Beauty Of The Beasts – Jo Wimpenny (1)

With such large numbers of these insects, might it therefore be that mosquitoes could be important pollinators? ‘We don’t know a lot,’ Reeves says, ‘but based on the bits that we do know, I would say that is very likely.’ More surprisingly, some mosquitoes are incredibly beautiful. Please take a moment to look up the genus Sabathes (‘the blue morphos of the mosquito world,’ according to Reeves), who combine sparkling iridescence in turquoise, indigo and teal, with fantastically funky legwarmers (called ‘paddles’).

Think 1970s aerobics but made of feathery scales and used for elaborate courtship displays. You can imagine Sabathes whirring around the forests of central and South America looking absolutely fabulous, waving her paddles in the tropical sunlight. Were you to be there she would have no qualms about taking a bite, so it’s best to admire from afar.

As mentioned, it’s only the females that have a taste for blood; the males are entirely innocent and spend their short lives quietly buzzing between flowers, supping nectar and minding their own business. But we shouldn’t even get rid of the females either, because these little insects may hold the clues to major medical advances. When a creature has been on the planet for as long as mosquitoes have, you know that they’ve hit upon an extraordinarily successful way of life, and by studying the secrets to their success we can benefit too.

One of those secrets is in the saliva, because those chemicals that our bodies react to so strongly have extremely potent and selective anti-clotting properties. We’ve known the value of naturally-derived anticoagulants for millennia – the archetypal molecule is hirudin, which comes from the medicinal leech, itself an extremely disgusting creature thanks to its legless body plan, sliminess and habit of sucking blood. Leeches have been used medicinally for bloodletting since ancient Egyptian times, and hirudin was first extracted in the 1950s, spearheading the development of more potent variants. The anticoagulants bivalirudin and desirudin are based on hirudin and extensively used today to prevent blood clots, and ongoing research is investigating the molecules produced by ticks and mosquitoes to keep blood flowing.

Rather than kill all mosquitoes, let’s get to know them better.

Chapter 1: All animals aren’t equal Chapter 2: An awfulness of teeth and claws Chapter 3: Snake in the grass Chapter 4: To make flesh creep Chapter 5: Keep calm and carrion Chapter 6: Easy on the aye-aye Chapter 7: Naughty neighbours Chapter 8: The good, the bad and the animal Epilogue Acknowledgements Selected Bibliography Index 1kitap1.com/en Preface It was 2010, in our rental house in Sheffield, and I’d just made a coffee.

Settling onto the hard orange sofa I heard the letterbox snap and spotted the cheery red of the postman as he moved off down the road. A moment later my housemate, Charlie, entered the room carrying a letter and, on top of the letter, a Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) flyer seeking donations for threatened Bengal tigers. As typical for such flyers, it depicted a stunning animal, staring directly at the camera, as if to implore people to do something. Help me. Charlie glanced at it, uttered the depressing words, ‘Who cares?’

and threw it in the bin. Catching my expression, he shrugged. ‘Why should I care if there are tigers in India? It doesn’t matter to me, it’s not going to impact my life.’ Oof. I still remember my shock. And outrage. This was not an opinion I was familiar with and I didn’t know how to react. Slack-jawed, I think my first response was, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I’m pathologically non- confrontational but inside my head I was raging.

Why couldn’t he see the beauty of the tiger? Why didn’t he appreciate that we had a responsibility to protect this animal? Why wasn’t he as moved by the natural world as everybody should be? It was sometime later before I realised something else. Charlie was right. Why should he care about tigers in India? That encounter was significant, because for the first time, probably ever, I realised that not everybody cares about the wild world.

That will sound stupidly obvious, but it had never hit me so hard before. I, like so many of us, had been living in a little echo chamber, surrounded by people who shared my views about nature and conservation, and I was unprepared for this radical, alternative perspective. Community is important, and it feels good to be part of a group with a common set of values, which might extend from the people we call up to go to the pub to our virtual communities, and our preferred news sites.

But as we cultivate these group memberships, we prune away those with dissenting voices, and it becomes easy to ignore, even forget, that our common ground within these echo chambers is not the common ground. It’s good to poke our heads out of the bubble from time to time and tune in to what other people think, especially when those thoughts fly in the face of what you consider to be important.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 9f8180dda8f4ab5f
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 6,018,885 bytes (5.74 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 290
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 503.67 minutes
• Total Words: 100,734
• Total Characters: 611,238
• Average Words per Page: 347.36
• Average Characters per Page: 2107.72

Most Frequent Words

animals (429), it’s (360), one (310), people (305), species (300), like (233), snakes (231), also (227), they’re (187), animal (173), vultures (170), many (166), even (164), around (163), world (151), that’s (150), wasps (138), per (134), much (133), things (133), little (132), don’t (130), sharks (124), years (124), birds (124), human (121), time (120), rats (120), good (117), cent (114), way (112), found (112), conservation (107), behaviour (107), get (104), says (103), study (103), well (102), see (101), vulture (100), different (94), snake (93), something (91), first (90), think (88), nature (87), creatures (86), natural (85), there’s (85), food (84), fear (83), humans (83), need (83), know (81), disgust (81), life (80), work (80), cockroaches (80), between (80), another (80), research (80), still (79), group (79), social (78), towards (77), back (77), including (75), two (74), comes (73), insects (73), since (72), use (72), far (72), make (71), large (71), really (71), new (71), wild (70), others (70), less (69), million (69), shark (69), long (69), example (67), going (66), we’re (66), predators (66), likely (65), important (62), every (62), doing (62), live (62), public (62), year (61), i’m (60), disease (60), enough (60), take (59), known (59), we’ve (58).

PDF Download