146 Fun Facts About Insects

How many legs does an adult insect typically have?

Six is no accident: it is the fewest legs that allow a tripod gait, in which three feet stay planted, two on one side and one on the other, while the other three step forward.

An adult insect's body is divided into how many main sections?

Three: head, thorax and abdomen. Spiders and scorpions get by with two, because a single front section does the work of both head and thorax.

Albert's swarm of 1875, which covered an area larger than California, was made up of which insect?

The Rocky Mountain locust darkened the sky from the Dakotas to Texas in the 1870s, yet within about thirty years it had vanished; the last live specimens were collected in Manitoba in 1902.

Which insect secretes the resin used for French polish and glossy candy coatings?

The lac bug's resin, scraped from tree bark in India and Thailand, is shellac; until vinyl replaced it, most gramophone records were pressed from the stuff.

Which of these insects lives in highly organized colonies with a queen, workers and soldiers?

Ants are eusocial insects living in colonies of a few dozen to millions, with a division of labor: the queen, workers and soldiers each play a specific role in the colony's survival and reproduction.

Periodical cicadas of the genus Magicicada spend how many years underground before emerging en masse?

13 or 17 years: such long, odd cycles may help broods escape specialised predators, and so many adults emerge at once that the birds waiting above cannot eat them all.

Which giant Asian moth, one of the largest insects on Earth, has wingtips that resemble snake heads?

The Atlas moth cannot eat: adults emerge without working mouthparts and live only a week or two on fat stored as larvae, just long enough to find a mate.

Which insect order has hardened forewings that protect the hindwings?

Beetles fold their membranous flight wings beneath these armoured cases, which lets them burrow and squeeze into tight spaces without damage.

Which solitary wasps stock each cell of their nests with paralysed spiders for their young to eat?

Mud daubers sting spiders to paralyse rather than kill them, so the meat stays fresh; each cell is packed with spiders, given a single egg and sealed.

Which insect defends itself by firing a boiling-hot chemical spray from its rear with an audible pop?

The bombardier beetle stores two chemicals apart and mixes them in a chamber only when threatened; the reaction heats the spray to near boiling, and one beetle can fire about 20 times.

Members of the subfamily Phymatinae, which seize prey on flowers, are commonly called what?

Phymatinae are the ambush bugs; despite being only about a centimetre long, they routinely seize prey ten or more times their own size, including bumblebees.

Which New Zealand insect is among the world's heaviest, one egg-laden captive female reaching about 70 grams?

The giant weta can outweigh a sparrow, but that record female was unmated and swollen with eggs she never laid; adult females usually weigh up to about 35 grams.

Which type of mimicry has a harmless species evolve to resemble a harmful one?

Batesian mimicry is a bluff: predators that have learned to avoid a noxious species mistake its harmless lookalike for the real thing and leave it alone too.

Which body segment of an adult insect typically bears the wings and legs?

The thorax is the insect's engine room, packed with muscle; in many insects the flight muscles never touch the wings but flex the thorax itself, and that makes the wings beat.

With which body part do most insects mainly smell?

Antennae are an insect's nose: they are covered in receptors that pick odour molecules out of the air, which is how a moth finds a mate or the right plant for her eggs in the dark.

Which type of insect metamorphosis has four life stages rather than three?

Complete metamorphosis gives young and adults different bodies and diets, so a grub and the beetle it becomes need not compete for the same food or living space.

Which of these insect orders is generally considered to have the largest number of described species?

Coleoptera, the order of beetles, is the largest order of insects, with more described species than any other order.

What are the external openings of an insect's breathing tubes called?

Spiracles have tiny muscle-worked valves: an insect opens them to breathe and shuts them to stop water evaporating from its body, a vital trick in dry places.

Which compound do fireflies combine with oxygen to produce their glow?

Luciferin gives off light when the enzyme luciferase joins it to oxygen; the glow is a 'cold light', with almost all the energy released as light and hardly any wasted as heat.

