Michael Holland FLSHead of Education, Chelsea Physic Garden

5 Beards, a football, a gun, a submarine and a glasshouse:

Michael Holland’s boneless banquet

The invertebrates in perspective

About 98% of animals are invertebrates

From 0.1mm 15m in size(and a lot in between)

Lancelets – our closest invertebrate relatives

So there’ll be no……

Why are they ‘heroes’?

Those who have: • Outlived millions of others • Found their own unusual

ecological niche• Amazing survival strategies

• Have helped or could help humans somehow

But they might be maligned by us as pests

Mr. Maudsely & I

Earthworms

• They don’t live for more than 2 days in water (personal research, aged 9)

• Can burrow down to 3 metres• Can sense light and breathe through their entire

body• Are 1000 times stronger than humans, relatively

speaking• About 25 British species• Australian giant Earthworm is up to 4m long

Mr. Maudsley, Aristotle, Darwin & Cleopatra

It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world as these lowly organisedcreatures

Intestines of the Earth

acred

LimpetThey have silicon dioxide-

reinforced magnetite ‘teeth’ for rasping algae from rocks

With possible applications in nano-scale cutters

Their ability to hold on to rocks in storms

(with a mixture of suction and glue)

Possibilities for super-suction devices(e.g. moveable aquaculture pens)

Underwater robotic technologies for exploration

Chelsea Physic Garden

•Living museum of medicinal and ethnobotanical plants

•Rare and endangered plants

•Also an urban nature reserve

James Petiver (1663-1718)Demonstrator of plants from 1709

Red Admiral feet are 200 times more sensitive to sugar than the human tongue

Leeches – bloody amazing

• Used since 1000B.C. to make people bleed to get rid of disease (can make you bleed for 18 hours)

• Used more recently to assist in tissue transplants

• Current research into anticoagulants found in the saliva of leeches, ticks and vampire bats (Draculin)to help with:• Heart attack prevention• Strokes• Blood thinning

Slug – slippery so & so

• A cubic metre of garden contains about 200 slugs

• Around since the Ice Age

• They have 27,000 ‘teeth’

• Slime contains fibres which help with climbing

• An invasive carnivorous Spanish variety caused car accidents in Sweden

• They smell with their bodies• 5% of the population are above ground• Their blood is green

The foot of the Banana slug generates a propulsive force against surfaces via mucus secretions which act as both a lubricant and an adhesive

Robots with propulsion equipment capable of movement over special surfaces

The photosynthetic sea slug

• Elysia chloroticafeeds on intertidalalgae (Vaucherialitorea)

• Once eaten, it sucks out the chlorophyll and stores them in its cells

• They carry on photosynthesising and provide Elysiawith sugars

Resurrection: brine shrimps

Daphnia – tough eggs over-winter

• 145 million years old• Useful since they are transparent – can see their organs• They are also used as a water pollution monitor (like a canary in a mine)

Woodlouse armour-geddon outta here

• Incubates young in a saline ‘marsupium’ –a remnant of their ancestry

• They don’t urinate, but create ammonia gas which they fart out through their exoskeleton

• They have blue blood• They can drink with their anus (possible

industrial biomimicry for humidity control)• They sometimes eat their own faeces –

to recycle essential copper• Armour-plated like an armadillo, or pangolin

Horseshoe Crabs

• Very similar species were around 400 million years ago

• Not actually crabs (closer to arachnids)

• Their blue blood contains Limulus amebocyte lysatewhich coagulates in the presence of small amounts of bacterial toxins, is used to test for sterility of medical equipment and the safety of intravenous drugs

• They are also used in the manufacture of surgical sutures, making dressings for burn victims, and in eye research

Spiders & mites

Spiders & mites • Jumping spiders have the best vision of all invertebrates: 2 large eyes placed close

together in the front of the head give accurate stereoscopic vision for judging distance when pouncing. The remainder of its eight eyes give it almost all-round vision, so it can spot prey moving anywhere near it

• Spider silk is incredibly strong and is used for catching and immobilising prey, mating, travelling, shelter, egg sacs. A strand long enough to circle the Earth would weigh less than 500 grams.

