“There is grandeur in this view of life … from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
– Charles Darwin
Welcome to the Endless Swarm, a celebration of insects! In time this will host a collection of posts, links, movies, and information about insects and invertebrates sent to me by friends, coworkers, and relatives. Along with the tumblr site, which is mostly images, Endless-Swarm will contain art, literature, and biology of insects and invertebrates. The more unloved, the greater the adulation on this page. Here, mosquitoes hold their own along monarch butterflies, and ladybugs take a back seat to lice. This blog is part of my quest to keep a written record of all the entomological goodness out there I have encountered, and share it with the world.
Like the tumblr page, I’m going to ceremonially start out with one of my favorite unloved insects, the earwig. Even those who aren’t entomophobic have unkind words for that furtive eater of flower petals. But though earwigs mostly just crawl (and sometimes pinch), they’re fairly harmless, and even contain a hidden beauty, unseen but to the lucky few:
Underneath their skin-tight wing covers (which earn them the name Dermaptera), earwigs possess a pair of delicate fanlike wings that depending on their species can help them escape a predator by flying, or more often fall with style. Although folks in Europe and the US only know about the common earwig, there are several handsome species out there.
Comments are welcome, though we’ll see how that evolves as time goes on.
Bugs gotta blog!