The red food and lipstick colourant carmine (E120) is extracted from which insect?

Cochineal are scale insects that live on prickly-pear cactus; the dye is simply the dried, crushed bodies of the females, about 70,000 of them to every pound.

What is the primary method of communication for many social insects?

Chemical pheromones do the talking: an ant that finds food lays a scent trail on its way home, and every nestmate that follows adds to it until the food runs out.

What is the 'blood' of insects called, which circulates nutrients but not oxygen?

Hemolymph is usually clear, sometimes greenish or yellowish, rather than red: it washes freely around the organs instead of running through veins, and leaves oxygen delivery to the air tubes.

What type of mouthparts do mosquitoes and aphids have?

Piercing-sucking mouthparts are specialized for penetrating plant or animal tissues and drawing out fluids, as seen in mosquitoes that feed on blood and aphids that feed on plant sap.

What is the primary role of a drone bee in a honey bee colony?

Mating with the queen is a drone's only job and usually his last: a drone that succeeds dies in the act, and those still in the hive when the cold comes are forced out by the workers to starve.

What is the rigid chitin-based structure that supports and protects an insect's body called?

The exoskeleton is more than armour: a thin waxy layer on its surface stops water escaping, the waterproofing that lets such small animals survive in dry air.

What is the term for making sound by rubbing body parts together, as crickets and grasshoppers do?

Stridulation works like a nail drawn along a comb: a cricket drags a scraper on one wing across a toothed file on the other, while most grasshoppers rub a hind leg against a forewing.

What do scientists call an aphid being born already pregnant with its own young?

Telescoping generations nests daughters and granddaughters inside one mother; since aphids also clone themselves without mating, their numbers can multiply with great speed.

Which insect's 'waggle dance' communicates the location of food sources?

Honey bees perform a complex 'waggle dance' to inform other worker bees about the direction and distance to profitable food sources.

Which disease is transmitted to humans by certain species of mosquitoes?

Malaria is Italian for 'bad air': the fever was long blamed on swamp vapours, until Ronald Ross showed how the parasite is carried by mosquitoes, work that won him a Nobel Prize.

What is the process by which an insect sheds its old cuticle in order to grow called?

Ecdysis is the moult: the old cuticle splits down the back and the insect crawls out. H. L. Mencken borrowed the word to coin 'ecdysiast', a grand name for a striptease artist.

What is the inactive, non-feeding stage between larva and adult called?

The pupa only looks idle: inside, most of the larva's organs are broken down and rebuilt into the adult from small clusters of cells held in reserve since the egg.

The first animals sent into space, aboard a US-launched V-2 rocket in February 1947, were what?

Fruit flies went up so scientists could see what cosmic radiation did to living things; the capsule was recovered safely, and the flies came back alive and unharmed.

The emerald jewel wasp stings which insect in the brain, then leads the docile victim to its burrow?

A cockroach stung this way loses the urge to flee: the wasp walks it home by an antenna like a dog on a leash, lays an egg on it, and the grub eats it alive.

Which insect order includes grasshoppers, crickets and locusts?

Orthoptera means 'straight wings'; a locust, incidentally, is no separate creature but a grasshopper of certain species that has switched into its crowded, swarming phase.

Which type of eye, built from ommatidia, do most adult insects have?

Compound eyes are made of many ommatidia, each with its own lens pointing in a slightly different direction, so the mosaic image is coarse but exceptionally good at detecting movement.

Which insect do gardeners welcome as a voracious predator of aphids?

Ladybugs are such effective hunters that in 1888 California shipped in an Australian species to save its citrus groves from a scale insect, an early triumph of biological pest control.

What do young worker honey bees spend their first weeks doing, before ever flying out to forage?

Nursing brood and building comb are indoor jobs for the young; a worker turns to foraging only at about three weeks old, and the risks outside are why summer workers live just a few weeks.

Which mouthpart type is typical of a grasshopper?

