WEEVILS i think that you will LIKE

Here are some weevils I think that you will like. They’re mother nature’s favorite insects — magical little guys. I’m going to introduce you to ones with cute boots, ones with cute snoots, and also ones that have influenced the US in ways you could never imagine.

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New backdrop’s up, new camera. Insects tend to get a pretty bad rep. Yes,  humans usually like small animals with big eyes,   but insects went too far with it and seem to be  immediately disqualified. Except for one group:   the weevils. These tiny creatures seem to be  otherworldly, and even magical in appearance.  

Like something out of Harry Potter or Alice  in Wonderland. Weevils have become the most   cherished insects around, and even have  a reddit fan club called weevil time. Today, I’m going to introduce you to some with  appearances and reputations that will surprise  

You. So sit back and relax, while I show  you some weevils I think that you will like. Let’s get the general information out of the  way. Well, as general as we can get. Weevils   are impossible to generalize. They’ve been around  for like 200 million years and have really become  

Their own at a species level. One thing we can  say for sure is weevils are tiny. We’re talking   millimeters. But what makes a weevil a weevil?  Well, the majority of them have a rostrum,   that elongated snout. Cute as fuck. With  chewing mouthparts at the end of it. Not  

To be confused with the proboscis that  many insects have their piercing and   sucking mouthparts. No. These are chewing  mouthparts. And are objectively much cuter. Many weevils also have elbowed antennae, often  coming off of that rostrum. The Reddit fanpage   often describes weevils as having boots and  snoots. Snoots, obviously the rostrum. They also  

Tend to have some pretty cottagecore lookin feet.  Most weevils can fly, and ALL weevils are beetles. Yeah. Beetles. If you’ve been watching my content for a while,  you’ve probably heard me say THE beetle fact,   at least once. I say it all the time and I’m  gonna say it again. 25% of all discovered  

Animal species are beetles. 1 in 4 animal species  ever discovered is a beetle. Do you know how many   beetles that is? 350,000 species, dude. There  are so many beetles. And the biggest taxonomic   family of beetles is the weevils! [struggles]  Curculionidae, also known as the true weevils.

Yeah. Fuck. It’s the crab situation  all over again. There are true weevils,   about 83,000 species. And then another 12,000  species that are not true weevils, but still,   technically, weevils. Some true weevils don’t  even look like weevils, like bark beetles,  

Which are so un-weevil they got kicked out of the  club. And don’t even get to be called weevils. And other beetles, like biscuit  weevils, are called weevils but   are not true weevils and don’t even look  like weevils. It is all SORTS of fucked up.

And it’s only gonna get worse. If we total it  up, the true and false weevils, there are 95,000   species that have been discovered. Scientists  estimate there’s about 220,000 species total,   which they believe will take another 650 years  to describe. It’s gonna be absolute mayhem.

Let’s get back to the snoot. With the  chewing mouthparts at the end. They use   these to pummel into a variety of  plants, depending on the species,   and are often viewed as pesky little rats.  Despite being the size of a grain of rice,  

Their lifestyles can lead to the damage of crops  on an incredibly large scale. They obviously eat   the plants, but they also use the plants to  lay eggs in them. And once the eggs hatch,   they feed on that plant even further. From  our perspective, causing even more chaos and  

Destruction, but from their perspective getting a  nice, nutritious meal as a welcome to the world. One of the easiest examples of this process  is a weevil that I’ve talked about before.   That look like they have little shops to sell  potions and trinkets, and need wizard hats.  

Everyone’s favorite weevil: the acorn weevil.  (That’s the cutest fucking thing I’ve ever seen   in my entire life.) Notorious for infesting  the – you guessed it – acorns of Oak trees,   making them absolutely useless. However,  they do not give a fuck about that. As you can see, acorn weevils  have a needle-like snout. Ideal  

For drilling into young nuts. Females  approach an immature nut in the summer,   and use their antennae to determine if the  nut is suitable, and soft enough to get in to. I don’t know if anybody else has this  problem, but you know those cardboard  

Boxes that hold litter in them, you have to  punch a hole into it with your thumb to get   the litter out? And it’s hard as fuck because  they don’t actually perforate it so then you’re   just fuckin sitting there pushing with your  life to get it open? And then you give up,  

You grab a sharp object, stab it in, make  your own perforations because they couldn’t   do it for you and then you finally get it  open and it’s just unnecessarily difficult. Well, that’s essentially what the acorn weevils  do. They make cuts on the surface of the nut  

To loosen it, and then punches through it  and drill right into it. Rotating her head,   looking like an animatronic.  Like, weevils don’t look real. Once she’s in, she lays her eggs in the  hole she just made and leaves them be.  

