insects

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Fiji’s ants might be the canary in the coal mine for the insect apocalypse

ants, Biology, evolution, Fiji, insects, Science, speciation / /

A new genetic technique lets museum samples track population dynamics.

In late 2017, a study by Krefeld Entomological Society looked at protected areas across Germany and discovered that two-thirds of the insect populations living in there had vanished over the last 25 years. The results spurred the media to declare we’re living through an “insect apocalypse,” but the reasons behind their absence were unclear. Now, a joint team of Japanese and Australian scientists have completed a new, multi-year study designed to get us some answers.

Insect microcosm

“In our work, we focused on ants because we have systematic ways for collecting them,” says Alexander Mikheyev, an evolutionary biologist at the Australian National University. “They are also a group with the right level of diversity, where you have enough species to do comparative studies.” Choosing the right location, he explained, was just as important. “We did it in Fiji, because Fiji had the right balance between isolation—which gave us a discrete group of animals to study—but at the same time was diverse enough to make comparisons,” Mikheyev adds.

Thus, the Fijian archipelago, with its 330 islands, became the model the team used to get some insights into insect population dynamics. A key difference from the earlier study was that Mikheyev and his colleagues could look at those populations across thousands of years, not just the last 25.

“Most of the previous studies looked at actual observational data—things we could come in and measure,” Mikheyev explains. The issue with those studies was that they could only account for the last hundred years or so, because that’s how long we have been systematically collecting insect samples. “We really wanted to understand what happened in the longer time frame,” Mikheyev says.

To do this, his team focused on community genomics—studying the collective genetic material of entire groups of organisms. The challenge is that this would normally require collecting thousands of ants belonging to hundreds of species across the entire Fijian archipelago. Given that only a little over 100 out of 330 islands in Fiji are permanently inhabited, this seemed like an insurmountable challenge.

To go around it, the team figured they could run its tests on ants already collected in Fijian museums. But that came with its own set of difficulties.

DNA pieces

Unfortunately, the quality of DNA that could be obtained from museum collections was really bad. From the perspective of DNA preservation, the ants were obtained and stored in horrific conditions, since the idea was to showcase them for visitors, not run genetic studies. “People were catching them in malaise traps,” Mikheyev says. “A malaise trap is basically a bottle of alcohol that sits somewhere in Fiji for a month. Those samples had horribly fragmented, degraded DNA.”

To work with this degraded genetic material, the team employed a technique they called high-throughput museumomics, a relatively new technique that looks at genetic differences across a genome without sequencing the whole thing. DNA sampled from multiple individuals was cut and marked with unique tags at the same repeated locations, a bit like using bookmarks to pinpoint the same page or passage in different issues of the same book. Then, the team sequenced short DNA fragments following the tag to look for differences between them, allowing them to evaluate the genetic diversity within a population.  “We developed a series of methods that actually allowed us to harness these museum-grade specimens for population genetics,” Mikheyev explains.

But the trouble didn’t end there. Differences among Fijian ant taxa are based on their appearance, not genetic analysis. For years, researchers were collecting various ants and determining their species by looking at them. This led to 144 species belonging to 40 genera. For Mikheyev’s team, the first step was to look at the genomes in the samples and see if these species divisions were right. It turned out that they were mostly correct, but some species had to be split, while others were lumped together. At the end, the team confirmed that 127 species were represented among their samples.

Overall, the team analyzed more than 4,000 specimens of ants collected over the past decade or so. And gradually, a turbulent history of Fijian ants started to emerge from the data.

The first colonists

The art of reconstructing the history of entire populations from individual genetic sequences relies on comparing them to each other thoroughly and running a whole lot of computer simulations. “We had multiple individuals per population,” Mikheyev explains. “Let’s say we look at this population and find it has essentially no diversity. It suggests that it very recently descended from a small number of individuals.” When the contrary was true and the diversity was high, the team assumed it indicated the population had been stable for a long time.

With the DNA data in hand, the team simulated how populations of ants would evolve over thousands of years under various conditions, and picked scenarios that best matched the genetic diversity results it obtained from real ants. “We identified multiple instances of colonization—broadscale evolutionary events that gave rise to the Fijian fauna that happened in different timeframes,” Mikheyev says. There was a total of at least 65 colonization events.

