Nepalese craftsman, Chandra Bahadur Dangi, holds the record as the world’s shortest adult, at 54.6 cm (1 ft 9 ½ inches). The tallest human is Sultan Kösen, a Turkish farmer, almost five times taller at 2.52 meters (8 feet 3 ¼ inches).
In nature, size differences among males of a single species are not uncommon, but in a new paper, a team from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), The University of Auckland and the University of Arizona, discovered a case of male beetles that are not only extremely different in size, but also provide an answer to long-standing puzzle in evolutionary biology: how can larger animals afford the energetic cost of making and maintaining disproportionately large weapons?
Almost one in every four species in the world is a beetle: about 350,000 beetle species have been identified so far. Male New Zealand giraffe weevils, Lasiorhynchus barbicornis, were known to be the longest beetles in the world, but when researchers measured the differences in the weight of the smallest and largest beetles, they were in for a surprise. [Read more…] about Is it cheaper to be bigger? Lessons from the extreme weapons of giraffe weevil warriors