4. Mating Wheels and Sexual Cannibalism
1 .â
There are of course exceptions to this general pattern; insects are such a vast group that there are always exceptions. In stag beetles, for example, the males fight each other for females, and so they tend to be the larger sex, and also have greatly enlarged jaws for fighting.
2 .â
Tropical orb-web spiders are a fascinating exception. Male orb-web spiders are tiny compared to the females, and it has long been known that they are frequently consumed by their mates before, during or after copulation. It has recently emerged that the male genitalia (strictly their palps, which are used to transfer sperm into the female) often snap off inside the female during sex. This has the advantage for the male that it permanently blocks her reproductive tract, preventing her from mating again and so ensuring his paternity of her offspring. Of course the disadvantage is that he is now a eunuch, and he may as well get eaten since he has no way of ever mating again.
5. Filthy Flies
1 .â
Technically flies belong to the insect order Diptera, meaning âtwo wings', differentiating them from most flying insects, which have four wings.
2 .â
âVexatious' is not a word one reads every day. When I read in an end-of-year report from one of my PhD students, who shall remain unnamed, that house flies were vexatious, I recalled that I had read the very same phrase in Jason's thesis a year or two earlier. In fact, when I checked, much of the report had been lifted word-for-word from the introduction of Jason's thesis. The unnamed student got into a lot of trouble, not least because â when questioned â he didn't even know what âvexatious' meant, hesitantly suggesting that it might mean to fly in circles. Plagiarism has become one of the banes of academia, for it is all too easy for lazy students to patch together essays from Internet sources.
3 .â
A magnificent soft blue cheese â if you haven't already tried it, you really should â but, sadly, also very popular with flies. Disappointingly there is no such place as Saint Agur, for I would have liked to go there on a cheese-related pilgrimage.
6. The Secret Life of the Meadow Brown
1 .â
It seems very likely that Ford was gay. He lived at a time when homosexuality was illegal and subject to horrendous persecution. He never married, had no children and was a prominent campaigner for the legalisation of homosexuality. He seems to have held women in low regard. He campaigned vociferously against their admission to Oxford, as either undergraduates or fellows. A story passed on to me as an undergraduate at Oxford was that on one occasion he turned up to teach a class to find that only female students were present. Legend has it that he gazed around the room as if looking for someone and then announced, âSince no one is here, today's class is cancelled.'
7. Paper Wasps and Drifting Bees
1 .â
Toby was trained by the army to sniff out bumblebee nests, which are usually hidden underground or in dense thickets. Toby and Steph's exploits are described inA Sting in the Tale .
2 .â
2013 was a bumper year for nest-usurping. We placed about 100 buff-tailed bumblebee nests out in the countryside in May, part of an experiment to see how many pesticides they are exposed to. It had been a very cold and miserable April, and perhaps this prevented many buff-tailed queens from founding their own nests. Whatever the reason, we found that almost all of our experimental nests were invaded by wild queens, with some accumulating as many as seven dead queens lying in the bottom of the nest, in addition to the resident. We don't know how many of these invasions were successful, and what proportion of the original queens survived.
8. The Mating Habits of the Death-Watch Beetle
1 .â
Sadly Martin died in 2009, aged sixty-five.
9. The True Bugs
1 .â
The many eccentric cures that Darwin tried included wrapping himself in bands of copper and having his butler pour buckets of ice-cold water over his head.
2 .â
The leaps of froghoppers are amongst the most impressive of all insects'. They can accelerate themselves from a standstill at 4,000 metres per second, subjecting themselves to 400 âGs' â the force of gravity â in the process.
10. Hothouse Flowers
1 .â
Probably the best-known mammalian pollinator is the incredibly cute honey possum of south-western Australia. These tiny, long-snouted creatures are the only mammals to feed exclusively on nectar and pollen, having a brush-like tip to their tongue to aid in pollen collection. Amongst mammals they are unique in a number of other ways: they have the largest testes, proportional to their size, and the smallest young at birth, weighing just 1/200th of a gram.
2 .â
The largest flower on Earth is that of the rare plantRafflesia arnoldii , which is found in the dense, steamy rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra. The brownish-pink, mottled flowers are about one metre across, can weigh more than ten kilograms and reek of decaying flesh to attract flies. This plant is also peculiar in having no leaves and little in the way of stem or roots; it is a parasite, sucking its nutrients from rainforest vines.
3 .â
In the 1970s Lawrence Gilbert, a butterfly expert from the University of Texas in Austin, discovered that theHeliconius butterflies of South America are able to digest pollen. These elegant, long-winged neotropical insects are Methuselahs of the butterfly world, living for up to six months as active adults, whereas most butterflies live for just a couple of weeks. To fuel this longevity they collect a ball of pollen at the base of their tongue and exude sugary liquid on to it. This is sufficient to cause the pollen to release much of its amino acids (the building blocks of proteins), which the insects can then suck up through their tubular tongues.
11. Robbing Rattle
1 .â
Plant taxonomists seem to be a perverse bunch. Not only do they insist on family names that have at least a dozen or more syllables, but they then change them every five minutes, so that whatever names you manage to learn are soon out of date.
12. Smutty Campions
1 .â
Geraniums should not be confused with pelargoniums, the red-flowered stalwart of every hanging basket, which are often mistakenly called geraniums. True geraniums include many native, wild species, such as herb robert and the lovely purple-flowered meadow cranesbill (so called because the seedhead resembles the head of a bird with a long bill, one of the distinguishing features of the geranium family). There are also many perennial herbaceous garden varieties, most of which are good plants to encourage bumblebees.
