#arthropods are THE most diverse group of animals on earth by a LOT. a FUCK TON. there are more arthropods than every other species of anima
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[ID: A tweet by @ DefiyantlyFree reading, "DOGE, coming to a government building near you..."
Attached to the tweet is a meme of buff doge + crying doge. Buff doge says, "Pack your bags" and crying doge is labeled 'Government employees studying the sex life of beetles" and is saying, "Please no". End ID]
There’s a bunch of right-wing people posting memes about “”DOGE”” making the government more efficient by removing funding from “”dumb bug researchers”” and I am now realizing how little the average person knows about entomology and its importance
Excuse me while I get sad .
#oohhhhh as an undergrad entomologist this actually makes me mad#arthropods are THE most diverse group of animals on earth by a LOT. a FUCK TON. there are more arthropods than every other species of anima#actually thats insects specifically#80% of all known animal species on the earth are arthropods#theyre going to say something along the lines of 'ooh well we'll keep the agriculturally important ones studied'#bitch thats all of them do not fucking underestimate our fucked up ecosystems rn#also bug diversity means that they have a TON of really cool adaptations that we can study and harness to use in our own technology#eg the sound absorbing qualities of moth wing scales#beetles were THE og pollinators and there are still plants that rely on beetles for pollination#bees are not the only pollinators and native pollinators are usually much more efficient at pollination than non native honeybees#not to mention all the people studying pests (for agriculture or as invasive species or as forest killers or things that live in ur house..#AND. the importance of studying bugs for HEALTH REASONS! FOR HUMAN FUCKING HEALTH REASONS!!!!!!#there are a TON of people studying mosquitos and ticks and other insects that are disease vectors. for obvious reasons!!!!#guess what fucking happens when you stop funding that? we get fucking disease outbreaks! you absolute dipshits!#if you live in an area prone to mosquitos your local health department probably has an entomology division that keeps mosquito numbers down#we can prevent outbreaks of diseases like west nile by managing these animals!#also wheres your fucking whimsy. where is your thirst for knowledge. is it not enough to just know new things#my friend is working at a lab that studies locusts and its important because they are working on ways to stop them from swarming--#--and fucking up landscapes and crops by all descending en masse and eating everything in their path#(this is a thing that some grasshoppers do. not all of them)#but they also have some cool side projects. did you know that you can jumpscare a grasshopper by putting them up by a screen and--#--making a black dot suddenly get really big (similar to say a predator animal suddenly getting really close)#that sounds kind of useless but its pretty cool to me#one of the people that work there did a small study about the effects of royal jelly on various insect species. thats pretty cool.#(royal jelly is the special food that is fed to bees to make them into queens and it does weird stuff)#it can make them grow bigger and cause them to make more eggs. it can do a whole host of weird miracle food-type shenanigans when given--#--to mammals. like what the fuck. it has potential to be helpful for cancer and alzheimer's patients. I think thats pretty cool and#we would not have found out shit like that unless entomologists were fucking around with random 'useless' studies#elon musk fuck all the way off
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