I recently started reading a great new book on insect evolution, Planet of the Bugs: Evolution and the Rise of Insects, by Scott Richard Shaw. It's highly readable for smart sixth graders on up, and is filled with fascinating information presented in a friendly, conversational tone.
Below I quote from a few of the facts I've learned so far in Bugs:
...Keep in mind that given the current rates of new discoveries, description, and publication, it could take an estimated 500 more years just to provide names and morphological descriptions for the remaining insect species.
Insects are cold-blooded animals, and since blood flows through the veins in the their wings, insect wings work very well as little solar panels for warming up on cold mornings.
Small size has promoted insect species diversity by allowing bugs to divide the world into exceedingly small niches.
For as long as 150 million years, insects were the only animals that could fly, and that gave them great advantages in terms of their ability to escape predators and to disperse and colonize new areas.
Over the past 120 million years, insects have coevolved and explosively diversified in tandem with the angiosperms--the dominant forms of plant diversity in modern ecosystems. They are essential as pollinators and seed-dispersers for most of the flowering plants, whose communities would be vastly diminished if all plant-associated insects were eliminated.
No comments:
Post a Comment