You really won’t ever appreciate how cool insect wings are until you’ve seen all this footage.
The ones with wing covers that completely open up are beetles, by the way, but the ones LIKE beetles whose protective cover remains in place are bugs. Bug is supposed to be a special term for just one insect group!
Mid-way through is an earwig’s wings, which is neither a beetle nor a bug, but does have very beetle-like wing cases.
with some bugs it really does feel less like the larval stage is the ‘baby’ stage and more like its the ‘normal’ stage and the bug’s final form is just their extra special final form they use to fuck
I was actually distraught as a child when I found out that an antlion was “just” a “larva” to something else but later I learned that they spend two to three entire years that way and the adult only lives for a couple of months.
Butterflies are also shorter lived than caterpillars; we can think of them more as the caterpillar dispersal system.
We also always hear about how “mayflies only live a few days” but that ignores the fact that they, too, spend years as aquatic nymphs.
same for dobsonflies, which live for maybe a week as adults, but for years as enormous highly predatory aquatic larvae called hellgrammites.
except with dobsonflies, all forms feel a bit extra. If they were pokemon they would be some late generation multi-form legendary
Pretty, graceful adult dragonflies live only for like seven months, but beforehand they spend five years as this
aquatic predatory incarnation of bullshit, which hunts other aquatic insects and even small fish with its big fucking xenomorph mouthparts.
not to make a long thread longer but i think the ultimate manifestation of powered up final fuck form is 17 year periodical cicadas
like they arent just hibernating or something, they spend the length of a human adolescence as these nymphs living underground and feeding on fluids from roots. and after 17 years their population group emerges in eerie synchronization and they all molt into their adult stage, which only survives for a few weeks . like 99.5% of their life is spent in their “baby” stage and the final .05% of it is a powered up flight capable adult form that exists solely to scream and fuck
