Beetles and other small creatures

Mailase trap, yellow traps, water traps, ground traps, sticky traps, light traps, or something new to me; beer & cheese trap. We humans, or some of us called entomologists, want to know more about small creatures.

--I will give you a story.

One day I found a beetle in my bean cultivation. It had transformed from the quite big larva I bought to the spiders and been to a beautiful quite big beetle (Genus Pachnoda) from the soil I used from a terrarium. In the same time, at my friends house (also working with animals in the home space), an unusual speciment of a skin beetle (Family Dermestidae. the second picture) showed up. While he arranged traps with small bottles filled with beer and cheese, my little friend named Arne was climbing ontop of the curtains and pooped everywhere.












Beetles (Order Coleoptera) is the largest insect order with 350.000 described species. The number of species of the class Insecta is estimated at between six and ten million, and potentially represent over 90% of the differing life forms on Earth.

How would the world look without them? Bee Disappearance article in the UK Independent: “The implications of the spread are alarming. Most of the world’s crops depend on pollination by bees but also other small creatures, like the beetles. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, “man would have only four years of life left”.

Why do some people hate them so much, the small creatures? Have man become something disconnected from nature when we started to have civilisation? Is it wild and naughty to like them, or even to care about them, notis them?

Small creatures work hard. All around us. Helps us with all. We can not replace them. They are needed.

--An example of what you can do with them if you don't want to meet them is to listen to Amon Tobin- Esther's, with influences from Beetles flying--

Do we need to have them in our homes? I guess we should, in an organized way. If we understand and connect to even the smallest creatures, we find ourselves.

A common picture used in the ecology studies is this one with the big fly. An overview of relative speciess richness of various groups and other organisms, showed in proportional to size to picture.

If you wonder where humans are look at the raindeer, which indicates all mammals, under the mushroom.

And Arne? He scared me once, when he was out here in the room, he flow over, with that special hard and noisy sound and landed on my stomach. Now he have to share space with the crickets, but he seems to like it.

[And still alive in December 2010, like as a domestic birds, he is curtailed, which was cricket's fault]