Text/Xia Xiaoyou
Suddenly it is the season of eating watermelon, blowing air conditioning, nibbling on watermelon, probably what summer should look like, but recently because of the matter of eating watermelon, my baby has a little trouble.
Here's the thing, one day after dinner, she was watching cartoons, digging watermelons, eating happily, I don't remember how long later, suddenly saw her throw down the spoon, while running away to the sofa, while shouting: "Mom, there are ants!" Hurry up and get rid of them! I looked in the direction of her finger and saw only a few ants looking for the ground, and a long line behind us, and there were faint ants crawling towards us.
I took a tissue and wiped it on the ground, and sure enough, I found several drops of watermelon juice on the ground, smelled the sweet and greasy watermelon juice, can there be no ants? I told the child, "You eat the watermelon juice on the ground, so there will be ants, next time you should pay attention, otherwise there will be." Are you afraid or not? ”
She quickly nodded, and then asked incomprehensibly, "Do ants also like to eat sweet things?" But how could it smell of watermelon juice in our house? They don't live in our house either, how can the nose smell? Is an ant's nose worse than a dog's nose? "I really can't answer this question for a while, but there are scientific answers in the Incredible Insect Book."
The author of the book, Balter Roselle, is a famous Dutch bioengineer, entrepreneur and inventor; Illustrator Medici Oberndorf, graduated from the School of Fine Arts and Design at Maastricht University with a master's degree in scientific illustration, has published 4 children's books so far, and her illustration of Doug's Cabin was named the 2019 Dutch "Book of Beauty".
Open the Incredible Insect Book, you will explore the classification, form, defense skills, and predation techniques of insects from unexpected angles. And, whether you know or are familiar with these insects, you can reacquaint yourself with them in the illustrations.
According to the book, ants can't speak, the hearing system is not developed, they communicate information by touching each other's tentacles, and more importantly, when they want to convey information, the body will emit a special smell, relying on this smell, the ant can mark a route to food, let companions along the route to find.
Ants are sweet,and their love for sugar has reached the point of obsession, so, let alone watermelon juice, is a sporadic bit of sweetness that can attract ants over. The book says that in order to get sweets, ants do not hesitate to protect aphids and take care of their young for aphids, only because aphids secrete a sweet honeydew, and almost all aphids and ants have a sweet trade.
Isn't it incredible that looking at such a small number of insects, they will even know the principle of barter like humans. In fact, there are still many incredible places in the insects. Like cicadas, we all know that in the middle of summer, cicadas are particularly noisy, but do you know why they call?
It turns out that birds are the natural enemies of cicadas, a careless, cicadas will be eaten by birds, in order to drive birds, they have to make a noisy sound, their noise can reach up to 120 decibels, this volume is equivalent to the roar of an airplane taking off, or the sound of a cutting machine at work, has long exceeded the hearing of birds and humans, can play a good protective role.
What's even more amazing is that such a loud noise, the cicada's own hearing is not affected at all, why is this? Originally, the cicada's tympanic chamber is connected to the auditory organ through a membrane, and whenever the drum begins to sound, its auditory organ will automatically close up.
Of course, in the world of insects, not only normal events such as ants foraging and cicadas protecting themselves, things like cheating, camouflage, and mutual harm also occur from time to time, like there is an insect called Grass Ridge, which specializes in eating aphids in the larval stage, but aphids are protected by ants, what to do?
The clever grass ridge larvae will specifically pick out the single aphids, and they will peel off the white wool on the aphids before they start eating. It turns out that the cunning grass ridge larvae will put on this white silk, disguise themselves as aphids, and blend into the aphid team, so that if the ants are not paying attention, they can enjoy the aphids and catch them all! I have to say that this heart is so much!
By the way, there is another very annoying thing in the summer, that is, it is easy to have cockroaches at home! But do you know, in this world, there is an insect, specifically eat cockroaches, but this process of eating cockroaches is really a bit scary, if any cockroach unfortunately witnessed the same kind of encounter, feel trembling, every day nightmares.
"The Incredible Insect Book" really lives up to the title of the book, and the knowledge about insects in it is all so incredible, whether it is the ants, cicadas, butterflies, caterpillars, cockroaches, fireflies that we are familiar with, or unfamiliar grass ridges, ant lions, green long-backed mud bees, flies... Nearly a hundred kinds of wonderful insects, their stories, are amazing!