Do Beetles Have Heart Attacks?

While standing outside my back door, a rather small brownish beetle clinging to the stucco of my house caught my eye.   I had no sooner focused on the beetle when it fell from the stucco and crashed down onto the brick ledge about two feet below.   After falling, the beetle did not move.  I watched the beetle for quite a while.  No movement at all.  Eventually, I gently prodded at the beetle with a blade of grass.

The beetle was dead.  I had, apparently, witnessed the beetle’s death and spectacular fall.

Had the beetle suffered a heart attack?

Wait.

Do insects have heart attacks?   Is that something important to know?

I withdrew to the house and scoured the internet.

Insects don’t have a complex system of veins and arteries splayed throughout their bodies like the roots of a great oak tree, as we do.  Instead, they have an open system where hemolymph flows freely throughout their body cavities, lubricating tissues and transporting nutrients and wastes.   The heart of a beetle is something of a dorsal vessel that pulsates to circulate the hemolymph throughout the body cavity.

Heart attacks seem unlikely.

What, then, caused this sudden death and dramatic fall?

Annie Dillard, within her brilliant work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, wrote this: “A photography professor at the University of Florida just happened to see a bird die in midflight; it jerked, died, dropped, and smashed on the ground.”

A few years ago, a dead starling hung upside-down  from a powerline I passed almost daily on my drive into town.  The bird had died while perched on the line.  Upon death, the bird’s claws froze around the line and it swung down below the wire like macabre pendulum.  The bird hung on the line this way for several weeks.

I don’t know why some birds and beetles die, but they are as good at is as anything else.

—Mitchell Hegman