Friday, April 06, 2018

"An Inordinate Fondness for Wasps" is a damn good title.

Here is the paper itself.
>We challenge the oft-repeated claim that the beetles (Coleoptera) are the most species-rich order of animals. Instead, we assert that another order of insects, the Hymenoptera, are more speciose, due in large part to the massively diverse but relatively poorly known parasitoid wasps.

2 comments:

Peculiar said...

The link in the article is also nuts:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/11/30/how-fairy-wasps-cope-with-being-smaller-than-amoebas/

Odious said...

I know! Neurons without a nucleus, and only a few thousand of them--utterly bizarre. It reminds me of the cetaceans' return to aquatic living--you adapt to one mode of life (terrestrial/being reasonably sized, respectively) and then back to another (aquatic/absurdly tiny nano-world nonsense).