New speculative biology book about future insects

One main playing field of speculative biology concerns life somewhere else than Earth, such as my Furaha project. Another describes how life on Earth might have evolved if some event in the past had taken a different turn, such as Dougal Dixon’s book The New Dinosaurs, and the third, the subject of this post, deals with life on Earth in the future.

Well-known examples are Dixon’s After Man and the French book Demain, les animaux du futur (see posts A, B, C, D and E). While these projects discuss various animal clades, one group of animals receives less attention than it deserves, based on ecological clout, numbers of species and of individuals: insects!
  
That changed with a new speculative biology book about future insects. Before you run to the nearest bookshop, you should realise that it is in French. At the time of writing the authors do not yet know whether there will be versions in other languages. The book is called Les insectes du futur, a title that should be understandable without knowing French. The subtitle is Petite entomologie post-effondrement, which means ‘small entomology after the collapse’. The book was published last September by Belin in France. The first author is Lucas Etienne, a researcher who designed the arthropods and made the illustrations. You may already know the second author, Jean-Sébastien Steyer, as he was one of the two authors of Demain, les animaux du futur ; he is a palaeontologist (see his book Earth before the dinosaurs) and has published various books popularising science. 

The book counts 163 pages and describes a large variety of insects and other arthropods, as told by two human researchers who make their way from Paris to Monaco in the year 2499. The protagonists make this journey after leaving the underground collection rooms of the Muséum d’Histoire naturelle where they sat out a nuclear war. They encounter many species of arthropods that are as new to them as they are to the reader. The book is divided into chapters that describe ecosystems and various biological principles, such as camouflage, symbiosis, parasitism, flight and adaptations to aquatic life. Let’s have a look at a few organisms.

Click to enlarge; © Belin Éditeur/Humensis, 2025

Nepa dendrobates
This animal may look like a tropical frog, but it is in fact an insect of the clade Hemiptera. The bright dazzling colours of the frog it mimics are a warning to would-be predators that these frogs are poisonous. The insect mimics the frog in colour and shape, so predators should mistake the tasty insect for a poisonous frog and stay clear. This is a nice example of Batesian mimicry, something than can be described as a sheep in wolf’s clothing. I wondered what happens if some predator that never eats frogs comes across such an insect. That predator would not be warned off by the colours because it never eats frogs, poisonous or otherwise. It would still not eat the insect as it wouldn’t recognise the insect as an insect, but as something inedible. Does that turn the effect into simple camouflage rather then Batesian mimicry? That sounds like a nice subject for a biology examination.

Click to enlarge; © Belin Éditeur/Humensis, 2025

Aquatic ants
Quite a few insects adapted to a life underwater, but never ants, or so I thought. I was wrong: there is an ant that dives into the fluid of pitcher plants to steal animals that fell in, and there is a mangrove species that allows its nest to be inundated by the tide. Etienne and Steyer developed their own aquatic ants. They developed gills, have grown considerably larger than any terrestrial ant and have become good swimmers. These ants are still colonial and still build their own housing, which in this case resulting in underwater ant cities. These marine ants developed symbiosis with corals, which is a very interesting idea, so altogether they paint a very intriguing picture.

Click to enlarge; © Belin Éditeur/Humensis, 2025

Abyssal wasp
This wasp descendant can grow to an astonishing length of 60 centimetres. It is bioluminescent thanks to symbiosis with luminescent bacteria. Unfortunately, the book provides little detail how it lives, although it is clear that it has lost its sting.

The story takes place in the year 2499, almost 500 years from now. That may be long enough for mankind to further change the climate and to damage or destroy many ecosystems, bringing about an overall collapse. But how much biological evolution can take place in that time? In other words, what is the maximum speed of evolution? That is probably complex. Factors that must play a role are how large the pressure to change is, such as due to a quickly changing environment and mixing species that were previously separated. The amount of genetic variability and the mutation rate would also be important modifiers of change. The morphological changes in the insect book are so large in such a short time that evolution here has jumped, something known as ‘saltation’.

One theory of saltational evolution by Goldschmidt described ‘hopeful monsters’ that came about through very large mutations, large enough to explain the advent of new species. This concept of saltational evolution was never wholly discarded and new papers keep on appearing on the subject. I do not know enough about it and cannot therefore afford a strong opinion on the matter. Readers of this blog will know about ‘punctuated equilibrium’, a theory stating that species do not change for a long time but may then suddenly undergo a major change. At present, there is evidence for both long periods of stasis as well as for evolutionary jumps. In short, the speed of evolution can vary. 

