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A review by logarithms
Planet of the Bugs: Evolution and the Rise of Insects by Scott Richard Shaw
5.0
(this is a 5 stars for my personal enjoyment...note it is pretty specialized and also the conclusion chapters have severe tonal mismatch to the rest of the book) (but come on the guy did astrophysics and entomology what a cool combo)
yea i liked it a lot and it was fun reading the story of life on earth from a pov that isnt human centric :D
notes and tabs (the spoiler is just for length lol. the concept of spoilers for a nonfiction book is v funny tho) :
"When insects invented wings there were no other flying animals, and they completely mastered the air for more than 150 million years before any other organisms evolved the ability to fly or could chase them in the air." FUCK YEA
this note was super interesting (as a math nerd...):
"There is a fundamental reason to use six legs. With six legs it is possible to translate and rotate in all three directions. Also, six-legged creatures can resist forces and torques in all directions. The stability of six legs is well known in the field of robotics."
"Upside down walking on inverted surfaces is possible because insects are so small that the forces of surface tension and cohesion are proportionally greater. Attachment to both smooth and rough surfaces is improved by a variety of microscopic adaptions at the tip of the insect foot, including claws, hairy pads and adhesive secretions."
"Mass extinctions appear to be periodic and repeat on a somewhat cyclical basis. On average, it looks as if an extinction event of varying intensity occurs about once every twenty-six million years. Granted, this could just be a coincidence, but it prompted scientists to speculate about how and why such events might regularly repeat. The dominant notion is that the earth is getting hit by asteroids, and that something out there with gravitational pull is affecting their stable orbits, as well as the orbits of comets, on a cyclical basis, about once every twenty-six million years. Perhaps either a remote small planet or dark star with a broad twenty-six-million-year orbit perturbs them whenever it passes near to our solar system."
"Maybe it's perilous to divide the history of life into separate ages, but in this case perhaps we can indeed pick one singular moment when the Paleozoic era came to an end. I'd choose the particular day when the final trilobite died. What other creature better symbolizes the entire era than the trilobite?"
"One might try to rationalize this situation by thinking that there are millions of insects, so why would it matter if any of them are lost? Some might think, who cares if one fly or bee goes extinct, if that fly or bee belongs to a species that has not been catalogued? But what if that fly - or bee, or wasp, or beetle - were a specialized pollinator of an epiphytic plant? The fall of that one insect species might cause a subsequent loss of plant species, and also of other insects that depends on them." (cascade effect)
"Each living species is unique. Each fills a distinctive ecological role, and each encodes, in its genes, some qualities not found in other species." brb crying
"Setting aside the utilitarian perspective, living species are also intrinsically interesting simply because they exist." (see note above)
yea i liked it a lot and it was fun reading the story of life on earth from a pov that isnt human centric :D
notes and tabs (the spoiler is just for length lol. the concept of spoilers for a nonfiction book is v funny tho) :
Spoiler
"When insects invented wings there were no other flying animals, and they completely mastered the air for more than 150 million years before any other organisms evolved the ability to fly or could chase them in the air." FUCK YEA
this note was super interesting (as a math nerd...):
"There is a fundamental reason to use six legs. With six legs it is possible to translate and rotate in all three directions. Also, six-legged creatures can resist forces and torques in all directions. The stability of six legs is well known in the field of robotics."
"Upside down walking on inverted surfaces is possible because insects are so small that the forces of surface tension and cohesion are proportionally greater. Attachment to both smooth and rough surfaces is improved by a variety of microscopic adaptions at the tip of the insect foot, including claws, hairy pads and adhesive secretions."
"Mass extinctions appear to be periodic and repeat on a somewhat cyclical basis. On average, it looks as if an extinction event of varying intensity occurs about once every twenty-six million years. Granted, this could just be a coincidence, but it prompted scientists to speculate about how and why such events might regularly repeat. The dominant notion is that the earth is getting hit by asteroids, and that something out there with gravitational pull is affecting their stable orbits, as well as the orbits of comets, on a cyclical basis, about once every twenty-six million years. Perhaps either a remote small planet or dark star with a broad twenty-six-million-year orbit perturbs them whenever it passes near to our solar system."
"Maybe it's perilous to divide the history of life into separate ages, but in this case perhaps we can indeed pick one singular moment when the Paleozoic era came to an end. I'd choose the particular day when the final trilobite died. What other creature better symbolizes the entire era than the trilobite?"
"One might try to rationalize this situation by thinking that there are millions of insects, so why would it matter if any of them are lost? Some might think, who cares if one fly or bee goes extinct, if that fly or bee belongs to a species that has not been catalogued? But what if that fly - or bee, or wasp, or beetle - were a specialized pollinator of an epiphytic plant? The fall of that one insect species might cause a subsequent loss of plant species, and also of other insects that depends on them." (cascade effect)
"Each living species is unique. Each fills a distinctive ecological role, and each encodes, in its genes, some qualities not found in other species." brb crying
"Setting aside the utilitarian perspective, living species are also intrinsically interesting simply because they exist." (see note above)