The lads from Liverpool were right to name themselves the Beatles, evoking both rock and roll's rhythms together with the most common animal species on Earth. The Beatles went on to conquer the world in the 1960s, something the beetles did hundreds of millions of years ago.
Many saw the Beatles as a threat with their long hair and their music that first drove young girls crazy and then encouraged young people to use drugs. Others saw the Beatles as musical geniuses, the voice of the Baby Boomer generation. The same goes for the beetles. In some cultures, the beetle has been revered. Take the depiction of the scarab in ancient Egyptian artifacts, for example. In other times and places, the beetles have been nothing but a pest, a threat to the health and prosperity of the humans in the area.
Beetles as pest is certainly the viewpoint of Prince George residents and Western Canadians. The mountain pine beetle destroyed billions of trees in B.C. and Alberta, closing mills, putting thousands out of work and causing significant economic damage. Now entomologists are mapping the spread of the spruce beetle across the Central Interior.
If humans were less self-centred about their place in Earth's biological sphere, we would realize that Earth is a planet of beetles. One out of every four animals on Earth is part of the beetle family. Biologists have catalogued nearly half a million species of beetle and guess that there are millions of unidentified beetle species. Except for the poles, beetles are the only creatures other than Homo Sapiens that can be found everywhere on Earth.
Through their sheer numbers, beetles, like humans, shape the environment around them. They have the ability to control the population of trees, insects and animals. Numerous plants are dependent upon beetles to spread seeds. Dung beetles are an essential component of soil health on every continent.
Beetles not only dominate the world in population and geography but also in time. It's estimated that beetles were around for more than 200 million years before the dinosaurs were wiped out. Not only did the beetles survive that mass extinction but the two before it. Evolutionary biologists estimate the Permian-Triassic mass extinction about 250 million years ago wiped out more than 95 per cent of life on Earth at the time.
The beetles lived.
Seen in that light, we shouldn't have been surprised to hear that it takes 10 to 14 days of sustained -40 C to kill mountain pine beetles nestled inside a tree for the winter.
Or that spruce beetles are even more resilient to winter weather, able to survive both as larva and as adults.
Both the hardiness of the beetles and their adaptability to environmental change have long been known to entomologists. Based on their numbers, their diversity and their prevalence across the planet, beetles will likely survive future mass extinction events and will still be around long after humans cease to exist.
They have time and toughness on their side.
That means people stopping a spruce beetle or a mountain pine beetle or any unwanted beetle infestation would be as impossible as a group of local residents holding hands, walking out into the Fraser River and stopping the water from flowing.
It's beetles, not strawberry fields, that are forever. On the long and winding road of life, the beetles can get through any hard day's night and still feel fine.