But the future insect book still forces a closer look at that speed. The fossil record does not exactly have a nice temporal resolution, with a complete fossil every hundred generations or so.

 

Click to enlarge; source: wikipedia

This Wikipedia graph neatly explains that gradual change over 10,000 years will show up as a qualitative jump if you only sample the record once every 10,000 years. But the graph is quite hypothetical. Very well, let’s hypothesise a bit ourselves. Making an insect look like a frog must involve changes to a great many genes. It seems extremely unlikely for all genes involved to mutate in the correct direction at the same time (but if this does happen, you might get an evolutionary jump). It seems more likely that weeding out any variant that reduces ‘frogginess’ requires untold encounters between predators, the insect and the frog. How many generations would that take? Likewise, adapting insects to water is likely to go through successive stages, perhaps starting with short dips to get food. From there, you can expect changes allowing the animal to last longer under water. I would not be surprised that breeding under water would be one of the last changes to take place. Again, it seems unlikely that all features would change in the correct direction at the same time.          
  
I understand the style figure of using human guides to show these new animals. The alternative would have been to move forward a few million years and to depict the animals as they are, without human interest. Would that have been better? That depends on what you want from such a book. The authors must have had great fun using their new arthropods to illustrate various biological principles such as Batesian mimicry. They did not in fact use the term Batesian mimicry; instead, they chose to teach by example, making their book highly accessible. That is an advantage and does not harm the fun. Come to think of it, showing how biology works is, for me, the essence of why speculative biology is fun.

More future evolution in Japan

Sometimes I like to revisit sites to see whether there is anything new. In this post I will show a few interesting species that came up in this way. The site in question was visited in 2010, and shows the work of the Japanese author and illustrator Satoshi Kawasaki. He specialises in palaeontological illustrations but does not shy away from extending the time line of his work well into the future, up to 200 million years from now, in fact. In palaeontological papers and books you sometimes read 'mya' as an abbreviation for 'million years ago'. As the world of speculative biology is less hampered by ugly facts, perhaps it could profit from having a similar term for 'million years from now': myfn, or perhaps 'million years on': myo.

Click to enlarge; Copyright Satoshi Kawasaki

As I wrote before, Mr. Kawasaki has the sense of humour that allows him not to take his creatures equally seriously, something I like very much (I find mere monsters boring). Some of the animals on the pages showing life 100 and 200 myo are apparently drawn by other artists than himself, so het lets others play along, another nice trait. I would have like to exchange emails, but previous attempts to contact him failed. Let's have a look at some of the creatures.

Click to enlarge; Copyright Satoshi Kawasaki

In Google's translation this one is called 'Nereusu'. By omitting some of the Japanese characters I found out that Nereusu is simply a transliteration of the Japanese characters, so I could not translate it.  I therefore suppose the name refers to Nereus, the mythical being from classical Greece Nereus, who was after all as sort of sea god. Somewhat ironically, there is of course another Nereus in speculative biology...

Anyway, the animal is obviously a large marine predatory bird descendant (probably descended from penguin stock). Students of speculative biology will note that such creatures are very abundant in fictional future seas, as they apparently tend to evolve in the minds of many creators. I do not really mind if such a concept is not completely original; after all, all of science fiction is full of common ideas. While I applaud originality, there is also pleasure in seeing a job well done. Mr. Kawasaki is a very adroit illustrator, and this is an excellent 'future orca-like penguin-descendant marine predatory beast'.

Click to enlarge; Copyright Satoshi Kawasaki

Have a look at this drawing, and you will probably guess what it is about without having to read the text. It can only be a social crab modelled on the pattern of ants, bees and similar colony dwellers. There is one giant 'mother' laying lots of eggs, here very neatly held in a redeveloped abdomen. The ones in the front must be soldiers, and the little ones in the middle must be workers. I cannot see whether or not they have pincers, but assume they do; otherwise, what will workers work with?