The first ants, according to Mikheyev, arrived at Fiji millions of years ago and gave rise to 88 endemic Fijian ant species we have today. These ants most likely evolved from a single ancestor and then diverged from their mainland relatives. Then, a further 23 colonization events introduced ants that were native to a broader Pacific region. These ants, the team found, were a mixture of species that colonized Fiji naturally and ones that were brought by the first human settlers, the Lapita people, who arrived around 3,000 years ago.

The arrival of humans also matched the first declines in endemic Fijian ant species.

Slash and burn

“In retrospect, these declines are not really surprising,” Mikheyev says. The first Fijian human colonists didn’t have the same population density as we have now, but they did practice things like slash-and-burn agriculture, where forests were cut down, left to dry, and burned to make space for farms and fertilize the soil. “And you know, not every ant likes to live in a field, especially the ones that evolved to live in a forest,” Mikheyev adds. But the declines in Fijian endemic ant species really accelerated after the first contact with the Europeans.

The first explorers in the 17th and 18th centuries, like Abel Tasman and James Cook, charted some of the Fijian islands but did not land there. The real apocalypse for Fijian ants began in the 19th century, when European sandalwood traders started visiting the archipelago on a regular basis and ultimately connected it to the global trade networks.

Besides the firearms they often traded for sandalwood with local chiefs, the traders also brought fire ants. “Fire ants are native to Latin America, and it’s a common invasive species extremely well adapted to habitats we create: lawns or clear-cut fields,” Mikheyev says. Over the past couple of centuries, his team saw a massive increase in fire ant populations, combined with accelerating declines in 79 percent of endemic Fijian ant species.

Signs of apocalypse

To Mikheyev, Fiji was just a proving ground to test the methods of working with museum-grade samples. “Now we know this approach works and we can start leveraging collections found in museums around the world—all of them can tell us stories about places where they were collected,” Mikheyev says. His ultimate goal is to look for the signs of the insect apocalypse, or any other apocalypse of a similar kind, worldwide.

But the question is whether what’s happening is really that bad? After all, not all ants seem to be in decline. Perhaps what we see is just a case of a better-adapted species taking over—natural selection happening before our eyes?

“Sure, we can just live with fire ants all along without worrying about the kind of beautiful biodiversity that evolution has created on Fiji,” Mikheyev says. “But I feel like if we just go with that philosophy, we’re really going to be irreparably losing important and interesting parts of our ecology.” If the current trends persist, he argues, we might lose endemic Fijian ants forever. “And this would make our world worse, in many ways,” Mikheyev says.

Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.ads3004

Photo of Jacek Krywko

Jacek Krywko is a freelance science and technology writer who covers space exploration, artificial intelligence research, computer science, and all sorts of engineering wizardry.

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Cyborg cicadas play Pachelbel’s Canon

biobots, Biology, cicadas, cyborg cicadas, entomology, insects, Science / /

The distinctive chirps of singing cicadas are a highlight of summer in regions where they proliferate; those chirps even featured prominently on Lorde’s 2021 album Solar Power. Now, Japanese scientists at the University of Tsukuba have figured out how to transform cicadas into cyborg insects capable of “playing” Pachelbel’s Canon. They described their work in a preprint published on the physics arXiv. You can listen to the sounds here.

Scientists have been intrigued by the potential of cyborg insects since the 1990s, when researchers began implanting tiny electrodes into cockroach antennae and shocking them to direct their movements. The idea was to use them as hybrid robots for search-and-rescue applications.

For instance, in 2015, Texas A&M scientists found that implanting electrodes into a cockroach’s ganglion (the neuron cluster that controls its front legs) was remarkably effective at successfully steering the roaches 60 percent of the time. They outfitted the roaches with tiny backpacks synced with a remote controller and administered shocks to disrupt the insect’s balance, forcing it to move in the desired direction

And in 2021, scientists at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore turned Madagascar hissing cockroaches into cyborgs, implanting electrodes in sensory organs known as cerci that were then connected to tiny computers. Applying electrical current enabled them to steer the cockroaches successfully 94 percent of the time in simulated disaster scenes in the lab.

