What a body!
by Dr Wolfgang Kuhn
If a car manufacturer were to succeed in somehow making the same material as the
outer skeleton of the humble stag beetle—its ‘armour-plating’—he'd
be a multi-millionaire overnight! Imagine a car body that’s lighter than any
metal, will never rust, shrugs off corrosive liquids, copes with extremes of heat
and cold, doesn’t need painting, and resists knocks and scratches. If dented
by mild-to-moderate accidents, it will pop back to the original shape.
That’s what the ‘wonder substance’ (chitin), of which the beetle’s
body-covering is made, is like. What’s more, such a car body would always
be shiny, without washing, waxing, or polishing—ever. Have you ever seen a
stag beetle that’s not clean and shiny? Even a dung beetle crawling out of
its unsanitary mound emerges a sparkling metallic-blue, as if freshly polished.
A car body that repels dirt—imagine!
Incredibly, this marvellous chitin is only a combination of protein and sugar. Only?
In a strict chemical sense, yes. But the secret of its amazing multitude of useful
properties is only partly in the actual substance. It is mainly due to the fine,
submicroscopic details of the way in which it is constructed.
So even if we could produce chitin itself, all our modern technology would be unable
to imitate this fine microstructure so as to make a sports car body out of it, for
instance.
Yet this miracle-body, in the case of the beetle, develops at its last moulting—all
by itself—with all the complicated joints between all the parts that have
to be able to move in relation to each other. Next time you see this humble beetle,
consider the incredible amount of programmed information needed just to construct
this super-high-tech marvel, its outer coat. Such information is passed on generation
after generation, silent testimony to the Master Programmer.
It can take five years or more to get a mature stag beetle (family Lucanidae). Its
large larvae are quite useful in a forest economy—they help to dismantle dead
and rotting tree-stumps. The female lays up to 100 eggs at such sites, burrowing
down as far as 80 centimetres (2-3/4 feet) into the forest floor.
The male can grow to a length of 11 centimetres (more than four inches) if the antlers
are included. These impressive appendages are actually huge upper jaws. In spite
of such war-like equipment, stag beetles are actually peaceful ‘saplickers’,
which is why they have a long, paintbrush-like tongue. Their huge ‘jaws’
are used in bloodless combat for mates. The array of ‘spikes’ along
the inside ensures that they don’t slip off their rival’s smooth chitinous
armour after grabbing him—the same purpose as the ridges inside the jaws of
our manmade pliers.
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