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29 August 2009

Night of shiny armour Head-on, there is a fleeting resemblance to the hulking arthropods that bug post-apocalyptic worlds. But this is a far more primitive beast from a time when the air was thick with spores and no wings fluttered through damp forests of ferns and horsetails. Phylogenetic siblings to the silverfish that lurk in pantries and dry pages, bristletails prefer the great outdoors, where they happily bewilder peepers more used to pterygotic hexapods. At nearly an inch, this bristletail was hard to miss as it rested on a mossy tree trunk. The creature is vaguely prawn-like; its tapering abdomen bears ambulatory styles that recall the pleopods of shrimp and the carapace-like thorax gleams with an oriental armour of iridescent scales. The business end is cluttered with a pair of compound eyes in medial contact, whip-like antennae and long maxillary palps that threaten none but lichen, algae and plant debris.

Built for flight rather than fight, the humpbacked thorax and flexible abdomen provide leverage to flick the bristletail into the air when danger looms. Despite its lowly status on the tree of life, this bug was smart enough to know that my duck posed no plausible threat. So it refused to display its somersaulting prowess and instead dashed into a crevice under the bark to chew over the night's fowl encounter. With just 500 or so species in two families, bristletails are Devonian holdouts in a world of winged dominance. They may run fast, but grow slow, taking up to two years to reach sexual maturity. Moulting is lifelong and complicated by the insects' strange need to fasten their body to the substrate using fresh droppings. And if the shit doesn't stick, the bristletail can't shed and will die. This combination of simple ontogeny and long lifecycles may have contributed to their limited speciation as well as their ability to cling to marginal habitats such as Arctic grasslands and rocky shores.

Locally, bristletails are known to occur on algae-covered rocks (Pedetontus), tree trunks (Megalopsobius) and the ground (Machilontus). One species, the camel rockspringer (? Dromadimachilis gibba) is thought to be nationally extinct, as it is known only from a swamp that now lies in the waters beneath Seletar Reservoir. It's a fitting burial for a bug that has outlived its time and offers nothing of value to a nation where deep curiosity is drowned out by a morbid fascination for unnatural developments.

29 August 2009 in Biodiversity & Conservation | Permalink Very interesting! Scales & compound eyes.

Posted by: Aydin | 30 August 2009 at 07:40 AM Wow! Great close-ups! The scales are gorgeous! Well done, Thank you. : )

Posted by: Joseph Lai | 30 August 2009 at 09:48 PM








