How diabolical ironclad beetles survive cars

This 21 October 2020 video is called Diabolical Ironclad Beetle: Unlocking the secrets of its super-tough design.

From Purdue University in the USA:

This beetle can survive getting run over by a car; Engineers are figuring out how

October 21, 2020

Getting run over by a car is not a near-death experience for the diabolical ironclad beetle.

How the beetle survives could inspire the development of new materials with the same herculean toughness, engineers show in a paper published Wednesday (Oct. 21) in Nature.

These materials would be stiff but ductile like a paper clip, making machinery such as aircraft gas turbines safer and longer-lasting, the researchers said.

The study, led by engineers at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and Purdue University, found that the diabolical ironclad beetle’s super-toughness lies in its two armorlike “elytron” that meet at a line, called a suture, running the length of the abdomen.

In flying beetles, the elytra protect wings and facilitate flight. But the diabolical ironclad beetle doesn’t have wings. Instead, the elytra and connective suture help to distribute an applied force more evenly throughout its body.

“The suture kind of acts like a jigsaw puzzle. It connects various exoskeletal blades — puzzle pieces — in the abdomen under the elytra,” said Pablo Zavattieri, Purdue’s Jerry M. and Lynda T. Engelhardt Professor of Civil Engineering.

This jigsaw puzzle comes to the rescue in several different ways depending on the amount of force applied, Zavattieri said.

To uncover these strategies, a team led by UCI professor David Kisailus first tested the limits of the beetle’s exoskeleton and characterized the various structural components involved by looking at CT scans.

Using compressive steel plates, UCI researchers found that the diabolical ironclad beetle can take on an applied force of about 150 newtons — a load of at least 39,000 times its body weight — before the exoskeleton begins to fracture.

That’s more impressive than sounds: A car tire would apply a force of about 100 newtons if running over the beetle on a dirt surface, the researchers estimate. Other terrestrial beetles the team tested couldn’t handle even half the force that a diabolical ironclad can withstand.

Zavattieri’s lab followed up these experiments with extensive computer simulations and 3D-printed models that isolated certain structures to better understand their role in saving the beetle’s life.

All of these studies combined revealed that when under a compressive load such as a car tire, the diabolical ironclad beetle’s jigsaw-like suture offers two lines of defense.

First, the interconnecting blades lock to prevent themselves from pulling out of the suture like puzzle pieces. Second, the suture and blades delaminate, which leads to a more graceful deformation that mitigates catastrophic failure of the exoskeleton. Each strategy dissipates energy to circumvent a fatal impact at the neck, where the beetle’s exoskeleton is most likely to fracture.

Even if a maximum force is applied to the beetle’s exoskeleton, delamination allows the interconnecting blades to pull out from the suture more gently. If the blades were to interlock too much or too little, the sudden release of energy would cause the beetle’s neck to snap.

It’s not yet known if the diabolical ironclad beetle has a way to heal itself after surviving a car “accident.” But knowing about these strategies could already solve fatigue problems in various kinds of machinery.

“An active engineering challenge is joining together different materials without limiting their ability to support loads. The diabolical ironclad beetle has strategies to circumvent these limitations,” said David Restrepo, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio who worked on this project as a postdoctoral researcher in Zavattieri’s group.

In the gas turbines of aircraft, for example, metals and composite materials are joined together with a mechanical fastener. This fastener adds weight and introduces stress that could lead to fractures and corrosion.

“These fasteners ultimately decrease the performance of the system and need to be replaced every so often. But the interfacial sutures of the diabolical ironclad beetle provide a robust and more predictable failure that could help solve these problems,” said Maryam Hosseini, who worked on this project as a Ph.D. student and postdoctoral researcher in Zavattieri’s group. Hosseini is now an engineering manager at Procter & Gamble Corp.

UCI researchers built a carbon fiber composite fastener mimicking a diabolical ironclad beetle’s suture. Purdue researchers found through loading tests that this fastener is just as strong as a standard aerospace fastener, but significantly tougher.

“This work shows that we may be able to shift from using strong, brittle materials to ones that can be both strong and tough by dissipating energy as they break. That’s what nature has enabled the diabolical ironclad beetle to do,” Zavattieri said.

This research is financially supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Army Research Office through the Multi-University Research Initiative (award number FA9550-15-1-0009). The study used resources at the Advanced Light Source, a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility.

Korean beetles can decompose plastic

This 21 July 2020 video is called A new species of darkling beetle larvae that degrade plastic.

From the Pohang University of Science & Technology (POSTECH) in South Korea:

A new species of darkling beetle larvae that degrade plastic

July 20, 2020

Summary: A research team confirms biodegradation of polystyrene using darkling beetle larvae found in Korea.

