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
Adaptation doesn’t mean survival. You are correct that due to short lifespans bugs respond to natural selection faster.
There have been experiments to prove this.
However adaption doesn’t mean everyone survives, it means the strongest survive.
So the bugs will still die off at huge rates, they will be replaced by others with different traits, sometimes other species completely ie the ones most adapted for the new condition.
Since we left Africa, human adaptation to new environments has been technologically driven rather than evolutionarily driven.
that’s not how evolution works. adaptions happen over time. As the environment changes, the ones that can survive those changes survive and pass their genes on. So a lot will die, and the survivors gradually repopulate the world with more resilient offspring.
You know how people talk about how natural selection and environmental pressures are drivers of evolution? Well the climate changing is a pretty big pressure, and the non-adapted species dying off is a crucial part of that equation. The ones *that are left* will be the ones who are more adapted to handle the new environment, and them and their offspring will continue to pass down those traits.
You don’t get rapid evolution due to environmental pressures *without* also the dying off of the rest of the unadapted population. The thing that’s confusing you is literally the answer. It is happening, you’re just seeing the start of the process.
They will evolutionarily adapt faster than humans.
That’s still too slow for the multiple rapid changes we’re causing to their environment. It took the peppered moth about 50 years to fully adapt to the soot from industrialisation ruining their camoflage. The pressure we’re applying to insect populations is stronger and more multifaceted, making it harder to adapt.
Most human adaptation isn’t evolutionary but technological. We can live in places that are too cold or too hot because we have heaters and air conditioning, not because our bodies are capable of surviving those environments. We can survive in places with no easily accessible food because we can move it around in trucks, not because we adapted to eat the food that is avaliable.
It is quite likely that within this generation, climate change will cause populated areas of the world to become uninhabitable for significant parts of the year without relying on air conditioning, as sweating simply won’t be enough.
“Changes in the environment” includes poisons specifically engineered to kill bugs. Not just kill the bugs, but sometimes to kill them in such a way that targets their fundamental structure; the bugs would have to have totally different physiology, which means a fundamental DNA change.
Then we also attack their trophic environment, killing their food sources.
Then we attack their nesting grounds.
Part of evolution is that unsuccessful adaptations don’t make it to the next generation. It’s *very* hard to adapt to humans trying to kill you.
Other comments are right, but when bugs evolve to adapt to their environment, plenty of species will go extinct in the process bc they didn’t adapt. We also shouldn’t expect bugs to be able to adapt in a short 20-50 year span because a lot of it happens over thousands of years
environmental changes like pollution and global warming are happening instantly compared to the speed of the evolution of any animal bigger than a bacteria. No time to evolve to survive it yet.
You have to understand that the idea of bugs being eliminated is part of evolution. Not all species survive.
Some bugs also reproduce asexually so the genome is rather small (the gene pool is a puddle) so if something in the environment would lil one bug it’ll probably kill every other one with the same genes. Humans genome is different person to person because our genes come from two places, mum and dad. More diversity means more adaptability
Latest Answers