It is said that the famous British biologist J. B. S. Haldane, back in the days when he was a firm believer in Marxism (that is to say, before the Lysenko scandal undermined many of his certainties), replied to a churchman who asked to know his conception of God: “He is inordinately fond of beetles.” I would guess that Haldane, when he used the generic term “beetles,” was referring to coleoptera, and in this case we can certainly agree with him: for reasons that we don’t really understand, this “model” alone, albeit within the remarkably multiform class of insects, numbers at least 350,000 officially catalogued species, and new species are being discovered every day. Since there are many environments and parts of the world that have not yet been explored by specialists, it is estimated that there are currently one and a half million species of coleoptera. Now, we mammals, so proud of our role as the crown of creation, number no more than 5000 species; it is unlikely that many more than a few dozen new species will be discovered, while many of the existing ones are rapidly reaching extinction.
And yet the coleoptera’s invention doesn’t seem so innovative after all: it consists “only” of changing the purpose of the forward pair of wings. They are no longer wings but “elytra”: they are hardened and thickened, and their only function is to protect the rear wings, which are membranous and delicate. If you think of the meticulous ceremony with which a ladybug or a May bug prepares for flight, and you compare it with the instantaneous and directional takeoff of the fly, you will easily see that for most coleoptera flight is not a way of escaping attack but, rather, a method of transport that the insect resorts to only for long journeys: a bit like one of us who, when taking a plane, puts up with the purchase of the ticket, the process of check-in, and the lengthy wait in the airport. A ladybug opens its elytra, fiddles around to untangle its wings, finally spreads them, lifts the elytra obliquely, and begins its flight, neither agile nor fast. We must conclude, it seems, that there is a high price to be paid for solid armor.
But the armor of the coleoptera is an admirable structure: to be admired, unfortunately, only in the vitrines of zoological museums. It is a masterpiece of natural engineering, reminiscent of the suits of armor, made entirely of iron, worn by medieval warriors. There are no chinks: head, neck, thorax, and abdomen, although they are not welded together, form a stout block that is virtually invulnerable, the fragile antennae can be retracted into channels, and even the leg joints are protected by jutting segments reminiscent of the greaves in the Iliad. The resemblance between a beetle pushing its way through the grass, slow and powerful, and a tank is so great that a metaphor comes immediately to mind, working in both directions: the insect is a tiny panzer tank, the panzer tank is an enormous insect. And the beetle’s back is heraldic: convex or flat, opaque or glistening, it is an aristocratic coat of arms, though its appearance has no symbolic relationship with its owner’s “calling”—that is, the way it eludes its predators, reproduces, and feeds.
It is here that the Almighty’s “fondness” for beetles unleashes its full imagination. There is no organic material on Earth, living or dead or decomposed, that hasn’t found a fan among the coleoptera. Many beetles are omnivorous, others feed only at the expense of a single plant or animal species. There are beetles that eat only snails and have transformed themselves into an ideal tool for that purpose: they have become living syringes, with a voluminous abdomen but a head and thorax that are elongated and penetrating in shape. They insert themselves into the soft body of their victim, inject digestive fluids into it, wait for the tissues to break down, and then suck them out.
The beautiful cetoniae (so beloved of Gozzano: “Disperate cetonie capovolte”—“Desperate upside-down cetoniae”—one of the loveliest lines of poetry ever composed in Italian) feed only on roses, while the no less beautiful sacred beetles live exclusively on cattle dung: the male beetle shapes the dung into a ball, seizes it between his hind tarsi as if between two hinges, then moves off in reverse, pushing it and rolling it until he finds suitable soil in which to bury it: then the female enters the scene and lays a single egg in it. The larva will feed on this material (no longer ignoble) that the foresightful couple has assembled with such great effort, and, after the larva molts, a new beetle will emerge from the tomb: indeed, according to certain ancient observers, the same insect as before, risen from death like the Phoenix.
