I’ve briefly touched on this subject before, both on tumblr and on my website, but this is my very small collection of rubber Melophagus, and I think it’s just fascinating, in a very sad way, that this insect was ever considered recognizable enough for MULTIPLE styles of gumball machine toy.
These insects are actually wingless, parasitic flies more commonly known as “keds,” and they mostly infest the wool of sheep…an animal I’ve personally only ever seen at a distance. I have never actually met a sheep up close in my entire life.
But that statement would be BAFFLING to people just a few generations back. There was a time before the farming crisis, before industrial-scale agriculture and outsourcing when the average child would have been up close with every kind of barnyard animal at some point, and one nasty chore they might have been given would have been to help rid sheep of these very insects before their droppings ruined the wool.
All three of my rubber keds came from different ebay auctions, and were listed as “SPIDER THING?” “Beetle/cockroach” and just “bug.”
Our society forgot that this insect existed because it only crossed paths with us in the context of very hands-on, old-fashioned agriculture, and that is something that became thoroughly alien to the average American practically overnight.
Nope, not a one! It’s believed that insect wings actually evolved from a set of external gills, which arose in a single insect ancestor and no other arthropod.
Insects are the only flying invertebrates at all, and with invertebrates constituting something like 999 out of a thousand species on Earth, it’s really wild that us vertebrates have some flying species. Insects really have dominion over sustained flight, and things like bats and birds are just ripping them off.
He’s a Eurycantha calcarata, a large species of phasmid (stick/leaf insect relative).
A lot of herbivorous insects only eat a few types of plants, but these guys will eat literally anything that might count as a leaf. Grass, cacti and succulents, ferns, moss, even rhododendrons and other toxic plants that are left virtually untouched by insects outside aren’t safe. In the wild they’re pests of oil palm plantations, being among the only insects able to chew through the palms’ thick, leathery leaves.
And apparently they eat paper too. He can probably get some nutrition out of it as well, because he can digest some cellulose. Unlike weak- ass mammalian herbivores and their gut bacteria, phasmids produce their own cellulose- wrecking enzymes to handle their fiberey diet.
Other fun facts about this species:
- The males have giant spikes on their legs that can pierce human flesh down to the bone (but mine never seem to use them as long as they’re handled gently)
- Unlike other phasmids, which tend towards the epitome of passiveness towards their fellow insects, males of this species are jealous bastards that will murder each other with their leg spikes if kept together in the presence of a female
- There’s anecdotal evidence that mating pairs sometimes form long- term bonds (sleeping in the same toilet paper tube every day, coming out to feed at the same time night, etc.) and when one partner kicks the bucket, the other one often dies soon afterwards even if they were different ages.
- Their eggs are the size of small beans, and look exactly like beans. Seriously, you could throw them into a bag of mixed dried beans and you’d never know which beans were the eggs unless you knew exactly what shape and color of bean to look for.
Anyway I hope you had fun learning about this one particular type of bigass paper- munching bug. They’re one of my favorites and I enjoy them immensely.
Scanning electron microscopy is awesome and I personally think the images it produces are gorgeous but objectively speaking I feel like it doesn't do any favors at all for the "scary" cultural image of insects, because I mean, here's a closeup of a carpet beetle in its true colors:
And here's an SEM image that comes up for carpet beetles on google:
And the thing about SEM images is that they aren't "photographs;" they are computer scans. They're 3-d digital models generated by scanning an object at the molecular level.
Color is not preserved by this process, and if it were all the specimens would look like metal anyway (I'll explain this is in a moment), so images like this had to be colored artificially. This isn't done to recreate the true colors, but to make different body parts more visible as study material, resulting in scientific images of wacky blueberry fleas:
The subtly varying transparency levels of living tissues are completely lost as well, which is why the fine hairs of insects stand out more like cactus thorns in SEM imagery, and tardigrades look like opaque leathery things with no eyes:
...Even though a tardigrade actually has eyes, they're just under the surface of a crystal clear exoskeleton:
Another thing that probably contributes to the uncanniness of SEM images is also the fact that they can only show us embalmed corpses encased in liquid metal.
It's not possible to do this fine level of scanning "instantaneously" enough for it to work on anything that's still moving, so even when you see scanning electron images of animals in various lifelike poses, it's because they're preserved specimens that were carefully positioned, or they were live specimens basically "flash frozen" by a sudden dehydration process, mummified so fast they never knew it.
