Insects
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8correct to beat the crowd
This bug trivia quiz has 146 free questions with answers and covers the insect world from the basics (how many legs, how many body segments, which order holds ants, bees and wasps) to the strange corners: the bombardier beetle's boiling chemical spray, the 17-year cicada, the mayfly that lives for minutes as an adult, the desert ants that serve as living honey pots, and the 1875 locust swarm that darkened the sky over Nebraska. The easy questions suit kids and classroom bug units: what caterpillars become, which insect pollinates most of our crops, which creature is an arachnid rather than an insect. The medium ones cover metamorphosis, honey bee roles and the waggle dance, mosquito-borne diseases and how fireflies glow. The hard ones ask about mouthparts, mimicry, the largest wingspan alive today and the 75 cm dragonfly relative from the fossil record. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered.
30 of 146 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many legs does an adult insect typically have?
Six
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.
Q 02An adult insect's body is divided into how many main sections?
Three
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.
Q 03Albert's swarm of 1875, which covered an area larger than California, was made up of which insect?
Rocky Mountain locust
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.
Q 04Which insect secretes the resin used for French polish and glossy candy coatings?
Lac bug
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.
Q 05Which of these insects lives in highly organized colonies with a queen, workers and soldiers?
Ant
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.
Q 06Periodical cicadas of the genus Magicicada spend how many years underground before emerging en masse?
13 or 17
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.
Q 07Which giant Asian moth, one of the largest insects on Earth, has wingtips that resemble snake heads?
Atlas moth
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.
Q 08Which insect order has hardened forewings that protect the hindwings?
Coleoptera
Beetles fold their membranous flight wings beneath these armoured cases, which lets them burrow and squeeze into tight spaces without damage.
Q 09Which solitary wasps stock each cell of their nests with paralysed spiders for their young to eat?
Mud daubers
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.
Q 10Which insect defends itself by firing a boiling-hot chemical spray from its rear with an audible pop?
Bombardier beetle
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.
Q 11Members of the subfamily Phymatinae, which seize prey on flowers, are commonly called what?
Ambush Bug
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.
Q 12Which New Zealand insect is among the world's heaviest, one egg-laden captive female reaching about 70 grams?
Giant Weta
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.
Q 13Which type of mimicry has a harmless species evolve to resemble a harmful one?
Batesian mimicry
Q 21What is the primary method of communication for many social insects?
Chemical pheromones
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.
Q 22What is the 'blood' of insects called, which circulates nutrients but not oxygen?
Hemolymph
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.
Q 23What type of mouthparts do mosquitoes and aphids have?
Piercing-sucking
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.
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.
Q 14Which body segment of an adult insect typically bears the wings and legs?
Thorax
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.
Q 15With which body part do most insects mainly smell?
Antennae
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.
Q 16Which type of insect metamorphosis has four life stages rather than three?
Complete metamorphosis
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.
Q 17Which of these insect orders is generally considered to have the largest number of described species?
Coleoptera (beetles)
Coleoptera, the order of beetles, is the largest order of insects, with more described species than any other order.
Q 18What are the external openings of an insect's breathing tubes called?
Spiracles
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.
Q 19Which compound do fireflies combine with oxygen to produce their glow?
Luciferin
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.
Q 20The red food and lipstick colourant carmine (E120) is extracted from which insect?
Cochineal
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.
Q 24What is the primary role of a drone bee in a honey bee colony?
Mating with the queen
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.
Q 25What is the rigid chitin-based structure that supports and protects an insect's body called?
Exoskeleton
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.
Q 26What is the term for making sound by rubbing body parts together, as crickets and grasshoppers do?
Stridulation
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.
Q 27What do scientists call an aphid being born already pregnant with its own young?
Telescoping generations
Telescoping generations nests daughters and granddaughters inside one mother; since aphids also clone themselves without mating, their numbers can multiply with great speed.
Q 28Which insect's 'waggle dance' communicates the location of food sources?
Bee
Honey bees perform a complex 'waggle dance' to inform other worker bees about the direction and distance to profitable food sources.
Q 29Which disease is transmitted to humans by certain species of mosquitoes?
Malaria
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.
Q 30What is the process by which an insect sheds its old cuticle in order to grow called?
Ecdysis
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.