Click to enlarge; Copyright Satoshi Kawasaki

Sometimes Mr Kawasaki works on a theme; in my previous post I showed terrestrial cephalopods (I know, I know...), and this time I will focus on a group of his animals that do not seem to enjoy the common attention of future evolutionists: starfish! There is only one on the 100 myo page, shown above. It is not drawn by Kawasaki but by someone else. It may also be the most original of all the future Asteroidea ('starfish'). You cannot beat Google Translate for creating a sense of wonder, particularly where one was not intended: "One of the arm portion becomes large, the remaining portion forms a head lump pseudo part." I guess we would have guessed that anyway: four of the five original arms have shrunken and are now appendages around what is now a proper head. As a result, the animal is now bilaterally symmetrical. I do not quite see how evolution would set off in this particular direction, but like the result. I do not think I have seen anyone else designing this before, either.

Click to enlarge; Copyright Satoshi Kawasaki

The world of 200 myo has more future Asteroidea.The one above is a pseudoplant, a Parasasuteru. It lives in Australian swamps and -I think!- envelops animals moving in its shade, only to digest them at leisure.

Click to enlarge; Copyright Satoshi Kawasaki

And finally, one I rather like: the 'Di pedal stell' ; could that be a 'bipedal star', I wonder? If you count the number of limbs, you will find six rather then five, but the texts suggests that one of the original arms has split to form two legs: "Part of the two-that looks like a foot is what arm once was transformed." Probably. Have a look at Mr Kawaski's site for other interesting creatures, or, if you like palaeontological illustrations -who doesn't?- visit his pages of the past world.


And now something somewhat different
I have been looking for other projects of speculative biology, but have not found any new ones. I searched in various languages, albeit my skills are limited to Germanic and Romance ones. If readers know of projects that deserve attention, let me know, particularly ones I am likely to miss, such as ones in Slavic or non-European languages.

Finally, I have begun considering ending this blog. It is in its sixth year and I feel that some of the freshness has gone. The number of readers has not diminished, by the way: it is stable and in fact grows slowly. I find it a bit more difficult to come up with new subjects, and after more than five years the blog has perhaps become a fixture in the little world of speculative biology, not something that attracts much attention. Perhaps blogs are a bit like television series; at some point you stop caring about the characters, and that may be the time to consider a final episode. 

Predatory penguin's evolution in Brussels' future evolution back on course.

Regular readers may have noted a predilection for incomprehensible titles, or let's say titles that need a lot of knowledge to be comprehensible. This one fits that bill, I think. The previous post dealt with models of future animals in the Brussels museum of natural history. One thing that struck me was that the model of a Neopygoscelis, a penguin descendant, differed quite a bit from the earlier published design. The feet had expanded at the cost of the flippers, an evolution that I would not have expected. The designers, Marc Boulay and Jean-Sébastien Steyer, explained that the actual models had been produced without much control by themselves, explaining the changes. Marc and Sébastien are working on a book about future evolution that will appear in 2014, as told here previously (you can read starting here or here).

My discussion of the odd 'evolution' of the Neopygoscelis model persuaded them to send me two photographs of Neopygoscelis as it will appear in the book, meaning 'Furahan Biology and Allied Matters' gets another exclusive preview of that work.

Click to enlarge

The photograph above shows clearly that the model maker had evolved the enormous hind legs of the museum model quite separately from the designers' ideas. The ratio of flipper to feet size clearly shows that the flippers are still the primary propulsion method of this animal. The feet with their long nails do look formidable though, but not as a propulsion organ. The eyes are large, so the animal does not seem that large to me; the size of 4 m as stated for tye museum model seems too large for this particular animal. Note that the nails differ in size between the two animals, so I guess that we are looking at sexual dimorphism here, with one a male and one a female. I do not know which one is which, though: Marc and Sébastien sent me the photographs, but no accompanying text. That is probably wise: always leave the reader wishing for more...

Click to enlarge

The image above shows a pair of Neopygoscelis in their habitat in photorealistic mode. A very nice addition. So there are now three versions of Neopygoscelis: the digital illustration  originally shown in the magazine, the grey model in the museum that we should probably regard as a largely 'unauthorised' version, and the one in this post, that will make it into the book. That is, unless the designers feel a last-minute need to change something before the book goes to press.

