Jiri Hulcr - The Surprising Lives of Bark Beetles: Mighty Foresters of the Insect World

The Surprising Lives of Bark Beetles

Mighty Foresters of the Insect World

Jiri Hulcr and Marc Abrahams

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA PRESS

Gainesville

Although most photos in this book are from my humble camera, many colleagues graciously contributed their incredible images. Their names are placed next to their photos.

Copyright 2022 by Jiri Hulcr

All rights reserved

Published in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022938406

ISBN 978-1-68340-263-3

University of Florida Press

2046 NE Waldo Road

Suite 2100

Gainesville, FL 32609

http://upress.ufl.edu

THE SURPRISING LIVES OF BARK BEETLES

There are people who dont know much about bark beetles.

If they read this book, then they will know a lot about bark beetles.

Most people never think about bark beetles. But some people do.

Some people think bark beetles are yucky.

Some people think bark beetles are invading, marauding, voracious pillagers.

Some people think rocks and dirt are not interesting, and that bark beetles are less interesting than rocks or dirt.

And then, there are some people who have spent time lookingactually lookingat bark beetles. And looking at what those bark beetles are doing.

Who are these little beetles, these watchful people wonder. What do these little cartoony thingies do every day, and what do they do every night? And how do these little bark beetles affect me?

Jiri Hulcr is a person who spends a lot of his time watching bark beetles do their bark beetle best to live their bark beetle lives and maybe find joy, and definitely find meals and sex.

Perhaps you have some neighbors whom you never pay attention toboring, ordinary, dull-as-rocks-or-dirt people. And perhaps one day, for no particular reason, you focus your attention for a few minutes on what they are doing. And you discover that those neighbors are doing things that are kind of mesmerizing. They are not just part of the woodwork. You find yourself wondering what they are up to, and why, and whether it affects you. And what your life would be like if you were in their place.

Bark beetles are our neighbors. Look at them through Jiri Hulcrs eyes. And though his camera.

Look at the lovely photos in this book. I am almost sure that you will see at least one or two bark beetles that, when you think about it, are less ugly and maybe more beautiful than two or three particular people in your own family, distant cousins or great-uncles whom you run across, occasionally, at weddings or funerals or holiday gatherings.

If you read the book, you might decide that bark beetles, many of them, are helpless victims of sometimes vicious propaganda. You might decide all sorts of things. You might even decide that you kind of like bark beetles. If you are intensely lonely, you might decide that you are falling in love with a bark beetle. Be careful about that, when you read this book.

MARC ABRAHAMS

Bark beetles. Most people dont even know what bark beetles are. The few who recognize the name, bark beetles, probably heard it in a news report about Evil Pests Destroying Forests on a Continental Scale. Wow, they said, thats big. And they walked away from that news report, wondering: Why does nature do such mean things?

Left, below: Camptocerus, the South American jewel among bark beetles. In addition to being good-looking, it farms fungi for food. Photo by Alex Petrov.

This book aims to put that stereotype to rest. Bark beetlesO, lovable creatures!are among the strangest, funniest, and most misunderstood insects. There are more than six thousand different species. We dont really know how many, because taxonomists keep counting and arguing. (Taxonomists are scientists who try to classify organisms.) The bottom line is that this one group of little beetles contains about the same number of species as there are mammal species on the planet. More than six thousand.

Just as mammals exist in different shapes and sizes, bark beetle species also differ wildly. They have different hair styles (seriously, see ). They invented agriculture at least thirteen times (mammals managed to do that only once; guess which particular mammal species did it). Among the different bark beetle species, you can see a variety of ways to have sex, and to pass inherited traits on to the next generation of cute babies (mammals, in contrast, all have the same boring genetics).

Clearly, I am biased because I love them. After leafing through this book, perhaps you will too.

Right, below: Scolytoplatypus. If you took the oddest bark beetles, chopped them into pieces, and then reassembled a bug from the remains, it might look like this. Photo by Alex Petrov.

Where did bark beetles come from? They are all weevils, the family of beetles famous for having long snouts. Yes, the chunky beetles whose larvae live in all kinds of seeds and other plant parts. So why are all bark beetles smaller than a mouse poop, and why do they have no nose? About a hundred million years ago, at the peak of the dinosaur era, one weevil species evolved a way to live inside plant tissue not only during its larval stages, but also on into its adulthood. Those weevils evolved a short nose and a cylindrical body, both of which are advantageous if you live in a tunnel. The snub noses and the rotundity proved to be great for that species long-term success.

How do we know what ancient bark beetles used to look like? Because many unfortunate ones got stuck in the resin of ancient trees and were preserved in amber. This is a picture by Anthony Cognato, who determined that this hundred-million-year-old fossil is actually Microborus. These beetles were around way before Tyrannosaurus rex was a thing. Modified from Cognato and Grimaldi (2009), with permission.

A primitive bark beetle: with googly eyes, lots of pimples, and an otherwise unremarkable facade, Microborus looks much the same as its ancestors did millions of years ago. Photo by Andrew J. Johnson.

Because bark beetles all live in tunnels, their bodies cannot afford to grow into wild and crazy shapes. All bark beetles need to look like a short drill bit. But their endsthe head and the buttare not so constrained, and these two body ends evolved an array of truly phantasmagorical shapes. The front and end shapes and styles are the main story, mechanically, about how particular beetles have sex.