I had planned to write a diary about biodiversity, climate change, and ecosystem services. Fate intervened in the form of a beetle struggling upside down in our pool a few hours ago. When I fished it out this is what I had in my hand
This amazing creature is a scarab beetle of some sort. The Scarabaeidae is large and diverse family of beetles. There about 30,000 species in this family that have been described by scientists. For some perspective that is equivalent to 60% of all vertebrate species or about 6 species of scarab beetles for every species of mammal on earth.
What does this have to do with climate change?
Scarabs are beetles. Beetles are the most diverse group of animals known on earth with about 350,000 named species. This is approximately 1/3 of all animals. Studies in tropical forests estimate that the true number of beetle species is at least ten times the named number.
The great evolutionary biologist JBS Haldane was asked what biology told us about god. Haldane replied that it showed that the almighty had "an inordinate fondness for beetles."
Looking at my friend it is easy, for me at least, to see why.
Each of these beetle species is the product of millions of years of evolution. Each has a developmental pathway where thousands of genes are triggered at the right time to produce legs, antennae, horns, wings, etc. Each has a larval form that completely reorganizes its body to an adult during a pupal stage. Each has a strategy for finding mates, finding food, and avoiding becoming a meal. These strategies are accomplished by patterns of neurons firing in a brain that is barely visible to naked eye.
A few of these species have gone extinct over the decades and centuries that humans have created civilization and a few more have gradually become different from what was before without our ever being aware of it.
And in the past few years more and more of these myriad species have vanished from the world as sections of the world's rainforests have been turned into substandard farmland. Most of these extinctions have never been documented. In fact many beetles have undoubtedly gone extinct without ever been noticed by a human being.
A beetle is, comparatively speaking, a large and conspicuous organism. There are other groups of organisms which are likely even more diverse, ecologically important, and poorly known such as bacteria and fungi. Much of the biological world remains undocumented.
As I held my colorful friend I was reminded of the words of William Blake
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour
Each species is much more than a grain of sand and we should not regard their disappearance casually. As the world warms the number of species sliding in to oblivion is increasing. Most of these disappearances are unremarked.
I remain optimistic about progress on climate change and stemming the tide of habitat loss and extinction. But I think it will require a perceptual change in the people of this planet. A willingness to be paid in sunsets as RLMiller so eloquently puts it. A willingness to place value on all the myriads of crawling miracles of this planet. Not to be frozen into inaction but to make choices with the true value of the costs we incur foremost in our minds.
Sorry the pictures aren't better. Haole in Hawaii I am not.