Beetles

what purposes do they serve. mine eat my rose leaves.

 

i was, but i didn't want to stump you in public.

 

What is that graph? If I take it at face value, it shows beetles experienced a substantial decrease in body size since 1750. Numerous clues in the post indicate it probably means something different.

 

Ok, so where do ticks rank?

Bob Wilson

 

As mite and spider relatives.

 

I don't have any problem with beetles.
They're not trying to bite, sting, or eat me.

Speaking of which:
I wonder if this will scale down to water-bottle size....


It doesn't seem to be very efficient, but I'm intrigued by the 'yeast as bait' feature.
Since it's a CO emitter, I wonder if I have to license it?

 

Nope, the sugar the yeast are eating was made from CO2 by some plant.
The syrup might attract bees and wasps.
Use a little rotted meat, and it will work as a fly trap.

 

And then there are some beetles that won't cross the tire track left by a truck in the roads.

 

The annoying ones to me are the june bugs. They always seem to turn up dead in the pool.

Still beetles are beneficial. Its those mosquitoes that I hate. lots of bats nearby to cut down the population though. one man's pest is another mammals food

 

The big bat colony near us was nearly wiped out by that European fungus. The wife spotted one bat a few nights ago, but we would spot several on a night in the past.

They also brought the cane toad in to control sugar cane pests.

Tiger beetles are predatory insects that eat pests, and probably anything they can catch. They are quite pretty with bright metallic blue or green sheen, and vicious looking with their large mandibles. They are also long legged and active. They can't see movement, or more importantly, they can't see while moving. They do a quick sprint, then stop and look around, sprint, stop to see if they are closer to any prey, sprint, etc.


Don't know if they are beneficial, but I've had fun playing with click beetles. Roll them on their back, and they snap their mid-body hinge with an audible click. This launches the half inch insect about 6 inches into the air.

 

Given the extreme interconnectedness of the ecosystem, it is hard for me to imagine any creature which isn't eventually beneficial.

Is it possible to wipe out mosquitoes without killing ourselves as well? I don't know, and I suspect neither does anyone else. I do know that if we keep causing the extinction of species at our current rate (1 / day?) we must eventually kill off some species upon which our survival is completely dependent. We may have already done so.

 

That would concern me in any urban or populated environment that might be frequented by dogs, cat's or pets.

It's hard to cover up anything with a board that a dog can't get to..and antifreeze can be lethal.

Is there anything else that can be used?

 

We can see from invasive species how this is not the case. Evolution is not necessarily benevolent, but there is a strong desire on some parts to make it look like it is. The effects of "bad species" for an environment can best be seen in the cases of ship transport of these to Hawaii and Australia.

While we can all see how the dung beetle benefits society, and how the native grasslands of the planes and buffalo formed a ecosystem, it is hard to believe the great swarms of rock mountain locusts benefited anyone but themselves. Although we can not be 100% sure we accidentally wiped them out, I can not think of it as a bad thing. Certainly from evolutions point of survival of the species, rapid reproduction and mass migration blackening the skies helped them survive sever droughts, but they didn't exactly do much for the rest of the species. Evolution is often selfish as we can see in man.

We may have the technology. I'm not sure if this will work.

Up for Debate: Should We Eradicate All Mosquitoes from the World? | Cogito.org

I doubt it will actually work, but it may reduce the population, and reduce the amount of pesticide sprayed, and misery felt from mosquito born disease. I say we need to do a very careful small test, before trying it world wide, but it seems so much better than round up ready soybeans.

 

I think it shows rather the opposite. Invasive species are a disruption to the natural ecosystem which worked well before their arrival. It is easy to postulate a similar disruption when *removing* a species. That there are species which harm an ecosystem when introduced into it shows that there is fragility there, that we mess with at our peril.

Really? You don't think anything ever ate them. We should expect to find massive piles of non-rotting rock mountain locusts were that the case. It just really isn't that simple. People often look at a single effect and make conclusions about 'bad' or 'good', and that just isn't a way to evaluate long term environmental effects.

If you want to make an exhaustive list of all the species upon which our survival depends, and then another list of all species upon which any of those on the first list depend, and keep doing that until no new species are added, only then would I consider killing a species not on any list. To do otherwise is to roll the dice on murdering every human alive.