical cousins, pop up separately every summer). Sometimes two broods emerge at the same time. It’s also not unheard of for multiple broods to coexist in the same place. “What’s unusual is that these two broods are adjacent,” says John Lill, insect ecologist at George Washington University. “Illinois is going to be ground zero. From the very top to the very bottom of the state, it’s going to be covered in cicadas.” The last time that these broods swarmed aboveground together, Thomas Jefferson was president and the city of Chicago had yet to exist.

Enlarge / BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ (credit: astrida via Getty Images )

One of the world’s most peculiar test beds stretches above Princeton, New Jersey. It’s a fiber optic cable strung between three utility poles that then runs underground before feeding into an “interrogator.” This device fires a laser through the cable and analyzes the light that bounces back. It can pick up tiny perturbations in that light caused by seismic activity or even loud sounds, like from a passing ambulance. It’s a newfangled technique known as distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS.

Because DAS can track seismicity, other scientists are increasingly using it to monitor earthquakes and volcanic activity . (A buried system is so sensitive, in fact, that it can detect people walking and driving above .) But the scientists in Princeton just stumbled upon a rather … noisier use of the technology. In the spring of 2021, Sarper Ozharar—a physicist at NEC Laboratories, which operates the Princeton test bed—noticed a strange signal in the DAS data . “We realized there were some weird things happening,” says Ozharar. “Something that shouldn’t be there. There was a distinct frequency buzzing everywhere.”

Enlarge / Part of the system of reticulated tunnels (egress complex) of a mound of Macrotermes michaelseni termites from Namibia. (credit: D. Andréen)

The mounds that certain species of termites build above their nests have long been considered to be a kind of built-in natural climate control—an approach that has intrigued architects and engineers keen to design greener, more energy-efficient buildings mimicking those principles. There have been decades of research devoted to modeling just how these nests function. A new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Materials offers new evidence favoring an integrated-system model in which the mound, the nest, and its tunnels function together much like a lung.

Perhaps the most famous example of the influence of termite mounds in architecture is the Eastgate Building in Harare, Zimbabwe. It is the country’s largest commercial and shopping complex, and yet it uses less than 10 percent of the energy consumed by a conventional building of its size because there is no central air conditioning and only a minimal heating system. Architect Mick Pearce famously based his design in the 1990s on the cooling and heating principles used in the region’s termite mounds, which serve as fungus farms for the termites. Fungus is their primary food source.

Conditions have to be just right for the fungus to flourish. So the termites must maintain a constant temperature of 87° F in an environment where the outdoor temperatures range from 35° F at night to 104° F during the day. Biologists have long suggested that they do this by constructing a series of heating and cooling vents throughout their mounds, which can be opened and closed during the day to keep the temperature inside constant. The Eastgate Building relies on a similar system of well-placed vents and solar panels.

Enlarge / The colorful jumping spider Siler collingwoodi mimics the walk of an ant to evade predators. (credit: Hua Zeng)

We typically think of camouflage in nature in terms of bodily coloration, enabling the species to blend in with the background and evade predators. But previous studies have documented locomotor mimicry in some species, like swallowtail butterflies and clearwing moths, as well as the jumping spider Myrmarachne formicaria, which mimics the limb use and general movement of ants. The latter is an example of perfect mimicry, generally assumed to be most effective in terms of evading predators.

But Hua Zeng, an ecologist at Peking University in China, and colleagues were intrigued by the colorful jumping spider Siler collingwoodi , which exhibits imperfect mimicry, and decided to run some lab experiments to determine how this might confer protective benefits They also set out to explore the effectiveness of the spider's coloration as a camouflage strategy, describing their results in a new paper published in the journal iScience.

“Unlike typical ant-mimicking spiders that mimic the brown or black body color of ants, S. collingwoodi has brilliant body coloration,” said Zeng . “From a human’s perspective, it seems to blend well with plants in its environment, but we wanted to test whether their body coloration served as camouflage to protect against predators.”