13. The Disappearing Bees
1 .â
Interestingly, corncrake distributions, both past and present, closely match those of the great yellow bumblebee. Corncrakes used to be found nesting in hay meadows and cereal fields all over the UK, but the loss of hay meadows removed much of their habitat, and the switch to early-maturing winter cereals means that many of their nests are destroyed by combine harvesters. They now cling on only in the remote, crofted corners of Scotland where farming has changed relatively little.
2 .â
Actually, to start with, much of the set-aside was useless for wildlife as it was often treated with herbicides to prevent weeds from seeding, and land was only left fallow for short periods, giving little time for wild plants and animals to colonise before it was ploughed up. Later iterations of set-aside schemes were much improved, allowing for the long-term set-aside of areas. Sadly, just as many of these were becoming havens for wildlife, EU policy changed and in 2008 more or less all set-aside schemes were abandoned.
3 .â
At the time of writing a number of major garden centres and DIY chains have recently withdrawn these compounds from their shelves.
14. The Inbred Isles
1 .â
I hesitate to use the phrase âparadigm-shifting', which sprang to mind here but is now horribly overused in scientific circles â it seems that every research grant application has to pretend that it is going to shift at least half a dozen paradigms if it is going to stand any chance of receiving funding. The European Research Council actually specifies that it will only fund paradigm-shifting research, but as far as I can see, if you know you are going to shift a paradigm before you have done the work, it must be a pretty dumb paradigm in the first place. When I was an undergraduate I embarrassed myself considerably by pronouncing paradigm as para-dig-m (in case, like me, you don't know, it should be para-dime).
2 .â
Actually, no we don't â at least not the roads part. It is a source of constant dismay to me that successive governments unthinkingly accept forecasts of future growth in traffic, and hence the need for endless road-widening schemes, bypasses, and so on. Why aren't we spending this same money encouraging people out of their cars and on to public transport, or giving incentives to companies to allow their staff to work from home one or two days a week? This would also reduce pollution, and would reduce the need to grow biofuel crops, freeing up more land for food production or for conservation.
15. Easter Island
1 .â
It is sometimes argued that primitive human societies lived in harmony with nature, and that it is only modern society that is wasteful, profligate and destructive. However, the evidence suggests that humans haven't really changed much at all. Our ancestors exploited the environment as ruthlessly and with as little care for the future as we do today. The only difference is that our increased number and more advanced technology enable us to destroy the Earth much more quickly than they could manage. As Matt Ridley points out in his excellent bookThe Origins of Virtue , the idea that Native Americans had an environmental ethic and avoided over-exploiting resources was a romantic but entirely false invention of the twentieth century, later fostered by films such asLast of the Mohicans . Indeed, there is strong evidence that in some regions the Native Americans hunted bison simply by stampeding whole herds over the nearest cliff, only bothering to cut joints from the topmost carcasses in the pile.
2 .â
There remains some debate as to exactly what happened on Easter Island. Jared Diamond's fascinating tome,Collapse , paints a very bleak picture of the state of the islanders when first visited by Europeans, but his view has offended the descendants of the islanders, who resent the implication that their ancestors destroyed their ecosystem and turned to cannibalism, and argue instead that the main decline of the islanders occurredafter European visitation. If we put political correctness to one side, the facts appear to support Diamond â there is no doubt that the islanders failed to manage the resources at their disposal, drove dozens of species to extinction and vastly reduced the capacity of the island to support life of any sort.
3 .â
Some estimates of the number of species on the planet even go as high as 100 million, although an awful lot of these would be bacteria.
Acknowledgements
I must thank all of the many people that I have worked with over the last twenty years, particularly my thirty or so PhD students and the countless undergraduate project students who have working in my research group, all of whom have had to put up with my spectacularly disorganised and forgetful supervision. It was an honour to work with you all. My apologies to them and other scientists whose work I mention if there are factual errors or inaccuracies.
Particular thanks are due to my agent, Patrick Walsh of Conville & Walsh, without whom my first book,A Sting in the Tale , might well still be nothing more than a file on my laptop, in which caseA Buzz in the Meadow would surely never have been written. Thanks also to my editor, Dan Franklin, and the wonderful staff at Jonathan Cape and Random House, with whom publishing is a pleasure.
Finally, I must mention Ellen Rotheray and Kirsty Park, the first people I trust to read my manuscripts. Thank you both for your encouragement, and for gently pointing out the worst of my many blunders.
Index
The index that appears in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
Adonis blue butterfly
Aesculapian snake
agri-environment schemes
Animalocaris
Anthophora plumipes
Aoki, Shigeyuki
aphid
arachnid
Arctic poppy
axolotl
Banksia
barn owl
bartsia
bat
bat bug
bed bug
bee orchid
beech marten
Berlins, Marcel
Bernwood Forest
Bernwood Meadows
bilberry bumblebee
Birch, Martin
black hairstreak
blackthorn
black-veined white butterfly
Bombus wurflenii
Brakefield Paul
brimstone butterfly
broom
buff-tailed bumblebee
Buglife
bumblebee
Bumblebee Conservation Trust
Burgess Shale
buttercup
butterfly
buzz pollination
campion
campion moth
campion smut
carboniferous period
carrion beetle
Carson, Rachel
Casey, Leanne
centaury
