Bumbling Beetles

For many in the world, early August is a time for heat waves, monsoons, and torrid humidity.  In my neighborhood, late summer is a time for wildfires and the big bumbling beetles Cotinis mutabilis, the figeater beetle.  Two days prior, I set out some old oranges to help hydrate thirsty birds while the Holy Fire raged on some 20 miles to the east.  Today, I noticed the orange was still there.  Not only that, it had a bunch of visitors!

These are the infamous fig beetles, named for how they grossly glom the ficus.

These big green bumbling beetles can never seem to fly in a straight trajectory.  Generally pretty harmless, they have smacked into people before.  Apparently their rearwings, which do all the work in this case, don't offer the beetle enough control.  It doesn't help that the forewings are heavy, armored plates that don't completely move out of the way.  The crazy thing is beetles have existed for millions of years.  Why are they such terrible fliers?

I'll explain as a follow-up to a previous post.  As described before, dragonflies earn their fearsome name.  Among insects, they are the masters of the sky and have held that title for over a hundred million years.  They use their four wings directly anchored to muscle fibers to maneuver with precision and agility.  The more advanced Neopteran insects, in most cases, have only two wings.  If a more primitive flying insect had four wings, what happened?

Beetles and flies evolved divergently, each lineage of flying insect re-purposing a different pair of wings.  In flies, the back wings shrank over time to form halteres.  These look almost like stirrups and they help with balance during flight.

Beetles turned their front wings into armor.  The hardened shell called an elytron--by the way, Coleoptera means sheathed wing--helped beetles proliferate into the most diverse group of insects.

Oh wait...  That's right, the parasitoid wasps might actually be more diverse.  This is crazy to think about, but that category of insect is so diverse with specialists.  Anyways...

In RPG terms, beetles boast outrageous defense at the cost of mobility, yet retain the flight ability in many builds.  Among insects, beetles make the best tanks.  Some are large enough to stay safe from mantises, dragonflies, and other insect predators.  They're not the best at escaping, but they can get some distance quickly if need be.  Beetles don't usually offer much in offense, but some get really creative with defense.  Beetles are, however, outclassed by larger vertebrate insectivores.

Still, trading mobility for defense paid off.  Beetles have persisted for over 300 million years.  And the fig beetles in my neighborhood don't seem to have many predators.  Sad.

I met a bug in the same weight class with maxed mobility.  Bee careful around parasitoids.