Many specimens are then "sputter coated," meaning they're sprayed with a thin (like microns thin) layer of liquid gold, platinum or other fine metal in order for the electrons to perfectly bounce off of every subatomic detail and produce that perfect scan.
So this is a live fruit fly:
And this is a fruit fly mummy with probably some sort of chrome plating:
I do something like this almost yearly and it feels like it gets a little longer every time!
Personally I draw either cartoony stuff or hybrid monsters where none of this is mandatory, but here are some of the things I sometimes see missing or inaccurate in insect artwork that wasmeant to be lifelike, and even if you only do alien, monster or cartoon arthropods, or you don’t make art at all, you might still like to know some of these things!
First off, an insect leg pretty much always has 9 segments. #1, the coxa, is what attaches it to the body and can be a short little “ball” or a whole long piece, but almost always bends DOWN.
The last five segments are almost always very short, forming a super flexible “foot” or “tarsus” ending in a set of claws and sticky pads. All spiders have this “foot” as well!
The foot is even still present on the claws of a preying mantis - growing right out of the “sickle” like this, and still used as feet when the mantis walks around or climbs.
Basically ONLY CRABS have limbs ending in simple points!
Insects don’t just have side-to-side mandibles at all, but an upper and lower set of “lips” like a duck bill! In some, however, these parts can be very small or even fused solid.
Insects also typically have four “palps” on their head, an upper and lower pair, which evolved from legs and are used to handle food!
Most insects have ocelli, single-lens eyes in addition to their multi-faceted compound eyes.
The point about venomous bites isn’t completely true. Neuropteran larvae and certain beetle larvae (such as those of predaceous diving beetles and possibly rove beetles considering the painful bites they inflict) can inject venom.
Diving beetle and neuropteran larvae are interesting cuz they have a pair of ‘fangs’ and actually drink the bodily fluids of their prey with them the way spiders are often erroneously believed to.
I can’t believe I forgot that it’s how antlion larvae actually feed when they’re one of my top favorite insects and I’ve actively complained about fiction ignoring their toxic bites :(
Between that and me giving the feet an extra segment by mistake, it goes to show that there’s just a lot going on with insects to keep track of in your head.
If you’re interested in ants alone you’re in for a lifetime of study to even scratch the surface.
Octopuses and squids both have only one siphon. An octopus can move its siphon around and usually sticks it out of the side.
Finding Dory is the biggest budget depiction of an octopus to get this wrong.
A leech has only a microscopic pinhole of a mouth opening, but surrounded by three hard jaws. Each jaw has a single row of tiny teeth. Hundreds of them!
GOOD LUCK finding many real photographs but this is how an earthworm’s mouth goes
by the way this isn’t a drawing note but ants are just a type of wasp and some people get real mindblown when they hear that but are you really surprised?
I also have another clarification to make, since I worded it funny - spiders don’t have the whole flexible multi-segmented foot, but they have the tarsus, the two-clawed “toes!”
I do something like this almost yearly and it feels like it gets a little longer every time!
Personally I draw either cartoony stuff or hybrid monsters where none of this is mandatory, but here are some of the things I sometimes see missing or inaccurate in insect artwork that wasmeant to be lifelike, and even if you only do alien, monster or cartoon arthropods, or you don’t make art at all, you might still like to know some of these things!
First off, an insect leg pretty much always has 9 segments. #1, the coxa, is what attaches it to the body and can be a short little “ball” or a whole long piece, but almost always bends DOWN.
The last five segments are almost always very short, forming a super flexible “foot” or “tarsus” ending in a set of claws and sticky pads. All spiders have this “foot” as well!
The foot is even still present on the claws of a preying mantis - growing right out of the “sickle” like this, and still used as feet when the mantis walks around or climbs.
Basically ONLY CRABS have limbs ending in simple points!
Insects don’t just have side-to-side mandibles at all, but an upper and lower set of “lips” like a duck bill! In some, however, these parts can be very small or even fused solid.
Insects also typically have four “palps” on their head, an upper and lower pair, which evolved from legs and are used to handle food!
Most *FLYING* insects have ocelli, single-lens eyes in addition to their multi-faceted compound eyes! Some flightless insects can also have them but it depends on the species.
All legs and wings are always attached to the thorax!
Caterpillars still have six legs! They’re very small and up near the head. All the other “legs” are actually just suckers on its underbelly.
