BUG FACTS!
25 Interesting Bug Facts
- There is estimated to be 10 quintrillion insects alive at any one moment, so around 200 million insects for every human.
- The largest known insect to have lived is an ancient dragonfly-like insect, the griffinfly. Its wingspan was 27 inches from tip to tip. The amount of oxygen in the air was much greater 300 million years ago than it is today. This made it possible for large insects to evolve.
- The oldest insect fossil ever found is 410 million years old. scientists believe it was a flying insect.
- There are 10 million billion ants in the world.
- Ants have an excellent sense of taste. They can taste the difference between sour, sweet, bitter, and salty flavors.
- Leafcutter ants feed on a fungus- a plantlike organism-which they grow in a colony garden.
- Cockroaches have hairs called setae that help them sense air pressure. This helps them escape from predators such as humans.
- Since a cockroach's brain does not control its breathing, the insect can survive for weeks without a head.
- There are 825 known tick species. Some ticks can live as long as 200 days without food or water.
- Despite their name, fireflies are not flies. They are beetles.
- Ladybugs which are a type of beetle, bleed from their legs when threatened.
- Dragonflies have the largest compound eyes of any insect. Each eye contains 30,000 lenses.
- Mosquitoes rely party on their sense of smell to find humans to bite. They can smell carbon dioxide the gas humans breathe out.
- Bog orchids rely on mosquitoes for pollination. So they give off a humanlike body odor that attracts mosquitoes.
- Before some wasps forage for food. They fly several loops around their nest to help identify it's location and find their way back.
- When a worker honeybee discovers a food source, it informs other members of the colony. if a food source is less than 80 feet from the hive, the bee preforms a circular dance. if the food source is farther away, it performs a waggle dance. to indicate a food source is abundant, the worker honeybee will change direction many times during its dance.
- Adult moths and butterflies suck up nectar through a long feeding tube called a proboscis.
- A female wolf spider lays several dozen eggs, which she wraps together in a silk sac and carries on her back. After the eggs hatch, the tiny spiderlings climb onto their mothers back. She carries them for several days.
- Instead of laying eggs, scorpions give birth to live young.
- Snails are hermaphrodites. They are capable of producing eggs and sperm.
- Clover mites reproduce by parthenogenesis. This means that only females are known to exist. The females are able to reproduce without mating.
- Critters in the order of Opiliones-often called daddy longlegs or harvestmen-are not spiders. unlike spiders they have two eyes and do not produce silk or venom.
- A diving bell spider spends most of its life underwater. The diving bell spider lives in a homemade underwater "diving" bell." The spider comes to the surface, traps a bubble of air, and then dives back down again to release this bubble under a 'canopy', a shelter that is made of silk sheet fastened horizontally between submerged stems of water plants with silk binds.
- Aphids excrete a sweet-tasing material called "honeydew". Since the insects eat copious amounts of sap, their leavings are jam-packed with sugar, which attracts other animals like ladybugs. Certain ants are so fond of honeydew that they'll raise their own aphid colonies-like human farmers tending to cows.
- The rabbit flea Spilopsyllus cuniculi reproduces only on pregnant rabbits. The functioning of the germinal cells of the flea are regulated by the sexual hormones of the host. The reproduction of host and parasite are synchronised so that the young fleashatch to meet the young rabbits. The dependence is so close that the flea will reabsorb its eggs if the female host miscarries.
