My daughter, MilliCal, presented me with a drawing she did. It shows a large blue nine-legged bug with two smaller six-legged bugs following it, apparently.
“It’s a bombadier beetle,” she proudly told me. I’d told her about bombadier beetles, but it had been quite a while ago. Ages, I thought. She’d remembered about it all this time.( http://tolweb.org/tree?group=Brachinini&contgroup=Brachinitae ) “It’s attacking the ants that are trying to eat it.”
Sure enough, when I looked close I could see something squirting out of the back. One of the ants had a frown on its face. The other one was lying on its back, its tongue hanging out of its mouth. (Ants have tongues?)
“Whhat’s this?” I asked. Written across the top was what looked like: PUqooq
“That says PU. Is that how you spell PU?” MilliCal is five. I was impressed.
“Yes. What’s the rest?”
“That spells POOP.”
Well, the P’s were backwards, and there was no space between the PU and the POOP, but it was there, alright, and properly spelled. I told her that Bombadier Beetles didn’t poop on their enemies, and more than skunks did. She said she knew that.
So now I’m sitting here with her Bombadier Beetle posted on my office wall. It has a sort of Neutral Face looking out at you (a Happy Face without the smile, but with a nose), and no antennae, unlike the stricken ants. “This is what I have to do to survive,” it seems to say. “Ignore my extra legs.” (I don’t think ants attack bombadier beetles, but we’ll ignore that in favor of a dramatic scene.)
I’m impressed. MilliCal has obvious inherited my Artistic Perversity gene – the one that as a kid drove me, when asked to draw a tree, to draw a very exact Baobab.
(Incidentally, when I looked on the Internet for pix of a bombadier beetle, I was amazed at how many sites there were that sem to call the BB evidence of Intelligent Design. Here’s an example: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/bombardier.html )