1 - Overview
2 - Introduction to the area
3 - Geology & Climate
Granite
Climate
4 - Vegetation
5 - Forest Types
Vegetation
Tea/Miang Plantations
Forrest Conservation
6 - The Pang Soong Treewalk
7 - Treespecies
Fig Trees
Epiphytes
Saprophytes
Bamboo
Click here for full tree list
8 - Forest Fires

9 - Birds
Observing Birds
10 - Bird Trail Walk
11 - Mammals
Mammals of Northern Thailand
Mammals of Pang Soong
12 - Insects
Introduction
13 - Projects
Observing Birds & Mammals
Watching Birds, makung use of Observations
Identification
Behaviour
Mammals
14 - Biographies of contributing experts

butterflies
By guessing, the whole insect wings story could be like this. The insects at that time were living in water. When become an adult, they climb up on plants, move up about water surface to mate. There are two reasons for them to do like this. They use plants about water surface as meeting place, and over there they can avoid the predator in the water during mating, as at this time water was a dangerous place, while no predators had evolved to live on land or in the air. They may climb, with a bit of jumping, between plants to find their mates. Perhaps the adult life was very short, they died shortly after reproduction, just like the mayflies today.
Some insects possibly had a device that helps a bit for gliding when they jump. This device could be modified from the gill that they used to breath in the water. Under natural selection, the device became larger and more wing-like. After some generations, muscles and nerves developed to control the device and it became their wings for flying. Though the adults became the dispersal stage and can fly to new areas and explore new habitats. The adults further on live in a total different environment as their larvae and they become look different, with different body shape to cope with the different living condition. Then this group of insects' life cycle become similar to the dragonfly nowadays. They become the most successful animals on earth as they can inhabit different habitat according to their lifecycle stage.
Approximately 315 million years ago, soon after the development of wings and flight ability, insects developed wing-flexing mechanisms and insects like beetles, true bugs and cockroaches evolved. This is the ability to fold up the wings over the thorax and abdomen and get them out of the way when not in use. This allowed the insects to run better and have better access to restricted habitats. The Coleoptera (Beetles) specialized in this discipline to championship. They didn’t just stick the fold-away-wing technique; they modified the first wing pair to a hard shield that protects the fragile flying wings, while crawling in litter. This seems to be a very good concept, as beetles are nowadays the widest distributed animals on earth.
The latest important step in the evolution of insects was the development of complete metamorphosis. The change in body form, from larva to pupa to adult, allowed individuals to take advantage of more than one habitat. Individual insects were now free to exploit new resources and reduce competition between adults and young. This occurred about 290 million years ago in upper Carboniferous.
The characters of larva and adult became genetically independent; in response to natural selection, therefore, each was able to evolve independently of the other. Mouthparts, limbs, and other morphological features were modified in different directions and in higher groups. Where these differences were extreme, an intermediate pupal stage evolved to bridge the morphological gap between larva and adult like in lepidopterans (butterflies). It seems quite probable that the development of metamorphosis occurred more than once during the evolution of insects.

Due to some reasons, such as drying out ponds, avoiding of predators etc., some larvae of the winged insects move to the land like their adult stages. After this, the evolution of insects goes at least three different ways:
Larvae and adult look similar: After the larvae landed, the living environment of the larvae and the adults became the same. So the larvae and the adults are evolved to the similar shape. This reverse the evolution process mentioned above. For the insects with graduate or in-complete metamorphosis, the shape of different stages is similar. This is because they all live in the same environment, so they evolved the similar shape. This group of insects became the Orthopteroid insects with chewing mouth parts. They include grasshoppers, stick insects, mantids, cockroaches and termites etc. The other group of insects with sucking mouth parts, the true bugs, share also this incomplete metamorphosis.
Larvae and adult look different: After shore leave of the larvae, if the larvae’s living conditions were different from the adult, they evolved to a different shape. Cicadas are a good example here. Their larvae landed, but they live deep under ground, while they have to dig up from the soil, transform into adults to find their mates. They retain their living style as their ancestors, they come up from the soil, not water, and climb to the plants for the final molting and become an adult.
Pupa as intermediate change: For the insects larvae and adults living in different environments, and a shape of different for graduate changes, some insects evolved the pupa stage to overcome the problem. Between the last larvae stage and the adult stage, a stage where the larvae stays motionless without feeding for a certain time is added. In this stage a total body transformation takes place. These insects have two completely different body shapes, which makes them gain a lot of advantages. Including that adults and larvae are not competing for the same food and living resource, to overcome season changes, and to avoid predators in the different stages. This group of insects became another blooming of the insect’s class.

When the Dinosaurs saw their end in the often cited meteorite, insects nearly didn’t recognize this disaster. They persisted and even spread further over the earth. From the Late Cretaceous (up to 65 mill. years ago), and even more so the early Cenozoic period, insects were essentially of modern type. Though we can conclude that minimal since 65 mill. years all modern insect orders existed.

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