Not just sailor aphids, but an aphid ship too – Insect Class Gunboats

Some of you may have come across Reaktion Books and their Animal series, which as well having the usual vertebrate suspects has a refreshingly large number of invertebrate titles, for example, Moth, Ant, Mosquito just to name those gracing my shelves. I had, at one time, the ambition of adding to the collection with Aphid :-). Unfortunately, one of the requirements for inclusion in the series is what one might call a cultural dimension, and despite being fabulously awesome, aphids have not, as yet, made a huge impact on human culture.  In spite of assiduous searching on my behalf, I have not, as yet*, managed to find many instances of aphids making it into the wider human consciousness beyond their undeserved (in my opinion) reputation as mega-pests.

My count to date is a post card, a children’s book, a postage stamp, a sculpture and two poems. Sadly, I don’t feel I can count coloured plates from entomological texts, no matter how beautiful 😦

Punk aphid postcard – adapted from the cover of an issue of New Scientist published in 1977, when our PhD group at the University of East Anglia had our fifteen minutes of fame 🙂

To my knowledge, the only children’s book (or any work of fiction for that matter), with an aphid as the main character.

The World’s classiest stamp – thank you Slovenia for recognising the importance of aphids 🙂

An artist who appreciates the beauty of aphids – Aphid on rose – Beth Biggs.

Of the two poems that mention aphids, Charles Goodrich’s is, in my opinion, the winner, so I have reproduced it in full. I am much less enamoured of Greenfly from Giles Goodland’s collection celebrating insects, The Masses, so have not shared it with you.

A Lecture on Aphids by Charles Goodrich

She plucks my sleeve.
“Young man,” she says, “you need to spray.
You have aphids on your roses.”

In a dark serge coat and a pill box hat
by god it’s my third grade Sunday school teacher,
shrunken but still stern, the town’s
most successful corporate attorney’s mother.
She doesn’t remember me. I holster
my secateurs, smile publicly,
and reply, “Ma’am,

did you know a female aphid is born
carrying fertile eggs? Come look.
There may be five or six generations
cheek by jowl on this “Peace” bud.
Don’t they remind you
of refugees
crowding the deck of a tramp steamer?
Look through my hand lens-
they’re translucent. You can see their dark innards
like kidneys in aspic.

Yes, ma’am, they are full-time inebriates,
and unashamed of their nakedness.
But isn’t there something wild and uplifting
about their complete indifference to the human prospect?”

And then I do something wicked. “Ma’am,” I say,
“I love aphids!” And I squeeze
a few dozen from the nearest bud
and eat them.

After the old woman scuttles away
I feel ill
and sit down to consider
what comes next. You see,
aphids
aren’t sweet
as I had always imagined.
Even though rose wine is their only food,
aphids
are bitter.

---

“But what about the ship?” I hear you cry.  To cut a long story short, I was looking for images of Aphis species for a lecture, when up popped a picture of a ship, HMS Aphis. I of course immediately jumped down the internet rabbit hole in pursuit and found to

HMS Aphis https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HMS_Aphis_AWM_302297.jpeg

my delight that during the first World War, the Admiralty commissioned a class of ships, the Insect Gunboats, for the Royal Navy designed for use in shallow rivers or inshore. Twelve of these were commissioned between 1915 and 1916. They were, in alphabetical order, not in order of commission, Aphis, Bee, Cicala, Cockchafer, Cricket, Glowworm, Gnat, Ladybird, Mantis, Moth, Scarab, and surprisingly, given the huge number of candidates to choose from, a non-insect, Tarantula.

I haven’t been able to discover why someone decided to call them the Insect class or why they choose the names they did.  Most

HMS Aphis, ship’s badges – very pleased to see the siphunculi, somebody did their research.

of them are not particularly pugnacious species with the possible exceptions of the Bee, Gnat, Ladybird, Mantis and the non-insect Tarantula.

