Ask me anything
"what I got was the big-daddy version of that, raw rush, the king hell killer uncut real thing, exploding eight ways from sunday into a void that stank of poverty and lovelessness and obscurity" - William Gibson - The Winter Market
You really won’t ever appreciate how cool insect wings are until you’ve seen all this footage.
The ones with wing covers that completely open up are beetles, by the way, but the ones LIKE beetles whose protective cover remains in place are bugs. Bug is supposed to be a special term for just one insect group!
Mid-way through is an earwig’s wings, which is neither a beetle nor a bug, but does have very beetle-like wing cases.
Bug side of tumblr! How do the funkly little dudes with big wings and v small protective covers get their wings back under the covers?!?! The wings look thinner than tissue paper and look very hard to put back right.
It actually works a lot like a “slap bracelet!” There are elastic-like materials in the wing veins that stabilize when either straightened out or collapsed, so the wings “snap” easily from one position to the next. Some insects switch between the two positions with muscular movement, while others don’t really need any special muscles to do it at all.
Earwigs have the most extreme folding of all, with their wings folding in a couple dozen places each to curl up under that little “backpack,” and they actually use the tail pincers to push their wings back into the folded position!
Earwigs don’t fly often, though. A majority of them seem to live their whole lives never using the wings even once.