I have in the past reworked oil paintings, sometimes more than once, but doing so was a big job: it involved scraping off layers of paint before adding new ones, so the process was quite destructive. Working digitally means you can do the same thing without losing anything. Most older Furaha animals were designed for visual attraction than a coherent body plan, but I am remedying that slowly, whole keeping visual appeal intact -in fact I try to improve it-. There is always a temptation to go back and push and pull at a design some more. Obviously, the same temptation works for the designers of 'Demain: les animaux du futur', but there is one big difference: there is a publisher, so there is a deadline, and so at some point the image is finished and you cannot go back any more; what a luxury.

I can't wait for the book. When it appears I will write about it here, and perhaps earlier than that as well...  

Back to future evolution in Brussels

In 2009 I wrote about a paper in a Belgian magazine showing models of future animals in the Brussels Museum of Natural Sciences. The animals later also appeared in Darren Naish' Tetrapod Zoology blog. For me, discovering the Brussels animals had as an unforeseen effect that I got to know the makers of the models, for whom designing future animals proved to be more than a single occurrence. Marc Boulay and Jean-Sébastien Steyer have been working on a book on future evolution at least since 1999. The book will be published by Belin in 2014 (in French). There are glimpses of animals as yet unseen by others on Marc's site, by the way.

Back to the future, or back to Brussels, whatever the case may be. I have now finally visited the museum; it is quite good as Natural History museums go, and specialises in dinosaurs. There is an impressive display of nine mounted specimens of Iguanodon bernissartensis, and that alone should be worth the visit. Belgium is famous for its rich supply of Iguanodons, found around 1878 in a coal mine.

Click to enlarge

As you can see, the Iguanodons are standing upright in the tripod position favoured at the time when the skeletons were mounted in 1883, not with their vertebral columns and tails horizontally as would be the case today. This is not because the museum is not up to date; it is  as far as I can tell, so I suppose they are just wary of the cost of remounting various very large dinosaur skeletons. Or perhaps there is a risk of harming the priceless skeletons, or perhaps there is an historical continuity in keeping the Iguanodons mounted according to yesterday's ideas.

The museum has a gallery of evolution, illustrating some major events and their consequences in evolution, such as the developments of eyes, of jaws, of armour and fins. There is a nice video illustrating evolutionary branching, ending for once not with man on top but with many species at the same point in time; if any species is singled out, that is -jokingly- a penguin! At the very end of that gallery there is a small group of models, and those are the animals of the future. That part of the exhibition is rather small and has not got much in the way of explanation. There is a video showing continental drift for the next 50 years, but that is about it. There are no plaques stating what is special about these animals. In fact, I saw a group of children walk by, probably ignorant of the fact that there were fundamental differences between these displays and the multitude of stuffed animals in the museum. There was a sign saying that some items had been removed from the display because of changes being made to the room's climate system; as far as I can tell a snake and a gliding mammal (Trichopteryx dixoni -surely I do not need to explain who that animal is named after-) were missing. Perhaps this also explains the lack of explanations. In this post I will add some explanations, obtained in part from the interview with Jean-Sébastien Steyer in 2009, and to a larger extent directly from his and Marc's comments on a first draft of this post.

Click to enlarge

Corticochaeris gouldi
This is a descendant of the capybara, today's largest rodent. It has become larger, with a disproportionate growth in its teeth, head and front quarters. The magazine text states it is a forest dweller, and its colours seem quite appropriate for that, mimicking spots of light falling through a leaf cover.

I had not seen the species' part of the various names before, as these are only mentioned on small plaques in the museum. The species' names reveal something about the designer's taste in biology and illustration, so they deserve mention. The name 'gouldi' is an homage to the late Stephen Jay Gould. He is considered one of the best writers popularising science of the last century, so I am glad I the designers must have felt similarly.

Click to enlarge

Propellonectes russelli
This is a one meter long descendant of the Northern Giant Petrel, Macronectes halli. As you can see it has evolved into a large flightless swimming bird, propelling itself with its feet by way of flaps on the toes that no doubt fold back with the feet are pulled forwards and that spread out when the feet move back. 

'Russelli' denotes Dale Russell, the Canadian palaeontologist who proposed that dinosaurs might have evolved into an intelligent dinosauroid.

