Bugs & Insects Facts for Kids
Creepy-crawly facts about insects and bugs
Dragonfly nymphs live entirely underwater for one to five years, hunting tadpoles and small fish using a lightning-fast extendable jaw called a labial mask, before climbing out to emerge as adults.
Camouflage and mimicry are different strategies — camouflage means blending into the background, while mimicry means resembling a specific other organism (like a harmless fly mimicking a stinging wasp).
The insect fossil record extends back about 400 million years — some of the earliest known insects preserved in amber are remarkably similar to their modern descendants.
When a honeybee swarm needs to find a new home, scout bees perform waggle dances promoting different sites; through a democratic process of evaluation and counter-dancing, they reach consensus on the best location.
Assassin bugs have a curved beak called a rostrum through which they inject a cocktail of paralysing and liquefying enzymes into prey — some species can also give a painful defensive bite to humans.
Insects have an open circulatory system — their heart pumps a fluid called haemolymph directly into body cavities rather than through enclosed blood vessels, and haemolymph carries nutrients but not oxygen.
Biomedical engineers are developing synthetic spider silk to create artificial tendons and ligaments, sutures, and even bulletproof vests that are both stronger and more flexible than current materials.
In the Argentine ant supercolony, millions of nests share the same chemical signature and workers from different nests show no aggression to each other — this unity is thought to underlie their invasive success.
The economic value of insect pollination to global agriculture is estimated at over $500 billion per year — making wild pollinators one of the most economically important groups of animals on Earth.
Sequencing the German cockroach genome revealed an extraordinary expansion of genes for detecting chemicals — they have evolved rapidly to exploit human food environments, developing preferences for glucose as a survival strategy.