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

By the invention of the flying wings, insects suddenly extended their living habitat - from land to air. Because they are the first one in this habitat, there have been a lot of space and resources for them to explore. The room for evolution increased suddenly and the numbers of insect species increased accordingly in an adaptive radiation.
When there opened up a novel available habitat, successively the number of species evolving to fit into this environment increases explosively. This is called an adaptive radiation. In the evolution history there is a lot of radiations due to the sudden appear of habitat or better to say the abilities to exploit it. This could be due to external factors, like in the case of dinosaurs extinction, or due to the species themselves, like the adaption to a formerly hazardous environment (e.g. evolvement of breathing air) , the invention of organs (e.g. flying wings, eyes) , and the change of life form (e.g. single cell to multi cell, from water to land).

The existing of birds, bats and spider webs change the way how insect wings developed. Before birds and bats (of course also the pterosaurs), insects dominate the air. They are the first animals to fly. Most insects fly for escaping from predators or to find their mate or to find a good place for their eggs. All the insect species now flying freely on air have a very good eyesight to avoid the spider webs. Moths and butterflies even evolved their scale to escape form the spider webs. Moths fly at night to avoid birds. Wasps and bees have their sting as weapon. Butterflies are distasteful and use mimic techniques. Dragonflies and flies have extremely good flying skills.

The second reason for the success of insects is the co-evolution of insects with plants. By the help of insects, plants invented their most important organ – the flower. The insects not only consume the plants, but co-evolute with them and help plants to develop. One example are the beetles and the flowers. When flowers first appeared on earth, also beetles first appear on earth. Beetles were not necessarily dependend on flowers for food, however, flowers provide food for beetles and let them to help for pollination. Flowers and beetles both benefited form each other. Beetle species become the largest number order in insects. The butterflies and bees that depend on flowers appear after the booming of beetles, which is another story.
One can hypothesize about the evolution of flowers like this: Many millions of years ago, just before the flowers existed on earth, plants were all green in color. Plants had already developed two sexes for the propagations of their offspring. They had developed a special organ for genetic information exchange – pollination or spores. The plants, themselves were not able to move, pollination was done only by the help of the wind. The wind carried the pollens from plants male sex organ to fertilize the female sex organ. This is not very efficient, because the wind will carry the pollens anywhere it blows. Then here come the winged insects into play. Those insects, such as beetles, came to eat the pollens. The insects visited many similar types of plants for the food. By doing this, the insects helps to carry the pollens from one plant to the others, i.e., a more efficiency pollination. Both parties benefited and became depend on each others. The plants sexual organs become more colorful to advertise to the insects, some plant develop special fragrance to attract the insects furthermore. Instead of supplying the pollens as food, some plants supply a liquid with sugar. This plants sex organ became the flowers we see today. Insects relied more and more on the flowers as the food source. Some insects become hairy so that they are more efficiency to carry the pollens. This co-evolution between the flowers and the insects is today one of the reason of the success of both.

Insect taxonomy

On the track you will be confronted with a huge variety of insects. There will be insects crawling on the floor, flying around the trees, sitting on flowers and leafs, hiding under stones and dead logs as well as dwelling on and in water. There are just to many to review them all. If you recognize some interesting creatures on your way and you are keen enough to require their names, but they are not mentioned in the following paragraphs, you might need some very basic knowledge in insect taxonomy. Taxonomy supplies biologist with the basic tool to categorize the various kinds of organisms. If you consult the online dictionary Wikipedia you will be informed that “Taxonomy (from"Greek taxinomia from the words taxis = order and nomos = law) may refer to either the classification of things, or the principles underlying the classification. In the first and still used categorization by Linnaeus's Scientific classification of organisms, the root is the Organism. Below this are the Domain, Kingdom,Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species, with various other ranks sometimes inserted”. Simply spoken, taxonomy gives organisms their names, define their groupings and their closest relatives based on their unique assemblage of characters. The next pages provide you with some basic characteristics to identify common insect groups.

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