Chewing mouthparts are considered the most primitive type and feature robust mandibles used for biting, tearing, and grinding solid food, as seen in grasshoppers and beetles.

What material do worker honey bees produce from glands on their abdomens to build honeycombs?

Wax is costly: bees burn through several pounds of honey to secrete a single pound of it, and hexagons wall in the most storage with the least wax.

Which insect order includes butterflies and moths?

Lepidoptera means 'scale wings': the colours and patterns come from thousands of tiny overlapping scales, really flattened hairs, that cover the wings.

Adult females of one species of which insect live for less than five minutes?

Mayflies are adults only to breed: they emerge with useless mouthparts and never feed, and females of the American species Dolania americana are dead within five minutes.

Which insect has been farmed for about 5,000 years and can no longer fly or survive in the wild?

The silkworm moth depends entirely on people: millennia of breeding left the adults too heavy to fly, while each cocoon unwinds into a single thread up to 900 metres long.

Among mosquitoes, which individuals bite and drink blood?

Only the females bite: both sexes feed on nectar, but in most species a female needs the protein from a blood meal to mature her eggs.

Which insect order includes flies and mosquitoes?

Diptera means 'two wings': true flies fly on a single pair, which is the quick way to tell that a butterfly, a firefly or a sawfly is no fly at all.

What is the common name for the larvae of butterflies and moths?

Caterpillars are 'eating machines' that do nearly all the feeding: the winged adults they become only sip liquids such as nectar, and some never eat at all.

Which of these is a social insect known for building complex nests called mounds?

Termites are highly social insects that live in colonies and are renowned for constructing elaborate nests, often in the form of large mounds.

What type of metamorphosis do grasshoppers and cockroaches undergo?

Incomplete metamorphosis is the gradual kind: the young, called nymphs, look like small wingless adults, and their wing buds grow a little with every moult until the last.

Which butterfly flies up to 3,000 miles each autumn to spend the winter in the mountains of central Mexico?

The monarch butterfly that flies south never makes the full trip back: the return north takes several short-lived generations, yet their descendants find the same Mexican mountains the next autumn.

A stick insect grabbed by a predator may escape by doing what?

Shedding a leg and regrowing it is the stick insect's last resort: the held limb breaks away, and a young insect grows a replacement over its next moults.

Which insect order includes ants, bees, and wasps?

Hymenoptera are the only insects that can sting, and the sting is a modified egg-laying tube, which is why a male bee, wasp or ant is harmless.

What is the function of the labrum in an insect's mouthparts?

Acting as an upper lip, the labrum is a flap that closes the front of the mouth and keeps food in while the jaws, which swing from side to side rather than up and down, do the cutting.

Which of these blood-feeding pests is an arachnid rather than an insect?

A tick is an arachnid with eight legs as an adult; oddly, it hatches with only six and gains the fourth pair after its first blood meal and moult.

Mealworms, farmed by the tonne as animal feed, are the larvae of which beetle?

The darkling beetle Tenebrio molitor is an old pest of stored grain that people turned into a crop: its larvae are now bred on purpose as food for pet birds, reptiles and fish.

Honey bees can see ultraviolet light but are blind to which colour?

Red falls outside a honey bee's range: its colour vision is shifted towards the ultraviolet and stops short of red, so it reads ultraviolet patterns on petals that we cannot see at all.

Dolbear's law, published in 1897, lets you estimate the air temperature by counting what?

Cricket chirps quicken as the air warms, which is what physicist Amos Dolbear's rule exploits: count the chirps in about 15 seconds and add 40 for a rough reading in Fahrenheit.

What is a queen honey bee's main job in her colony?

Laying eggs is her whole job, up to about 1,500 a day; when her output or her scent signal falters, the workers simply raise a new queen to replace her.

Which insect is known for transmitting African sleeping sickness?

The tsetse fly breeds more like a mammal than an insect: the female carries one larva at a time inside her body and feeds it on a milk-like secretion until it is ready to be born.