The glassy-winged sharpshooter drinks huge amounts of water and thus pees frequently, expelling as much as 300 times its own body weight in urine every day. Rather than producing a steady stream of urine, sharpshooters form drops of urine at the anus and then catapult those drops away from their bodies at remarkable speeds, boasting accelerations 10 times faster than a Lamborghini. Georgia Tech scientists have determined that the insect uses this unusual "superpropulsion" mechanism to conserve energy, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

A type of leafhopper , the glassy-winged sharpshooter ( Homalodisca vitripennis) is technically an agricultural pest, the bane of California winemakers in particular since the 1990s. It feeds on many plant species (including grapes), piercing a plant's xylem (which transports water from the roots to stems and leaves) with its needle-like mouth to suck out the sap. The insects consume a lot of sap, and their frequent urination consumes a lot of energy in turn, because of their small size and the sap's viscosity and negative surface tension (it naturally gets sucked inward). But the sap is about 95 percent water, so there's not much nutritional content to fuel all that peeing.

“If you were only drinking diet lemonade, and that was your entire diet, then you really wouldn’t want to waste energy in any part of your biological process,” co-author Saad Bhamla of Georgia Tech told New Scientist . “That’s sort of how it is for this tiny organism.”

Enlarge / A road sign in Bursa, Turkey, warns drivers of the presence of dung beetles, stating "Attention! It may come out, don’t crush it please!" (credit: Ugur Ulu/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images )

If the TV series Dirty Jobs covered animals as well as humans, it would probably start with dung beetles . These hardworking critters are among the insect world’s most important recyclers. They eat and bury manure from many other species, recycling nutrients and improving soil as they go.

Dung beetles are found on every continent except Antarctica , in forests, grasslands, prairies, and deserts. And now, like many other species, they are coping with the effects of climate change.

I am an ecologist who has spent nearly 20 years studying dung beetles. My research spans tropical and temperate ecosystems and focuses on how these beneficial animals respond to temperature changes.

Enlarge / Mosquito larvae under a microscope. Certain predatory species feed on the larvae of their rival mosquito species. (credit: Boonyakiat Chaloemchavalid/Getty Images)

Mosquitos are the bane of many people's existence, especially since their bites aren't just annoyingly itchy; they can also spread potentially deadly parasitic diseases. Even the larvae of certain species can be formidable. While most mosquito larvae feed on algae or bacteria and similar microorganisms, some predatory species feed on other insects—including the larvae of other mosquitos. A team of scientists has captured the unique attack methods of these cannibalistic predators on high-speed video, revealing how they capture their prey with lightning-fast strikes, according to a recent study published in the journal Annals of the Entomological Society of America.

Co-author Robert Hancock, a biologist at the Metropolitan State University of Denver, became fascinated by predatory mosquito larvae when he first watched them strike their prey under a microscope during an undergraduate entomology class in college. He was impressed by the sheer speed of the attacks: "The only thing we saw was a blur of action," he recalled . Scientists have long studied these larvae because they are so efficient at controlling the populations of other mosquito species. Just one predatory larva can devour as many as 5,000 prey larvae before reaching adulthood.

Hancock first attempted to capture the striking behavior of the larvae on 16-millimeter film by jerry-rigging a setup with a microscope and camera back in the 1990s—a process he said resulted in a lot of wasted film, given the blistering speed of the strikes. Now as a college professor, he was able to exploit all the advances in video and microscope technology that have been made since his undergraduate years to learn more about the biomechanics involved.

When a rare species is a product.

Alive or dead, rare or mundane, bugs are weirdly easy to find for sale online. However, in some cases, the insects or spiders sold through the various e-commerce sites, both niche and large-scale, may be of dubious provenance. Some may be bred and reared in sustainable programs. Others might be taken from wild populations that are at risk, according to new research out of Cornell University that was published last week.

“It’s not always clear… if they’re sustainable or not,” John Losey, a Cornell entomology professor and one of the paper’s authors, told Ars. “There are sites out there that are definitely not providing documentation that what they’re selling is being done sustainably.”

According to Losey, some websites will provide no documentation or proof showing that a rare pinned butterfly specimen or pet tarantula was collected in a way that doesn't pose a risk for wild populations. Some of them could very well have been reared in a sustainable program, Losey said—there's just no way to tell.