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Hello, my name's Lindsay Turnbull and I'm an associate professor in the Department of Plant Sciences

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at the University of Oxford, and we're right in the middle of this very serious corona virus crisis right

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now. And my students are all stuck at home and we want to keep them in touch with biology

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and keep in touch with us. And so we're going to make a new series of videos and they're going to be called back garden

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biology.

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Today, we are going on safari, garden, safari, of course. Now, when people

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go on safari, they're often obsessed with seeing what are known as the Big Five. And those

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are the five biggest animals that you can find in an African national park. I a very childish thing to

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do in a way, because the size of an animal has nothing to do. How interesting air cooler is, how

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colourful it is. So I like all things that matter how big they are. But I'm going to apply my

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big five to the insect world, so I'm going to call them the bug five. Now,

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identifying insects, as we've seen, is difficult because there's so many species. But the best starting

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point is to think about the insect orders. So orders of insects are

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grouping. That comes there's the high level grouping just below the insect growth. We can

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call something an insect. And then we want to assign it to an order. And then order might be something

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like the beetles. They are in order. So which are the big five insect orders?

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Well, let's have a look at this book first. This is amazing. Paul Broks, Insect Guide. I told you about

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on the right hand side. Here are all the insects from just five orders.

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And on the left hand side is basically all the rest. So you can see just how big the big five are.

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In terms of numbers of species, there are really only five orders that absolutely dominate

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the insect world. I've got a whole phone here. This is a great place. A big flowering

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tree like this is a great place to start looking for insects, especially because it's a native tree.

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So loads of things will want to eat it, come to its flowers, and we're going to look through those five

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orders and find out what exactly characterises each one. I mean, I'm going to put together my

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garden. Five, not just from the grouping's, but actually five individual species

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chosen each one from each of those groups. Find it with my big five. Well, how does it hold

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up against your big five? Throw in

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at number five with just eighteen hundred species in the UK, are the true bugs

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a man Latin name is the Hammet Bitterer. All insect orders are the something.

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Terror peaty ERISA and that means wings. So their distinguishing characteristics

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are the arrangement of the wings. And that's one of the things that we'll be looking closely at.

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So what's characteristic of a true Barga, Hamit Bitterer? Well, again, the Pandora Juhan, a former student,

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has done some wonderful drawings for us. Let's have a look at one of her lips, her.

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So this is a classic hampster. It's actually a shield bug. And that's quite commonly

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found in gardens. And if we look at the left hand diagram, we can sort of see where the hemi

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terror comes from. Saw Hemet to a really means Heny terror halfway parked

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wing. And that's because the wings are partly hardened at the top. But the bottom

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part of the wing is membranous. And that gives them that rather unusual look.

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You can see it's very different from a beetle, which we'll see in a moment. A beetle has always has a clear line

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down here. This has a much more sort of complicated arrangement because of these unusual wings.

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Now, the biggest group of Hemet Turin's are the aphids. And the scale insects.

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And if you want to see a tree bug and you wander out into your garden right now, I can absolutely guarantee that you will be able to find an

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aphid. Not all of them have wings at this time of year, especially aphids

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have a really extraordinary lifecycle. So quite a lot of aphids don't have any wings at all. But you might be able to find

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a winged one. And they, of course, are sucking the sap of plants. Let's have a look closely

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at the mouthparts of the bugs and see what they're up to. So they have this

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amazing piercing rostrum and very often they stick that rostrum into plants

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and suck the sap of plants like the aphids or indeed the shield bug. And common

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examples in gardens are the Greenshields bug, which we can see here. And that's often

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found on Hawthorne or various shrubs. I also found this Boksburg wandering

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around that you spend incredibly rare insect. But since 1990, it's been spreading

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out across southern England and now is quite easy to find. These piercing mouthparts

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are not only used to set this up of plants. Some insects suck blood, of course,

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and bugs are no exception. Think about bedbugs. They are a true bug. But there are also bugs

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that suck the sap, if you like, of other insects. They can pierce into the hard exoskeleton

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and suck out the juicy contents. And that's a group of bugs called the assassin bugs.

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So that's the bugs they're in at number five.

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They're coming in at number four with around two and a half thousand species in the UK are the butterflies

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and moths, which are the lepidoptera and lepidoptera, I mean, scale wings. And we're all quite familiar

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with those beautiful patterns and colours that those scales can create on our most exotic looking

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butterflies. We've got some pretty great ones in the UK. Let's have a close look at one of Pandoras drawings.

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She's chosen to draw the large white butterfly and probably one of the least popular

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members of the group in Britain because, of course, they lay their eggs on cabbages and butterflies.

