The Perfect Insect

Posted by Ivan The Insect February 12, 2022

The Perfect Insect

The concept of perfection itself is deeply flawed and troubling, at least when applied to our current reality and the universe as we know it.

Why is that so?

For something to be perfect it has to be complete but also unchangeable, the issue here is that if something needs to change in order to survive or be "more" perfect then logically it is not perfect as it already should be.

But this is a blog about giant insect monsters in fiction and I'm desperately trying to play with philosophies and concept so out of my league I probably know more about quantum mechanics based solely on what I hear about it in sci-fi.

The reason I brought up my take on the issues with perfection as a concept and theme is because it goes against life. At least life as we know it. The very reason you, I and every single living organism on this planet exists is because we are all not perfect in any way, and that's great!

Life exists because it moves, not in the actual sense of movement (I can assure you your plant is pretty darn alive right now, just don't water it for a month and you'll believe me) but rather movement on a scale often so subtle and small we don't even feel it or even acknowledge it, but we suffer the results of all that movement. Our biology is based on physics and chemistry, our bodies are in constant movement on a chemical and atomic level, we are in constant chaos and order, a balance crucial for all the processes needed for life to emerge, exist and continue changing to avoid going extinct.

Movement is life, change is life, stagnation and eventual static equilibrium is death, at least on a biological and cosmic scale.

Then why did I pick the title of this post to be The Perfect Insect?

Simple!

It sounds cool and I like Alien!

But being a wisecracking geek aside, today I want to introduce you to someone.

This is Ultimate Blue! And yes quite the blue fellow indeed!

It was about time I looked at anime, after all Japanese manga and anime have an amazing catalogue of fictional arthropods! More impressive than the vast majority of western fiction in fact.

I feel almost compelled to have Blue Gender as my first anime post on the blog.

The show came out in 1999, almost 2 years after Starship Troopers crawled on the big screen and a whooping 15 years since the cinematic debut of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind!

What's the connection between a military live action sci-fi gore fest of a movie and a beloved beautiful and emotionally deep and complex Japanese anime classic? Trust me it's not as obvious as the giant insects theme, but I want to touch upon the show's themes in a future post.

Today we look solely and directly at the big bad bug of the show, the apex of the Blue species and what I can only call the closest to a perfectly built giant insectile killing machine!

I'm in no way a professional entomologist, for now I am fully satisfied with calling myself an amateur entomologist and nothing more, but I guess spending your life so far reading about arthropods, watching documentaries on arthropods and generally feeling a fuzzy overwhelmingly exciting feelings whenever I see a small crawling organism in person or on the screen has given me limited rights to try and use a somewhat scientifically sound guess at what makes some insects better than others.

To say that one organism is better than another one is again like in the case with perfection quite flawed as a concept... No organism on this planet, be it extinct or extant, can be considered a failure. I often see people using long dead and gone animals to try and justify them being "less successful" or "less complex", this is further from the truth than most realise. I would be hard pressed to find a single person who considers the dinosaurs a failure in any other way than just being the poor casualties of a planet-wide catastrophe, yet no one talks about trilobites who not only lived longer than any dinosaur but also were among the first complex organisms to diversify in ways not seen before them.

Judging the success of an organism is a daunting and almost impossible task, even I as someone who loves claiming arthropods are the apex life forms on this planet am still aware that what I'm saying is half the truth. When you decide to judge an organism's success you need to first limit and define the way you yourself view success. Is biological success based solely on species numbers, physical size, adaptability, geographical range, evolutionary age, impact on the environment, intelligence, sheer amount of global biomass, specialisation, generalisation and so on... It's really a complicated subject no matter how you look at it.

So then how can I claim to say I know what makes one insect type better than another, well I'll have to cheat a bit (if my high school bio teacher somehow reads this, no I never cheated on an exam, I'm a smart good boy, also hi!), when you limit your sample to a single class of organisms and take a general look at what makes each order and family within it perform better overall you can try and deduct a generalised pattern as to why some groups do better on a broader sense.

I'm a beetle boy, I like beetles, I consider myself a beetle. If I have to describe myself in a bug geek fashion it'll be something like "I'm a human beetle who's in painfully obsessive relationship with parasitoid wasps". Beetles are my thing but parasitoid wasps have been parasitizing my brain and soul for the majority of the last 2 decades.

