Tag: insect

Posted in Philosophy

Skeleton

Posted on by Jinavie

Is it better to have a skeleton inside the body, or on the surface?

In the case of insects, the skeleton is on the surface and takes the form of a shell that protects them from external damage. The flesh is protected by this shell and becomes soft until it becomes fluid-form. Therefore, when something sharp penetrates the armour, it causes critical, irreversible damage.

If the skeleton is inside the body, it takes the form of thin, hard bones. The soft flesh on the outside is exposed to harm. This leads to endless number of wounds. However, the weakness of being exposed leads to the muscles becoming harder with more resistant muscle fibres. The flesh evolves.

I have met many people who wear an intellectual shell made from remarkable knowledge and intellect, protecting themselves from attacks made by people with different ideas. They appeared much more robust than normal people. They would laugh at everything else, saying “I don’t care”. But when a different opinion would penetrate the hard exterior of their mind, the blow to their ego was indescribable.

I have also met people who would be hurt by even the smallest, insignificant confrontations or dissonance. However, they were sensitive because their minds were open and they learnt something from whatever attack they received.

(from The Encyclopaedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge by Bernard Werber)

Werber spoke of the “skeleton” of the body and mind, but human beings have one other thing that needs a sturdy skeleton – the heart. Many people protect their heart from being broken with hard armour. They do not open up themselves easily and always give an image of strength and stability. But there is no such thing as a life without pain. People who put a skeleton on the outside of their heart tend to be those who have been hurt badly before and trying to protect themselves from being hurt again. This may be effective to some degree, but if you close off your heart, you cannot heal your wounds and you also shut off the happiness of connection. If they suffer pain greater than their armour can withstand, their heart is shattered and they fall into a pit of despair, unable to recover.

On the contrary, some people open up easily to others, exposing themselves to frequent pains from social interactions. These people are sensitive to pain and heartbreak. Hence, the world considers them frail and weak. But as these people have a strong skeleton inside their hearts, they can recover from any wound and they become stronger like well-developed muscle. They grow through pain and their heart – like a warrior who has fought countless battles – becomes strong and resilient against the pains of the world.

We mustn’t avoid suffering and pain and instead try to overcome it. Through this we learn how to bounce back and through experience, we develop ourselves. Suffering is hard, but it is a catalyst that helps us grow into a strong, resilient person.

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Posted in Science & Nature

Honeybee Dance

Posted on by Jinavie

How do honeybees share the location of a food source, such as a flower, to other bees of their colony? An Austrian biologist named Karl Von Frisch devised an experiment to learn how the honeybees communicated with each other. He set up two different food sources and tagged every bee that came to pot A green and bees that came to pot B red. He then studied the behaviour of these bees back at the hive. What he discovered was fascinating.

For millennia, beekeepers have noticed that some honeybees have a tendency of moving in a peculiar yet methodical way once they returned to their hive after foraging for flowers. The bees would move in a straight line while waggling their bottom (moving side-to-side), then walk in a semicircle back to where they started. They would then waggle in the same direction, then move in a semicircle on the opposite side, completing a figure-eight path. This is called a waggle dance.

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Frisch noticed that bees with green spots and the bees with red spots both did the waggle dance once they returned to the hive, but in different directions. All bees with green spots danced so that the straight line pointed a certain direction, while the bees with red spots danced the same dance except pointing another direction. Amazingly, the angle between these two directions was exactly the same as the angle separating pot A and B (with the hive as a point of origin). Frisch deduced that the waggle dance was the language of honeybees.

Through further experimentation, Frisch was able to tease out the details of this “language”.

  • Honeybees’ eyes can see ultraviolet and polarised light, which allows them to see where the sun is in the sky at all times. This is because sunlight polarises so that it points towards the sun and honeybees can see this direction. Therefore, the bee’s eyes act as a solar compass that tracks the exact location of the sun in real-time.
  • Bees have a finely-tuned internal clock that allows them to predict exactly where the sun should be depending on time, season and latitude, as the sun moves through the sky.
  • Another point of reference that is used in the bees’ language is gravity. Gravity is a constant that does not change, meaning all bees know which direction is “up” and which is “down”. This also means they can use a vertical, perpendicular line as a standard zero-point.

