Hello, my name's Lindsay Turnbull and I'm an associate professor in the Department of Plant Sciences
at the University of Oxford, and we're right in the middle of this very serious corona virus crisis right
now. And my students are all stuck at home and we want to keep them in touch with biology
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
biology.
Today, we are going on safari, garden, safari, of course. Now, when people
go on safari, they're often obsessed with seeing what are known as the Big Five. And those
are the five biggest animals that you can find in an African national park. I a very childish thing to
do in a way, because the size of an animal has nothing to do. How interesting air cooler is, how
colourful it is. So I like all things that matter how big they are. But I'm going to apply my
big five to the insect world, so I'm going to call them the bug five. Now,
identifying insects, as we've seen, is difficult because there's so many species. But the best starting
point is to think about the insect orders. So orders of insects are
grouping. That comes there's the high level grouping just below the insect growth. We can
call something an insect. And then we want to assign it to an order. And then order might be something
like the beetles. They are in order. So which are the big five insect orders?
Well, let's have a look at this book first. This is amazing. Paul Broks, Insect Guide. I told you about
on the right hand side. Here are all the insects from just five orders.
And on the left hand side is basically all the rest. So you can see just how big the big five are.
In terms of numbers of species, there are really only five orders that absolutely dominate
the insect world. I've got a whole phone here. This is a great place. A big flowering
tree like this is a great place to start looking for insects, especially because it's a native tree.
So loads of things will want to eat it, come to its flowers, and we're going to look through those five
orders and find out what exactly characterises each one. I mean, I'm going to put together my
garden. Five, not just from the grouping's, but actually five individual species
chosen each one from each of those groups. Find it with my big five. Well, how does it hold
up against your big five? Throw in
at number five with just eighteen hundred species in the UK, are the true bugs
a man Latin name is the Hammet Bitterer. All insect orders are the something.
Terror peaty ERISA and that means wings. So their distinguishing characteristics
are the arrangement of the wings. And that's one of the things that we'll be looking closely at.
So what's characteristic of a true Barga, Hamit Bitterer? Well, again, the Pandora Juhan, a former student,
has done some wonderful drawings for us. Let's have a look at one of her lips, her.
So this is a classic hampster. It's actually a shield bug. And that's quite commonly
found in gardens. And if we look at the left hand diagram, we can sort of see where the hemi
terror comes from. Saw Hemet to a really means Heny terror halfway parked
wing. And that's because the wings are partly hardened at the top. But the bottom
part of the wing is membranous. And that gives them that rather unusual look.
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
down here. This has a much more sort of complicated arrangement because of these unusual wings.
Now, the biggest group of Hemet Turin's are the aphids. And the scale insects.
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
aphid. Not all of them have wings at this time of year, especially aphids
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
a winged one. And they, of course, are sucking the sap of plants. Let's have a look closely
at the mouthparts of the bugs and see what they're up to. So they have this
amazing piercing rostrum and very often they stick that rostrum into plants
and suck the sap of plants like the aphids or indeed the shield bug. And common
examples in gardens are the Greenshields bug, which we can see here. And that's often
found on Hawthorne or various shrubs. I also found this Boksburg wandering
around that you spend incredibly rare insect. But since 1990, it's been spreading
out across southern England and now is quite easy to find. These piercing mouthparts
are not only used to set this up of plants. Some insects suck blood, of course,
and bugs are no exception. Think about bedbugs. They are a true bug. But there are also bugs
that suck the sap, if you like, of other insects. They can pierce into the hard exoskeleton
and suck out the juicy contents. And that's a group of bugs called the assassin bugs.
So that's the bugs they're in at number five.
They're coming in at number four with around two and a half thousand species in the UK are the butterflies
and moths, which are the lepidoptera and lepidoptera, I mean, scale wings. And we're all quite familiar
with those beautiful patterns and colours that those scales can create on our most exotic looking
butterflies. We've got some pretty great ones in the UK. Let's have a close look at one of Pandoras drawings.
She's chosen to draw the large white butterfly and probably one of the least popular
members of the group in Britain because, of course, they lay their eggs on cabbages and butterflies.
And moths normally are quite specific about the food plants for the larvae hunting out maybe just
one species that the caterpillars then eat. The mouthparts are pretty
extraordinary. They have this amazing long proboscis that they can coil up like that.