The eggs hatch into babies, and then feast  on the inside of the nut. They stay there   until sometime in the fall when it’s time  for the acorn to drop to the ground. The   babies chew themselves out of the nut  and go to their next home, the soil,  

For another like 2 years until they become an  adult, which honestly, sounds like a pretty good   setup to me. But some animals that like nuts like  birds, and squirrels, and us, do not like that,   since empty nuts that baby weevils were  living in is not a particularly pleasant meal.

Others, actually turns out, don’t give  a fuck under the right conditions.   Researchers in 2007 determined that  ungulates, i.e. deer and wild boar,   will eat infested acorns with absolutely  no discrimination IF the acorn supply is   low. They figured eating weevil-infested nuts  opposed to no nuts was the lesser of two weevils.

That aside, I think we can agree that this  particular look of weevil is working really   well for them. So I’m gonna introduce you to  some weevils that kind of have the same vibe. The boll weevil. Found in the US, Central and  South America. They like cotton. And actually,  

In Alabama, have a monument honoring them as  if they are some sort of Greek god. But not   because they are weirdly adorable and have images  online of them riding bicycles and playing button   guitars. Despite looking extremely polite, boll  weevils are the most destructive cotton pest in  

North America. And are considered the most hated  agricultural pest of all time, in the United   States – costing the US like $20 billion since  arriving. Quite the title for such a little guy. So boll weevils are originally from Mexico,  and made their way into Texas in 1892. And  

They immediately went for the jugular.  Invading cotton fields all over Texas,   spreading to the southern United States and even  up, I think, into the Dakotas. And this happened   QUICK. They traveled like 100 miles per year, and  were pretty resistant to pesticides because the  

Eggs were inside the cotton bolls rather than  the outside, and their lifecycles are so quick   that they could have, like, 13 generations born  in a single cotton season. Which is fucking nuts. This became a weevil war. With some  fields apparently 100% infested,  

Played some role in the Great Depression,  and people just couldn’t grow cotton anymore.   The weevils were clearly winning. They  tried getting rid of them with viruses,   every single possible pesticide, and even  imported fire ants from Guatemala at some point. And by the 1970s, the largest eradication  program the US ever saw was started,  

Which has since been insanely successful. I  think all of the boll weevils are gone for now,   except for some parts of southern Texas. Okay, so what about the statue? How  does this play into it? Well, in 1916,   a town called Enterprise in Alabama was  feeling the wrath of the evil weevil. As  

Was everywhere else. Their cotton was obliterated.  But instead of trying again the following season,   like a lot of areas did, they decided to  switch up their crops. Stop the weevils in   their tracks entirely. And they became extremely  successful with peanuts. They were raking it in.  

The weevils indirectly put Enterprise on  the map. And so, they wanted to honor it. The statue originally had a  fountain in place of the weevil,   but then people came together and decided they  needed to put a weevil there instead. To honor  

It for its destruction that ultimately led to  the town’s fortune. All hail the boll weevil. You might be wondering why such a devastating  weevil was in a video titled “weevils i think   that you will like”. This would arguably  be THE weevil people most definitely do not  

Like. And to be honest, I was not expecting  to go into all of that. I didn’t know any of   that existed. I thought it was cute and I was  just gonna be like “look at this cute weevil”,  

“look at it riding a bicycle”, “look at it  playing a button guitar”. But then I read,   like, the first thing about them and just  went down this rabbit hole. And then I   found out about the statue and  I obviously couldn’t look back.

So anyway, here’s another one you might like.  Rhinastus latesternus. There’s no common name for   this weevil, but they clearly need one. Maybe the  big boot weevil. But please leave your suggestions   in the comments because we gotta figure this out.  This weevil is notably cannibalistic in their  

Larval stage. So, maybe the “cannibal weevil”. The  larvae have been observed committing hunger games   at each other in the bamboo shoots they reside  in, eating each other until only one remains. Alright, so we’ve gone over  the cute snoot weevils. Now   get ready for the extensive neck weevils.

