My Science School

To begin, insects don't have a vertebral column (backbone) like people have and therefore are considered to be a type of invertebrate animal. Instead of a backbone, insects have a hard exterior body covering, called an exoskeleton. Insects are arthropods: invertebrate animals that have an exoskeleton, a segmented body, and jointed appendages. Arthropods are members of the taxonomic phylum Arthropoda, which includes insects, arachnids, and crustaceans. Insects represent about 90 percent of all life forms on earth. More than one million insect species have been identified throughout the world, and some entomologists (scientists that study insects) estimate there may be as many as 10 million species. These species are divided into 32 groups called orders, and beetles make up the largest group. No one knows exactly how many insects are found within Everglades National Park. Entomologists have prepared lists of some insect groups, such as bees, ants, and butterflies, but no park-wide inventory has been carried out yet. 

Insects have six legs and two antennae, and their body is made up of three main regions: head, thorax, and abdomen. They have an exoskeleton that contains sense organs for sensing light, sound, temperature, wind pressure, and smell. Insects typically have four separate life stages: egg, larvae or nymph, pupa, and adult. Insects are cold blooded and do not have lungs, but many insects can fly and most have compound eyes. Insects are incredibly adaptable creatures and have evolved to live successfully in most environments on earth, including deserts and even the Antarctic. The only place where insects are not commonly found is in the oceans. Insects pollinate flowers and crops and produce honey, wax, silk, and other products. However, some species that bite, sting, destroy crops, and carry disease may be considered pests to people and animals.

Credit : National Park Service 

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The number “1 million billion” may sound made up or incalculable, but you’ll reach it trying to count all the ants on the planet. We share the Earth with an estimated 1 quadrillion ants spread out over more than 12,000 ant species. That’s 1,000,000,000,000,000 of these insects. This outnumbers all other living species on Earth, excluding bacteria. The next time you’re feeling stressed about the sight of a few dozen ants in your home, take a breath and be thankful that all the ants on the planet aren’t working together.

Enthusiastically social insects, ants typically live in structured nest communities that may be located underground, in ground-level mounds, or in trees. Carpenter ants nest in wood and can be destructive to buildings. Some species, such as army ants, defy the norm and do not have permanent homes, instead seeking out food for their enormous colonies during periods of migration.

One Amazon species (Allomerus decemarticulatus) cooperatively builds extensive traps from plant fiber. These traps have many holes and, when an insect steps on one, hundreds of ants inside use the openings to seize it with their jaws.

Another species, the yellow crazy ant (Anoplolepis gracilipes), is capable of forming so-called supercolonies that house multiple queens. On Australia’s Christmas Island, the accidental introduction of yellow crazy ants in the early 20th century has led to a destructive infestation. The ants are a significant threat to the island’s endemic population of red crabs, which are displaced by the ants from their burrows or killed as they pass through ant nest sites during the crabs' large-scale annual migration from the forest to the coast.

Credit : National Geographic

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Cockroaches are infamous for their tenacity, and are often cited as the most likely survivors of a nuclear war. Some even claim that they can live without their heads. It turns out that these armchair exterminators (and their professional brethren) are right. Headless roaches are capable of living for weeks.

Cockroaches do in fact have brains. And they use them. It’s just that cockroaches don’t really need them that much.

In addition to brains, they have nerve tissues that control reflexes throughout their bodies, and these are distributed within each body segment. If a cockroach loses its head and brain, the nerve tissues (known as nerve tissue agglomerations) continue doing their job, providing the strange headless creature a fairly normal life. It can stand, react to touch, and move around. Cockroaches do in fact have brains. And they use them. It’s just that cockroaches don’t really need them that much.

In addition to brains, they have nerve tissues that control reflexes throughout their bodies, and these are distributed within each body segment. If a cockroach loses its head and brain, the nerve tissues (known as nerve tissue agglomerations) continue doing their job, providing the strange headless creature a fairly normal life. It can stand, react to touch, and move around.

A headless cockroach isn’t going to die from bleeding and it’s not going to die from being unable to breathe. It’s also not going to die from the relatively minor event (for it) of losing its brain.

But it is going to die from being unable to eat. And well before that, it’s going to die from thirst. A headless cockroach has no mouth to drink with and will be dead from dehydration in less than a week.

Credit : Cockroach Facts 

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Typically only a few inches in length, some members of this species have been known to grow to a serpentine 14 inches. Earthworms’ bodies are made up of ring-like segments called annuli. These segments are covered in setae, or small bristles, which the worm uses to move and burrow.

Night crawlers are so named because they are usually seen feeding above ground at night. They burrow during the day—typically keeping close to the surface—capable of digging down as deep as 6.5 feet.

The worm’s first segment contains its mouth. As they burrow, they consume soil, extracting nutrients from decomposing organic matter like leaves and roots. Earthworms are vital to soil health because they transport nutrients and minerals from below to the surface via their waste, and their tunnels aerate the ground. An earthworm can eat up to one third its body weight in a day.

Night crawlers also mate on the surface. They are hermaphroditic but do not self-fertilize. Following mating, each worm forms a tiny, lemon-shaped cocoon out of a liquid secreted from its clitellum, the familiar-looking bulge seen near the first third of the earthworm’s body. The sperm and egg cells are deposited inside the cocoon, and it is buried. After a two- to four-week gestation period, the baby worms emerge.

Earthworms are a source of food for numerous animals, like birds, rats, and toads, and are frequently used in residential composting and as bait in commercial and recreational fishing. Their numbers are strong throughout their range—they’re even considered agricultural pests in some areas—and they have no special status.

Credit : National Geographic

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Grasshoppers, crickets and locusts all have knee-ears that, at just a fraction of a millimetre long, are among the tiniest ears in the animal kingdom. Even though countless numbers of these insects had been dissected, no one had really understood the structures of these ears.

Like most animals, a grasshopper hears by receiving and processing sound waves. When the sound waves are received by the grasshopper, they act both on the external tympanum and the internal chambers. The interaction between these two pressures and the tympanal membrane results in the grasshopper’s ability to hear. This mechanism is so sophisticated, that a grasshopper’s ability to identify the direction of a sound source rivals that of a human.

Aside from locating and avoiding predators, acoustic communication in grasshoppers is mainly used for the attraction of mates. The male initiates a call, often a whirring or snapping noise, which is heard by the female. The male then listens for her response, and due to his sensitive hearing, is able to pinpoint her location with relative ease. Thus, a grasshopper’s ability to hear helps ensure the survival of the species.

Credit : National Geographic

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There are about 5,000 different species of ladybugs in the world. These much loved critters are also known as lady beetles or ladybird beetles. They come in many different colors and patterns, but the most familiar in North America is the seven-spotted ladybug, with its shiny, red-and-black body. In many cultures, ladybugs are considered good luck.

Most people like ladybugs because they are pretty, graceful, and harmless to humans. But farmers love them because they eat aphids and other plant-eating pests. One ladybug can eat up to 5,000 insects in its lifetime! Most ladybugs have oval, dome-shaped bodies with six short legs. Depending on the species, they can have spots, stripes, or no markings at all. Seven-spotted ladybugs are red or orange with three spots on each side and one in the middle. They have a black head with white patches on either side.

Ladybugs are happy in many different habitats, including grasslands, forests, cities, suburbs, and along rivers. Seven-spotted ladybugs are native to Europe but were brought to North America in the mid-1900s to control aphid populations. Ladybugs are most active from spring until fall. When the weather turns cold, they look for a warm, secluded place to hibernate, such as in rotting logs, under rocks, or even inside houses. These hibernating colonies can contain thousands of ladybugs.

Credit : National Geographic

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