You will be forgiven for never drawing this but this is how many parts a mosquito’s mouth actually has. Every piece you can find in another insect’s mouth - the “upper lip,” the mandibles, the palps, etc. - are all present as different needles and blades!
The word “bug” originally referred only to one group of insects, the hemiptera, including stink bugs, assassin bugs, aphids, cicadas, bed bugs and water striders to name a few. One distinguishing feature of this group is that it did away with all those separate mouth parts - all “bugs” have just a single, hollow “beak” or “proboscis” to feed through!
The vast majority of insect groups have wings or at least members with wings, and all insects with wings have FOUR of them…..except that in beetles, the front wings evolved into solid, protective shields for the hind wings, and in true flies (which includes mosquitoes!) the hind wings evolved into tiny little knobs with weights on the end, called halteres, which the fly’s fast-paced brain uses to feel its orientation, altitude, speed, surrounding air pressure and other fine data making them quite possibly the most advanced aerial navigators on the planet.
OTHER NOTES THAT DON’T NEED ILLUSTRATION:
Insects and other arthropods HAVE TRUE BRAINS in their heads, made of brain cells like ours. They can learn, memorize, and make decisions.
Insects do have males and females and obviously only females lay eggs. Fiction is always getting this wrong, but I guess it also does so with birds so whatever.
Of insects, only termites, ants, some bees and some wasps have fully evolved a eusocial colony structure with “queens” as we think of them. Of these, the termites are actually highly specialized cockroaches, and the rest (bees, ants, wasps) are the same exact group.
The scrabbling, clicking noise associated with insects is usually added artificially in nature footage for dramatic effect. While their movements likely emit some sort of sound, it’s probably no “louder” proportionately than, say, the sound of a cat’s fur as it walks. In other words it should not be noticeable; what kind of animal survives as a species if it clatters with every step??
Compound eyes do not see a bunch of identical little images. There is no advantage to any organism seeing that way. An insect sees one big picture just like you do.
Only some insect groups have “larvae.” Others have “nymphs” which resemble fully grown but wingless insects.
The only insects with a venomous bite are some true bugs and some flies. There are no beetles or roaches or wasps or anything else that inject offensive toxins through their mouth parts, as far as I know!
The only insects that lay eggs inside other insects parasitically are certain wasps and flies. There are also NO arachnids that do this.
Only certain bees, wasps and ants have stingers on their abdomens. These are modified from egg laying appendages, so it’s also only ever the females.
The only other kind of “sting” in any insect is a venomous hair or spine, mostly seen in caterpillars.
Here’s an exploded diagram that shows insect mouthparts in more detail (using a grasshopper as an example, because grasshoppers, cockroaches, and mantises all preserve pretty basal mouthparts that other insects have fused):
The labrum and the labium are the top and bottom of the “beak” respectively, and you can see the labium has the bottom two palps on it. The only parts bogleech’s post left out are the maxillae (where the other palps are), which come below the mandibles. In a grasshopper/roach/mantis, the mandibles can be thought of as big incisors that slide out, and the maxillae are like “cheeks” holding food in on the sides!
Not noted in the diagram are parts the maxillae and the labium are further divided into. The part at the base of the labium is the postmentum, and it splits into two prementa, which themselves split into a glossa and paraglossa each. (Not super obvious on the grasshopper–the inner paraglossae seem to be mostly evolved away, so you’re mostly just looking at two big glossae at the end.)
Then, each maxilla has a stipes at the base, which splits into two parts–the galea on top, and the lacinia on the bottom.
Overall, the bits at the end end up working like lips, in that they help to manipulate food, and teeth in that they can also help chew it up!
Also, attached to the inside of the labium is the hypopharynx, which is kind of like a tongue! (It can’t taste, though–that’s what the palps are for.)
Here’s an image that shows how these mouthparts have fused in a bee (top left), butterfly (top right), and a mosquito (bottom right)! You can see how in the bee and the mosquito the proboscis is mostly made out of the “bottom lip,” but the butterfly’s is mostly made out of the “cheeks.”Also, unlike the other two, the bee has held on to its mandibles, so it can still bite! (Interestingly, ants have mouthparts very similar to bees–the only different is that the proboscis has shortened back up into a bottom lip. They’re never getting those maxillae back the way they were, though, and only have the two labial palps now.)
ALT
ALT