There floats an enormous plastic garbage island in the North Pacific that is seven times the size of the Korean Peninsula. The island, called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is the result of 13 million tons of plastic that flow into the ocean annually from the 20,000 units of plastic consumed per second around the world. Plastic takes decades to hundreds of years to decompose naturally with plastic bags taking 10 to 20 years, nylon products or disposable straws 30 to 40 years, and plastic water bottles — commonly used once then thrown away -500 years to decompose. This problem of plastic, which has been labeled a human disaster, has been recently proven to be decomposable by beetles common in Korea.

A joint research team consisting of Professor Hyung Joon Cha and a doctoral student Seongwook Woo of the Department of Chemical Engineering at POSTECH with Professor Intek Song of Andong National University has uncovered for the first time that the larvae of the beetle in the order Coleoptera (Plesiophthophthalmus davidis) can decompose polystyrene, a material that is tricky to decompose.

By 2017, 8.3 billion tons of plastic waste were produced across the globe, of which less than 9 percent were recycled. Polystyrene, which accounts for about 6% of total plastic production, is known to be difficult to decompose due to its unique molecular structure.

The research team found that the larvae of a darkling beetle indigenous to East Asia including the Korean peninsula can consume polystyrene and reduce both its mass and molecular weight. The team also confirmed that the isolated gut flora could oxidize and change the surface property of the polystyrene film.

Meanwhile, the research team isolated and identified Serratia from the intestinal tract of P. davidis larvae. When polystyrene was fed to the larvae for two weeks, the proportion of Serratia in the gut flora increased by six fold, accounting for 33 percent of the overall gut flora. Moreover, it was found that the gut flora of this larvae consisted of a very simple group of bacterial species (less than six) unlike the gut flora of other conventional polystyrene-degrading insects.

The unique diet of the darkling beetle larvae that was uncovered in this study presents the possibility that polystyrene can be broken down by other insects that feed on rotten wood. In addition, the development of an effective polystyrene-decomposing flora using the bacterial strains found in the simple gut flora of P. davidis is highly anticipated.

The study is also noteworthy in that the paper’s first author, Seongwook Woo, who has been interested in insects since childhood and wished to make the world a better place through them, sought out Professor Cha as soon as he entered POSTECH and focused on research under his supervision over the years.

As the corresponding author of the paper, Professor Cha commented, “We have discovered a new insect species that lives in East Asia — including Korea — that can biodegrade plastic through the gut flora of its larvae.” He concluded, “If we use the plastic-degrading bacterial strain isolated in this study and replicate the simple gut floral composition of P. davidis, there is the chance that we could completely biodegrade polystyrene, which has been difficult to completely decompose, to ultimately contribute to solving the plastic waste problem that we face.”

These research findings were recently published in the online edition of Applied and Environmental Microbiology, a long-standing authoritative journal in applied and environmental microbiology.

In a new laboratory study, experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) investigated how many microplastic particles would be absorbed in the muscle tissue of young European sea bass after being given feed with extremely high microplastic particle content for a period of four months. At least with regard to this particular food fish, their findings are good news: only an extremely small percentage of the plastic particles ingested found their way into the fish fillets; the majority were excreted. The experts take this finding as a first indication that fish fillets can still be safe for human consumption, even if the fish eaten are subjected to extreme microplastic pollution. Their study has now been published in the July issue of the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin: here.

Why jewel beetles are colourful

This 11 July 2020 video says about itself:

Jewel beetles are pretty eye-catching with their glossy, bright coloration. But if you were a small creature that needed to avoid predators, you might think that eye-catching is the last thing you’d want to be. But it turns out that their iridescence doesn’t hinder their camouflage…it IS their camouflage!

Stag beetle mating season fight

This 1 July 2020 video is about a stag beetle mating season fight in the Netherlands.

E.P. van der Ploeg made the video.

Dung beetle and mites, video

This 25 June 2020 video shows a dung beetle with mites on its back. The mites do that to go from A to B.

Herman Korndewal in the Netherlands made the video.

18 new South American water beetle species discovered

From the University of Kansas in the USA:

Undergraduate student discovers 18 new species of aquatic beetle in South America

June 22, 2020

It would be striking for a seasoned entomologist with decades of fieldwork to discover such a large number of species unknown to science. But for University of Kansas student Rachel Smith, an undergraduate majoring in ecology & evolutionary biology, the find is extraordinary: Smith recently published a description of 18 new species of aquatic water beetle from the genus Chasmogenus in the peer-reviewed journal ZooKeys.

“The average size of these beetles, I would say, is about the size of a capital ‘O’ in a 12-point font,” said Smith of the collection of new species. “They spend a lot of their life in forest streams and pools. They’re aquatic, so they’re all great swimmers — and they can fly.”