What are the hardened forewings of beetles, which protect the hindwings, called?

Elytra, from the Greek for 'covering', shield the delicate flight wings folded beneath them; in some flightless beetles the two halves have fused shut for good.

Why does a worker honey bee usually die after stinging a person?

Its barbed sting rips out, taking part of the abdomen with it, because the barbs catch in elastic mammal skin; the same bee can sting another insect and fly away unharmed.

What is the largest purely terrestrial animal native to Antarctica?

A flightless midge, Belgica antarctica, is just 2 to 6 mm long; going without wings may keep the wind from blowing it somewhere deadly, and the adults live no more than ten days.

Certain desert-dwelling ants have specialised workers called 'repletes'. What is their job?

Their bodies become living larders that nestmates tap when food is scarce; the nests are found in arid and semi-arid regions.

The word 'insect' comes from a Latin word meaning what?

Cut up, or notched: Latin insectum translated Aristotle's Greek entomon, because an insect's body looks cut into sections, and the Greek word lives on in 'entomology'.

Roughly how many insect species have been formally described and named?

About one million insect species have been named, more than half of all known animals, yet most are still waiting: estimates of the true total run to five million or more.

The loudest insect ever measured, an African species whose call tops 106 decibels, is what kind of insect?

A cicada, Africa's shrill thorntree cicada, holds the record, nearly as loud as a chainsaw; males make the din by rapidly buckling drum-like membranes called tymbals, not by rubbing wings or legs.

Cicadas, aphids and bed bugs all belong to which insect order?

Hemiptera are the 'true bugs': to an entomologist only they earn the word, so a lovebug, which is a fly, and a maybug, which is a beetle, are not bugs at all.

Beondegi, a street snack of silkworms served in paper cups, comes from which country?

South Korea makes beondegi from a leftover of the silk trade: the insects are what remains once the thread has been unwound from their cocoons.

Which California crop needs so many pollinators that over a million beehives are trucked in for its bloom each February?

Almonds mostly cannot pollinate themselves, so beekeepers from across the country truck their hives to California for the bloom, the largest managed pollination event in the world.

Leafcutter ants carry cut leaves back to their nests in order to do what?

They feed a fungus they eat: the garden nourishes the ant larvae, and if a kind of leaf turns out to poison the fungus, the colony stops collecting it.

Greenhouse tomatoes are pollinated commercially by which insects?

Bumblebees grip the flower and vibrate their flight muscles until the pollen shakes loose, a trick called buzz pollination that honey bees cannot perform.

Nurse bees feed which secretion to every larva for three days, and to some throughout development?

Royal jelly is fed to every larva for its first three days, but only future queens keep receiving it, which helps trigger the fully developed ovaries they need.

Ants 'milk' aphids for a sugary liquid called what?

Honeydew is the sugary waste aphids pass after feeding on plant sap; ants collect it and guard their 'herd' in return, and bees that gather it instead of nectar make a dark honey.

Butterflies' taste receptors are located mainly on which body part?

Butterflies taste mainly with their feet: contact sensors on the tarsi let a female check, just by landing, whether a leaf will feed her young before she lays eggs on it.

In true flies, the hind wings have evolved into small club-shaped organs called what?

Halteres beat in time with the wings and sense body rotation like tiny gyroscopes; in the parasitic strepsipterans it is the front wings that became halteres instead.

Males of which beetle can reach 17 cm including the horn, the longest of any beetle?

The Hercules beetle is half horn: more than half the male's length can be the pincer-like pair he uses to seize a rival, lift him off the branch and hurl him aside.

The Oriental rat flea is the primary vector of which disease?

Plague reaches people when the rats die: their hungry fleas, already carrying the bacteria, jump to the nearest warm body, the route long blamed for the Black Death.

Africanized bees spread across the Americas after escaping a 1957 apiary in which country?

Brazil's Warwick Kerr was crossing European bees with a hardier African strain at Rio Claro when a lapse with the queen excluders let swarms with African queens escape and spread.

