Engineering News

This is a nice suggestion. But there is nothing in the article that backs up the claim.

A bit too flat this is.

IS

You see a lot of this lately: someone 'suggests' a possibility and it's somehow news. Well, it isn't really. If this had been, say, an actual discovery and one independently verified, yes, that would be news. Suggestions do not news make, IMHO, but all is not lost...

A little tidbit toward the end of the piece leads to some interesting and Real News about the world's smallest insects - certain wasps which are actually smaller than amoebas.

The one shown in the pic below, a so-called 'fairy wasp' (Megaphragma mymaripenne) is the world's third smallest insect and smaller than both a Paramecium and an amoeba, shown together here at the same scale:

The world's smallest insects have some interesting and unusual traits:

"The smallest insects are comparable in size to unicellular organisms. Thus, their size affects their structure not only at the organ level, but also at the cellular level. Here we report the first finding of animals with an almost entirely anucleate nervous system. Adults of the smallest flying insects of the parasitic wasp genus Megaphragma (Hymenoptera: Trichogrammatidae) have only 339-372 nuclei in the central nervous system, i.e., their ganglia, including the brain, consist almost exclusively of processes of neurons. In contrast, their pupae have ganglia more typical of other insects, with about 7400 nuclei in the central nervous system. During the final phases of pupal development, most neuronal cell bodies lyse. As adults, these insects have many fewer nucleated neurons, a small number of cell bodies in different stages of lysis, and about 7000 anucleate cells. Although most neurons lack nuclei, these insects exhibit many important behaviors, including flight and searching for hosts."

So which insect holds the world's record as being the smallest? Dicopomorpha echmepterygis (Hymenoptera: Mymaridae), a parasitic wasp. Males of this species are blind and wingless and measure only 139 µm in length - a little larger than the thickness of copier paper.

Now this is something new (to me) and very interesting. How many of those little fellows might really exist? How many more lines in evolution went that way. Lilliput comes to mind and whole societies that live on the smallest island on earth - unseen untouched or already stamped upon without knowing.

Will have a look what more I find about this.

Nice find - worth posting.

See if it lives up to the test.