A big huge post of BUG FACTS
PHOBIA SAFE (no real creatures shown in post itself) with clickable source links for every single fact!
Arthropods are wonderful amazing living things, but often poorly appreciated. This post dispels some common arthropod myths, but also collects some generally cool, fun or surprising facts!
Some people don’t like looking at arthropods, and I won’t pretend to get it, but they still deserve cool and (to the best of my ability) accurate facts, so there will be no real photos in this post. It’s also extremely long, so I’ve put a cut after the first few items! I apologize if any links change or go down, and will fix them when possible.
First: “Bugs” ARE animals. An animal can really be as simple as a jellyfish or a sea sponge, but Arthropods are on the more complex side of the animal kingdom with such familiar adaptations as legs, eyes, muscle tissue, neural cells, egg-laying and more. Possibly only rivaled by nematode worms, they may also represent the majority of animal life in terms of both species and actual biomass, making arthropods the foremost representatives of what constitutes an animal.
Wasps are at least as important as bees. Wasps can pollinate almost all the same flowers, even if it’s with slightly less efficiency, but many plants also attract wasps alone for pollination, and wasps pull additional duty regulating every food web that involves insects at all.
Mosquitoes are also necessary, sorry. The viral claim that “scientists” have “proven” them to be useless is a misunderstanding of one researcher’s opinion that it would be safe to eradicate one variety of mosquito from a limited area. All over the world, mosquitoes are a massive part of the nutrient cycle, and little else could multiply as rapidly in the same range of conditions if they were to go missing.
Ants and bees are effectively just specialized wasps themselves, together forming the order Hymenoptera along with the less famous “sawflies.” You can think of ants as super-social, super-successful subterranean wasps for having evolved from the same ancestors.
Fireflies are carnivorous beetles, which feed primarily on slugs and snails during their larval stages. In some species, adult female fireflies also prey on the males of other fireflies, imitating their light signals as a lure.
Male fruit flies deliberately get drunk if too many females reject them. Anything with a brain can get intoxicated from alcohol, and arthropod brains run on familiar reward systems.
Termites are cockroaches. Totally unrelated to ants despite their very similar lifestyles, termites were always considered closely related to roaches but were more recently proven to actually just be very oddball roaches themselves. There are even some highly social wood-eating cockroaches that bridge the evolutionary gap, still alive today.
OVER 40 MORE FACTS UNDER CUT!!!
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