Comment by gumby
3 hours ago
Famously, when asked about a god, J.B.S. Haldane allegedly said that if there is a god or gods, they must have an “inordinate fondness for beetles.”
3 hours ago
Famously, when asked about a god, J.B.S. Haldane allegedly said that if there is a god or gods, they must have an “inordinate fondness for beetles.”
There is a Discworld joke about this. After being introduced to the God of evolution, God shows off the magnum opus he has been developing, the cockroach.
I read somewhere that some scientists now think there may be more species of wasps than beetles. Not least because many species of beetle seem to have a species of wasps that prey on them.
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This is because when they would lay a sheet on the ground and shake the branches of a tree, they would often find more species of beetles than anything else. However, they may have been extrapolating a bit far from the few places they tried this.
No, it’s because beetles have the most diversity of any animal order.
“The Coleoptera, with about 400,000 described species, is the largest of all orders, constituting almost 40% of described arthropods and 25% of all known animal species…”
First paragraph of the wiki article! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beetle