The Book of Animal Ignorance Read Online Free PDF

They’e not filthy, opportunistic carpbet- baggers like flies. They are professional, with a skill. Thrre is nowhere that doesn’t, sooner or later, call in a beetle t o set up shop and get things done .
    A. A. GILL
    Why are there so many? The simple answer seems to be flowering plants. Not much happened for beetles until the flowering plants began to diversify 120 million years ago. They were the beetles’ food of choice and as they crept across the planet, adapting themselves to new environments, the beetles followed. In the process, they far outstripped even the plants; able to burrow, fly and swim, beetles became the universal animal. If something’s edible, you can guarantee there will be a beetle out there to eat it. Ham, tobacco, ginger, bonemeal, paper, carpet, stuffed animals, strychnine, wood, all are grist to a particular beetle’s mandibles. The ‘short-circuit’ beetle chews through lead sheathing on telegraph cables to get to the tasty fibre insulator around the copper wires. A specialist called Zonocopris gibbicolis feeds only on the droppings of large land snails, hitching a ride inside the shell.
    A BLISTER BEETLE HONEYTRAP
    Their mating strategies are just as varied. Flour beetles have even found a way of reproducing by proxy. When it’s notchewing its way through the nation’s stores of grains and cereals, you’ll usually find Tribolium castaneum copulating. They are very promiscuous, even by insect standards. The male starts by using his spiny penis to sweep out a previous occupant’s load, before unleashing his own. Unfortunately, his rival’s sperm has a way of clinging to his tackle, so his next conquest stands a 1 in 8 chance of finding herself fertilised by a beetle she’s never met.
    We have much to learn from beetle. But far from being just a grotesques’ gallery, they are a living laboratory, where almost every extreme has been tested, every obstacle overcome. The Bombardier beetles, who fire a boiling chemical spray out of their rears at 300 pulses per second, might help us to re-ignite jet engines that cut out during a flight. Tenebrinoid beetles from the rainless Namib desert, who can channel the morning dew into their mouths using the microscopic bumps and troughs on their backs, are being used to develop new fog harvesting technology; and the Jewel beetle ( Melanophila acuminate ) may hold the clue to early-warning system for forest fires. It has an infra-red sensor under one of its legs that can detect a fire over 50 miles away. Why? So that it can fly towards the blaze. It knows the smouldering tree trunks offer a rare predator-free opportunity to mate recklessly and lay its eggs.
    Only a beetle …

Binturong
    Smell my popcorn
    H igh in the trees of southern Asia’s tropical forests there lives the only Old World carnivore that uses its tail for climbing. Commonly called a bearcat, it is neither a bear nor a cat, but a member of the civet family. Civets are related to cats, but are also cousins to the mongoose and the hyena. The bearcat, or binturong ( Arctitis binturong ), gets its name from a Malaysian language that no longer exists and at first glance it’s not hard to understand the confusion: it has the face and whiskers of a seal, the thick shaggy fur and flat feet of a bear, the tail of a monkey and the claws of a mongoose. And it’s no tiny, scampering marmoset: it weighs 3 stones and is 6 feet long (imagine a golden retriever that can use its tail to climb trees). So, although binturongs spend almost all their life in the canopy, they tend to move around quite slowly, which sometimes leads people to mistake them for sloths.
    DON’T TRY THIS IF YOU ARE A BEAR
    The binturong tail is a 3-foot long, muscular fifth arm with a bare leathery patch at the end for gripping, just like a monkey’s, although they evolved quite separately. Also, just like monkeys, they use their tail to pick and hold food as well as