So, you want to know more about our creepy crawlie friends. Here goes:
- An ant 3mm long has been observed dragging prey 6mm long back to its nest. This is equivalent to a human dragging a small car by their teeth over a distance of 8km
- A particular Asian moth has evolved to feed on the tears of buffalo.
- Fireflies are beetles that use light to attract a mate.
- A colony of army ants may reach over 700,000 individuals.
- When a flea jumps it accelerates at a rate 20x faster than a rocket being launched into space
- Without bees we would have little in the way of fruit, vegetables or sugar. As pollinators they are vital to the life cycle of many plants
- The combined weight of all the insects in the world is 12 times greater than the weight of the entire human population.
- For every human alive, there are 200 million insects.
- To avoid being eaten, stick insects hold their twig-lie bodies and legs at the correct angle on a branch, they even sway like twigs when a breeze blows.
- Malaysian giant stick insect eggs are just 4mm wide, but when the baby stick insects hatch they are already 70cm long!