Nature Zen: Something Weevil This Way Comes

Weevils are beetles with an odd twist. Their mouthparts are extended into a "snout" out in front of the head. Their antennae are located on their schnoz. This gives them an adorable Jimmy Durante profile.

Weevils use their snout to chew holes into plants, seeds and nuts; it's handy to have your mouth on a stick when you need to eat through food with a hard outer shell. Many weevil species – and there are 60,000 of them by the way – eat only a single part of a single species of plant. The relationship of weevils and their host plants are so specific, fossil weevils can be used to reconstruct past climate and ecosystems (paleoecology).

Many weevils also come in beautiful colors.

This video shows a weevil with a very long snout in action. Its mouthparts are basically a straw with jaws at the end.

Microinvasive mouthparts of a long-snout weevil (Curculio sp.) from Christoph Allgaier on Vimeo.

Fear No Weevil

While the vast majority of weevil species are harmless and just trundle along in their tiny ecosystems, a few weevils are evil, and cause significant problems for humans. The boll weevil is considered one of the worst insect pests of the 20th century (and also inspired some great blues songs.) In the 1960's, a highly successful eradication program was begun, using the beetles' own sex pheromone to lure them into traps. This monitoring system allowed more targeted sprays and control methods.

The Boll Weevil has its own statue in Alabama, built in 1919. It's a classically Greek statue of a woman holding aloft...a weevil. You may recognize the characteristic snout! Why would you build a statue to an agricultural pest?

The city of Enterprise built the statue in recognition of how the weevils forced farmers to diversify their crops away from cotton, planting peanuts and sweet potatoes instead. The weevil is a symbol of human ability to adjust to adversity. Or, if you look at another way, the statue was built to honor a bug instead of the black man that really saved the economy:

...The boll weevil was just a more socially acceptable substitute for the real hero of the city's economic recovery, an agricultural chemist named George Washington Carver. Not only did Carver, who was black, urge ruined farmers to turn to peanuts and sweet potatoes, he worked tirelessly in his laboratory at Tuskegee Institute to create a market for the crops by coming up with more than 300 new uses.
"So here's the man who helped save the state of Alabama, yet they set a monument to a bug in the middle of the street," says Michael Woods, who runs an African-American heritage shop just down Main Street from the monument.