Animals / Insects
Insects
Q: How many insects are in the world?
A: If you are talking about the number of different kinds of insects in the world, a good scientific estimate is that there are 1,017,018 species of insects in the world. Wow! That means you could spend your whole life looking at different kinds of insects and never see them all. Three out of four creatures on the planet are insects.
The Smithsonian - Jakob Sturm’s Insecten-Sammlung (1796) Subsection 1
Q: What insect lives the longest?
A: Tarantulas can live 30 years; a queen termite has been known to live 50 years; and there are, of course, the 17-year locusts. Most bugs live less than a year and are seasonal. However, some wood beetles can emerge from wood where they live after as long as 40 years!! In one recorded case, the beetles came out of wood that had long ago been cut down and made into a bookshelf!
The Smithsonian - Jakob Sturm’s Insecten-Sammlung (1796) Subsection 2
Q: Why do insects like light?
A: No one really knows. Most scientists think that bright lights confuse the insects' guidance systems so they can't fly straight any more.
Q: What is the largest insect?
A: In the book Beetles by Bernard Klaustnizer, there is a beetle called the South American longhorn beetle (Tytanus giganteus) that measures 25 cm! The heaviest insect is probably the African goliath beetle (Megasoma elephas), weighing up to 3.4 oz. And the longest insect is a huge stick insect (Pharnacia serritypes). The females can be over 36 cm in length!!
The Smithsonian - Jakob Sturm’s Insecten-Sammlung (1796) Subsection 3
Q: Do insects have blood and do they bleed when they are hurt?
A: Insects have blood, but it's not like our blood. Our blood is red because it has hemoglobin, which is used to carry oxygen to where it is needed in the body. Insects get oxygen from a complex system of air tubes that connect to the outside through openings called spiracles. So instead of carrying oxygen, their blood carries nutrients from one part of the body to another. They do bleed when they are hurt, and their blood can clot so they can recover from minor wounds.
The Smithsonian - Jakob Sturm’s Insecten-Sammlung (1796) Subsection 4
Q: Why do insects drown in water?
A: Not all insects drown in water. In fact, quite a few live there for at least part of their lives. Insects breathe through holes in the sides of their bodies. If they can't get air in through the holes, they will suffocate. That's why insects that are not specialized for living in water will die in water. But dragonfly nymphs, mosquito larvae, and water beetles all live in water quite happily!
Luna Moth - Montreal Insectarium
Entomology is the study of insects. Insects have an exoskeleton, three body segments - the head, the thorax, and the abdomen. The head is where you find all the sensory organs - the eyes, ears, mouth and antennae. The thorax is where all of the insect's legs and wings are attached. The abdomen is where the insect digests its food and where its reproductive organs are located. Most insects have 2 pair of wings, but some have one pair like flies.
The Smithsonian - Jakob Sturm’s Insecten-Sammlung (1796) Subsection 5
Certain types of fleas may be trained to perform various feats such as jumping through hoops, juggling, and pulling objects several hundred times their weight. Fleas can jump the equivalent of what, relative to body size, would be the length of a football field for a human.
The Smithsonian - Jakob Sturm’s Insecten-Sammlung (1796) Subsection 6
Certain large spiders are very powerful and can kill small birds, rats, fish, and other small animals. Although spiders are officially arachnids not insects.
The Smithsonian - Jakob Sturm’s Insecten-Sammlung (1796) Subsection 7
If you weighed all the ants in the world, the total weight is more than all the people put together. For every human there are one million ants.
The Smithsonian - Jakob Sturm’s Insecten-Sammlung (1796) Subsection 8
Fire ants can find their way back to the nest in full darkness using an internal compass. According to resarchers, they consume very small amounts of a natural mineral called magnetite which functions as a compass.
The Smithsonian - Jakob Sturm’s Insecten-Sammlung (1796) Subsection 9
African weaver ants can haul prey weighing more than 1,000 times their own weight up trees to their nests mainly through the aid of large adhesive pads on each foot.
The Smithsonian - Jakob Sturm’s Insecten-Sammlung (1796) Subsection 10
The beautiful, iridescent colors of butterfly wings are a result of the way the tiny over-lapping scales covering the wings reflect light. The beauty is dependent on structure, not pigment.
The largest known butterfly, Queen Alexandra's Birdwing of New Guinea, has a wingspan of about 11 inches. The smallest with a wingspan of only 1/2 inch is the Dwarf Blue from Africa.
The types of insects (orders) are:
- Archaeognatha (bristletails)
- Thysanura (silverfish)
- Ephemeroptera (mayflies)
- Odonata (damselflies and dragonflies)
- Orthoptera (crickets and grasshoppers)
- Plecoptera (stoneflies)
- Grylloblattodea (rock crawlers)
- Phasmotodea (stick and leaf insects)
- Dermaptera (earwigs)
- Mantodea (mantids)
- Blattodea (cockroaches)
- Isoptera (termites)
- Embioptera (web-spinners)
- Zoraptera (angel insects)
- Psocoptera (barklice and booklice)
- Phthiraptera (parasitic lice)
- Hemiptera (bugs)
- Thysanoptera (thrips)
- Megaloptera (dobsonflies and alderflies)
- Rapdhidioptera (snakeflies)
- Neuroptera (antlions and lacewings)
- Coleoptera (beetles)
- Strepsiptera (strepsipterans)
- Mecoptera (scorpionflies)
- Siphonaptera (fleas)
- Diptera (flies)
- Trichoptera (caddisflies)
- Lepidoptera (moths and butterflies)
- Hymenoptera (bees, wasps, ants, sawflies)
Wikipedia excerpt for "Insects":
Insects (Class Insecta) are the biggest class of arthropods and the only ones with wings. They are the most diverse group of animals on the Earth. They are most diverse at the equator and their diversity declines toward the poles. With over a million described species—more than half of all known living organisms — with estimates of undescribed species as high as 30 million, thus potentially representing over 90% of the differing life forms on the planet. Insects may be found in nearly all environments on the planet, although only a small number of species occur in the oceans, a habitat dominated by another arthropod group, the crustaceans.
There are approximately 2,000 praying mantis, 5,000 dragonfly species, 20,000 grasshopper, 82,000 true bug, 120,000 fly, 110,000 bee, wasp ant and sawfly, 170,000 butterfly and moth, and 360,000 beetle species described to date. Estimates of the total number of current species, including those not yet known to science, range from two million to fifty million, with newer studies favouring a lower figure of about six to ten million. Adult modern insects range in size from a 0.139 mm (0.00547 in) fairyfly (Dicopomorpha echmepterygis) to a 56.7 centimetres (22.3 in) long stick insect (Phobaeticus chani).[7] The heaviest documented insect was a Giant Weta of 70 g (2½ oz), but other possible candidates include the Goliath beetles Goliathus goliatus, Goliathus regius and Cerambycid beetles such as Titanus giganteus, though no one is certain which is truly the heaviest. The study of insects (from Latin insectus, meaning "cut into sections") is called entomology, from the Greek εντομον, also meaning "cut into sections".
See full Wikipedia Insects article
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