🐝✨The Nexialist #0138

what’s this insect? | what we get wrong about saving the bees | insect joy or pain | insects are pop | animal dreamworlds | metamorphosis is very weird | biomass on earth

Sep 14, 2023

welcome to another week of cyber-web-weaving of content, the nexialist

hello, everyone! i hope this message finds you well! this week and the following, my parents are visiting my siblings and i in amsterdam. this means i’ll be sending you a shorter (but not less brainsparkly) edition. last weekend, we were blessed by a heat wave here in amsterdam, and i could finally practice some nudism (aka getting butt naked in nature) in a lake near amsterdam with juan, andrea and more friends. the moment was idyllic, even with me getting stung by a bee on my back (luckily not elsewhere). this helped me choose the topic of today’s nexialist, enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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🪰what’s this insect?

i’ve been mesmerized with the subreddits like r/insects, r/whatsthisbug and r/entomology for a while, and i’ll tell you why. in these communities people are documenting some beautiful and weird creatures, asking what they are or what they’re doing. and the most inspiring part is that someone will always know what’s going on. it’s supernice to see people sharing curiosity and knowledge, in such (mostly) wholesome interactions around this specific subject.

🐝what we get wrong about saving the bees

“saying “save the bees” and using a honeybee as representative is like saying you want to save the birds. But using a chicken as representative.”

this video from vox opened my mind to how the “save the bees” campaign and argument can be misleading. yes, honeybee population is declining in the world (aka beepocalypse), but their population is still safe since they are domesticated animals. their wild counterparts are the ones truly in danger here.

🪲insect joy or pain

thank you, michell, for sharing this with me. “do insects feel joy or pain?” gives great insight into the inner life of insects. it is quite interesting how they evaluate this and what kind of impact these findings could have.

Researchers have since shown that bees and some other insects are capable of intelligent behavior that no one thought possible when I was a student. Bees, for example, can count, grasp concepts of sameness and difference, learn complex tasks by observing others, and know their own individual body dimensions, a capacity associated with consciousness in humans. They also appear to experience both pleasure and pain. In other words, it now looks like at least some species of insects—and maybe all of them—are sentient.

brainsparks: non-human perceptions + umwelt (tn#86)

🪳insects are pop

both in lady gaga’s chromatica ball in 2022 and beyoncé’s renaissance tour in 2023, one of the most astonishing outfits were the insect costumes, which belong in the same superhero universe. i just needed to add this here due to their fabulousness.

💭animal dreamworlds

“How might the dreamworlds of other animals differ from our own?” deirdre barrett, psychologist and dream specialist gives us some insight into how other animals dream, and it’s fascinating. it’s worth pressing play:

the cetaceans are very different from us and they either don't have REM sleep or have very little but that's because they sleep with one side of their brain at a time. their left hemisphere goes to sleep while their right hemisphere stays completely active and then that switches off. they have times where they're wide awake on both sides and they're the most functional then and they can do a more limited repertoire while one side sleeps and. try to imagine what it would be like to have one hemisphere completely active and the other one comatose. that would be a very unusual state of consciousness.

brainsparks: dreaming octopus (tn#42), scientists going into your dream? (tn#13), why do we dream? (tn#72)

🦋metamorphosis is very weird

i literally gasped at some of the discoveries from this video, like the moment they show that the larva already has tiny wings under their skin. they even show what happens inside of the cocoon. interesting to see this moment also called the black box period, which we see today being used for artificial intelligence. i’ve posted about the imaginal disc (tn#19) before, so it’s nice to see it in a deeper context.

The process of metamorphosis for a butterfly is pretty fascinating and they grow through four different stages. Egg first, and then a larval stage where they're feeding on the foliage. And then they really go through what some people call that black box period. They are pupating into a chrysalis, and that's where a lot of changes really happen before they enter the adult stage as an adult butterfly.

🌎biomass on earth

it is always impressive to understand that humans only represent 0.01% of all biomass on earth. anthropods, which include insects, are in 4th place, and their biomass represents much more than human biomass.

see you next week, busy bees 🐝✨

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