— Your article in Nature and your previous article in PNAS are rare instances of Russian articles in top-tier journals. In PNAS, all co-authors were from Russia, while in Nature there were several foreign co-authors, but the lead authors were all from Russia. Do you ever get harassed by patriots because of this?
— Not at all. Thankfully, the press office of the biology faculty filters out anyone with dubious intentions.

— On a serious note, how challenging is it to conduct purely Russian science? How sufficient is your critical mass and pool of collaborators here?
— This is a complex and very multifaceted question as it greatly depends on the tasks, volume of work, and so on. We work on many projects not just with a Russian team but with the staff of a single department.

— It's quite an unusual situation these days because typically good articles involve large collaborations.
— Yes, but we are entomologists. Many of us work individually, particularly systematists. We are moving away from this, but some inertia, or tradition if you will, remains. Previously, it was easier to work within a small team, and now this tradition is proving to be very beneficial.

— Does present-day systematics make any sense without molecular phylogeny?
— It absolutely does. Especially with insects, whose diversity is not even 10–20% studied, and molecular data is available for only a minuscule fraction of what is already known. So, undoubtedly, classical systematics and taxonomy hold immense significance.

— Is there no need to revise it?
— I'm referring to the lower levels, species and genera for which it is currently physically impossible to perform even basic DNA barcoding.

— Is this due to a lack of resources and energy? Or is it a fundamental thing?
— Regrettably, for many specialists, this is a matter of principle. There are still individuals who practice systematics and do not acknowledge molecular methods or the results they yield. Undoubtedly, this is a completely flawed policy.
In turn, sensible systematists are primarily limited by funding. If you have a million or one and a half million species, calculating the cost of barcoding them is difficult, and it's hard to imagine that the funds will suddenly become available.
But it should also be noted that many insect species are known only from type series stored in museums, or not stored at all, or even lost, or their condition is such that extracting DNA from them is either very difficult, very costly, or even impossible due to their poor condition.

— Is there no chance of recapturing them?
— We often work with material available in single copies. It no longer exists, and, no, it's not possible to recapture it. And even if you do capture it, you still have to strictly morphologically determine whether it's what you need.

— As Nabokov taught us, the main way to distinguish insect species is to look at the structure of the male genitalia. And if it exists in a museum, what kind of genitalia can it have?
— Its genitalia are just like everything else because they're chitinized and sclerotized. You can store them dry for hundreds of years and then take them out and examine them. There is absolutely no problem with that. Insect genitalia are complex sclerites with a cuticle, often even with denticles and other features that are preserved. Regardless of what happens to an insect, its basic set of genitalia traits may remain. However, unfortunately, this doesn't apply to all insect groups. With butterflies, yes, genitalia are all a taxonomist needs. But for many groups, these traits have not yet been included, and often a significant step in studying a group is to start systematizing their genitalia. That's a substantial amount of work.
If you have a family with thousands of species for which these traits have not been used before, and you start using them, it means you need to dig up a lot of museum material to make comparative descriptions, tables, and pictures and introduce them into scientific use.

— A systematist comes to a museum, finds a sample, and looks at its dentures. Then another systematist does the same. How many examinations can a sample withstand?
— As many as you like, as long as it's not dissected. There are decades-old techniques for preserving genitalia both in vitro and dried. And then you can work with them without causing further damage.
Moreover, if you consider how many experts there are for each group... Except for the most popular materials, museum samples are examined once every 50–100 years. Also, a good specialist doesn't leave behind damaged specimens.

— If molecular barcoding is successfully performed, how much do the traditional classifications that existed before need to be revised? And if a group is studied by two specialists, can they end up with two completely different taxonomic systems?
— Molecular systematics of insects is also not very straightforward. Different orders have very different rates of evolution, so the same markers will work well for some and completely fail for others. For example, cytochrome oxidase works very poorly for distinguishing species or groups of species in dipterans.
If we talk about macrosystems — tribes, families, orders, and suborders — then there are dozens, if not hundreds, of people who do this. Every year, these people publish dozens of systems, either for insects as a whole or just for arthropods alone, or, on the contrary, for some specific superorders. And they are regularly revamped in absolutely radical ways. There are orders that have been moved from completely different groups, divided, split, then merged, and then moved again... And the process continues to this day.

