It took 100,000 years for human ancestors to become the creatures that have the greatest impact on the earth's natural environment. But human beings are just one of the countless species on this planet, and the small bugs that are often looked down upon by people live on the earth earlier than humans, and there are countless more powerful than humans.
--Maruyama Sotoshi, "The Great Insect"
Maruyama Sotoshi: Popular science writer, doctor of agronomy. Born in 1974, he is currently an associate professor at the Museum of Integrated Studies at Kyushu University. He has served as a researcher at the National Museum of Science and nature in The Field Museum of Japan, specializing in the study of insects with symbiotic relationships such as ants and termites, and is the first person in Asia in this field of research.
Earth is the planet of insects.
There are more than a million known insect species, accounting for more than half of the known biological species, including fungi, plants and other animals. Especially in terrestrial environments, insects account for the vast majority of species.
We first have to understand what insects are.
Insects are a group of animals belonging to the arthropod phylum Insecta. Arthropods are characterized by bone-wrapped meat, and vertebrates, including humans, are meat-wrapped bones. The body of the insect is roughly divided into three segments: head, thorax and abdomen, with three pairs of feet, and most insects have two pairs of wings. If you still can't understand, there is a simplest and most effective way to distinguish insects, except for watermelon worms, centipedes, horses, spiders, ticks, scorpions, and the rest of the bugs are basically insects. But snails and slugs are very different categories, and they belong to shellfish.
Flying and metamorphosis are two characteristics of insects, while 99% of insects can fly.
The next concept is "perversion", don't get me wrong, this is different. Metamorphosis here refers to the change in morphology of insects as they grow. 80% of insects undergo "total metamorphosis", that is, the morphology of larvae to pupal is completely different from that of adults, and the most common is butterflies. There is also "gradual metamorphosis": the larvae grow up and molt to grow wings, and finally become adults. Growing up without any changes except sexual maturity is called "table metamorphosis".
The life history of a fully metamorphosed insect is divided into three stages: the stage of larvae that eat and grow non-stop, the pupal stage of great transformation, and the adult stage of reproduction. To use the analogy of plants, larvae are the process from germination to growth, and adults are the process of flowering and fruiting.
The largest are Coleoptera, with 370,000 known species, as well as Hymenoptera, Diptera, and Lepidoptera, all of which are all metamorphic insects, accounting for half of the known insects.
The dietary life of insects is wonderful.
Predatory insects usually eat food as quickly as possible, but Hunting Peak invented an exclusive preservation technique that feeds the larvae every day, and they are good at anesthesia, using poison needles to keep prey in a state of suspended animation so that they can maintain freshness for a long time.
For the scaled frog larvae, termites are incomparably strong opponents, just the jaw that can pierce the wood is enough, but the scaled frog larvae can release substances containing paralyzing effects, launch a "poisonous gas attack", make the termite unable to move, and then drag it to a safe place to eat.
A Cryptoptera that lives in South America will attack ants that are several times longer than their own body. They first wandered around the ant team, and the weaker ants pulled it out of the queue and ate it. There is also a golden turtle that lives in South America and specializes in preying on large centipedes. This golden turtle has two teeth in front of its head, which can clench the centipede that is larger than itself, tear it apart and eat it.
In parasitic creatures, the goal is achieved by manipulating the host, just like manipulating a half-dead zombie.
A species of flea fly in the family Flea flies parasitize North American ants called fire ants, and after their larvae mature in the ant, they cut off the ant's head and crawl out of it to pupate. Within 8 to 10 hours before being cut off by the fly's larvae, the ant will leave the nest and walk around. At this time, the ant is just a walking tool, like a zombie, finding the most suitable feathering environment, and then diving into it, it sounds creepy.
Here is an example of a non-insect: the clematis of the linear animal phylum is about 20 to 30 cm long, parasitizes on a stove horse or praying mantis, in order to reproduce in the water, the clematis grows up in the host, will manipulate the host to go to the place where there is water, and once it comes to the water's edge, it will immediately break out of the abdomen. It turns out that the Korean horror film "Clematis" has a real prototype, and I have to say that it is too scary!
The artistic life of insects ~
The behavior of organisms that mimic the posture, color, or smell of something else is called mimesis. Mimicry is the most skilled in biological simulation behavior.
The most common example around us is probably a locust or grasshopper that simulates the shape of a leaf, and another well-known mimetic insect is the stick insect.
The phenomenon of non-toxic insects simulating toxic substances is called "shell mimicry", named after the discoverer of this phenomenon, the great British naturalist H. W. Bates. Two more toxic species mimic each other so that the pressure of predation can be shared, a mimesis called mimmography, named after fritz Müller, the biologist who first described the phenomenon.
Insect love life ~
The insect's pheromone is a chemical that females release into the air through bundles of hair on their abdomen in order to attract the opposite sex. Even the pheromones of a molecule can be perceived, and this is the sweet taste of love.
Sound is the language of insects, there are many insects can make high-decibel sounds, they use sound as a tool to summon the opposite sex, that is, insect love songs.
Love also shines. Fireflies use their luminescence to attract heterosexual tails, and there are some species of fireflies that only females emit light to attract males. However, the terrible thing is that this habit is also exploited by their natural enemies. There is a firefly of the genus Carnivorous Witch Firefly that lives in North America, which signals the same as the females of other species, and then eats the males it attracts. This is probably the fraudulent marriage of the insect world.
When humans are in love, they will give gifts as a means of pleasing each other, and in the insect world, this kind of courtship behavior similar to "giving a bride price" is very common. One of the more famous examples is the dancing flies, which vary slightly in gift-giving behavior, but both are males who show their prey and use this as bait to attract females to come and have their tails.
There is an insect called the mosquito scorpion, the female will choose the male according to the number and quality of prey sent by the male, and it has to be said that the insect world is also very cruel.
Gifts are certainly not limited to prey.
The most extreme case is when the male offers himself as a gift to the female after mating. Here you can recall the episode of Miss Mantis's new marriage in the cartoon "Black Cat Sheriff" when you were a child.
It can be seen that men give gifts to women, not only a sense of ceremony, but also biological significance!
The social life of insects ~
When raising offspring on the ground, the Japanese vermilion bugs will come out to look around and collect the fruits that have fallen on the ground, and then bring them back to The DPRK to regularly feed the larvae.
An aquatic Tsubaki elephant with an egg on its back
Marching ants, spear ants, double-knotted marching ants have many symbiotes, such as ticks parasitic on the surface of the ant body, mixed with various types of beetles living together in ant colonies, etc., for them, ant nests are like heaven.
The world of insects is diverse... People who like insects, love nature, or simply want to return to their youthful feelings, open the book and look at it, and may be able to harvest a lot of things!