Ladybugs hatch from eggs. We’re done here.

What’s that? The header picture says to go from egg to ladybug, not vice versa? Well, that will take longer, and there will be dragons bridges.

Eggs are only fragile when squeezed the wrong way. If you squeeze top-to-bottom rather than side-to-side, eggs are shockingly strong. Your average chicken egg can withstand 100 pounds. Your average ostrich egg, 1000. (Although I live in Massachusetts, where there is no such thing as an average ostrich. There is only, “Oh my god is that an ostrich? How is it so big? Why’s it in the living room?”)

Incredulity over the existence of ostriches aside, let’s return to incredulity about the strength of eggs. Force on the top gets spread through the rest of the shell, just like in an arched bridge. But it’s more interesting than that cursory summary suggests. Eggs and bridges don’t merely spread forces. they transform tension into compression. Tension spreads a material apart while compression squeezes it together. Most materials, including eggshells and concrete, are stronger under compression than tension, because little cracks get shoved together instead of being opened wider.

Most, but not all. It’s fairly hard to tear a piece of paper by pulling two sides apart (tension) but fairly easy to crumple it by pushing the sides together (compression). That also makes paper easy to fold into airplanes. (I never got into the paper airplanes with flat ends, even though they always seemed to work better. I’m something of a purist.) Now, planes fly for a constellation of reasons that are a story for another time. Insects, on the other hand, fly for reasons that are (mostly) a story for right now. They push their wings down against the air, which, through Newton’s Third Law, pushes them back up. That’s far from the full picture, of course. Air’s viscosity and other aspects of fluid dynamics mean that insect flight is in truth as complex as anything else. But that’s the big-picture gist for all insects.

Including, of course, ladybugs. Now we’re done here.