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| 1 - Overview |
9 - Birds |
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butterflies
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“The world is covered in bugs,
though shouldn’t you know something about them?” Introduction Creepy crawlies can be quite charismatic if they are colorful and of exotic shape. But they are more. Besides their overwhelming numbers and varieties of shapes they are also a product of their environment. Evolution has created creatures with astonishing capabilities to interact with their environment. In order to survive insects have evolved uncountable ways to cope with the challenges of life. In many cases it is incredible how insects are able to succeed against the odds. Usually people expect insects to be annoying, boring and creepy, in the worst sense disgusting, but they overlook the spectacular life of some insects. Creepy crawlies are named scientifically Arthropoda. Their name refers to their segmented limbs and they become to be our favorite animals and study objects, because they seem to be evolutions most loved children. The astonishing variety of species is reflected as well in their variety of size, color, shape, behavior as in their adaptation to nearly every habitat the world can offer. But as variable insects are, their basic body plan is the same in all. All these insect species are divided into about 32 orders of which, the largest is the beetles, or Coleoptera, with 125 different families and around 500,000 species they are an incredibly diverse group of animals. In fact, one in every four animal species on this planet is a beetle. Their dominance among animals is evident in their total number of species, with over 750,000 described, but some studies indicate that there are up to 1 million species alone of insects. You will find that insects are ubiquitous; they are in the soil beneath your feet, in the air above your head, on and in the bodies of the plants and animals around you, as well as on and in you. Very few insects have colonised the sea, on the land however there isn't anywhere you can't find some insects, even in the frozen extremes of Arctica and Antartica you will find some insects alive and active during the warmer months. The biggest or bulkiest/heaviest insect is the extremely rare South American Longhorn Beetle Titanus giganteus, these giants can have a body length (not including antennae) of over 16 cm (6.5 ins), other longhorn beetles or also Rhinoceros beetles are nearly as large and heavy like this, also in Thailand. The smallest insects outnumber the bigger ones by far. There is an incredible number of very small insects in the world, far more than there are giants. Many beetles are less than one millimeter in length, and the North American Feather-winged Beetle Nanosella fungi, at 0.25mm, is a serious contender for the title of smallest insect in the world. There are also many small Hymenoptera, especially in the superfamily Chalcidoidea, such as the Fairy Flies of which Alaptus magnanimus, at 0.21mm long, was once thought to be the smallest insects in the world. However another hymenopteran parasite now holds the record. Megaphragma caribea from Guadeloupe, measuring out at a huge 0.17 mm long, is now probably the smallest known insect in the world. The incredible size of individual species of insects is only dwarfed by the incredible numbers they sometimes occur in. In 1943 Professor Salt found that an acre of British pasture land near Cambridge supported over 1,000,000,000 Arthropods of which nearly 400,000,000 were Insects and 666,000,000 were Mites the remaining 38,000,000 were Myriapods (Centipedes and Millipedes). In Africa swarms of Orthoptera (Desert Locusts Schistocerca gregaria) may contain as many as 28,000,000,000 individuals.
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