By pairing the two global constants, gravity and the location of the sun, the bees can accurately signal to other bees the direction they should fly in to find the food source. If a bee does a waggle dance that points 60° right from the vertical “up” direction (as defined by gravity), it signals that the bees should fly 60° right from the direction of the sun. If the angle is 0°, the bees should fly directly towards the sun, and if the angle is 180°, the bees should fly directly away from the sun. The bees use their internal clock to calibrate the direction depending on the time of the day.

The straight line “waggle” part of the dance gives the information of distance. The longer the duration of the straight line, the further away the flower is. As a general rule of thumb, the duration of the straight line increases by 1 second for every 1 kilometre. When the food is within about 60m of the hive, the 8-shape waggle dance turns into an O-shape round dance. The bee deduces the distance by the energy required to fly to the location.

By encoding the two variables “direction” and “distance”, a bee can effectively use the waggle dance to accurately pinpoint the location of a food source. It is amazing to see that animals that we consider “primitive” such as bees have such an intricate method of communication.

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(Image source: http://aireona93.deviantart.com/art/YAY-Waggle-Dance-146361214?q=boost%3Apopular%20waggle%20dance&qo=1)

Posted in Science & Nature

Giant Monster

Posted on by Jinavie

A gigantic dinosaur monster of 50m height and 20000t weight appears in the centre of Tokyo! The invasion of giant spiders! These are common scenarios in science fiction films. Mankind has always been fascinated by giant creatures. Whether it be a child or an adult, no one passes by the skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex without being awestruck. Thus, it is very easy to use such creatures in movies. But the key point of every monster movie is the “stats”. A height taller than a high-rise building and a weight nearing one of a battleship excites people before the movie even starts. The problem is that this is very unscientific (considering it is a “science fiction”).

Let us look at the dinosaur monster first. The moment the monster steps on to land, it will be crushed like tofu. Every structure in its body will collapse and the skeleton will give way, causing 20000t of meat to crash to the ground. Simply put, the monster is just too heavy. Let us hypothesise that the monster is the shape of a gigantic T-rex. Tyrannosaurus rex was 15m tall and weighed 7t. If a 15m dinosaur is stretched to the height of 50m, the height becomes 3.3 times the original. But as the width and depth need to be expanded by 3.3 times as well, the weight becomes 37 times the original. The question is whether the monster can support its own weight. Just as the volume increased by a factor of 37, the cross-sectional area of every part of the body increases by a factor of 3.3 x 3.3 = 11. As muscle strength is directly proportional to the cross-sectional area, the strength only increases by 11 times. Thus, the load on a creature’s body is the same as the factor of expansion (e.g. there is 3.3 times the load on the monster’s muscles). But this is only when the T-rex was simply stretched. According to the stats, the monster weighs 20000t – 2800 times the weight of a T-rex. To support 2800 times the weight with 11 times the muscle, the load on the bones and muscle is 250 times. This is equivalent to having 249 people the same weight as you on your back. Of course, the monster cannot support this and its bones will become crushed and its internal organs will all burst, causing instant death.

Similarly, a giant insect monster also receives the same load as its expansion. But unlike an animal, insects have an exoskeleton instead of a skeletal system. This structure cannot support the load caused by the expansion (also, if you stretch an ant that is not even 1cm to just 10m, the load becomes over a thousand times). Ergo, the monster will collapse instantly. A giant monster is an unscientific creature that can only exist in our imagination.

Posted in History & Literature

Totalitarianism

Posted on by Jinavie

People take interest in ants for many reasons. Some people are fascinated by how ants have achieved what they deem a perfect totalitarian system. In fact, if you observe it from the outside, an ant nest appears to be completely harmonious as everyone works the same, everyone focuses on the good of the whole and everyone is prepared to sacrifice themselves. But humanity has failed in every attempt at totalitarianism up until now. The Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Babylonians, Carthaginians, Persians, Chinese, French, British, Russians, Germans, Japanese and Americans all experienced an age of glory and appeared as if the world would be assimilated into them, but fortunately a tiny grain of sand would always fall and destroy their unified systems.

This is why there are people who try to imitate insects who live in hive societies (consider how Napoleon’s insignia was of a honeybee). If what unifies an ant nest’s thoughts into one is pheromones, then modern society’s worldwide media does the same function today. People always suggest something that they believe is good and expect others to follow it. They believe that this way, we will achieve a perfect human society one day. But this is not the way of the universe.

