DR George McGavin has found TV fame late in life, thanks to the BBC1 series, The Lost Land of the Tiger, which ran last week.

After more than 20 years at Oxford University’s Department of Zoology, McGavin told a packed audience about his higher-profile adventures, as well as lifting the stones on insect life, which makes up 65 per cent of all living things on earth – 40 tonnes for every human.

He poked fun at himself for making headlines for being unable to find his example of the world’s tiniest insect and revelled in his reputation as an insect-eater. Back home in Ascot, apparently, Dr McGavin dines on black crickets, which he breeds himself.

“Not one chef was interested apart from Heston Blumenthal,”

he said.

While his beloved 50 species of dung beetle, who do so much to stop us becoming the poo planet, were hailed, it was bees who dominated the second half of this bug-eyed look at life.

There are (or at least were) 264 species of bees in the UK out of a world population of 20,000. But our mania for “tidying up” areas of greenery and use of insecticides means that virtually every country is losing an alarming number of the pollinators and some US states have none at all.

McGavin revealed that the CSI TV series had produced a huge demand from people wanting to become forensic entomologists, studying insects which reveal information about corpses.

And if all that has got you scratching your head, just think that head lice are probably the one insect we could kill off without doing any harm to anything.