And we can see that probing into the flowers here. So they're really good at feeding
on flowers and long Corolla chips where the insects have to reach down deep to get to
the nectar. And lots of flowers have adapted so that they only want to be pollinated by butterflies
and moths. Lots of people want to know what's the difference between a butterfly and a moth? Quite difficult to know. Quite
a lot of moths are actually de flying in the UK. The antennae are pretty characteristic.
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
almost certainly a moth. You can't necessarily apply that worldwide, but it works quite well for
our butterflies. What you can also see is sometimes the way they sit at rest. So
unless they're basking. A butterfly tends to shut its wings up and hold them above its body
like that, as we can see with this holly blue here. But moths will tend to put
the wings out flat. In at number three,
surprisingly, I think is the Coleoptera or Beatles. The Beatles are famous
for being mega diverse, but actually in the UK there's around four thousand one hundred species,
and that's considerably less than the last two groups that we're still to look at. Now, the Beatles are the
Coley Opta and that means Schiefer Wings. And let's have a quick look at this diagram
from Pandora and we'll see why they're called that. So, again, all insects have
two pairs of wings in the Beatles. The four wings have been modified into something
called Electra, and those are hard win cases. And the hind pair of wings
is membranous and is tucked and folded away beneath foes alike. Try to keep them
safe and undamaged. And we can see this in this lady bird as it takes off from
my hand and say unpacking behind wings and whizzing off.
Now for the mouthparts, a lot of Coleoptera have large chewing mandibles.
Not all of them, but a lot of them are predatory. And of course, we are very well disposed
as gardeners towards beetles because a special kinds of them are really helpful towards gardeners. Obviously,
the ladybirds being one. And here there is roaming around Rose Plant looking
for aphids eat and their larvae are particularly voracious aphid
predators. The other kind of beetle that is really
helpful to the garden, the ground beetles, as some of them can be really large and they're very fast
active moving predators like this one that managed to get a very brief glimpse of as it scuttled away.
They're nocturnal. They don't like being active during the day. So they're hard to get hold of, but they're really
good predators. You can tell something's predatory normally as an insect from the rate it moves if
it is rushing away from your high speed. And it's probably an active hunter.
In at number two, the dip terror or the true flies dip terror means
die terror two wings because they don't really have two wings, but they have really specially adapted
hind wings that make them the supreme flyers. Let's have a closer look.
This is actually a Drosophila fruit fly, something that most of us are familiar with in the summer as they swarm around the
bananas in our kitchens. The four wings, you see is a membranous wing, and that is the
hind wing. This tiny little structure here is called a halter, and it's a balance organ.
It's covered in little sensory has and it's really an insect marvel and it allows
the flies to be spectacularly good flyers. And the best thing insect to see them
on is a crane fly. Daddy, long legs. If you can look closely at a daddy long legs, you have a good chance
of being able to see these. They're very tiny on lots of other flies, but they give them this exquisite
control. As you can see from this bee fly in the way it's doing this incredible hovering. No bee could actually
fly like that. And there are lots of different types of flies eating lots of different
things. We add the mouthparts are quite often modified into this strange
little dabbing structure. It's actually a highly specialised mouthparts
in the flies. They can often vomit up is often described as a bit unfair that they
can extrude enzymes onto the food to digest the food and then suck
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
with that. They also, lots of them feed on nectar as adults. You see lots of different types of hover flies.
And of course, hover flies are famous for being mimics of the bees and wasps, and that's just to keep predators away
from them. They don't have a sting, but a predator might not wish to take a chance. And some of that minut
craze really, really clever. So one of the most interesting things
I found in my garden very recently was this Narcissus fly. When I first spotted it, I thought it
was a worker of the large red tailed bumblebee. I thought it's really agile for a bumble bee.
So maybe look closer and you can see it's an amazing mimic. So most flies will hold
the wings out at a much higher angle to the body. About 45 degrees is
the classic thing. But this flies even learnt to put its wings further back over its body. So
that mimic craze really. Very, very good indeed.
And at number one, did you get it? It's the hymenoptera. Those are the ants, bees
and wasps, and hymenoptera means membranous wing. And they have two pairs of
membranous wings that are often zipped together to act as a single wing.
The ants, of course, are only wings for the reproductive space for dispersal Solvay. Then the worker
ants are not. Not when most science you see around Jigar Garden, of course, don't have wings.