—What is the point of higher taxa in the first place? In what sense are insect orders and mammalian orders the same level taxa?
— I can't tell you what the point is because there is probably no point. They obviously don't exist in nature. It's more of a convenience for researchers that we have groups linked by kinship, which allows us to presume some similarities.
Insect orders certainly don't correlate with mammalian orders, as most of them are so ancient and diverse that they have much higher taxonomic ranks in terms of age and molecular distances than mammalian orders. When mammalian orders emerged, there were already existing modern insect families, if not genera. The issue with genera is a complex one, as they have all been redefined. Although, honestly, I believe that half of the described paleontological material of new insect species are actually existing species.

— What's the point of having this taxonomic hierarchy then? Why not simply use a phylogenetic tree?
— Because it's impractical. The insect tree turns out to be too fragmented.

— Should taxa necessarily be monophyletic? Or can we allow for a paraphyletic taxon?
— This is a philosophical question. Surely, taxa should be monophyletic, but insects have a vast number of paraphyletic taxa that have been proven and demonstrated, yet no one has the stamina to tackle and restructure them. In theory, there should indeed be monophyly, but in practice, I'm not sure what percentage of systematic articles on insects feature a paraphyletic taxon. I'm quite far from systematics, so my opinion might be somewhat amateurish. That said, I started as a systematist, describing a certain number of species and genera of featherwing beetles. We recently published a paper on their family system, incorporating molecular and morphological aspects. This is the first system of subfamilies and tribes for this family, but we have a paraphyletic tribe there due to a lack of material and resources to handle it.

— Then let's discuss what you do. These are very tiny beetles and extremely small Hymenoptera. Anything else?
— We work with all types of miniature insects, and lately with other arthropods as well. By miniature, I mean anything less than half a millimeter in length.

— That's comparable to a decent-sized amoeba, right?
— If it's a decent-sized amoeba, then it's half the size. And if it's not a very decent one, then yes, it's comparable. Generally, what we refer to as micro insects, and what can already be studied for our research, starts from a millimeter or slightly more. About one and a half millimeters.

— What's special about them? How do very small insects differ from the regular ones?
— That's precisely what we've been studying for the past twenty years. That question sparked everything, and now it just won't stop.

— I'll venture a guess. Obviously, the first aspect is biophysics. Because when you're very small, you interact with air and water differently. The second aspect is something I've already read in your work, the peculiarities of the nervous system. What other aspects are there?
— It's almost an endless list. In different groups of insects, as well as spiders, mites, springtails, etc., there are some very general consequences of miniaturization — some obvious, some not. But each group has its own unique aspects.
The most astonishing and unexpected thing is that almost all of them maintain a very complex structure, unlike most other invertebrates that lose organ systems and entire functions when miniaturized. This complexity is absolutely astounding because objects the size of an amoeba retain thousands of cells. Thousands of cells just in the nervous system alone.

— So, do the cells become very small as a result?
— The cells do become very small, disrupting all known nuclear-cytoplasmic ratios compared to other insects. But hundreds of individual muscles are retained. It's absolutely unimaginable to be the size of a unicellular organism and have a hundred separate muscles controlling your legs, wings, mouth parts, and so on.
One of the key general patterns associated with miniaturization is the reduction of transport systems, respiratory system, and hemolymph with the heart. Because of the small volume, oxygen and everything else can be transported through diffusion. The second common consequence is the absolutely disproportionate size of the nervous system and an increase in its relative volume to 15%, and sometimes even 20% of body weight.

