The Ebola virus, almost extinct grouse, ear mites and eye worms: the questions were not really fun during the VMBO final exam in biology on Thursday. Between questions about the headless King Louis XVI and an aquarium full of dead fish, breeding stallions and pooping pigs still had to bring some life to the brewery.
One row of questions was about human reproduction, but it sounded more edifying than spicy. “Wedding night sex” read next to a black-and-white photo of a newlyweds. Would have depicted that black grouse, I thought bitterly.
The last time I took a biology final exam was in 2008. I had already graduated from high school for five years, but it was a bet with my boyfriend at the time: I boasted that as an earth scientist I knew a lot more about nature than he did as an earth scientist. astronomer. And so we looked at an online final exam. In the end I scored a 6.2, he an 8.4. Too many questions about the human body, I grumbled, and too few about ecology. As if man is the only interesting animal on earth.
This year I couldn’t complain: even an illustrious insect like the harlequin longhorn beetle, which feeds on rotting wood, was featured – with illustration and a smooth story: “Before a harlequin beetle flies to another tree, mongrel scorpions crawl under its wings. (…) One male bastard scorpion and several females crawl on a harlequin longhorn beetle. During the flight of the harlequin longhorn beetle, the bastard scorpions mate.” I was so excited about this fact that when I asked the next question (“A male bastard scorpion chases away other males if they also want to crawl on its harlequin longhorn. What is this behavior called?”) I couldn’t come up with the answer “territory behavior.”
Elsewhere, too, I was mistaken: I had forgotten the existence of a “vitreous body” in the eyeball—or perhaps I was too distracted by the life-sized eye worm that had been drawn therein. brrr.
With that eyeworm a simple family tree was depicted. The entire final exam therefore contained exactly one question about evolution. I thought back to the riot last fall, when research by NRC it turned out that publishers sometimes ‘clean’ the content of school books so as not to offend strict religious school boards. This also has consequences for the final exam.
Luckily there was the side note about the bastard scorpions, I thought as I added up my points – with a bit of luck I just got a pass. Mating while flying: still some exciting sex.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of May 13, 2022
#Mating #wings #harlequin #longhorn #beetle