The globe skimmer, which migrates some 18,000 km over generations, is what kind of insect?

The globe skimmer is the dragonfly Pantala flavescens; it rides monsoon winds between India and East Africa, with individuals flying more than 6,000 km of the circuit.

In the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs, which moth does the killer leave in his victims' throats?

The death's-head hawkmoth carries a skull-like mark on its back; it raids beehives for honey and squeaks like a mouse when disturbed, which did nothing to calm old superstitions about it.

Queen Alexandra's birdwing, the world's largest butterfly, is found only in which country?

Papua New Guinea's Oro Province is its only home, about 100 square km of rainforest; the butterfly is so prized by collectors that all international trade in it is banned.

Crickets hear through eardrum-like organs located where on their bodies?

Crickets' tympanal ears sit on their front legs, just below the knee; the parasitic fly Ormia ochracea exploits the songs those ears are tuned to, homing in on calling males to lay its larvae on them.

The peppered moth of Victorian England is the textbook example of what?

Industrial melanism: dark moths took over as soot blackened the trees, because birds picked off the pale ones that stood out; when clean-air laws cleared the soot, the pale form came back.

Which of these insects has a level-4 sting on Justin Schmidt's pain index?

The bullet ant's sting, Schmidt wrote, is like walking over flaming charcoal with a nail in your heel; boys of the Amazon's Sateré-Mawé people endure it on purpose as an initiation rite.

On moonless nights, African dung beetles keep rolling their dung balls in a straight line by steering by what?

The Milky Way is their compass: tested in a Johannesburg planetarium, the beetles kept a straight course when shown nothing but the galaxy's faint band of light.

Epidemic typhus is spread between humans mainly by which insect?

The body louse passes the bacteria in its faeces, and the victim scratches them into the itchy bite; the same louse carries trench fever and relapsing fever.

Millions of migrating butterflies overwinter in Michoacán, Mexico, on which type of tree?

Oyamel fir forests, high in the mountains, give the butterflies a ready-made shelter: the thick canopy keeps temperature and humidity steady, so the clustered insects neither freeze nor dry out.

Army ants have no permanent nest; what is the living nest made of their own bodies called?

The bivouac is a ball of workers clinging to each other's legs; it looks chaotic but is highly organised, and soldiers swarm to its surface at the slightest disturbance.

The glowing larvae in New Zealand's Waitomo Caves belong to what kind of insect?

The Waitomo glowworm is the fungus gnat Arachnocampa luminosa, found only in New Zealand; its larvae hang sticky silk threads from the cave roof and light up to lure flying prey into them.

Who won a 1973 Nobel Prize for decoding the honeybee waggle dance?

Karl von Frisch shared the 1973 prize with Lorenz and Tinbergen; his bees signalled direction by the angle of the dance to vertical and distance by how long the straight run lasted.

Which brain chemical triggers desert locusts to switch from solitary to swarming mode?

Serotonin is the trigger: crowding and the jostling of hind legs raise its level, turning shy, solitary grasshoppers into a mutually attracted, nomadic horde within hours.

The world's longest insects, some over half a metre with legs outstretched, are what?

Stick insects hold the record, and the disguise goes beyond looks: many sway as they walk like a twig in the breeze, and some simply play dead when disturbed.

Female Photuris fireflies mimic the flashes of other species' females in order to do what?

Photuris females lure and eat the males of other species, mainly Photinus; these 'femme fatale' fireflies gain defensive lucibufagin chemicals from their prey, and their flashes mimic the prey's signals.

Clocked at 855 millimetres per second, which is the fastest known ant species?

The Saharan silver ant, Cataglyphis bombycina, forages at midday in temperatures around 47 °C, racing to finish before the sand reaches a lethal 53 °C; it is among the most heat-tolerant animals known.

The smallest known insects, under 0.2 mm long, belong to which family of tiny wasps?

