Articles
Non-stick
Bugs
by
Brian Thomas
In South Africa, special “mirid bugs” make their homes
in sticky, living-flypaper plants, feeding on other insects that
get trapped in the plants’ leaf-secreted glue. How do they
avoid getting stuck themselves?
German researchers at the Max Planck Institute conducted a study
to find out, and the results from their investigations recently
appeared in The Journal of Experimental Biology.1 All insects have
a thin outer film coating, but the scientists found that the mirid
bugs have a coat of non-stick grease that counteracts the plant
glue and is 30 times thicker than that of a blowfly.2 Upon microscopic
inspection, tiny droplets of the plant glue easily ran off of the
mirid bug, but adhered to the blowfly.
Mirid bugs are integral to the cross-pollination of their flypaper
plants. These woody plants, named Roridula gorgoneus, have specially-designed
flowers that the mirid bug’s needle-shaped mouthpart activates.
“One species [of mirid bug] for each Roridula species, pierce
and feed from the anther.…The piercing causes the anthers
to spring up through 180°, dusting the insects with pollen.”3
How does such a symbiotic system develop wherein a plant relies
on one species of insect for cross-pollination, and that insect
in turn depends on the plant to provide food? Further, how did the
plant glue and the correct quality and quantity of the insect’s
“anti-glue” arise, both of which were necessary preconditions
for their interdependent living relationship? Such a specific balance
demonstrates a fully-formed design, rather than an imaginary proto-status
or transitional state.
Similar precisely-calibrated features characterize other plant and
animal relationships. Apparently, when God created these living
things to reproduce “after their own kinds,”4 he also
created them to reproduce in concerted harmony with specific but
unrelated other kinds.
References
1. Voigt, D. and S. Gorb. 2008. An insect trap as habitat: cohesion-failure
mechanism prevents adhesion of Pameridea roridulae bugs to the sticky
surface of the plant Roridula gorgonias. The Journal of Experimental
Biology. 211 (16): 2647-2657.
2. Phillips, K. 2008. How Nonstick Bugs Avoid Natural Flypaper.
The Journal of Experimental Biology. 211 (16): i. Posted on jeb.biologists.org
August 8, 2008, accessed August 14, 2008.
3. Kubitzki, K. 2004. The Families and Genera of Vascular Plants,
Vol. 6. New York: Springer-Verlag, 340.
4. Genesis 1:11-12, 21-25.
http://www.icr.org/article/4088/
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