When it comes to beetles you're already dealing with the apex of insect success and diversity.

Beetles are everywhere and they do pretty much anything a terrestrial arthropod can!

Beetle diversity rivals that of parasitoid wasps without relying on parasitism induced diversification but rather on adapting to every possible terrestrial niche, environment and food source.

If there's something edible by a biological organism there's a high chance at least one species of beetle is already munching on it. Entire groups of beetles have turned on frogs, salamanders, snakes (both adults and eggs) and fish, be glad you're not on the menu... yet!

What makes beetles so successful and what sets then apart from any other insect group?

Beetles make up the order Coleoptera named for their pair of hard armoured wings called elytra that cover up and protect their second pair of soft membranous wings used for flight.

It's immediately obvious how these come in handy to an insect.

Insect wings are not alive in the sense that they gradually grow or get repaired.

Insect wings develop either internally or externally as small buds, only becoming wings once the insect reaches maturity and the final moult.

A damaged wing remains as such, it cannot be repaired or replaced, only discarded (ants and termites for example).

This has restricted many flying insects from a subterranean life or even avoiding crevices and tight spaces where the wings might get damaged.

The beetle elytra solve this problem quite well!

While the hard and sturdy elytra cover the soft and vulnerable flying pair of wings the beetle can dig and squeeze through pretty much anything and go where other winged insects cannot.

This alone opens up so many new niches for beetle to occupy while also retaining their ability to disperse and conquer new lands.

But the benefits of the elytra don't stop there, they also give beetles extra protection against predators and weather conditions, they allow them to breathe underwater by trapping air (scuba diving comes to mind) or avoid getting dehydrated in the desert by limiting how much moisture escapes during respiration. A beetle would lose almost all its advantages without these wing shields.

So then... Which are the most successful among the beetles?

The ones that tried to get rid of their elytra!

Yes I'm talking about the absolute raving maniacs of the insect world...

The Rove Beetles (Staphylinidae)!

Rove beetles of western Eurasia

Now that we established why elytra are crucial to beetles' success lets talk about why rove beetles decided to reduce them to the absolute limit!

There's a reason I opened this post with my little rant about perfection being inherently flawed in our current reality.

If beetles have already found the thing that makes them such a success story, their own little perfection in the form of hard wing cases then why oh why are the most successful of beetles trying to mess with an already perfect design?

Quite easy, evolution and adaptation are an ongoing process, what works for beetles as a whole might not work for some groups within that want a slightly different lifestyle.

Rove beetles have reduced their elytra to the limit where they still retain the main advantage for which the wing cases arose in the first place, to protect the delicate flying wings!

Thus the tiny and compact elytra of rove beetles still offer protection and allow dispersal, however they are no longer protected enough from predators, drying out or pretty much anything that would otherwise struggle with your average beetle armour.

Then what did rove beetles gain from all this?

They gained higher agility and maneuverability!

Typical elytra allow beetles access to places where other flying insects cannot venture but ironically they also restrict them from fitting into spaces where fully wingless insects can!

I said how insects gain their fully formed wings when they reach adulthood but some never sprout wings to begin with. In fact the very first insects were wingless, such as the silverfish and firebrats of today. Some modern winged insects adopted an apterous lifestyle too but that's more a case of losing traits rather than never adopting them at all.

What these insects enjoy is the ability to be flexible, agile and able to fit in very tight places, something modern insects abandoned in exchange for flight.

Some winged insects are still rather flat and long allowing them to enjoy benefits from both being maneuverable and flight capable, however they can't even compete with insects who have been built for flight or the ancient apterygotes who still excel at being top bugs in the soil.

Then came rove beetles.

They have the ancient insect body plan, almost worm-like in nature more accurately comparable to silverfish than to other beetles.

They can move through soil like sharks, and they hunt like ones too.

Rove beetles are the masters of the soil habitat, almost all are vicious predators and they can and will swarm a larger prey if the opportunity presents itself.

Yet they can still fly almost as good as any flying insect their size!

Thus due to striking gold with the elytra design yet again these beetles diversified further... almost insanely.

We have so far discovered around 63,000 species of rove beetles out of a total rough beetle diversity of 400,000!

