I saw these bugs all the time growing up but never knew what it actually was. Could you tell me? (It has 6 legs although not shown)
Well that there is an Earwig (Order: Dermaptera) my friend. The picture is pretty blurry but these insects have a very distinctive body plan starting with those heavily segmented antenna and ending with those characteristic forcep-like cerci. This insect is one of many that desperately needs a pokemon modeled after it!
Can’t you just imagine it firing electricity or some kind of shockwave out of those butt pincers??
Or maybe it could be a fighting type and use those to do bodyslam-esque moves.
Here are a few attempts from like-minded DeviantArtists:
oh and this is a cute baby version called the HearWig by Reallydarkandwindie:
Anyways, earwigs are remarkable insects even beyond their staggering Pokemon potential. They’re among very few non-social insects that raise their young:
(Photo credit: Tom Oates)
The females have distinctly potent instincts to protect round squishy things! They will even defend balls of wax or vaseline from predators and clean them to protect against fungal growth. The females stay with the young in their earlier stages of their lives, feeding them predigested food she regurgitates for them.
Earwigs have highly flexible abdomens that allow them to use those fully-functional pincers on their back end as defensive weapons against predators. (I saw one grab and body slam a would-be predatory jumping spider once! He wasn’t dead but perplexed, shaken up, and wholly unwilling to try again.) In addition, they can fire a pungent, gluey solution from the middle of their abdomen too. They’re not interested in making life easy for predators and parasites. Many wasp and fly species that would that attempt to land on their backs and lay eggs on or in them can be picked off easily. And if they ever bite off more than they can chew in a scuff, they’re also able to fly away with the extremely intricately folded wings that they keep stored like a little leathery jetpack on their backs.
You’ve got nothing to fear from these creatures though.
The name may make it seem as if these creatures are able to infiltrate your head through your hearing holes like something out of a b-list alien movie but that’s not at all apart of their life cycle!
Earwigs feed on decaying plant matter and occasionally smaller insects but never the brain matter of sleeping mammals. Their common name turned up so long ago that we’re actually not sure where it came from. It’s quite possible though that they were named for the shape of their wings when unfolded (which sort of look like ears at the right angle) + the Old English word “wicga” which means beetle. The old wives tale about them crawling into the ears of sleeping humans potentially came from a misunderstanding of that name. They’re actually pretty friendly ^____^