Let's have a quick look at the diagram then. This is Pandoras beautiful drawing of a honeybee.
A very familiar insect. For most gardeners. And here you can see the two pairs of membranous
wings. One of the key things about Highman uptrends is they always have a really good waste, say, between
the thorax and the abdomen. They always really go in there and then some wasps. It's really highly perens
that waste. They are often also really busy looking. They look really intense, almost
like intelligent. They're often waving and waggling their antennae really madly. And
that's because a lot of them are parasitic and they're hunting for prey the whole time. And
you can see a little broken and wasp here that's waggling its antennae like mad as it searches
around for aphids to parasitise. So again, Highman options are generally very valuable to gardeners.
What about the mouthparts? Well, a lot of them do have chewing mouthparts that the bees have been
specially modified to have these sucking mouth parts to enable them to lap up nectar.
And of course Highman options are really famous for something called you sociality
and you sociality is a an evolutionary transition to a new way of living
in which individuals, some of them do not reproduce. Instead, they give their
labour to help their siblings or their mothers reproduce. So you have a huge number
of individuals who are not going to have any offspring themselves that help to rear the offspring of related
individuals. Of course, the ants are famous for their own honeybees. Bumblebees, not
all Highman uptrends are social like that, but it has evolved several times within that group.
And the flexibility of the mouthparts are such that, for example, in a big ant colony, you'll have the soldier
ants with gigantic jaws. Some of them no longer able to eat. They actually have to be fed by
the workers. So that just tells you about the flexibility of the insect body plan
has really been key to their success. And you can see that across the orders, how they're all specialised,
the different ways of living and make an occupy every niche on this planet more or less.
So the last thing I have to do is to pick my big five, my bug five. That means
one individual species to represent each of those five groups and they have to be things I've seen in the
garden this year already say some things I quite like to cheat, to choose, but I haven't seen them, so I can't
for the bug. I'm going to pick the green Spielberg for the Lepidoptera.
What moths and butterflies. I'm going to choose the peacock butterfly. It's really such a stunning
insect for the beetles. The Coleoptera. I'm gonna pick the Rose Chafer.
I haven't shown it in this video yet, but here it is. I think you have to agree that is a stunning
insect for the flies. I think it has to be a hover fly. And I'm going to pick that Narcissus
fly, which is the incredible mimic of the large red tailed bumblebee.
And for the hymenoptera, I'm gonna pick the large red tailed bumblebee because I'm not surprised that flies
tried to mimic that insect, the queens of the large red tailed bumblebees,
some of the insects I enjoy seeing most. And finally, I actually managed to get some film of one of them.
And here it is now, as well as my book five. I've asked entomologist Liam Crowley
to do the same. So here he is with his bug five and you can decide which you think is better.
Hello, I'm Liam Crowley and I'm a postdoc in the Department of Equality and I'm gonna give you
my own personal garden book five. So start off with with Coleoptera.
I'm gonna go for the common cold. Take the beetle, also known as a MAYBERG, because it
is made that started to come out. Now, these are very large, charismatic
beetles and as you can see here, have these fantastic eliminate antennae.
Then Hymenoptera, my nomination would go for none other than
the European Hornet vestment grab. Right. These are actually fantastic
wasps, which don't get enough appreciation if you watch them. They're unbelievable hunters
and they're not as aggressive as well as their reputation sometimes suggests
they might be. Then for Lepidoptera, I'm going to go for the aptly
named Garden Tiger Ball. This is a stunning species, as you can see,
and unfortunately has declined in recent times, and it's not as widespread
as it used to be. Then for departure, my one my choice would
be the big grubber. So these are absolutely fantastic.
Place really, really cool. They actually Parisot weeds of bumblebees and
Maione bees and what they do is they grab hold of the bee and fly and then use their tin
opener like of depositor and slice apen their poor bees abdomen
and lay their eggs straight inside them. Very cool little fly. And then finally for her Mitra,
I have to choose an aphid just because aphid biology is so unbelievably cool.
Things like telescoping generations and the ability to clone themselves and rapidly
increasing population size. So I've chosen the sycamore aphid, which if you have a
a sycamore tree in your garden, then you would also almost certainly be out to find a signal,
a fence on the on the leaf buds. This time of year.