• A web lasts for about 2 days and will be eaten once finished with, so as not to waste any tasty morsels, like pollen

• Australian scientists are investigating the use of tarantula venom as an insecticide

• Attempts to insert a spider silk gene into goats so silk could be extracted from their milk worked, but wasn't financially viable – the product was called BioSteel™ and was a project for the U.S. army

• They helped flowers by speeding up pollinators and could have helped plants colonise land (about 450mya), along with anything else that pooped on land

• You mite hear a little explosion while you sleep…..David Knight

FliesEssential decomposers of dead things Fruit flies

(not true flies) use booze to deter parasitic wasps

Forensic entomologyIn the 13th century a murder in China was solved when flies were attracted to invisible blood residue on a sword of a man in the communityToday scientists like AmoretWhitaker (NHM) are refining this ancient science

Can a fly stop a train?

Aphids - clever little suckers (some males lac k mouths)

• Mindarus harringtoni (not M. ebayi)• A new species of aphid encased in plant resin 45 million years ago.• Bought for £20 on eBay by Dr. Richard Harrington, Vice-President of the

Royal Entomological Society and aphid expert.

• Gall aphids aren’t ‘milked’ by ants, so they have a sticky problem to deal with.

• So they produce sap-repelling wax to line the inside of the gall.• There is a caste of soldier aphid who elbow the wax-lined sticky balls

out.

Aphids can make their own carotenoids, which give them their green or orange colour (helpful for camouflage)

These pigments capture light, which is converted into ATP, the ‘currency’of respiration

This back-up energy may help them in times of environmental stress. But isn’t photosynthesis.

Ants (we’re in a relationship)

Helpful dispersing &

burying seeds (e.g nabira fru it, wolf ,

leaf-cutter)

Leaf cutter ants farm fungi by

feeding themleaves

The largest ant colony ever found

was over 6000 Km wide

The total weight of all the ants on

Earth is roughly equal to the total weight of all the people on Earth

Some ants can support up to

100x their own weight, upside down on glass

Ophiocordyceps camponoti-balzanicontrolling a ‘zombie ant’

Ants (when the relationship turns nasty) Ants (when a career turns nasty)

WaspsWell over 100,000 species

worldwide

Inspiration for paper making

Great consumers

of meat and vegetable

matter

Many are parasitic and lay their eggs directly into other larvae

Some aquatic – such as the ‘Fairy wasp’

Some pollinate

How a moth built an empire

There are also some

aquatic moth species

Dragonflies

• Can fly up, down, forwards, backwards and can hover

• 2 pairs of wings beat at 30 beats per second (bees 300/second)

• 5000 species globally• Their eyes are made up

of 30,000 lenses • Order Odonata means

‘toothed one’ and refers to their formidable serrated teeth

• They have a Kung Fu fork-lift jaw

By Tessa Farmer

Monsters of the deep

Caddis fly Caddis fly larva jewellery by Hubert Duprat

Phantom midge larvae (Chaoborus spp.)

• Regulate their depth in water using air sacs, like a stealth submarine to sneak up/down on prey (such as Daphnia)

• The 'fang' at the front is actually its antennae that have evolved into this claw-like arm which it uses to grab its prey

Pond skater

• Back legs for steering, middle legs for rowing and front pair for grabbing food from the surface

• All legs for sensing surface vibrations• Convergent evolution with…..

Raft spider Water boatmen:

Greater water boatman(Notonectidae)

Predatory and fierce

Lesser water boatman (Coroxidae)

Herbivorous and loud…..

Superhydrophobic(expialidocious)

Hexi Uni

Snorkels for those that can’t walk on water, but love to breathe the air

Rat-tailed maggot Mosquito larva• Greater water boatmen (Notonecta) feed on mosquito larvae

• Female Culisetalongiareolata mosquitoes can sense whether there are Notonecta in the vicinity or not, and will avoid laying their eggs there

• Approx. 3 million people die each year from mosquito-borne diseases

• These chemicals (kairomones) could be used to control where mosquitoes lay their eggs

Leopold & Rudolph Blaschka’s marine invertebrates

Calcareous spongeStar coral

Starfish

Radiolaria(marin e

protozoa)Siphonophora(in same class as hydras)

Marine moss animal

Rotifer

Camp anulariidae (hyd roid polyps)

Marine protozoan

Sea squirt

Ernst Haeckel1839-1919

Vorticella (a springy little fella)

• Lives in fresh water (puddles, ponds and ditches)• Sucks food towards its mouth by creating a

vortex with cilia• When disturbed it contracts its springy

spasmoneme which exerts a force of at least 300 nanonewtons (for its size, Vorticella'sspasmoneme is more powerful than a car engine)

• This natural, microscopic spring mechanism could be used as a nanospring or a microactuator (a mic roscopic s ervo mech anis m that supplies and transmits a measured amount of en ergy for the operation of anoth er mech anism o r system)

Thank you