Arthropod Trivia

Did you know...?

• The African Goliath beetle, Goliath goliath, is the heaviest beetle (insect) in the world and weighs 100 grams (3.5 ounces) - the same as 33 pennies.
• The loudest insect in the world is the male cicada. He can be heard over 400 meters away, about the distance of four football fields (slightly more than 1/4 of a mile).
• When it gets hot some dragonflies point their long abdomens right at the sun. This way the sun's rays only hit the tip of the abdomen and not the whole length, keeping the dragonfly much cooler.
• There may be as many as 659,000 ants in a single nest.
• The oldest identifiable fossil insect is a 390-million year old bristletail found in Quebec, Canada. The fossil insect is remarkably similar to modern-day silverfish.
• The infamous "Mormon cricket" is actually a type of flightless shieldback katydid (long- horned grasshopper).
• It takes about ten pounds of mulberry leaves to enable silkworm caterpillars to manufacture one pound of cocoons - which can be spun into a silk thread more than 100 miles long.
• The largest butterfly in the world is the Queen Alexandra butterfly (Ornithoptera alexandrae) of Papua New Guinea; the females reach a wingspan of up to 11 inches.
• The largest moths in the world are the Hercules emperor moth (Coscinocera hercules) of northern Australia and New Guinea (the females reach a wingspan of 10.5 inches with a surface area of 1002 inches) and the great owlet moth (Thysania agripinna) of South America (females measure up to 12 inches in wingspan, but lack the large surface area).
• The "manna" of the Old Testament bible was a sugary substance formed by aphids feeding upon the tamarix tree.

• The Siamese archer fish gets its food by squirting water at insects so accurately that it hit insects more than 3 feet away.
• A termite colony might contain more than 3 million individuals.
• The red admiral butterfly can distinguish sugar solutions 200 times more dilute than the human tongue can taste.
• The compound eye of a housefly has more than 4,000 lenses.
• The largest termite in the world is the African species Macrotermes bellicosus, which reaches a length of 5 inches.
• Fossils of prehistoric dragonflies have been found with a wingspan of 30 inches and a body length of 18 inches. (These insects are believed to have lived over 200,000,000 years ago.)
• At least 50 important crops grown in the United States depend on insects for pollination.
• The periodical cicada lives underground as a nymph for 16.5 years.
• An insect's worst enemies are other insects: of the millions of insects that eat animals instead of plants, most feed on other insects.
• A scale insect, Laccifer lacca, is cultivated in parts of southeast Asia and the Philippines because a sticky secretion produced by the scale insects can be used to manufacture shellac. (It takes the combined efforts of more than 150,000 insects to produce one pound of lac.)
• Some tropical orb-weaver spiders of the genus Nephila spin huge webs that stretch more than 18 feet across and are capable of snaring insects, small birds, and bats.
• The longest-lived of the spiders are the tarantulas, with some Mexican species (females) living for up to 28 years.
• The first flight on earth was undoubtedly made by an insect.

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This educational resource was prepared by the Young Entomologists Society, 6907 West Grand River Ave., Lansing MI 48906-9131, phone/fax 517-886-0630, e-mail YESbugs@aol.com.  Support minibeast youth education - join Y.E.S. today!