Click to enlarge

Neopygoscelis dentatus
This is a toothed descendant of the penguin species Pygoscelis papua, so its formal name means 'toothed new brush-tailed penguin'. The teeth are apparently not just serrations of the edge of the beak, but proper teeth: the magazine interview states that birds still have the genes for teeth, and that it is not impossible for these genes to regain their expression. Neopygoscelis is an impressive four meters long. Its feet have evolved into large paddles and its wings/flippers have decreased in size, it would seem. That is odd: current penguins have very efficient flippers, so I wonder whether their continued evolution would promote feet at the cost of flippers. The animal appears not to need to climb ashore any more, which would certainly free the feet from their current restrictions as walking appendages. That would make them susceptible to evolution in another direction, but a drive towards them serving as propulsion aids has to start with a propulsion advantage right now, not a future advantage its descendants may gain from enlarged feet. Because of that, I would expect the flippers to stay in place as near-perfect propulsion limbs, and the feet would, well, what would the feet do? Turn into rudders? Disappear altogether? Turn into sexual aids? (In zoology that can always happen...)

Click to enlarge

In the magazine, Neopygoscelis was shown in a penguin-like black-and-white coat (top), but in the museum it is an overall grey colour (bottom). With the magazine in the one hand and my photographs of the museum version in the other, it became clear that the two do not represent the same model at all! Jean-Sebastièn and Marc explained that the process of having the digital designs converted into an actual model had to be done in a hurry to get the models ready for the opening of the exhibition. The result of this was that there was unfortunately not enough opportunity for interaction with the model maker, so the museum models ended up rather different from the original designs. I suppose that that explains the 'feet vs. flipper' exchange in size, which probably reflects a choice of the local model maker. 

Click to enlarge

Helicopodus buriani
For this species and the next, there is nothing in the paper and no explanation in the museum. The model confused me a lot: I could see that it has a segmented body and jointed exoskeletal legs, so it can only be an arthropod. Still, its head looked very unfamiliar, and its eyes certainly look like camera eyes, although it is hard to be certain. Again, it appears that the design suffered from a lack of time for cooperation between the designers and the sculptor. Luckily, I had help from the creators of this odd animal: what we have here is a centipede with a flattened body allowing it to glide through the air. Now that is a neat invention; of course, animals from very diverse groups developed gliding forms, including mammals, lizards, squid and insects, so why not centipedes?

It really is a pity that the museum provides so little information, not even stating that the animal is a glider! (This is a pet peeve of mine: why do museums usually only provide meagre information at infant level? With modern media it should be possible to provide information on many levels, so visitors should be able to choose the level and extent of information they want!)      

'Buriani' refers to Zdenek Burian, whom I consider to be one of the world's best painters ever of prehistoric life forms (and I am not alone in this).

Click to enlarge

Rhombosepia gregaris
The shape and name help here: the 'communal rhomboid-shaped squid'. These are apparently  descendants of cuttlefish swimming head first instead of backwards. Drawing attention to 'swimming head first' may seem strange as it seems the normal direction; true, but squid generally swim with their tentacles trailing them, meaning that anatomically they swim backwards. In fact, many can swim either way. Swimming with the tentacles pointing the way means the tentacles have to be pressed together to form a smooth surface so as not to impede movement. As far as I remember, the thing about Rhombosepia was that its tentacles had fused. I did not check that with its inventors, but relearned that from people commenting on my own blog, who had followed links towards more information on this variant of future evolution. When I checked now, many of those links did not work any more. Those posts were only a few years old, and yet the information has been lost already. With such a quick loss of information in mind, perhaps the guardians of the Brussels museum did well in keeping their Iguanodons in their old-fashioned tripod stance. Concepts of Iguanodon stance are no older than about 125 years, but the skeletons have been underground for more than 500,000 times that length of time.

Having said that, I still find it very difficult to wait for about ONE more year for the book showing us these future animals...

Five years on

On April 22, 2008 I started writing this blog without any clear thoughts on the direction it should take or how successful it should be.  I still do not know how successful it actually is, as the niche this blog occupies is so specialised. Even though I cannot compare the blog easily to other blogs, I can show you some results of the last five years.

A few days ago the count stood at 172 posts with over 225,000 page views, 1042 comments and 131 followers. This results in a mean number of page views per post of 1303. Most views last less than 15 seconds, so most viewers probably people leave the page after a quick glance, which is to be expected. Every now and again someone spends 45 or 90 minutes, though, and old posts keep on being read. I will show a number of lists to illustrate how viewers behave.