Nature, unlike what Darwin suggested, does not evolve so that the fittest survive and rule (and what standard could possible differentiate “fit” and “undesirable”?). Nature’s powers lie in variation. In nature, there are good, evil, insane, devastated, lively, ill, deformed, demented, happy, depressed, intelligent, foolish, selfish, generous people and big, small, black, yellow, red, white things etc. They must all exist. If there is one danger in nature, it is when one group is destroyed by another group.

If there is a field of corns and only the corns that have the “best” traits (i.e. require the least water, stand cold weather and produce juicy corn) are used to pollinate, then the entire crop can be wiped out by a single disease. Contrastingly, a wild crop with individual corns having unique traits with varied weaknesses and differences can survive diseases as the corns find a way to beat it among the many different traits.

Nature hates standardisation and loves diversity. It is through diversity that nature exerts its original abilities.

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(from The Encyclopaedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge by Bernard Werber)

Posted in Science & Nature

Cordyceps sinensis

Posted on by Jinavie

Cordyceps sinensis is a fungus known as dongchoong-hacho(동충하초, 冬蟲夏草) in Korea, with the same characters used in China and Japan. It literally translates to “worm in the winter, herb in the summer”. It is a peculiar fungus with an interesting life cycle. In the summer when the weather is warm, the fungus infects its host (usually ghost moth larvae) through spores. The infected caterpillar is slowly filled with mycelium (thready part of fungi), until it becomes mummified with only the shell remaining. The fungus keeps replicating until it bursts out of the caterpillar’s head with a club-like fruit body (which holds the fungus’ spores). This makes it look as if the caterpillar, which was an insect in the winter, turned into a fungus in the summer (technically it is at this stage, but the caterpillar is long dead). In English, it is also called caterpillar fungus or vegetable worm (which is a misnomer as fungi are not vegetables).

Cordyceps sinensis is an important ingredient in traditional Eastern medicine as it is believed to be a perfect balance between yin and yang due to it possessing both animal and plant (actually a fungus) properties. It is used to treat many diseases from fatigue to cancer.

Although Western medicine usually looks down on and ignores Eastern medicine, research shows that Cordyceps sinensis actually has medicinal properties. Cordycepin, a chemical extracted from the fungus, has been shown to inhibit the growth of viruses, fungi and tumours through its inhibitory actions on a certain protein. There is also research that suggests it can protect the body against radiation poisoning.

Posted in Science & Nature

Badass Weapons Of Nature: Carpenter Ant

Posted on by Jinavie

There is an extreme number of ant species, each with a unique characteristic. In the case of carpenter ants, they are famous for their strange defence mechanism.

Some species of carpenter ants, such as the Camponotus saundersi, have warrior ants with very large mandibular glands (many times greater than normal ants). When in a battle it judges that it has no chance of winning, the ant rapidly contracts its abdominal muscles to build pressure. When sufficient pressure is reached within the mandibular glands, it explodes violently, shattering the ant in the process. The glands are filled with a sticky, toxic fluid, which is spread all around where the ant used to be, ensnaring the foes. The inflicted enemies are killed by the poison. 
This is the reason why they are sometimes referred to as exploding ants.

It is a bold, yet fearsome sacrifice for the greater good.

Posted in Science & Nature

Praying Mantis

Posted on by Jinavie

The praying mantis is sometimes considered a symbol of ultimate female empowerment. After mating, it has been observed that the female would immediately proceed to kill the male she just mated with and eat his corpse, head first.
However, one thing that is less known is that this act – known as sexual cannibalism – occurs almost exclusively in captivity. This is because in the wild, a male runs off quickly after mating to avoid a grim fate. The female, with a massive appetite after the tiring act of copulation, looks for a source of nutrients to upkeep her pregnancy. As in a captive environment the male cannot run far and the female cannot hunt easily, she opts to eat the male as this is more beneficial for her. Furthermore, as mantises have very sharp vision, it is highly likely that the observing scientists (giant, towering figures dressed in white) will intimidate the female mantis. The anxiety caused by the observation would thus make the female act more violently.

The theory that lab intervention caused sexual cannibalism was proven when mantises stopped cannibalising after being fed ad libitum (until they were full). In fact, the female would carefully observe the courtship dance of the male and decide whether he is worthy of mating. This courtship dance also has the effect of switching the female’s priorities from feeding to mating.

