I’m always happy to find a beetle. Probably because you don’t get to see many of them. This pretty green beetle from Germany is called False oil beetle, Thick-legged flower beetle or Swollen-thighed beetle. The bright color and the thick legs make it quite remarkable. Our beetle is a female with regular legs.
Beetles, order Coleoptera, come in 400.000 species, an unbelievable number. Similar to butterflies, the adult insect only lives for a few weeks, while the larvae look very different. Beetle larvae often live for years well hidden in the ground. Giovanni Antonio Scopoli described the species in 1763. Adults feet on pollen, larva on brooms and thistles. Only males have thick legs, which seem to be useful to get hold of the female while mating.
Remarkable is the story I found for you.
23 years after the publication of the description of our beetle, Scopoli described a worm, a human parasite, Physis intestinalis. And it would change his life.
He was at the University of Pavia, a university that was established in 1361! Imagine, other today still operational universities were teaching for over 300 years already. Scopoli had a bit of a ongoing situation with his college Lazzaro Spallanzani. Scopoli accused Spallanzani to have taken specimen from the university for his own collection. He did, but he claimed he took them for work.
I would like to call the following action a vendetta. It seems that the English speakers misunderstand vendetta as blood feud, while in Italy a blood feud would rather be a faida.
Anyways, the result of the vendetta of Spallanzani on Scopoli is the worm. The worm’s description was published in this paper: Scopoli, J. A. 1786. Deliciae florae et faunae Insubricae seu novae, aut minus cognitae species plantarum et animalium quas in Insubria Austriaca tam spontaneas, quam exoticas vidit, descripsit, et aeri incidi curavit. This means in English:
Scopoli, J. A. 1786. The delightful flora and fauna of Insubria, or new or less well-known species of plants and animals which he saw in Austrian Insubria, both spontaneous and exotic, described, and took care to have engraved on the air.
Insubria was the name for the region where Switzerland and Italy meet.
AI might tell you that this worm is a tunicate which is now called Ciona intestinalis, but this is not true. It is a coincidence that the epithet is the same. And another example how AI is often misleading. And so was Spallanzani. His revenge on Scopoli was well prepared, and meant to harm Scopoli’s reputation.
In fact Scopoli (63 years old then) was handed over a fake worm by Spallanzani (57 years old), in order to make a fool of a rival, and ruin his career. This sounds like a bit of fun, but in fact on had a huge, negative impact on Scopoli. After the publication, Spallanzani published two letters incognito to make fun of Scopoli. He died of a stroke only 2 years after. A passage of these incognito letters:
“Please take care of your lungs so as not to
burst out laughing. It is the trachea and esophagus with
a good part of the goiter of a hen.”
Probably it wasn’t a coincidence that Spallanzani chose an esophagus as fake worm. He studied the process of digestion on dogs and cows and is a pioneer in understanding the human digestive system. See here: Dissertazioni di fisica animale e vegetale (1780)
I get the idea that Spallanzani was a free thinker, a rebel. He dared to criticize Linneaus for describing animals only on their physique. His point was, that you need to see the whole picture, like behavior and location. Scopoli on the other hand was pro Linneaus, and in the end Spallanzani made the point that Scopoli described a worm without wondering how or where it would live.
Who would have thought that a green beetle in Germany reminds us on a 239 years old hoax?!
There’s also an article about this vendetta behind a pay wall: https://www.nature.com/articles/434142a
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