— Presumably because everything else can be reduced, but if you want to fly, you can't reduce the nervous system much.
— Because it's the only organ system whose efficiency is determined by the number of cells. You can have a muscle with just one cell and an intestine with 20 or 30 cells, but if you have complex sensory organs, complex mechanics, and control over everything, you still need thousands of neurons. And no matter how much you compress them, their minimum size is still limited...

— ...By biophysics...
— And by the size of the nucleus and the minimum axon diameter that allows a stimulus to pass without noise.

— How does an intestine with 30 cells function?
— The intestines of small insects are structured almost the same way as in large insects. They are divided into sections. The midgut performs the main digestive function. Its effectiveness is determined by the surface area, not the number of cells. As body size decreases, the surface area changes more slowly than weight, so the efficiency of the digestive system actually increases. They also have disproportionately large reproductive systems and disproportionately large eggs. For instance, the smallest beetles produce only one egg at a time.

— Is there no room for more eggs?
— Correct. And that sole egg takes up about half of the female's body volume. Because if the larva is to emerge from that egg and move, feed, etc., it must already have a complex structure. In other insects, the larvae are parasitic. For example, Hymenoptera larvae live in the eggs of other insects, and they are highly desembryonized. They look like sacs that float in the host's yolk, and they don't need anything but the intestines. Consequently, they have small eggs and a small reproductive system.

— What do microscopic beetle larvae eat?
— They are mainly microsaprophages. They live in decomposing plant substrates and eat the bacterial and yeast film that forms there. But there are many more different strategies, such as a separate tribe that lives in the hymenophore tubes of the polypore fungi. It lives right in the tube and eats the spores that haven't had time to be expelled. Both larvae and adults live in these tubes.

— Both Hymenoptera and beetles are insects who grow through complete metamorphosis. Does that mean miniaturization is specific to insects with complete metamorphosis? Or could there be others?
— Indeed, most of the miniature forms are insects with complete metamorphosis, and the smallest insects are those with complete metamorphosis as well. Only insects with complete metamorphosis cross the boundary of 0.4–0.3, maybe even 0.5 millimeters in body length. We have a hypothesis as to what that might be linked with.
As we have already discussed, the huge nervous system is partly one of the factors limiting the minimal body size of insects. In insects with incomplete metamorphosis, the first-instar larva, which geometrically is the smallest stage in ontogenesis, already has the number of neurons and nervous system volume comparable to that of an adult.

— Is a small cockroach any less intelligent than a large one?
— The answer to that question is not exactly straightforward. I can't give you a simple yes or no. But if we're talking about the structure of the nervous system and its size, then no. However, when it comes to the number of pathways in the brain, probably yes.
Insects that undergo complete metamorphosis have a totally different nervous system development pattern. The adult insect's nervous system essentially forms anew during the pupal stage.

— But you just mentioned that the larva's nervous system is more or less maintained.
— It's maintained in the sense that if we have a nerve mass from the larva that was passed on to the pupa, it remains as that nerve mass. However, most cells are newly formed, and their count significantly increases at this stage. Almost all of the brain structures responsible for certain functions are formed during the pupal stage. Thus, it's possible to have a very basic larval nervous system that is designed for the number of functions the larva has, and then further develop everything the adult needs during the pupal stage.

— So, does complete metamorphosis allow for a smaller larva, meaning everyone else can be smaller too?
— Yes.

— From an evolutionary perspective, are miniature insects dead ends? Or do they exist long enough? Clearly, large mammals represent an evolutionary dead end. In every order, occasionally someone emerges, grows larger, and doesn't survive for long after that. Parthenogenesis is also a dead end. Parthenogenetic species appear in many orders, but they don't live long. As for miniatures, can we examine molecular phylogeny to see how far back the current branches extend? Or do creatures become smaller and smaller until they eventually die out?
— I think they are more likely not a dead end because many of them have been around for a very long time. For instance, there is an entire order of thrips that originated in the miniature class. This is a very ancient order, and they continue to exist without going extinct. They once specialized in extracting individual spores and adapted their mouthparts, size, and everything else for this purpose. Then, they secondarily became herbivores, predators, and so on. Some of them have even grown significantly larger than their ancestors.

