Bugs & Insects Facts for Kids
Creepy-crawly facts about insects and bugs
The assassin bug of China and Vietnam stacks the dried corpses of ants it has killed on its back — the camouflage allows it to sneak into ant colonies undetected.
Adult luna moths do not have mouths — they cannot eat at all and live only for about one week, using fat reserves built up as caterpillars solely to find a mate and reproduce.
When floods strike, fire ants link their bodies together using their legs and jaws to form a waterproof floating raft that can keep thousands of ants alive for weeks at a time.
The Hercules beetle is the longest beetle in the world, with males growing up to 18 cm — more than half of that length is the large curved horn used to wrestle rival males.
Wood ants spray formic acid from their abdomen as a defence and to kill prey — in large numbers they can squirt a fine mist of acid over a metre away.
It takes about one million golden silk orb-weaver spiders to produce enough silk for one square metre of fabric — a golden silk cape was made in 2012 using silk harvested from wild spiders.
Male cicadas produce their loud mating calls using a pair of drum-like organs called tymbals in their abdomen — the sound can reach 120 decibels, one of the loudest sounds made by any insect.
Flies can walk upside down because their feet have tiny pads covered in thousands of hair-like structures coated in a sticky fluid — like millions of tiny suction cups.
Caterpillar droppings, called frass, are rich in nutrients and are sold as a natural organic fertiliser — some farmers grow crops irrigated with solutions made from insect frass.
Early aerodynamic calculations suggested bumblebees shouldn't be able to fly — in reality they fly by rapidly rotating their wings at high angles, generating short bursts of vortex lift.