Fairyflies include a species whose blind, wingless males can be as short as 0.14 mm, smaller than some single-celled creatures; those that fly use hair-fringed wings in a swimming-like stroke.

In 1860 Darwin wrote he couldn't believe a kind God had designed which parasitic insects?

Ichneumon wasps lay their eggs in caterpillars, and the grubs eat the host alive from within; that so troubled Darwin that specialists now propose calling the family 'Darwin wasps'.

Insects were the first animals on Earth to evolve which ability, more than 300 million years ago?

Powered flight began with insects some 300 to 350 million years ago; they have since turned wings into armour, sun-traps, gyroscopes and musical instruments as well.

Which moth became a notorious American forest pest after escaping from Étienne Trouvelot's Massachusetts home in the late 1860s?

The spongy moth slipped out of a colony Trouvelot was raising behind his house; twenty years later it was stripping Medford's trees bare, and he had long since swapped insects for astronomy.

Tiny flies rather than bees pollinate the tropical tree whose seeds give us what?

Chocolate relies on tiny biting Forcipomyia flies, which set more cacao pods than artificial pollination does.

Honey bees build each comb cell in which shape, the one that encloses equal areas with the least wall?

Hexagon grids were long suspected to be the thriftiest way to divide a flat surface into equal cells, but mathematicians only proved the 'honeycomb conjecture' in 1999.

In Jurassic Park, dinosaur DNA is recovered from a biting insect sealed for ages inside which golden gemstone?

Amber is fossilised tree resin, which is how it comes to hold whole prehistoric insects. It has been worked as a gemstone since classical antiquity.

A honey bee worker dies after stinging a person because her stinger, unlike a wasp's smooth one, has what?

Barbs lodge a worker's stinger in thick mammal skin, so it tears free and soon kills her. She can sting other insects repeatedly without dying.

Every mosquito sips plant nectar, but which ones also bite people and other animals for a meal of blood?

Only females bite, and in some species they cannot produce eggs without a blood meal. Male mosquitoes live on nectar and plant juices alone.

Many flowers carry hidden patterns that guide bees to the centre, because bees can see which kind of light?

Ultraviolet markings give many blooms a dark centre that people cannot see. The colour has even been nicknamed 'bee violet'.

The colours of a butterfly's wings come from thousands of tiny, powdery what that rub off when touched?

Scales each grow from a single skin cell and carry their own pigment. Many of the shimmering blues and greens come from their microscopic structure instead.

Which insect, named for the way it holds its folded forelegs, can turn its head almost 180 degrees?

Praying mantis necks are so flexible that some species can swivel their heads nearly 180 degrees. Mating is risky too: the male is sometimes eaten afterwards.

Which fruit is pollinated only by tiny wasps that crawl inside through a small hole to lay their eggs?

Figs are hollow clusters of inward-facing flowers, and each species depends on one or a few kinds of wasp. Planted far from home without them, the trees are effectively sterile.

A 2022 study estimated that roughly how many ants are alive on Earth at any one time?

20 quadrillion is the study's cautious figure, and together those ants outweigh all the world's wild birds and mammals combined.

England's William Kirby is widely considered the father of which science, the branch of zoology that studies insects?

Entomology takes its name from the ancient Greek word for insect, and is easily confused with etymology, the study of where words come from.

Insects, crabs and centipedes all belong to which phylum, the largest in the animal kingdom?

Arthropods make up more than four in five of all known living animal species. The name comes from the Greek for 'jointed leg'.

Which garden 'bug' that curls into a tight ball is not an insect at all but a land-living relative of crabs?

Pill bug is a common name for the woodlice that can roll up, and woodlice are crustaceans. Most other kinds of woodlouse cannot curl into a ball at all.

Which insect carries a pair of pincers at the tip of its abdomen, and is known for mothers that guard their eggs?

Earwig mothers tend their eggs and young, a rarity among insects. The name is popularly tied to an old wives' tale that the creatures burrow into people's ears.

