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ambience: fire
You’d think that any animal in the path of an approaching forest fire would be doing its utmost to get as far away as possible. Well, that’s mostly true, except there’s a beetle that actually seeks out forest fire sites – for a very good reason. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet. The insect in question is the black jewel beetle, aptly nicknamed the firebug. If it senses a fire – it heads in that direction.
“We examined the reason for this very strange behavior and found out that this beetle breeds in the charred bark of trees. Because if the beetle lays eggs in this bark, there is no enemy, no competition, and virtually no defense from the tree.”
Stephan Schuetz is a chemical ecologist at the University of Gisan in Germany. He says that the Black Jewel Beetle can detect fires from miles away.
“No analytical instrument made by human beings is able to detect forest fires from distances of dozens of miles. For this task, this beetle has got two special kinds of senses. A very highly developed sense of smell for the odor of burnt wood at the one hand. At the other hand a special sense for infrared radiation which enables it to see the radiation coming from forest fires with very high sensitivity.”
We’ll hear how scientists are trying to make use of the firebug’s unique abilities in our next program.
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