The research involved Smith traveling to Suriname to perform fieldwork as well as passing countless hours in the lab of Andrew Short, associate professor of ecology & evolutionary biology and associate curator with KU’s Biodiversity Institute, who co-wrote the new paper.

Smith said many of the aquatic beetle species are virtually indistinguishable simply by looking at them, even under a microscope.

“Something unique and fascinating about this genus, particularly the ones I worked on, is that many look almost exactly the same,” she said. “Even to my trained eye, it’s hard to tell them apart just based on external morphology. Their uniqueness is in there but kind of hidden in this very uniform external morphology.”

To identify the new species, Smith compared DNA evidence from the aquatic beetles with a few external morphological differences that could be observed. But this was not enough: Much of Smith’s work also hinged on dissecting these tiny specimens collected in northeastern South America to spot key differences in their internal anatomy.

“Because it’s difficult to tell them apart from external morphology, you kind of have to go inside,” she said. “I ended up doing over 100 dissections of these beetles to extract the male genitalia and look at it under a microscope. That really was the true way to tell them apart. Ultimately, it came down to male genitalia and genetic divergence that I used to delimit many of these species.”

The aquatic beetles described in the new paper were collected over multiple trips to Venezuela, Suriname and Guyana. Smith herself participated in one expedition to Suriname to collect specimens.

“In Suriname, almost every day involved a boat ride down a river or kayaking to a location,” she said. “And there would have been either a short or a long hike. One day it was up an entire mountain, another day it was just a short little hike down a river trail. Well, not necessarily a trail because there aren’t trails in the rainforest. We’d find an area that had some small, slow-moving or stagnant pools. The best ones are usually still and have dead leaves and mud and detritus — that’s where a lot of these beetles are found. You definitely have to get dirty to do this work, but it’s very satisfying.”

Indeed, one of the beetles Smith and her fellow researchers discovered in the Suriname rainforest ended up being unknown to science.

“I was part of a group that collected one of the beetles that was named in this paper,” she said. “So, I was involved in the entire process of naming a species — going to the rainforest, collecting it, bring it back to the lab, naming it and describing it. It was so nice to be a part of the whole process of discovering a new species.”

Smith’s co-author and faculty mentor Short said her paper reflects two years of work and is a remarkable accomplishment for any scientist, much less an undergraduate student.

“While new species for me are common, this is quite a lot for one paper and a huge amount for a student to describe,” he said. “Rachel has done a great job. An undergraduate describing 18 species is extraordinary — it’s rare even for experienced scientists. I’ve described a lot of new species but never as many as 18 at once. This work highlights just how little we know about how many species there are in South America.”

Smith said after graduation from KU in December, her aim is to develop a career in fieldwork and research, to uncover hidden biodiversity in hopes that it can empower conservation efforts in threatened areas.

“I’ve always had my sights set on a larger picture, and conservation really is my ultimate goal,” she said. “You have to start from the bottom up, with taxonomy. You can’t really know the efficacy of any kind of conservation effort without knowing what you’re protecting or any idea of how many species are there. As I described in this paper, over half of these species are microendemic, meaning that they only occur in one specific locality. So, it begs the question — is there something unique in that area that these beetles are specializing on, and what kind of kind of niches or roles do they play in that ecosystem? Hopefully, it leads to a larger conversation about taking action to get certain areas protected.”

Smith said destruction of such habitats could lead to an incalculable loss of biodiversity, but taxonomists could inform debates that pit species conservation against economic gains that come from extraction of natural resources.

“There’s deforestation and logging and a lot of gold mining in this particular area where I was at in Suriname,” she said. “But I think the take-home message from this paper really is that biodiversity is found in even in the smallest puddles in South America.”

How bombardier beetles bomb

This March 2020 video says about itself:

Bombardier Beetle Sprays Acid From Its Rear | Life | BBC Earth

These oogpister and bombardier beetles have developed a deadly defence mechanism – a sharp spray of boiling acid from the rear!

From the Stevens Institute of Technology in the USA:

Chemistry behind bombardier beetle’s extraordinary firepower

June 16, 2020

Summary: Researchers show how the bombardier beetle concocts its deadly explosives and in the process, learn how evolution gave rise to the beetle’s remarkable firepower.

If you want to see one of the wonders of the natural world, just startle a bombardier beetle. But be careful: when the beetles are scared, they flood an internal chamber with a complex cocktail of aromatic chemicals, triggering a cascade of chemical reactions that detonates the fluid and sends it shooting out of the insect’s spray nozzle in a machine-gun-like pulse of toxic, scalding-hot vapor. The explosive, high-pressure burst of noxious chemicals doesn’t harm the beetle, but it stains and irritates human skin — and can kill smaller enemies outright.