Beekeepers calm a hive before opening it by puffing in what, which makes the bees gorge on honey?

Smoke masks the alarm scent that guard bees release, and sets off a feeding response as if the hive might have to be abandoned to a fire.

Paper wasps build their grey nests by chewing which material and mixing it with their own saliva?

Wood fibres scraped from dead timber and plant stems dry into a papery comb. The scientist Réaumur's study of these nests is credited by some with inspiring wood-pulp paper.

Which Pixar film follows Flik, an inventor ant who recruits circus performers to fight off a gang of grasshoppers?

A Bug's Life took its plot from Aesop's fable of the ant and the grasshopper, recasting the idle insects as a gang running a protection racket.

In which Disney film does a top-hatted insect named Jiminy serve as the hero's official conscience?

Pinocchio's cricket was a minor, nameless character in Carlo Collodi's original novel, where the puppet kills him before he returns as a ghost.

In which Roald Dahl book does an orphan boy befriend a huge talking grasshopper, centipede and earthworm?

James and the Giant Peach ends with the enormous fruit speared on the spire of the Empire State Building, before the children of New York eat it.

Ancient Egyptians wore amulets shaped like which insect, sacred as a symbol of the morning sun god Khepri?

Scarab beetles roll balls of dung along the ground, which Egyptians saw as an echo of Khepri pushing the sun across the sky each day.

Which wingless, nocturnal household insect feeds on the starch in book bindings and wallpaper paste?

Silverfish get their scientific name, saccharinum, from a diet of sugars and starches, and will strip wallpaper just to reach the paste behind it.

The 'lady' in the name of the red-and-black ladybird beetle originally referred to which figure?

The Virgin Mary was often shown in a red cloak, and the insects were first known in Britain as 'Our Lady's birds'.

Which computing pioneer's team taped a moth found in Harvard's Mark II into the logbook as a literal 'bug'?

Grace Hopper is credited with popularising 'debugging', though engineers had been calling faults 'bugs' for decades before the 1947 incident.

Casu martzu, a cheese deliberately riddled with live fly maggots, is a traditional delicacy of which island?

Sardinia's aficionados consider the cheese unsafe once its maggots have died, so it is served while they are alive and wriggling.

Some tiger moths answer the calls of hunting bats with bursts of ultrasonic clicks in order to do what?

The clicks jam their sonar, scrambling the echoes a bat needs to home in on its target. Other tiger moths click simply to advertise that they taste foul.

Which tree-dwelling insects build nests by gluing living leaves together with silk squeezed from their own larvae?

Weaver ants hold a larva like a tube of glue and tap its head to make it release silk, while chains of workers haul the leaf edges together.

The young of North America's famous orange-and-black butterfly eat only which toxic plant?

Milkweed poisons stay in the insect's body into adulthood, so a bird that tries one gets a foul-tasting lesson it rarely forgets.

Which stinging insects survive floods by linking their bodies into floating rafts, as seen after Hurricane Harvey?

Fire ants in a raft can sense how the water around them is flowing, and shift their behaviour to keep the whole mass stable.

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring turned the public against which bug-killing chemical, later banned on American farms?

DDT was banned for US farm use after the book swayed public opinion, though Carson herself never called for an outright ban.

The infected in The Last of Us were inspired by which fungus genus, whose relatives turn real ants into 'zombies'?

Cordyceps caught the game makers' eye in a segment of the BBC's Planet Earth. A real zombie-ant fungus makes its host clamp its jaws onto a leaf before it dies.

Enterprise, Alabama, built a monument honouring which cotton pest for pushing local farmers into profitable peanuts?

Boll weevil damage was wiping out whole cotton crops by 1918, and the statue put up a year later thanks the insect for the prosperity that followed.

Phylloxera, a tiny sap-sucking insect from North America, laid waste to which European crop in the mid-1800s?

Grapevines across France were rescued by grafting them onto rootstock from American vines, which could resist the pest.