— How do you know this? Do you trace it back using amber?
— No, we are talking before the amber period here. They exist in fossils from the Jurassic and Triassic periods. All thanks to the chitin. They're small, but if you find them, a lot is preserved. Besides, paleontologists have such an active imagination they even count the bristles on their wings.

— Do you mean on the fragments?
— Fragments, imprints…

— If you're half a millimeter in size, the imprint you leave on shale won't be very informative.
— I really like paleontologists, but I don't always believe them. I have a school friend who studies extinct thrips. He once told me that they had found a thrips in which everything was visible and perfectly preserved (I think it was from the Triassic period). And he showed me a picture. A whole A4 sheet with a drawing of a thrips, with bristles on its legs and wings. Millimeter or two in size, I can't remember. It was perfect. Flattened, crumpled, but perfectly detailed. And then he showed me a photo, and I couldn't even find the thrips in it, let alone identify its body parts. Then, out of curiosity, I asked to see the stone, because I couldn't see anything in the photo.
And yes, you can see something on the stone under a microscope. But how he managed to discern everything else.....

— What's the most interesting thing about small insects? For example, if something happened and you were left with only one PhD fellow, what would you have them do?
— I don't know. It's hard to choose. Maybe that's why I've always studied very different things only connected by the subjects themselves. Although they are all interconnected in some way. Right now, the most interesting things we are doing and will be doing involve flight and brain structure.

— Is that what your article in Nature is about?
— The article in Nature is about flight. It doesn't mention brain structure, but we'll definitely publish an article about it someday as well. These are related topics anyway because you need a brain to fly. Still, these are some very broad research areas.

— By "flight", do you mean flight mechanics and aerodynamics? Or do you mean flight in terms of reactions to obstacles and direction?
— I'm more interested in the mechanics of flight, but not just the aerodynamics. We are currently working with some of the co-authors of this paper to understand the muscles, flight control, and mechanics of wing movement...

— Isn't that classical mechanics?
— It's not as classical as in other insects. Of course, we're neither physicists nor mechanics or mathematicians. So for us, another interesting aspect of flight is diversity. There are many insects, and they all fly differently. What we have demonstrated in beetles, and what has been shown before in Hymenoptera, is not universally applicable. Different groups handle the changing balance of physical forces at very low Reynolds numbers in different ways. The Reynolds number is the ratio of inertial forces to viscous forces in different media. It's a certain constant that determines the balance of forces and largely affects the effectiveness of flapping flight at different sizes. And not just flight, it's also applicable to swimming. Small insects have very low Reynolds numbers, and for them, the balance of these forces is quite different from ours. They are essentially swimming in the air rather than flying, and their problem is more about pushing through the medium than maintaining their position in the air and compensating for their weight. Different insects deal with these problems in very different ways. Interestingly, there are some convergent similarities across different orders.

— Why do they need to fly at all when they can just live inside the fungi?
— One of the classic functions of living organisms is dispersal. This is very conveniently achieved by flying, and when you're small, it's doubly necessary. Because if we take some substrate, or some fungus, or something else, it can be short-lived. And if you lay just one egg, you have to live a very long time to gradually lay a certain number of eggs.

— Why not just fly with the wind then? Why is active flight necessary?
— Because flying with the wind means flying in a random direction. And if you live inside a fungus, you need to find that fungus in the rainforest. Flying with the wind, you'll probably never find any fungus. The main thing is that you don't have a lot of time, because outside of the substrate you're going to dry out because you're small. They most likely find the fungus by smell. But this is just speculation. We know very little about their biology and how all this happens.

— How do Trichogramma locate eggs?
— Trichogramma have excellent distance and contact chemoreception, which allows them to find everything without any issues.