The beetle’s extraordinary arsenal has been held up by some as a proof of God’s existence: how on earth, creationists argue, could such a complex, multistep defense mechanism evolve by chance? Now researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. show how the bombardier beetle concocts its deadly explosives and in the process, learn how evolution gave rise to the beetle’s remarkable firepower.

“We explain for the first time how these incredible beetles biosynthesize chemicals to create fuel for their explosions,” said Athula Attygalle, a research professor of chemistry and lead author of the work, which appears today in the July 2020 issue of the Science of Nature. “It’s a fascinating story that nobody has been able to tell before.”

To trace the workings of the beetle’s internal chemistry set, Attygalle and colleagues at University of California, Berkeley used deuterium, a rare hydrogen isotope, to tag specially synthesized chemical blends. The team led by Kipling Will then either injected the deuterium-labeled chemicals into the beetles’ internal fluids, or mixed them with dog food and fed them to the beetles over a period of several days.

Attygalle’s team sedated the bugs by popping them in the freezer, then gently tugged at their legs, annoying the sleepy insects until they launched their defensive sprays onto carefully placed filter papers. The team also dissected some beetles, using human hairs to tie closed the tiny ducts linking their chemical reservoirs and reaction chambers, and sampling the raw chemicals used to generate explosions.

Using mass spectrometers, Attygalle checked the samples sent to Stevens for deuterium-labeled products, enabling him to figure out exactly which chemicals the beetles had incorporated into their bomb-making kits. “People have been speculating about this for at least 50 years, but at last we have a clear answer,” Attygalle said. “It turns out that the beetles’ biochemistry is even more intricate than we’d thought.”

Previously, researchers had assumed that two toxic, benzene-like chemicals called benzoquinones found in the beetles’ spray were metabolized from hydroquinone, a toxic chemical that in humans can cause cancer or genetic damage. The team at Stevens showed that in fact just one of the beetle’s benzoquinones derived from hydroquinone, with the other springing from a completely separate precursor: m-cresol, a toxin found in coal tar.

It’s fascinating that the beetles can safely metabolize such toxic chemicals, Attygalle said. In future studies, he hopes to follow the beetles’ chemical supply chain further upstream, to learn how the precursors are biosynthesized from naturally available substances.

The team’s findings also show that the beetles’ explosives rely on chemical pathways found in many other creepy-crawlies. Other animals such as millipedes also use benzoquinones to discourage predators, although they lack the bombardier’s ability to detonate their chemical defenses. Evolutionarily distant creatures such as spiders and millipedes use similar strategies, too, suggesting that multiple organisms have independently evolved ways to biosynthesize the chemicals.

That’s a reminder that the bombardier beetle, though remarkable, is part of a rich and completely natural evolutionary tapestry, Attygalle said. “By studying the similarities and differences between beetles’ chemistry, we can see more clearly how they and other species fit together into the evolutionary tree,” he explained. “Beetles are incredibly diverse, and they all have amazing chemical stories to tell.”

Foxglove flowers and cockchafer beetles

This 8 June 2020 photo shows foxglove flowers in Gooilust nature reserve near Hilversum.

A bit further, there was this beetle.

A cockchafer beetle.

This species is also called Maybug, though this beetle was still around in June. After the photo session, the beetle flew up to a treetop.

Then, once again foxglove flowers.

Stay tuned for more Gooilust photos!

New beetle species named after Beatles

Translated from Taxon Expeditions in the Netherlands, 4 June 2020:

Researchers announced today that they have discovered a new beetle species and named it after The Beatles. The insect was found during a citizen science ‘expedition’ in the Vondelpark in Amsterdam – near the Hilton Hotel where John Lennon and Yoko Ono did their “Bed In For Peace” fifty years ago.

Insects are sometimes named after famous musicians: Lady Gaga was given a cicada, Beyoncé a fly, and four species of damselflies were named after all Queen band members. But strangely, a beetle (beetle) has never been named after the Beatles. This has now been rectified in a new publication in the scientific journal Contributions to Zoology.

A team of insect researchers took a group of local residents on an ‘expedition’ in the Vondelpark. There they discovered a new beetle species (only 2 mm long and living in the soil) and decided to call the animal Ptomaphagus thebeatles. …

During the research in the Vondelpark, the group previously discovered a new parasitic wasp, which they called Aphaereta vondelparkensis.

Finally, a beetle named after The Beatles!
Ptomaphagus thebeatles was discovered by citizen scientists on our expedition to the Vondelpark in the centre of Amsterdam: https://t.co/tgLkPnFhgh pic.twitter.com/ShJFJj3Gvb

— Taxon Expeditions (@TaxonExped) June 4, 2020

Stag beetles mating, hornet arrives

This 3 June 2020 video shows a stag beetle couple mating. Then, a hornet arrives, looking for food on the tree.

Harry Brummelhuis in the Netherlands made that video.