beetles

Words

Sarada used to be a zymurge. That is, a brewster. She used to brew beer and wine, and such a person is referred to by such a name. Aardvark, though, is something she never was. Nor has she ever considered changing her name to Zzzzzzzzabakov to be the last person in the Telephone Directory, which someone apparently did at some point. I don’t remember their name.

A little annoyingly, alphabetical order requires shorter words to be filed before longer ones, which presumably means there’s less if any kudos involved in being the first entry in the ‘phone book, which in any case is nowadays mainly a conceptual thing. A is actually the most common single-letter surname, comprising more than a tenth of people with such surnames. English, of course, has the indefinite article, leading to the rather boring first entry in the dictionary. This is sometimes followed by the Hawaiian word “aa”, actually a two-syllable word referring to the rugged crust of a lava flow. “Aal” is a red dye from a plant related to coffee, and then we get to the iconic “aardvark” and “aardwolf”.

At the other end of the alphabet there’s no such encumbrance, and there’s plenty of scope for “zy-” words, from the Greek ζυγουν – “to join”, cognate with “Yoga” and “yoke”, and also ζυμοῦν – “to ferment”. There is a species of wasp called Zyzzyx , which suggests onomatopœia, which might occupy the last entry. This opens the floodgates to scientific names of genera, but then there probably isn’t a common name for that wasp and we’re happy to say things like Boa constrictor or Aubretia, so the chances are that if we did have to refer to that species we really would call it a Zyzzyx.

The existence of that insect slightly spoils the narrative I’m trying to spin here, because just before that entry there would be another one which, were it not for Zyzzyx‘s name, would surely be the last word in the dictionary (or “fictionary”, because I’m not sure there is such a work in reality): Zyzzyva. In fact you get all the way through this word before you encounter a vowel as the final letter, another neat feature. “Zyzzyx” has no vowels at all unless you count Y, and on a mythical English Scrabble board with three Z’s, it would score 168 points if played in the top left hand corner. Sadly, it would be impossible to play on such a board. You might think it could be played easily, with a low score, on a Polish scrabble set, but Polish has no X.

Like the zyzzyx, a zyzzyva is an insect. Namely, they’re brilliant red weevils a couple of millitmetres who live on Brazilian palms. First described scientifically in 1922, they were probably named that way as a practical joke to put them last in guides to beetles. Something similar may be happening at the other end of the dictionary with “Aaaaba“, whose name has a rather convoluted history. This refers to another beetle, this time an Australian one, who was originally called “Altinous” until it was realised that name had already been given to a sea spider, so they were renamed “Aaba”, which turned out to be the name of a sponge, so in 2013 they were given a name starting with four A’s. As far as I know, there are no words with four consecutive “vanilla” A’s in any written language, but there is the Estonian “jäääärne”, which means something like “at the edge of the ice”, and once again I think this was probably named as a joke, possibly in response to “zyzzyva”.

The words deployed in Scrabble games delight and sadden me in equal measure because on the one hand weird words are appealing, but on the other the game divorces them from their meaning. Maybe somewhere out there in Halbakery Space there’s a word game which uses both the form and the significance of the words, and it would be interesting to try to invent one. The only two word games I’m aware of which use words like Scrabble are Scrabble itself, of which the casual FB game Words With Friends is a cut-down variant, and a game called Lexicon my grandmother used to play. Lexicon is a card game with letters rather than suits and is described here.

If you assume a random distribution of letters used to make up each name for a genus, and imagine an alphabetical list of all named genera, there would still be a certain type of organism which would be more likely to turn up at the start and end of such a list. If you further confine this to animals, this becomes even more probable. This is of course reminiscent of the Doomsday Argument, and uses established facts about the Latin alphabet to draw a conclusion which doesn’t depend quite as firmly on the facts of what’s being decided as might be expected. One animal species in four is a beetle. Reducing this to insects raises the proportion to two in five. Consequently, if there’s a dictionary of up to date generic names for animals, and these are randomly distributed in the alphabet, the probability of it ending in the name of a beetle is one in four, as is that of it beginning with one, and therefore the odds of it both beginning and ending in the name of a beetle would be one in sixteen. Nor is that a merely technical thing confined to the realm of entomology, because as a language, English only has about a million words, so if these are seriously understood to be proper English words it would more than double the size of the dictionary. As it stands, the OED seems to consist substantially of variant spellings of fairly common words such as “ynpossybul”, which is a little irritating and raises the question of how big English vocabulary really is, and it’s also worth mentioning that a very large number of “English” words are in fact variants, or even identical, to words used internationally in technical contexts, although they may often have been used initially by first language English speakers. Nonetheless, there are rather a lot of species of beetle. J B S Haldane, a rather polymathic scientist who came up with a rather ridiculously large number of influential ideas such as IVF, primordial soup and the hydrogen economy and was an influence on Olaf Stapledon, is alleged to have been asked by a theologian what he had learnt about God from his studies, and replied that God has “an inordinate fondness for beetles”, because there are just so many different species that it’s ludicrous.

