Curated playlist
Insects in culture
- MosquitoMosquitoes kill more than one million people a year simply by transmitting disease through a bite.
- AntAnts may outweigh every wild bird and mammal on Earth combined. A 2022 estimate counted around 20 quadrillion of them.
- Honey beeA honey bee queen, once she has mated, can lay up to 2,000 eggs in a single day. Around her may live tens of thousands of workers, and none of them survives alone. The honey bee is a eusocial flying insect of the genus Apis, which means…
- WaspThe smallest known flying insect is a wasp that fits on a pinhead. Kikiki huna measures just 158 micrometres.
- FlyThe fly, a member of the insect order Diptera, can leave the ground in under five milliseconds. Dolichopodid flies of the genus Condylostylus do exactly that when a camera flash goes off. Their order takes its name from a single pair of…
- DragonflyEach compound eye of an adult dragonfly holds nearly 24,000 tiny lenses called ommatidia, and the two eyes together cover most of the insect's head. Few animals are built so completely around sight. The dragonfly belongs to the infraorder…
- LocustThe locust is a grasshopper with a second life, and in 1875 that life produced a swarm known as Albert's swarm. It was estimated to contain 12.5 trillion insects. It covered about 198,000 square miles, an area larger than California, and…
- MantisMantises can swivel their heads nearly 180 degrees, turning a hunter's gaze almost fully behind it without moving the rest of the body. The order Mantodea contains more than 2,400 species, scattered across temperate and tropical habitats…
- CockroachCockroaches include about 4,600 described species, yet only about 30 of them have ever settled into human habitats. Those few have given the whole group its reputation as dirty pests. Most of their relatives are small, inoffensive animals…
- TermiteIn the northern part of Kruger National Park, about 1.1 million active termite mounds can be found. Yet most termites in the world are almost never seen. Termites are social insects that feed on decaying plant matter, mostly wood, leaf…
- Tsetse flyThe tsetse fly, a large biting insect of tropical Africa, can swallow a blood meal that weighs as much as its own body. Its abdomen changes dramatically in volume while it feeds. It is also remarkably tough. A housefly or a horsefly dies…
- CicadaCicadas, the loud insects of the superfamily Cicadoidea, produced a rare coincidence in 2024. Two groups of periodical cicadas surfaced in the same year across the midwestern and eastern United States. One group keeps a 13-year underground…
- Scarab (artifact)A Bronze Age shipwreck off Turkey held a beetle carved with Nefertiti's name.