— And it's species-specific. Does that mean this chemoreception also helps in distinguishing the host from its relatives and in finding mating partners?
— It's not entirely species-specific, with many species infecting a range of hosts. How they differentiate them, how they find them, and whether there is a significant difference are all very interesting questions.
Finding mates is somewhat easier for Hymenoptera than other insects, as their haplodiploid sex-determination system leads to the prevalence of close inbreeding. They often emerge from a host's egg clutch, mate with their siblings there, and then lay their own eggs in fresh ones nearby or elsewhere.

— What's the purpose of sexual reproduction if you're mating with your siblings? Isn't it supposed to help mix traits?
— Trait mixing still happens because the males are haploid. This prevents issues related to close inbreeding. Meanwhile, the majority of them reproduce parthenogenetically if males are not present.

— Species that reproduce parthenogenetically don't last long.
— A large number of Hymenoptera exhibit facultative parthenogenesis. They reproduce in the usual way if males are present. And if there are no males nearby, their reproduction occurs parthenogenetically. This doesn't deplete the population's gene pool as much as regular parthenogenesis does.

— Do they have Wolbachia?
— For most of our species, this is unknown. This is because hardly anyone has worked on their genetics. We sequenced the genome of a Megaphragma, which carries Wolbachia.

— Megaphragma?
— Megaphragma is one of our favorite subjects for which we have described nucleus-free neurons. It has become somewhat of a mecca in neurobiology. It's one of the smallest parasitoids, for which we have sequenced the entire genome. It carries Wolbachia in some populations but apparently not in others.

— Was there anything particularly surprising in its genome?
— To be honest, the project had an unexpected but disappointing result. There are numerous studies showing that the genome size in many animal groups correlates with body size, among other things.

— Shouldn't it correlate with the effective population size?
— Among other things. At least, there are studies on crustaceans and insects that show it really does depend...

— It depends because there is a common cause. If the body size is larger, the population size for the same area is usually smaller.
— We didn't specifically look at population size, but...

— Exactly. And if the population size is smaller, selection is less effective, and the genome may expand due to repeats. How can size have a direct influence?
— It can have a direct influence because the nuclei are larger. Somehow there is an elimination of some or all of the material, as is the case with Megaphragma, which has no nuclei in its neurons at all.

— Where does its transcription occur? Or is there no transcription at all?
— That's the biggest mystery. Transcription in neurons seems to occur before the nuclei disappear. They are not present in 97% of neurons in the adult, but everything is in place in the pupa. The nervous system, cells, pathways, etc., are formed. Just hours before the adult emerges from the pupa, a mass lysis occurs. The neuron nuclei are destroyed, leaving only the axons. And the adult lives with a nervous system in which 97% of its cells lack nuclei. It lives, eats, reproduces, flies, and even learns. I'd like to get back to what we were discussing earlier because I collaborated with Canadians on a project about beetle genome size. We took closely related beetles of different sizes with similar ecology and, I suspect, fairly similar population density. These populations are limitless because they live everywhere. And it turned out that within this group of beetles, the genome size varied almost tenfold between large and small beetles.

— Did it correlate with the size of the nucleus?
— Yes. We also examined this in sperm cells nuclei.

— Do larger beetles have larger sperm cells?
— Not always. Within the same family, there are sperm cells two and a half times longer than the body, while neighboring genera have tiny sperm cells which are 20 times shorter.

— Then let's leave the sperm aside. Will the average cell size vary?
— Yes, it will vary greatly, and it significantly correlates with body size.
With this in mind, we decided to sequence the entire genome of one of the smallest insects to understand the nature of this change. Although we didn't choose a beetle, we chose a Megaphragma because that's when nucleus-free neurons were discovered. It turns out that the Megaphragma's genome is almost the largest among all studied Hymenoptera.

— That contradicts what was said earlier, doesn't it?
— Indeed it does because these are two completely different groups of insects. It's possible that the lack of nuclei is partly due to the large genome. It seems that some species have reduced the size of their nuclei, allowing them to greatly compact their nervous system, while others have had to abandon nuclei in their nervous system for some unknown reason.