Beetles are just one order of one class of one phylum of animals, but include 25% of all animal species, 40% of all insect species and I’m guessing about 30% of all arthropod species. Both the largest and smallest species of free-living insect is a beetle: fist-sized Goliath beetles at the upper end and a featherwing beetle at the lower, whose adults average only 340 μ long. This makes the former thirty-six million times as bulky as the latter. Beetles were also the earliest pollinating insects, because flowering plants evolved before social insects or pollinating butterflies, although there used to be an order of insects practically identical to butterflies in the Jurassic who used to pollinate plants as well. Beetles still pollinate Magnolias. Unlike Lepidoptera or Hymenoptera, beetles don’t just pollinate the flowers but also defæcate on them and eat petals, so they’re like nature’s “first try” at a pollinating insect, less sophisticated than their successors.

Beetles themselves, and I might as well introduce the name “Coleoptera” at this point, are a kind of “second try”. Back in the early ’70s, our garden shed was populated by what we used to call “black beetles”, who are in fact cockroaches, and belong in the other main half of insects from beetles, the Hemimetabola who don’t pupate but just grow bigger, sometimes developing wings in the process. To a casual glance, an American cockroach looks just like a beetle, and on the whole a glance is all you get because they run away pretty fast. I mentioned yesterday that there are two forms of insect flight, and cockroaches, being venerable, are the first insects to use the indirect method, which seems to be connected to the ability to fold the wings flat across their backs. Britain also has native cockroaches who are much smaller and live in burrows. Unlike most beetles, cockroaches lack wing cases and have been around since the coal forests. Some cockroaches have quite sophisticated social structures and termites are in the same order.

The fact that beetle-like insects have evolved twice, along with the fact that they have the most species of any order, once again suggests that if the hard exoskeleton and jointed legs of animals is a common adaptation elsewhere in the Universe, there may well be beetles all over the Galaxy. On Earth, two factors limit insect size. One is that they use tubes open to the outside to move respiratory gases around, meaning that the bulkier an insect gets the spongier it has to be, and the other is that their hard cuticles have to be proportionately heavier the larger they are. Hence the largest insects ever existed on this planet when there was much more oxygen in the atmosphere. However, there isn’t any particular reason why they shouldn’t’ve evolved lungs instead, which many other arthropods have, and they can also approach bulk through forming large colonies of discrete individuals. Consequently, a feasible alien intelligence might exist in the form of swarms of thousands of giant beetles, perhaps with hand-like mouthparts, none with human-like intelligence as such but collectively of perhaps more than human cognitive ability.

Anyone old enough to remember the summer of ’76 in England will remember the ladybird plague. There were twenty-four thousand million altogether that year, mainly seven-spots. This is, however, unlikely to happen again because ’75 was also very hot and sunny, which I can remember but many people forget, and many more ladybirds survived the winter. Also, more recently parasites have killed larval ladybirds, but it could happen again and I imagine climate change makes it more likely. It depends on a larger than usual population of aphids as well. It was also the first time I noticed that ladybirds seem to produce an irritant straw-coloured liquid, which is presumably why they’re brightly coloured. Nowadays our native species compete with East Asian harlequin ladybirds, whose appearance is very variable and are therefore hard to recognise.

One of the sadnesses of my life is that I’ve never seen a stag beetle. They seem to be quite common, since most other people I know seem to have come across them. As such, they’re a little like vipers, whom I’ve also never seen despite them being very common in the area of England I lived in as a child. As with many other insects, including the mayfly, stag beetles live most of their lives as larvæ and pupæ, taking six years to mature into imagos (adults) at which point the males develop their enormous mouthparts which may actually prevent them from feeding at all in that form, which is also the case with many other insects such as some moths. Although stag beetles are the largest terrestrial British insects at up to six dozen millimetres, great diving beetles are also very big at three centimetres, and unlike them are not topped out by the enormous mandibles.

One of the sad things for a sighted person living in the British Isles is that few of our animals are very colourful. We don’t, for example, have anything like the cardinal birds common in North America although we have got kingfishers, bullfinches and the various titmice and wagtails. Beetles are a welcome exception to this rule. As well as the aforementioned ladybirds, we have tiger beetles and the metallic-looking tansy and rosemary beetles and rose chafer, rainbow leaf beetles which are both multicoloured and metallic in appearance, and in my childhood I recall a very common bright red beetle who used to live on flowers, possibly Rose of Sharon. One thing I find hard to tell is whether I simply lived in a more biodiverse area than I now do, which is true, or whether biodiversity has fallen dramatically, which is also true. It’s a question of which factor is more influential on my experience. I have never seen a glow worm, for example, since I left Kent, although apparently they only tend to exist in patches. They’re also beetles, in case you don’t know.

In conclusion therefore, beetles are bloody brilliant and their names are useful for playing Scrabble, and maybe also crosswords.