Extreme insects

Researchers interested in biodiversity could make no better start than with insects. A new illustrated book looks at the extremes in these species, highlighting just how diverse and numerous these animals are. “Through looking at insects,” the author Richard Jones says, “you can study the world — the whole natural environment — far better than you can by looking at humans. In fact, there’s a lovely idea that, if an alien civilisation landed on earth and had limited time and resources to study life, all it need do is study beetles and dismiss everything else as sampling error, because you can understand the whole of evolution, ecology, genetics, physiology — the whole way life on earth works — just by studying insects.” Jones’s book features images of more than 100 different insects selected to be the most extreme — the shiniest (golden chafer), the loudest (dogday cicada), the heaviest (giant weta) and shortest lived adult (mayfly), for example. “I just started with the biggest, fattest, smallest, thinnest and longest and worked from there.” He finally considered insects in three categories: extreme form, extreme evolution and extreme impact. But Jones was limited by the need to find excellent illustrations of his chosen species. “Humans now reckon themselves to be the dominant life form on earth, but we have been around for only a few hundred thousand years. Insects were here over 300 million years earlier. Humans, the mere junior upstarts, now come into conflict with much older and better established groups of organisms. And extreme insect forms are in abundance. And some have only recently been recognised. The longest insect, at more than half a metre, is the stick insect Phobaeticus chani, of Borneo, only described two years ago. Insects usually have two pairs of wings, but the flies have reduced this to one and some have none at all. But the twenty-plumed moth has divided the four true wings into a fan of ‘finger wings’ that comprise 24 plumes. And it is a moth that holds the record for the greatest wingspan: the ghost moth of Central and South America has a wingspan that can reach 305 mm.