wild

Bees declared to be the most important living being on earth (July 2019)

The bees have been declared the most important living beings on this planet, the Earthwatch Institute concluded in the last meeting of the Royal Geographical Society of London. However, according to wildlife experts and scientists, the bees have joined the endangered species long list.

The recent studies show a dramatic decline of the bees' number as almost 90 percent of the bee population has disappeared in the last few years. The uncontrolled use of pesticides, deforestation or lack of flowers are the main reasons for their extinction.

However, why would such a little being be named the most important creature on Earth? Well, the answer is actually more simple than you ever thought. Seventy percent of the world's agriculture depends exclusively on bees. Needless to mention the pollination is the bees' job, although the plants would not be able to reproduce, therefore the fauna would have been gone in a very short time. More than that, a study conducted by the Apiculture Entrepreneurship Center of the Universidad Mayor (CeapiMayor) and the Apiculture Corporation of Chile (Cach) with the support of the Foundation for Agrarian Innovation (FIA) concluded that the bees are the only living being who does not carry any type of pathogen.

Computational analysis of size shape and structure (2019) https://doi.org/10.1242/bio.040774

Mary K. Salcedo, Jordan Hoffmann, Seth Donoughe, L. Mahadevan https://journals.biologists.com/bio/article/8/10/bio040774/224129/Computational-analysis-of-size-shape-and-structure

Abstract: The size, shape and structure of insect wings are intimately linked to their ability to fly. However, there are few systematic studies of the variability of the natural patterns in wing morphology across insects. We have assembled a dataset of 789 insect wings with representatives from 25 families and performed a comprehensive computational analysis of their morphology using topological and geometric notions in terms of (i) wing size and contour shape, (ii) vein topology, and (iii) shape and distribution of wing membrane domains. These morphospaces are complementary to existing methods for quantitatively characterizing wing morphology and are likely to be useful for investigating wing function and evolution. This Methods and Techniques paper is accompanied by a set of computational tools for open use.