Continuing from last week’s Outliers post, I’m going to consider some of the more extreme things one could collect. Think not ‘extreme’ as in extreme sport, where goatee-bearded men on motorcycles roar off a 100 metre ramp only to rejoin their machines (after somersaults and a quick guzzle of the Sponsor’s product) three minutes later in another State. Think ‘extreme’ as in extreme possibilities.
Think animals. It would be rather daunting to collect the whole set – there seems to be an awful lot of them. Let’s see, you’ve got your five animal kingdoms, they each contain a number of phyla, which in turn contain classes. A class has orders, they hold families, which contain genuses (not geniuses – very few families have those), before you finally drop down to species level. Oh, and sub-species. Hmm.
In terms of collecting animals, many categories are kind of self limiting. Take giraffes. They’re gorgeous and most people would love to have one as a pet. Collecting-wise, there aren’t that many different species of them, you can’t get them at your local pet store, and they’re also very large – out of reach of most collectors. On the other side of the vast taxonomical savannah, however, is something more accessible. More collectable. Insects.
In a square mile of farmland, it has been suggested, there are more insects than all of the people on Earth. Chances are, there’d be a fair few in your backyard too – so you’re already an insect collector… probably without even realising it.
What they lack in size, insects make up in sheer numbers. Over 80% of all known species are insects. There’s an insect for everyone, and everyone knows an insect. Maybe it’s one of the 1,400 types of flea tagging along on your dog, the 1,900 types of termite undermining your foundations, or the 6,000 types of roach documented thus far. And they’re just the niche bugs.
Let’s assume an average sized insect is two centimetres long, and it would fit (with spacing around the outside) in a glass-lidded specimen box maybe four by five centimetres, and maybe two centimetres deep. If you were collecting Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths)
like this, you’d just fit all 150,000 of them in a generously-sized home. Of course, they’d cover every wall, floor to ceiling, and you could forget about windows or doors. If your partner had a thing for Orthoptera (grasshoppers, around 20,000 species), you could kiss the floor goodbye as well.
Should you possess a complete collection of Hymenoptera (bees, wasps, ants), you could put unique species end to end and they would stretch across the Golden Gate bridge. All 2.3 kilometres of it.
And, if you had one of each of the 370,000 types of beetle (Coleoptera), all in their little wooden specimen boxes, they’d pack out a double decker bus.
Nearly.
You’d still have room for a giraffe.
Kollectamaniac 