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And moths normally are quite specific about the food plants for the larvae hunting out maybe just

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one species that the caterpillars then eat. The mouthparts are pretty

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extraordinary. They have this amazing long proboscis that they can coil up like that.

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And we can see that probing into the flowers here. So they're really good at feeding

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on flowers and long Corolla chips where the insects have to reach down deep to get to

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the nectar. And lots of flowers have adapted so that they only want to be pollinated by butterflies

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and moths. Lots of people want to know what's the difference between a butterfly and a moth? Quite difficult to know. Quite

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a lot of moths are actually de flying in the UK. The antennae are pretty characteristic.

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If they have a club on the end like this, then it's a butterfly. It is a more feathery looking structure than it is

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almost certainly a moth. You can't necessarily apply that worldwide, but it works quite well for

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our butterflies. What you can also see is sometimes the way they sit at rest. So

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unless they're basking. A butterfly tends to shut its wings up and hold them above its body

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like that, as we can see with this holly blue here. But moths will tend to put

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the wings out flat. In at number three,

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surprisingly, I think is the Coleoptera or Beatles. The Beatles are famous

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for being mega diverse, but actually in the UK there's around four thousand one hundred species,

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and that's considerably less than the last two groups that we're still to look at. Now, the Beatles are the

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Coley Opta and that means Schiefer Wings. And let's have a quick look at this diagram

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from Pandora and we'll see why they're called that. So, again, all insects have

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two pairs of wings in the Beatles. The four wings have been modified into something

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called Electra, and those are hard win cases. And the hind pair of wings

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is membranous and is tucked and folded away beneath foes alike. Try to keep them

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safe and undamaged. And we can see this in this lady bird as it takes off from

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my hand and say unpacking behind wings and whizzing off.

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Now for the mouthparts, a lot of Coleoptera have large chewing mandibles.

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Not all of them, but a lot of them are predatory. And of course, we are very well disposed

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as gardeners towards beetles because a special kinds of them are really helpful towards gardeners. Obviously,

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the ladybirds being one. And here there is roaming around Rose Plant looking

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for aphids eat and their larvae are particularly voracious aphid

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predators. The other kind of beetle that is really

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helpful to the garden, the ground beetles, as some of them can be really large and they're very fast

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active moving predators like this one that managed to get a very brief glimpse of as it scuttled away.

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They're nocturnal. They don't like being active during the day. So they're hard to get hold of, but they're really

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good predators. You can tell something's predatory normally as an insect from the rate it moves if

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it is rushing away from your high speed. And it's probably an active hunter.

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In at number two, the dip terror or the true flies dip terror means

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die terror two wings because they don't really have two wings, but they have really specially adapted

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hind wings that make them the supreme flyers. Let's have a closer look.

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This is actually a Drosophila fruit fly, something that most of us are familiar with in the summer as they swarm around the

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bananas in our kitchens. The four wings, you see is a membranous wing, and that is the

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hind wing. This tiny little structure here is called a halter, and it's a balance organ.

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It's covered in little sensory has and it's really an insect marvel and it allows

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the flies to be spectacularly good flyers. And the best thing insect to see them

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on is a crane fly. Daddy, long legs. If you can look closely at a daddy long legs, you have a good chance

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of being able to see these. They're very tiny on lots of other flies, but they give them this exquisite

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control. As you can see from this bee fly in the way it's doing this incredible hovering. No bee could actually

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fly like that. And there are lots of different types of flies eating lots of different

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things. We add the mouthparts are quite often modified into this strange

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little dabbing structure. It's actually a highly specialised mouthparts

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in the flies. They can often vomit up is often described as a bit unfair that they

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can extrude enzymes onto the food to digest the food and then suck

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it back up. And of course, some of the flies that hang around your house and do that on your food are not very happy

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with that. They also, lots of them feed on nectar as adults. You see lots of different types of hover flies.

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And of course, hover flies are famous for being mimics of the bees and wasps, and that's just to keep predators away

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from them. They don't have a sting, but a predator might not wish to take a chance. And some of that minut

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craze really, really clever. So one of the most interesting things

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I found in my garden very recently was this Narcissus fly. When I first spotted it, I thought it

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was a worker of the large red tailed bumblebee. I thought it's really agile for a bumble bee.

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So maybe look closer and you can see it's an amazing mimic. So most flies will hold

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the wings out at a much higher angle to the body. About 45 degrees is

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the classic thing. But this flies even learnt to put its wings further back over its body. So

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that mimic craze really. Very, very good indeed.

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And at number one, did you get it? It's the hymenoptera. Those are the ants, bees

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and wasps, and hymenoptera means membranous wing. And they have two pairs of

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membranous wings that are often zipped together to act as a single wing.

