Why DO these bugs kick ass tho?? Please enlighten me I’m curious now
beetles make up 40% of described insects and 25% of all known animals,coleoptera is the largest order of the animal kingdom with over 400,000 species, compared to 10,000 species of birds and mammals. thats a lot of fucking cool ass bugs. there’s a saying that goes “1 in every 4 animals is a beetle” because there are So Many Of The Fuckers. they’re found on every continent except Antarctica and are very good at adapting to any environment, and many act as essential decomposes by eating leaf litter/dead trees/fungus/carrion/dung. they’ve been around since before the super continent Pangaea broke up, meaning they’ve been around for 270 million years, which also means they’ve survived 3 mass extinction events (Permian-Triassic: 95% of all living beings dead, worst extinction event; Triassic-Jurassic extinction; Cretaceous-Paleogene, what took out the dinosaurs, 76% of all living things dead)
and they look kick ass!!
Hercules beetle,( Dynastes hercules) largest beetle!! can grow up to 16cm long!
harlequin beetle, (Acrocinus longimanus)the one pictured is a male; males will have extremely long front legs (females as do as well comparatively to other beetles but males are like, twice as long) and we have no idea why. we think its because of sexual advertising. long sexy legs
The Humble Dung Beetle (Copris lunaris), dung beetles are actually one of the few insects that exhibit parental care! both male and female dung beetles care for their larvaeas their children eat the shit theyve rolled up. a loving family
An adult insect wing is basically dead. Most of it is dried up, like a dead leaf. Only a little bit — the skinny dark lines called veins — have living, breathing parts inside. Or so Rhainer Guillermo Ferreira thought. So what were those little pipes that looked like breathing tubes doing in the dried parts of dragonfly wings?
Guillermo Ferreira was stunned. The pipes looked like tracheal tubes. They are what carry oxygen to living tissues in insects. So why would tissue that was supposed to be dead need to breathe? That’s what this insect biologist — or entomologist — working at Kiel University in Germany was curious to know.
50 species of lizard and one species of snake reproduce through parthenogenesis (that’s the fancy word for producing offspring as a female without having sex).
Except.
Whiptails are stimulation ovulators. That is to say, they can’t ovulate without having sex.
So not only do they are give birth through immaculate conception, they’re ALL LESBIANS.
There are two kinds of parthenogenesis seen in reptiles. That used by whiptails and the other all female species is true cloning – the egg contains the female’s full genetic material).
Other species including komodo dragons use another form of parthenogenesis where they actually fertilize themselves, with a haploid polar body used instead of a sperm. Because of the way reptile sex chromosomes work, this form of parthenogenesis can produce males as well as females – however, the females produced have weird sex chromosomes and can only lay other females. It’s used as a backup reproductive strategy if they can’t find a mate. This works because in reptiles, unlike mammals, its the males that have two sex chromosomes the same (ZZ) and the females different (ZW). Females produced by parthenogenesis are WW – and that’s what happened to the whiptails. They lost the Z chromosome and now are all WWs.
oh my god these two capercaillie cocks are fighting each other and then this golden eagle just lands on one of them and stands there waiting for him to die, and the other capercaillie just keeps fighting. you can see the eagle watching him like “buddy…. buddy i am in the middle of killing a guy.” and then they slap each other a bit and the eagle the whole time is just staring at him like
and then the dude just… does not stop interrupting this murder, so the eagle has to let go of Slowly Dying Capercaillie #1 to kill this second dude, and then there’s two dead cocks and 1 very confused eagle
OKAY WE NEED A LINK FOR THIS.
it’s Wild North on netflix, episode 2, 25 minutes in. i also found it on youtube (its the only video where an eagle fights two capercaillie cocks so its that one) but its better quality on the show with noise etc.
TIL the Dung Beetle is the only known insect that uses the Milky Way as a reference to move in a straight line despite not being able to see individual stars. Scientists initially thought they were using the moon, however they still moved in a straight line on moonless nights.
I fucking hate space, I hate the universe, I hate science and I hate when shit like this happens. how in the fuck does a wholr species of fucking insects know to look up at the sky at all let alone actually follow the direction of a whole fucking galaxy. why the shit was I even born. why do I exist. this pisses me the fuck off. I wish I was dead
BettSplendens Tumblr Evac 