— Is the large genome due to repeats? If you take a closely related species and look at synteny.
— Everything turns out to be exactly the same. That is, we invested a lot of money in genomes, doing transcriptomes separately for the head and body. And in the end, we got a regular wasp and an article in PLOS One instead of Nature. Because it really turned out to be very boring.

— Boring as it may be, how transcription and splicing occur without a nucleus is an interesting question.
— It is an intriguing question, especially in the nervous system, because a significant part of its function is related to specific protein synthesis, which should determine the formation of synapses and so on. In theory, long-term memory should depend on proteins.

— So you can't synthesize everything while you still have nuclei and then work with that, right?
— Theoretically, it's probably possible. But how can it be regulated?
One of the things we're actively trying to do is to demonstrate that these insects have memory and experience learning processes so that we can then thoroughly study how it all works.

— Do you mean spraying something attractive for the insects with mint extract, let’s say, and seeing if they recognize mint? Something like that?
— Something like that. We tried all sorts of things with them. It's way trickier than working with bees and ants, which are well-understood. We started by trying to offer insects substrates with a set of smells or tastes, but it was very difficult because we couldn't distinguish age and often even gender in live specimens, nothing. All experiments involve host eggs, as is traditionally done with parasitoids, but the varying conditions of the insects greatly hinder them.

— There are probably also females mixed in with males... The behavior will depend on the ratio of females to males, right?
— Yes, it proved quite challenging, so we devised a small electric shock for them. They are 200 microns in length, you understand. We created chambers where we would shock them and simultaneously expose them to a neutral odor, so they could learn to avoid it. We even conceived, designed, built, and tested everything. It worked, but in the end, we couldn't find a neutral stimulus for them as their olfaction is so discrete that they only respond to a very limited range of stimuli.

— So they have certain odors they notice, and the rest they simply ignore, right?
— Yes. And what they notice is so deeply ingrained that retraining them proves to be very difficult.

— In retrospect, it seems obvious that this is how it work
— Indeed. We knew how many sensillae they have on their antennae, what types they are, and so on. But one wants to believe in the impossible. In other words, the result was somewhat expected, but we still had to see it for ourselves, and we did.
We then began to study them in a thermal arena similar to the Morris water maze, where he had rats swimming in the water with small islands appearing here and there...

— And the rats would memorize their locations.
— That's a classic experimental setup. For insects, a version was created long ago that included a field heated to an uncomfortable temperature with cold spots that would activate intermittently. Insects scurry around this arena locating the cold spots, and there are landmarks that rotate in sync with their activation. The insects' objective is to learn to navigate using the image on the screen and quickly locate the next cold spot.
Initially, these arenas were designed for crickets. In our experiments, we were inspired by an article in Nature where a similar 20-centimeter arena was used for Drosophila. In their setup, they already had a Peltier cooling module, computer controls, and an LED screen. All very sophisticated but of 20-centimeter size.
We spent a couple of years developing an 18-millimeter arena with four cold spots, cramming in all the necessary components, including controls for the cold spots, an LED screen displaying surrounding images, and the software to manage it all. And now, we're putting it through its paces. At this point, it doesn't matter whether the insect wants to eat or reproduce.

— I understand. It's too hot to do either of those things. But how do you verify things?
— It's quite simple because the insect doesn't know anything at the beginning. We can conduct several versions of the experiment. At first, we observe how the insect moves around the arena to ensure it doesn't prefer a certain part or a particular screen image. After that, the entire training sequence comes down to us activating a cold spot and observing the subject as it scurries around the arena until it finds it. Then it stays on the cold spot for a while to rest, after which we switch to another cold spot. When the previous cold spot warms up, the subject starts moving again, searching for the next one. The positive reinforcement here is that it finds a cold spot with a comfortable temperature...

— While observing the marks on the screen...
— By repeating this process a certain number of times, we can analyze the path the subject takes, the time it takes, the direction it starts moving after leaving the previous cold spot, and so on.