The authors of this latest paper were inspired by that 2021 project and decided to apply the basic concept to singing cicadas, with the idea that cyborg cicadas might one day be used to transmit warning messages during emergencies. It’s usually the males who do the singing, and each species has a unique song. In most species, the production of sound occurs via a pair of membrane structures called tymbals, which are just below each side of the insect’s anterior abdominal region. The tymbal muscles contract and cause the plates to vibrate while the abdomen acts as a kind of resonating chamber to amplify the song.

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The amorous adventures of earwigs

animal behavior, insects, Science, syndication / /

She ain’t scary, she’s my mother

Elaborate courtship, devoted parenthood, gregarious nature (and occasional cannibalism)—earwigs have a lot going for them.

Few people are fond of earwigs, with their menacing abdominal pincers—whether they’re skittering across your floor, getting comfy in the folds of your camping tent, or minding their own business.

Scientists, too, have given them short shrift compared with the seemingly endless attention they have lavished on social insects like ants and bees.

Yet, there are a handful of exceptions. Some researchers have made conscious career decisions to dig into the hidden, underground world where earwigs reside, and have found the creatures to be surprisingly interesting and social, if still not exactly endearing.

Work in the 1990s and early 2000s focused on earwig courtship. These often intricate performances of attraction and repulsion—in which pincers and antennae play prominent roles—can last hours, and the mating itself as long as 20 hours, at least in one Papua New Guinea species, Tagalina papua. The females usually decide when they’ve had enough, though males of some species use their pincers to restrain the object of their desire.

Males of the bone-house earwig Marava arachidis (often found in bone meal plants and slaughterhouses) are particularly coercive, says entomologist Yoshitaka Kamimura of Keio University in Japan, who has studied earwig mating for 25 years. “They bite the female’s antennae and use a little hook on their genitalia to lock them inside her reproductive tract.”

Size matters

Female earwigs collect sperm in one or more internal pouches and can use it to fertilize multiple broods, so they don’t need to mate again. The only thing most males can do is add their own sperm, but Kamimura has seen males of the pale-legged earwig Euborellia pallipes remove the sperm of other males using an elongated part of their peculiar penis.

It’s better if females can prevent this from happening, because they can be particular about the males they mate with. This may explain why, in some species, male and  female genitalia have increased in size as part of a kind of evolutionary arms race in which males benefit from access to the pouch and females benefit from keeping them out. In the bristly earwig Echinosoma horridum, the male’s genitalia are nearly as long as the rest of his body, and the female’s genitalia almost four times as long as the rest of hers.

Fascinating though they are, the amorous adventures of earwigs weren’t what first caught Kamimura’s attention. Rather, he was intrigued by the female’s dedication to her offspring. “When I was a student, I accidentally disturbed an earwig caring for her eggs in our backyard,” he recalls. “She ran away but returned the next day. I was very interested, and I started to rear them.”

Grow your own earwigs

The care that female earwigs provide to their eggs has also become the focus of study in Europe, where a surge of lab research on European earwigs—Forficula auricularia—was kick-started almost 20 years ago by entomologist Mathias Kölliker at the University of Basel, Switzerland. “Getting them to breed continuously over multiple generations was a big challenge,” he recalls. “The females did lay eggs, but they didn’t develop, and never hatched.”

It turned out that the eggs, which are laid in late fall and hatch in January, need the winter cold to start their development. So the scientists figured out a lab regimen that would chill but not kill the eggs. “That took us about two years,” says Kölliker.

In 2009, Kölliker hired entomologist Joël Meunier, who continues to study earwigs at the University of Tours in France and wrote an overview of the biology and social life of earwigs for the Annual Review of Entomology. Earwigs are high maintenance, he says. “If you work with fruit flies, you can breed 10 generations in a few months, but earwigs take much longer.… And they’re all kept in separate petri dishes—thousands of them—that we have to open twice a week to replace the food.

“I think this is one of the reasons few people work on them. But they’re very fascinating.”

