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Asked by anon-349109 to Sam on 8 Mar 2023.
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Sam Mugford answered on 8 Mar 2023: last edited 8 Mar 2023 8:00 pm
Hi,
Thanks, I’m very pleased you asked me that! The insect I spend a lot of time with, the green peach aphid, doesn’t have a lot about it that’s loveable, but I have grown some fondness for it. Much more charismatic (although many people might disagree with me on that) are the spittlebugs, they are a bit bigger than aphids (but still only a few millimetres long), and they’ve got more personality. They can jump extremely well- 100’s of times they’re own body length, that’s like you jumping the length of a football pitch. And when they’re young they live inside a cluster of bubbles made from thier own excretions, yummy.Actually, many years ago I did a project on ants, and I must admit that ants are much much more intelligent than aphids or spittlebugs. The ants I was working with lived in large colonies that live in cracks in rocks. when they need to find somewhere new to live, the scout ants can measure the size of cracks in the rock and decide whether it is big enough for the colony. Amazingly it turned out that they use an equation that was developed by a French mathematician in the 1800’s to measure the area of the crack. I don’t think an aphid would be clever enough to do that.
If i could work with any insect at all, i would like to work with treehoppers. They are very closely related to spittlebugs but they look incredibly strange. have a look at the picture of them for yourself.
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Comments
Laura commented on :
Almost similar here to Sam. Mine is the peach potato aphid (a type of greenfly). They are the coolest most underrated insect in my view. My reasons, 1) in the summer they are all females and give birth live to clones of themself 2) within each female in the summer there is developing a daughter and granddaughter all at the same time within one aphid, this we call the “telescoping of generations” and makes them the real life Russian dolls. 3) they don’t chew to feed, they have sword like mouthparts that stab plants and then “suck/drink” from plant veins (think mosquito of the plant world” 4) like a mosquito they transmit viruses to plants, yes plants also suffer from viruses 5) when it becomes crowded and they bump into each other, their offspring are born with wings to fly off to a new plant host 6) when it becomes Autumn they give birth to males and females, these mate to lay eggs that can survive the winter.
So those are my reasons and hopefully that has inspired some of you to find the humble greenfly most interesting
Phil commented on :
I dont know if they’re my favourite, but I have worked with some insect pests called blossom midges. One species is called “Orange wheat blossom midge” – the eggs inside wheat flowers (=wheat blossom) hatch to form wiggly orange larvae that eat the developing seed. Some varieties of wheat are resistant to this pest, they produce a substance on the seed coat that the larvae don’t like the taste of so they stop eating.
There’s a closely related species called “Yellow wheat blossom midge”, where the larvae (you guessed it – they’re yellow!) eat the parts of the flower itself so it doesn’t even get to start producing seed. Here there aren’t any resistant varieties…yet….but I’m working on it!