I got the Libby app to read books digitally from my library. Looking through their stock, I found their selection of books on dinosaurs and evolutionary history and stuff disappointingly thin (or it’s not all showing up because of its bad search function, which I also know is true). I was already getting worried that I had seen all their books, which barely fit into a couple shelves. Among the books that came up with the subject “science” were more than a few books on creationism and atheist-bashing, which is also pretty sad. And I have to wonder what our relationship with science, nature, and spirituality would be as a society if there were a stronger influence of traditional European religion in the West. Christianity colonized Europe before European powers colonized the world; I have to imagine that the fay-filled, naturalistic, pagan religions of Europe have more values in common with other indigenous religions compared to Christianity and other monotheistic religions, which state that humans are special creations and nature is merely our playground and backdrop. I mean, having done no research into pagan traditions. These are just the general vibes I get from each religious tradition in the West. The pagans would probably care more about protecting forests, at least; those trees wouldn’t just be “the things for me to cut down as I take over this place” to them.
So let’s see…I had tried writing on another subject, but it wasn’t going the way I wanted, which means I now have about two and a half hours to write something else, and nothing’s coming to mind. I guess I’ll just play around a bit for a few paragraphs. This week, I saw a video of a snail stretching like Tarzan. It looks like a table in a lab, because the snail is on a plastic dish with water, and it’s stretching from that to a plastic cup that’s set up like a terrarium. The snail is stretching out way longer than you think a snail can stretch, and in general I haven’t seen snails do that kind of thing. It’s really cool.
And that got me thinking about another thought I had a while ago, which is that I didn’t think, if insects were to disappear from the world, that vertebrates would take their place. I was thinking that there is only so small that a creature with an internal skeleton can get, and so it wouldn’t be feasible to imagine vertebrate animals filling all the niches that insects fill. Instead, I imagined that mollusks are more likely to fill in for bugs. They’re already small and live in similar conditions. The main challenge they have to overcome is to move faster, and it’s fun imagining a slug or snail relative that moves quickly. I just looked it up, and from the sounds of it, two possible options exist for mollusks to take over the insect jobs. First, we might end up seeing some of those octopuses that can move across rocky shores start to spend more time on land and become some kind of land octopus, and that’s really neat. Second, as someone on team slug, I’d like to see a new gastropod line that evolves a new form of locomotion, which uses their mucus for grip and has replaced their foot with different arms from the mantle so that they can “walk” and thus move much more swiftly; basically, the other kind of land octopus, or a slug puppy.
Of course, none of this helps with the flight issue, and I’m not sure how a mollusk learns to fly. Insects fly with a modified section of their exoskeleton, while bats (and historically most vertebrates) use skin membranes, and birds have feathers; slugs have nothing of the sort, and no anatomy that easily conduces itself to wings. It could depend on how this scenario is imagined; if we’re talking “bugs,” that colloquially includes arachnids, but they may be spared because they’re not “insects.” If arachnids are still around, I imagine they could evolve flight more easily, for the same reasons as insects were able to. Spiders already go into the air regularly with their ballooning, though that’s currently uncontrolled. Without predatory flyers like wasps and mantises keeping them grounded, it seems like a strangely mutated spider or scorpion would be best suited to the skies. Imagine a small flying scorpion that uses its tail as a proboscis to get nectar from a flower. The new butterflies.
And of course, you can’t count out crabs. There are already plenty of crabs on land, and I even saw a report recently about some shrimps in trees on top of a mountain forest. They’re out here right now, being small invertebrates breathing air and crawling up trees and around the forest floor. They could easily become like insects. It would be a while before they learn to fly and breed the flowers, with their denser, hairless exoskeletons. There’s as much room for them to play as there is for arachnids.
As I was writing this, however, I did a search to see how small vertebrates can actually get, and I got a surprising result. There’s a frog in Papua New Guinea that’s not even eight millimeters long! And some fish that are technically longer weigh a tenth of those frogs. So clearly I underestimated how small vertebrates can get. The smallest mammals are still over an inch, so we have some room to shrink. Odds may be in our favor, since mammals already dominate so much of the world’s current ecosystems. The birds are in a similar position, in terms of smallest size. It’s bats or birds for main flower pollinators in a world without bees, probably; they need to get smaller and adapt to new flower relationships, but they’re already in similar niches and can fly, which gives them a huge leg up on my slug puppies and butterfly scorpions. Lizards are already in the millimeter range with the nano-chameleon, so it’s not out of the question that they could do some bug stuff. And since reptiles have evolved flight before, they could eventually do it again, if they find themselves in a place where birds and bats can’t outcompete any newly mutated flyers.
And then there’s that tiny frog I learned about today. Amphibians are very cool and already occupy a similar position as a lot of insects, with a larval phase born in water and very different, specialized adult forms. Considering all that they’ve accomplished so far, I think they have a shot at evolving a whole new wing of winged amphibians, if given the chance; frogs have webbed feet already. They also can fulfill other aspects of the insect role more easily, with their massive number of simple, defenseless tadpoles produced in a given cycle able to serve a food role like insect larva. That’s something birds, mammals, and lizards can’t quite match. It’s hard to imagine any mammal, which has to feed its young with milk, adapting to having hundreds of babies at a time, you know?
All of this is assuming that there could be a smooth transition for new animals in this same type of ecosystem, because that’s obviously the easier thing to imagine. Without insects, other pollinators would struggle to keep up with their duties. They may stretch themselves to other kinds of flowers, but they can’t immediately serve all flowers. Same thing with the base food role of insects: Amphibians are the best suited vertebrate to that position, but they mostly eat bugs, so a lot of them would starve to death, with the survivors being the ones able to hunt other vertebrates or eat slugs. Without the vast number of little wormies and swimmers from insects, a lot of food webs would collapse before other animals have a chance to move in. It’s easy to see a world without insects losing a lot of flowering forests over time, with conifers potentially making gains in the interim and whatever grasses can pollinate with wind spreading. Maybe it would be a great time for ferns and other spore-producing plants. Flower trees wouldn’t go away completely, since they live for so long, so it’s more a matter of time on if other pollinators can emerge before the elders die out. We’d have to scramble to find new vegetables to eat, with the loss of fruits and grains; or else create a new class of hand-pollinators for our farms, which I can only imagine would be underpaid and undervalued based on how we currently treat farm labor.
It’s just fun to think about how the world could change. Our entire history as a species has happened on the back of a mass extinction event that got rid of most large animals, and in general the world’s ecosystems look sparse compared to the past. We’re doing all kinds of things that could wipe out other species. All of that is sad to consider, but there’s always opportunity in nature. Imagining a world our descendants could inhabit, or even a world without us, with strange fantasy creatures running around, is a fun pastime. We are but one species among many currently adapted to life on Earth; our own path could have gone differently, and so many others are possible in the future. It’s good to think outside of human needs and consider the world as a whole. It’s also the kind of opportunity we could envision if we ever change our society to be inclusive of nature. What new giant mammals could evolve to roam the grasslands, if they had bridges over our roads to traverse an appropriately-sized territory? Or we could straight up play god by making a self-sustaining terrarium in a lab filled with flowers, slugs, snails, and no insects. We could let that sit for a few decades and see if I really can get my slug puppies.
So yeah, that’s two hour’s work. Words are on the page.
Weekly Thoughts 1/27/24
Life in the Gutters 