Fending off males

The female’s careful egg grooming has at least two important functions. First, she uses a small brush on her mouthparts to remove the spores of fungi that can kill the eggs. Secondly, as Kölliker, Meunier, and colleagues found, she applies water-repellent hydrocarbons to keep them from drying out.

Males that attempt to approach the nest are aggressively chased away, and with good reason, says Meunier. “Once, when we were in the field in Italy to collect earwigs, we found a male and a female together with a clutch of eggs. We were quite excited: ‘Wow, biparental care, cool!’ So we brought them to the lab. But what we actually observed was that the female was very stressed out, showing a lot of aggression towards the male, while the clutch size was continuously decreasing.”

Males, it turns out, love to snack on eggs, even ones that they fathered. To chase them off, females raise their abdomens to show off their pincers. If that’s not enough, they can use the pincers to hurt the male—even to cut him in half. (Scary as they look, the pincers can’t harm people at all, Meunier says.)

Earwigs can also spray each other with defensive secretions that may have antimicrobial properties, too. “They often use those secretions when meeting others,” says Meunier. “Maybe it also prevents the spread of disease.”

As far as scientists know, these secretions are harmless to humans. But because they contain quinone derivatives, which are also found in substances like henna, they have some quirky side effects. “When you get a lot of it on your hands,” Meunier says, “they’ll turn blue, like a bruise, and these marks can last all week.”

The secretions smell quite pleasant, says Kölliker. “When I had a visitor in the lab, I would sometimes pick up an earwig and hold it under their nose. It’s a very nice odor, actually, kind of an earthy smell.” Kölliker’s cat was less appreciative when he tried it on her: “She immediately backed off,” he says.

A female earwig with her young.

A female earwig with her young. Credit: Patrick Lorne / Getty Images

Overbearing moms

Surprisingly, Meunier’s recent work suggests that earwig offspring may pay a price for their mom’s protectiveness. In European earwigs and several other species, although the nymphs that emerge from eggs can feed on their own after a couple of days, mothers usually stay with them for a few weeks after they hatch. Yet, at least in the lab, that does not seem to enhance the nymphs’ chances of survival.

“In the best case, the mother’s presence doesn’t change a thing,” says Meunier. “At worst, nymphs that grow up with their mother are less likely to reach adulthood and will become smaller adults.” It’s unclear why. But things may be different in the wild, where male earwigs or predators like spiders pose threats, making it safer to stay with mom.

The mother herself seems to benefit. Meunier has observed that as soon as the nymphs emerge, they eat the parasitic mites that often bother breeding females. And once they start foraging on their own, the feces they leave all over the nest may be food for their mother and help her to produce a second brood. The nymphs also feast on each other’s feces, sometimes straight from the source.

The voracious nymphs don’t stop there: They regularly eat each other, and nymphs of the hump earwig Anechura harmandi will almost always eat their mother. “It occurs in every family,” Meunier says, “and it helps the nymphs grow.”

Let’s get together

With all this aggression and cannibalism, you’d expect adult earwigs not actively seeking mates to avoid each other, and in many species, they do. Yet European earwigs regularly group together by the hundreds, sometimes mixing things up with other earwig species.

Recent work from Meunier’s lab showed that European earwigs that grew up in groups are more likely to look for company as adults than those reared in isolation, and females removed from these groups can get so stressed they are more likely to succumb to fungal infections.

“We have no idea why,” says Meunier. “Maybe it’s healthier to live together. Or maybe they just like company.”

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a nonprofit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. Sign up for Knowable Magazine’s newsletter.

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Knowable Magazine explores the real-world significance of scholarly work through a journalistic lens.

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These hornets break down alcohol so fast that they can’t get drunk

alcohol consumption, Biology, entymology, Genetics, hornets, insects, Science / /

Many animals, including humans, have developed a taste for alcohol in some form, but excessive consumption often leads to adverse health effects. One exception is the Oriental wasp. According to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, these wasps can guzzle seemingly unlimited amounts of ethanol regularly and at very high concentrations with no ill effects—not even intoxication. They pretty much drank honeybees used in the same experiments under the table.

