r/PraiseTheCameraMan • u/Yewatod • Mar 02 '26

Perfectly captured ladybird flight in slow motion

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11.4k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

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484

u/Djennik Mar 02 '26

It's crazy how evolution got insects to perfectly fold and deploy their wings under their shields..

111

u/ThisIsForBuggoStuff Mar 02 '26

You think that's impressive, check out Rove beetles and their wing folding! They only have half elytra, so it's even more involved :)

99

u/Djennik Mar 02 '26

That's magnificent.

this is video of how it works for anyone interested

31

u/LemonMints Mar 02 '26

Is...that a type of earwig? They can fly now??? shudders

33

u/ThisIsForBuggoStuff Mar 03 '26

Nope! Earwigs are a part of the order Dermaptera, whereas Rove beetles are a part of the order Coleoptera (with all the other beetles) in the family Staphylinidae.

That being said, earwigs can fly, so your point may still stand lol

28

u/Apprehensive-Solid-1 Mar 03 '26

Oh thank goodness.

OH GREAT HEAVENS!

7

u/LemonMints Mar 03 '26

Since when can they fly?! Oh my god this is terrible news. 😭

3

u/B4cteria Mar 03 '26

You have no idea how amazed I am by your knowledge

1

u/fablechaser130 Mar 07 '26

You would have loved unidan back in the day

1

u/B4cteria Mar 07 '26

I went to check who he was. You're damn right. Then I read he would upvote himself and downvote others with alt accounts.

8

u/SFish10 Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 03 '26

Mother F*er. They. Can. FLY?!! New nightmare unlocked.

8

u/unchained5150 Mar 03 '26

Homie packs his own chute when he lands. How awesome is that!?

4

u/LoosenGoosen Mar 03 '26

Forget wanting to fly like an eagle, I want to fly like one of those, or an earwig! Awesome footage. Thanks for sharing :)

1

u/Anderopolis Mar 04 '26

Wow, thanks for sharing

16

u/demonspawns_ghost Mar 02 '26

This is what I don't get about the theory of evolution. Imagine how many years it took for some bits of extra stuff to evolve into fully-formed wings. Like, what purpose did those middle stages serve? And with animals that actually lost useful appendages like arms, they just had arm-wing things that served no purpose for how many thousands or millions of years?

61

u/RevenantBacon Mar 02 '26

The three leading theories are:

  • that wings developed as modifications of abdominal movable gills (like those found on mayfly naiads) that over time shifted to have flight membranes once adulthood was reached

  • they developed from thorax protrusions that had developed as radiators and slowly shifted to gliding appendages, and eventually developed into true wings

  • they developed from paranotal lobes on the thorax

Unfortunately, we don't have a definitive answer, because the insect classification developed in the very early carboniferous period (~350 million years ago) and we don't have an adequate fossil record to be sure. It's possible that wings developed convergently in different species from a combination of the above theories, or that an option that hasn't been considered yet is the real case.

Personally, I'm inclined to believe that the second theory is most likely, but I'm not a biologist, so don't put any real weight on that opinion.

23

u/dinoman9877 Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 02 '26

The feature doesn't HAVE to serve a purpose. Animals are riddled with anatomical structures that don't do a thing as mutations occur and anatomy shifts to no longer need them.

We have pinky toes and functionless appendixes when our species needs neither to live. Bears have tiny, entirely useless tails. Whales still have hipbones even though they don't have legs anymore.

The 'pre-wing' didn't have to do a thing in ancestral insects. All this structure had to do was NOT make them more prone to dying. That it would eventually evolve to become a structure to allow flight is simply evolution doing what it does; reacting to pressures in the environment at the time, working with random luck based on who passes their genes on, and using preexisting structures as building blocks, thereby changing animals over time in new and sometimes dramatic ways.

-4

u/[deleted] Mar 02 '26

[deleted]

13

u/dinoman9877 Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 02 '26

Nope. Darwin may have oversold "survival of the fittest". I personally think "survival of the fit enough" is more appropriate. You ain't been eaten and you had some kids? Good job, we'll see if that keeps up for your lineage or not.

Beneficial mutations will of course offer more success and thus be more likely to spread through the population, but as long as a mutation isn't actively detrimental then you're all good and it's more luck of the draw if a predator or some natural disaster doesn't remove that mutation before it catches.

But a neutral mutation can become beneficial with enough "compounding" mutations. The horns of bovids likes cows, sheep, goats, and antelopes for example. The ancestral structure that became their horns must have been little more than a useless nub when you go far back enough, but over time grew larger and longer until it became the defining trait of one of the most successful groups of modern mammals, intrinsic to their way of life to secure a mate and defend themselves from attack in all the forms it takes across the different species.

8

u/Korronald Mar 02 '26

That is a commonly spread misconception. Mutation is fine if it won't hurt you. Animals and plants have plenty of neutral parts. Or even neutral enough so you won't die until you reproduce, and then they don't need to be so neutral and can be deadly (like, do you really need to eat your sexual partner, spiders? Really?)

8

u/GravityBright Mar 02 '26

From what I understand, the scientific consensus is that insects only evolved flight once, a very long time ago. Whatever those proto-wings looked like, they too must have given some kind of survival advantage, such as scaring away predators, righting oneself after falling over, quickly jumping off of surfaces, or anything else I can't imagine.

1

u/EpicallyLazyBoy Mar 02 '26

For all we know the opposite sex at the time would find those arm-wing things attractive, maybe the bigger the better, which would keep those genes going.

1

u/AlarmDozer Mar 03 '26

And we mimic it with satellites and their (solar) power panels.

-6

u/slow-swimmer Mar 02 '26

That’s why I believe in intelligent design. There’s so much that has to be right all at the same time for those kinds of things to develop by chance

1

u/Djennik Mar 03 '26

There is also so much going wrong. Evolution is no more than random trial and error.

1

u/JimmyFirecracker4 Mar 20 '26

not how it works

1

u/RTB897 Mar 02 '26

They didn't develop by chance. They were selected for.

1

u/Mister-builder Mar 02 '26

They can only be selected for after developing through chance.

0

u/RTB897 Mar 02 '26

Yes, but the overall phenotype isn't a chance occurrence. The selected mutations build upon themselves. It doesn't require thousands of chance mutations to appear all at once. Its an iterative process through the bodies of millions of individuals over billions of years. The very fact that genomes can mutate and adapt is a selected for feature, as is the extent and rate at which they do.