Tag • #insects

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Britain’s natural landscape is in ruins – thanks to the Tories. Here’s how Labour will restore it | Steve Reed

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 2 days ago - 15:57

Sewage pollutes our waterways, species face extinction. We must act fast to halt the decline – and we will

Steve Reed is shadow environment secretary

We must not be the last generation to have the opportunity to marvel at nature.

When I was growing up, I took for granted the excitement of climbing trees in the local woods at the end of our road, sleeping under the stars at Scout camp, and exploring the micro-worlds of seaside rockpools on holiday in Cornwall. Our children and grandchildren deserve to be astounded by the magnificence of our landscapes and coastlines, mesmerised by the beauty of a robin’s song, and to splash about in the local river.

Steve Reed is the MP for Croydon North, and shadow secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs

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High-speed imaging and AI help us understand how insect wings work

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · 5 days ago - 20:16 · 1 minute

Black and white images of a fly with its wings in a variety of positions, showing the details of a wing beat.

Enlarge / A time-lapse showing how an insect's wing adopts very specific positions during flight. (credit: Florian Muijres, Dickinson Lab)

About 350 million years ago, our planet witnessed the evolution of the first flying creatures. They are still around, and some of them continue to annoy us with their buzzing. While scientists have classified these creatures as pterygotes, the rest of the world simply calls them winged insects.

There are many aspects of insect biology, especially their flight , that remain a mystery for scientists. One is simply how they move their wings. The insect wing hinge is a specialized joint that connects an insect’s wings with its body. It’s composed of five interconnected plate-like structures called sclerites. When these plates are shifted by the underlying muscles, it makes the insect wings flap.

Until now, it has been tricky for scientists to understand the biomechanics that govern the motion of the sclerites even using advanced imaging technologies. “The sclerites within the wing hinge are so small and move so rapidly that their mechanical operation during flight has not been accurately captured despite efforts using stroboscopic photography, high-speed videography, and X-ray tomography,” Michael Dickinson, Zarem professor of biology and bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), told Ars Technica.

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Butterfly Tale review – kids insect story wants to take long trip south to Mexico

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 17 April - 06:00 · 1 minute

Anodyne children’s picture provides some gentle entertainment once you forgive the cloying anthropomorphism

‘Is that a butterfly fairy?” asks a confused seven-year-old who watches with me, pointing to the screen at the start of this Canadian animated tale. Nope. The purple creature with a humanish face and body, dressed in a hoodie, wings poking out of its back, is in fact the film’s rendering of a monarch butterfly. The film-makers behind this have really outdone themselves with their tackily revolting anthropomorphic butterflies. Still, if you can get past mutilating a wonder of nature, the movie is a harmless and rather sweet cartoon for under-eights.

Teenager Patrick is a monarch who cannot fly because of an undeveloped wing. His dad was a big hero in the community after pecking out the eye of a fearsome eagle (he paid the price too). But because of his wing, Patrick has been banned from taking part in the annual winter migration south to Mexico. Not this year, says his overprotective mum. (The film ignores the fact that the monarchs make their incredible epic journey only once.) So, Patrick turns stowaway, hiding in the emergency food supply with his chubby caterpillar pal.

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Bumblebee species able to survive underwater for up to a week

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 17 April - 04:00

Common eastern bumblebee queens’ ability while hibernating could help it endure flooding, scientists say

Bumblebees might be at home in town and country but now researchers have found at least one species that is even more adaptable: it can survive underwater.

Scientists have revealed queens of the common eastern bumblebee, a species widespread in eastern North America, can withstand submersion for up to a week when hibernating.

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‘A glittering new world of intrigue’: the rich stories Britain’s insects have to tell

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Saturday, 13 April - 12:00

The fascinating, strange and sometimes hilarious insect world awakens in spring outside our doors

Cast your vote for the UK invertebrate of the year

I never expected a later-life love affair. But a few years ago, I was commissioned to write a book on garden insects and the earth moved. All of a sudden, I realised that my garden wasn’t just full of six-legged aliens, but characters, all with stories to tell, some of which were often bizarre and others hilarious. A few metres from my backdoor a glittering new world of intrigue opened up.

Now that it is spring, this world is awakening and the stories are piling up and moving on fast. As I have become familiar with more insects, the joy of the encroaching season becomes richer still, and more entrancing. Already we have hummingbird tribute acts flying around the spring flowers, bee flies with their hovering flight and long beaks, as fluffy as a child’s toy. Soon their larvae will hatch and grow into child-killers, brutalising the nests of solitary bees.

A Year of Garden Bees and Bugs by Dominic Couzens and Gail Ashton is published by Batsford

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The shrill carder: once-common bumblebee heading for extinction

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 11 April - 11:30

Bombus sylvarum is now found in only a few pockets as intensive farming destroys UK wildflower habitats

The shrill carder ( Bombus sylvarum) is the bookmakers’ early favourite for invertebrate of the year. (I’m picturing a smooth, charming worm giving it the bookies’ patter and an embittered elderly grasshopper totting up the odds, disgruntled because his kind wasn’t nominated.)

Here flies one of our smallest bumblebees, a distinctive greyish-green and straw-hued species which is named after the high-pitched buzz it makes when airborne.

Welcome to the Guardian’s UK invertebrate of the year competition . Every day between 2 April and 12 April we’ll be profiling one of the incredible invertebrates that live in and around the UK. Let us know which invertebrates you think we should be including here . At midnight on Friday 12 April, voting will open to decide which is our favourite invertebrate – for now – with the winner to be announced on Monday 15 April.

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The minotaur beetle – a down-to-earth devourer of dung

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 10 April - 11:30

The minotaur couple work together to provision their young with food, helping to keep our planet functioning

If you’re a what-have-they-ever-done-for-us? sort of voter, you will be won over by the minotaur beetle. It’s as spectacular as any beetle, the shiny black male sporting three bullish horns on their thorax. But the minotaur is also one of that great hidden army of invertebrates who keep our planet functioning – clean and fertile – without us even knowing.

The minotaur is a dung beetle and roams across grassland and heathland at night devouring mammalian droppings.

Welcome to the Guardian’s UK invertebrate of the year competition . Every day between 2 April and 12 April we’ll be profiling one of the incredible invertebrates that live in and around the UK. Let us know which invertebrates you think we should be including here . And at midnight on Friday 12 April, voting will open to decide which is our favourite invertebrate – for now – with the winner to be announced on Monday 15 April.

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How insect blood stops bleeding fast

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 8 April - 13:47

Image of a large green caterpillar against a backdrop of foliage.

Enlarge (credit: Weber )

What if human blood turned into a sort of rubbery slime that can bounce back into a wound and stop it from bleeding in record time?

Until now, it was a mystery how hemolymph, or insect blood, was able to clot so quickly outside the body. Researchers from Clemson University have finally figured out how this works through observing caterpillars and cockroaches. By changing its physical properties, the blood of these animals can seal wounds in about a minute because the watery hemolymph that initially bleeds out turns into a viscoelastic substance outside of the body and retracts back to the wound.

“In insects vulnerable to dehydration, the mechanistic reaction of blood after wounding is rapid,” the research team said in a study recently published in Frontiers in Soft Matter. “It allows insects to minimize blood loss by sealing the wound and forming primary clots that provide scaffolding for the formation of new tissue.”

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Why are there so many species of beetles?

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Sunday, 7 April - 11:02 · 1 minute

Enlarge (credit: Laurie Rubin via Getty )

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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