Kissing bugs, blood-feeders named for biting around people's mouths, spread which illness across Latin America?

Chagas disease is named after Carlos Chagas, the doctor who in 1909 traced his patients' infections to the insects.

What name do scientists give the syndrome in which a hive's worker bees vanish, leaving a queen and plenty of food?

Colony collapse disorder got its name in 2007 after a surge of reports from North America. In Britain it was also dubbed 'Mary Celeste syndrome', after the deserted ship.

Japanese honey bees kill an invading hornet by swarming it in a tight ball and then doing what to it?

Cooking it is the trick: hundreds of bees shiver their flight muscles until the ball reaches about 46 °C, hot and stuffy conditions they can tolerate but the hornet cannot.

Which black-and-brown banded caterpillar is said in North American folklore to forecast how harsh the winter will be?

Woolly bear lore says a wide brown band means a mild winter, but the band simply widens as the animal ages and moults.

The ominous ticking of the deathwatch beetle in old timbers is really the adult insect doing what?

Attracting a mate is the point of the tapping, but people keeping a night-time vigil beside the dying heard it as an omen of death, hence the name.

Which leaf-green relative of crickets is named in North America after the sound of its loud, three-pulse song?

Katydid is an imitation of the insect's call, usually written as three syllables. In Britain the same family goes by the name bush crickets.

Which Russian-born novelist was also a butterfly expert who ran the collection at Harvard's zoology museum?

Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita during the butterfly-collecting road trips he made across the western United States every summer.

Male butterflies crowd onto mud puddles, dung and even sweaty skin mainly to drink in which nutrient?

Salt from these puddles boosts a male's breeding success, and much of the sodium he collects is handed to the female as a gift during mating.

Europe's standard ink for some 1,400 years was usually made from galls that tiny wasps cause on which tree?

Oak galls, also called oak apples, swell up around a wasp larva and are rich in the tannic acid that reacts with iron to make a dark, lasting ink.

Which sticky 'bee glue' do honey bees make from tree resin to seal small gaps in the hive?

Propolis also deals with intruders too big to drag outside: a mouse or lizard that dies in the hive may be sealed in it and mummified.

What do scientists call the solid droppings of insects, such as the neat pellets left beneath plants by leaf-eaters?

Frass is not always wasted: the larva of one tortoise beetle carries a mass of its own droppings on its back as a shield against attackers.

Which garden insect, whose young hide in blobs of 'cuckoo spit', can spring 70 centimetres into the air?

Froghopper legs work like a catapult, locking in place until two huge muscles snap them open. It leaps about as high as a flea despite being 60 times heavier.

Which butterfly makes a 9,000-mile round trip between tropical Africa and the Arctic Circle over several generations?

Painted lady journeys are a relay: no single insect completes the trip, which is made in steps by up to six successive generations.

Darwin predicted an unknown moth with a tongue nearly a foot long after studying which flower from Madagascar?

An orchid with a roughly foot-long nectar tube convinced him such a moth must exist. When it was found, its Madagascan form was named praedicta after a matching forecast by Alfred Russel Wallace.

River blindness gets its name from the waterside home of which small biting insects that spread it?

Blackflies pass on a parasitic worm when they bite, and the illness it causes is the world's second most common infectious cause of blindness, after trachoma.

What term did Edward Poulton coin for bright warning colours, like a wasp's stripes, that tell predators to keep away?

Aposematism need not be visual: the warning can also be a sound or a smell, as long as it tells a predator the animal is not worth attacking.

The wingtips of the huge atlas moth are shaped and patterned like the heads of which animals?

Snakes are what the curved tips of the forewings resemble, and the moth's Cantonese name translates as 'snake's head moth'.

Witchetty grubs, fat white moth larvae eaten raw or roasted in hot ashes, are a traditional food in which country?

Australia's desert peoples have long relied on the grubs as a staple, and the best-known kind feeds on the roots of the witchetty bush.