Not sure which species of ladybird this is supposed to represent but felt that as an insect often associated with aphids it deserved a mention 🙂

Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera and Diptera

HMS Glowworm – a shame that this is symbolic rather than the actual insect 😦

Sadly, none of the Insect gunboats have survived, HMS Aphis was scrapped in 1947, in Singapore of all places, and the last one, HMS Cockchafer, was sold for scrap in 1949.

Pleased as I was to discover HMS Aphis, I am still a long way off having enough cultural references to convince Reaktion Books that Aphid is a possible title in the series. The Secret Life of Aphids, is however, a real possibility :-).  Finally, if you were puzzled about the sailor aphids I mention in the title, you can satisfy your curiosity by clicking on this link.

*I continue to live in hope of discovering a hidden cache of material celebrating aphids as cultural icons 🙂

Pick & Mix 57 – insect decline, rewilding death, blister beetles, chicken nuggets, fraudulent honey and much more

How we can help reverse insect decline

Nature emerging from the industrial wastelands

Why keeping one mature street tree is far better for humans and nature than planting lots of new ones

Blister and oil beetles

Chicken nuggets grown in a lab have just been approved for sale for the first time in the world! So what is lab-grown meat and is it even worth it?  Watch the video here

Biodiversity: why foods grown in warm climates could be doing the most damage to wildlife

Honey fraud – a bigger problem than you might think

Royal Jelly Isn’t What Makes a Queen Bee a Queen Bee -Everything we thought we knew about royal jelly is backward.

Charley Krebs – On an Experimental Design Mafia for Ecology

Rewilding death – not as macabre as you might think

Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider – a cornucopia of wit and information

I have always been a fan of Steve Heard’s writing, be it pitcher plant mosquitoes (Heard, 1994ab) or his never boring, frequently amusing blog, Scientist See Squirrel, so I was very pleased to find his latest book in my Christmas stocking 🙂 As expected it is a great book, very reminiscent of Steve’s blog, amusing and informative.  This is only a brief review as I don’t want to detract from Steve’s sales by giving away too many spoilers.

The first two chapters are on the need for universally agreed names and the history of naming organisms. These are followed by a series of what you might call biographical chapters, in which the importance of particular individuals to their disciplines are highlighted, and why and whom honoured them by naming species after them.  Many of the individuals I had not heard of before, so kudos to Steve for delving deep into the history of non-entomological disciplines. Steve also addresses the vexed question of what we should do about those Latin binomial (the technical term) names that celebrate the less savoury members of society, such as the beetle Anophthalmus hitleri. There is also a chapter on insult naming, the moth Neoplapa donaldtrumpi for example, and

Neopalpa donaldtrumpi, a moth with a golden comb-over and very small genitalia. Photograph Dr Vazrik Nazari cc. by 4.0.

another on naming species after your one true love. Steve also asks us what we think about naming species after celebrities, a good thing or a bad thing? Should taxonomists be above this sort of thing and confine themselves to purely descriptive names? There are, however, as Steve points out,  just too many species to do this sensibly, and scientists, despite the way in which we are often portrayed, are human beings with likes, dislikes and favourite artists, authors and super stars 🙂

There are two very important chapters in this book, that in my opinion, raise it from being an enjoyable romp through history via taxonomy to a much more thought-provoking work*.  These are respectively, Chapter 15, The Indigenous Blind Spot and Chapter 18, Names for Sale, to a truly thought provoking work.  Incidentally, all the chapter names in the book are truly inspired, Gary Larson’s Louse, Harry Potter and the Name of the Species and The Name of Evil to give you a flavour.

 The Indigenous Blind Spot deals with the way in which the indigenous peoples who were, and still are, instrumental in the collection of new species from what, we as privileged northerners, see as exotic locations.  Yes, the countries are often commemorated in the names, but as Steve points out there are only a handful of species that recognise the indigenous field assistants. Unfortunately, this attitude persists in many areas of ecology and conservation, despite the relatively recent recognition of it as a problem (Baker et al., 2019; Eichhorn et al., 2020; Hart et al., 2020).

