The Unknown Insect

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31262, 7 January 1967, Page 5

The Unknown Insect

(Contributed bv Canterbury Museum) “W/HAT is this insect? I found it crawling up the curtain in ™ my kitchen. I’ve never seen one like it before.” Madam neither have I, not that I remember. And that’s not surprising.

Inquiries like that are frequent at the Museum. Often there is no satisfactory answer.

There are 10,000 or 12,000 named species of insects in New Zealand, all but a few hundred of them unknown anywhere else in the world. Worse, there are in this country an unknown number of thousands of kinds which have not been described or named at all.

Informed of this, the average persons finds it vaguely disquieting. The world, he thinks, is a place in which someone, somewhere, can give him the answer to any question. It is uncomfortable to be told: “Noone knows, noone at all.” Suddenly, the world and his position in it seem somehow less secure. Indeed, there are nearly a million kinds of named and described species of insects

in the world, yet one competent authority thinks this may be no more than a fifth, or perhaps even a tenth, of the total that actually exist. Insect species far outnumber all the other kinds of animal and plant life put together. The beetles alone about one-third of insect species are beetles—outnumber all other non-insect species. There are, very roughly 40,000 kinds of molluscs, that is shellfish, slugs and snails. There are 30,000 or so kinds of single-celled animals, those that can only be seen with the help of a microscope. There are 100,000 or so other “creepy - crawlies” besides some 45,000 kinds of what the layman would consider “real animals,” those with backbones. More than half of these back-boned animals, say 25,000

are fish. 8000 or 9000 are birds. Snakes, lizards, tortoises and crocodiles account for 4000. Of frogs and toads and newts there are about 3000. Only 4000 or so are mammals like ourselves.

These are trifling numbers compared with the several million kinds of insects. Insects are, without a doubt, the most diverse and successful group of animals on this planet. Their history begins about a quarter of a billion years ago, when the first insects probably differed very little from the presentday “silver-fish,” a flightless insect familia rto everyone as a denizen of neglected bookcases and drawers of old papers. Somehow, long ago, insects acquired the power of flight, and for millions of years dominated the dry land, for there were not yet any birds or reptiles to prey on them. There were giants in those days—some insects had a wingspan of as much as 30 inches.

By comparison, man has a history of a mere million years or so. It is interesting to reflect that just one very recently evolved species, man, vies with the most numerous, and one of the most ancient, of animal groups for the domination of the earth.

Millions of species of insects play their diverse roles in the world of nature, eating this, parasitising that, being fed upon by the other, all affecting at first or second or third hand the vast complex of plants and animals upon which we ultimately depend for our very existence. What do we really know of them? Next to nothing. Most are not even named. It is a sobering thought.—J.G.B.