LE appendages

If you are looking for strange forms and shapes, you have come to the right address. Insects are famously eccentric when it comes to body structure. This article will look at one particular sub-topic: ‘Long things that stick out’.

Starting at the front end, the prima donna in this performance has to be the hose-nose cycad weevil (also featured in the title image), whose snout is longer than her entire body! She uses this unbelievably long ‘rostrum’, which bears tiny mandibles on the very tip, to chew deep into cycad seeds, where she lays her eggs. This gives new meaning to the Afrikaans saying, ‘sy eet met lang tande’.

Read the whole article in Leopard’s Echo, a bi-annual online magazine of Kloof Conservancy.