Other beetles live in sluggish or stagnant water. They are magnificent swimmers: some, for unknown reasons, swim in tight circles or complicated spirals, while others move in straight lines in pursuit of invisible prey. None of them have lost the ability to fly, though, because they are frequently forced to abandon a pond that has dried up and search for another body of still water, maybe a considerable distance away. Once, driving at night on a moonlit highway, I heard the windows and roof of my car being peppered as if by hail: it was a swarm of diving beetles, shiny, dark brown edged with orange, each half the size of a walnut; they had mistaken the asphalt of the highway for a river and were unsuccessfully trying to set down on the water. These beetles, for hydrodynamic reasons, have attained a compactness and simplicity of shape I believe is unique in the animal kingdom: seen from above, they are perfect ellipses, from which only the legs protrude, transformed into oars.
When it comes to escaping dangers and predators, these insects “think of everything.” Some exotic species, no bigger than a fava bean, are endowed with unbelievable muscular strength. Grasp one in your hand and it will force its way out between your fingers; if swallowed by a toad (a mistake! though a toad will swallow any small object it sees moving horizontally), it will not follow the tactics of Jonah swallowed by the whale or Pinocchio and Geppetto in the belly of the Terrible Dogfish, but, with the strength of its forelegs, meant for burrowing, will simply dig an exit through the body of the predator.
Other singular escapes are those of the Elateridae, or click beetles, handsome local beetles with elongated bodies. If picked up, or disturbed in any other way, they will fold up legs and antennae and play dead; but after a minute or two you’ll hear a sudden click, and the insect will shoot into the air. This brief jump, meant to disorient an attacker, does not rely on the legs: the click beetle has come up with a novel system of tension and release. In the position in which it plays dead, thorax and abdomen are out of alignment, forming a slight angle: they suddenly straighten when a sort of latch is released, and the click beetle is gone.
The cool light of the firefly (it, too, is a beetle) is not designed for defense; instead it serves to facilitate mating. This, likewise, is an invention unparalleled among animals that live out of water; but there are super-fireflies of other species, whose females imitate the steady light of the female firefly, thus attracting male fireflies and gobbling them up as soon as they set down next to them.
These behaviors trigger a complicated array of impressions: astonishment, curiosity, admiration, horror, hilarity. But it seems to me that what prevails over all is a sensation of strangeness: these little flying fortresses, these small but prodigious machines whose instincts were programmed a hundred million years ago, have nothing in common with us, and they represent a totally different approach to the problem of survival. To some extent, or even just symbolically, we humans recognize ourselves in the social structures of ants and bees, in the industriousness of the spider, and in the dance of the butterfly. But there is really nothing linking us to beetles, not even parental care, since it is exceedingly rare for a mother beetle (and even rarer for a father beetle) to see its offspring before dying. They are other, aliens, monsters. Kafka knew what he was doing in his atrocious hallucination, where the traveling salesman Gregor Samsa, “waking one morning from uneasy dreams,” finds he has been changed into an enormous beetle, so inhuman that no member of his family can tolerate his presence.
Let it be said, then: these “others” have shown admirable abilities to adapt to all climates, they have colonized all the ecological niches, and they eat everything: some even punch their way through lead and tinfoil. They have developed armor that has an extraordinary resistance to shocks, compression, chemical agents, and radiation. Some of them dig burrows that extend meters deep into the ground. If there were to be a nuclear catastrophe, they would be the leading candidates to succeed us (not the dung beetles, though; they would lack raw materials to feed on).
Above all, their technology is ingenious but rudimentary and instinctive; from the day they take over the world, many millions of years will have to pass before a beetle particularly beloved of God completes his calculations and finds, written on a piece of paper in letters of fire, that energy is equal to mass multiplied by the speed of light squared. The new kings of the planet will live long and peacefully, doing no more than devouring and parasitizing one another on an artisanal scale.