These grasshoppers, like many insects around the world, are declining.
Dave Rintoul
Insect populations are falling as what they eat becomes more like iceberg lettuce and less like kale.
Mosquitoes play an important role as pollinators.
(Shutterstock)
Mosquitoes have intricate and essential relationships with plants. Understanding their important work as pollinators would help to understand their role in different ecosystems.
A firefly’s light is part of its mating strategy.
Japan's Fireworks/Shutterstock.com
For many people, the gentle blinks of fireflies flashing are a favorite part of summer evenings. An entomologist explains some lightning bug basics.
Ladybirds are insects with a hard outer shell, just like beetles.
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Ladybirds do not have tails because they have no backbones.
The good type of tickles.
Shutterstock.
Tickling is an important sign that someone – or something – is touching you. An expert explains how it works.
In fact, it’s not even the moths eating your clothes.
Flickr/Vlad Proklov
If you see moths and their larvae near your clothes, it’s a sign that it’s time to wash all your clothes and air them out in the sun.
Sometimes thousands of ladybirds will ‘overwinter’ in the same spot, which experts say is normal behaviour and nothing for homeowners to be alarmed about.
David Lovejoy
According to experts, ladybirds are no more dangerous than they were before.
Inside the pupa (or chrysalis), the caterpillar actually turns to liquid as it transforms into a butterfly or moth.
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Scientists were not sure if an adult butterfly could remember things it learned as a caterpillar. Then a study by a team of US scientists found something very interesting.
Once the car is at steady speed, the insect doesn’t need to be pulled along anymore and it won’t be able to tell that the car is moving.
Shutterstock
If the insect wants to stay right in front of your nose, it must fly forwards just a little bit when the car is speeding up. But when the car is at constant speed, it only needs to hover.
play4smee/Flickr
If warmer weather is your sign to reach for the pesticide, think again. From better soil to your own army of beneficial bugs, here are five reasons to put down the insect spray.
Allied forces wearing gas masks at Ypres, 1917.
Wikimedia Commons
The first fully industrialised war prompted many to draw parallels between human society and the insect world.
The last thing the spider saw before everything went black.
Flickr/Nicola Albertini
If a huge huntsman spider is sucked into a vacuum cleaner, can it crawl out later? Lucy, age eight, really, really needs to know.
Insect repellents can keep biting mosquitoes at bay but they’ve got to be used correctly.
Dr Cameron Webb (NSW Health Pathology/University of Sydney))
This is what really works to beat the bite of summer mosquitoes!
Shield bug guarding her eggs in the Ecuadorean rainforest.
Andreas Kay/Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The perils of bug parenting.