“To the best of our knowledge, Oriental hornets are the only animal in nature adapted to consuming alcohol as a metabolic fuel,” said co-author Eran Levin of Tel Aviv University. “They show no signs of intoxication or illness, even after chronically consuming huge amounts of alcohol, and they eliminate it from their bodies very quickly.”

Per Levin et al., there’s a “drunken monkey” theory that predicts that certain animals well-adapted to low concentrations of ethanol in their diets nonetheless have adverse reactions at higher concentrations. Studies have shown that tree shrews, for example, can handle concentrations of up to 3.8 percent, but in laboratory conditions, when they consumed ethanol in concentrations of 10 percent or higher, they were prone to liver damage.

Similarly, fruit flies are fine with concentrations up to 4 percent but have increased mortality rates above that range. They’re certainly capable of drinking more: fruit flies can imbibe half their body volume in 15 percent (30 proof) alcohol each day. Not even spiking the ethanol with bitter quinine slows them down. Granted, they have ultra-fast metabolisms—the better to burn off the booze—but they can still become falling-down drunk. And fruit flies vary in their tolerance for alcohol depending on their genetic makeup—that is, how quickly their bodies adapt to the ethanol, requiring them to inhale more and more of it to achieve the same physical effects, much like humans.

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High-speed imaging and AI help us understand how insect wings work

AI, Biology, Biomechanics, Computer science, flight, insects, muscles, Science, wings / /
Black and white images of a fly with its wings in a variety of positions, showing the details of a wing beat.

Enlarge / A time-lapse showing how an insect’s wing adopts very specific positions during flight.

Florian Muijres, Dickinson Lab

About 350 million years ago, our planet witnessed the evolution of the first flying creatures. They are still around, and some of them continue to annoy us with their buzzing. While scientists have classified these creatures as pterygotes, the rest of the world simply calls them winged insects.

There are many aspects of insect biology, especially their flight, that remain a mystery for scientists. One is simply how they move their wings. The insect wing hinge is a specialized joint that connects an insect’s wings with its body. It’s composed of five interconnected plate-like structures called sclerites. When these plates are shifted by the underlying muscles, it makes the insect wings flap.

Until now, it has been tricky for scientists to understand the biomechanics that govern the motion of the sclerites even using advanced imaging technologies. “The sclerites within the wing hinge are so small and move so rapidly that their mechanical operation during flight has not been accurately captured despite efforts using stroboscopic photography, high-speed videography, and X-ray tomography,” Michael Dickinson, Zarem professor of biology and bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), told Ars Technica.

As a result, scientists are unable to visualize exactly what’s going on at the micro-scale within the wing hinge as they fly, preventing them from studying insect flight in detail. However, a new study by Dickinson and his team finally revealed the working of sclerites and the insect wing hinge. They captured the wing motion of fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) analyzing 72,000 recorded wing beats using a neural network to decode the role individual sclerites played in shaping insect wing motion.

Understanding the insect wing hinge

The biomechanics that govern insect flight are quite different from those of birds and bats. This is because wings in insects didn’t evolve from limbs. “In the case of birds, bats, and pterosaurs we know exactly where the wings came from evolutionarily because all these animals fly with their forelimbs. They’re basically using their arms to fly. In insects, it’s a completely different story. They evolved from six-legged organisms and they kept all six legs. However, they added flapping appendages to the dorsal side of their body, and it is a mystery as to where those wings came from,” Dickinson explained.

Some researchers suggest that insect wings came from gill-like appendages present in ancient aquatic arthropods. Others argue that wings originated from “lobes,” special outgrowths found on the legs of ancient crustaceans, which were ancestors of insects. This debate is still ongoing, so its evolution can’t tell us much about how the hinge and the sclerites operate.

Understanding the hinge mechanics is crucial because this is what makes insects efficient flying creatures. It enables them to fly at impressive speeds relative to their body sizes (some insects can fly at 33 mph) and to demonstrate great maneuverability and stability while in flight.

“The insect wing hinge is arguably among the most sophisticated and evolutionarily important skeletal structures in the natural world,” according to the study authors.

However, imaging the activity of four of the five sclerites that form the hinge has been impossible due to their size and the speeds at which they move. Dickinson and his team employed a multidisciplinary approach to overcome this challenge. They designed an apparatus equipped with three high-speed cameras that recorded the activity of tethered fruit flies at 15,000 frames per second using infrared light.