First, here are the 10 most-visited posts preceded by the number of page views:    

1. 6565 Swimming in Sand 1: the Sandworms of Dune /  Feb 2011
2. 3113 Warren Fahy's "Fragment" / Aug 2010   
3. 2814 A century of thoats / May 2012
4. 2544 Avatar's 'Walking with hexapods' or 'Don't walk this way' / Feb 2010
5. 2529 A future book on future evolution from France / Nov 2011
6. 1451 "A Venusian Bestiary", in Which Greg Broadmore Ill... / Apr 2011
7. 1408 Future evolution in Brussels / Feb 2009
8. 1353 How many legs are best for megamonsters?  / May 2011
9. 1345 Ballooning animals and Newtonian fitness / Jul 2011
10. 1312 How much more Speculative Biology is there? / Mar 2009

The list suggests that a post may become popular for three reasons: in some cases a large spike in views was generated when a large newspaper drew attention to my blog (Der Standard from Austria). Referring to popular films (Avatar), books (Fragment) or well-known names (Greg Broadmore) seems to help, and finally key words such as 'future evolution' and 'speculative biology' draw attention. Still, there are two 'biomechanical' posts with some hard science in the list. When I started doing those I wondered whether people would skip them. Apparently not; good!

Here is a list of the most often used search terms resulting in people being referred to my blog:

1. 1122 speculative biology
2. 612 future evolution
3. 566 dougal dixon greenworld
4. 262 furahan biology
5. 210 cladogram
6. 204 henders island
7. 200 planet furaha
8. 197 bobby chiu
9. 190 creature journal
10. 190 furahan

There is a definite interest for Dougal Dixon's Greenworld, so I hope it will see an English version in addition to the existing Japanese one. I was much surprised by 'cladogram'. When I use 'Google images' to find out how that word leads to my blog, a familiar cladogram appeared on the second row. Someone has copied Evan Black's Nereus cladogram from my post here to his own blog (here), with a clearly stated reference to my blog, so that is all right. I can only hope that that roundabout route also led people to Evan's own Nereus page. 

There was also some bad news: my posts were copied verbatim on someone else's blog. I am at present busy with having these posts deleted through Google, citing a breach of copyright. That seems to be working well. I will not provide links to these blogs; these people are stealing page views from my blog, so I certainly will not direct attention to them. Away with parasites!

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

That's enough about the blog. I have not done much with the main Furaha site, as I spent the little time I had on new digital paintings. The image above shows a study for one. I sculpted the head of an 'Ochreback Thresher' (Ira tarda) in Sculptris as a help with perspective. Its nasal horn can be used to ward off predators, but is also used in intraspecies conflicts. The horn fits under the opponent's parietal shield bosses, meaning the combatants obtain a lock on one another in which the one with the most stamina wins. The ridges on the side of the face are meant to protect the eyes (four, not well visible) from damage, but loss of one eye in dominant individuals is not uncommon. The painting will not show such a combat, by the way.

I will end with some good news and a question. I produced a 20-page sampler of The Book and have finally started sending it to publishers! I hope one will be interested, but do not dare expect much. After all, the book is as specialised as the blog, so the potential readership might be small. In my covering letter I wrote that it should appeal to people who like science fiction art and biology. If you have made it to the end of this post, you must be one of the interested people. Is that a good description of the possible readership? Is there a better one?  

Epilogue, May 2, 2013

After the post was published I noticed a surge in page views. The source was easily identified: the Austrian newspaper 'Der Standard' had published an article about the post above, in which I had drawn attention to the fact that their earlier messages had resulted in clear spikes in the number of page views concerning the posts they had drawn attention to. Confused? You may be after this epilogue, because their article not only resulted in a spike in views of the post 'Five years on' (the one you are reading now), but also in the posts already in the top ten. The top ten for the last week was:

1. 267  Swimming in Sand....
2. 239  Five years on
3. 162  A Venusian bestiary...
4. 131  Avatar, or how...
5. 91    A century of thoats    

See the list above for the links.  To close the circle of references, you may visit the article at the site of 'Der Standard'. It is entitled 'What fascinates people about fictional life forms' (but in German, obviously). You will find it here.