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The ants, of course, are only wings for the reproductive space for dispersal Solvay. Then the worker

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ants are not. Not when most science you see around Jigar Garden, of course, don't have wings.

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Let's have a quick look at the diagram then. This is Pandoras beautiful drawing of a honeybee.

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A very familiar insect. For most gardeners. And here you can see the two pairs of membranous

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wings. One of the key things about Highman uptrends is they always have a really good waste, say, between

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the thorax and the abdomen. They always really go in there and then some wasps. It's really highly perens

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that waste. They are often also really busy looking. They look really intense, almost

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like intelligent. They're often waving and waggling their antennae really madly. And

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that's because a lot of them are parasitic and they're hunting for prey the whole time. And

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you can see a little broken and wasp here that's waggling its antennae like mad as it searches

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around for aphids to parasitise. So again, Highman options are generally very valuable to gardeners.

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What about the mouthparts? Well, a lot of them do have chewing mouthparts that the bees have been

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specially modified to have these sucking mouth parts to enable them to lap up nectar.

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And of course Highman options are really famous for something called you sociality

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and you sociality is a an evolutionary transition to a new way of living

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in which individuals, some of them do not reproduce. Instead, they give their

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labour to help their siblings or their mothers reproduce. So you have a huge number

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of individuals who are not going to have any offspring themselves that help to rear the offspring of related

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individuals. Of course, the ants are famous for their own honeybees. Bumblebees, not

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all Highman uptrends are social like that, but it has evolved several times within that group.

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And the flexibility of the mouthparts are such that, for example, in a big ant colony, you'll have the soldier

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ants with gigantic jaws. Some of them no longer able to eat. They actually have to be fed by

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the workers. So that just tells you about the flexibility of the insect body plan

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has really been key to their success. And you can see that across the orders, how they're all specialised,

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the different ways of living and make an occupy every niche on this planet more or less.

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So the last thing I have to do is to pick my big five, my bug five. That means

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one individual species to represent each of those five groups and they have to be things I've seen in the

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garden this year already say some things I quite like to cheat, to choose, but I haven't seen them, so I can't

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for the bug. I'm going to pick the green Spielberg for the Lepidoptera.

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What moths and butterflies. I'm going to choose the peacock butterfly. It's really such a stunning

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insect for the beetles. The Coleoptera. I'm gonna pick the Rose Chafer.

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I haven't shown it in this video yet, but here it is. I think you have to agree that is a stunning

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insect for the flies. I think it has to be a hover fly. And I'm going to pick that Narcissus

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fly, which is the incredible mimic of the large red tailed bumblebee.

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And for the hymenoptera, I'm gonna pick the large red tailed bumblebee because I'm not surprised that flies

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tried to mimic that insect, the queens of the large red tailed bumblebees,

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some of the insects I enjoy seeing most. And finally, I actually managed to get some film of one of them.

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And here it is now, as well as my book five. I've asked entomologist Liam Crowley

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to do the same. So here he is with his bug five and you can decide which you think is better.

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Hello, I'm Liam Crowley and I'm a postdoc in the Department of Equality and I'm gonna give you

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my own personal garden book five. So start off with with Coleoptera.

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I'm gonna go for the common cold. Take the beetle, also known as a MAYBERG, because it

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is made that started to come out. Now, these are very large, charismatic

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beetles and as you can see here, have these fantastic eliminate antennae.

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Then Hymenoptera, my nomination would go for none other than

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the European Hornet vestment grab. Right. These are actually fantastic

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wasps, which don't get enough appreciation if you watch them. They're unbelievable hunters

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and they're not as aggressive as well as their reputation sometimes suggests

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they might be. Then for Lepidoptera, I'm going to go for the aptly

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named Garden Tiger Ball. This is a stunning species, as you can see,

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and unfortunately has declined in recent times, and it's not as widespread

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as it used to be. Then for departure, my one my choice would

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be the big grubber. So these are absolutely fantastic.

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Place really, really cool. They actually Parisot weeds of bumblebees and

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Maione bees and what they do is they grab hold of the bee and fly and then use their tin

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opener like of depositor and slice apen their poor bees abdomen

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and lay their eggs straight inside them. Very cool little fly. And then finally for her Mitra,

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I have to choose an aphid just because aphid biology is so unbelievably cool.

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Things like telescoping generations and the ability to clone themselves and rapidly

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increasing population size. So I've chosen the sycamore aphid, which if you have a

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a sycamore tree in your garden, then you would also almost certainly be out to find a signal,

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a fence on the on the leaf buds. This time of year.