For Oliver, woods weren't abstract entities; they were symbiotic networks of carpenters, beetles, deer, land-thieves, lichens, pollards, surveyors and toadstools.
Jewel beetles lay their eggs in the bark of smouldering trees.
As moisture-laden breezes roll in from the Atlantic, the water in the air condenses on the beetles' backs (just as a cold bottle of beer left on a table causes water in the air to condense on its surface).
Fog-basking beetles, which are found in Namibia, have an ingeniously simple way of doing this.
His firm has borrowed a trick used by fog-basking beetles and in the nostrils of camels for a novel desalination plant.When Grimshaw was given the brief to regenerate the Santa Catalina Isthmus, a narrow stretch of land on the coast of Las Palmas in Grand Canaria, the firm came up with the concept of a 3km (1.9 mile) promenade with a theatre and botanic garden as its focus.
And that dominance, and thus, in essence, the dominance of the beetles, Dr Smith and Dr Marcot found, is indeed because polyphagans seem hard to exterminate.Since the Polyphaga appeared about 220m years ago, no family belonging to the suborder has become extinct even at the end of the Cretaceous, 66m years ago, when an asteroid strike did for the dinosaurs and many other types of animal.
Now, only three other suborders remain.Why this group of beetles has such resilience to extinction remains unknown.
The house down the road was infested with rice beetles.
In species such as dogs, cats, seals, birds, humans and even burying beetles, infants know that the way to get what they want is to make a fuss.
The others mated with beetles rendered sterile by irradiation.
This ensured that all female beetles would become pregnant, but those who mated with irradiated males were impregnated by damaged sperm, and would not lay viable eggs.