— Is there a camera overhead capturing the tracks, which are then processed by some software?
— Yes, we track the subject's movements and then analyze all the data. After that, we can deactivate all the cold spots and let the subject roam around the hot arena to see if it will search for a non-existent cold spot and measure how much time it spends in the area where a cold spot should have been.
We observe all of this in small insects. It appears that not only can they learn this, but they do so very quickly.
M.G.: Why do they run when they can fly?
A.P.: Well, they can’t. The arena is flat, and we adjust the height so that the subjects can run freely but are unable to fly. That is, it's about 200–300 microns high. It turns out small insects are capable of learning. All the subjects we've worked with learn to orient themselves in less than ten attempts.

— Is that faster than crickets?
— Yes, it's faster than crickets. According to Morris's classic studies, rats start learning from around the 15th to 18th attempt, while crickets start learning from the tenth attempt. The trichograms we mentioned earlier start learning from the fourth attempt, but the Megaphragma don't learn. Well, to be more precise, only some individuals learn.

— What does it depend on?
— That's a question we're trying to answer. Most likely, it depends on either their physiological state or environmental factors like temperature and light levels.

— A difficult upbringing, huh?
— It seems so. Given their limited set of senses and what they can perceive, one of the challenges when working with insects is that we don't fully understand how their world is designed. Until recently, most insect learning experiments were highly anthropomorphic. Giving them a task that is unsolvable for them and assuming they can learn to solve it, or giving them a task that they wouldn't naturally encounter in the wild, was a failed approach.
About 30 or 40 years ago, Mazokhin, one of the heads of our department, demonstrated with bees and later many times with ants that the level of learning varies greatly.
With ants, it turns out that roles within a single family are distributed in a very complex manner. There are individuals who can learn and those who can't. There are geniuses and those who can follow the genius but can't do anything on their own. In essence, it's a very complex world.
It seems we're dealing with individual peculiarities and the need to formulate the right tasks for experiments. With bees and wasps, you can try as much as you want, but bees easily learn color because they feed on flowers, while wasps learn the shape of images better and color worse because they are predators.

— Now you're talking about different species, not individuals within a family. By the way, I have another interesting question. It's clear that a large variance in learnability could be beneficial for social insects because a complex community is more stable than a community where all members are identical. But why does this happen with solitary insects? Does it simply depend on how the larva was fed?
— Indeed, a lot depends on how well you ate as a child. It's especially true for insects, and particularly for parasitoids, because depending on how many individuals develop in a single host egg or the size of the host egg, the body size can vary significantly. This is even true within the offspring of the same individual, and in the case of parthenogenesis, even within absolute clones.

— So how would you say this benefits the national economy? Or do they not allow journalists who ask such questions to talk to you?
— Unfortunately, I get asked this question often. Of course, I don't have an answer because what we're doing right now is purely fundamental science and has no practical application.

— Want me to come up with one? Your studies could be used to create microdrones.
— Every time I come up with some answers about biomorphic technologies, about micro-robotics... There is even a textbook on micro-robotics that has plagiarized parts of our articles and presented them as something from the future of robotics. But all of this is, of course, speculative. In reality, there is no practical sense in it at the moment.

— But there is. It's my question that was senseless. It was just a minor provocation.
— When we studied the flight of these small subjects, half of the people who wrote about it naturally wrote about miniature flying machines and so on. I think we even mentioned it in one of our articles. But not in the sense of "go ahead and make it", but as a challenge. Because currently, the development of miniature flying machines is mainstream in micro-robotics. Only the lazy aren't making insect-sized flying robots. Even top-tier labs and centers, like Harvard and MIT, are creating small robots. By their standards, small is one or two centimeters. They look fantastic in pictures, those cool winged robots. But the way they fly is laughably bad. So a robot that's a fraction of a millimeter in size isn't real robotics. It's a challenge for future roboticists.