It has also been suggested that females may choose to eat the males they do not deem worthy (before mating), or that the males are sacrificing themselves to improve the chance of fertilisation. This is supported by evidence of decapitated male mantises copulating more vigorously and mounting the female for much longer periods. 

In other words, male submissiveness can be a factor in reproductive success.

Posted in Science & Nature

Water Bear

Posted on by Jinavie

A water bear, also called a tardigrade, is actually an insect and not a bear. The nickname is due to its slow, bear-like gait. It ranges in size from 0.1 to 1.5mm and resembles a short caterpillar with eight legs.
The reason for the water bear’s fame is its amazing survivability. In short, a water bear can live anywhere.

Water bears are capable of cryptobiosis. This can be seen as an extension of hibernation and it is an organism’s ability to lower its metabolism to near-death rates in order to survive a harsh environment. In this state, a water bear can survive for indefinite amounts of time.

Why is cryptobiosis useful? The answer can be found from the water bear’s natural habitats. The water bear is found on the highest point of the Himalayas, the deepest oceans, hot springs and virtually any location from the North Pole to the South Pole. It can survive temperatures from 151°C to minus 273°C, the intense pressures in deep seas and even vacuum states.
Furthermore, water bears can survive in space. A recent experiment by NASA on the International Space Station found that not only can they live in space, but they also mated and laid eggs that later hatched. They can even survive heavy doses of radiation and toxic chemicals.

Ergo, if a cockroach can survive a nuclear war, water bears can survive even if the Earth was split in two. If we took a leaf out of the water bear’s book and lead a slower life, could we live a longer and happier life?

Posted in Psychology & Medicine

Post-mortem

Posted on by Jinavie

When a person dies, they leave a body. How does the body change after death? There are four main post-mortem events: algor mortis, livor mortis, rigor mortis and putrefaction. Forensic pathologists use these phenomena and an autopsy to determine the time of death, hearing out the final words of the deceased.

With death, all physiological functions cease. Therefore, the body produces no more heat and begins to cool (algor mortis), evident when touching the corpse. The rectal temperature is measured for an accurate reading. 
As blood is no longer flowing, red blood cells sink due to gravity. They sink to capillaries in the lowest point of the body, causing a purple-red rash on the skin of the area. This is known as livor mortis, or lividity. It appears first about 1~2 hours after death, and worsens with time. On the other hand, the other areas of skin become pale due to the lack of blood.
2~3 hours post-mortem, one can observe the jaw stiffening. This is called rigor mortis. It is caused as ATP is needed for muscle relaxation, and ATP production stops with death. This leads to the muscle becoming rigid, fixating on the position at the time of death. About 6~7 hours later, rigor mortis spreads to the entire body and completely fixes the body 10~12 hours later. After about 72 hours, rigor mortis dissipates and the corpse is limp again.

Putrefaction is the process of microbes decomposing the body – more commonly called rotting. After death, cells die from the lack of energy and are broken down by enzymes. As the immune system also ceases function, microbes easily infiltrate the body and begin converting organic material into inorganic material.
Microbes release gases as it digests the corpse, which collects and causes bloating. The main gases are carbon dioxide, methane and hydrogen sulphide, producing the rotting smell, attracting insects to the corpse.
The key insects studied by pathologists are arthropods and flies. They can estimate the time of death from observing what species are present on the body, and at what stage of the life cycle they are at. For example, 0.5~1 hour post-mortem, flies arrive and lay eggs, which hatch into maggots at 10~24 hours, which becomes cocoons after 8~12 days, which hatch into adult flies at 12~14 days post-mortem.

There is no dignity in death. The rich, the powerful, the kind, the happy – everyone rots away by nature after they die.

Posted in Science & Nature

Man Versus Ant

Posted on by Jinavie

Human:
A mammal that ranges in size from about 1 to 2 metres.
Weighs between 30kg and 100kg. Females are pregnant for 9 months. 
Omnivorous diet. Population estimated around 7 billion.

Ant:
An insect that ranges in size from about 0.01 to 3 centimetres.
Weighs between 0.001mg and 1g. Can produce eggs endlessly given there is an ample sperm reservoir.
Omnivorous diet. Population estimated around 1 quintillion (1 billion times 1 billion).

(from The Encyclopaedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge by Bernard Werber)