The only other group of beetles to outperform them are the weevils which have reached the ludicrous number of around 97,000 species...

Of course there's the added fact that rove beetles are vastly understudied and that number could very well not even be half of the actual real scale of the diversity of these apex soil dwellers!

The surge of diversification of rove beetles allowed them to gain some additional amazing traits rarely found in other beetles or even insects.

From raptorial legs to a mouth that shoots out a "tongue" reminiscent of the Xenomorphs from the Alien franchise to snatch small prey, to the myriad of chemical toxins and cocktails that these beetles use to fend off attackers, overpower prey and even jet on water.

For every single problem the reduction of their elytra brings they find a solution.

I must also note that the overwhelming success of beetles as a group is not due to the elytra alone, other insect groups have similar wing case (although not as effective) after all, beetles have just hit the jackpot too many times compared to most life on the planet. They benefit from complete metamorphosis, sophisticated yet generalised chewing mouth parts, the ability to digest plant material efficiently and having a resistance to extinction events with very few families going extinct since the emergence of beetle-kind.

Now time to get back to our "little" Perfect Insect!

Fascinating isn't it?

To claim that Ultimate Blue is a beetle is tricky to say the least but I can safely say it is overtly rove beetle-ish in morphology thus sharing the same advantages that the real life staphylinids enjoy.

Lore wise we know little about Ultimate Blue other than what the name implies, this is in essence the final boss of the show, the biggest and baddest of the Blue species.

The Blue are hard to explain, they are arthropodal in nature and appearance and without spoiling the show's entire story (trust me you need to experience it yourself) they are pretty much a planetary immune system, think Captain Planet crossed with the Arachnids from Starship Troopers.

The Blue come in many shapes and serve different functions. Some are gigantic sand worms, others are parasitic puppeteers and some just go head on into whatever moves.

For them humanity is nothing but biomass although they can also consume inorganic substances.

Slowly but surely Earth is being swarmed and prepared for... something.

Whether humanity succeeds against the Blue menace is up to you to find out... but if you're willing to let me spoil what is in essence the ultimate battle of the show I can finally dig into my perfect specimen!

As you can clearly see... when I said boss battle I was not exaggerating!

Ultimate Blue is a really well-designed insectoid monster and even more impressive killing machine!

While sporting a general staphylinid body shape instead of reduced elytra this beast has long and very agile raptorial pair of limbs! Although in this case it's more fitting to call them scythes than anything meant to hold prey...

Ultimate Blue is also capable of leaping high into the air and even hang down from the ceiling, truly an insect where it counts most!

But what makes this leaping and climbing abilities truly frightening is the creature's face...

Made to either impale or slice prey in half.

Truly a face only Mother Earth could love!

Yet we are still not even talking about the beast's ultimate weapon... its tail!

As I mentioned rove beetles and apterygote insects can have very long and flexible wormy bodies, in the case of rove beetles that allows them not only greater agility but also the ability to rear up their abdomen in a very scorpion-like fashion and spray chemicals from the rear end onto predator or prey.

Ultimate Blue clearly takes this a step further, mixing in some earwig elements as well as a novel mechanism not found in any beetles or insect as far as we know... being able to shoot out its tail and impale then seize and slice any prey. Its a well hidden ability too, anyone can assume just by looking at the creature's tail pincers that this is indeed a weapon but no one would expect it to be able to shoot out in such a manner and speed!

Using these weapons Ultimate Blue is lethal at almost any close to medium range!

Scythe arms and mandibles for close encounters, leaping and climbing abilities for closing the gap and finally the hidden extendable tail for any foolish prey that decides to run away or even more foolishly stay and fight.

To complement all this weaponry the Perfect Insect also has equally impressive armour!

A well protected head and body that can withstand most direct firepower!

Most...

Once again... nothing is truly perfect in this world.

And so our big bad Perfect Insect falls to the Hero but not without proving itself not to be perfect but more than deserving of its name... Ultimate Blue!

The rove beetle design is something I love a lot, something I wish was used more in fiction...

The other 2 examples I can think of right now that seem to follow a similar design are the Seltas Queen from the Monster Hunter franchise (covering this amazing Queen soon I hope) and the Mud Demons from the latest Riddick movie which while not arthropods or invertebrates still feel more insectile than most creepy monsters in modern fiction.