I hear folks saying bugs are dying off because of changes in the environment, but shouldn’t bugs be some of the best equipped to handle changes? I imagine they reproduce faster than humans, and so I’d think their genes could adjust faster as well. You’d think we’d be having a worse time than bugs as the environment changes?
In: Biology
Bugs are very diverse. Some species like the Monarch butterfly are very reliant on specific foods, migration paths, and hibernation habitats. There are species of cicada that only emerge and mate every 17 years.
They will be less adaptable than other bugs with shorter lifespans (more frequent genetic iteration) and more varied habitats and food sources. Fruit flies, cockroaches, and ants for example.
~~Parrots~~ [Birds of Paradise?] could go extinct as the rain-forest is cut down, but pigeons will survive in cities.
Edit: I knew parrots were smart. Figured there was competition in the niche with corvids and pigeons, etc. Please provide some good examples in the spirit of the original coupled with the counter examples. I wish to know which cities to mark as parrot strongholds for when they fight our bug overlords, but we still need a good example to tie everything together.
Genes aren’t smart. They don’t look out at the environment and change accordingly. They just produce random variations, and if those variations work well in the current environment, that creature reproduces and that gene occurs more often, and if they work poorly, they occur less often.
Take the [peppered moth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution) as a buggy example. This is a light colored moth living in England. Occasionally one will hatch and be a very dark color.
Light colored moths are well camouflaged against light colored trees, while dark colored moths are eaten by birds.
During the early Industrial Revolution, coal soot darkened a lot of the surrounding area. Suddenly, the dark moths became way more common and the light moths were rare.
What happened wasn’t a case of the moths getting together and saying “alright lads, time to switch on Dark Mode.” It was a case of birds eating the light colored moths while the dark ones were now well hidden.
Environmental change triggered natural selection, but the key part here as it relates to your question is the adaptive gene *was already in the population.* Dark moths had been showing up presumably for thousands of years, all the coal ash did was flip this from a downside to an upside.
When the environment changes, it will favor the portion of the bug population that is already well adapted to the new environment. If that portion doesn’t exist, then the change will just wipe out the entire population.
Imagine you have an animal that is adapted to survive in an extremely wide range of environments. Now imagine that you have another animal that reproduces more quickly, but is only well adapted to survive in a narrower range of climates.
If the local climate changes, the faster reproducing animal will have an advantage in terms of how quickly it can change the environment it is best suited for, but the animal that is already suited for a wider range of environments can sustain larger changes before such adaptation even becomes a consideration.
The environment is changing faster than a lot of bugs can adapt to it, but it hasn’t yet changed so much that humans can’t survive in it. If and when we get to the point where the changes to the environment fall outside of what humans can easily survive in, we will absolutely fair worse than most bugs in that situation. A lot of bugs are just hitting the point where that is a concern faster than we are because they aren’t as well suited to the variety of environments that humans are.
Between existing genetic traits and cultural/technological adaptations, humans are *extremely* versatile in what sorts of environments we can successfully inhabit. But if we ever reach a point where further evolution is required to be able to continue surviving in the environment we have created, yeah, we’re going to be in trouble.
While bugs *do* adapt faster, they still require ideal environments to grow and reproduce . The Peppered Moth is a great example of rapid natural selection. But unlike bugs, us humans can adapt within our lifetimes due to our problem-solving skills and large brains. Bugs require generations of natural selection to adapt: we no longer do.
Evolution can’t precisely be predicted especially in a biology as diverse as insects. Food sources, environment, predators, disease are not understood enough
People have a fundamental misunderstanding of how things like adaptation work. Individuals don’t adapt. The ones that are least suited to their environments just die. The ones that are better suited live and reproduce, and the cycle continues. If the entire population of a species is so poorly situated to its environment that they can’t reproduce at replacement rate, then that species will slowly (or sometimes not so slowly) just cease to exist.
Adaptation is only faster in insects because they reproduce faster, but reproducing quickly doesn’t necessarily make you suited to your environment.
What makes you think we can adapt to climate change? All the signs are that we are going to experience massive die offs.
Our biggest advantage is figuring out how to write shit down. Even if bugs have decent communication abilities they are losing all knowledge every so many generations
Biologically, they adapt much faster. Some bugs will have 10,000 generations in the lifespan of one human.
But far more unique stressors get invented or introduced in that one lifespan of a human than bugs would face through evolutionary means.
Aside from the technology stuff people are bringing up, the basis of your idea is correct, shorter generations means faster adaptation. The first example of observed evolution was moths in England adapting camouflage to the soot build-up during the industrial revolution. This is also why fruit flies are used in genetic studies
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