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Monday 24 August 2015

Insect

Insects have six legs and bodies in three sections: abdomen, head and thorax.

In ancient Egypt, servants were covered in honey so as to attract flies away from the Pharaoh.

During the 1899 Harriman Alaska Expedition the naturalist Trevor Kincaid collected about 8,000 specimens of insect, resulting in the discovery and naming of more than 240 new species. They included Mesenchytraeus harrimani which he named after the expedition's patron, E. H. Harriman.

Satoshi Tajiri, creator of Pokémon, loved insect collecting as a child. As more and more land was paved over to make room for Japan's cities, Tajiri became inspired to create the Pokémon video games so that other children could experience the joy of catching bugs just as he had.

The mystery of how insects fly was solved following some brilliant work by Danish scientist Torkel Weis-fogh (1922-1975), a professor of zoology at Cambridge University in the 1970s. He explained that an insect’s wing works by encouraging air to flow over it in such a way that when the air leaves the rear edge of the wing, it moves downwards. The resultant eddy produces an upwards thrust on the wing.

In 2004, to study the declining insect population, almost 40,000 UK drivers affixed a "splatometer" to the front of their cars. The results found one squashed insect per 5 miles driven, contrasting with summers of 30 years ago when windshields would quickly become encrusted with tiny bodies.

At any time, it is estimated that there are some 10 quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) individual insects alive.

There are more than 26 billion insects living in each square mile of habitable land on Earth.

There are 1.4 billion insects for every human on Earth.

Every acre of crop harvested contains 100 lbs. of insects.

80% of the animals on Earth are insects.

The combined weight of all insects on earth is 70 times greater than the combined weight of all humans.

More than a million species of insects have been discovered and named. Some 24,000 can be found in the UK.


The rarest insect in the world is the Lord Howe Island stick insect. It was believed to be extinct since 1920 until some were found again in 2001. In 2006 there were only about 50 of them, but only two years later their population increased to 700.

The only insect indigenous to Antarctica is the wingless midge Belgica antarctica. It has the smallest known insect genome, with only 99 million base pairs of nucleotides (and about 13,500 genes).

Insects don't have lungs. They just kinda absorb oxygen and it is related to their size, which is why bugs got so big when the Earth had more oxygen.

The sound produced by insects rubbing their legs together is called 'stridulation'.

Insects do sort of sleep at times, their state of rest is called torpor. They are only aroused by strong stimuli – the heat of day, the darkness of night, or at times a sudden attack by a predator.

Thopha saccata, commonly known as the double drummer, is the largest Australian species of cicada and reputedly the loudest insect in the world. Its common name comes from the large dark red-brown sac-like pockets that the adult male has on each side of its abdomen—the "double drums"—that are used to amplify the sound it produces.

The praying mantis is the only insect that can turn its head through 180 degrees.

The small hopping insect Issus Coleoptratus uses toothed gears on its joints to precisely synchronize the kicks of its hind legs as it jumps forward. This insect has the only mechanical gears ever found in nature.

The smallest winged insect, the Tanzanian parasitic wasp, is smaller than a housefly's eye.

2.5 billion people are estimated to regularly eat insects every day. Insects contain high amounts of fiber, protein, vitamins and minerals.

In the course of an average lifetime you'll, while sleeping, eat 70 insects and 10 spiders.

Many female insects mate only once in their lives.  To control insect populations, a clever strategy has been developed: introducing swarms of sterile males into the wild. These males are unable to father offspring, and when they encounter the females, they engage in a mating ritual. The females, having mated with these sterile males, never give birth and simply die.

The most painful insect sting is from a bullet ant that can be found in Central and South America. The pain caused by this insect's sting is, according to some victims, equal to being shot, hence the name of the ant.

Bullet ant near La Selva Biological Station (OTS), Costa Rica. By © Hans Hillewaert. Wikipedia

The blast of air you feel when walking into a store is to prevent insects from flying in.

The most insects used in a movie is the 22 million bees used in The Swarm.

African driver ant queens lay the most eggs of any insect species: 3 to 4 million eggs every 25 days.

The actor Chris Pratt and his then-wife Anna Faris clicked over their shared hobby — collecting insects.

Here is a list of song titles with insects in them.

Source Daily Express
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