Names for Sale discusses the ethics of taxonomists naming species in return for money.  On one hand, the idea of commercialising taxonomy might appear to be trivialising the discipline, but when one considers how little money relatively speaking, comes from scientific funders (Ebach et al., 2011; Britz et al., 2020) anything that helps support the discipline is welcome.

If you want to know who has the most species named after them, and it may not be whom you think, then buy the book.  I promise you, you won’t regret it.

References

Baker, K., Eichhorn, M.P. & Griffiths, M. (2019) Decolonizing field ecology.  Biotropica, 51, 288-292.

Britz, R., Hundsdörfer, A. & Fritz, U. (2020) Funding, training, permits—the three big challenges of taxonomy.  Megataxa, 1, 49-52.

Ebach, M.C., Valdecasa, A.G. & Wheeler, Q.D. (2011) Impediments to taxonomy and users of taxonomy: accessibility and impact evaluation.Cladistics, 27, 550-557.

Eichhorn, M. P., Baker, K. and Griffiths, M. (2020) ‘Steps towards decolonising biogeography’. Frontiers of Biogeography, 12, e44795 (7 pp).

Hart, A.G, Leather, S.R. and Sharma, M.V. (2020) Overseas conservation education and research: the new colonialism? Journal of Biological Education, 55

Heard, S.B. (1994) Imperfect oviposition decisions by the pitcher plant mosquito (Wyeomyia smithii). Evolutionary Ecology, 8, 493-502.

Heard, S.B. (1994) Pitcher-plant midges and mosquitoes: a processing chain commensalism. Ecology, 75, 1647-1660.

*See Steve’s response to those people who didn’t like these chapters.

Why using an expert to review a paper is sometimes a bad thing

I have written about the importance and role of paper reviewers before, but a recent experience has prompted me to put fingers to keyboard yet again. As an Editor, my practice when choosing referees is to invite, whenever possible, an early career researcher (ECR) and a well-established expert in the field. My reasoning behind this being that the ECR will be very au fait with the current literature and techniques (statistical and experimental), and very likely to do the job quickly. The ancient professor old fogey well established expert, may take longer to respond, but will definitely know the early literature and be in a good position to judge the novelty of the work and point out if the wheel is being reinvented (Leather, 2004).

Until recently I thought that this was a fool-proof approach, but then I had the opportunity to referee a paper right up my street; the study organism was the subject of my PhD and I have continued working with it (albeit recently, mainly via PhD and MSc students) for the last forty years.  The paper described a well-designed and analysed experiment, and, miracle of miracles, cited me all the relevant literature.  I had only a few minor points and enthusiastically recommended publication with only minor revision.  I was a bit surprised when I received notice of the journal’s decision to see that they had given the author a major revision. On reading the other reviewer’s report, (the practice of copying the reviewer’s reports to each reviewer is a fantastic service), I realised why.

Having being involved with the topic for a life-time, I knew exactly what the author had done and what their rationale was, so hadn’t picked up on the fact that some of the methodology and whys and wherefores would be somewhat opaque to non-experts.  This is of course why we get (or should) our colleagues to read our papers before we submit them.  Familiarity doesn’t necessarily breed contempt, but it can certainly lead to a false sense of how niche one’s research area actually is.

I will, despite this, still continue to use well-established experts to review papers but will try not to weight their opinions more highly than those of the ECRs. As for me, I will, in future be looking much more critically at the approaches and rationale of papers that deal with subjects very close to my heart. Alternatively, I could just give up reviewing papers 🙂

Reference

Leather, S.R. (2004) Reinventing the wheel – on the dangers of taxon parochialism and shallow reference trawling! Basic and Applied Ecology, 5, 309-311.