Specifically, the madagascar giraffe weevi. Found  in, you guessed it, Madagascar. And named after   its, you guessed it, long neck. They were only  originally discovered in 2008, so not much is   known about them other than the fact that they  look like giraffes. But they’re usually found  

In trees called the “giraffe beetle trees” which  are also only found in Madagascar and they seem to   live their entire lives on it. And like giraffes,  the males seem to use their necks as weapons,   fighting other males to impress the ladies  and maybe possibly for territory shit as well.

There are multiple giraffe weevil species, many  unrelated to each other but they tend to be some   of the larger weevils species, that we know of.  The largest, the New Zealand Giraffe Weevil,   can get to up to, like, 3 and a half inches  long. Absolutely gargantuan for a weevil.  

Kinda looks like a french chef to me, y’know?  He looks like he serves souffle. [French music] And one that kinda has the same vibe as  this, but like much worse, but also I   think you’ll still like, is the Hose Nose Cycad  Weevil. Quite the smeller on this one. Well,  

Not smeller, chewer. Quite the chewer  on this one. The females actually hold   the record for longest weevil snout  compared to body length in weevils,   that we know of. Getting up to 3x the length of  their body. They’re found in southern Africa and  

Bore into the seeds of cycads. I don’t know  how they get around like this, to be honest.   I feel like it’s as debilitating as carrying a  2 by 4 around the lamp section of Home Depot.

The thing about weevils is, once you know a few,  you kinda get the gist, y’know? Y’know what the   fuck is goin on. They like nuts and fruits,  and plant material. They weevil their way into   it. So these last few are just quick, rapid  fire weevils that I think that you will like.

First, the jewel weevil. Found in  central america and south florida,   where it might’ve been accidentally introduced in  banana shipments in 2002. They like grapevines. And the polka dotted clown weevil, flightless  weevils found in the Phillippines. There’s a   variety of subspecies that have  a variety of colours and like a  

Variety of plants. And they kinda  look like rainbow ice dip n dots. Kinda like the glitter weevil, which  have photonic crystals all over them,   giving them that shimmery glow. They  live in Central and South America. There’s also Schönherr’s blue weevil,  

That looks like a baja blast. Found  in New Guinea. And the willow weevil,   that looks like bird shit, found in Europe. And I would also like to turn your attention   to another long neck weevil, [struggles]  Trachelismus protractus. They are definitely  

In need of a common name as well,  so lemme know in the comments. There was also another weevil I was having  a hard time identifying. This one. It’s so   cute. It looks like a dog. It also happens to be  the top image search result for “stupid looking  

Bug”. I was having a hard time narrowing  it down so I asked my instagram story if   somebody could identify it and it seems to  have been narrowed down to the genus Lixus.   The picture was also apparently taken in  Yunnan, China. That’s where we’re at for  

Now. Nevertheless, I would argue this  is my favorite weevil that I know of. Alright, it’s time for this  week’s questions. First one: “One time I was in my dad’s house and I saw a   piece of dust move. Is it just  the wind or some sort of bug?”

It could’ve been a masked  hunter – a bug. Specifically,   an assassin bug that uses dust or  lint as camouflage when they a nymph,   like a teenager. Their bites are painful and  can lead to swelling, so don’t pick it up. Next! “What are some creepy facts  about butterflies that you might know?”

Ummm, some male butterflies have organs called  coremata, or hair pencils, that are inflated and   produce pheromones to attract female butterflies.  Not super creepy in butterflies but definitely can   be in moths, like Creatonotos gangis, also  known as the Baphomet moth, that I talked  

About in the Freak Edition of “what the fuck  is this”. Just a bit unpleasant to look at. If you have a weird animal you want identified  lemme know in the comments and I might feature   it. And if you liked this video, be sure to  subscribe so you don’t miss the next long  

Form video on the largest ape to ever exist,  that we know of. Check out my Patreon for our   Discord server and livestreams. And for now, stay  curious. The world has a lot for us to learn. Cya!