We travelled yesterday to the Suffolk coast near Aldeburgh, to look at some of the work being done by Helen Gilbart, a painter currently working in the Geological museum in Cambridge.
This latest work is wonderful. I thought she’s trying to do the same sort of thing as I am doing with the worm book: to discover and redisplay the refreshing strangeness of biology.
I ought really to ask her to do the cover of the worm book but I doubt the publishers will spring for it.
There were a couple of guys from the museum in her studio too, and we talked about how dragonflies manage to be so large. It’s not obvious: since they are insects, they don’t have hearts, or blood, to move oxygen around their bodies. The oxygen must all diffuse to their muscles from the skin, and large flying insects are going to need a lot of oxygen. So the existence of huge dragonflies does make a small mystery. One answer turns out to be that they don’t have to contract their muscles once for every time their wings flap, as birds must do. A dragonfly’s wings are connected to the thorax in some way that makes them oscillate several times for every muscle contraction. I didn’t understand the details. What matters is that they need fewer muscle contractions, and thus less oxygen, than an equivalent bird would do.