They also used a calcium-sensitive protein to track changes in the activity of the steering muscles of the insects as they flew (calcium helps trigger muscle contractions). “We recorded a total of 485 flight sequences from 82 flies. After excluding a subset of wingbeats from sequences when the fly either stopped flying or flew at an abnormally low wingbeat frequency, we obtained a final dataset of 72,219 wingbeats,” the researchers note.

Next, they trained a machine-learning-based convolutional neural network (CNN) using 85 percent of the dataset. “We used the CNN model to investigate the transformation between muscle activity and wing motion by performing a set of virtual manipulations, exploiting the network to execute experiments that would be difficult to perform on actual flies,” they explained.

In addition to the neural network, they also developed an encoder-decoder neural network (an architecture used in machine learning) and fed it data related to steering muscle activity. While the CNN model could predict wing motion, the encoder/decoder could predict the action of individual sclerite muscles during the movement of the wings. Now, it was time to check whether the data they predicted was accurate.

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Why are there so many species of beetles?

beetles, entomology, insects, Science, syndication / /

The beetles outnumber us —

Diet played a key role in the evolution of the vast beetle family tree.

–

A box of beetles

Caroline Chaboo’s eyes light up when she talks about tortoise beetles. Like gems, they exist in myriad bright colors: shiny blue, red, orange, leaf green and transparent flecked with gold. They’re members of a group of 40,000 species of leaf beetles, the Chrysomelidae, one of the most species-rich branches of the vast beetle order, Coleoptera. “You have your weevils, longhorns, and leaf beetles,” she says. “That’s really the trio that dominates beetle diversity.”

An entomologist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Chaboo has long wondered why the kingdom of life is so skewed toward beetles: The tough-bodied creatures make up about a quarter of all animal species. Many biologists have wondered the same thing, for a long time. “Darwin was a beetle collector,” Chaboo notes.

Despite their kaleidoscopic variety, most beetles share the same three-part body plan. The insects’ ability to fold their flight wings, origami-like, under protective forewings called elytra allows beetles to squeeze into rocky crevices and burrow inside trees. Beetles’ knack for thriving in a large range of microhabitats could also help explain their abundance of species, scientists say.

Enlarge / Despite their kaleidoscopic variety, most beetles share the same three-part body plan. The insects’ ability to fold their flight wings, origami-like, under protective forewings called elytra allows beetles to squeeze into rocky crevices and burrow inside trees. Beetles’ knack for thriving in a large range of microhabitats could also help explain their abundance of species, scientists say.

Of the roughly 1 million named insect species on Earth, about 400,000 are beetles. And that’s just the beetles described so far. Scientists typically describe thousands of new species each year. So—why so many beetle species? “We don’t know the precise answer,” says Chaboo. But clues are emerging.

One hypothesis is that there are lots of them because they’ve been around so long. “Beetles are 350 million years old,” says evolutionary biologist and entomologist Duane McKenna of the University of Memphis in Tennessee. That’s a great deal of time in which existing species can speciate, or split into new, distinct genetic lineages. By way of comparison, modern humans have existed for only about 300,000 years.

Yet just because a group of animals is old doesn’t necessarily mean it will have more species. Some very old groups have very few species. Coelacanth fish, for example, have been swimming in the ocean for approximately 360 million years, reaching a maximum of around 90 species and then declining to the two species known to be living today. Similarly, the lizard-like reptile the tuatara is the only living member of a once globally diverse ancient order of reptiles that originated about 250 million years ago.

Another possible explanation for why beetles are so rich in species is that, in addition to being old, they have unusual staying power. “They have survived at least two mass extinctions,” says Cristian Beza-Beza, a University of Minnesota postdoctoral fellow. Indeed, a 2015 study using fossil beetles to explore extinctions as far back as the Permian 284 million years ago concluded that lack of extinction may be at least as important as diversification for explaining beetle species abundance. In past eras, at least, beetles have demonstrated a striking ability to shift their ranges in response to climate change, and this may explain their extinction resilience, the authors hypothesize.

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